I want to begin with a disclaimer, not because I think it will help me, but because I've found that leading with context tends to soften the blow. The context is this: I was eight years old.
In second grade, my class was assigned what my teacher called the Influential Person Project. We were to select someone who inspired us, print out a photograph of their head, cut it out, and draw the rest of their body on construction paper. Then we would present our person to the class and explain, in our own words, why this individual deserved to be called influential. The project was graded. This is relevant because it means there was, at minimum, one adult in the room who saw what I turned in and simply gave me a B-plus and moved on with her life.
My best friend Sarah picked Gandhi. This tells you everything you need to know about Sarah. She went to Brown for undergrad, Columbia for law school, and now works for a congressional subcommittee in Washington D.C.. She selected Gandhi at the age of eight because Sarah was already, in some essential way, Sarah.
Our friend Nick picked Mr. Rogers. A warm choice. Defensible. And our other friend Matt went with Michael Jordan. It was such a statistically inevitable pick for a second grade boy in the early 2000s that Matt was actually one of four boys in our class to independently choose "His Airness" as his Influential Person.
My friend Rowan -- bless her -- printed out a photograph of her father's face, cut it off at the neck with safety scissors, and glued it to a drawing of a body she'd sketched in crayon. Her father is, by all accounts, a perfectly nice artist from Altadena. She got an A.
And then there was me.
Eight-year-old Jacqueline's Influential Person was none other than Donald J. Trump.
Yeah. I know. Sorry that I didn’t pick Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie! I was EIGHT!
But you have to understand something about my household growing up: We watched The Apprentice religiously. We would tune in every Thursday night, and watch it without fail. We were so committed to this ritual.
One year we flew home from Hawaii after spring break and landed at LAX with forty-five minutes to spare before the season finale and my Dad drove us directly from the airport at a speed I can only describe as similar to Doc Brown’s DeLorean sending Marty McFly back to 1955. Once home, all of us sprinted through the front door, and threw ourselves onto the couch like soldiers diving into a foxhole. We did not stop for dinner on the way home. We did not stop to unpack our luggage. We sat there after getting off the 110 freeway and watched as Trump fired Jennifer Massey and then, finally, we exhaled. Kelly Perdew ended up winning that season.
Now, to my eight-year-old self, I didn’t see The Apprentice as a business competition. To me, The Apprentice was the world’s most intense, high-stakes game of Show and Tell on steroids. I didn't see corporate strategy because I had no idea what the hell corporate strategy was at the time. What I saw instead was a televised battle to see who could be the most creative under pressure.
From my perspective, the height of professional achievement involved a bunch of stressed-out adults in power suits sprinting around Manhattan trying to sell lemonade. Sometimes it was a charity auction or a marketing campaign for a brand I wouldn't be able to afford for another twenty years, but the vibe The Apprentice always gave to me was, "Recess, but with Briefcases."
The boardroom drama was the undisputed main event. Much like the losing tribe on Survivor trekking to Tribal Council to vote someone off the island, the losing team on The Apprentice was hauled into a wood-paneled arena to devour their own.
It was a beautiful, chaotic mess of adults bickering over who dropped the ball or who was just dead weight. Names were called, fingers were pointed, and the air was thick with desperation until Trump finally ended the misery by dropping the "You’re fired!" hammer.
Then came the Walk of Shame. The loser had to perform the mandatory "I’m not crying, you’re crying" hug-fest, grab their rolling suitcase, wave a somber goodbye to Robin the receptionist, and deliver a dramatic, tear-stained monologue in the back of a yellow taxi cab while the credits rolled.
I LOVED EVERY FREAKING SECOND OF IT!
Because to my child-brain, this was a VIP peak behind the curtain of The Real World. I assumed this was just the standard post-grad career path: You graduate college, you enter Corporate America, you sell lemonade for a few weeks, and -- BAM! -- you end up working for Donald Trump. Honestly? It looked like a blast!
I’ll never forget the ice cream episode. Contestants had to invent a new flavor of ice cream which to my eight-year-old mind, was the pinnacle of adult achievement. I had strong opinions. Even then, I was convinced I could’ve crushed that challenge by pitching something hip before it was cool -- think ube, yuzu, or brown butter with sea salt. These flavors weren't on most menus yet, which meant eight-year-old Jacqueline was ahead of the market!
The fact that I have never worked in ice cream development is one of the quiet tragedies of my professional life.
