Burning Passion, Everlasting Fear and Unapologetically Pride(1) — Queer, Autistic Friendship
Vivian C.
For my best friend Pasha
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With Pasha’s permission, a series of his stories should follow. Or should I say, he was eager to share his story, and I felt that if I was going to write about the struggles and growth I’ve experienced this month, our stories would probably need to be cross-referenced, and then grow our own roots in a foreign land, one after the other.
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Although we met just over a month ago, Pasha has been an important pillar of my life in Warsaw, and together we have created some of the happiest moments in Warsaw. I used to be a bit upset about the dormitory, but after many late night chats, I realized that I could talk until dawn in the dormitory, just like I was in a graduation trip every day. After that, I stopped complaining about the dormitory. Of course, he also stayed with me on my worst nights, letting me shrink in his room and telling him that I was really scared, so scared, and I didn’t know what to do.
The day I met him, I was feeling lonely as an exchange student, but I went to an event at Queer University Warsaw. We were the only two non-Polish people there. So after the meeting we talked to each other, and little did I know that I would hear his introduction many, many times again.
“Where are you from?”
“Russia, unfortunately. My mom’s Russian, my dad’s Ukrainian, and I grew up in Moscow. You know, being queer, I couldn’t support the regime. When the war broke out, my mom protested in the streets and was detained for three days. I didn’t go because if I did I would have been expelled from school, but I knew that academics were too important for me to lose the chance to go abroad for my PhD, but I always felt bad that I didn’t do anything”. I remember a cool evening at the end of September as we walked out of the campus, and he said to me.
“Ah… that’s really hard. I can’t say I understand it, but I think I might know what it’s like to be afraid to do a lot of things out of fear.” I tried to respond, thinking of Hong Kong, but knowing that it was so different, and I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but I felt a resonance. “So what did you study?”
“PhD in Chemistry. When I graduated from high school, I thought about studying history or politics because I was really interested. But I knew that in an authoritarian country, everything I read was government propaganda, and I couldn’t really study the humanities. But I was lucky that I really loved chemistry. Chemistry saved my life, and I found myself in college. I found myself in the university. College was a really safe place for me to be, to keep me from losing my mind”.
I didn’t know what to say at the time, and I realized that I didn’t need to say anything, or I could share my own experience in a very parallel way. Because we lived on different floors of the same dormitory, he asked me that night if I wanted to go to the 10th floor balcony of the dormitory to see the night view, so I spread the picnic cloth I brought from Taiwan on the ground, faced the railing, and gazed at the skyscrapers in the distance.
In the night, he talked about his lab in Russia, his friends and students. His university classes, his instructors and their deep connections. It was only later that I realized that part of the reason he kept talking about the past was that he was thinking about home, the home he didn’t dare to go back to, the home where the government wanted him to go to war and die.
But I saw his eyes light up. He was sharing with me the importance of encouraging students, and how he felt teaching could impact the world. He told me that scientific research, especially the chemistry research he was doing, could have a lot of impact on society, but that after the basic research was done, it was hard to control what other people would do with it, for good or for bad. He said. “Many scientists live in their own world and don’t think about the impact of their research. But I want to do things that are good for society. I think teaching is one of them”.
As I listened to him, I thought to myself, “Poland really is the place where all the magic happens”. I also shared my experience with him, talking about 238[1], Hong Kong Studies Club, Hong Kong social movement, my own research, and even sent him the English translation of my tertiary student’s study on the political identity of Taiwanese international students in Hong Kong.
Within a few days, he sent me a message saying that he liked my research. He said he wept while reading it and realized that people other than him also cared about identity. He was very happy that I explored national identity in a systematic way, and he said to me, “I think you are a great scientist! We use different research methods, but we both love our science”. Although I think it is still debatable whether sociologists are scientists or not, I felt his support. Later, he helped me with my CVs and applications, and I would throw him links to books and papers whenever I felt like it.
Later, we went to the grocery store together, he accompanied me to take the TOEFL, we cooked together, we went to the thrift store to pick out clothes, and we had a lot of fun together.
On the third day we met, we went to the grocery store together. It was supposed to be the last warm day of the year, and I was still wearing my Taiwan Human Rights Association t-shirt and shorts. When we got back, we sat in the park across from the dormitory and talked.
