Confronting Inadequacy,Imposture,and Inaction: Ukraine,Hong Kong,and Difficult Knowledge

Abstract

In this piece, I explore the deluge of thoughts and emotions triggered by the opportunity of writing about the war in Ukraine. Thinking with Noddings’s ethic of care, Britzman’s idea of difficult knowledge, Dewey’s and Ingold’s visions on education and commoning, and Probyn’s arguments on writing about affects, I reflect on academic practices of research and writing, what constitutes the urge of responding to the call for papers of this special issue, the affective response it sparks in me concerning my relation with my own home city, and some sense of how to move forward.

1

Confession

I will begin with a confession.

When I was a child, I had a pack of cards. On each card, there was a traditional costume (or was it a national flag? Or both?) printed on one side, and the name of the corresponding country on the other. The cards were held together only by an elastic band—it must have been one of those games that we inherited from our distant cousins. There was no instruction manual, but it was obviously a memory game. I was not into games as a child, but I remember going through the cards, not particularly mindfully, and reading to myself the names of the countries printed on the matte surfaces. That was when I first came across the name 烏克蘭 (the transliteration of Ukraine in Chinese).

I wish I could say my curiosity about Ukraine was piqued then by those cards, and I had gone on to find out more about the place and its people. But I was a singularly incurious child, or person for that matter. I had lived most of my life quite contented with the little I knew about Ukraine. I would not have been able to identify Ukraine on a world map if I had been asked, but I had not let it bother me. It was not a place that I had reasons to think about on most days.

It was Philippe Sands’s East West Street that put Ukraine back into my consciousness, more than three decades after I had read the name of Ukraine on one of those cards out loud to myself. Sands tells a multipronged, intricately entangled story of Lviv, the Nazis, his own grandfather, the Jewish lawyers and legal scholars Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, and the international laws and conventions on human rights of which each of them conceived. I was drawn into the stories very early on, when Sands explains the many names of Lviv:

Lemberg, Lviv, and Lwów are the same place. The name has changed, as has the composition and nationality of its inhabitants, but the location and the buildings have remained. This is even as the city changed hands, no fewer than eight times in the years between 1914 and 1945. (Sands, 2016, p. 8)

It reminded me of Alsace, an hour away from where I currently live. I mentioned to my partner in passing that in the faraway future, I would like to visit Lviv, to see for myself the city whose history Sands describes so vividly and engagingly in his book.

(I wrote “put Ukraine back into my consciousness,” but why “back”? It creates the impression that Ukraine has previously occupied a space in my thoughts. But it cannot be further from the truth. All I did was reading the name of the country out loud to myself, back in an unspecified time in my distant childhood. I took no interest otherwise. Nothing is being put “back.” It was a ploy to manipulate.)

I read East West Street in spring 2021. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, I learned that many Ukrainians had anticipated another invasion from Russia since the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Sands’s Lviv fascinated me, yet I was utterly oblivious to the predicament the country had been facing.

My confession is a confession of shame.

2

Opportunity

But my ignorance had not caused me to refrain from having an opinion about it, talking about it, or even writing about it.

In late 2021 and early 2022, I was working on a piece with my thesis supervisor about migrant housing based on some work my supervisor had done in the previous years. When the piece was sent back to me to work on in April 2022, I had what I can now only describe as a “brainwave” of inserting a paragraph about the Ukrainians fleeing their war-torn country. I described the west’s readiness to respond and its contrast to their response to refugees fleeing other countries to justify the relevance and the timeliness of the piece. There was no sinister agenda behind the act, no malice in the idea or the tone in which the idea was expressed, but increasingly I find myself thinking about, and feeling troubled by, that “brainwave.”

(“Brainwave” insinuates a moment of genius, and it captures well the affect of the moment in which I decided to mention Ukraine in the piece.)

There was something akin to a cold, utilitarian calculation disguised as objectivity lurking behind it. Compassion, sympathy, and the intention to invoke hope through exemplifying new possibilities notwithstanding, the war was momentarily reduced into a tool, all the sufferings, compassion and emotions collapsed into the shell of the instrument itself, incorporated into a piece that had not started out with the war and the Ukrainians in mind. The war broke out (a developing situation, a humanitarian crisis), it was there (an event, an object), and I seized it for my own purpose (a tool). There was an unmissable opportunistic overtone to it.