So when the Influential Person assignment came home in my backpack, the answer arrived fully formed, the way only the worst decisions do. I wasn't gonna pick Gandhi. I wasn't gonna pick a warm-hearted man in a cardigan. I was gonna pick the guy who let people compete to invent ice cream flavors on reality TV. I was gonna manifest my future career working for Donald Trump.
I printed out a photograph of Trump's face, cut it neatly along the jawline, and drew his body on a large piece of construction paper. I gave him his signature tie. I gave him his characteristic hand gesture -- fingers pressed together, held just below the chin, as if perpetually on the verge of making a very important decision -- though in my rendering he came out looking somewhat like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, which I maintain is a reasonable likeness for an eight-year-old working from memory.
"So, Jacqueline," my art teacher said when it was my turn to present. She spoke with the careful patience of someone trying to diffuse a situation that had not yet been classified as one. "You picked… Donald Trump I see."
"Yep!"
"And why is that?"
"When I grow up, I wanna to work for him!"
"Uh-huh. Doing what, exactly?"
"Coming up with ice cream flavors!" I said. "Oh, and also being president of the Trump Organization."
Nobody said anything. My teacher wrote something in her gradebook, and then we moved on to the kid who picked Rosa Parks. That was that.
What I find remarkable, in hindsight, is what was and wasn't questioned.
Around that time, I’d developed a scrapbooking habit. My mother passed down her finished copies of People and Entertainment Weekly, while my Bubbie saved me issues of Vogue and Elle from her home in San Diego whenever I would come down to visit. I would cut out every glamorous person or cool advertisement I could find -- most often Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian -- and paste them into a scrapbook I kept on the top shelf of my bookcase.
I liked Paris because she always seemed to be having fun, and fun seemed, at that age, like an excellent quality in a person. I liked Kim because her eyebrows were flawless and I couldn't wait until I was old enough to own a mascara wand. These were not complicated feelings. Again, I was eight. I thought they were cool.
One afternoon I brought my scrapbook to my therapist's office. She looked for a long moment at the pages where I cut out and pasted the magazine images of Paris and Kim.
"Jacqueline," she said, in a tone I recognized as incoming. “Do you know why Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous?"
"Sure," I said. "Paris has that show with Nicole Richie on Fox that’s super funny. And Kim’s dad is a famous lawyer here in LA."
I would like to point out that both of these were true statements that I had arrived entirely on my own. I was a well-informed child. Because at that time, Paris was famous for her show with Nicole Richie on Fox, The Sweet Life. And Kim’s dad was a famous LA based lawyer -- Robert Kardashian was the guy who defended OJ Simpson.
But my therapist shook her head.
“No, Jacqueline.” She said to me, like it should’ve been obvious. “Paris Hilton got famous after her sex tape leaked online. Same thing happened to Kim.”
She then began to describe in great detail to eight-year-old me what a sex tape was.
“Happened to Pamela Anderson too.” She added.
“Okay,” I said.
“Basically, Jacqueline, you shouldn’t look up to these types of girls. Girls who make sex tapes are not the kinds of girls you would like to model yourself after.”
“Right,” I said. And then -- because I really couldn’t think of anything else to say after my therapist just killed my vibe -- I asked her, “So… have you had sex before? What’s that like?”
My therapist then got really mad at me for straight up asking her that question and promptly told me that our time was up.
How convenient.
Here is what I've never been able to shake about that session: My therapist spent twenty minutes dismantling my admiration for two women who, as far as I understood, were famous for being glamorous and fun. Meanwhile, at school, not a single adult had pulled me aside about my Influential Person drawing -- the one of the man who would eventually be on trial in four separate jurisdictions. Trump got a B-plus and Paris Hilton got a therapeutic intervention.
Can you tell that I've thought a lot about this?
As I got older, I started to notice that this was a pattern rather than an exception.
Pablo Picasso has always been my favorite artist, and as a child, I was absolutely obsessed with his 1932 masterpiece, Woman with a Book. I used to beg my parents to take me to the Norton Simon Museum just so I could stand in front of it and stare.
The painting captures his muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in a moment of quiet absorption. But to an eight-year-old, it was like staring at a more sophisticated version of a Lisa Frank folder. The painting had that coloring book aesthetic going for it -- bold, with thick black outlines and vibrant, saturated colors. Between the floral-like sleeves, the seemingly lacy green bodice, and the yellow and red dots that linked up below her neckline, the painting was a feast of patterns.
