In this world, who is normal?

I was out with two friends who study language for a living — both of them PhD students in linguistics, the kind of people who can spend a whole night happily arguing about a single particle. One of them mentioned that someone in their department had just gotten married.

I responded in Mandarin. “Oh?” I said. “What are they like — the couple?”

“正常的一对儿,” they said at the same time. A normal couple. The three of us realized something was off after two seconds of silence, but we just moved on with our shopping.

This is the most ordinary phrase in this world. A normal couple. But I heard it, and it snagged on something, and I’ve been picking at the snag ever since.

Because a normal couple meant, of course, a man and a woman. That was the entire content of the sentence. Not a nice couple, not a young couple, not a couple who met at a conference — a normal one. And here is what got me: it was two linguists who said it. Two people whose whole job is to notice what words are quietly doing. And even they reached for that word without a flinch, the way you reach for a light switch in your own house.

So today I want to share a bit of what that word is doing, because it took me a while to see it myself.

正常. In Chinese, that first character — 正, zhèng — doesn’t mean average. It means upright. Righteous. Proper. It’s the 正 you’d use for correct, the 正 you use for a positive number.  It’s a moral word, standing up very straight. The second character, 常, means constant — the way things have always been and ought to stay. So 正常 doesn’t quietly say this couple is statistically common. It says: this couple is upright. This couple is the way it should be.

Which means that every other couple is, by the plain arithmetic of the word, not upright. Crooked. And nobody had to say that part out loud. The word said it for them, over drinks, and none of us said a thing.

Now — I’m the kind of person who cannot leave a thread like this alone. So a few days later I carried it to my lab mate who’s gay and my bestie. He’s not Chinese; he doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin. I told him I’d been thinking about the word normal, and I asked him what it meant to him.

He said, without thinking, “Yeah — we’re not the norm.”

We’re not the norm.

My Chinese friend said 正常 and handed me a verdict — upright, correct, the way it should be. My gay lab mate said norm and handed me a map. The norm is only the middle of the graph, the fat part of the bell curve we all drew in school. To say we’re not the norm is just to say: we’re standing over here, off to the side. It’s a location, not a sentence. And he said it plainly, almost lightly — not we’re wrong, not we’re broken. Just: this is where we are. Take it or leave it.

I found out later this isn’t a quirk of my two friends — it’s baked into the languages themselves. The English normal comes from the Latin norma, a carpenter’s square, a tool for checking whether an angle is true. Somewhere along the way the statisticians borrowed it, married it to the word average, and normal learned to hide behind the math. I’m only describing the distribution. But in Chinese, it is a different kind of weather.

So, for a while I went looking for a better word. The way how would I solve an engineering problem is to propose a better solution. So, I figured, if 正 is the problem — all that uprightness — I’ll just swap it out. And I found one I liked: 见. It only means commonly seen. — to see. Not upright, not righteous, just: you see this a lot. Combined with 常, it becomes 常见，means common. And its opposite, 不常见, means only rare — uncommon. The way blue hair is rare or taste cilantro like soap. Rare, not wrong.

I was very pleased with myself for about a week. And then I realized a nicer word doesn’t dismantle the machine. Because we humans, after all, are not machine. You can rename the two piles all you like — upright and crooked, common and uncommon — but you’ve still got two piles, and someone still standing at the sorting table deciding which one you go in, and how you’ll be treated once you’re in it. A kinder border is still a border. It still has a guard.

So I don’t think the fix is a better word anymore. I think the fix is to walk away from the sorting table entirely — to stop asking of anyone, are you the upright kind, or the other kind — and to make room instead for a range wide enough to hold every so-called deviation, to embrace a wide enough spectrum. Because here is the thing: everyone is somebody’s 不正常. Everyone, from some angle, is not the norm.

I still catch the word — 正常 — in other people’s mouths, and in my own. This word is used frequently enough that it is judging every aspect of our life.

So, we, in this world, are not the norm. Who is?  The moment I began to ask “what is normal” — am I already standing at the threshold of freedom?