Mum likes to eat fish head.

My Chinese tutor and I are slowly working our way through a year 4 reading book during my weekly sessions.  Most of the lessons in the book are magazine or newspaper articles that send some sort of didactic message.  This week the story was called "Mum likes to eat fish head" and I thought it terribly apropos seeing as this Sunday is mother's day.  In the story a little girl from a poor family noticed that every time the family ate fish, her mum would put the fish head into her own bowl and then serve the rest of the of fish (the fleshy bits) to her children.  The little girl would cry out "mummy, you love the fish head"!  The little girl thought the fish head must be the best part because her mum always took it for herself.  She once asked her mother for the fish head, but the mother declined, giving her daughter the fleshy part.  Once, when the girl's grandmother came to visit, she brought a fish for dinner.  After cooking it, the grandmother placed the fish head in her own bowl and gave the fleshy bits to her daughter (the girl's mother) and to the girl.  The little girl cried out "but mummy likes the fish head"!  The grandmother smiled, but did not give the fish head to her daughter.  The young girl grew up and had her own family.  Once she had her own children she realised her mum had not actually liked the fish head.  The mother took the fish head because it had the least amount of meat.  She took the inferior part of the fish and gave the children the best part, to nourish them and help them grow strong.  The girl now put the fish head in her bowl and gave her children the good part of the fish.  She would sacrifice in the same way her mother, and her grandmother did for their children.

The story got me thinking about mothers in general.  The little girl for her whole young life thought her mum was taking the best bit of the fish for herself, but really the little girl did not understand.  The mother was sacrificing to help her children grow strong.  Mothers do things like that all of the time; they do things to help family at their own expense.  My mum gave up work to raise my sister and I.  She made the ultimate sacrifice, putting the lives of two others ahead of her own for so many years.  She neither blamed me for taking away her freedom nor accused me of forcing her to sacrifice.  She took on the unpopular role of rule enforcer, making her often the one I resented when I could not go to a friend's house, or to a party, or get that new pair of shoes I "desperately" wanted.  But really I should be thanking her later in life - NOW.  Whenever she was in my eyes the one curtailing my fun, she was really sacrificing my adoration for her in order to make me a better, stronger, more moral person.  In many ways it must be harder to say "no" in the aim of nurturing a better child but practically making the child angry, than always saying "yes" and be the mum that every child loves.  For this weekend where we are thankful to our mums....I'd like to say thank you to mine, for "pretending to like fish heads" so that I'd grow up to be a better, stronger and more self-aware person.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

 - Maya Angelou

Looking like you don't belong.

I've been thinking a lot lately about about migration, both forced and voluntary.  Part of that may stem from the fact that there is a Refugee law exam looming on my calendar, but mostly it is from the world that we all live in.

Recently the United States has taken another nosedive into another divisive topic......immigration.  It seems as if the country goes from one polarising problem to another, politicians not gaining consensus but always blaming others for the problems of the world.  Regardless, migration is an issue for every country in the world.  Some suffer from emigration while other are worried about immigration.  Push factors propel people out of regions (war, drought, persecution, famine, natural disaster), while pull factors lead people to seek refuge or asylum in particular areas of the world (family, common language, viable job prospects).  It seems strange to me that while immigration has long been a popular topic when discussing the dynamic fabric of countries, migration has been rarely acknowledged.  However migration is at the very root of immigration.  America is a country almost completely filled with migrants and immigrants.  It is only at present that people are analysing the reality of migration; what it means when protracted refugee situations become intractable, what it means to be an "economic migrant".

In the nation-state model of the world, people fit neatly into boxes.  One person belongs on the left side of the border, another belongs on the right.  But now our world is littered with families on either side of the borders, with traders straddling the borders, with borders gone, with borders razor-wired, with landmines "protecting borders".  Reality is not neat.  Reality does not fit into boxes.

