Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: social norms

Two seeming opposites can both be true (at the same time), part three

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I have one more post in me about opposites being true at the same time. Here was my second post about it yesterday, in which I wrote mostly about what it was like to grow up with an undiagnosed (likely) neurodivergency. Specifically, autism. It wasn’t even an acknowledged thing when I was a kid. In fact, I don’t think I heard about it until I was in my twenties. I know I knew it existed in my early thirties because I saw it in my nephew when he was young, and I noted to myself that his behavior was very similar to my brother’s, who I had pegged as autistic several years before.

Hm. which seems to mean that I knew about it in my late twenties. It was a very rudimentary knowledge, though. “Something that boys have. It means they can’t look people in the eye; can’t feel emotions; don’t want to be touch; and are very set in their ways.” Even though I was most of those things, the factt that it was only seen as a boy thing made it impossible for me to have. I also thought it meant that you were out of control with temper tantrums, really loved mechanical/technical things, and that you could not relate to people at all. These I could not relate to at all because I had all that drummed out of me at an early age.

What I mean is by the time I was ten, I knew better than to talk back, state my opnion, or do anything that was deemed unladylike. It didn’t always stop you, mind, but I was painfully aware of how short my leash was. I was not supposed to talk too loudly, shout, climb trees, run around, sit with my legs uncrossed, or showing any personality in any way.

Both American and Taiwanese cultures had definite ideas of how a girl should be, and while they weren’t completely the same, they were both pretty restrictive. This was my first remembered time when two opposite things were both true–though I did not recognize it at the time.

I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in to make me a boy, but I never wanted to be one or thought I was actutally one. I just didn’t want to be a girl because it seemed so unappealing to me. So I guess it’s not a question of two opposites being true, exactly, but that I learned at an early age that I didn’t want anything to do with gender.

I will do a post on that soon (more than one, probably), but this is not that post. This is just to say that I learned at an early age that while I did not feel like a boy or wanted to be one in particular, it seemed preferable to being a girl.


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Two seeming opposites can both be true (at the same time)

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One thing that tipped me into thinking I might be autistic is that I have always felt like an alien. I talked about it with an online friend who is autistic, and I said those exact words. “I felt like an alien when I was a kid.”

At the time, I thought it was just because my parents were immigrants who were loath to involve themselves in American culture. Of course, they had to work in American institutions, but they spent all their free time with Taiwanese poeople. Whether it was at church or playing sports or doing karaoke, they did it with Taiwanese people. I knew nothing of American culture all the way through elementary school.

I remember being on the playground during recess, looking around me, and feeling like an alien. I did not know what to do, what to say, or what to think. Kids were doing regular kids stuff like playing on the playground equipment, playing games with each other, or just running around. I tried to mimic what they were doing, but I was in way over my head.

It didn’t help that I was seriously depressed and thought life wasn’t worth living. Or rather, I thought my life was worthless and I shouldn’t be alive. That did not help my feeling of being an alien, and I pretty much gave up on life. At seven.

One thing that bemuses me is the argument between neurotypical people and neuroatypical people over social niceties like the whole ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ ‘Fine, and you?’ exchange that you have to do at work and in many social situations. Neurotypicals say it’s just a ritual that has no literal meaning to it. It’s a phatic exchange, rather than anything with meaning.

I was always confused by this and by how it seemed to go against the admonishment not to lie. In fact, there are many things that seem to go against the decree not to lie. First of all, there’s the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus–two of the biggest lies told to children. Blatant lies. Oh, sure, there were rationalizations for why this was an acceptable lie, but I could not understand why those lies were acceptable, but others weren’t.

Telling your spouse that their clothes doesn’t make them look fat? Acceptable. Saying you love someone you don’t? Not acceptable. Saying you’re washing your hair to not go on a date? Acceptable or not, depending on your point of view.

As a kid, I had no idea which lies were ok and which were not. I learned by intensely studying the kids around me, but that still wasn’t enough. I had no clue how to do the intricate dance that society demands we do on the daily.