But it is also a portrait made by a man who, according to nearly every biographical account, treated the women in his life with extraordinary cruelty. Marie-Thérèse Walter eventually took her own life. Picasso reportedly described women as either "goddesses or doormats," which is a formulation that would, at minimum, warrant a conversation with a therapist.
Gandhi developed the philosophy of nonviolent resistance that shaped Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.. He also, by his own account in his autobiography, hit his wife and refused her penicillin when she was dying, insisting that prayer and goat's milk would do the job. She died. When Sarah presented Gandhi as her Influential Person in second grade, no one asked her any follow-up questions.
One of my favorite movies, Midnight in Paris, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2012. And honestly, it deserved every ounce of that gold. It’s a gorgeous, whimsical love letter to the romance of art, memory, and that nagging sense of longing for an era you never actually lived through. It is a wonderful film! It was also written and directed by Woody Allen. I’ll leave the math there for you to do.
I am not arguing that we should ignore what these men did. What I'm sitting with is something messier: The question of whether we can look at a painting, or a film, or a television show, and let it mean something to us without that meaning being annihilated by the person who made it. Whether, in other words, we're allowed to take anything at face value anymore. And if not -- if we're required to know everything about everyone before we decide what we're allowed to admire -- then eight-year-old me was less naïve than she appeared. She was just working with the information she had at the time.
I listened to the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, in which Trump described grabbing women by their genitals as a natural consequence of being a celebrity -- "they let you do it" -- and I felt something I can only describe as mortification on behalf of my eight-year-old self and her construction-paper homage to her Influential Person. I did not vote for him. I have not voted for him. My therapist would be relieved to know that “Apprentice Trump” and I have gone our separate ways.
And yet.
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas-led militants launched a coordinated attack from Gaza into southern Israel. Around twelve hundred people were killed. More than two hundred and fifty were taken hostage. I am Jewish. I watched the news that day the way you watched something that keeps refusing to be a bad dream.
What followed, here at home, was its own kind of vertigo. I read about an eighty-nine-year-old Holocaust survivor named Susanne DeWitt who had appeared before the Berkeley City Council to request a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. She mentioned the massacre of October 7th. She was heckled and shouted down at the microphone. At the same meeting, a woman testified that her seven-year-old son had heard classmates say, “Jews are stupid.” Protesters responded with, "Zionists are stupider." And then, from somewhere in the crowd, “You are spies for Israel.”
I did not go to a synagogue for two years. I live in New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and I was afraid to walk into a synagogue. I want to say that again because it still sounds impossible to me: In New York City, in 2023, I was afraid.
And then Donald Trump brokered a deal. Working with mediators in Egypt and Qatar, his administration leveraged back-channel diplomatic maneuvers and economic statecraft to negotiate a ceasefire and a multi-phase hostage release. The hostages came home. Some of them. The ones still alive.
"You know what's funny?" Sarah said, the last time we were together. "Remember when you picked Donald Trump as your Influential Person?"
"Yes," I said. "I was eight."
"You were eight," she agreed.
We sat with that for a minute.
I don't know what it means to hold two true things that refuse to resolve into a lesson. That a man can be genuinely terrible and also, on one specific occasion, do something that mattered enormously to people of your own background and religion. That a painting can be beautiful even when you know what happened to the woman in it. That an eight-year-old can pick someone for the right reasons -- because she wanted to make ice cream flavors for a living, because she liked watching adults argue in boardrooms, because she was just a kid taking in the first impressions of her surroundings -- and that the world will, eventually, complicate every face it shows you.
In her 2021 Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Director, Chloé Zhao quoted from the Three Character Classic, a Chinese text she'd memorized as a child: That people, at birth, are inherently good. She said she still believed it. The audience applauded. Somewhere, a second-grader was cutting out a photograph with safety scissors and thinking to herself, This person, right here. This is the one who influences me now.
Maybe that's all the Influential Person Project was ever asking. Not who is objectively worthy of your admiration, but who, at this moment in your small and earnest life, do you think is good? Who do you want to be like, when you grow up and the world turns out to be more complicated than it looked from the couch on Thursday nights?
Eight-year-old me wanted to come up with ice cream flavors. She wanted to be in the boardroom. She wanted, in her loud and unsophisticated way, to matter.
I don't think that's so hard to understand. Even if she could've picked Gandhi.
