Our Twisted Mind

I was clicking on a random video in Spanish last night and found out that Biden had dropped out. This is the first time I received news in Spanish before receiving it in English. I couldn’t help feeling a sense of triumph. My Spanish has plateaued for months and had no sign of improving despite my small but consistent daily effort. Then suddenly, something like this happened to boost my confidence. By the hours I’ve spent for the past three years, I am definitely in the 800 hours category, still I am not fluent at all. I can only follow the news with frequent stops and with double subtitles turned on. By the way, the Firefox double subtitle extension has spotty performance and often it doesn’t show up at all despite my repeated clicks on the extension on-off button. Without subtitles, I just hear a string of familiar sounds but without making much sense of it, although here and there certain words or phrases can be discerned and digested.

The news immediately reminded me of 2016 when our twisted mind was put on full display. I had two friends. Let’s say they are A and B.

A said, “When I was young, I was the best student in our local school. My classmates’ mothers would come to the school to protest, telling teachers that it was unfair to make me the star student because their sons didn’t feel good when they lost to a girl.”

B said, “My experience was a little different. My classmates’ mothers didn’t come to our school to protest, but my parents and my grandparents treated my existence as non-existence. My good grades were praised by them only when they wanted to use me as a catalyst to encourage my brother, whose existence they acknowledged and appreciated.”

I think I said something similar at the time. My narcissistic relatives had plenty of ways to make me feel small and degrade me. That was eight years ago, and we were all a little upset about our growing up experiences when sexism played a role in big and small ways. However when it came to the 2016 election, we were all very pessimistic about Hillary’s chance of winning. Actually according to the statistics that came out after the 2016 election, Asian women were the only demographic group, among all the minority groups, to have voted for Trump with a high percentage mark, like 40% or something. I just couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the number.  

As you know, Asian immigrant communities are extremely conservative. I just talked with somebody yesterday who told me that she didn’t want her son to attend a university in New York. Too liberal for her taste. I was thinking at the time of the conversation why a woman would say something like that. Such women really don’t deserve to live in our area. Probably she can be shipped to a conservative place where women cannot go to schools or cannot drive or cannot go out without covering up from head to toe. She deserves to live in a conservative place. Or probably the woman was just echoing her husband’s opinion. She is happy to let other people think for her.

I think I am living in a conservative and narcissistic community and circle. I must have offended either Buddha or some other deities in my past life to be condemned, in this life, to grow up with my narcissistic parents as a kid and live in a conservative community as an adult.