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.

It's been 15 years.

About 15 years ago late night stopovers in Taipei were normal. The once a year trip home usually included a plane change in Taiwan and such stops usually coincided with fairly inconvenient times. Usually it was a 5am arrival from the US. Nothing was open, the airport was empty, and I am fairly certain my sister and I were not wonderful traveling companions so early in the morning for my parents (and usually just my mum). The trip from America back to Indonesia at the end of every summer usually started in Los Angeles. My sister and I, and likely many other expat families doing the same thing, slept on luggage, sat on carts and waited in sunny CA to check in our two bags each, 80 pounds a piece (oh how times have changed....hoarding Americans can no longer travel like snails with everything we own in tow). After checking in, and eating one last meal of American fat and grease (I seem to remember Pizza Hut personal pan pizzas having a special place in my heart) we were off to drape ourselves over chairs and sometimes sleep on the floor until our plane left for Taipei at the convenient hour of one or two am. Sometimes the plane took off an hour later than planned because the tailwinds were so favorable that we would have arrived in Taipei before the airport opened. I loved airplane rides back then. I was still small enough and Asia was still untrendy enough of a travel destination (again how times have changed) that rows of seats were often empty. I just spread myself across a couple of seats and I was good. Now I am taller, empty seats are a rarity, and as I'm a human rights lawyer without cash flow the airlines I fly on do NOT give passengers extra legroom. They charge you for that now. If you want economy class legroom in 2009, you now must pay extra for "super economy" tickets. The regular economy tickets should really be called "not for people over 5'10"" tickets.

15 years ago seems like a long time. There were times even farther back than that where a friend of mine and I built a fort in first class by hanging blankets from the overhead compartments and we pretended we were living on a desert island. Outraged as you may be that I partook in such an activity in first class, I offer two qualifications for making it less of a big deal. #1: It was a Garuda Indonesia flight on an ancient plane and there very well might not have been a single other person in first class besides my family and my friend, and #2: this was back in the day where there was still a "smoking section" on the plane portioned off by only a curtain (so smoke wafted underneath the curtain and into our section), so really my extra blanket hanging from above was shielding my small lungs from 15 hours of second-hand smoke. There was another time when I was older that another friend and I convinced a poor unassuming stewardess on Eva air that we were diabetic and therefore needed an extra piece of chocolate cake. Ha, we'd have needed a doctor after that cake if what we told her was true.

I still love flying. I love airports; there always seems to be positive and electric energy. Usually people are going to wonderful places or have come from somewhere that was a happiness-maker. And in the event that it's sad travel, in Asia that solved by buying your way through duty free --> retail therapy. Never have I seen so many luxury stores in airports or so many trollys filled with shopping bags than here in Asia (the two carry-on limit seems to be malleable if 9 of your extra carry-ons are Ferraga, Bvlgari, and Fendi bags).

15 years ago I'd lived in Indonesia for almost four years, I was an old pro at the around the world travel (or at least I thought so). Back then virtually no one I talked to in America knew what or where Indonesia was. For all they knew, Indonesia was in Africa. Times are different now; the world is becoming more aware of itself and technology has made it smaller. Global travel is common, if not required for business. I wonder what I would see if I came back for a late night stopover in Taipei in another 15 years...what memories would come back? What elements of the exciting plane travel I grew to love as a child would remain?

Where is home?

"Where are you from?" and "where is your home?" have always been difficult questions for me. The first one seems easy enough as I am American by birth and passport, but at the age of 26 I have spent almost half of my life outside of the United States. The time spent in the USA was divided between four different states, but more perplexingly I felt the most connection to a state I never actually "lived" in (North Carolina). How does this work?

Then, to add insult to this serious geographic injury, proclaiming that I am American is recently not the best friend-maker here in Asia as most of the world dislikes us "free" Americans for our lack of rules and morality and our arrogance and our overt excess in the way we lead our lives. For me it is easier here to say yes I am American but originally I was from Denmark, Germany etc. which is technically true. However it's not as if my family came in a boat to Ellis island twenty years ago with nothing but a couple of suitcases in tow. The United States of America by construct is a nation of immigrants, but people seem to overlook that truth when I spout my Scandinavian heritage and immediately I rise a few places on their list of worthy people. They overlook the "American" part and focus on the fact that my heritage is Danish and that I "look more Danish than American" (whatever that is supposed to mean, can one "look" American? ... not in the Hawaiian tourist shirt, poor grammar, fanny pack and camera kind of way).

I've noticed that lately people also get their feathers a bit ruffled when the USA is referred to as "America" because in truth there are two continents with dozens of countries that comprise parts of an America. It is just another excuse for people to think Americans are arrogant ... acting as if the USA is the only part of the "America[s]" that is noteworthy.

Is "home" where you are currently living? For me that would be Hong Kong, but that doesn't seem quite right. Is "home" where your parents live? Most likely yes, home is where family is. But what if you don't necessarily identify with the area where your family lives? Is it still home? Often people have called me a "citizen of the world". It is a strange phrase to me. On the surface it appears to encapsulate my life quite well .... I've lived on three continents and multiple countries in 26 years. But if my citizenship is the world, does that mean I do not belong to any particular part? And if I do not "belong" then where is "home"? I don't know that I have any sort of answer to these question. At the end of this long rambling process I suppose I would have to just admit that "home" is the USA and leave the details for someone else to jump to conclusions over as to lay "home" in what state.