The new Arizona law causing such a stir in America calls for a reasonable suspicion determination when deciding to stop a person to check his/her status in the country.  I have been reminded over that last few days about what people seem to think suspicious means.  I have never seen a white person asked for their ID in Hong Kong, but last week I saw a man in tattered clothes pushing a dolly of goods on the street get stopped.  The police took his ID card and called in the number to check the authenticity.  Did he look like he didn't belong?  My flatmate was on her way to work the other day and she was stopped by the police and her ID details were checked.  Did she, a HK permanent resident, look like she didn't belong?  My flatmate's sister was boarding a plane in America last week to come to Hong Kong and officers at the airport stopped her from getting onto the plane to ask about her travel to Hong Kong, wanting all identification documents,  wanted know why she was going, where she was staying, proof of return ticket, what was her occupation, how much money she had on her person.... Did she, as a dual HK and US resident, not look like she belonged?  Regarding this last anecdote, it reminded me of something I read earlier this year.  Many countries are stationing officers at foreign airports whose job it is to interdict persons who look like they are going to to seek asylum or stay unlawfully in the country they are going to.  It's effectively illegal border patrol because it happens super-extraterritorially.

I understand the purpose of laws; I've spent the last four years gaining an intimate awareness of them.  But to me I cannot understand what we are all afraid of.  For all the talk on TV and in magazines about our "global world" there must be a real nascent fear about this very global world.  How can I, you, a police officer randomly select a person to check their status in HK, in America, in another country....it's clear that there is a you don't belong look.  The only problem with that look is that, as in the three instances that I mentioned, ALL do belong. 

Migration makes people of the same nationality different colors, speakers of different languages, wearers of different styles of clothing, livers of different kinds of lives.  That does not mean anyone belongs any less. And yet there is a pervasive fear of those perceived as not belonging, as infringing on your quality of life, as taking what is rightfully yours.  If they are illegally present then I understand, but if you target them, look at them, fear them because they look like they don't belong...check your premise, because many of the people you think don't belong actually do.

When words are dry and videos painful......

reality is unimaginable and worse.

We are lucky to live a life away from a conflict zone.

Fears and 饺子 (Jiaozi).

This past week was another partial holiday week for Honkies.  Unbeknownst to me, the whole city once again shut down for a combination of Easter holiday and the Qingming festival (清明节).  The first holiday you Westerners obviously know the drill for (although I went to a Christian law school and we never got Good Friday off), and the Qingming festival, well that's a Chinese festival that may be sort of likened to All Souls' day.  It's a day for visiting the graves of the departed and enjoying spring weather.  For HK, this means five days of holiday.  For me, I was supposed to be working on my dissertation.  In the midst of hating on the crummy weather (sunshine where art though?) and doing other fun things, I did get some writing done, but perhaps the most enjoyable and biggest achievement was making jiaozi.

For those of you that know me, you'll attest to the fact that i don't like to engage in activities that I don't know ahead of time that I will be good at.  This may entail practicing away from judging eyes or just altogether tossing the activity.  I guess I have a fear of demonstrable weakness, which is stupid I know because every human cannot be a crack shot at everything he or she tries.  However, for me, public failure is something I fear.

How does fear combine with jiaozi?  Well, my chinese tutor invited me over to her house for the last day of the holiday.  I had previously told her that I LOVED jiaozi (because in fact I LOVE jiaozi...funny that).  She told me that in Hong Kong shops don't make them properly and she being a Beijing-er, she knows how to make them well.  So she invited to come and make jiaozi with her.  She said her daughter and the daughter's boyfriend would be there.  I quickly agreed because 1) I did not have to time get into to my head and think about the implications of agreeing and 2) I LOVE jiaozi so how could I turn this down?  However, once I had agreed and my tutor had left for the day I did some mental calculations....I would probably have to speak Chinese for 4 hours (which I haven't done since college probably) and I was going to bring my flatmate with me so if/when my language skills failed and I looked an amateur, she'd see it (she's quite the linguist).  I'd be lying if I said this impending jiaozi-making scenario didn't plague the back of mind for about five days until I actually engaged in said planned activity.

Tuesday finally came, I bought some boxes of biscuits to bring as a gift and my flatmate and I were off for our adventure.  And it was an adventure and let me say up front that I am SO GLAD that I went and that I didn't chicken out.  

