The Colour of Ultra-Violet Light: a Tale of Mantis Shrimps

The Colour of Ultra-Violet Light: a Tale of Mantis Shrimps

Reflection on Communication and Understanding at the Winter School

Emily Zhang

 

When I was in middle school chemistry class, we used to practice a kind of brainstorm for questions that might get asked in exams. We were meant to find obscure and counter-intuitive facts from the textbooks and question each other with them. “Does water conduct electricity?” (No, not pure water.) “Why is the sky blue?” (Something to do with wavelength and reflection, I think.)

And then someone asked, “What colour is ultra-violet Light?”

Someone immediately responded with “purple”, but then the whole class erupted with confusion, as ultra-violet light cannot, by definition, be seen by human eyes. It should be transparent, shouldn't it? It does not have a colour, as no man has ever seen its colour. But then, does that mean it is colourless?

Many animals are able to see past the human perception range of colour. Snakes have excellent vision of infra-red. Mantis shrimps (which I just had for lunch) have 16 different kinds of colour receptors and know many different shades of ultra-violet. If they have language, they probably would laugh at us for blanket calling all the different colours beyond violet “ultra-violet”. They must have a name, no, many names for all the ultra-violet colours and then some more.

But what colour is ultra-violet light? We do not know, for none of us has ever seen it. Yet the delicate eyes of a mantis shrimp, the complicated little machine that we as humans could only dream of, those eyes that have seen near infinite shades of colours in their lifetime, crumble under my teeth as I consume its flesh in oblivion, contemplating the colour of ultra-violet light.

Such is the problem many policy makers, foreign volunteers and in particular, privileged “think tank” members like us at the winter school encounter without even realising: “invisible” obstacles, and the lack of adequate language to describe it. Colours, in this case, are the cultural, social and economic backgrounds of an environmental problem. As we sat in the air-conditioned room of the centre, never having lived at or even seen the Inle Lake that we were supposed to develop an environmental solution for, I felt like the middle schooler ten years ago, scratching my head trying to imagine the colour of ultra-violet light. How could I? The edge of my imagination only stretched so far to deep purple, just as initially my best mental image of the Inle Lake and its villages were a less developed version of Jiuzhaigou, a popular tourist destination in China with beautiful natural lakes and touristy “native” villages.

So how did we know which questions to ask? The whole spectrum stared at us in our face, yet it took thousands of years in human history for a middle-schooler to ask, “What’s the colour of ultra-violet light?”

On the visible spectrum, the problem was clear: a standard problem of water pollution caused by the problems of over-population and commercial development. But we felt like grasping at the air: what “colour” is it? How is the problem actually affecting the lives of the locals and vice versa?

Grasping at the air became more or less a theme throughout the entire winter school. Trying to understand the problems rooted in Myanmar soil, their true significance and causes, is like staring at a blank wall trying to imagine the colour of ultra-violet light. This is not to say that we should leave it to the professionals and locals; as fresh pairs of eyes, internationals, professionals in different professions, we were meant to bring innovative solution from unexpected angles to a tired topic. But perhaps talks and group discussions in a detached space was not the best way to prepare us for it?

Fortunate for us, we could just ask the mantis shrimp in this case. We had May, who worked for the Myanmar government and did a project on the water pollution of Inle Lake. Surely we could just ask her everything. But is it this simple?

So you got yourself a talking mantis shrimp. “What is the colour of ultra-violet light?” You ask the mantis shrimp, pointing to the particular wavelength on the spectrum. “Why, it’s ultra-violet.” The mantis shrimp answers, your trans-species translator identifies the semantic meaning of that particular word in the mantis shrimp language to be, precisely, what humans refer to as ultra-violet. “Yes, but what is it like?” You ask, slightly confused, a sense of dread looming in your stomach. “Well, it is just… ultra-violet. Like this rock. Like the sky above the South Pole. Like the ocean flowers.” You look. The rock is but a dull grey in your eyes. The sky is ever so blue, deep like some mystic cosmic gem. The flowers it referred to were of all kinds of dark purple, green or red. Frustrated, you begin to understand the feeling of someone colour blind from birth trying to understand the notion of colour.

