I am finishing up my first year on the tenure track, and something amazing just happened to me last week. So, I am finally sitting down to write about what this all means, and I will share that amazing thing with you all. I am very proud of myself not for the reasons you might think right now. But I will explain. This is going to be a long one, because it’s going to be more self-indulgent than my usual posts.
1.
I had one of those precious moments of clarity, excitement, and determination on the plane on my way toward my first ever on-campus job interview. It was February, 2020 and I was still somewhat in shock that I even got the Skype interview. I tried very hard not to allow myself to anticipate what all of this could’ve meant. But, on that plane, I could no longer contain myself.
To prevent myself from awkwardly crying on a plane alone, I took out my phone notepad and wrote the following:
For being explained my own research to me;
For sitting down next to somebody and have them immediately getting up because I’m not important enough to talk to;
For being told “this is a hard topic; Many smart people have worked on this; I don’t think you should try.”
For being the only woman speaker at a conference and nobody talking to me during conference dinner presumably because I’m taken as an undergrad tagging along;
For the very surprised looks on the faces of other grad students when my advisor/mentor gestures at me as an expert in something;
For attending a workshop and having the hosting grad student introducing himself to all of my male colleagues and silently staring at me wondering whose partner I am.
But also, for the people who took me seriously out of the kindness in their hearts, even though it’s objectively true that I have less to offer in return.
For Margaret Schabas, who was the first person to tell me my paper was well written and I was good at philosophy. I would not have applied to philosophy grad programs if she hadn’t said that.
For Bill Harper, who kept me entertained when nobody else would.
For Adrian Currie, who as a post doc took me seriously even though I was a master’s student and didn’t know what I was talking about, and who remembered me a few years later.
For Nic Fillion, who never questioned my ability to do formal work even though I had no background and really struggled.
For Holly Andersen for being Holly.
For Sean Walsh, who took it as his mission to fight for me.
For Cailin O’Connor, who has always been willing to listen even when the problems are too hard to solve.
Typing this out in its entirety, without alteration, feels very strange now. I had not finished my dissertation then, and so some stuff were later repeated in my dissertation acknowledgement. Also, when I typed this on a plane at 1:25pm on February 12th, 2020, I had meant them as notes for myself– as notes I would edit and expand into a blog post. Today is the first time I read them in full in three years.
2.
I didn’t get that job, of course. So I buried the note and hoped that I wouldn’t forget about the thought once I do get a job.
To cope with waiting anxiety, I got a tattoo. (I love talking about this tattoo, so you can totally ask me about it.)
It can be read in either Chinese or Japanese, and roughly translates to “original heart”, or the heart that you had when you first started, as a reminder that you shouldn’t forget about it.
Given what I wrote in my note, it would seem that my original heart was pettiness and revenge fantasy. And that would be correct. I don’t really believe that there’s anything that only I can do, or that there’s any idea that, if I don’t say it, no one else would. My main motivation for seeking academic success is, really, so I can *do it right*, and *prove them wrong*.
3.
As I’ve noted before, when the pandemic hit, I was also hit with the real possibility that *this*, whatever it is, would never happen for me. I looked into alt-ac positions and was successful in getting one. I had no doubt that I would be happy doing that job, and the job itself would be impactful (perhaps more so than what I’m doing now). But I still couldn’t help but be deeply, deeply saddened by the prospect that I wouldn’t be able to “prove them wrong”.
Sure, I would be happy and fulfilled, but I want to beat them at their own game, so to speak. I want to become the person they once ignored me to talk to, so that I can tell them “it doesn’t work like that anymore; it’s too late now”.
(I should still state the obvious: I do very much enjoy philosophy, and believe that I’m good at it. You just don’t have to be in academia to simply enjoy philosophy.)
4.
I got my current job two years after that plane ride.
It’s not that I forgot about the note, and it’s certainly not that I stopped being petty. I guess I just had a hard time transitioning into being an authority figure. I had a hard time figuring out how to wield the power that had just been suddenly bestowed on me.
