On things we don't understand
Posted: 2025-09-24
I keep thinking back to when my mom and I were in Xinjiang, and we saw a bulletin board about the different types of wild animals local to the area, written in both Chinese and Uyghurche. My mom was all like, "these letters all look the same to me!" Even after I repeatedly told her "they look the same because you can't read them. They will look vastly different if you can read it. Conversely, all Chinese characters would look the same to someone who can't read Chinese." She then said, "well Chinese is really obvious, the characters are all different! But for this, all the letters are the same!"
We repeated our words a couple times over to each other, an extremely unproductive conversation of "how could anyone understand this?" "They can, you cannot! They can't understand Chinese either!" "But how could anyone understand this?" … She even brought it up again when we went back to Shenzhen and saw some Uyghur restaurants with the Arabic script Uyghurche written on the sign. By then, I had begun learning Uyghurche, and could read a little bit of the pronunciation — despite me literally reading the sign out to her (although I still didn't understand what the sign said either), she was still like, "how could anyone understand this?"
It strikes me as interesting how when we saw something we didn't understand, my mom's reaction was largely negative towards it, and had a very stubborn layer of assuming nobody else could understand it if she herself could not; and assuming other people can understand anything that she can understand.
My mom was getting old, so I don't blame her for repeating things and not listening to me. But I can't help but think about this mentality. This goes deeper than a negative attitude towards things we don't understand, like I mentioned before; there's this inability to see things from other people's viewpoint. My mom, being able to read Chinese but not Uyghurche, cannot imagine a person being able to read Uyghurche but not Chinese. Uyghurche was gibberish to her, so she can't imagine anyone comprehending it; Chinese was very clear to her, so she can't imagine anyone seeing it as gibberish.
Which leads me to think about whether I had done this too. It goes beyond just languages and cultures; it includes anything I cannot understand or appreciate, like abstract art, religion, philosophy, or just about anything that appears too "abstract" to me. Would my rejection of them make me un-accepting to new ideas? Conversely, for things I do like and understand, like just English for a quick example, might I appear too haughty to people who don't understand it as well as I do? This should be something to keep in mind.