Rina Bliss - Rethinking Intelligence: A Radical New Understanding of Our Human Potential

B eing intelligent was my mantra. I believed it was my ticket out.

I grew up in a middle-class home in a middle-of-the-road neighborhood in Los Angeless San Fernando Valley. Our public schools provided a mediocre education to an average sample of LA youth (which was remarkably diverse, thanks to busing laws that helped to redistribute the citys population). At first glance, there was nothing noteworthy nor problematic about my situation. But prick the surface and a different image appears.

My family was struggling. My mom, Liza (ne Guojia Hua Caryabudi), hailed from the floating city of Banjarmasin in Indonesia. Distant relatives had snatched her from her young laboring parents and planted her in a Dutch convent on the neighboring island of Java. In college, she joined a generation of Western-enculturated Indonesians who shipped off to Europe and the United States to study abroad. When her scholarship ran out, she took up work as a domestic servant in the Hollywood Hills. She vowed to do anything to remain.

My dad, Nathaniel Jr. (also known as Junior or Natty), belonged to one of the well-to-do families that lived in those Hills, a prominent military family in California politics. But beneath a veneer of Democratic respectability lay a family ravaged by trauma, abuse, and addiction. Tormented by prisoner-of-war flashbacks, my grandfather terrorized my father with knockout blows and fugues of rage. By eight, my dad was regularly robbing his parents medicine cabinet of sleeping pills and painkillers. By eighteen, he was subsisting on a daily diet of codeine and barbiturates.

My mom and dad met one balmy day in 1972, as they were descending the hills for the valley below. They flirted at the bus stop at Hollywood and Vine and then boldly arranged to meet again. It was love at first sight.

Lifted by love, my parents tried to make a fresh start. My mom took a secretarial course and my dad started law school. They rented a sunny apartment in Sherman Oaks. Yet by the time I came around, substance abuse had overtaken my dad, and it had moved him to the streets, to the slippery recesses of junk dens and crack houses. As he spiraled, my mom ferried us to a safer place. She got an office job in Beverly Hills, rented a new apartment just for the two of us, and found someone to watch me day and night as she hustled overtime to support us.

It was hard waking up to my mom leaving every morning and heartbreaking to fall asleep before she got home. My dad would come over to play with me and the other little ones under the care of our buildings sitter, but he was always on the brink of an overdose and often unintelligible.

Shockingly, however, my real troubles began when I started school. As the only Southeast Asian biracial kid in my classes, I was immediately regarded as an oddballnot white, not black, not even yellow... an indeterminate tawny other. One boy in my kindergarten class made a game of rounding up a group of kids to chase me around the playground, making squint-eyed faces and hurling epithets at me. Another kid at my summer program would cut me off when I spoke, to deliver slurs and threats. Negative stereotypes abounded and crowded the air I breathed every day.

The one positive about those stereotypes: kids thought I was smart. Being Asian (even just part) seemed to magically confer upon me a superior intellect. As one school year gave way to another, I took solace in my perceived giftedness. Believing there was no other way to go, I read, I studied, I achieved, and I outsmarted.

Or so I thought.

The way I saw intelligence as a kid was limited, to say the least. I believed being smart was an innate quality, and this is exactly how grown-ups around me talked about it. In the classroom, I heard the word gifted just about every time anyone talked about intelligence. My teachers and TAs encouraged only some of us students to dream of being intellectuals and growing up to use our smarts. Others they would applaud for their athletic ability, as if being intelligent and physically adept were opposing things. In the media, scientists were intelligent. Doctors were intelligent. Professors were intelligent. Engineers, too. In my eyes, these high achievers were winning at life as a result of their God-given talents, with little exertion required from them.

My understanding of it was you were either born with intelligence, or not. It certainly wasnt something that anyone could learn and develop as a skill over time.

Growing up with American media, the stereotypes I saw in TV and movies certainly didnt help with this misconception: between the autistic-coded math genius and the East Asian tech wiz, brainy, intelligent characters were either white men (and the main character) or people of color (in a supporting role).

Popular science only made matters worse. For centuries, evolutionary biology, genetics, phrenology, and psychology popularized the idea that, like height and weight distribution, intelligence ran in families. It was etched into our DNA, a part of our innate biology. Scientists had worked hard to perfect intelligence measurement. A simple IQ test said it all and foretold our future.

Placing Intelligence

In the 1980s and 90s, intelligence testingbased on a universal criterion of intelligence quotientwas big business, and its implementation was ubiquitous. School districts like mine were testing all year long to determine teacher performance, student performance, and student giftedness. High test scores meant more resourcesbetter funding, better teachers, and more support for specialized programs. From administrators to parents, everyone was deeply invested in the outcome of these tests.

Even for a smart kid like me, the pressure to perform was overwhelming. I was tormented by the fear that I wouldnt measure up. And then one day, my fear came true.

A letter from the LA Unified School District arrived stating that I had not tested into the local magnet school. Instead, I would have to remain at my run-of-the-mill neighborhood elementary school. The news devastated my mother. It was the first time I ever saw her cry.

Soon after, she purchased two thin Mensa books, puzzle books designed by the worlds oldest high-IQ society. She would quiz me from them in the evenings, sometimes late into the night. As much as I loved spending that time with her, I was confounded by the kinds of questions I found in those books. I was missing background information on the words or shapes, and I recognized very few of them. But I played along and tried my best, because I was terrified my ineptitude might make my mother cry again.

On test day, I squeezed my pudgy fist around the thick blue pencil. A sour breath rushed into my throat. Letters and shapes grew fuzzy as I struggled to make out the exams questions. But I got lucky. Though I didnt test out of my school, I performed well enough to test out of the standard curriculum. By the third grade, I was one of the few students who were tutored apart from the rest of the class and cultivated for educational excellence. Slurs gave way to accolades. And though the racial stereotyping around me only intensified, I found that overachievement could also garner praise. It protected me, at least emotionally, from the sting of being different.

My classmates started to suggest that I was the smartest kid in the class. My teachers echoed them. I was proud to come home to my mom and pull the Outstanding Reader award from my backpack, my heart swelling as she smiled. Intelligence became my mantra. There was never any question of whether I would prioritize academics, or graduate, or go to college, or get a degree and a job that utilized my inherent smarts. Even when my family moved from LA to the Coachella Valley, and I began skipping school in a classic display of teenage rebellion, I still made it a point to show up for exams. I would get that A-plus and preserve my sterling GPA. I didnt question any of itthe ends, the means, the definition of intelligence at its heart. To me it all made perfect sense. I was using my smarts to propel me to a new place.