"Why Don't They Eat Minced Meat Rice Soup?"

"I'm sorry.  I was wrong.  I really didn't know." Mama said.  

It is a bit of a surprise to have my 80-year-old mother apologize to me out of the blue.  

"I kept demanding that my kids get good grades in school.  You already did so well, but all I knew was to keep pressing for more.  I had no idea what it meant to be in school.  I just find out that studying is not easy, now that I attend classes at the Buddhist church . . . "

Indeed, it was tough being my mother's children.  Even if you get 99 out of 100, she would still pull out a stick and ask you where the missing one point had gone.  I thought she was just being a demanding perfectionist.  

"Similarly, I didn't know that my mother's work was hard when I was little," she said.  "As a kid, I went to the field with her and watched her farm everyday.  But I did not know how hard it was until I recently saw some Japanese farmers on a TV show.  The show had some elementary school students interview the farmers and try out the work themselves.  Some of the kids fell into the rice paddy as they bent over to plant rice seedlings.  I remember watching my mother perform the same task.  That was when it dawned on me that it must have been hard work for my mother " Mama recounted.

I was astonished.  "So, Mama, even though you watched Grandma do all that physical work under the hot sun, you could not tell that it was hard work for her until now?"  

"No!  I had no idea until I watched the kids on the TV show.  The farmers explained how taxing it was, and, now, I know."

Her response was perplexing to me.

"You visited me and saw me work in the garden.  From that, you still could not tell it was hard work growing crops??"  

"Was it really?  It looked like you were just having fun.  You were happy doing it . . ."

"Yes, I love gardening.  I enjoy doing it.  Yet, that does not make the tasks easier.  It was still very hard work.  Do you understand?"  

"Well, okay.  Now that you tell me so . . ."

After our conversation, I contemplated some of the difficult exchanges with my mother in the past.  For the longest time, I thought she was just stubborn, difficult and demanding.  It seemed like she would not budge no matter how I suffered.  To me, she was cold and cruel.

Here is my epiphany: My mother has extremely low empathy.  She had no insight.  As she said, she really did not know.  

It is astonishing to me because one of my favorite childhood memory was to go to work with my father.  My father ran a moving service with a small truck.  At first, I just watched him work.  But then I realized how heavy the boxes were.  I decided to chip in to help.  My father loaded the stuff on the truck bed; I pushed them towards the front of the truck and stacked them.  Many times, we came home being dirty, sweaty and stinky, but we were happy.  It made me feel close to my father.  It also made me a frugal person because those experiences taught me that nothing comes easy.

I was no older than my mom when she watched her mother work in the field.  It is, therefore, a big surprise for me to hear that she had no insight from watching Grandma work.  For over seven decades, she recounted her childhood so many times, but that was not enough to bring her to empathize with her mother.  Since she never worked in the field herself, she had no reference.  At the end, it was a Japanese TV show that touched her and "enlightened" her!

Many terrible things are going on in this world: discrimination, violence, inequality, poverty.  "How can people do this to others?"  "Can't they try stepping into the others' shoes?"  "Can't they see people are suffering?  How can they be so indifferent?" we ask.  These are reasonable questions to ask, presuming everybody is the same.

What if our presumption is wrong?  What if these people are like my mother?  What if they have low empathy, and they are lacking the ability of developing insight without experiencing the circumstances themselves?  That may help explain the rhetorics and behavior of some politicians:  Before their children came out of the closet, they were hard against gay rights.  They were "pro-life" until someone in the family had a life-threatening condition and needed an abortion.  Some government officials still refuse to support serious measures for COVID 19 prevention because the virus has not yet touched their inner circle.  And the sad thing is: They have many supporters!

These politicians remind me of a famous historic story:  In Jin dynasty of ancient China, there was a famine.  Many people died from hunger.  When briefed by his advisers, the emperor innocently asked, "Why don't they eat minced meat rice soup?"  This line has become what this last emperor of Jin dynasty is remembered for.  

As always, to make the world a better place, I believe we need to give our children better education.  They do not need harder curriculum or more computers.  Instead, to build a better world, they need to learn empathy, compassion and kindness.  If the world continues to be run by self-centered people who cannot feel for others, it will be even more of a dog-eat-dog world.  There will be no peace and no happiness.  Regardless of wealth and status, we are all doomed.