First, I got to go to a part of HK I'd never been to, a massive old housing development in the New Territories.  It was great getting to see a different side of HK.

Second, My tutor's daughter and boyfriend were so kind.  When words in chinese failed me they helped in English and even though they were probably just saying it to be nice, they said I had terrific command of Chinese for only having studied it for three years.  They on the other hand had studied English for 20, but I demanded that our main medium be mandarin.

Third, making jiaozi was so fun....and fantastically tasty.  My tutor made filling with pork and carrots.  I'd never had that kind before and it was really really good.  And the jiaozi I assembled actually looked like proper jiaozi...they stood tall and moon-shaped and didn't 睡觉, or fall asleep (aka lie down) on the tray.  I'm pretty sure I ate a whole dish of them, and also ate these yummy giant pan-friend jiaozi-type creations that my tutor made herself that had spring onion and microscopic shrimps in them.

Forth, I ate raw garlic and I had never done that before.  Apparently part of eating great jiaozi is first making great jiaozi, second is having great soy and vinegar sauce (my tutor lugged hers from Bejing in an empty red wine bottle) and third you must nibble on a clove of raw garlic while enjoying said jiaozi.  I did just that...and my friends....it was good!  I am now a garlic-lover of all preparations.

Fifth, my tutor is quite the accomplished opera singer and so she broke out into Chinese folk opera a number of times.  You may think it a bit loud and cacophonous, but it really was a treat to have her share that with us.  She even did a little traditional dancing for my flatmate upon request, ha ha.  I think pre-Cultural revolution she was quite the looker. 

Sixth, my 4-hours of speaking Chinese actually turned into a United-Nations style evening of multi-languages.  My tutor's husband's great uncle came over after we made jiaozi for a glass of wine with us.  He grew up in the French Concession in Shanghai and is a French citizen.  He and my flatmate spoke French to each other, my tutor and I spoke Mandarin to each other, I spoke a combination of English and Mandarin to the daughter and boyfriend (only English because they asked me tricky questions about human rights and at that point I totally failed in chinese), my flatmate spoke Spanish to me when she wanted to ask questions that no one else would understand, my flatmate, the chinese-french uncle and the daughter spoke Cantonese with each other.....Basically there were about six languages whizzing about the living room and it was quite enjoyable.

I'm not sure if one evening of success will help totally overcome my fear of public failure, but I am grateful that fear did not keep me from going altogether.  Life isn't about "getting it perfect" all of the time because that is impossible, instead life is about trying things out, experiencing things and I think, sometimes failing.  I can't always be good at things, but I sure can continue to try to be better...in private or in public.  Other people will not be the judge of my worth. 

On that note, time for a leftover plate of jiaozi.

Perspective.

For as much as I try to put myself in the shoes of survivors of conflict there are many things that I recognise that a person like me will never fully understand without having actually having lived through it.  While we are all humans on this earth, we are humans with very different means and opportunities and outlooks.  Justice comes in many shapes and sizes.  The following is an except from a speech that Pierre Richard Prosper gave at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2002.  He was a Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.  His anecdote honestly made me cry; it reinforced the fact to me that legal terms and austere tribunals often poorly capture raw tragedy.

"Just to give you an example of the mindset of some of the victims and survivors, I recall I had a witness, Witness C, as in Charlie.  He came from Taba, never left the essentially 2-mile radius.  We took him out of Taba to Kigali, which is 45-minutes away.  It was his first time ever going to Kigali.


Later that day, we took him at night and put him on our little 10-seat plane and flew him to Arusha, Tanzania.  It was his first time ever being on a plane.  I remember he said as we were taking off -- through his translator, he looked at me and said, boy, too bad it's night, you know.  I was hoping it was daylight so I can see heaven".


Is an international court a place where this fellow will find justice? Legal proceedings are not where a survivor is going to find justice.  Many other alternatives must be offered to heal a society in different ways.  The legal path is too foreign for most.

The elusive succinct and neutral application.

