Q
Literature
Question your elders A shiny brown insect was crawling on one of the cucumbers I reached out to pick. I jumped back immediately and shrieked. "What is that?!" The creeping beast was as big as my little finger, and seemed to have its jaws or pincers on its hindquarters. Viciously sharp things, too! Grandma came over, putting her bigger, fuller basket of cucumbers down. Her face was shiny with sweat, and her hair was a wispy mess of slightly curly silver strands. "What's the racket?" I pointed to the creature. She slapped it down to the ground and stomped on it with her heel, killing it with an ugly crunch on the dried mud. I wasn't wearing shoes yet - it was the height of summer and I was too young to be required to wear them. "Careful with those", grandma said. "They're earwigs. That means they can crawl into people's ears and eat their brains." — My professor invited me for a coffee one afternoon, after I gave a presentation on the history of female involvement in warfare. Clearly, I bit off more than I could chew in a freshman level assignment that was supposed to take up 30 minutes, as opposed to roughly 90, which I had gathered materials and prepared slides for. I had my own reasons for this - it had been one of my topics of interest ever since I had lost my self-esteem and enrolled in tertiary education. I wasn't sure whether my excessive enthusiasm was off-putting or promising to her, so I didn't know what to expect. "Good morning", she greeted me with a generic smile. I smiled back nervously. We both wore blue jeans, because campuses are a classless society in a bubble of their own. "I was slightly concerned about your presentation", she began. My stomach constricted, and I hung my head in shame. That's when I saw the bug. I slammed my black grade book on the table, hard like thunder. The insect was flattened in an instant. To dispel the bewilderment of my teacher, I showed her the mangled remains. "Those sharp bits… this was an earwig. They crawl into people's ears and eat their brains, so you have to be careful with them", I explained. "Where did you learn that from?" "My grandmother. She grew vegetables and chickens, but passed away last year." "May she rest in peace, but that information is incorrect." It was my turn to feel concerned. To her credit, my professor explained quite thoroughly why the earwig tale was biologically impossible, and it made perfect sense. But if that was wrong - what else had my family lied about, willingly or unknowingly? If I hadn't already been an atheist, this would have been the beginning of a very rough road… We did get back to the issue of the presentation, eventually. "I had assumed you weren't particularly interested in my class", she teased me. "For the most part, I have not", I admitted. "I'm having a weird time adjusting to my new life, and my academic interests are scattered at best. I picked whatever sounded easy, and nothing before 10 am, as I'm a bit of a night owl." "But then you put together an entire lecture." "I apologize." "Apologize?" Her left eyebrow shot up. "Au contraire! This isn't high school. I was delighted to hear what you had to say. But you seemed personally invested…" "I am. Well, I was. But then I ended up here." I was clutching my glass of Cherry Coke a little too hard, and my voice cracked just a bit, reminiscing about the circumstances that led me here. "You didn't want to?" "I mean, I tried to stay objective and all, but you could see that the assignment ended up being a speech to convince the audience that women can make just as capable soldiers as men. My parents said that wasn't possible, and I wanted to prove them wrong." "Why didn't you just accept that story without question, just like the one about the earwig?" That caught me off guard. I had no idea. I put my beverage back down and invented an explanation on the fly. "Maybe… because one is a simple precaution? Like, why would anyone lie about that? I get why they lie about women though - it's a power thing. A division tactic. Like when I was told that we have two extra ribs compared to men. I didn't know that was bogus until two months ago, when I attended that open dissection session that the med school people offered." "And of course", she mulled over my words, turning the spoon slowly in her foamy latte, "being cautious about an insect doesn't impact your life as much as…" "...not getting your dream job. Yeah." That wasn't the ending she expected, but I was too agitated to be patient. I wished the ground had swallowed me. I was thinking, academia is all about objective facts and such, and here I am being emotionally vulnerable like a child - not a great impression. "I'm not going to eat you", my professor said. "You don't have to look like a deer in the headlights every time a teacher asks you something. Maybe that's another thing your parents taught you?" "Probably." We both had to go to the next class of the day, so we parted ways. The encounter stayed with me, though. I mean, think about it. How many things that we "know for a fact" are just stories we received like old clothes and porcelain dish sets? How many of our fundamental truths are mere hand-me-downs? And how many of them are acts of rebellion - hand-me-downs that we no longer wish to wear, but can't prove neither wrong nor right, trapping ourselves in circles of self-scrutiny?
