VOLUME V, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 2
The Photograph at a Forty-Five Degree Angle, a Hero Who Vanished into the Crowd
The last section set down that we the people was never truly all the people, only a position with a moving edge. This section tells a smaller sample, a single photograph, and the one person who changed it. A green card photograph, shot at a forty-five degree angle, holds one of the quietest positions there is. And the one who changed it was not a bloody uprising. It was an ordinary person who heard, who went quietly and did the thing, and who vanished back into the crowd. The layer this section fixes is the true position of a hero. The one who does stands higher than the one who speaks.
Begin with the photograph. Before the nineteen nineties, a person who wanted to immigrate to the United States and apply for a green card was told one thing about the photo. It had to be shot at a forty-five degree angle, the face turned to the side, not squared to the camera. The shutter clicked, the photo came out a three-quarter profile, and it was pasted onto the form and handed in. Most people shot it and thought no more of it, filed the paperwork, got the card, began their lives, and very few ever stopped to ask one question. Why forty-five degrees.
An identification photo has a few standard angles, and each carries a meaning. Full face, squared to the lens, is the angle for photographing a person, the one used for a passport, a driver's license. Full profile, the face turned all the way to the side, is the angle for photographing a criminal, the one police keep on file, a front shot and a side shot together. This convention has held for more than a hundred years. The lens is the most honest thing there is. To face it squarely says, I stand here in the open, with nothing to hide. To be told to turn aside says, there is a side of you that must be recorded and watched. The difference between photographing a person and photographing a criminal was never in the face. It was in the angle you were made to hold.
The one who arranged this book was, in his early years, a photographer, and he saw the trick in the forty-five degrees at a glance. It sits exactly at the midpoint between the person and the criminal. The green card applicant is not a citizen, and so may not be photographed squarely like a citizen, and is not a criminal, and so may not be photographed in full profile like a criminal, and so is set in the position of the half-person, half-criminal, and given the middle value, forty-five degrees. This is the deepest layer of Wei in a position. It does not say aloud you are not a person, and it does not say aloud you are a criminal. It uses only an angle to set you quietly in the middle, so that you do not even know your own position. A sign that read you are lesser, a person would see and tear down. But forty-five degrees writes not a single word, and you take it for a mere technical rule about photography, and you turn your face aside and go along with it. It hides the heaviest of verdicts inside the lightest of motions, deeper than any open discrimination, because the open kind can at least be resisted, and the hidden kind gives you no handle even to grip.
Once a thing like this is seen, it cannot be unseen. He told it to the people around him, to colleagues, to friends, to students, to anyone willing to hear. The content was plain. A citizen may face the camera squarely, and a green card applicant must turn forty-five degrees, which is the middle value between a criminal and a person, so that the immigrant is denied even the standing to look the lens in the eye. He never told it to complain about America, and never to stir anyone up. He only set out a position he had seen through, plainly. Lay out the position, pass no verdict, and this one photograph is no different. The rest he left to whoever heard.
No one knows which year, which day, which occasion it was. After he had told that story, a young woman of Chinese descent came up to him and said only one line. America really has wronged you. And then she left, leaving no name and no way to reach her, and vanished into the crowd. That one line carries great weight. She did not say this rule is unreasonable, which would be to argue a point. She said it has wronged you, which is to set herself in the other person's position and, on behalf of a system that had shortchanged people, own an apology. A person able to say that line has already, in her own heart, completed a trading of places. She was not standing inside we the Americans looking out at the immigrant. She had stepped over to the immigrant's side and turned to look back at we the Americans. That she said it and left, leaving no name, shows further that she was not performing sympathy. She simply could not get past the thing in her own heart.
It was guessed afterward that she may have been a low-ranking clerk somewhere inside the immigration bureau. After she went back, she reported the matter up through the inside, with no statement, no press conference, no hearing, no protest, and the requirement for the green card photograph was quietly changed, from the forty-five degree profile to the full face. From then on, a person applying for a green card could look straight into the lens and stand there like a person. Most people never even noticed a change had been made. They just shot a full-face photo by the new form. The people who benefited were many, and of those who knew there was anyone to thank, there was not one. To do a good thing so cleanly that it leaves no trace, so cleanly that not even a word of thanks has anywhere to be delivered, is a very high thing.
