Hijab

A week ago I was at a Panera near Cal State Fullerton. I passed by a woman wearing a hijab. I might've paused half a second. She noticed me, and perhaps noticed the pause. I wondered how she had interpreted it. Did she give it any thought? Is she used to it? It passed, though it lingered. I had a vague sense of guilt or sorrow about the whole thing.

How does one go up to someone and say:

I looked at you, but did not intend to gawk. I looked at you not because I am a fearful reactionary, nor because I'm an objectifying male. I perhaps looked without any present emotions, because I wasn't really looking at you. But you weren't an abstraction of a race or a faith. You were an echo of a specific person I had met in college, a woman who I didn't really know, and still don't, but who, ten years after we had graduated, had engaged me in a conversation that convinced me that we understood each other and our younger selves better.

I look at you, or through you, to the past, and realize that I had never talked with her about the hijab, though she had explained at the beginning of school (coincidentally, a few days before September 11) that it represented modesty, though then, and now, I did not know if it represented an act of modesty or itself served as a reminder, a totem, to be modest in our endeavors.

I had not talked with her about faith, or family, or hardly anything. A small school can seem so impossibly vast sometimes.

And now I did not see you, or her. I saw an idea -- that the people I had met, I had treated as representatives of types, used them to understand the identity or identities they claimed, or disclaimed, or reclaimed. And too, too often, I didn't see the person.

And yet how grateful I am, that I have pokemoned my way to some rude decency and understanding, that I would find it at least somewhat difficult to ascribe broad traits to swaths of society. Grateful at good moments -- smugly self-satisfied at worse moments -- and dangerously vulnerable and reactionary on matters of identity in the worst moments of all. But my judgment seems somewhat sane, even if my advocacy is timid.

To know how a person values and weighs their identities, which ones are superordinate or subordinate, how contextual is that ranking, how unstable and self-contradictory are the weights in the expression of thought or deed, I might have to know them better than I have known any person. Perhaps I wouldn't be equal to the task. Perhaps it would destroy the relationship; there is, of course, a difference between empathy and dissection.

When I go into the world, am I the example floating in someone's mind of the Japanese ethnicity? Or of a scientist, laughable as that possibility seems to me? Maybe. And maybe that knowledge will, or should, change me.

This is a bizarre and self-indulgent entry, even by the standards of this blog. And yet, the gulf between the dominant identities I carry around within my own head and those projected onto me is probably the source of most of my major failings.

So to the person of the past -- I'm sorry we never had a chat about you, or what you wanted me, or others, to know. I neither want to assume that these fifteen years, or thirty years, have been difficult for you, nor communicate that a complicated and variegated sense of self can or should be summed up in any one aspect of external appearance, even, and perhaps especially, clothing. And yet I fear that I have abstracted away the actual you.

And to the stranger of the present, thank you for setting my thoughts along a different course, one that will hopefully get me out of my headspace and into the world.

The lines and internet are always slow there, at the Panera.

The lines and internal thoughts are always slow here.