I grew up in a very secular and somewhat nomadic family. My mother also traveled so much when she was growing up – spending years at a time in South America, Africa, and Europe – that we both qualify as third-culture kids. That’s a part of her identity that she passed on strongly to me: being connected to enough of the world to understand that state-based or region-based (or even cultural) ideas of what’s right or decent are limited to a certain context. Nearly everywhere, people think the way their society arranges things is the “best” way or the only way or the hallmark of real civilization. She taught me to take assertions like that very skeptically, on account of having personal experience with a broader range of customs. And she made sure we had stories from all sorts of cultures, from lighthearted kids books to more serious ones.
I’m explaining this as backdrop to the fact that some of the stories that made a deep impression on me, I don’t necessarily even know what they were called in their original language or whether they were translated officially or pirated. We lived in many countries that had sizable diaspora populations from elsewhere, and what people missed having and couldn’t get through official channels, they often smuggled or recreated on the spot. And most of the market for this stuff was people who had ties to the original country, but … for instance, in much of Latin America, no one blinked at you for being interested in things from a different culture. Not at all. So, I had a kids book in Spanish – my first language is Spanish – that was translated from Chinese, and it was called A Quien Prefieres? which would translate to English as, literally, “Who Do You Prefer?” and more idiomatically as, “Who Do You Love Best?”
It was about two young, anthropomorphic cats who were sent out on an errand by their mother to go to the river and bring home fish for dinner. Neither of them knew how to get there, exactly, and both made mistakes, but the yellow cat had impeccable manners and interacted with the other animals in ways that earned their goodwill, while his grey brother was rude and skittish. In the end, the yellow cat came home with an impressive basket full of fresh fish he’d caught himself, while the grey cat only had a couple of sad-looking, scrawny minnows. I know looking back that the lesson the writer probably intended children to get from it was, be like the yellow cat, but my heart went out to the other one. By instinct, you could say. Immediately. And the idea that the mother cat would love the yellow cat more than they grey one because it had brought her many fish, and the story would be expecting ME to leave the grey cat all alone with its frustration and hurt was too terrible for words. I went straight to my mother and insisted that she needed to pretend to be the grey cat so I could hug it and tell it that things were going to be okay and that I loved it and that I knew it had tried hard and that talking to strangers could be scary. And my mom was kind of like “??” but she was a good sport about it and went along with me. Which made me feel somewhat better.
I can consider that a cute and funny story from my childhood, looking back. But at the time it felt so serious. This young cat had spent all day making mistakes and antagonizing neighbor animals and its fishing went so poorly that most of what little it caught it couldn’t help eating, because it reached the stream hungry and tired and late, and then it had to go home to its mother that way, and the implication was that its brother was more lovable than it was. It seemed to me that the grey cat just had a much harder time doing what it was supposed to do around people. From what I remember (and please bear with my paraphrasing, because it’s been decades since I actually read this book), it would have preferred to avoid socializing altogether, because it was so bad at that. When it wanted something, it just blurted out what, without so much as an “oh, hello Mrs. Rabbit, how are you today?” for preamble. When an adult got angry and yelled at it, it got scared and yelled back, or just ran away. But, I mean … what it had for experience, as far as I could see, was failure and humiliation. The last thing it needed was someone judging it. Especially its mother. And certainly also not an onlooker like me.
What I’d want, if I'd just had a day when none of what I tried worked and everyone was disappointed or mad at me, was to be comforted. I wouldn’t hold it against other people, if they tried to learn from my mistakes, but I would feel very alone and betrayed if they acted like nothing about me mattered except as a bad example.
And, for some reason, a lot of the “wrong things” that characters do that were portrayed as actively villainous have always been sympathetic to me. Even when a story is mild about its moral judgments, like the one I described above, the characters I feel close to are nearly always the bad guys. There’s a lot of dimensions to that, but one part is that, the way society is telling them to act goes deeply against their nature. Script following and rule following often suits them very poorly. While who they are, who they can’t stop being and don’t want to repudiate, is treated like it’s bad.
Native American stories provide a conspicuous exception to this rule. There’s … kind of a whole genre about That One Guy in the tribe who’s doing anything but what everyone else knows you’re “supposed” to be doing, and that often doesn’t go well for him, but at times other people have real reasons to honor him for making valid contributions to the group, and regardless of whether he looks foolish or clever, these stories manage to convey information in a fairly respectful and thought-provoking way. It’s not about “wow, look at what that moron did this time, and let me tell you how he got punished again.” It’s gentle, for one thing. But it’s also more about how the world righted itself after being pushed a little off-balance than it is about him.
I remember one Anishinaabe story where the sensible way to fish was by catching enough for the human people to eat and leaving the rest in the river. Our protagonist had other ideas. He worked like a crazy person, catching all the fish and taking them back to his camp to smoke and dry … and then when Fox went to the river, there was nothing to eat, so Fox followed his nose back to the human camp and took his rightful share of the stolen fish. I was much older when I read that, and I was impressed. Here the human didn’t have any more of a right to hunt than the other animals did. Post-Christianity, in any European story, only the fox would have been considered a thief, even though we’d just watched the man take the food and leave none for others. Treating humans like they’re no more or less deserving than other creatures seems more correct to me that buying into the widespread belief that everything around us exists to serve us.
But even though this guy’s role in those stories is often to illustrate what happens when social norms are not followed, when someone outright flouts them, the narrative doesn’t treat him like he’s doing anything that the rest of us wouldn’t do. And also … his community knows some (many) things, but his testing whether he can improve on the arrangements that existed before he was born is still treated like a gift to them. It was an eye-opener to me to realize that some cultures are so secure in their beliefs that someone can challenge everything and be seen as serving the greater good as opposed to threatening it!
I wish there was more room for that in Western storytelling - for villains to be characters who are doing what makes sense to them, and have integrity, and are responding to things that are bigger and older than them and basically valid.