Listening to the person in front of you

Organic chemistry was a required class for my undergrad major. I hated the lecture, but I liked the lab. It was easier than my physical chemistry lab, and the TA wasn't nearly as tough of a grader as some of the other instructors. I was surprised one day to have my lab notebook handed back to me with a comment of how well I expressed myself in English. It was on the tip of my tongue to sarcastically say that English was read and written even in remote places like New Jersey, but I took pity on  him. He meant it as a compliment, which I received  rather awkwardly, although I tried to correct his wrong impression about me with the usual, "I was born here. I'm an American. Blah, blah blah."

There could have been a number of factors that played into his wrong assumption. He was a grad student. He could have been running on caffeine fumes and probably had tons of work on top of a teaching assistantship. He may have come from a part of the country with very few Asian immigrants, which is not surprising.¹ So perhaps he assumed that I was an international student.

But it just hit me recently that there were plenty of clues to indicate that English wasn't my second language. I've been told that I sound like I'm from the mid-West or even California. You would not be able to tell that I was ethnically Chinese based on my voice.² But my TA just didn't listen to the person standing right in front of him, and "when there is no listening, there is no thinking."³

I never saw my TA again after that semester. I haven't been carrying a grudge after more than 30 years, but this incident from my past shows how much we miss when we stop listening to the people in front of us. When we turn off our ears, we turn off our brains and fall back onto assumptions that may or may not be correct. In our individualistic culture, we process the world through the lens of our experience, but that only affords a very narrow window onto the world around us. We still have a lot to learn. We also may not realize the limits of our understanding until someone comes along and fails to conform to our preconceived ideas. But then we have the choice of updating our knowledge base and adjusting our lenses or not.

Do I listen well or poorly? One of my biggest pet peeves is having assumptions made about me above and beyond my gene pool including politics and personal Christian convictions. Consequently, I don't want to do unto others that which is irksome to me. Do I fail sometimes? Yes. Do I want to grow in this? Yes, and this requires conscious effort to respectfully engage and think. It also might mean trying to better understand why someone would stereotype me.

1. Until 1965, immigration from Asia was severely restricted to 105 persons per year. Of course, this was  better than the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 when my family would have been banned from the US.
2. An accent is NOT a source of shame. Nor should people be mocked for having one. An accent shows that you know more than one language unlike many of us Americans.
3. How to Think, Alan Jacobs, Currency Books, 2017, pg. 18.
Photo credit: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/A_woman_shouting_into_a_man%27s_ear-trumpet._Wood_engraving._Wellcome_V0011264.jpg