Chapter Five: Dear Jinghan, Don’t Be Brainwashed By Religion (~jinghan)

I’m hanging out with my friend who is also on exchange. She came to visit me in Davis and since I had a long weekend we’re heading down to LA to play tourist, before she heads back to Melbourne from LA airport. We each have our head in a book as we wait for our flight at Sacramento airport. She seems completely absorbed by her book but my mind is elsewhere. I had been reading the New Testament Bible over the winter (your summer) break and I had been surprised by how much of what is said in the bible is relevant, even to me. I felt a deep respect for the book and the sort of wisdom it held within it’s pages. However, there were also things that rubbed against my attitude towards the world and I was having trouble assimilating these ideas into my understanding. So out of the blue a question popped out of my mouth:

“What do you think of patriarchy?”

“It’s bad.”

I hadn’t been expecting an opinion so blunt. After being taught to think about the world by feminist literature teachers in the final years of high school, I can’t help but now be curious about what stands on the other side of that wall of argument. Is there anything that holds up the case for patriarchy. “But what if…” Inspired by my reading about the society of the bible and of nativ americans I imagine a world where patriarchy is justified and describe it to her. I want to know what she has to say against all this.

“Jinghan! That’s a terrible way to think! Patriarchy is never justified. Do you even know what it means? Patriarchy means that men have the right to make decisions for women, everyone has the right to their own decisions.”

I am a little taken aback by how aggressive she is about the topic. I attempt some further discussion but it seems only to fuel her outrage. She returns to her book and is silent towards me. It seems the conversation is over. But it doesn’t feel resolved for me. I come out of the short-lived conversation feeling hurt – it seemed that it wasn’t outrage against patriarchy, but outrage against me and my thinking.

I had just been curious. Innocently. Or perhaps: ignorantly.

Before I can stop it hot tears are in my eyes, but I don’t go to wipe them away least my body language give away my irrational burst of emotion. I pull out my phone and start are new email. I had been intending to vent my emotions to another friend, but what I end up doing is dissecting the situation. Perhaps my friend was in a bad mood. Perhaps I myself had been a little bit too agressive about the topic and caused her agressive return. Perhaps it wasn’t really silent tension I wasn’t feeling now and she was just really absorbed by the book and impatient with my interrupting her reading with conversations about controversial topics. Perhaps I had unknowingly brought up something that was a sensitive topic to her. I’d never know what went on in her mind. My thinking reaches it’s conclusion: regardless of what happened there was no benefit in my taking the situation personally and ruining the mood of the weekend.

***

A couple of week later I receive an email from my friend. She’s worried because I’m very open to new ideas. She’s worried because I seem to only hang out with church people “a bit like surrounding yourself with only one political party” in terms of biasing my opinions. She doesn’t agree with many things in the American religious climate. I discuss things without informing myself about the topic properly first. Saying something without thinking is not a good habit. She never says things without thinking about it first. It’s never justified to hurt someone.

I hit reply and start typing something. But the words are too fast and too many. So I discard the email. I try and do my homework but I can’t stop thinking about the email. So I take out my journal (for emotional venting) and reread the email – slower this time. “It feels so passive agressive,” I write, “it upsets me that she seems to be trying to be a good friend to me but is criticising me so much. But haven’t I said that I respect people who are able to be bluntly honest with me? But! Arg. ‘It’s never justified to hurt someone’????? What the heck does that mean? Did I hurt someone? Did she just go off topic?”

At first my thoughts come fast and furious, but slowly I come to an understanding. She’s worried about me. I see myself as having spent the past few months striving to balance different world views in a way that is good, reading lots of books, talking to different people, observing different people, trying new ways of thinking about life, testing ideas, accepting and rejecting ideas. I’ve been anything but the careless opinion maker she was accusing me of. But – how was she supposed to know that? I had barely talked to her about the developments of my world view and just expected her to understand my changes in attitude and new curiosity.

Taking a deep breath. I click the reply button and started from the beginning.

Yeah, your emails are preachy which made it hard for me not to just hit reply straight away and go on a defensive rant. But I have gotten over that knee-jerk reaction, so preachy is okay. Plus, I did say that I appreciate blunt honesty and I’d like to continue honouring that.

