This is something that’s been more noticeably prominent to me ever since I started my PhD: sometimes people respond with sentiments that carries an (not necessarily negative) implicit assumption about me and my character.
Yet anyone more familiar with my overall life trajectory, what I’ve done and could do better than the average person, could easily recognise me as a polymath, capable of having conversations in mathematics, classical music, audiology, accessibility, and I could also be a coach for autistic/ADHD people in helping explain human behaviour and how to navigate those things. I’m also more computer literate than the average person and have dabbled in photoshop, digital art, making videos, and all of them to me are ‘just’ skills and knowledge I could get better at if I invested more time into those.
Right now I’m doing my PhD in mathematical biology, and it’s easy to assume upon initial introduction in that “Oh I can only talk about whatever it is that I’m working on and nothing outside of it”. Most people meeting me for the first time in that realm would think “Oh just another PhD student” and yet not realising I’d been teaching undergraduate maths for 12 years before that.
(D’you know, also, I’m the only PhD student in this building who regularly sits at the communal staff lunch table and is able to chat with other stuff about course discussion, uni admin, because I’ve done that stuff too. And what I love about where I am is that no one has said anything that carried a sense of speaking down to me because I’m “just” a PhD student. I’m just like another person at that table.)
Culturally, I’m Chinese-Malaysian diaspora – my mother’s side is Chinese-Malaysian, my father is Chinese, I was born here in Australia. And I think there are fundamentally very stupid things in both cultures and as a result I don’t involve myself in either completely fully. But it also means I’m very much an outsider to both (also a common sentiment expressed by mixed Asians, but I would say generally applies to any mixture of two distinct cultures).
People look at me and the default stereotype is that I’m a stereotypically quiet Asian man. My name has no hints of being Asian either so some people meeting me in person for the first time has had that short moment of silence while they’re quietly processing something before we continue on with the pleasantries.
Also, I’m hard-of-hearing. Not deaf enough and don’t know Auslan, so Deaf community is a no. Yet there are many moments in the hearing world that I just can’t navigate either: conference dinners, events with many people talking, casual dinner with another person in a noisy restaurant. I also thought my hearing aid was visible enough for people to notice, but apparently not! So I look like a normal hearing person until I openly ask for an adjustment on the fly.
So it’s safe to say that my sheer existence feels like an entire anomaly and the only people it’s felt like I could comfortably sit with are, basically, worldly, highly educated, and most likely neurodivergent to some degree as well. The mathematicians I look up to all fit this profile as well.
What it also means for my interacting with others is that on social media it’s very normal for me to have open conversations with people from vastly different disciplines. I’ve never cared about how it looks to others. Beyond the occasional comment from someone on how “highly networked” I am (which is also a rant needing its own post but basically, I just talk to people about things I find interesting and I find their stuff interesting too), no one’s ever brought it up to me.
At the same time, there are different groups of people within those interests that I talk to, and there’s usually no space for me to talk about other things. At an accessibility conference I casually mention I’m doing a PhD in (unrelated) mathematical biology, but obviously people will engage with the accessibility content and I can easily indulge them. I’m also in a monthly meetup for hard-of-hearing adults where we share, we commiserate on how it’s frustrating getting other people to change their behaviour to accommodate us and the random bullshit people do. There’s an ‘Adult Musicians with Hearing Loss” Facebook group I’ve been in for a very long time and still dole out advice every now and then. I felt a wave of nostalgia when talking about optimisation stuff (which I studied for my Masters) in recent conversations.
And if there was ever a wonderful woman in this world that could easily indulge all of my craziness, they’ll undeniably be treated to my cooking experiments and whimsy with various crafting projects I get up to (seriously, have you seen another Asian man indulge in knitting and crocheting?!).
In the meantime I’ll continue to better understand why some people just go out and live alone in some remote place. I try to manage my monotonically increasing resentment but it’s really hard, some days.
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