Uncomfortable Conversations
Because the freedom to care is underrated
A few screenshots. Outrage. Immediately my WeChat Moments feed was flooded with comments like “Hang them all!” “These monsters need to be put to death!”
And just as abruptly as it had started, it was over. Allegations of child molestation at a Beijing kindergarten were given a swift verdict. An announcement stated that the security footage was incomplete (since the people running the facilities casually turned it on and off) and had also been corrupted. “No evidence of wrongdoing was found in the content recovered.” Now two parents have been detained and another woman is being prosecuted for rumor-mongering.
My WeChat feed groaned with … Disappointment is not quite the right word. What’s a good word for “we care, but we feel entirely powerless, knowing that we will never have the truth, knowing that there will be little that we can do other than vent frustrations online and watch our status updates and other people’s WeChat posts disappear, knowing the country might be progressing, but we will have no hand in directing its progress”?
Online commentary on Chinese social media platforms has long been censored. In the case of the allegations of abuse, people claimed that they couldn’t post their articles online with certain keywords unless they converted the whole story into an image, and even then, who knows how long it would stay live?
Any discussion about the incident was quickly deleted.
As an unusually bilingual and Americanized Taiwanese, I straddle two massive hive minds: The English-speaking world versus the Mandarin-speaking world. It has allowed me to observe and sometimes participate in two very different realities.
It also leaves me with a lot of mixed feelings.
“Fake news” isn’t new in China. The domestic news outlets are government-operated and tend to shy away from certain no-fly zones. There’s fair reporting, sometimes, but rarely any follow-up.
I don’t know what to believe. The initial accusations weren’t fact-checked. The investigation results came too swiftly.
On the other side of the world, the #MeToo movement is taking down one predator after another. Women and men shared stories about how they, too, battled mixed feelings of shame, rage, hope, and horror. The stories were difficult to read, but by sharing their experiences, they’ve allowed the world to be in that pain with them. An entire nation finally had an open conversation and demanded change.
And they said the Women’s March had no path nor purpose.
People owning their voices and their stories, and having their stories amplified by a movement — that’s the luxury of a messy democracy and a free press. Oh, and fact-checking and sting operations.
“There is more than one kind of freedom: Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from.
Don’t underrate it.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
The worried parents in China will never know if they have cause to worry (as if parents don’t have enough to worry about already). I wonder if their swift rage and threats of vigilantism were exacerbated by this lack of voice, this silencing of what could have been a discussion. They have freedom from worrying, because no amount of worrying out loud will lead to change on their terms.
So to my Western friends, please don’t despair. I know it feels like chaos now. The onslaught of information is just too much. Perhaps we’re really not built to accommodate this much input, hold this many sad stories. Maybe the overwhelm is contributing to this us-versus-them tribalism. Maybe it feels like there are just too many things to fix.
These are growing pains. Heck, the Taiwanese parliament is still infantile enough to throw punches and pull hair (toddler democracy?), but I’m still proud of it. It’s this messy democracy that allows us to challenge whether the guy whose picture is in every single classroom deserves his place of honor in history. Sure, I rage at the TV more than I’d like to admit, but you only get mad if you care enough. For many, the anger that could be channeled into change can’t be sustained, not when the conversation is constantly interrupted.
The conversation is uncomfortable, but please continue having them anyway. We’re watching your democracy develop in the digital age, and we’re taking notes. You’re demanding justice and transparency. You’re revitalizing activism. You're demonstrating the freedom to have a civil dialogue in the face of an discomforting reality.
Don’t underrate it.