“I’ve been oppressed my whole life. It’s an oppressive regime. When I was in Russia I was always afraid. They don’t beat up women on the road, because it’s not manly. Because if the passers-by see you as a feminine guy, they think they have the right to teach you a lesson. And if you get beaten up, you can’t go to the police because in the best case scenario, the police will laugh at you. In the worst case scenario, you’ll get into unimaginable trouble’.
‘But I don’t want to live like this anymore. All my life I wanted to get out of Russia. And now I’m in the EU, I’m in Europe, I can live a different life. It’s safe here”.
I didn’t know what to say, but he continued:
“We queers might have a capacity to recognize oppression in a way that no one else can. Because we’re not allowed to be ourselves, we know what oppression is, and then we start to understand other oppressions, from the state, from capitalism, from all kinds of oppressions. Many other groups are also oppressed, such as women. But they still have an oppressed role in society. In an authoritarian state, the queer people don’t have a role, you have to repress and hide. So you know more about how oppression works”
He told me, “People are social animals. If we don’t have the means to create meaning in our social relationships, then our lives will not be meaningful”. I was deeply moved, and I felt a very deep connection when the queer experience was used as a launching point, even though our experiences were very different. It was also a time for me to reconnect with my queer identity.
Indeed, my regime has never made me feel in danger. But I believe that although different experiences can’t fully understand each other, we can still feel empathy and stand with each other. I used to feel that when I studied different groups and societies, I didn’t know how I could speak, how I could put forward my views, how I could say that I stood with them.
But now, perhaps it is naive to say so, but I believe that it is the common quest for meaning, for humanity, for freedom that connects me to the different actors in the world.
After a week of knowing each other, it had become a habit to cook dinner together and chat in Pasha’s room. He loved to talk, in fact I never knew anyone who could talk faster than him. The way he talked was like reading out the whole essay without a break. By the end of the week, I had begun to get a picture of his friends in Russia, his best Ukrainian friend, his best friend, his lab partners. He showed me pictures from his cell phone — even more interesting were his freshman year organic chemistry notes and the journal paper of his first journal paper. This is a man who came to Warsaw from Moscow without even a winter coat, but who treasures his academic journey.
He likes his college memories. He also told me about two years of coma-like depression between high school and college. It was his Ukrainian friend who held his hand to enroll in college, and he wanted to say he wanted to give his life another chance. Then in the first class, he felt alive. So I know how important college was to him. He would show me his research and tell me how beautiful the pictures were. But I am a social science student after all, and I think what touched me more was the light and passion in his eyes.
After gradually recognizing his loneliness and passion, I also noticed a lot of his small habits. For example, he never turned on the main light in his room, only the table lamp and the small light at the door. Once when I turned on the light, he asked me to turn it off because it was blinding. He said he is very sensitive to light and sound, so he always wears over-ear headphones when he goes out.
There are so many little things that make him special to me. Not only was he a special friend, but I felt that he was so much like me in some ways, and overlapped almost exactly with the Autistic qualities I’d read about over the years as I tried to understand myself. So after a week of getting to know him, I couldn’t help but say, “I don’t mean to be mean, I just wanted to ask, and I hope you don’t mind, but have you ever thought that you might have a trait on the autism spectrum?”. He told me at the time that it was possible. He told me at the time that it was possible, but he had not thought about it seriously.
The next morning I was on the bus, and I received about two dozen screenshots of his notes in English and Russian, mostly about the Wikipedia on autism spectrum. He told me that he felt like he had found some kind of answer to life. Why people couldn’t always understand him, why it was so difficult to communicate with many people, and why he had a very specific work pattern.
He hardly stopped talking that night, and I could understand that. He was thinking too fast and he needed to talk to understand what was happening. And as I listened, I began to recall my own experiences. And although coming from a very different cultural and academic background, I knew exactly what he was talking about, but I didn’t know how to respond.
We went to an Asian supermarket that day and bought soju to celebrate his self-discovery. And I began to think about how I came to be in his experience. But after the soju, it was another story, especially about me. (To be continued)
[1] The office shared by activism student clubs in National Taiwan University. It is shared by Dalawasao club (for Taiwanese independence and local issues), Feminism Club, College Forum Club (for connection between university campus and NGOs, which is also pro-independence), and Hong Kong Studies Club (supporting Hong Kong democracy)
See other Chapters:
1. Queer Autistic Friendship
2.Memories like avalanches
3. Autistic Communication
4.Expressing Queer Identity
5. Queer and Nationality
6. Healing IS Possible