3

Care

In the piece I co-authored with my supervisor, I outlined the relevance of the war to the paper in a few sentences. I mentioned Ukraine and the horror in which Ukrainians found themselves in passing. In passing because it was not the focus of the paper. It was just to set the scene, so to say. If it had been a presentation or a conversation, I might have qualified the mention of Ukraine with an aside, by saying, in a noncommittal manner; it is a consequential topic in its own right and deserves more attention and space to do it justice—an aside that insinuates that I care. I do not elaborate only because it is neither the right time nor the right space for it. But do I really?

In In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan (2016) writes that “[t]he ideal of care is . . . an activity of relationship, of seeing and responding to need, taking care of the world by sustaining the web of connection so that no one is left alone” (p. 62). Seeing, or noticing alone, according to Gilligan, does not suffice; responding to what one notices through connecting and meeting needs is essential. “[D]irect attention and response” (Noddings, 2013, p. xiv) is also critical in Nel Noddings’s idea of care. She distinguishes caring-about from caring-for, and points out that the former “does not guarantee a response to one who needs care” (p. xiv). This distinction Noddings draws elicits considerable criticism. One of which Noddings cites in the preface to the 2013 reprint of Caring. Her critic, Barbara Houston, took offense to Noddings exemplifying the limits of our caring capability, and thus our limited obligation, with the starving children in Africa—a claim I also found unfathomable and outrageous when I first came across it. According to Noddings, Houston had the urge “to throw the book across the room” (p. xiv). However, Houston later wrote,

I was incensed that someone should deny an obvious obligation. Upon cooler reflection I realized you were drawing a useful distinction between caring for and caring about, and more to the point, I discovered something about myself, namely, that I wanted to fiercely insist I had an obligation that, in all honesty, I had to admit I never made any effort to meet. (pp. xiv–xv)

When the war in Ukraine broke out, the communities around me leapt into action. The school my child went to disseminated information to parents and the community at large detailing the number of children they would be taking in, how they would be funded (as it is not a state school and it operates on a tight budget), what kind of support, especially language support, the children who joined the school would be given. A girl who fled Ukraine with her mother, leaving behind her brother and father, joined my child’s class. The school arranged a teacher who can speak Russian to shadow her and offer her support.

Rainbow flags with “NO WAR” printed on them were flying in my neighborhood. Families who were able to take in Ukrainians seeking refuge were encouraged to get in touch with their municipality office. My child’s classmate and her mother stayed with a family in our municipality for months, until they were in the position to find their own place. Our next door neighbors went through the trouble of converting the home office into a guest bedroom and took in a mother and son. They went on to become very good friends, and stay in touch even after the mother and son have moved to Germany.

I discussed welcoming refugees into our own homes with another friend who, like me, also has a room to spare. We justified to each other why we did not “step up,” and lamented why the same courtesy had not been extended to those who fled Syria and Afghanistan. (As if the blatant discrimination could justify our inaction.) Did we not feel for those who suddenly found themselves displaced and their lives and families broken asunder? We did. We might at different points have described our response as “care” (“of course we care,” we might have exclaimed). But Houston’s self-reflective comment about her not making any effort to fulfill the care she claimed reminds me without action, the intention to connect, to meet the needs of those whom I claim to care, how hollow the claim rings.

4

Hong Kong

In spring 2023, my family and I visited Strasbourg with our extended family. A relative drew our attention to the number of times the nationality of the inhabitants in Strasbourg changed in the years between 1870 and 1945. My thoughts darted toward the other side of the globe. From Strasbourg, to Lviv, to Hong Kong. Four times, he pointed out, which put Strasbourg between Lviv (8 times) and Hong Kong (3 times between 1842 and 1997).

When I read the call for contributions on this special issue, I read Ukraine, but my thoughts refused to budge; they were all about Hong Kong.

On the CfC: “In just over 3 months since Russian [sic] invaded Ukraine, more than 14 million people have fled their homes (BBC, 2022, May 3).”

On my mind: “Hong Kong lost some 93,000 residents in 2020, followed by another 23,000 in 2021. But early estimates show this year will see far more people go.” (Petrilli, 2022)

On the CfC: “The forced attempt to colonize a democratic nation rips at the veil of civility often cloaking colonial, normative institutional power.”

On my mind: “It is a dramatic transformation for a city known for its civic values and commitment to ‘peaceful, rational, non-violent’ protest.”

“Barely veiled threats of state violence issued from the mainland so far include parading paramilitary troops just across the border, releasing a video showing the Chinese garrison in Hong Kong in urban combat and denouncing protesters as terrorists.” (Graham-Harrison & Kuo, 2019)

On the CfC: “. . . the institutional coloniality of power and highlights the necessity for critically conceptualized solutions at basic and broad levels for theory, methodology, and practice.”