In second grade, my class was assigned what my teacher called the Influential Person Project. We were to select someone who inspired us, print out a photograph of their head, cut it out, and draw the rest of their body on construction paper. Then we would present our person to the class and explain, in our own words, why this individual deserved to be called influential. The project was graded. This is relevant because it means there was, at minimum, one adult in the room who saw what I turned in and simply gave me a B-plus and moved on with her life.
My best friend Sarah picked Gandhi. This tells you everything you need to know about Sarah. She went to Brown for undergrad, Columbia for law school, and now works for a congressional subcommittee in Washington D.C.. She selected Gandhi at the age of eight because Sarah was already, in some essential way, Sarah.
Our friend Nick picked Mr. Rogers. A warm choice. Defensible. And our other friend Matt went with Michael Jordan. It was such a statistically inevitable pick for a second grade boy in the early 2000s that Matt was actually one of four boys in our class to independently choose "His Airness" as his Influential Person.
My friend Rowan -- bless her -- printed out a photograph of her father's face, cut it off at the neck with safety scissors, and glued it to a drawing of a body she'd sketched in crayon. Her father is, by all accounts, a perfectly nice artist from Altadena. She got an A.
And then there was me.
Eight-year-old Jacqueline's Influential Person was none other than Donald J. Trump.
Yeah. I know. Sorry that I didn’t pick Margaret Atwood or Salman Rushdie! I was EIGHT!
But you have to understand something about my household growing up: We watched The Apprentice religiously. We would tune in every Thursday night, and watch it without fail. We were so committed to this ritual.
One year we flew home from Hawaii after spring break and landed at LAX with forty-five minutes to spare before the season finale and my Dad drove us directly from the airport at a speed I can only describe as similar to Doc Brown’s DeLorean sending Marty McFly back to 1955. Once home, all of us sprinted through the front door, and threw ourselves onto the couch like soldiers diving into a foxhole. We did not stop for dinner on the way home. We did not stop to unpack our luggage. We sat there after getting off the 110 freeway and watched as Trump fired Jennifer Massey and then, finally, we exhaled. Kelly Perdew ended up winning that season.
Now, to my eight-year-old self, I didn’t see The Apprentice as a business competition. To me, The Apprentice was the world’s most intense, high-stakes game of Show and Tell on steroids. I didn't see corporate strategy because I had no idea what the hell corporate strategy was at the time. What I saw instead was a televised battle to see who could be the most creative under pressure.
From my perspective, the height of professional achievement involved a bunch of stressed-out adults in power suits sprinting around Manhattan trying to sell lemonade. Sometimes it was a charity auction or a marketing campaign for a brand I wouldn't be able to afford for another twenty years, but the vibe The Apprentice always gave to me was, "Recess, but with Briefcases."
The boardroom drama was the undisputed main event. Much like the losing tribe on Survivor trekking to Tribal Council to vote someone off the island, the losing team on The Apprentice was hauled into a wood-paneled arena to devour their own.
It was a beautiful, chaotic mess of adults bickering over who dropped the ball or who was just dead weight. Names were called, fingers were pointed, and the air was thick with desperation until Trump finally ended the misery by dropping the "You’re fired!" hammer.
Then came the Walk of Shame. The loser had to perform the mandatory "I’m not crying, you’re crying" hug-fest, grab their rolling suitcase, wave a somber goodbye to Robin the receptionist, and deliver a dramatic, tear-stained monologue in the back of a yellow taxi cab while the credits rolled.
I LOVED EVERY FREAKING SECOND OF IT!
Because to my child-brain, this was a VIP peak behind the curtain of The Real World. I assumed this was just the standard post-grad career path: You graduate college, you enter Corporate America, you sell lemonade for a few weeks, and -- BAM! -- you end up working for Donald Trump. Honestly? It looked like a blast!
I’ll never forget the ice cream episode. Contestants had to invent a new flavor of ice cream which to my eight-year-old mind, was the pinnacle of adult achievement. I had strong opinions. Even then, I was convinced I could’ve crushed that challenge by pitching something hip before it was cool -- think ube, yuzu, or brown butter with sea salt. These flavors weren't on most menus yet, which meant eight-year-old Jacqueline was ahead of the market!
The fact that I have never worked in ice cream development is one of the quiet tragedies of my professional life.
