The Strength of Caring By Melani Carrié @captainmelani Melani Carrié is a 20-something currently living in Hawaii. She has a degree in Politics and Social Anthropology from the University of Edinburgh and is working towards her goal of one day becoming a foreign service officer. She is a proud Democrat whose passions include culture, travel, music, boxing, and fantasy/science fiction.
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t is not easy to care.
To care requires attention. To care requires concern. To care requires a great deal of personal investment. And depending on what events transpire after the fact, it is very probable that to care is often ‘to care in vain’. I have never considered myself to be a woman with a particularly high EQ. I often equated ‘emotion’ with ‘weakness’ and prided myself on my ability to understand things through logic and reasoning, remaining unreadable and stoic in the face of adversity. It is only now, after a lifetime of ignoring, normalising, and disregarding the many things that have happened to me, that I can say I am (at long last) beginning to understand what strength it takes to care. I am a yonsei (四世), 4th generation Japanese-American from my mother’s side, and my father is a non-Hispanic white immigrant. I have lived in multiple countries on three different continents, endeavoured to learn and speak several languages, and identify as a Third Culture Kid. To have spent the majority of my life as an Asian in white-dominated communities, I understand very well how jarring it is to be the only different person in the room. To be asked where I came from. To be told that my heritage is ‘sexy’. To be faced with surprise when others realise I can speak English fluently.
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It is very hard to describe what a conflicting feeling it is to be both invisible and incredibly seen, but only through the ‘exotic other’ lens. As Asian women, we are ignored, yet fetishised, and desired, yet despised. For years, I let this type of treatment endure without confrontation. I would remind myself that my worth is not predicated upon others’ approval and that these types of people were simply bigoted, so why care about what they think. While I acknowledge that this was not technically a ‘bad’ way to walk through life, my behaviour pattern served to do absolutely nothing and proved, more than anything, that silence is complicity. This method of rationalisation was a result of certain aspects of Asian culture. Many Asian countries operate within a collectivistic society; that is to say, they focus on the whole rather than the individual. To quote Spock, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.” While this can be a positive thing for many reasons, it has the danger of enabling conformity to become not only a social norm but an expectation. I have referenced this Japanese saying many times in my numerous discussions on race that “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In its most positive light, this saying can (I suppose) be a rallying cry for teamwork and a reminder that society flows the smoothest
