[Essay 1] draft #2

My Mother-in-law's Stereotyping of Unfamiliar Things

　I have had some bitter experiences with my mother-in-law because of her stereotyped thinking. She is a person born and raised in a small province. Her family members have always been local government employees except her sons. Thus, the environment she grew up in was completely different from mine in that I was born and raised in a family of self-employed workers in Tokyo, the capital city of Japan. Her limited experience and lack of big city exposure has caused her to negatively stereotype Tokyo, self-employed business people, and me.
　Her biggest misunderstanding is about Tokyo. Although she has never lived in Tokyo, she thinks that Tokyo is dirty, dangerous, and people are very nasty. She said that Tokyo is not a place for human living. I am not able to deny the fact that there is air pollution there, though my district is kept clean because of the wealthy residents. When she went to Yokohama to see her relatives with her family including my husband, they all put helmets on their heads and in the car because they had to drive and pass through dangerous Tokyo. I have never seen people driving in Tokyo with helmets on except on racing tracks or construction sites. In fact, their act was a traffic violation in Japan. Certainly, a lot of crimes occur in Tokyo, but given the dense population, crime is understandable. Thus, the general populous knows how to protect itself from crime and shows how to avoid dangerous situations. In addition, with regard to people from Tokyo being especially nasty, spiteful people exist all over the world.
　Moreover, my mother-in-law despises independent workers. She has told me repeatedly that independent workers always carry a lot of cash and boast of their wealth, that they manipulate people by using their money to force them to do things they don't want to. I don't understand what grounds she bases her opinions on. My family and I are independent workers; a carpenter, a hairdresser, a free-lance computer engineer, and a free-lance journalist. Our cash is for our employees and for running our business. We have never been wealthy. We are actually kind of poor. Similarly, she has said that public employees earn very little in comparison with independent workers; therefore, her family must save all their money for emergencies. She has no awareness that self-employed people are totally responsible for themselves, their business and their employees.
　Finally, she has a very old-fashioned stereotype of marriage. When my husband asked his mother if he could marry me, she cautioned him that an older woman in Tokyo was tricking him into marrying. She believed that I (the older woman) would be getting some benefit and her son would be losing something. She would like me to stay home and do house work all day long, despite the fact that we couldn't live without my income when my husband was young. So she sympathized with him as I had to be absent from home working. In her opinion, a wife is supposed to stay home and not have any ambitions. I frequently wonder why she has never changed her stereotype.
　In brief, stereotyped thinking such as my mother-in-law's shows a lack education and experiences. She is totally unaware of how she hurts people's feelings, and she makes her world narrow by herself. It is my guess that my mother-in-law will never ever live nor make any friends in Tokyo.