You see, translation is a tricky business, and the worst part of it is when a notion exists in one but not the other. I am a firm believer of Sapir-Whorf theory, that the language greatly influences the cognition of its speaker. And in turn, our languages are bound by the experiences of our cognition. Yes, language has the ability to create and describe things that never existed or been experienced, like a blue apple; but a blue apple is just a compilation of existing concepts: the colour blue and the object apple. It falls short when no existing concepts or experience apply, and we find ourselves utterly speechless in the face of it.

We know this, don’t we? “You have to experience it to know”; “no words can describe it”, yet we chalk it up to a weak command of language. But there’s more to it: the mantis shrimp fails to convey the notion of ultra-violet to a human because it does not know what is missing. To them, it is just another colour that is unlike any other colour, and it will naturally presume that everyone can see it.

From this I begin to understand the discrepancy between the organisers’ expectations and our reality. It is easy to grow used to an environment without realising its subtle uniqueness, unaware of the culture shock the most mundane detail might bring to someone from another culture. Observant people will not be completely oblivious of the uniqueness of their norm for sure; but how they articulate them is deeply rooted in the way they think, the language they use, which in turn are shaped by that very norm itself – see the catch here?

I want to tell you, organisers, that your local knowledge and contacts are a valuable asset that we students often do not have, yet it is much needed in the projects we do. Release us into the wild – even what one sees on a bus ride to the suburbs of Yangon gives more understanding about the area than five days in the lecture hall.

So what have we learnt from our conversation with the mantis shrimp? On one hand, it is wise to stay vigilant when meeting with stakeholders from various background. It’s like what Steve Jobs said, that the customers “do not know what they want” until you build it for them. They do, it is just that their language only makes the full of its sense in the environment – social, cultural, environmental – that it developed in. On the other hand, it is even more important to constantly remind oneself when in such conversation that you will always be biased, to spot those biases as well as you can, and to acknowledge that you may still be biased in ways you don’t even know, and your words may not make full sense to someone without your background and experience.

How, then, does one break the curse of unseeing? If only I could borrow a pair of eyes from the mantis shrimp, and see the indescribable colours with my own eyes…

I stared into the eyes of a mantis shrimp, and in a lucid dream, I did see. It was the most incredible colour that I’ve ever seen, unlike any colour that were. It was nothing like purple, just like blue was nothing like purple. It is vibrant, happy, scary, and soothing… Can you picture it in your mind’s eye?

To see ultra-violet light, you need to be a mantis shrimp yourself. There we were, meditating every evening following the guidance of a Buddhist Master, discussing spirituality every day; but it was not until after the program concluded, when I walked barefoot through Sule pagoda, in the middle of a traffic junction, upon whose curbs the mundane lives of ordinary Myanmar people bustled, that I truly understood what I mentioned at the group project presentation: how deeply and uniquely intertwined Myanmar lives are with spirituality.

To understand the indescribable, the only way is to experience it yourself. And that even gives you an edge over the locals: you now know what is different from your experience. And that is exactly why we international students are needed: not to impose “superior” ideas, but to learn and to share different experiences.

And we would know what to tell the humans then. Because we share a language and previous experiences, we would know how to tell a story.

I remember when the nuns repeatedly told us how bad the war was in northern Myanmar where they opened schools for children. I didn’t fully understood what that meant until three months later, yesterday, when I read about how the WHO vehicle transporting COVID-19 test samples was ambushed and its driver killed. I understand it now because it intersects with the global concern that we are all going through in a personal way, and suddenly the schools are not just another school for impoverished kids – it is a beacon of hope, a silent stronghold for peace and goodness, held together by the resilience and faith of its teachers and students in a sea of turmoil.

Jane Goodall knows this. As a conservationist, an advocate for animal welfare, she is not afraid to collaborate with controversial parties like oil companies and labs that experiment on chimpanzees. She believes that confrontation does not change minds – you have to speak their language, reach into their hearts for them to decide to make a change. It goes both ways: you learn a language, too, only through learning the culture that comes with it.

