Behind the Faces
Grounds Keeping at Sunshine Gardens, Changzhou 2010
This lady works in the housing compound in which I live, Sunshine Garden. Unlike the gentleman I featured yesterday, she is not of the same economic class. What else do I know about her? Well, honestly, nothing. I do hope that over time I can find an opportunity to talk with her, even if only through the assistance of an interpreter. For now, it is enough that she is aware of my presence and that I am aware of her presence. I find that she is deferential to me and I wonder if it is because I am a laowai, a foreigner, or because I am a man.
It is difficult enough to engage with others in one’s own culture where language and a shared community are in place. To shift to another culture where there is no shared history, no shared language or any recognisable silent language. As Sergio Missana notes in his essay The Grip of Culture: Edward T. Hall :
“. . . people’s view of the world and behavior are largely determined by a complex grid of unconscious cultural patterns.”
So what is hidden there behind her face? In thinking about what kind of personality lay behind her visage, I thought that even she would be at a loss to know the answer. As Daryl Sharp explains:
“Typologically, most people are a bowl of soup. They function in an introverted or extraverted way depending on their mood, the weather or their state of mind; they think, feel, sense, intuit more or less at random, being no worse at one function than any other, and having little inkling of the consequences.” (Sharp, Jungian Psychology Unplugged, p. 13)
To know oneself is a challenge that seems insurmountable at times. To know another is almost a miracle. The process of self-discovery and discovery-of-other is work that perhaps goes hand in hand.