On my mind: “An employee in the education sector wrote in 2017 that before 1997, Hong Kong people did not even have a citizenship. Hong Kong residents could only hold British National (Overseas) passports (BNO), which was nothing more than a travel document. They did not have the right of residence in the United Kingdom. Those Hong Kong residents who were born in the mainland could only hold identification papers. Hong Kong people were stateless and without rights.

“Because of the lack of education and selective amnesia, the so-called “democracy and human rights” under British colonial rule have been greatly “glorified” in Hong Kong.” (Fan et al., 2019)

When I read the call for papers of this special issue, I felt compelled to respond, to contribute a piece. I thought I would write about Ukraine. But why Ukraine? Because of the stack of cards that I used to have? Because I was moved by Sands’s storytelling? Because I know a thing or two about war, displacement, and colonialism? Because it is a timely topic, a publication opportunity? Because I witnessed responses in the form of meaningful actions in my communities in Switzerland? Because, much as I would not like to acknowledge, I need to process the “difficult knowledge” (Britzman, 1998) that confronts me, but I have been too cowardly to pluck up the courage to face it squarely?

5

Difficult Knowledge

On June 4, 1989, when the Tiananmen incident/massacre happened, I was a 12-year-old primary six pupil in Hong Kong. The tanks rolled into the square in the small hours on Sunday. On the TV, I watched and listened to shots fired at the university students, the wounded (or the dead) being wheeled or carried away, potentially toward the first aid stations. There was a lot of screaming, people running in all directions, chaos, smoke, and blood.

I was a teacher, and I still identify as one professionally. When I first started as a school teacher, the June 4 incident was on the school curriculum. Deborah Britzman (1998) poses the question: “how can we grapple with the stakes of the learning when the learning is made from attempts at identification with what can only be called difficult knowledge?” (p. 117). To do so, Britzman argues that teachers “must be willing to risk approaching the internal conflicts which the learner brings to the learning” (p. 117). The first batch of pupils I discussed the incident with were toddlers themselves when the incident happened. Their being much too young to make sense of the situation as it unfolded of course does not automatically diminish their capability to learn about and appreciate the consequences of the incident. However, as I attempted to discuss the incident in the post-handover Hong Kong in the classroom, I noticed it was my own “internal conflicts,” entangled with apprehension, fear, and hope that filled the air in the pre-handover Hong Kong that I had to confront, to learn from.

When Hong Kong was deeply embroiled in political violence due to the proposal of the national security law, I had already moved to Switzerland for a few years. But I continued to follow the news and engage in discussions because I “cared.” Until one day, when a respected, well-loved friend who had made significant personal sacrifices in the process remarked that unless I was ready to return to Hong Kong to vote and to participate in protests, I had no right to comment, let alone criticize, those who were involved in the perilous struggle.

Slowly I stopped engaging. Eventually I stopped following the news.

Britzman reminds us of the distinction between learning about and learning from. “Whereas learning about an event or experience,” Britzman points out, “focuses upon the acquisition of qualities, attributions, and facts, so that it presupposes a distance (or, one might even say, a detachment) between the learner and what is to be learned, learning from an event or experience is of a different order, that of insight” that requires “attachment” and “implication” (p. 117). Britzman argues that learning from difficult knowledge is “a psychic event” that is “charged with resistance to knowledge” (p. 118). Such resistance is the result of the knowledge provoking “a crisis within the self and when the knowledge is felt as interference or as a critique of the self’s coherence or view of itself in the world” (p. 118). It renders one “incapable of an adequate response because the knowledge offered is dissonant in the order of trauma, so that the response can be only a working through–a mourning–of belated knowledge” (p. 118).

This belatedness has created a temporal space in which one can vacillate between confrontation of difficult knowledge and consolation of self. “When the movements of affect and idea are in conflict, as they are in the time of resistance,” Britzman explains; we cope through the “discounting of an experience as having anything to do with the self and the freezing of events in a history that has no present” (p. 119). She continues, “These mechanisms of defense–undoing what has already happened and isolating the event in a time that has long past–are key ways the ego attempts to console itself. But the cost of consolation is severe” (p. 119).

What the war in Ukraine and subsequently the call for papers have invoked in me is the desire to confront the part of myself that has been stowed away. Thinking and writing about Ukraine, to me, is what Britzman describes as a “risky business” (p. 61), an interference of the self, a decision to provoke. It provokes what I have been pretending to be settled—that my claim of care is empty, that I am too cowardly to participate meaningfully, to take action. By listening to, and thinking with, the “stories of another,” more can be done “with the stories one already holds” (p. 61). The provocation has awoken the inconsolable, what I did not previously tolerate knowing. Britzman describes it as an ethical concern, a prerequisite to fulfill to “surprise and surpass” (p. 61).