That brings me back to the subject of this post–are social niceties lies? I say yes-and I say no.

Let me explain.


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Neurodiversity and me, part six

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In yesterday’s post, I was musing about not even considering that I might be autistic. Plus a bunch of other things, too. I was saying how because of the norm being so engrained (and pushed), you can’t even see that there might be something else. Social skills? Of course everyone knows that when someone asks you how you are, you’re supposed to say ‘fine’. That’s just, like, you need to know it by osmosis!

Side note: So many of the things we think are normal or natural really aren’t. I see it on Ask A Manager when someone who was either in retail or in a blue collar job starts working in an office job. So many of the things that the commenters take for normal are questioned–and when you get down to it, there really is a lot of things in the white collar world that don’t make sense.

Things like why is it better to be salaried rather than hourly (in general, it’s not, but it benefits the employer to say it is). Things like what to wear to the office (there was a rousing debate recently as to whether not wearing a bra in the office is unprofessional for women), do you have to join in on after-work activities? (Depends on the office), etc. It’s a lot to think about, and it’s hard because it differs from office to office.

Same with culture in general. Cultural norms in the Midwest is much different than cultural norms in the Northeast, for example. Or New York. In New York, the culture is to be direct and forthright. In Minnesota, it’s to be the exact opposite. There’s a reason what we do is called ‘Minnesota Nice’. It’s because we are so very nice to your face and then tear you apart behind your back. Not really the second part, but the first part is true. Nice to your face regardless of how we feel about you.

When it comes to being neuroatypical, so much of it is couched in negatives. Meaning, that the person who is neuroatypical is deficient in some ways. Not reading social cues is considered a negative. Being obessesd with one thing. Not making eye contact. The stimming.

I mentioned in the last post that I don’t care about things like wearing makeup, fashion, etc. I also don’t care if people care that I don’t care. What I do care about, however, is maknig people feel heard. That’s because of my upbringing, and it’s not something I’ve had success in getting rid of. Mitigating? Somewhat. But also, I’ve learned to not care while performing caring. I mean, I’ve always just been performing caring, but now, I can not care about it as I do it–more so than before.


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Outside the norm

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So I’v ebeen prattling on and on about being a weirdo. It’s something I think about because I have never been a normie. Even before I realized that I waws outside the norm, I knew I wasn’t like everyone else. When I was a kid, that just made me miserable and lonely. And I felt as if there was something wrong with me.  It was only when I hit my…thirties that I realized how much of a freak I was.

In my early twenties, I started to see that being Asian, a woman, and bisexual, were all minorities. Put them all together, and it was one giant minority. I went to my first queer Asian women conference when I was twenty-two or twenty-three, and it was an eye-opener. I felt like I fit in for the first time, but even then, I knew I was still on the fringe. Yes, it’s possible to both fit in and be on the fringe.

Here’s the thing. We were playing the fun game of putting everyone on the femme/butch spectrum. Look. It was the nineties. It was a different time. When they got to me, the person who was doing the labeling paused for a long time and said that they could not put me on the spectrum. I was very pleased with this because that’s how I felt about myself. I wasn’t adrogynous because I embraced both the femme and the butch rather than eschew them both.

At the time, I had hair past my shoulders, big boobs, and wide hips. I look feminine even though I did not wear makeup and was not at all into fashion. On the butch side, I had a deep voice and a no-nonsense attitude. My hobbies leaned more masculine, and I hod no interest in typically feminine things. I was not a soft butch, either, that meant touches of femininity that I had no interest in.

I think it’s really difficult to talk about this because I don’t want to be dismissive of feminine hobbies and habits, but they don’t interest me at all. And I don’t think I should be penalized for that, either. Like, me saying I don’t wear a bra should not be something that women take issue with, but from the reactions I’ve seen in Ask A Manager forums, well, that’s naive of me.