A couple of years ago, I co-organized a series of “demystifying academia” panels with Chrisy with a “Chinese women abroad” online community. At one point, a guest, Wenqing Zhao, said something that has since profoundly resonated with me. To paraphrase, she said:
As women who grew up in China, we were never really taught how to act politically. But as a university professor, you occupy a space that inherently comes with power. You can choose not to use that power, but the power is there, and the power is yours. I often struggle with this, because I was not trained in how to think about these issues, how to reflect on my own power, or how to decide when or how I might want to use it.
Many, many years ago, there was a popular tweet that talks about how marginalized people have super powers. I think it was meant to be a way of talking about stand point epistemology and the idea that living in the margin bestows special vantage points which we ought to celebrate. In any case, I inherited a narrative which I detailed in a previous blog post, about how my super power is that I can always tell when someone wants to listen to me or not. And also, if they want to listen to me, they are probably a good listener in general.
I somewhat recently repeated this narrative to Cailin, who pointed out that I was losing this power. As I slowly accumulate social power, I lose the epistemic power of knowing who wouldn’t have paid attention to me had I not had my fancy title. (Not that my title is very fancy, to be fair, but I do have one.)
I suppose the reason I hadn’t written any blog posts since then was that I was struggling with the loss of identity — of no longer being the one who is always talked over.
Not that it’s a good identity to have, of course. I just hadn’t quite figured out who I was if not that.
5.
I was recently at a stats conference.
It was such a stats conference that I, along with 3 other philosophers in my session, were collectively known as “the philosophers”. People would, at various occasions, make remarks such as “I love that this conference also invites the philosophers” or “I’m so glad that you guys are here”.
Long story short, I don’t know if it’s the culture in stats, or the culture of this particular conference, or the fact that we were outsiders, or that people (to my surprise) liked my talk, but I had rarely felt this legitimate at a conference.
People came up to me at breaks to talk about my view — different people at different breaks came up to me. I became very good at explaining philosophy to statisticians.
Anyway, the point was that I was very legitimate, and a little exhausted towards the end of the day on all three days.
I had debated on whether to skip the grad student poster session because, truth be told, I couldn’t follow most of the talks. The posters also looked difficult and, even if I could somehow make sense of them, I wouldn’t be able to offer anything useful in return. Finally I figured, eh, what else was I gonna do?
Because I wasn’t expecting to make intellectual contributions, I figured I’d only go to posters where there was no audience. This way, I wouldn’t be taking away opportunities for them to receive actual feedback.
Then, something amazing happened.
6.
I had actually done this multiple times before — when I don’t have specific posters I want to see, I typically visit the ones where there’s no audience. When I was a grad student doing it at philosophy conferences, one of three things would happen: 1) the speaker would ignore me; 2) the speaker would leave to go join a better circle nearby; 3) someone who thought about stopping by would decide against it once they see that the speaking is starting to talk to me.
Not this time.
Students seem genuinely happy that I stopped by. They tried to understand what I was asking even after I warned them that it might not be coherent. Sometimes others nearby would be drawn to our conversation.
I was no longer repulsive (in the physics sense).
7.
This is the part I am most proud of.
There were a couple of times where a grad student would come up to me to tell me “I liked your talk”. Then they would stand there, looking at me anticipatorily, but with nothing more to say. (Because, let’s face it, what does one say to a philosopher anyway?) And it crossed my mind how easy it could have been if I just responded with “thanks” and nothing more. They would have to leave me be, and I could get either some alone time or an opportunity to talk with someone more important.
But I didn’t.
I dragged my tired brain online and forced the gears to turn. I could almost hear the rust falling off of them as I try to find a conversation that would be interesting and, hopefully, useful to them. A conversation that would let them talk back.
And that was the heart that I had when I started. It was the ability to do exactly this. It was the ability to choose to do this when I could have chosen otherwise.
8.
After the conference, I met up with Elliott for the mandatory reunion hot pot. (And yes, it has to be hot pot.) I told him of all the wonderful things that has happened at this conference.
“Several years ago when we talked about academia,” he recalled with amusement, “you said that what you wanted was power. I remember this vividly– Kino wants power.”
“That’s exactly right.” I said. Power, pettiness, and revenge fantasy. “I want to be the kind of person who would talk to junior colleagues, and they would be very happy about it.”
I’m starting to think that it might be able to happen after all.
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