So when the Influential Person assignment came home in my backpack, the answer arrived fully formed, the way only the worst decisions do. I wasn't gonna pick Gandhi. I wasn't gonna pick a warm-hearted man in a cardigan. I was gonna pick the guy who let people compete to invent ice cream flavors on reality TV. I was gonna manifest my future career working for Donald Trump.
I printed out a photograph of Trump's face, cut it neatly along the jawline, and drew his body on a large piece of construction paper. I gave him his signature tie. I gave him his characteristic hand gesture -- fingers pressed together, held just below the chin, as if perpetually on the verge of making a very important decision -- though in my rendering he came out looking somewhat like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons, which I maintain is a reasonable likeness for an eight-year-old working from memory.
"So, Jacqueline," my art teacher said when it was my turn to present. She spoke with the careful patience of someone trying to diffuse a situation that had not yet been classified as one. "You picked… Donald Trump I see."
"Yep!"
"And why is that?"
"When I grow up, I wanna to work for him!"
"Uh-huh. Doing what, exactly?"
"Coming up with ice cream flavors!" I said. "Oh, and also being president of the Trump Organization."
Nobody said anything. My teacher wrote something in her gradebook, and then we moved on to the kid who picked Rosa Parks. That was that.
What I find remarkable, in hindsight, is what was and wasn't questioned.
Around that time, I’d developed a scrapbooking habit. My mother passed down her finished copies of People and Entertainment Weekly, while my Bubbie saved me issues of Vogue and Elle from her home in San Diego whenever I would come down to visit. I would cut out every glamorous person or cool advertisement I could find -- most often Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian -- and paste them into a scrapbook I kept on the top shelf of my bookcase.
I liked Paris because she always seemed to be having fun, and fun seemed, at that age, like an excellent quality in a person. I liked Kim because her eyebrows were flawless and I couldn't wait until I was old enough to own a mascara wand. These were not complicated feelings. Again, I was eight. I thought they were cool.
One afternoon I brought my scrapbook to my therapist's office. She looked for a long moment at the pages where I cut out and pasted the magazine images of Paris and Kim.
"Jacqueline," she said, in a tone I recognized as incoming. “Do you know why Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are famous?"
"Sure," I said. "Paris has that show with Nicole Richie on Fox that’s super funny. And Kim’s dad is a famous lawyer here in LA."
I would like to point out that both of these were true statements that I had arrived entirely on my own. I was a well-informed child. Because at that time, Paris was famous for her show with Nicole Richie on Fox, The Sweet Life. And Kim’s dad was a famous LA based lawyer -- Robert Kardashian was the guy who defended OJ Simpson.
But my therapist shook her head.
“No, Jacqueline.” She said to me, like it should’ve been obvious. “Paris Hilton got famous after her sex tape leaked online. Same thing happened to Kim.”
She then began to describe in great detail to eight-year-old me what a sex tape was.
“Happened to Pamela Anderson too.” She added.
“Okay,” I said.
“Basically, Jacqueline, you shouldn’t look up to these types of girls. Girls who make sex tapes are not the kinds of girls you would like to model yourself after.”
“Right,” I said. And then -- because I really couldn’t think of anything else to say after my therapist just killed my vibe -- I asked her, “So… have you had sex before? What’s that like?”
My therapist then got really mad at me for straight up asking her that question and promptly told me that our time was up.
How convenient.
Here is what I've never been able to shake about that session: My therapist spent twenty minutes dismantling my admiration for two women who, as far as I understood, were famous for being glamorous and fun. Meanwhile, at school, not a single adult had pulled me aside about my Influential Person drawing -- the one of the man who would eventually be on trial in four separate jurisdictions. Trump got a B-plus and Paris Hilton got a therapeutic intervention.
Can you tell that I've thought a lot about this?
As I got older, I started to notice that this was a pattern rather than an exception.
Pablo Picasso has always been my favorite artist, and as a child, I was absolutely obsessed with his 1932 masterpiece, Woman with a Book. I used to beg my parents to take me to the Norton Simon Museum just so I could stand in front of it and stare.
The painting captures his muse, Marie-Thérèse Walter, in a moment of quiet absorption. But to an eight-year-old, it was like staring at a more sophisticated version of a Lisa Frank folder. The painting had that coloring book aesthetic going for it -- bold, with thick black outlines and vibrant, saturated colors. Between the floral-like sleeves, the seemingly lacy green bodice, and the yellow and red dots that linked up below her neckline, the painting was a feast of patterns.
