The blog post that isn’t there
Knackered STOP Back from Singers yesterday STOP Shopping trip EXCLAMATION Exhausted STOP Wrestling with contract fine print STOP Double exhausted STOP Want to scream COMMA throat raw from repressed anxiety STOP Send scotch STOP
How dare you!
J and I have had the occasional domestic dispute over the past 12 years (ahem). And in the post-dust up analysis, we’ve both come to the conclusion that we’re both “highly strung”, though me more than him. And I’ll cop to that. The thing is, after speaking with a few other friends, it appears that an awful lot of Asian women are “highly strung”. Let’s have a look at that a little bit more closely.
What do we mean by the term? I’m just throwing out stuff that I’ve heard, and think about myself:
I hope you’re starting to get the picture. (And, just to repeat the implication in plainer text, men can be highly-strung too, but we’re not talking about them in this post.) Now, let me wander off a bit to an anecdote.
J was recently at a workshop where an engineer was giving a highly technical presentation. Because the workshop was quasi-public, there were a lot of people standing around watching. An acquaintance of J’s, being short, asked him to take a photo of the engineer because she (the photographer) couldn’t see over the crowd and she (the engineer) wanted to send some photos of her presenting her workshop to her parents.
Just as J finished relating the story to me, a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
“I bet she’s single,” I said.
He nodded. “Yes. We got into a conversation afterwards, and she told she she was. But how did you know?”
You know how you get an insight that takes many hops but coalesces in your mind in a heartbeat? That’s what happened here. I’ll try to explain it to you in fewer words than I used with J. Tell me what you think.
What is of absolutely no doubt in Asia — at the risk of descending into stereotype — is that education is important. You may find a parent who’s inordinately happy with their son for everything he buys for them because he’s a successful, let’s say, landscaper. But no matter how proud his parents are of him, there is always some niggle that they’d be prouder of him if he had a degree. And perhaps worked in an office instead. Or had workers who toiled on his behalf. In an office. Or school of some type.
Here’s the problem with the Asian female. One, they’re told that Education is Critical. “Nobody will love you if you’re stupid.” She gets lots of pats on the head when she tops the class in school, becomes prefect, snags a spot at a good university, and graduates, beaming out of the photo frame that sits proudly in her parents’ living room. So far, so good.
The next obvious thing is to get a job. And that’s where the problems start. You see, the young Asian female thinks that she worked so hard, studied so hard, to get somewhere in life. The young Asian female’s parents, however, have inexplicably changed their tune. From, “So why aren’t you getting first-class honours?” it becomes, “Isn’t it time you got married?”
Now, this will throw any reasonable human being for a loop. What?! Why did you ride me so hard if all you’re going to say when I’m 23 is, “When can I expect the grandchildren? I’m not getting any younger, you know.”
At this point, our young lady is caught in an unfortunate case of cognitive dissonance. Of course she doesn’t want to throw it all away just to play mother, especially not if she’s smart and knows she can climb the corporate ladder. So, instead of marrying, she says to herself: “I just have to make my parents proud of me. And once they realise how important it is that I make something of myself — as a person in my own right, rather than just as a wife or mother to someone else — they’ll understand and approve of me and then we can put this marriage nonsense to the side for the time being.”
I hope you can begin to get an inkling of where the young engineer is in this timeline? Caught in the throes of this mis-thinking, she’s well on the way to seeking approval by sending her parents tangible proof that people hang on her every word. That she is doing Something Meaningful. And it doesn’t involve a wedding ring. Pity it won’t work.
The fact is, it never works, and the nagging grows in scope and frequency. “You’re getting so old, lah. No man will want you soon.” “Why are you so smart? Men don’t like smart women.” “You’re too big for your boots, thinking you can get this promotion/start your own business. No wonder you can’t get married.”
And the young woman keeps on thinking that if only everything looked a bit more sparkly, a bit more meaningful, then things would come good. After all, her parents were serious when they said her education was important. She has more examples than she can poke a stick at to prove that point. So if she can’t sway them from their one-track marriage mind now, it must mean she hasn’t proven the worth of her education — of herself — to them hard enough.
And that’s how it begins. She must be perfect. Her boyfriend must be perfect. Her apartment/house must be perfect. Her car must be perfect. Her wardrobe must be perfect. And, as I’ve said before, because the parents have completely and utterly changed their tune, it never is. The problem is not with her, it’s with them. And, because she’s Asian, that’s a verboten thought because, from Turkey to Taiwan, the authority figure in the family is Always Right.
