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.