Trading Places
It takes some personal pain to gain true empathy.
Originally published on How to Catch a Whale, Jiayi Liang’s blog that captures and shares the wonders of the world.
A coworker and I had planned to catch up before I headed out on my sabbatical, and I proposed to grab lunch later that week.
“Actually…” my coworker cleared her throat, “this week won’t work for me. You know, it’s Ramadan.” She had an apologetic smile, “shall we meet next week instead?”
“That’s right. It’s Ramadan! Absolutely.” And so we met up the next week.
Fast forward a few weeks, it is June. My dad and I have arrived in Morocco the night before, and now are roaming around Casablanca. The beautiful Hassan II Mosque towers over the Atlantic ocean, the feral cats meow for attention, and the exotic look the locals appear to us and we appear to them attract mutual admiration.
The mid-day sun is intense, and our bellies start to growl. However, this part of the city is eerily empty. All the vendors have their doors shut.
“Is there an economic crisis?” My dad asks.
“Not that I am aware of.” Wondering what makes the beautiful streets so dead, I remember my conversation a few weeks ago, “It’s not the Ramadan. I know THAT. My coworker told me it ended in May. Maybe people here don’t eat out as much for lunch.”
Hunger sharpens our vision. We notice a door in a quiet alley cracked open. I carefully squeeze through the 3-inch gap, and it is dark inside with all the windows closed. A Moroccan bakery! Shelves full of fluffy pastries! We have found a treasure after sailing for a hundred years.
The lady behind the counter has as many layers of wrinkles as her pastries. Her eyebrows raise when she catches sight of us, and I am too hungry to tell if that is a look of surprise or suspicion or just shyness. The store lady speaks very little English, so my dad and I liberally use our gestures to communicate. The pastries are one Moroccan Dirham each.
Desperation makes you less picky. Even my dad, who has never been a fan of sweet things, picked two. Seeing we happily munch on her pastries, crystal sugars sticking on our cheeks, the lady finally puts on a soft smile.
Then the door squeaks and in dashes a young man wearing a traditional outfit. He checks us up and down, then turns towards the lady to mind his own business. He picks his pastry, pays, devours it in two bites, and exits the shop in just a few minutes. They talk in fast-paced Arabic in a low voice as if they are concealing a deep secret.
He must be hungry. Just like us.
We finish the rest of our pastries on the street to get better lighting and some fresh air. A few locals stare at us while we savor the pieces. I guess they don’t see Chinese that often in this part of the world.
We search in vain for proper Moroccan food until we arrive at the train station in the mid afternoon to travel to Marrakesh. The McDonald there finally ends our dread. In American consumerism we trust.
It is only in Marrakesh that our AirBnB host unveils the myth behind the quiet street, the nervous bakery lady, the suspicious-looking young man, and the stares on us. We have just so caught the third to last day of Ramadan.
Ramadan takes place on the ninth month of the Islamic calendar. For a whole month, no food and water is allowed from sunrise to sunset. People here who choose to eat during the day can still eat, but they must do so in discrete to avoid blasphemy. The little street-side bakery we visited in Casablanca is a small food joint for the norm breakers.
Our host explains that my coworker was probably practicing a mini, week-long version of Ramadan to assimilate into the work schedule in the U.S.
I am kicking myself for missing the memo about Ramadan the second time: I never investigated the Ramadan schedule since my conversation with my coworker, nor did the fact that Morocco is an Islamic country register with me. At All.
Still blushing for inviting my coworker out for lunch during Ramadan, now the pain is a lot more personal. I have never felt the despair of having limited access to food until today. The path to honor my “normal” human need in this foreign land is full of thorns made of shame. The locals were polite to not stone us on the spot, but their stares weigh me down: THOSE GLUTTONOUS TOURISTS!
In the next two days, we stay strictly within the tourist areas where food is served all day long to not ignite “hanger” (hungry and angry) in the locals.
The odd thing is, my need to eat hasn’t changed since I left the U.S., but how I feel about my need has. Why is that?
By traveling from the U.S. to Morocco, my position in society has switched sides, from being the norm to being an outlier in terms of eating schedule during Ramadan. That belittling position dwarfs the legitimacy of the same ask for food: it forces me to become quieter. I sneak as if I am doing something “wrong”, something against the norm.
That’s it. My coworker and I have traded places, and I finally see the innocent ignorance I have been carrying around without noticing.
Being in a dominant position in a society fuels innocent ignorance. It takes hard work to see the unseen and to understand.
It takes hard work to see the unseen and to understand. The pain must be personal for anyone to care.
We live in a world where disagreement prevails and conversation thins. For every topic, from politics, global warming, abortion, gender, to racial inclusion, people are arguing from opposite camps.
It is easy to judge what one says without understanding why. When we say “I understand you”, we are, more often than not, imagining from our own position on the power spectrum, not from the other person’s. Everyone has a little bit of that.
What do we do about it? Imagining alone is not enough. Do we all need to live the other person’s life to gain empathy? In one extreme, Shirley Leung of Boston Globe proposed that women can have it all just as soon as “men get pregnant”. It is not scientifically possible yet, but there is some truth to that mental experimentation: the pain must be personal for anyone to care.
