My random encounter on a London DLR train

Hello guys, I'm going to share with you a random incident that happened to examine the theme of social skills. I go to a gymnastics club in East London about an hour away from me every Sunday, it's quite a long journey but it is worth it because the equipment there is fantastic and the Sunday afternoon session is ideal for my schedule. So last Sunday when I was on the DLR train as usual heading to the gym when I was approached by a little old Chinese lady clutching a bible and a pamphlet about her church, she asked me if I spoke Mandarin. Sensing that she wanted to preach to me in Mandarin, I said I only spoke a few words but I'm very sorry I don't understand enough to have any kind of conversation with you. So she persisted in English but her English was very limited, it was at that point which I felt sorry for her - is this how she has chosen to spend her Sunday? Approaching random strangers on the train and finding someone willing to talk to her about her religion? I sensed that I might have been the first person who didn't chase her away so I decided to be friendly. I'm an atheist who is vehemently anti-religion, but I didn't feel the need to get into an argument with her - I could have either spend the next 15 minutes looking at social media on my phone or I could chat to her, so I chose the latter. Let's call this woman Fei (not her real name), she was in her 60s and was originally from China. Our entire conversation took place in English - I did not want to tell her that I had earlier lied to her that I didn't speak any Mandarin. 

I realize of course I had forced Fei to struggle on in her second language and perhaps that was a bit unfair of me to have done that, but if she was trying to persuade me to listen to her and visit her church, well she failed. She didn't ask me what I did for a living - I work in sales and I do know how to deliver a good sales pitch. Fei's pitch was terrible, she started lecturing me about why her god is the one and only true god without checking with me if I am a Christian, if I had a religion or how I felt about religion. So here's the first lesson: always check if your content is suited to the social context. I can imagine if Fei stood up in her church and started praising god with such enthusiasm, then those around her would gladly give her their approval and applaud her. But would it have the same effect on me? Definitely not, yet it didn't even occur to her to try to change her approach and it was only because I was too polite that I didn't simply walk away at that point. Now what she should have done of course was to engage me and try to make me feel as if I was having a real conversation with her rather than being lectured at: so she could have asked some questions about whether I believed in god, whether I had been to a church before, whether I was open to the idea of visiting her church. But no, she had somehow made the assumption that I wasn't even a Christian and she needed to tell me all about Jesus - now I found that rather condescending as I did used to go to church every Sunday when I was much younger and even regularly attended bible study classes, so I had to tell her that she didn't need to tell me about Jesus but she didn't seem to listen. I felt like she had simply gone into auto-pilot mode as I couldn't break her out of her routine once she started praising god. 

I thought, we're going nowhere so let me try to ask her some personal questions, so she could talk about herself instead. So I asked her three questions: how long have you lived in England? What kind of job do you do? Do you live in East London? She told me that she had moved to England from China over 40 years ago, I didn't ask her how someone who didn't speak much English managed to come over but I didn't want to risk coming across as xenophobic. She works in a supermarket in Chinatown where she had to learn how to speak Cantonese over the years as many of her colleagues were from Hong Kong. She then went on to tell me about the various parts of East London she has lived in over the years and clearly, she was dependent on the social housing network for a roof over her head. Now for those of you not familiar with social housing in the UK, allow me to explain how it works: there are a lot of poorer, working class people in the UK who simply can't afford to own their own homes and have to rent, but without some help from the government, these people would end up either homeless or in horrific conditions like you see in the third world where a family of five lives in one room. So the British government has a social housing scheme where they build affordable housing for the poorest people in society and then let them rent it at below market rate prices; in some situations, like a severely disabled person or a single mother with many children, they end up paying no rent at all and they can effectively get the accommodation rent-free from the government. But if you think this sounds like a good deal, well no - it isn't. Even if you were offered social housing, most people who can afford to would usually prefer to move out and find better alternatives. 

