Subconcious racism and sexism

As you have probably figured out already from what I have written so far, I am quite insensitive to insults, which means I DO NOT usually think that people are being judgemental or insulting when they comment on what I do and who I am. This insensitivity of mine is protective of me being hurt. The downside of this trait of mine, however, often gets me in trouble, because I am equally insensitive to other people's feelings and often say things judgemental and hurtful without knowing. Therefore, I was given a name of Ma Da Ha (马大哈 as scatterbrain), have very limited number of friends, and only got married when I was 42! I have been asked to change as I grew up and older, but no matter how hard I tried, I'd failed. Therefore, I had developed mechanisms to cope with this by treating it as my characteristic or trait rather than my defect or shortcoming.
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Here is one example which happened recently:

"How was your grant, was it scored well?" I asked a colleague of mine in a hallway one day.

"Oh, I got 10%, which may be fundable in XYZ institute." He answered, without any sign of happiness or emotion, while accompanying me walking towards the elevator.  Nowadays, getting a grant scored at all is a big victory, let alone he scored so well, a 10% and fundable, wow!

"Congratulations! That is fantastic news." I said, truly excited and happy for him. But cannot help feeling left out, because I had a triaged grant that had been submitted in the same time as his fundable grant! Then we reached the end of our shared way where normal people would end conversations, but I did not. I continued on, "I don't believe the NIH study sections actually score grants by their merits anymore!"

What in my mind really was his 10% grant could have been between 1-5% among the top grants that had been scored.  Yet I did not have time to elaborate and I heard,

"Oh, thanks!" and he walked out of my sight.  I lost his trust for good!

That, my friend, is how stupid I can be.

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The secret is that I am not alone. Many of my colleagues are PhDs who are quite fitting into the category of permanent head damaged well! The following is what I experienced last night when one senior professor showed his subconcious racism and sexism.

Last night, I went out for dinner with 2 male "colleagues" and one female Asian honored guest. It was one of those business dinners that I usually reluctant to attend because they often make me feel awkward. But since the dinner invitation came at the last minute, together with the fact that our honored guest Ying was a female and Asian, I'd decided to answer the dinner invitation favorably based on two assumptions: the host Matt might not have enough time to get anyone who could go with him; and as a female and Asian, I might be able to help out to entertain Ying.

I intentionally arrived at the restaurant a bit earlier. After I situated myself at the bar a little while, just long enough to finish reading the wine list, I felt a gently tap on my shoulder - it was Ying. Since she and I had met earlier at my office after her seminar, we considered ourselves acquainted. A gentle tap on the shoulder as a form of saying hi was quite well received and we immediately started to chat like old friends. Matt, our host, happily joined in and the three of us carried our conversations enthusiastically all the way from the bar to the designated dinner table!

We would have a great time tonight, I predicted to myself.

After we settled in, however, the conversations turned South. It started the moment of our last guest Albert walked in the door. He was late by 10 minutes! I was seated facing the restaurant entrance so I spotted his inquiring expression and waved at him. He ignored me, of course. He and I had met at the seminar earlier, but obviously that did help him to recognize me. He was led to our table by a waitress and sat down right across from me. Matt introduced us and then he asked, almost immediately, "Who are you work for?" I was not prepared for this question, so I said, "What do you mean?" He then elaborated, " I mean whose lab you are in, who you are working for, who is your boss?" Good gracious, I finally understood he assumed that I was not his equal! "I work for myself, I guess. I mean I have my own lab." I simply put that way.

So, what do you feel if someone asks you,"Who are you working for?"

I must point out that I get this question a lot. But it usually happens at other locations. At a formal dinner table, that was the first time. What has gotten into his head that I was not like him who runs a productive lab? Was it my Asian race, female gender or the combination of both?

Clearly, the presence of Al would not help to turn the dinner conversation back to interesting topics like where we lived and how we lived. The whole time we were talking about science and work! I attempted to turn the situation around by asking Ying about her children and family and things that she did after work, Al kept pulling them back to work, work, and more work. The rest of the dinner conversations were all about Al's work, from what he had discovered 30 years ago to what he is working on now.

I finally gave up and simply kept my mouth shut, focusing on finishing my dinner quickly and leaving!

At the end, while we all walked out the restaurant, I said to Matt, "If you live far away, let me drop Ying back to her hotel."  Matt was smart and nice, he did not insist.  Ying was understanding and she probably sensed that I had something else to say.

As soon as Matt and Al were out of our sights, I said to Ying, "It's still early and I live close by, would you mind having a cup of tea with me and my husband?"

She said, "Not at all."

Off we went to our house and we then compensated the loss of our time in the restaurant and had a wonderful rest of the evening. I got to know her much better in that 30 minites then the 2 hours' dinner time.

With the nice time we had, I completely forgot about the bad interaction between Al and me, but Ying reminded me of it on the way back to her hotel, "How did you feel when Al ask you that question?"

"Which question?"  I had truly put everything behind me. Insensitive, you see?

"Who are you working for?" she explained.

"Oh, that one, I got that a lot." I said, but then I added "It was a strange dinner, the topics that we talked were so boring, why do scientists insist on talking about sciences after work? I thought dinner time is for us to relax and forget about work."