6

Commoning

Britzman cautions us of the severe cost of consolation, and points to the generative power of confronting difficult knowledge. What is the cost of consolation? What can be generated through acknowledging and confronting the difficult knowledge?

As a teacher-mother, a researcher-writer, I think (perhaps more as a writer than a researcher, more as mother than a teacher) often about teaching and learning, or what I would describe as pedagogical encounters. Increasingly, instead of thinking about delivery of materials, about skills and methods of teaching, about what can be exhibited and thus, for some, can be observed and evaluated, I become more and more preoccupied with readiness to relate, to common, and to continue life. The readiness that occupies my thoughts is educative in nature. It is not a readiness to teach or to learn; it is not readiness of teacher or student, but an individual’s readiness to common—connect, respond, and become in moments of pedagogical encounters, regardless of their role or status within the social structures or hierarchies.

“Every life,” Tim Ingold (2018) writes, is tasked with bringing other lives into being and with sustaining them for however long it takes for the latter, in turn, to engender further life. The continuity of the life process is therefore not individual but social. And education in its broadest sense, according to Dewey, is “the means of this social continuity of life.” Wherever and whenever life is going on, so too is education. (p. 3)

The education Ingold refers to is not simply about information exchange or transmission. It can only be achieved through commoning, when “people with different experiences of life can reach an accord–a degree of like-mindedness that allows them to carry on their lives together” (p. 4). The pathway leading to that accord, the like-mindedness, however, is not through suppressing differences and creating a false sense of sameness or similarity, but through response and being responded to, through answering to the variations of the co-participants. Ingold insists that “each of us comes into our own as a person with a singular and recognisable voice” (pp. 5-6).

Dewey’s and Ingold’s visions of education as a means to continue life are deeply hopeful in nature: not only do they orient toward the future, they also value individuals and the constellations of variations they embody. When their visions intersect with Britzman’s concept of difficult knowledge, however, we encounter the first reality check. For individuals, with all of their differences and singularities, to respond and be responded to, it would demand a level of self-knowledge that cannot be achieved without “work.” The differences and variations each individual embodies must consist of experiences of different natures, including those we cannot bear to revisit, to which our selves barricade against. Yet, as Britzman points out, we tend to idealize the inside of individuals as conflict-less and place the conflicts of love and aggression “outside of the very individuals who also live them” (p. 133). This “pedagogical idealization” blunts one’s “capacity to respond” (p. 133). The cost of consolation that Britzman talks about is, therefore, the diminished readiness, capacity, and capability, to respond, to common, and to co-create because of the ways we avoid painful encounters with difficult knowledge within ourselves.

In the context of Holocaust education, Britzman argues that “the refusal to engage a traumatic perception of helplessness and loss, often pushes educators to the opposite spectrum of affect: the focus on hope and courage as the adequate lesson to be made from difficult knowledge” (p. 119). However, Britzman points out that “hope . . . may actually take the form of a defense” (p. 119); we may hide behind hope as a way to avoid confronting trauma and pain. Through confronting the difficult knowledge within, we confront the possibility that the hope we invoke may simply be a cover-up, and ascertain that the hope we co-create is not despair in disguise.

7

Affects

As I was agonizing over whether to respond to the call for papers, I confided in a friend. I talked about my urge of submitting a piece to talk about Ukraine AND Hong Kong. I went from the uncertainty that what I had to say was either relevant or valuable, to the sense of imposture that was holding me back. But what troubled me most was whether it was even ethical to throw my thoughts into the mix and talk about Hong Kong, seemingly drawing attention away from Ukraine while their very existence as a sovereign state is threatened by an unprovoked aggressor.

Elspeth Probyn (2011) writes about a terror she experienced and the physical symptoms it brought about. What made her ill, she explains, was “the terror of not being equal to the interest of my subject. The idea that I would not interest readers triggered what seemed to be a mixture of fear and shame” (p. 72). She goes on to explore this sense of imposture. She writes,

Imposture implies making it up, hiding behind a mask of competence. Etymologically shame comes from the Goth word Scham, which refers to covering the face. The crucial element that turns sham into shame is the level of interest and desire involved. There is no shame in being a sham if you don’t care what others think or if you don’t care what you think. But if you do, shame threatens. To care intensely about what you are writing places the body within the ambit of the shameful: sheer disappointment in the self amplifies to a painful level.

