Matcha latte

This morning, a young woman wearing a hijab spilled what looked like an entire cup of matcha latte across the floor of the train. Rather than telling anyone, she simply walked away. As the train attendant appeared with a roll of paper towels, I felt rather strange just sitting there behind my laptop, so I got up to help.

While we were cleaning up the mess, the attendant began complaining about “Arabs”. And just like that, a rather ordinary instance of inconsiderate behaviour had become something much bigger. Or, perhaps more accurately, something much smaller. What struck me was how readily the stereotype was available, as if it had been waiting all along for an opportunity to be confirmed. The young woman had behaved badly, no doubt, but somehow her behaviour was no longer her own. It had become evidence about an entire category of people, one to which the attendant had assigned her without knowing anything else about her.

Almost at the same time, I happened to come across an old promotional photograph from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, where I used to teach. It shows me surrounded by students in a classroom, a little snapshot of a time when my own world was expanding. Looking at that photograph now, I was reminded of how much larger the world is than the categories through which we ordinarily understand it. Of course, meeting people from different backgrounds does not mean that we will always like them, agree with them, or approve of their behaviour. But perhaps it can teach us to let people remain individuals, rather than immediately turning them into representatives of something else.