"It's was unusual." Ying said. "But I just wanted to make a point that many, but not all, white men like to assume that we Asian women are not running our own businesses in academic settings." She then gave me few examples when she was asked similar questions on campus.

Now I hear that the U.S. colleges have already started to require higher academic achievements for Asians, particular Asian girls, in the admission office. Ying's daughter went Johns Hopkins School of Engineering. I wonder how she pulled that off!

Our conversations ended up by Ying explaining to me why applying for American citizenship might not be a good idea. I did not have enough time to find out why, but it made me thinking: do I want to become an American if I do not share the same moral standards with some of the Americans?  

Tiger Mother – Part III, family split

(Read the Part I, if you just stumbled here).

After losing the land, Mom’s family could no longer live in the hometown since none of the men in the family was raised to grow rice and vegetables.  As the oldest and married children, aunts Er and San decided to split the family duties: Aunt Er took Mom and her little half-brother uncle Shan to Guilin, one of the 4 cities in Guangxi province.  Uncle E was starting new projects of constructing China Southeast Railway Network there. Aunt San and uncle Playboy took stepGrandma, aunt Jun, and aunt Dai to Guiyang, the capital city of Guizhou (Edit: Aunt Jun said she joined them only briefly after she failed to pass the examination to the best girl's high school in Hunan.  She in fact stayed in Mom's place in Quanzhou, a small city close to Guilin for a month.  She had fun with Mom who suggested her to stay with her so that she could continue to finish her high school education.  But Mom's stepmother/aunt Jun's mother wanted aunt Jun to join her in Guiyang.)

So in early 50s, Mom’s family split into two subfamilies: one headed by Aunt Er and her husband Uncle E in Guilin, and the other headed by Aunt San and uncle playboy in Guiyang.

Cities like Quanzhou/Guilin and Guiyang at that time were much less desirable than today.  Since Guangxi and Guizhou were two of the least-developed provinces in the southeast of China.  Guilin was the city of the choice because it was where uncle E's worked for his next railway project whereas Guiyang had Mom’s extended family (Edit: Aunt Jun said that their cousin Uncle Sun, the son of Mom's Aunt, Grandpa's sister who raised Mom, worked there as the head of the banks.)

Soon after the split/moving away from her hometown, Mom got a job as a secretory for her Unit (Danwei, 单位) leaders.  And shortly after that, aunt Er's family and uncle Shan moved once again to relocate to Beijing, the capital city of country.  Uncle E had become a chief engineer there (according to Aunt Jun, but later they moved again to Xi'an).  Mom was left alone in Guilin and she stayed far away from her big family ever since.

In 1949, China just experienced long-lasting wars and the economy was still in a terrible shape: food supply was limited and hungry kids were everywhere countrywide.  Following that, Mao and his CCP did several crazy things, such as Great Leap Forward (Da Yuejin, 大跃进) in late 1957/ early 1958 that destroyed all kinds of metals including cooking wares that each household owned, the Anti-Rightist Movement (反右派运动) that took uncle Playboy's job in 1959, on the top of the Land Reform that took away Grandpa's power in 1950, all of which severely weakened the already fragile China economy.  Therefore, like many starving children born between 1950 and 1960 in China, Mom’s family in Guiyang suffered greatly from both starvation and lost social status (now you know why your parents ask you to finish your plate, there are starving children in China.  For the life of me, I cannot understand why anyone should enjoy food fight in this world).

After moving the Guiyang, stepMom was still in power within the family, even when she was living on the income of Uncle Playboy and Aunt San. Until today, I still hear stories from Guiyang's cousins about how selfish the stepGrandma was: since she only cared about Aunts Jun and Dai, but neglected the other 5 other small grand children (Edit: Aunt Jun said this part of the story could not be true, since her mother was the kindest human being of the world who would not do anything selfish things. She said she was attentive to all kids equally. I have to admit that I have never confirmed this with Aunt San and this part of story was told her youngest two girls, who could have been too young to really know anything at all. However, Aunt Jun was not in Guiyang living with her Mom in the beginning years so she could not know the real situation either herself.)

It is not clear to me when and how stepGrandma died, maybe early 60s. The family in Guiyang had not split further. Aunt Jun was encouraged to find a job and she was able to acquire one successfully in a postoffice.  She even was sent by her unit to study in Chongqing Institute of Posts and Telecommunications.  Aunt Dai finished her high school education and left the family when she went to a medical school in Zunyi, a key medical college in Guizhou.

Uncle Playboy and aunt San had hard time to raise a big family which expanded from 6 to 10 members from 1949 to 1958.  At the first few years following the family split, both of the heads of the household had jobs: uncle Playboy was a clerk/manager in a post office and aunt San worked in a department store.  Uncle Playboy also acted in various occasions, although I am not sure whether his acting career generated any additional income to help the family out or it was just one of his many hobbies.  The limited income of the family would need not only to support the 5 youngsters, but also stepGrandma, Aunts Jun and Dai, Mom's 2 younger half sisters, who were in colleges at the time.  The hardship of Mom's family in Guiyang did not end until sometime between late 70s and early 80s after Mao died and uncle Playboy got his job back, not in post office anymore.  He was finally discovered by the government after Mao's era as an valuable intellectual and politician in his late 50s. He worked in Workers Culture Palace in Guiyang for years until his retirement in early 90s.