My argument here is about writing shame, a phrase I use to capture both the affective, bodily feeling of betraying interest, and also about how we might envision writing shame as part of an ethical practice. Shame forces us to reflect continually on the implications of our writing. . . [W]riting shame is a visceral reminder to be true to interest, to be honest about why or how certain things are of interest. (pp. 72–73)

As I considered how to respond to the call for papers, I read through Probyn’s article again, thinking about my own sense of shame. I was discomfited by the word “interest.” The word does little to spark controversy of any kind in Probyn’s article, but when transplanted into my thoughts, it hits me differently. My mind was caught up in how the word is used in the daily parlance of academia, referring to one’s research interest, for example. It has taken on the colors of the ways research is construed. It connotes distance, detachment, and objectivity.

I looked up the etymology of “interest.” With inter “between,” and esse “to be,” it literally means “to be between.” Not distant or detached at all. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Probyn emphasizes that it is critical for writers to differentiate affects. She pointedly criticized the approach that treats Affect as a “unitary category, with a unitary history and unitary politics,” as if “[t]here is no theoretical room for any difference between, say, being amused, being disgusted, being ashamed, and being enraged” (p. 74). Probyn attributes the abstract conception of Affect to “the gulf between research and writing,” with the former being regarded largely as “writing up.” The fading of “the pretense of academic writing as purely objective” (p. 73) notwithstanding, it seems to have limited academics’ capability of writing about affects beyond abstraction, in all their specificities.

The opportunity of responding to this call for papers arose due to my being a PhD candidate; subject to editorial decisions, it would be “in my interest” to have this piece accepted to expand my publication record. One may say I am “interested” in writing this piece for practical consideration. It would be a fair comment.

However, the response was also being driven by affective forces. There was the convergence of shame from various fronts: my critique of movements in Hong Kong from a safe distance; my disengagement as a defense mechanism; my hesitation in answering our municipality’s call to welcome refugees into our home; my seizing the opportunity of the war to highlight the relevance of a paper . . . these are the reasons I could identify; many more are likely to have escaped my consciousness.

There was also a profound emotion that I cannot quite name. I gradually disengaged from the news in Hong Kong when protestors were beaten up, shot with live rounds, when political activists, lawmakers, scholars, and ordinary citizens began to be charged, put on trial, put behind bars. Some well-known public figures, a university classmate, the husband of a good friend, a former colleague. Many more whose faces and names I do not know, who are not famous, who are much younger than me. Their lives only just started.

And then there was the Ukrainian boy who stayed with my neighbors. He was one year younger than my child, and spoke English fluently. My own child, only 10 then, invited him to play together. They ended up having a conversation. When my child came home, she related their conversation: the boy missed his own bedroom and having his own stuff. He also missed his father, who had to stay in Ukraine just in case he had to be drafted. He hoped he could return home when the war was over, and he hoped it would be soon. In a subdued voice, my child asked, “Will Putin also invade Switzerland?” The usual brightness in her voice dulled by the gravity of the question. She said, “Mama, I can’t imagine what it would be like to leave everything behind. And I don’t ever want to move elsewhere without Dada.”

Conscious of the critical, utilitarian gaze that formed the bedrock of the academic publication culture, I have been revisiting these questions again and again: why did I decide to write this piece? What is the purpose of it? What do I have to achieve? What does this piece do? Part of my own work is about pushing back on the conventional utilitarianism that dictates our lives, but utilitarian thought continues to encroach into my thinking, cornering me at every turn.

I do not wish to pretend that there is even a remote possibility that I might understand the sufferings of others. Emmanuel Levinas (1991) reminds us of the infinity of the alterity. He cautions us that “[t]he face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed” (p. 194). I do not wish to “[envelop] the alterity” with “the identity of the I” (p. 194). To say “I understand,” Levinas says, reduces the alterity into “content.”

Neither do I believe that the sorrow I feel about Hong Kong is comparable to the shock, pain, despair, fury, and other emotions that I do not know how to name, that constitute how Ukrainians might feel about the war, constantly reconstituting, changing, becoming. It would be naïve of me to believe that emotions could be pinned down, contained, measured and compared.

If I must pin down a purpose for this piece, it will perhaps be best described as to respond, to common.

Returning to the friend with whom I talked about my hesitation in writing this piece: responding to my reluctance, she shared with me an anecdote. When she was 14, she listened to a Holocaust survivor tell his story. The survivor told the audience that he was no Elie Wiesel when it came to storytelling, but he felt compelled to share the horror the Jewish people lived through. In the messaging app, my friend wrote, “It was a super profound moment for me as a child. To think this ancient man felt his inadequacy and carried it with him, but did it anyway.”