ady’s mother told this story: in the 70s, in her first job as a junior official at the labour ministry she was negotiating with a group of trade unionists and as the meeting went on she gradually became self-conscious of her hands. being young and proud of landing a job with real responsibility and status she went to particular trouble to look well-groomed. as she spoke, and made her case, and gestured, she slowly became aware of her dark, rose-coloured manicure. the men (for they were all men) were already hostile because she was young, female and represented the government; but those manicured, rose-coloured nails indicted her unpardonably in their eyes, for each time she waved her hands she was waving in their face all the differences of social and economic class and gender and age — these gruff, middle-aged, working class unionists, none of whose wives would have had either the leisure or luxury or social occasion to paint their nails. how could she negotiate when they judged her thus?i think of this story often when i go to a legal clinic. my default there is severe glasses, neat pony tail, very light make up, inexpensive white uniqlo shirt, no jewellery, pale pink or beige nails. already in certain kinds of clinics, my gender and youth predispose clients to distrust me. older men accused of sexual crimes, particularly, but also, i’m beginning to find, divorcing women — when your marriage is in absolute pieces — you want an older woman, someone who looks like she’s lived, and is or has been married, who knows something of the emotional cruelties men and women inflict on each other, not someone 25 and fresh out of law school, worse, if it is someone pretty, and who has never known a day of romantic troubles except the occasional lover’s tiff. my accent too, can be a problem. i was once at a clinic trying to interview a remanded prisoner and was getting absolutely nowhere because she didn’t seem to understand me even though i had broken my sentences down as simply as i knew how. an hour later the senior lawyer in charge of the clinic came in and took over my interview. in fifteen minutes he had got everything he wanted, by throwing all grammar out of the window and asking the questions in fractured, bad english. that was a huge blow to me — and had to do with my consciously singaporeanising my speech over the last three years — just as the us had made me rhotic and shifted most of my back and low vowels higher and further front, and rubbed off my clipped ’t’s (it’s so hard going back once you’ve transitted into using the flap — ‘water’ used to be the hardest word for me to say in america), i am now having to work at slowing down before the flap actually pronouncing the ‘t’ (ridiculously difficult now) and carefully dividing syllables into equal length and giving each even stress to give myself that characteristic singaporean lilt. but it’s work, and my accent is so mongrel by now half the time i have no idea how to say a word.
it may be superficial, but this isn’t facile — it is a genuine problem, the distance you put between yourself and someone you’re helping, the connections you build or fail to build, like those rose-coloured nails of a young government official.
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