Editor’s note: This was a winning essay in The Tolerance Means Dialogues project. Read the other three essays here.
Tolerance is an act of patience and grace, held in tandem with the hopes for understanding and care. In an ever-evolving society of cultural, religious and political diversity and difference, tolerance can serve as a pause — an opportunity — for learning, relearning and growing to be in better relation and community with such diversity and difference.
In a world of difference and uniqueness, tolerance is a bridge for knowledge gaps, communication gaps and gaps that naturally arise with difference. It is an ability that, if carefully and patiently embraced, can serve life lessons and purposes of sympathy, empathy and care.
Tolerance was my mother staring deep into my eyes on a high school weeknight in shock, confusion and pain. I had just confessed to her that I don’t like girls. In a stern tone, she shared that she doesn’t understand and left my room.
Tolerance, also, was allowing my mom to feel all that she did in that moment and the days, weeks and years to follow. On the other hand, tolerance is a lifelong hope that my Hmong refugee and immigrant mother and father could one day accept me and realize I’m still the son they were once so proud of.
Multiple worlds — Laos, then Thailand refugee camps and now America — fostered unimaginable change to my parents. To my parents, being gay didn’t seem to exist before, and, therefore, it must be a phase, not an identity, not significant. It was difficult for my parents to understand that being gay could be associated with being Hmong, practicing Shamanism, and that it could be a part of their world.
While 15 and discovering that there are others like me out there, at school, everywhere, I could no longer deny who I am.
If anyone asked me at 8 years old or even 13 if I was gay, which was a question I was asked from what seemed to be the age of 5, I immediately denied it. I tolerated that question from childhood until my teenage years. That question haunted me — and it haunted my parents.
Despite such fear, lack of understanding and even anger, my parents and I, with time and by giving each other grace, allowed ourselves to sit in these tensions separately, then together, to see where it would take us.
Tolerance isn’t always easy, but it can teach us the greatest lesson in life if we allow it to.
Tolerance is essential to a growth mindset. It allowed my parents to move beyond judgment and toward deeper care for me, even if that took 10 years. Tolerance allowed me to accept a part of my identity I had been suppressing for so long. Tolerance allows for the complexities of the world, of people and differences, to better make sense together.
Pheng Lor
Pheng Lor is an environmental humanities graduate student at the University of Utah. There, he is a Mellon Community Engagement fellow and works to foster relationships between environmental institutions and the Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities throughout the Salt Lake Valley.
The Salt Lake Tribune is committed to creating a space where Utahns can share ideas, perspectives and solutions that move our state forward. We rely on your contributions to do this. Find out how to share your opinion here, and email us at voices@sltrib.com.