You said: “I really think you need to have read about it first before you discuss it or get into an argument or anything.” Touche. I don’t think I actually have anything to disagree with that about. I’m sort of coming out of my own dark age at the moment: you know how I joke about how I live under a rock when it comes to pop culture, well upon inspection it seems that I live under a rock when it comes to more serious matters as well. (Hypothesis: maybe something to do with my youthful experiences of cultural collision causing me to prefer an internal world to having to deal with the culture of the external world.) Anyway, you know how people told me I lacked opinions back in yr9, well I sort of learnt to have an opinion, how to word it to sound like it was interesting/important/informed, but I never actually learnt the how to inform myself part. Part of the difficulty is learning to care. What I mean by that is that I did go through a phase where I forced myself to read the paper, but it was just that: it was forcing – like completing your homework as fast as you can so you can go do something else without actually doing it to help you understand. So I didn’t really gain anything from that. I think I need to start doing that by working out how various issues will affect the world I (and future generations will) live in.

You said: “The only people you seemed to really interact with were the people from the church” That is a little bit true, and I heed your concern because it does mean some of their thinking will rub off on me. But so far it has proving to be an experience that has made me less in conflict with myself and more at peace with the world in the way that I live. For instance, I feel like (along with my maths experience) it’s helped me distance myself away from defining myself by grades and made me think about the real value of understanding/wisdom and knowledge. I used to want to be good at everything, be everything and be a good influence to everyone – and it was a very stressful (not to mention impossible) attitude to life.  I’ve learnt to be more trusting in the goodness and abilities of the collective people of the world and trusting in the fact that if I am not perfect that I have people to turn to so that I do not have to fear that the unpredictable challenges of life will be too much for me to cope with. I have built habits to think about life as a whole, not just from the viewpoint of now (and it’s highly career-ambitious academic climate). As for opinions on contentious topics that’s a work in progress, like you, I have many question marks marked on some of the opinions that come with a christian standpoint and I’ve yet to resolve them. My current thinking is that perhaps some of them will remain unresolved if they’re not problems that come into contact with my life – but this is just a tentative direction for now.

“I have always thought the way I do.” I was thinking, would it be fair to say that opinions and judging how well informed an opinion is comes intuitively to you in the same way that maths comes intuitively to me? I was thinking how, from what you said, once you have the facts/theory/different view points you can just think about it and work things out and come to the next conclusion on your own. For me maths is like that, but when it comes to thinking about opinions it seems I’ve got to stay after school and harass the teacher each day before I can earn an A.

“I do get very annoyed when the opinion is unfounded or they havent thought about it properly, which I think you can usually tell” That is true to an extent, if I stop and think about it, I can tell how uninformed my opinions are. But let me explain with a little lesson on cognitive psychology — we have two systems of thinking: a fast system that holds all our intuitive knowledge and knowledge of things that have been constant for generations so has been but on automatic drive. For example, our understanding of how if we sit on a chair, the solid structure of the wood will not allow us to fall through the material. Other things like the body language of our mother we understand without having to stop and think each time, fall into this category too. The slow system is when we stop and reason with ourselves before reaching a conclusion. I guess, when I’m in conversation sometimes I just default to fast thinking, which is bad when really my intuition isn’t so strong and I in fact need slow thinking. It will take me a while to shift from “Oh you asked me what I thought, this is my unthought out albeit socially interesting opinion.” to “I honestly don’t know what I think about that topic, I need to think more about this, can I get back to you?” since there is a lot of social conditioning for the former as opposed to the latter. I’ll keep it in mind. As for when I spontaneously produce badly thought out opinions? That’s probably my constant feeling of social pressure to enter into conversation and is a whole other kettle of fish which I am working on.

I realise, now that I’ve said all that, that I probably did keep you rather in the dark about the development of my world view and then expect you not to worry about me as I throw curiosity about contentious ideas that I haven’t really thought through at you. I hope this email relieves some of your worries. I’ve tried really hard to actually address your email this time, but you are welcome to tell me if I’ve missed your point (again)

Nerdy, crazy and fishy

Jinghan

I get a reply a couple of hours later, and reading it I feel all the tension that had been in the air since the conversation on patriarchy dissipate.

Could it be….? Could it be that emotionally impulsive and uncontrollable Jinghan (although still emotionally sensitive and easily stirred to tears) has learnt to deal with her emotions rationally? I hardly dare believe. But things certainly have turned out for the better this time, and it might just be that I have made progress in that direction.

We’ll see if it stands the test of time.