It’s my firm belief that one of the best things about being a parent is showing your kids all the things that you loved when you were their age.* Whether that’s movies (like I wrote about with Back to the Future on The History of It All) or books as I talked about a few years ago with The Bear That Wasn’t or music or sports you played/teams you rooted for. Passing that stuff on is pretty great.**
*A distant second is them being like “this stinks” when you show them your favorite whatever
**Except for rooting for the Jets. I have very specifically avoided making my kids Jets fans. In fact, they actively make fun of me for rooting for the Jets
When my kids were little, I read to them every night, which paid off because both of them love to read.* And the old books I loved to read are of course still great and fun and cute. I think the books I Love You Forever and Goodnight, Moon come out with the baby during delivery.
*This is a tremendous lie. Both of my kids would rather claw their eyes out than read a book right now, which will change, but is so incredibly gross. I should probably go into their rooms and start reading to them again
One of those books was Paddington Bear, the adorable bear who the Brown family find and adopt as their own, alongside their human children. The hi jinx generally ensue as Paddington learns to adapt himself to the workings of a human household, what it’s like to live in post-war London, get his stomach accustomed to British food of the 1950s, etc. I knew that Paddington wasn’t born with the Brown family (it would be extremely weird if Mrs. Brown gave birth to a bear), but at no point, however, did I internalize or remember the fact that Paddington Bear is Peruvian.
The quintessential British bear with the blue peacoat and red hat is actually from “darkest Peru”.
As I was thinking through what to write here (what I started thinking about isn’t what almost dozens of you about to read), I did a quick deep dive on Paddington’s backstory. Paddington has an Aunt Lucy and when she moves into the Home for Retired Bears in Lima*, she sends him off to London having taught him how to make marmalade and basically nothing else. I guess she taught him to be nice and kind also, but really not a ton other than that. So he arrives in London at his namesake tube station, with nothing but his suitcase, marmalade and the famous sign hanging around his neck:
“Please look after this bear”
*I swear I’m not making this up. This is Paddington canon.
As I kept falling into the Paddington* rabbit hole, I read through a little about the author, Michael Bond. Bond was a young man during World War II in Britain. He survived an air raid in a building that collapsed on him and killed 40+ people. He was in the Royal Air Force, and though he served sparingly he did see the horrors of war firsthand. The other thing he saw was the influx of refugee and evacuee children to Britain during the war. It’s that memory that gave him the idea and inspiration to write the Paddington books.
*Another thing of note, which pops in the first book, is that Paddington’s name isn’t actually Paddington. When the Browns ask him his name, he says he has one but they wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, so they rename him Paddington after the station where they found him. For the sake of completeness, his Peruvian name is Pastuso. I recognize this is a lot of Paddington’s backstory, so bear** with me
**Get it?
Paddington isn’t just a story about a bear from Peru who gets himself into various situations while making new friends. Paddington is actually a story about refugees. The most important thing isn’t that the Browns gain a new member of the family. I mean, that’s the actual text and it’s really cute. Like really cute. But there’s a far more interesting subtext.
Because the most important thing that happens in Paddington is pretty great. He’s alone with a simple request by an elder relative for someone to care for him and the most important thing is that someone does. Someone takes him in. The Browns don’t know Paddington. He’s not from the area, so he doesn’t really get British culture initially*. And as you read the books, he creates all manner of hilarious problems stemming from this dissonance. But the Browns response to this stranger in a strange land is hospitality, welcoming and empathy rather than fear.
*He’s also a tiny bear, so as a bear he doesn’t really pose much danger
And as importantly, Paddington doesn’t draw a line and stop being Peruvian in order to belong in his new world. He keeps his hat and marmalade, Aunt Lucy and his genealogical history. Over time, Paddington is simultaneously very Peruvian and almost comically British. He integrates without losing himself, which illustrates something truly amazing: that integration isn’t necessarily the newcomer being more like us. It’s also not just the idea of what “us” is becoming larger. It’s both of those things.
And I couldn’t help but find a parallel, a similar story to something else from my childhood that I adored. A child is born into dangerous surroundings. His family realizes that his very survival is predicated on his departure from his family. They make a difficult decision to send him away. He travels a seemingly impossible distance to a strange foreign land with nothing and a family finds him and takes him in. Am I talking about Paddington here? Yup. But I’m also talking about Superman. At the very bottom, Superman is a baby whose parents send him away because of the impeding destruction of their home planet and he lands on earth and is adopted by the Kents, who name him Clark*.
*Definitive Clarks ranking: Kent, Griswold, Dick, Petula, Gable, Roy, Will. Honorable mention: Arthur C.
Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster grew up in immigrant families in Cleveland, OH. And what they saw and heard from their parents as they grew up was that in America, anything was possible.* So they created a character who comes from somewhere else, but sees what he is capable of in America. Kal-El was born on Krypton, but he becomes Superman on Earth. He’s ordinary and typical under Krypton’s red sun, but when he arrives on Earth, our yellow sun gives him extraordinary powers. In a sentence, Superman isn’t just an immigrant. He’s the ultimate immigrant.
*Similar to how Feivel Mousekowitz hears that the streets of America are paved with cheese
And where Paddington asks the question “what can a new country do for the stranger who shows up on its shores,” the Superman story asks “what will the stranger be capable of once he arrives on its shores.” And when you put them together, they’re become a much richer version of a bigger story of welcoming and belonging. And for the sake of clarity, this isn’t a case for a specific immigration policy. To me, this is a story about what possibilities exist when someone gets the opportunity to start anew.
Because it’s really remarkable to me that two cultures have embraced these two characters so completely that we don’t even think of them as foreigners. Paddington is so British he could compete on the Great British Baking Show. Superman has been a symbol of American strength for 80 years. But foreignness isn’t incidental to their stories. Foreignness is critical to them. At some point, the stories that we tell about strangers from strange lands became more generous than the out loud conversations about them.
I have a theory about why. I think it’s because when we think about ourselves and our own identity, we reach for something associative or aspirational about the characters themselves. We’ve all been in a situation where we were new, whether that was in a new school or job or a new neighborhood or among a group that already had established a social cadence and we’ve hoped that someone would extend a welcoming hand and bring us in, rather than turn around and close the circle leaving us on the outside. And in those situations, we have a blank slate. The energy those situations is entirely potential and not at all kinetic, like a pendulum when it hits the apogee of its swing. But for whatever reason, we don’t extend that generosity to others rewriting their own narratives.
Aunt Lucy sent Paddington halfway around the world with the belief that some unseen generous force would take him in. Jor-El and Lara send their son orders of magnitude further with the same hope, even if those stories aren’t precisely the same thing.
“Please look after this bear”
At first glance, that’s just a fun little beginning to a super cute children’s story. But as it turns out, those words actually require a great deal of faith.
Today is 9/25. Nine two five. A newly christened “Dolly Day”. Let’s use it to find a way to use whatever power we have to do a little good.
Greg and I paid tribute to Dolly on Leadership In. You can listen to that episode here or here.
That’s all for this week. Until next week time, friends