Ever since I was a child, my life has been smooth. The hills and struggles in my life were mere illusions as they were straightened out by my hard-working father and generous mother. Unlike most children who languish at what the future holds, my future was secure as obstacles in life such as poverty and lack of education were not endured by me. My security spawned a vice so contradictory to it. I grew to be selfish and uncaring, a self-serving monster. This tragic flaw was neither acknowledged nor fixed until I was uprooted out of my sheltered, comfortable little paradise in Vietnam at age 14. I was now at an all-boys, boarding school in Southern California where cell-phones, laptops, immaturity and egotism were prohibited. I suffered but grew. As I grew, greed, which had clouded my intellect and impaired my ability to care for others, was replaced with charity, a love for neighbor. Hence, I decided to put this newly acquired virtue to use.
I went home during the summer break of junior year. I was back home to familiarity, however, a new and improved person with moral awareness. A skinny, old lady, around sixty-five years old approached and sat next to me while I was in Church. She wore a traditional, brown, old and ripped up Vietnamese Ao Dai. With a sense of obligation and desire to do good, I decided to help a stranger in desperate need of going to the hospital for a blood transfusion. I knew nothing about her, yet believed every word. I silenced my ignorance as I forced myself to do whatever it took to save her life. On the way to the hospital, the taxi driver took a sharp right turn. He stopped the car, headed towards her and threw her out of the car. A shocking incident, perplexed and utterly speechless, I begged him to stop. “Take a look at this,” he hands me an issue of the newspaper from two weeks ago. She was a con-artist, looking to scam, rob and kill me.
It was difficult to describe how I felt. Perhaps, it would have been better if I stayed ignorant and completely insensitive. My desire to help and be charitable almost cost me my life. To be charitable and benevolent is to be tricked. Even in the holiest of places, a crook can still perform his trait. My love for neighbor is now in doubt. I have to stop and think before helping others. I do not know who to trust anymore, even the most honest of people could be full of lies. To be a generous is to be naive. To be a good man is to be deceived.
In her essay, “Strangers,” Toni Morrison recounts the story of when she misjudged a stranger due to previous assumptions and prejudices she made mentally influenced by, “language and image,” which, “feed and form experience” (Callihan 146). She describes her experience of seeing a woman fishing on the seawall at the edge of her neighbor’s garden. “She wears: men’s shoes, a man’s hat, a well-worn colorless sweater over a long black dress,” she described the stranger in detail, an observation made regarding the stranger’s poverty. Through the stranger’s mundane appearance, she felt a, “feeling of welcome,” and approached her (145). The woman and the stranger spoke and immediately bonded as they first talked about the shallow topics of fish recipes and weather to soon talk about their children. “She is witty and full of the wisdom that older women always seem to have a lock on,” a feature which the woman appreciated (145). She saw in the stranger a certain goodness, a quality that she desires in a friend. She says that when they parted, “it was with an understanding that she will be there the next day or very soon after and we will visit again. I imagine more conversations with her.” She thinks of the wonderful things the two new friends could do together, even inviting “Mother Something,” over to her house, “for, coffee, for tales, for laughter.” She desired the ideal friendship and genuinely liked, “Mother Something,” as this woman had left her a great first impression.
“She is not there the next day,” marks the sudden change in tone from one that was hopeful and optimistic to one of betrayal and perplexity. Disappointed at the unfulfilled desire of an idealized and happy friendship, she starts to realize the folly in believing that a stranger could so quickly become a friend. Though overwhelmed with strong feelings of being, “cheated, puzzled, but also amused…annoyance then bitterness takes the place of original bewilderment,” she realized that the stranger was not the person she thought she was (146). What she had seen in the stranger was just a romanticized version based on her prejudice and imagination. She alluded to the Bible and the French existentialist philosopher as she connects that the love for stranger, charity, is the same love that, “could reveal as the very mendacity of Hell” (146). Strangers are powerful in that they unveil what we wish to see in ourselves through the assumptions we make about them. Since we do not know the stranger, it is often the case that we would force our personality, our likes and dislikes on to them. Hence, we eclipse what they are beneath the qualities we seek in ourselves. These preconceived prejudices are caused by image which, “increasingly rules the realm of shaping, sometimes become, often contaminating, knowledge,” and provoking language, “an image can determine not only what we know and feel but also what we believe is worth knowing about what we feel.”