Social housing like that however are of very low quality and the supply simply cannot keep up with demand over the years. A lot of the housing stock is very old and the waiting list is painfully long. Such social housing is often allocated to those who need it most - so if I applied for it, they would tell me, "you've a good job, you're earning a lot of money, you've got plenty of savings and thus that would automatically bump you so far down the waiting list that you'll be dead for a few decades long before your name ever comes up in the system, so there's absolutely no point in you applying for it." This does mean that people who end up in social housing are the poorest and most desperate. Fei described her neighbours as drug addicts, drug dealers, alcoholics, ex-criminals who can't get a job, teenage single mothers with too many children and refugees who didn't speak a word of English. Needless to say, Fei's living conditions were horrific. She told me a story about how some of the neighbours who were just kids would bully her, they would wait for her to come back from home and then throw random items from the dustbins at her. She would have to run down the alley to try to dodge the missiles but by the time she makes it into her front door, she would usually be covered with food waste and other foul, disgusting rubbish and even then, the kids would continue throwing crap her her front door. She lived in fear of them and was totally traumatized by all of this. Was this racism? Of course, those kids who picked on her sound like monsters but such is the nature of racism in the UK: poor people like Fei are a lot more vulnerable to such attacks whilst rich Asian people like me can afford to live in much safer neighbourhoods, very far away from these undesirable characters who get up to no good. Need I state the obvious? It truly sucks to be poor in this country and by that token I felt very sorry for Fei. 

So one day, a colleague at the supermarket invited Fei to go to her church and this was one of the few Chinese churches in London where all the services are conducted in Mandarin rather than English. Fei met a helpful friend (let's call this person Luo, not his real name) at the church who spoke English rather well. Once he realized the horrific abuse that Fei was suffering, Luo helped Fei contact the relevant local authorities to report the racist harassment she received - Fei had previously been reluctant to make a police report due to her very limited English, she was worried that she couldn't make herself understood by the police but with Luo at her side acting as her translator, she was then able to get a resolution quite quickly. The local council responsible for her housing quickly relocated Fei to another location where she was left in peace - she was so happy, she could now walk home in peace and nobody would harass her. She even found out later that the police did investigate the kids who harassed her and the families were dealt with by the authorities. This was the series of events that made her believe in god and she credits Jesus for saving her from that awful situation. This was when I rolled my eyes and thought, Jesus didn't save you - Luo was the kind person who had stepped in and helped you out, what about thanking him instead? Besides, once the relevant authorities were made aware of what was going on, they swiftly stepped in and moved you to a different council flat, so you were no longer harassed by those horrible kids. I thought Fei made the mistake that believing that god would care enough about her to intervene when it was Luo who was the one who went out of his way to help her out of that situation - the fact that he was from her church is just incidental. But I wasn't prepared to get into an argument with Fei over this so I just sat there quietly, listening to her story. 

So even though I politely gave Fei my attention, I thought that her logic was riddled with flaws - yet nonetheless, she thought that if she could share with me how Jesus had helped her when her life was so difficult, then she could convince me to turn to Jesus for help if I am experiencing any problems in my life as well. She didn't stop to once ask me what kind of problems I may be experiencing with my work or family life - she was simply so convinced that if I listened to her story, I would arrive at the same conclusion as she did. At this point I realized that she must probably be completely autistic as well as she did something that autistic adults often do - she totally failed to take into account of the fact that I may come to a totally different conclusion after hearing a story, that her perspective may not be one that I share. If you don't even acknowledge that the other person has a different perspective on the matter, how the hell are you going to start convincing them of the validity of your perspective? To be honest, she reminded me of my own severely autistic parents and that's why I felt sorry for her, because at least I know what it is like to deal with severely autistic adults with no social skills. The only part of her story which I would give her credit for was the way she said that Jesus had taught her how to forgive the horrible kids who used to harass her - that was why she has bears no grudge against them and she is able to move on with her life. Fei certainly has every reason to feel angry, resentful and bitter about what she suffered in the past but it was her religion that has given her the tools to deal with all those feelings. Thus I could see how religion could be useful for poorly educated people like her, to make sense of the world and deal with bad experiences. 

However, I felt that Fei was a poorly educated woman who was clueless, she thinks that she is doing her duty as a Christian to spread the word of god and preach to random strangers on the train, but we have here a classic case of the Dunning-Kruger effect: Fei was so incompetent at her job that she didn't realize just how hopelessly incompetent she was. I got the feeling that she simply loved the sound of her own voice but didn't really care to find out if she had been successful in convincing me to believe in her god. So to test her, I gave her this challenge: I told her that I used to go to church up till the age of 21, but I became disillusioned when I saw what my mother was doing. My mother would to go church every Sunday (and several times a week in fact, before the pandemic) - not only would my mother not understand what the pastor was preaching, but she would go on to do many wicked, cruel things that completely goes against any kind of Christian teaching. She once had gone out of her way to be incredibly cruel to her own husband out of spite and after witnessing how someone like that can claim to be a pious Christian, it left me completely disillusioned with Christianity. Now what should have done was to realize how difficult this question was and bought herself time by asking me for more details like, you said your mother did something very wicked to your father, what exactly did she do to your father? Why do you think she was wrong to do that? How did your father react to your mother doing this to him? What do you think that Jesus would have done in this situation? What does the bible teach us about dealing with family conflicts?