Now the layer this section truly means to fix floats up. The hero is not the one who speaks. It is the one who, having heard, is willing to go and do. The one who speaks sets up a word. The one who does the thing sets up a deed. Part One said that Wei is what human effort makes, and within what human effort makes, the turning of the word into the deed is the very stroke that actually moves the world. The world changes not because someone spoke, but because someone heard, and then went and did. That woman who vanished put out no book, went on no television, entered no history, won no prize, and asked not a cent in return, and yet she let everyone who applied for a green card after the nineteen nineties face the camera. And the thing she did stands higher than most uprisings paid for in blood. Most of the changes in human history were bought with blood, the great French upheaval, the American war between the states, the independence of India, hundreds of thousands and millions of lives traded for some widening of a position, at a terrible cost.
But there is another road, cheaper by a thousandfold, ten thousandfold. The inside person, the person who heard, and the person willing to act quietly, all three joined in one person, and without blood and without uproar, the thing was changed. It is high because it presses the cost to the lowest. It is rare because it takes three things at once, a person whose hand reaches the switch on the inside, who happened also to hear and truly feel the turn in the heart, and who was willing further to go and do it, and to want nothing back once it was done. Three things gathered in one person is very hard, and so history, most of the time, has walked the expensive road of blood.
But once the photograph was changed, did the green card holder's position truly improve. Only in part. To face the camera is a good thing, the full face, being taken as a whole person. But their root position has not changed. They cannot vote, cannot run for office, are never a full member of we the people, and though they pay the same taxes, keep the same laws, do the same work for this country, they are not counted as the people. Deeper still are those with no status at all, who likewise live, work, pay taxes, and keep the law, and who may be expelled at any moment, who fit into no square inside the people and into no square outside it either. Bring it down to the actual days. A green card holder has lived here twenty or thirty years, paid twenty or thirty years of taxes, has children born and raised here, and every election, the ballot that decides his own life is never his. A person with no status has it harder, going before dawn to the work site and back to the rented room deep in the night, doing the work no one else will do, not daring to fall ill, not daring to call the police, because any single facing of the authorities may be the beginning of expulsion. Both are laying brick and adding tile to this country, and both are held outside that one door marked the people, not because they did anything wrong, but because the position simply left them no place. For more than two hundred years, the people has never truly equaled all the people, and this is the rule of position, not the fault of any one administration.
So this section sets a twenty-fourth layer. We the people is forever a position, and yet there is a road higher than blood, that when the one who understands the position, the one whose hand reaches the switch, and the one willing to do it quietly are joined, the thing can be changed. The ancestors said this long ago. Around 500 BC, Confucius said the gentleman wishes to be slow in his words and quick in his deeds, few in speech, fast in doing, and modest once it is done. Laozi's line comes to rest here too. Around 500 BC, Laozi said the sage does not hoard, and the more he does for others the more he has, the more he gives to others the more he holds. That woman who vanished into the crowd was no sage and no gentleman, only an ordinary person, and yet what she did runs in the same vein as quick in deeds and the sage does not hoard.
A reader who reaches here need not go looking for some earth-shaking deed to do. Quick in deeds, brought down to daily life, is simply this, that when you see a small wrong and your own hand happens to reach it, you quietly set it right, without display, without waiting to be praised. A rule in the office that torments people, if you have the power to change it, you change it. A procedure that puts people in a bind, if you can simplify it, you simplify it. A person who has been overlooked, if you can lend a hand in passing, you lend it. None of these are large, none go into any history, and yet every one of them is the turning of a word into a deed. The world is pushed forward, a little at a time, by countless such unnamed small motions.
The next section is the one that caps this part, choosing with clear eyes, defending neither power nor crime. Let the reader carry this layer, that the hero is the one who does and not the one who speaks, into the section that follows. Many have spoken, and many have heard, but the ones who, having heard, were willing to go and do, and having done, vanished into the crowd, are very few. Blessings on her, and on every person who, having heard, quietly does the thing and leaves no name behind. They are the true heroes of all of it. This story is wholly fictional, and any resemblance is mere coincidence.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section Three. Choosing with Clear Eyes, Defending Neither Power Nor Crime.