“Why would we want to know a stranger when it is easier to estrange another? Why would we want to close the distance when we can close the gate?” It is much easier for one to estrange a stranger because it is common and easy to not know a person, but to take a chance and get to know one, one becomes vulnerable to disappointment. Being vulnerable to disappointment, one desires to “own, govern and administrate the Other. To romance her, if we can, back into our own mirrors” (146). The final sentence of Morrison’s reflection as she talks about Robert Bergman’s portraits of strangers, “photographs unveil us…that is as close as can be to a master template of the singularity, the community, the inextinguishable sacredness of the human race,” tells us the importance of strangers as they act as mirrors to what we want to see in ourselves, our wants and our needs.
Perhaps, it was through the con-woman’s helplessness and feigned sincerity that I developed empathy. I saw her weakness and hopelessness as qualities that I possessed as well; That I would like someone to help me when I am in dire need. The stranger, then, reflects my wants and needs as I desire to be helped when I am in trouble. The next example speaks of perspective and trust. Different from “Strangers,” but still speaking on the topic of trust, “Salvation” is written about a boy who placed trust in the people he loved and looked up to. Though they had good intentions, the way in which they did things inflicted negative effects on the boy.
In Langston Hughes’ essay, “Salvation,” the author recounts the moment that altered his perception of religion. As a young boy at twelve years of age, Hughes was brought to his aunt’s church for a religious revival where he and other young sinners were given a chance to be “saved.” Having never been exposed to a religious setting and religion in general, Hughes sought guidance and explanation from Aunt Reed, who seemed to know what religion was. “My aunt told me that when you were saved you saw a light, and something happened to you inside! And Jesus came into your life! And God was with you from then on! She said you could see and hear and feel Jesus in your soul. I believed her” (The Center for Fiction). The boy took Aunt Reed’s hyperbolic and exaggerated statements literally as he expected to physically feel and sense Jesus, a figure without shape, form and mass. Hence, he anticipated something that simply was not going to happen.
Authority was represented in the congregation who the boy described to have, “jet-black faces and braided hair, old men with work gnarled hands.” He saw the congregation as those who had authority and deserve to be respected, that their words should be upheld and what they desired should be carried out. Westley, a rounder’s son, decided to “go to Jesus,” without actually believing in Jesus. He was then introduced to the fact that most people say they believe in Jesus yet have ulterior motives and do not actually believe in Him. They say they do either because they are clueless people who are easily swayed yet have no understanding of religion, or to quiet a roaring crowd such as the congregation in this essay like what Wesley, the rounder’s son, did or they are like the twelve-year-old, skeptical yet too terrified of the majority’s pressure and letting down loved ones.
Aunt Reed, though having good motives, failed in her execution. She wanted to bring her nephew to the church for him to experience conversion but the way in which she does things resulted in the boy losing faith and trust in religion. He was told by his aunt that he was only saved only when he could feel Jesus. But, he never ended up “feeling” Jesus in his heart which meant that Jesus did not come to save him. Though the boy walked to the altar, an outward and false gesture as he conforms to mob psychology, he did not truly feel “saved. Thus, he goes home and cries out of guilt for he had deceived the entire congregation and committed a sin in church. “I buried my head under the quilts, but my aunt heard me…everybody in the church, that I hadn’t seen Jesus…” (The Center for Fiction). Still ignorant of what had occurred, Aunt Reed thought that he was crying because he was overcome with emotion. She clearly wanted what was best for her nephew, but lacked the knowledge and clarity in explanation to actually make him convert.
We try to help others, but end up either not helping them or even leaving them worse than before. My experience in encountering the woman helped me realize that strangers reflect what we hope to see in ourselves. We develop empathy and feel the need to help those who look helpless because we would like others to help us whenever we are in desperate need. But, since they are strangers, we do not know them on a personal level, not actually knowing exactly who they are as people. Hence, we “fill in the blanks” with traits that we desire to which they do not truly possess. Thus, we disappoint ourselves when we realize that they are not the type of people we expected them to be. Our effort in helping them is done in vain for what we thought they needed is not what they actually wanted from us.