Yes, I’ve been on the other side often, too. I remember my western friends’ shocked expression when we were sightseeing in Yangon. The state of Yangon was not something entirely alien to me, as I grew up with parts of my hometown resembling that. It was however something “only seen in documentaries” for them. I wonder what they would tell their friends back home.

Well, that’s the last part of the problem. How should I describe the colour of ultra-violet light to my fellow human beings?

It certainly is one big step from asking the mantis shrimp, because now that I share a language with my fellow humans, I know what was missing from the human sight. I find my words pale and weak, circling around and repeating myself. This is like describing ice to desert dwellers. Or trying to explain the fourth dimension. The reason is simple – the language for it hasn’t been invented yet. And even if it is, the meaning of the new word is not understood by anyone who hasn’t seen ultra-violet light with their own (borrowed mantis shrimp) eyes. Eventually I settle for analogies, and the cry of understanding on their face is both a relief that I managed to get something across and worries of misunderstanding.

Such is the problem I constantly face as a student abroad, and doubly so when I finally come home. In the U.K., I was often the only Chinese in a cohort, while the same time in my Chinese cohort back home, I was the only one with an experience abroad. Countless times, I struggle to find the words to describe an experience, an ambiance, a cultural environment that is so ordinary and immersive in one culture, and the stark chasm that separates people’s mind because the lack thereof. How do I even begin to explain the concept of “sky, heaven”（“天”）as a spiritual presence in Chinese culture, or how vegetarianism is both so easy and so difficult to practice in China? How do I explain to my Chinese friends the connotation of asking for pronouns in English when “he” and “she” sounds the same in Chinese yet we have no character reserved for gender-neutral pronouns, or the concept of pubs in the U.K.? Having the knowledge and experience, only to have no language to speak of them, demands a great deal of patience and willingness to listen from both sides of communication.

And these are things that are visible. Experiential. Things that you can borrow a pair of mantis shrimp eyes and see for yourself. There are even things that are harder to experience and compare notes. Like gender, neurotype, and race. We all live our lives in certain ways that it is nigh impossible to imagine it otherwise.

And in the settings of ecological issues, there is the most dreadful type of ultra-violet.

How do you know how the animals feel? What are the most pressing problems the trees face? Is there something the mud in the river wants to tell us? And these are just questions that I can think of asking. Like asking about the wavelength of ultra-violet light. There may well be questions that man can never think of asking, and thus never take into consideration, just because we have different perceptors then other species.

But they cannot speak, nor can their eyes be borrowed easily. Who can speak for them?

It sounded so pessimistic to say that true understanding will never be reached. But it is the different perspectives that made diversity so valuable. In fact, the solution to ultra-violet light problem is very straightforward. If more human beings could borrow the eyes of mantis shrimps, talking about the colour of ultra-violet light between them shouldn’t be a problem now. They may even start differentiating all the different colours that humans ignorantly slammed the label “ultra-violet” on, and giving them new names, attach different emotions to them like all the other colours… They will invent the language needed for communicating their unique experience, and this time it will have meaning. When asked about the colour of ultra-violet light, they will answer, “Of course. I’ve seen it. And you should too.”

This is why I believe it is ever so vital for people working together to carry out a project to have shared experiences, because only then do they communicate truly in one language. This is of course the ideal situation, but even if we cannot send everyone to spend a few month living on Inle Lake before hatching a plan, we should keep in mind to never underestimate the importance of being there on the scene, and to always be aware of how limited language can be each person’s own experience.

After all, all ecological issues are human issues. In that sense, it corresponds with Master Hsin Tao’s belief that healing the earth relies on every person to wake up to the calling. Earth itself does not need saving. The Book of Tao and Te (《道德经》) says, “Nature has no mercy, and treats every being as sacrificial straw dogs.” （天地不仁，以万物为刍狗。） The ball of lava and poisonous gas billions of years ago was the same earth as that of a blue and vibrant sphere today, and will continue to exist as itself until the inevitable collapse of solar system, which is far beyond our current control. It is us, human beings that need saving from ourselves.