When I finally admitted to myself in college that I was not going to be a groundbreaking female biomedical engineer and that I would not end up in medical school (the fainting episode that I tried so hard to deny during my high school "shadow your future profession" week that took me to the pediatric ICU in Texas should have been my first glaring clue), I decided I wanted to be a lawyer.  Not just any lawyer mind you, I had to be a lawyer that was going to do something to help people, and not just help them divide their assets or fight over children (though to be honest those jobs are equally as taxing and draining on the soul but maybe more financially rewarding).  At that time, at that turning point in a 19 year-old's life as it may have been, I used the phrases human rights lawyer and advocate of humanitarian law interchangeably as a way to describe my future aspirations.  It wasn't until a few years later that I learned there is a fundamentally important distinction between the two, a distinction that may in the future wedge the two further and further apart. 

Both come not without controversy, perhaps mostly directed at human rights law most cynically described as a sort of flimsy and lofty set of rights and entitlements that are supposed to yield a better life.  Human rights describe those things to which every person on this earth should equally be able to seek or achieve.... a fair trial, freedom of speech, freedom to exercise religion (not controversial in western countries), access to clean water, access to education, (more controversial in countries like the united states).  

Humanitarian law governs the treatment of hors de combat or those not taking up arms in armed conflict.  During the late 19th and 20th centuries there was a recognition of the barbarity of war and the damage that it wreaks on all portions of society, not just those in a combat zone.  The Kellogg-Briand pact attempted to outlaw war in general, but as the Greek gods predicted, conflict is part of the human world as run by gods.  What gods you ask?  Well for the Greeks it was their 12 Olympian gods, but take your pick these days and the God of Christianity, Judaism or Islam would probably concur.  Instead of banning war, there are now Hague laws and Geneva laws that govern the means and methods of warfare, and the treatment of persons involved (intentionally or unintentionally) in combat activities.  These are not lofty "be the best that you can be laws".  An Australian humanitarian lawyer Helen Durham said it in a way that has stuck with me: the laws of war are "pragmatic documents which relate to bare survival during the most horrific condition humans can manufacture - armed conflict".  (Helen Durham wrote a fascinating article on the Athena/Ares modes of warfare for the Melbourne Journal of Int'l Law in 2007, to which I credit my thinking for this entry).  It is these laws of war that allow killing with impunity. 

The right to life is at the heart of human rights law and the thought that killing another can and legally will result in impunity juxtaposes the two regimes of law and begs the question, can they be reconciled?  Arguably in some aspects yes, the laws of war set out restrictions and narrow circumstances in which taking the life of a combatant is legal.  Laws of war permit killing under certain conditions only; indiscriminate killing with weapons yielding excessive harm are banned.  The rules and the following of the rules is what makes human rights law marginally compatible with humanitarian law, while still recognising that there are aspects of both making them fundamentally at odds. 

However, in our world today, states choose to selectively apply the universally ratified Geneva Conventions.  Somehow there is a belief that a legitimate or a just conflict privileges the wagers to hold themselves to a less restrictive legal regime.  Is that right?  Is it right for global precedent to thumb ones nose at laws that make the most banal instances of human existence minimally protected?  To me (albeit a person on the outside of conflict zones and outside the rooms where orders of attack are launched) it seems detrimental to any sort of international harmony or just shear human co-existence (harmony/peace is likely an unascertainable and inadequate aspiration for the global community), to draw different rules for different interventions.  After all....who gets to decide what is just, whose measuring stick will be used in judgement? 

Human rights law applies at all times, even during armed conflict.  Certain aspects of the law are deemed derogable, while others such as the right to life and right to be free from torture are absolute.  Humanitarian law applies in times of armed conflict, modernly this has been made to encompass both international and non-international conflict.  When I changed career trajectories from doctor-who-would-save-people-who-were-ailing to lawyer-who-wanted-to-save-people-from-suffering-and-help-achieve-a-more-dignified-life, the spirit of altruism stayed.  I didn't understand the difference between human rights and humanitarian issues, I didn't understand the level of suffering to which people daily endure (I still don't think I can fathom it),  but I have a fuzzy understanding of fairness.  Human rights law and humanitarian law as overlapping concepts and as a means of protection bring to light a crucial notion of fairness: how to find a fair balance between military necessity and principles of humanity.  