I have known since my early twenties that I did not want to have kids. At all. Like, with prejudice. The idea of having them was repugnant to me, though I would not say that to anyone, obviously. Not people having children in general, but me in particular having children. It’s not a pregnancy thing, though that’s also something that I would not want to do. It’s the idea of actually having children that repulsed me. Again, for me.

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I had many women asking me if I was going to have children. Keep in mind that it was never a subject I brought up. Why would I? I didn’t want them, so there was no reason for me to bring it up. I thought that if I just simply said I didn’t want to have kidswhen they asked, it wouldn’t be a big deal.

I was naive and I was stupid. So many women took offense at my answer, even though as I said, I never brought up the subject. I only answered when asked, and I shouldn’t havve done that.


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Counter the culture

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I think often about culture because I’m so often outside it. I am in a culture that is a guess culture (Midwestern) and one that is even more a guess culture (Taiwanese). When my parents were here, my father would ask me I wanted to eat whatever they were eatting–like special delicacies such as mooncakes. Which I love, but cannot eat. I would explain this to him, but he did not seem to grasp it. He would sit there with a stony look on his face, then say, “You don’t want it?”

It was rude for me not to eat it in Taiwanese culture, but I can’t eat it. I can’t eat gluten or dairy. I was reading a thread on Ask A Manager about food and someone said that if they were offered something they couldn’t eat (because of allergies), they would eat it to be polite and just suffer later.

The askers in the crowd just could not understand it. In this weekend’s thread (or maybe the weekday open thread or even an old thread), someone said that they were glad when people said no and meant it. That kicked off this whole thread about ask vs. guess culture. And it reminds me of an incident in my Taiji class. One of my classmates was a pastor’s wife from, I want to say Alabama. She was talking about a church social she planned that everyone was enthused about, but only one person showed up. She voiced her frustrations, and my teacher who is also very ask culture commiserated with her. I interjected and asked my classmate what her parishioners actually said when she told them about the get-together. She said, “One said yes, a few said they had to check their calendars, others said they had to talk to their husbands. But they all said it sounded interesting!”

I told her that a straight-out yes is a yes, but anything else is a no. “I’ll ask my husband” is a no. “I’ll check my calendar” is a no. “That sounds great!” without a yes is a no. That’s the culture where I live, and while it can be frustrating to outsiders, it’s not any more mysterious than ask culture. Once you realize this simple truth, it can make life much easier.

I am a weird hybrid of the two. I can handle the ‘anything but a yes is a no’, but I really don’t like the ‘you have to demur three times until you can say yes’ bit.  In part because I can eat what I can eat, and I can’t eat what I can’t eat. I’m not going to make myself sick because of culture.

That’s where my anarchy streak kicks in. I don’t hate all rules. I don’t even hate most rules. But I don’t like rules that harm, and these kinds of rules do harm people–usually thoes with the least social capital. I do get that there is lubricant to be had for eating together, but the problem is that anything that is a social norms can go from being a welcoming thing to a gate-keeping thing.

That’s the problem with rituals and traditions. It’s easy to go from what they are supposed to mean to a rigid expectation of how things have to be. Then you lose the meaning of the tradition itself. There were two questions on the weekend thread at AAM about wedding invites. The first was about an evite from someone she didn’t really know. She wanted to know if she could just ignore it. She said it felt like a cash grab (later in the thread). One person agreed with her (that it felt like a cash grab), but other people admonished her for being too cynical. They said she should just say no and move on with her life.


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Why?

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I’m still thinking about anarchy per my convo with Ian yesterday. In this case, though, I’m thinking about it in terms of business norms and how they’re used to keep people in line. I was reading an Ask A Manager post from 2016. It was from a manager who wanted to tell her young report (in customer-facing healthcare) that ‘oil slick’ blue in her black hair was unprofessional. The letter wirter (LW) said it wasn’t in the dress code, so how could she address it?