I am of the firm opinion that one of the biggest obstacles to female empowerment in Asia are the parents. I have seen too many worthwhile lives descend into some kind of obsessive-compulsive tail-chasing because the parents have now summarily decided that they want grandchildren and bugger what it means for their daughters. Marriages have been destroyed through the kind of desperate, serial approval seeking that starts with a conceded ceremony and continues from there till the day somebody drops. For the sake of sanity, it’s got to stop but, short of just waiting for all the ignorant old farts to die out, I’m not sure how.
Definitely not a child-safe post
[NOTE: Jim C Hines recently had a post on rape on his blog, so I thought -- for reasons that will become obvious as this post continues -- I'd move this one up and save Monday's scheduled post for Wednesday.]
I swear. A Lot. If you’re ever in a relaxed conversation with me, the least offensive term you’ll hear me use is “bloody” and you’ll quickly discover that my favourite word (besides “utterly”) is “fuck” and its many, many, wonderfully evocative derivatives. When referring to people, I have no compunction about referring to them as “cunts”, whether in admiration or degradation. To me, it’s just a word.
I don’t temper my swearing in front of the kids, although I have told them not to use such language themselves because they will be judged by it and they’re too young for that to happen. So, despite hearing their mother swear like a sailor from the moment they were born, neither of our children swear. It’ll come, and I’ll deal with it when it does, but we’re not there yet.
As a compulsive swearer, there are a couple of things I’ve noticed about it. For one, it’s definitely all in the rhythm. You have to be relaxed to swear well. I have been more shocked by someone say “bitch” than a friend telling me about a few cunts he ran into at a nightclub. If you haven’t internalised swearing, relaxed into it, woven it into the very cadence of your speech, it sounds more provocative and jarring than if you have.
Does the fact that I swear mean I have a small vocabulary? No. I consider my vocabulary to be decent-sized. And it isn’t a pointer to a lack of education either. Likewise, I don’t regard it as any kind of mirror to my personal moral standing. So, why do I do it?
Well, for one, it’s a habit. People have their own little mannerisms and twitches. Mine is that I swear. That’s just the result, however. In order to understand this more fully, you have to understand three other things, from consequence to source, from least to most important.
One is that swearers swear because the word loses meaning. I once worked with a very nice Basque by the name of Felix. He was a software engineer. And he used to swear a lot. “How the fuck do they expect us to fucking code this shit when they haven’t bedded down their fucking architecture and haven’t fucking prepared proper fucking design documents for it yet?” was along the lines of his usual objection. (That he was right, you can take as a given.) Even in casual Australia, this caused a bit of a stir. When questioned about it, mild-mannered Felix had a ready answer. “It’s not my language,” he shrugged. “‘Fuck’ doesn’t mean anything to me. Plus it’s fun to say.” And he’s right. Having also learnt some choice Chinese dialect words, I can say that calling people some pretty nasty names in another language doesn’t mean anything to me, either.
Two, when I studied martial arts, my training partners were mostly nineteen and male. Do you know how much testosterone is pumping through those young, toned veins? You can almost smell it the moment you step into the kwoon. And do you know how much disregard such young males have for the English language? But, of course, that doesn’t mean that I fell into swearing just because others were doing it. I hope you at least know that much about me, by now. It just made the environment more lax.
Three. Now this is the most important, so I left it to last. And please do think about this one. My previous Chinese boxing instructor used to hold anti-rape workshops. He did a lot of research into the topic. And what he told me was that men often use swear words to shock their victims. Women, not used to hearing such language, would freeze or hesitate when they heard foul words being shouted at them by an assailant. And in that moment of inaction, the attacker would then press his advantage through the use of physical force.(*)
One reason my instructor did nothing to curb the level of swearing in our kwoon was that he had the express purpose of inuring me to it, so I wouldn’t fall into the same trap. What can I say? It worked. A stranger can walk up to me and call me a useless fucking excuse for a diseased cunt, a motherfuckin’ abortion, spittle-flecked and straight to my face and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Instead, I’d be watching for other things going on — any other people around? How is he standing? What is he doing? How is he moving?
Swearing is a complex topic and the knee-jerk response of saying it’s All Bad and that civilised human beings Don’t Do It is a gross over-simplification. Because of the kind of training I underwent, I know that I’m better able to stand up to verbal abuse as a precursor to violence than the average woman. Because of the kind of world we live in, this training has actually paid off. The “downside” is that I’m not offended by any swearing and, as a corollary, tend to swear a lot myself. You can’t really have one without the other and I have no regrets. Just something for you to think about the next time the moralists start up.
(*) Rape is an heinous invasion of another human being’s privacy and will. Author Jim C Hines (whose blog I read religiously but who doesn’t know me from toffee) has a page on rape at his website. If you know anyone who has suffered rape, please go here for further links and information.