We live in a world where states choose to selectively place themselves under the ambit of international law.  International humanitarian law is neither applied succinctly nor neutrally in any conflict.  But it's universal law, why not???  I've never been a real rule-breaker (the one time I missed curfew by 5 minutes I got grounded) so maybe it's easy for me to say follow the freaking rules! If a state signs up to a set of rules and laws....follow them!  Don't personally decide what is just, don't make up rules of impunity for one group and actively prosecute others.  If the world continues to selectively fashion itself in that way, then human rights law and the eventual incarnation of humanitarian law will be forever at odds instead of both protecting the human being, however small that protection may in fact be.  If human rights law and humanitarian law were meant to be selectively incorporated, they would have been called "selections for states to choose from at their whim and convenience" and not "law".  

For all those rule-benders out there....bending rules may be fine, but when you bend the rules and that bending infringes on my rights and legal protections as a person, you've bent too far.    Your rights are not more important than mine, or more important than those of a woman in Bosnia, a man in Burundi, or a child in East Timor.

A community for surviving....barely.

Often words fail me, but pictures can tell a much more effective story about the things I am learning, studying, confronting, mulling....

There are currently almost 2 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan.  This is after the UNHCR and other int'l organisations worked on voluntarily repatriating over 3 million refugees that were in Pakistan back to their home state of Afghanistan.  The irony of this was that the UN originally estimated that there were only ever 3 million total Afghan refugees in Pakistan beginning from when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the late 1970s.  Somehow nearly 2 million people went unaccounted for.  Think for a moment, aide that has arrived over the years - based upon a belief there were 3 million - barely covered the 3 million that were thought to be there; what about aide for 2 million more people?  Criticisms lately go that refugee camps in the region are harbouring terrorists, that people are "economic" migrants, that moving out of their home state b/c of drought is not a legitimate reason.  While the official "Refugee Convention" definition does not include persons moving due to natural disaster or for reasons of making a livelihood, it is undeniable that suffering is ubiquitous in the region.  As humans we may in theory all have "equal human rights" but the reality is that conditions in many areas of the world make it nearly impossible to realise a majority of human rights without help.


even with all of this aid from America, the UN and MANY other countries.......





.
.....this still happens.





 Check out other photos from this series.


Visual injustice is a funny thing....it makes people FEEL bad, or sad but few are propelled to do anything.   Why? 


I suppose a more telling question would be if your neighbor was suffering like this would you help? 


Or even MORE potent in this world: do you even know your neighbor?  Are you so convinced of the infallibility of the individual that it's not worthwhile to make your neighborhood a community?  These people in the photos would not be surviving, albeit by a thread, without a community.


Where is your community? 

The reluctant leader.

Someone told me last night that the best leaders are the reluctant leaders, those individuals that don’t walk with puffed chests, but instead move more slowly and deliberately and with a limp.  It got me thinking, what our world needs is not the self-assured and overly-charismatic to take center stage, but for the self-assured to encourage those they believe can change and lead, to take a step forward.  That step out of obscurity could be the first one to change.  Martin Luther King Jr. was a reluctant leader; he was a father, a husband, a preacher in a small Southern town and did not see himself as the one to lead a charge for equality. And yet during the March on Washington he spoke to over 250,000 people crammed shoulder to shoulder and delivered what was the greatest speech by an American of the twentieth century.  This reluctant leader showed that dreams are not impossible and to call a dream impossible is to utter an oxymoron:

Washington D.C., 28 August 1963:

“Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

MLK, the reluctant leader of the 1960s helped the United States break down racial barriers, and helped reduce to the law that which was supposed to be self-evident and was long overdue…that every man IS equal.  America and the world in general still need the “leader with a limp” to fight for injustices against women, minorities, castes, gays and lesbians…anyone who continues to live a life where oppression is the status quo and equality is still the dream.  All you flashy and swaggering leaders, find a reluctant leader and convince her or him to take a stand; we are always in need of change. 

The beauty of Culture.