But unfortunately, Fei did none of that. She simply sidestepped the issue, I wondered if she understood what I had explained about my mother in full as Fei's English was rather limited. Instead, she reacted by exclaiming, "Aiyah, you young people are always so impatient, you want the answers immediately - you don't understand the situation because you don't study the bible! If you really study the bible and believe in god, then all will make sense to you! You must have faith in god's plans for you." She then went back to her default mode of praising god and telling me how wonderful Jesus is, whilst conveniently ignoring the story I had just told her about my mother. I didn't want to pressure her into talking about my mother, after all, I was expecting Fei to give me any useful advice about the situation - I was merely testing Fei so see if she would have the social skills to react appropriate (and unsurprisingly she totally failed). As the train reached the final destination at Beckton, she once again extended her invitation for me to visit her church with her and I politely declined. I didn't give her a reason but she didn't ask, she merely said, "I'll pray for you Alex. It has been nice chatting with you, thank you." Frankly I don't think it really bothered her whether or not she had convinced me to believe in her god, I think she was just grateful that someone was willing to listen to her respectfully and engage her without prejudice. I could have easily given her some advice about how to speak to strangers and engage them if she was determined to spend her free time preaching to random people on the train but I don't think she would have been interested. As I took one last glance at her before I left the station I noticed that she already started talking to another person on the platform. 

Such is London for you, you can run into someone like Fei whilst taking the train and I hope she finds fulfillment in her own weird way. She reminds me of this other guy I run into quite often on my way to and from the office, I usually pass through Oxford Circus junction (depending on the route I take, but it is only about 720 meters from my office according to Google maps). Oxford Circus is one of the major junctions in central London where two famous shopping streets intersect: Oxford Street and Regent Street. This is also one of the busiest tube stations on the London Underground network as three lines intersect there and it is an important interchange station. So this guy would stand at the entrance of the tube station with a loud speaker and lecture random strangers about why we're all going to hell because of our deadly sins and we need to embrace Jesus before it is too late. However, this guy never ever has an audience, in fact most pedestrian actually start walking faster just to get away from him one they realize what he is preaching. Does it bother this preacher guy that he doesn't really have an audience? No, not at all - so if you were to actually spend more than a minute listening to him, you would realize that his 'sermon' is a stream of incoherent ramblings, he is extremely inarticulate and none of what he said makes any sense at all. It is certainly not a convincing, cogent argument, just the nonsensical ramblings of a delusional guy who is probably uneducated and highly autistic. Even Fei did much better than this preacher man at Oxford Circus as she at least managed to get me to listen to her for a good 15 minutes on the train. 

So allow me to conclude by comparing Fei's performance to what I am expected to do at work: my role is sales, my company is paying a lot of money to make those sales happen. Am I able to sell to every single person I speak to? No, but I need to generate a decent amount of sales each quarter in order to prove my worth to my employers. Yes, we are very much results orientated and that is why we pay successful salesmen a lot of commission because we want to reward the results rather than the effort. If I were to do what Fei did by pitching a lot of people only for none of them to invest with us, then I  think I would be sacked pretty quickly! I feel very sorry for Fei - I see a lot of effort but none of that is going to yield any results given how atrocious her social skills are. I do wonder what might happen if Fei's church would reward her with big wads of cash or some kind of special status in the church for new each person she actually brings with her to church each Sunday- would that motivate her to focus on results rather than just endlessly praising god. There is after all no punishment, no penalty at all for Fei failing so miserably and I'm sure if the people at her church knew just how hard she was trying, they would certainly praise her. But isn't she simply wasting her own time if she persists, given how terrible her social skills are? Shouldn't someone at her church say to her, "Fei, you work so hard six days a week at the Chinese supermarket, why don't you make the most of the one day you have to yourself and get some rest Fei? Why spend your one day off preaching to strangers on the train like that, you really don't need to do this." 

There you go, that's it from me on this episode. What do you think? Have you ever encountered someone like Fei before? Why do people like her suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect?  Why do people who preach religion tend to like to hear the sound of their own voices so much? Is this because they think they are performing to their god rather than preaching to me - do they actually believe that their audience is divine rather than earthly and mortal? Would you have spent time talking to someone like Fei if she had approached you on the train or would you have simply walked away?  Do you feel sorry for Fei? Or would you judge her more harshly? Leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.