Being a left-handed person is a life at odd. My memories are full of frustrations and confusions which continue till today. Science may provide some theories about the origin of handedness but won’t help my daily life.

A lefty kid brings shame to the family. In my hometown, and in China generally, struggling chopsticks clumsily with your left hand is a sign of low family education. Parents believe that it is their negligence that kids become lefties. Thus they feel responsible to correct this mistake, often forcibly. One trick my grandma used was to let me use chopsticks to pick up beans in a bowl with my right hand. It was fun at the beginning but quickly went miserable after I couldn’t pick most of beans. Picking up beans is OK, but no-food-with-your-left-hand is definitely a punishment. Left hand being slashed to red during the dinner is a common experience most switchers have suffered.

Thanking my open-minded parents, they noticed the genetic component of left-handedness. It happened that among my mother-side cousins, there were three lefties which nicely proved the heredity of left-handedness (my grandpa might be a left handed person although my mother and grandma fervently denied). Although my father wished I could learn to use chopsticks properly with my right hand, he gradually gave up the training. Besides, my good study reports partially relieved his guilty.

But that didn’t solve all of my problems at all. Right in the first few days of my kindergarten, I amazed the teacher and the rest of class that I wrote Chinese characters with my left hand. Since most lefties were forced to use their right hands, it was rare that a child at the age of seven was still overtly left-handed. The teacher had several serious talks with my father who, once a teacher himself, then engaged in a strict training program on my writing. It was miserable. I never got the handwriting right. As a result, I had to practice handwriting till the end of high school when it finally became less important than the incoming big exams. It was really shameful that I was the only two or three people who had to turn in handwriting practice every week.

There are many more odd things for being a left handed person than bad handwriting. For example, you will often fight against your left neighbor in the dinner table; you can’t cut line straight because knife and scissor never fit your hand; you refuse to do any handcraft project because your clumsiness always ruins the delicate work. You are more likely to injure yourself during exercise because all facilities are for right-handed persons. I have experienced all of these tragedies and could write a book about them.

The most important thing being a lefty I think is that you are always different in others’ eyes. It is not a big stigma, thanking to the myth that left-handedness correlates with smartness. Yes, I did find that there was an unusually high prevalence of left-handedness in my elite high school classmates, and in my college classmates who were from places other than Shanghai. Even three out of five my thesis committee members were left-handed persons. But that correlation may be just a myth.

To prove a causal association, biological mechanisms are determining factors. It is generally believed that the handedness is due to the specialization of brain functions. The right half of the brain mostly relates to the intuition and the process of the visual and spatial information, while the left half of the brain primarily deals with the logic, analysis, and language comprehension. But both halves of the brain can process or be trained to process all information. For some reasons unknown (testosterone during pregnancy? Genes randomly turned on?), one side of the brain becomes the dominant one of the two. The dominating pattern of the brain leads to the hand dominance. The dominance of right brain causes the left handedness.

The fuzzy biology may answer some questions. For example, left-handed persons are more likely to have learning disabilities (not sure whether my incorrigible handwriting is one type of learning disabilities.). Lefties are also more likely to have accidents due to their clumsiness. They are also more likely to die young, and die in heart diseases (due to stress and forever combating against the self-righteous world?). Recently, research also pinpoints the positive correlation between left-handedness and behavior, emotion, and personality problems. One particular problem which is interesting is that lefties are more likely to have attention deficiency disorder (ADD).

That reminds me that I was never a good behaved student in school. I always talked to my classmates during the class, and never paid much attention to what teachers said. Even now, I prefer self-study to listening to the instructors. I guess the neurotransmitters in my brain may be drained out during a two hour sitting in the classroom so that I always feel tired and become inattentive at the end of class.

Now back to the smartness business. It seems that intelligence has a lot to do with language skills. I am not sure where my language center locates in my brain. Because I was forced to switch my handedness of writing at an earlier stage, all tests involving handwriting will fail on me. Further, because it seems to me that I have no trouble in reading, writing (at least in Chinese), and expressing my ideas, I certainly don’t have learning disabilities (except for handwriting). Therefore, I guess both halves of my brain maybe have developed pretty well. For us whose two dominant brain sides working coordinately, it is really a big advantage (but why I am not a genius and haven’t become famous yet?).

Finally, one interesting anecdote I think illustrates something common for lefties. In a discussion session of a teaching class, the instructor measured our learning styles. It happened that among five PhD students (2 males and 3 females), I am the only one labeled as “common sense” type (emotionally or intuitively oriented type) and the other four (all Caucasians) are “analytic” type. Because we first learned that researchers were more likely to be analytic persons, my face flushed red instantly. But I quickly explained that I am a left-handed person, and they were all relieved by a big “Oh” type of expression. Even in the US where 10% people are untreated left-handed persons, being a lefty still carries a stigma.

But I am proud of myself being a left handed person.