I had the distinct privilege of attending a Burmese Culture Night with some of my colleagues this past week.  One of my classmates is from Burma and he invited us to another uni in Hong Kong to experience an evening all about Burma.  It was a wonderful presentation of photos, information, songs and food.  It made me wish for the 1,003,200th time that my home country had more of a distinct culture.  It reminded me of being a child in Indonesia.  At the international school that I attended, United Nations Day was the biggest holiday (bigger than days such as Halloween or Valentine's day).  Students came to school in their national costumes.  The mums of the children would cook yummy food from their home country and at lunch there would be a "great hall of food" in the gymnasium and we would sample food from all over the world.  I loved and hated that day.  I loved it because I loved all the international food and I loved seeing my friends in their costumes and I loved going to the assemblies where national dances would be performed.  But I hated being me on that day for while everyone else had terrific national costumes, I had a tshirt from Old Navy with a US flag on the front, and one year I wore a man's tie with the American flag printed on it.  What a terrible national dress.  There are so many wonderful things about my home country...the freedom and relative tolerance of religions and beliefs, the whole melting pot concept, the opportunity....but as a 10-year old at school...I wanted to be from a country with a long rich history and a national costume.  I suppose that will never happen, but now, 16 year later...I'm ok with that.  I can travel the world, live for long periods in other place, and learn about other countries and appreciate their culture and custom and hope someday, many years from now, my country will have a lengthy culture so that a little girl may wear her national costume proudly (and leave the flag tshirt at home on UN Day).

Below is a song that I heard at the aforementioned culture night.  It sounded lovely in Burmese, but the English translation is also beautiful:

Let's make the world beautiful

(1) How majestic are the rivers, the valleys and the mountains
Teeming with sweet and colourful flowers
Making the whole world look beautiful

(2) Though we are entrusted with the task to maintain its beauty
Our misdeeds make the world ugly
Now where are love and kindness

(3) Many plants and flowers have withered in the scorching sun
But let's take the task of a gardener
And let's revitalise and beautify the world again

Chorus:
People are hungry, they thirst for love
People are mourning and perishing in the darkness
They are dying in wars of hatred
Now our world has become ugly
Let's revitalise and beautify the world again.


- I want to thank my colleague for sharing part of his culture with me for an evening.


from:http://www.everyculture.com/Bo-Co/Burma.html

It happens even where freedom and opportunity are coveted.

As seems to be a consistent trend lately, I head to class in the evenings and something thought-provoking is said during the lecture and I am consumed by it for the next twenty-four hours or so. Last night I had the pleasure of attending the first of four lectures being given by a distinguished professor who advises multi-ethnic countries in drafting constitutions and bills of rights. Constitution-drafting is already a daunting task, meant to enshrine principles and protections that will be the cornerstone of law in a country, but the whole process becomes infinitely more complex when undertaking the task in a multi-ethnic country. Group rights and individual rights must both be considered. Anyway I digress from my blogging thought of the moment. A classmate of mine mentioned last night during this lecture that the “ethnic minority” that are the Native Americans in the USA seem to be doing pretty well in America, so the theory goes, that our Bill of Rights adequately protects them. This got me to thinking, for all the things I know about minority groups or poverty or suffering of people outside of America, I know very little about that which goes on inside America. I went home and spent a couple hours on the internet reading intently and watching various documentaries on the Native Americans.

I certainly do not pretend to be an expert in this field (in fact I know VERY LITTLE) but I was impacted by a number of things that I saw and read. First, when people think of Native Americans a couple of visions may pop up: teepees and headdresses, or casinos and gaming facilities on reservations. After doing some reading, I reconfirmed that neither are really ubiquitous when it comes to Native Americans any more. Surely culture is very important to them and rituals are remembered and passed down generation to generation, but they do not live in teepees anymore. Additionally, this vision of Indian reservations being prosperous b/c they allow gambling is also somewhat misguided because that is not a source of income for most reservations and it often leads to grave gambling problems amongst people living on reservations.

Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota struck me as somehow a failure on the part of the people and government of my country. It is one of the largest reservations in the country, larger than the state of Delaware, is home to about 50,000 people, most of which are Lakota Indians and is almost the poorest area of America. Life expectancy on this reservation doesn’t exceed about 50 years, teen suicide is 150% higher than the American national average, unemployment stands somewhere between 70-90% depending on the time of year, an estimated 80% of people there struggle with alcoholism (it was decided that the reservation would be a “dry” reservation once the alcohol situation reached such dire levels, but a tiny town next to the reservation with a population of just 22, has 4 liquor stores and ostensibly just exists to serve the people and their disease on the reservation) and average annual incomes may be as low on average as US$3000. To put this into perspective, a life expectancy that low is right up there with countries like Ghana or any other third-world country not suffering from an epidemic or in the middle of war. How could this be in America? Families of 17 or more live in tiny trailers, not insulated from the cold, holes in the floor and black mold in all of the walls. Many are homeless. Many live in cars. A particularly poignant image for me was from an Al-Jazeera news clip: it showed a man pushing a car that did not work and had a tv in the backseat, he was taking the tv to the pawnshop to pawn to get money to feed his family, it was too heavy to carry and the car didn’t work so he and his family had to push the car with the tv all the way to the pawnshop.

The professor reminded me last night that poverty is a constant sense of vulnerability. The Lakota are living in serious poverty and the tragedy is two-fold: on the one hand it is tragic because America is a wealthy and developed nation, and on the other hand it’s terrifically tragic because America used to be only their land. Over the course of 150 years, they have been marginalized to “reservations” amounting to about 2% of the land area of the United States. Initial reservations “reserved” for the Native Americans were reduced in size because the white people in America thought the land grants were “too generous”.

It was suggested to me that while this phenomenon that I have described is tragic, it is partly on the onus of Indians themselves to change their current situation. It was suggested that they could just leave the reservations and seek a better life in a different place where employment and suitable housing could be found. But to me, the answer is not just as simple as: pick up and leave. Reservations are what is left of ancestral land, maybe leaving is effectively abandoning part of who they are. I do not really know, but to me it just seems woefully inadequate to see this state of life for anyone, especially native americans. It seems that somehow dialogue has broken down and the governance of the country as a whole and the somewhat autonomous governance of the various Indian nations are not working together for solutions – for if it was working, surely there would not be this disparity of economics and quality of life. For me, my lasting thought is: how can you resolve a situation where values rooted in the ancestral land, modernity and a lack of reconciliation over a feeling that America is built upon stolen property, are all clashing against one another exacerbating the conditions of a large group of Americans? How can history be embraced, atrocities be acknowledged and a plan for a better future be crafted? Opportunity should not only be available outside a reservation.

For beautiful and haunting photos of Pine Ridge Reservation see Aaron Huey's NYTimes photo journal from last year: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/behind-22/

Fair weather weather lover.

The lunar new year holiday is underway here in Hong Kong and for most children and parents it meant at least a 4-day holiday and at most a couple of weeks away from school. For me, there is no class this week and while I had grand plans to read for my dissertation all week....just me and my books and papers on war crimes trials....but the chilly and rainy weather has made me motivated to do little more than watch the Olympics on TV and stay in my warm bed because there is not indoor heating in HK and the temperature was 9 degrees C last night.

In a 24/7 city such as Hong Kong, it was amazing this weekend to see life come to a standstill....few cars on the roads, almost no people out walking about, and most shops closed. The South China Morning Post (leading English newspaper in Southeast Asia) even shut up shop for two days and did not publish a newspaper. The got me to thinking....I don't know of any other major newspaper that stops publishing for say New Years or Christmas, so lunar new year must be a fairly important holiday. Afterall....good and bad things do not stop happening merely because it is the lunar new year.

When I was living in California, I craved days where the sky was cloudy. Those days were few and far between. However ever since I came back to HK from winter holiday, the skies here have been so gray and the weather so grim. Now all I want is some sun! When my flatmate and I went to the flowermarket over the weekend for new year celebrations, we got completely soaked in the rain....no one wanted to stand next to us on the subway-ride home! I guess my cravings for first clouds and now sun make me a fair weather weather lover - always seeking something I cannot have. At this moment I want sun, and LOT of it.

