Good luck and bad luck create each other

A timeless perspective on life.

The other day I was reading a David Foster Wallace essay—wait, don’t go, it gets better!—in which he wings a famous parable about a Chinese farmer and his horse. It’s a good one. Here’s wisdom-whisperer Alan Watts telling it.

One of Wallace’s personal touches on the story is describing the farmer’s son as “getting shanghaied.” I'd never seen Shanghai get verbed before. I just assumed it was a Wallacism, something he'd invented.

When I looked it up, I landed on one of those classic Depths of Wikipedia pages to learn that shanghaiing is actually a pretty grim racket rooted in sea slavery. Also called “crimping,” the practice involved abducting men and forcing them into unpaid sailor labor – furling sails, mopping puke, pumping the bilge, etc. – on ships commonly bound for Shanghai. It peaked in the latter half of the 1800s and declined as ships transitioned from sail to steam power—smaller crews, lower demand for slaves. Alternative propulsion technology saves the day.

The most notorious crimp was San Francisco's John "Shanghai" Kelly, a.k.a. the "King of the Crimps.” He once crimped a then-record 50 men in 3 hours, but worse than that were his manners. One on occasion, he wrapped a crew of men, who had perished from consuming embalming fluid, with blankets and sold them as drunk sailors to a captain who discovered they were actually dead only after leaving port. On another occasion, his birthday, Kelly lured 90 guests onto a booze cruise and drugged them with opium-laced whiskey. Once they were unconscious, he dumped them on three ships to be shanghaied, earning Kelly a new crimping record.

Aware that returning with 90 fewer men on board would raise suspicions, Kelly sailed the California coastline to strategize, where, to his good fortune, he crossed a sinking ship. He rescued its 800 crew members from certain drowning and returned to Market Street Wharf a hero, with a net gain of 710 men.

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Why did I share this random blessing-in-disguise story? Honestly, it's the only way I could link the essence of the Chinese farmer parable to the digression I’d started on shanghaiing. You'll see the connection in a moment. To close the circle, here's the parable in Wallace's words:

I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that.

It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse.

One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labor-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills.

All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?"

A couple days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging.

The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it.

But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg.

And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed horses onto the farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?"

A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between like 10 and 60 for cannonfodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer.

Good luck? Bad luck?

Of course, this perspective feels so self-evident that it’s almost unremarkable. “Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” as Hamlet said—and who could disagree? But to recognize is not to internalize, and I often struggle to consider the yin of a yang or vice versa. It would be so grounding to shrug at any subjective notions of fortune. Good luck, bad luck, who knows? The original parable, translated from Chinese, concludes: “This happens without end, and nobody can estimate it.”

Maybe next time I'll share how David Foster Wallace’s recounting of a 1200-year-old story put me on the Tao. Until then, I hope you enjoyed the detour to Shanghai. And if you're a writer, do read the Wallace essay. It's from his anthology, "Why I Write," and it's about—it's DFW, so it's kind of about everything.

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