Even back then, Alison asked if the LW was sure it needed to be addressed. Alison said times were changing and ‘unnatural’ hair colors were becoming more acceptable. And, I must saay, post-pandemic (current endemic) me thinks this is a non-issue. I mean, if your biggest problem at work is the color of your report’s hair, well, I can’t help you.

I have never understood it, though. When I worked at the county, I had extensions tied into my hair. They were of colors that were obviously not my own–blue, green, brown, red, etc. Not at the same time, but I would change them every three months or so. One of the muckety-mucks at the county (I worked on the floor with the heads of many different deparctments) asked me if I had changed the color in my hair the night before. I said no, I just got the extensions changed. It didn’t occur to me that he was disapproving of the blue streaks in my black hair, but I wouldn’t have cared if I had realized it.

I was an admin assistant to the director of the Diversity Training department. And Asian. It would not have been a good look on his part to question me about my hair. More to the point, I wouldn’t have cared. For whatever reason, despite all my mental health issues and my self-confidence issues, I just could never make myself care what the bosses thought about shit like that. It was too silly for words. I know that’s a privileged place to be, but I wish more people were in that position.

Look. I odn’t question all rules and laws. Such as driving laws. I think when you’re in two tons of metal, there should be rules governing who should go wihch way and in what order. I don’t want anyone dying on the streets, yo. But in terms of hair color…who cares. Honestly. Same with tats as long as they are not offensive. I will admit that I would pause if I saw someone who had them on the face, but other than that, who cares? Same with piercings. I also don’t think  women and female-presenting people should have to wear bras or makeup, or shave their armpits/legs. There. I said it. Dudes and male-presenting people should not have to wear ties or starched collars. Back to the female side–hosiery and heels, naw, son.

Basicalyl, if a person is wearing clean clothing and has all their bits covered, it really shouldn’t matter (barring regulations for safety, of course). I get really sad over how many women strenuously defend bras, heels, makeup, hosiery, etc., for work. I don’t care if they want to do it themselves, but every time one of these questions come up (do I have to wear ______ at work?), there are always women who will say yes. Either covertly or overtly. Letter writer states they explicitly don’t want to, say, wear makeup to work. Dozens of women in the commentariat: Have you thought of maybe wearing a little makeup? Even for letter writers who are firm about not wanting to wear makeup.

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American toxicity of constant productivity

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There was a question in the Ask A Manager’s work open thread that really struck a chord with me (and many in the commentariat). It was about having a question about what did you do for self-improvement during the pandemic placed on their list of standard interview questions. She thought it was tone-deaf and was wondering if she was just being too sensitive since she had a (literal) breakdown during the pandemic. The question is here (search for Keymaster of Gozer if the link doesn’t take you directly to the question, which it should). It struck me not just because it’s an awful question, but because it’s so on brand for America and its passion for being productive all the time.

It’s everywhere. You see it often in fitness magazines that counsel how to turn ordinary events into exercise. It’s doubly so for parents who have a serious time crunch. I’m not against it in general because it can make sense to do a twofer when you’re running short on time. However, the mania for making every minute ‘productive’ is, ironically, counterproductive to mental health. I know for me personally that if I only think about maximizing everything for productivity, I start feeling like shit because you can never 100% that category.

In addition, it’s a con when it’s used in the business sense. It’s a way for TPTB to keep their workers down by holding up a mythical standard of productivity over their heads that no one can live up to. If the workers are pressed to be productive at all costs, they can’t take time to think about anything else. It’s always frustrating when non-Americans on AAM comment about how dismal things are for employees in America because we fucking know! They’re right, though, in that so many of us are caught up in that web. And, again, being told it’s unproductive to ‘only’ work 40 hours per week is not uncommon in America. American workers are told they’re lazy if they actually want to have work/life balance, much to everyone’s detriment. Not only to the worker who is forced to give so much of their life to the company, but for the company itself as an exhausted workforce is not good for anyone.

Anyway, in response to the question above, my answer would be thusly:


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