An unjustified reason not to feel.

In a lecture last night I learned about perpetrators of grave crimes: of the people that took part in the holocaust, of those in the Rwandan genocide, and other massive human rights violations. As much as we as outsiders looking in on the history want to paint the perpetrators as something other than us, extensive studies show that perpetrators are ordinary people. They are ordinary people that owing to a number of factors in a high-stress situation come to do extraordinarily evil things. But the common misconception that must be dispelled is that they are not extraordinary people.

I sat in class listening and believing both what I had read and what I was hearing about these ordinary men, but I thought in my mind that gosh, if “I” was ever confronted with a situation like that, committing atrocities would certainly horrify me and surely prevent me from inflicting pain onto others. While I do sincerely believe that my moral compass would not be lost, a colleague of mine reminded me last night of the somewhat frail nature of the human mind. She mentioned that she used to give beggars money when she would see them on the street. But after awhile there were so many and after awhile she just stopped, and stopped acknowledging them. Well, her simple admission struck a particularly powerful chord with me. I remember living in Shenzhen a few years ago and every time I would walk down the main street in the city, Shennan Lu, I would see so many beggars and seemingly homeless people. They tore at my heart because many were missing limbs or holding frail children in their arms and clothed in winter in tattered tshirts. I wanted to help. I would put change from my pocket into their bowl or their hat and try to look them in the eye. I felt that even if I could not lift them out of their desperate situation, at least I was trying to do something. This continued for a few months. Then a friend of mine living in the city told me a story. She asked if I had seen “all those deformed” beggars on Shennan Lu. I said yes I had seen people in need of help on the street. She told me that they were all being exploited by a particular gang or group in the city whereby the gang would go to the countryside and kidnap people with physical disabilities and bring them to Shenzhen, place them incrementally along the main road and then snatch all the money that people give them each day. I was appalled – how could this be? All the money I had given them, taken by greedy gangs? I still felt I needed to do something. If the money I gave them was just going to be stolen by a gang, then maybe if I gave them food, at least that would go into their malnourished stomachs. So for awhile anytime I bought baozi on the road for myself, I would buy a few extra and place them in a bag in the bowls of some of the beggars. But then something happened. I kept hearing the voice of my friend in my mind and how the beggars were all part of a scam. A scam…..in my mind I began to think that because my friend told me it was a scam, then it was ok not to give them anything anymore. Soon I gave neither money, nor food, and I made every effort not to look at the beggars as I walked past them, sometimes almost stumbling over them and still not looking them in the eye. I did not think twice about them and their awful situation in life. Sometimes they even seemed to me a nuisance when I was trying to traverse a crowded street and they were laying on the pavement where I needed to go.

What had happened to me? In my mind I was compassionate and caring and thoughtful and I cared about human rights. But over a period of mere weeks, I used an uncorroborated story told to me by a friend in order to justify not giving money or food to people in desperate need and even feel scorn for them! I, a self-professed compassionate person had conditioned myself not to feel for these people.

I could have tried to check to see if the story was true, I could have tried to talk to the people on the street. I did nothing. I stuck my hands in my pocket, my music into my ears and I drowned out the pain around me. I recognise now what I did and I am saddened by it. If I could so easily become insensitive to people in need based upon one story from one person, imagine what thoughtless and vengeful remarks told over and over again might do to other ordinary people.

Despite me realisation of my narrow-mindedness, I do not presently know how I should have acted. I should have kept trying to look them in the eye, for not doing so implies I think of them as something less than human, and surely they are not so. But giving them change might have helped them – maybe they were not part of this scam. But giving them money might have also aided this scam whereby people are plucked from their homes and hopelessly exploited to no profit of their own? Maybe giving food would have been best? What I do know is how I managed to justify doing absolutely nothing was wrong.

So in a lecture on how ordinary people can perpetrate terrible crimes, I was humbled in realizing that I, in the past, had managed to condition myself not to feel emotion for those in desperate need of help. I am ashamed that I chose not to feel.