The Unbearable Unculturedness of Being

The sense that I’m nowhere near as cultured as someone with a PhD stems from a certain crudeness I can’t shake.

This was not long after I started my PhD program at Georgia Tech. I took a picture of myself next to some statues on campus. They were of two old ladies smiling warmly, and they gave me a sense of comfort and acceptance that’s hard to explain, so I wanted to capture that moment. I find comfort in being around grandmas in general.

It was much later that an American colleague told me, as we walked past the statues on campus, that they were of Rosa Parks as a young woman and as an old woman. Only then did things start to add up. This was Atlanta, after all. It’s not as if I didn’t know who Rosa Parks was when I took the picture. But I hadn’t even wondered who the statues were of. Oh, some grandmas. They make me feel comfortable. I should take a picture with them. That was pretty much my entire thought process.

There’s a certain crudeness and ignorance in me I can’t get rid of, no matter how educated I am, even with a PhD. Part of it is that I don’t have a clear grasp of the cultural and historical context, and also my English plays a part, too. This was about two years ago. I came across roly polies in the woods, and I was happy to see them. At the time, I had vaguely supposed that they were only found in Korea, or maybe East Asia. However, while I could say things like “scheduler” and “data centers” in English, ridiculously enough, “roly poly” was outside the very limited realm of my English vocabulary. I still wanted to say something, so I said, “Here’s a tiny armadillo.” And the response I got was, “You’re so innocent.” It’s not like I’m particularly innocent or pure-hearted. I just happened to have the kind of English proficiency that innocent children tend to have, and I said what I could. Needless to say, I did not think it was an armadillo.

Despite all my ignorance, I get by just fine. At least I knew what an armadillo was and managed to say something. That’s something. And if I found comfort in a couple of statues of old ladies in a foreign country, well, that’s nice too.