Be Open to the Uncommon Voice

Summer in Taiwan is typhoon season. The air is thick and warm, and heavy clouds preclude the usual bite of the midday sun. Winds can be rough but they aren’t so bad up north in Hsinchu, so they don’t stop my students from chasing each other around outside. The other tutors, as boisterous and enthusiastic as the stereotypical American tourist, are eager to play alongside them. But not everyone wants to venture outdoors, and I stay behind with the stragglers.

The principal’s daughter, who is about 9, doesn’t work well with the other kids. During classroom projects, the other students cry out as she cuts their paper crafts into pieces and draws all over team worksheets. But when she brings a deck of cards to my desk, they look well-kept enough. Our game is soon joined by a little boy with an interestingly cropped mullet, whose thin tail of hair hangs off the back of his head. He’s smaller than the rest of the kids, and breaks down in tears when he loses in afternoon sports. Both he and the principal’s daughter are quiet and keep to themselves during classroom activities, but as we take turns placing down cards, they exclaim each time I mistakenly break one of the game’s mysterious rules.

As English tutors, we are instructed to hide from students our understanding of Chinese, encouraging them instead to speak with us solely in English. This poses a challenge to my two fellow card players, who cannot quite explain to me how the game works. I ask them to try their best, and I attempt to decipher the rest. Patience, I think, is the only real prerequisite to overcoming such barriers in communication.

I’ve learned over time that people cannot always communicate within the standard, preferred method we’ve grown accustomed to in neurotypical-centered institutions: amiable and clear, firm yet unimposing. A voice with the proper amount of inflection, which never breaches the border into loud and jarring, but also doesn’t slip into mumbling. Without this, a person’s social mannerisms can lock them away inside themselves: If they speak and gesture in a way that takes some effort to understand, the listener often gives into a deeply entrenched disinclination for the incongruous vernacular; they smile placidly and disengage, never sparing a glance into the rich novel of the speaker’s personhood — just as valuable and engaging as any other medium, but unreasonable in its demands that you take time to read the page.

How often, I wonder, do we make a genuine effort to engage with those who exist outside of the neurotypical hegemony of speech? The boy in your lecture class whom no one really talks to because he moves and speaks abruptly, plowing confidently through any social blips or flubs; that girl you worked with whose eyes never left the ground as she mumbled to you; that friend of a friend you can’t stand because they’re loud, overly talkative and miss every social cue. What harm do they pose, aside from the perceived difficulty of communicating with them?

An individual’s social mannerisms are not definitive of their personality. A variety of biological and environmental factors shape the ways in which we get our thoughts across, and some methods of communication are not always found palatable by people who adhere to the neurotypical norm. But a person’s verbal mannerisms do not detract from the value inherent within their heart and mind. And it is cruel to discard their contributions in the same way many argue it is inequitable to discard the contents of a person’s speech based on its grammatical correctness.

Yes, it took me a few rounds of trial and error to learn the rules of my students’ card game, but that didn’t make it any less pleasant of a way to spend the time. And I was blessed with the opportunity to see a side of the kids that I’d never witnessed before: that which unfurls in the presence of a patient listener, who engages with genuine interest and acceptance rather than wariness and judgment.

If we mean to live in a society in which all people are regarded as equals, an openness to the uncommon voice must be established; if not, we are scorning our neighbors over nothing but an unwillingness to process what we don’t find immediately easy to understand.

Tazia Mohammad ’27 is a sophomore majoring in economics and political science.