But it is also a portrait made by a man who, according to nearly every biographical account, treated the women in his life with extraordinary cruelty. Marie-Thérèse Walter eventually took her own life. Picasso reportedly described women as either "goddesses or doormats," which is a formulation that would, at minimum, warrant a conversation with a therapist.
Gandhi developed the philosophy of nonviolent resistance that shaped Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.. He also, by his own account in his autobiography, hit his wife and refused her penicillin when she was dying, insisting that prayer and goat's milk would do the job. She died. When Sarah presented Gandhi as her Influential Person in second grade, no one asked her any follow-up questions.
One of my favorite movies, Midnight in Paris, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2012. And honestly, it deserved every ounce of that gold. It’s a gorgeous, whimsical love letter to the romance of art, memory, and that nagging sense of longing for an era you never actually lived through. It is a wonderful film! It was also written and directed by Woody Allen. I’ll leave the math there for you to do.
I am not arguing that we should ignore what these men did. What I'm sitting with is something messier: The question of whether we can look at a painting, or a film, or a television show, and let it mean something to us without that meaning being annihilated by the person who made it. Whether, in other words, we're allowed to take anything at face value anymore. And if not -- if we're required to know everything about everyone before we decide what we're allowed to admire -- then eight-year-old me was less naïve than she appeared. She was just working with the information she had at the time.
I listened to the Access Hollywood tape in 2016, in which Trump described grabbing women by their genitals as a natural consequence of being a celebrity -- "they let you do it" -- and I felt something I can only describe as mortification on behalf of my eight-year-old self and her construction-paper homage to her Influential Person. I did not vote for him. I have not voted for him. My therapist would be relieved to know that “Apprentice Trump” and I have gone our separate ways.
And yet.
On October 7th, 2023, Hamas-led militants launched a coordinated attack from Gaza into southern Israel. Around twelve hundred people were killed. More than two hundred and fifty were taken hostage. I am Jewish. I watched the news that day the way you watched something that keeps refusing to be a bad dream.
What followed, here at home, was its own kind of vertigo. I read about an eighty-nine-year-old Holocaust survivor named Susanne DeWitt who had appeared before the Berkeley City Council to request a Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation. She mentioned the massacre of October 7th. She was heckled and shouted down at the microphone. At the same meeting, a woman testified that her seven-year-old son had heard classmates say, “Jews are stupid.” Protesters responded with, "Zionists are stupider." And then, from somewhere in the crowd, “You are spies for Israel.”
I did not go to a synagogue for two years. I live in New York City, home to the largest Jewish population outside of Israel, and I was afraid to walk into a synagogue. I want to say that again because it still sounds impossible to me: In New York City, in 2023, I was afraid.
And then Donald Trump brokered a deal. Working with mediators in Egypt and Qatar, his administration leveraged back-channel diplomatic maneuvers and economic statecraft to negotiate a ceasefire and a multi-phase hostage release. The hostages came home. Some of them. The ones still alive.
"You know what's funny?" Sarah said, the last time we were together. "Remember when you picked Donald Trump as your Influential Person?"
"Yes," I said. "I was eight."
"You were eight," she agreed.
We sat with that for a minute.
I don't know what it means to hold two true things that refuse to resolve into a lesson. That a man can be genuinely terrible and also, on one specific occasion, do something that mattered enormously to people of your own background and religion. That a painting can be beautiful even when you know what happened to the woman in it. That an eight-year-old can pick someone for the right reasons -- because she wanted to make ice cream flavors for a living, because she liked watching adults argue in boardrooms, because she was just a kid taking in the first impressions of her surroundings -- and that the world will, eventually, complicate every face it shows you.
In her 2021 Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Director, Chloé Zhao quoted from the Three Character Classic, a Chinese text she'd memorized as a child: That people, at birth, are inherently good. She said she still believed it. The audience applauded. Somewhere, a second-grader was cutting out a photograph with safety scissors and thinking to herself, This person, right here. This is the one who influences me now.
Maybe that's all the Influential Person Project was ever asking. Not who is objectively worthy of your admiration, but who, at this moment in your small and earnest life, do you think is good? Who do you want to be like, when you grow up and the world turns out to be more complicated than it looked from the couch on Thursday nights?
Eight-year-old me wanted to come up with ice cream flavors. She wanted to be in the boardroom. She wanted, in her loud and unsophisticated way, to matter.
I don't think that's so hard to understand. Even if she could've picked Gandhi.
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