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.