Assumptions

I think intelligence lies in being able to change your assumptions. Assumptions are generalities, of course, so I'm aware that what I'm saying isn't true in every case. That's what going to college is good for. So in honor of the beginning of school, I have four assumptions I've been learning about. I'll start with the most controversial:

1) Assume that senior girls are taken. I'm up to an age where it's worth looking at a girl's left hand to determine her stage of life. This summer at least ten couples I know got engaged. And now every senior girl worth her salt wants to get married and is in a relationship desperately pursuing that. I know, Alice is a senior and she's single. But I strongly suspect she's not worth her salt, either. (There's my first case of changing somebody's name. I should have a career in espionage if blogging doesn't work out.)

This is a difficult assumption for me to work into, because in the Christian scene, girls are single by default. They're all too frosty for the uncertainty of relationships. But the cool ones are single, too, because Christian guys haven't had practice wooing girls.

So now there's a tendency to continue that thinking. But senior girls are the most likely ones to have a long-distance relationship with some guy who's graduated and is just waiting to propose. Long-distance relationship for freshman can practically be discarded. Unless they've braved a summer together in high school, I haven't known a couple to survive the end of the year. Senior girls' dating lives are much more opaque. The helpful "relationship status" on Facebook is too crude for their maturity, and that's a good reason to assume that seniors are taken.

2) Americans haven't been to Kazakhstan. I saw a kid the other day wearing a shirt with the border of Kazakhstan, the country's name, and some quote from Borat. It took me longer to process the fact that most people who have seen Borat don't know Kazakhstan is a real country than to think that this guy had probably gotten it as a souvenir. After all, I'm wearing my Naxi t-shirt today which features the last living pictographic language in the world, because I've been to a place with lots of Naxi people. I almost asked him when he went to Kazakhstan, but then I caught myself.

3) Chinese teachers who speak really good English don't have American values. Today in my horribly boring "Chinese culture" class when we weren't watching a movie about China which featured several places I've personally been to, we had to do an exercise in interpreting Confucian sayings. Every group was supposed to pick a proverb from the book that no one's actually read and explain it to the class.

One group's proverb was "The gentleman desires to be halting in speech but quick in action. "Their spokesperson summarized it well for modern-day kids: "You gotta walk the walk," he said. "Can't just talk the talk."

Our teacher listened to this and thought that the group was saying that talking was a deficit. "Well, that's not quite right. Girls talk a lot," he said. "Growing up, girls talk to their mothers more than boys do, right? But they can still know things sometimes."

I realized that he was trying to defend women's rights. To him as a Chinese man, women obviously talk a lot, but he was being magnimous by saying that this didn't necessarily disqualify women from being wise.

All the American girls in the class heard him and thought he was the one being sexist. "No," one girl said out loud when he rhetorically asked if little girls learn to talk to their mothers. Because as Americans, our idea of equality is that women should act just like men do, and our teacher's saying that girls talk more denies that.

4) Oil is flammable even if a match doesn't ignite it. But that's just a teaser for my next post...