One final query that I really have no answer to .... can you be glad to be from somewhere but at the same time be very ashamed that you come from that place?

The measure of a quality city?

On Thursdays here in Hong Kong I do not have class. I often spend these weekdays exploring different areas of of the Island, Kowloon and the New territories. Having this "free" weekday is a sort of luxury because the parks and attractions around the city are not as crowded as during the weekend. It is on these days that I put down the human rights reading, stop trying to come to my own conclusions about the world, and explore the world for what it is.

Over the last six years I have lived in six vastly different cities and I came to love each one of them for their uniqueness (St. Louis, USA; Shenzhen, China; Malibu/Santa Monica, USA; London, England; Den Haag, Nederlands; Hong Kong, SAR). On thing that ALL of the cities have in common is the concept of a park. Parks are places where communities and families thrive amidst the bustle of modern life, and parks are places where an individual like me can go to feel included in a community.

In St. Louis I spent countless hours a week running, walking, reading, exploring, and daydreaming in Forest Park. It is a park that I will always love what with its rich 1904 World's Fair heritage. Before I started university my grandmother took me to Forest Park and gave me the "grand tour" by car showing me the museums, the massive glass greenhouse ("Jewel Box"), the outdoor theatre, golf course, pavilions and the grand basin. It was a place she loved as a child and she spread that love to me.

Parks in China are places that I also happened to love. Since grass is at an extreme premium in populated cities such as Shenzhen, the grassy areas of the park are always cordoned-off and signs in Chinese and imperfect English tell you to keep your feet and bum off the grass. Instead of grassy knolls for patrons to sit on, chinese parks have ponds and bridges and many benches. Old men are seen liuniar (walking with caged birds), playing the erhu (two-string upright fiddle), practicing qigong, playing majong, or writing beautiful Chinese characters on the pavement with a giant water brush and comparing the quality of calligraphy with others engaging in the same activity. Perhaps my favorite thing about Shenzhen parks was the kite-flying. On Sundays when there are fair skies and a breeze, perhaps the only free day for families each week, many city parks are carpeted with patrons flying kites. I love watching families fly kites; they look happy and carefree.

In Malibu, I shall call Zuma beach my "park" - technically it is a part of the LA county parks systems. I used to love running or walking on cool winter mornings at low tide when only the locals could be found at the water's edge. The beach becomes almost private once the labor day crowd drives down the PCH one final time.

In London I fell in love with first Hyde Park, then St. James Park, and finally my heart was left in Regent's Park. Regent's park is up near Russell Square/Euston and is an amalgamation of football pitches, fancy educational institutions, ponds for rowing and paddle-boating, cafes for tea, an outdoor theatre for summer plays, a japanese garden, and my favorite spot ... Queen Mary's Garden. During the spring and summer months meticulous groundsmen ensure that flowers bubble over from every pot and planter and that the water in the fountains flow crystal clear. I distinctly remember spending a lazy summer afternoon with Adam reading books in Queen Mary's Garden, our noses constantly filled with the fragrance from her roses. I was at peace in Regent's Park.

When I arrived in Den Haag it was August, the height of summer. Before acquiring my bicycle to get me around everywhere, I walked nightly home through a string of three parks. There were no restrictions on using the grass and often fellow law clerks at the UN could be found in the park playing football until dark. I also love another park that skirted the beach near my house in Scheveningen. Serious cyclers used to pedal through there and I had to be careful not to get mowed down on my cheapy bike only meant to get me from point A to B.

In Hong Kong, one of the first "Thursday outings" I took was with a new friend to Kowloon. Without really intending it, we ended up wandering through two of Kowloons nicest parks: Kowloon Park and the Walled City Park. The Walled City Park is very new. It is located in Kowloon City and covers a stretch of land that used to be filled with highrise slum buildings that were notorious for triad (Hong Kong mobsters) activity. The government finally had enough of the crime in the area and pulled down all of the buildings and ironically built a park full of serenity. The park (see above photos) is fashioned to be like a Chinese park and it is a lovely sanctuary to stumble upon after having traversed the bustle of Hong Kong to get to it. We saw few people in the park; not much of a sense of community in it, but still it was beutiful and peaceful.

While I adore museums and greatly appreciate quality architecture and historic monuments, for me, parks in cities are the places I love to be. They are places where you can watch life go by, but at the same time feel very included in life. Parks are places where you can watch children grow up or grandparents grow old. I believe parks reinforce community and I am grateful for every community in which I have belonged.

Universal human rights or regional human rights ... acceptable contradictions?

Are human rights universal???

I came to Hong Kong this fall to learn more about human rights. To me, talking about human rights has always been an exercise in passion, me believing that since no person was chosen to be born, that therefore each person has some sort of inherent protective rights. While many of my fellow colleagues came here with strong notions of their beliefs of human rights, I am still finding my way. In a field riddled with contradictions and being a subject that pulls on the heartstrings of most, I am trying to make sense of this subject of human rights.

There are many arguments that human rights are purely western constructs, that human rights are used by the north to control and admonish the south, that countries like the United States are “above human rights”. It is true that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is the foundation of much of international customary law and the impetus for subsequent UN Conventions was created in the wake of World War II and largely out of a fear of what Western nations might do to each other again in the future, but does that make it only applicable to the west? China’s P.C. Chang was very instrumental in the document’s drafting. But say for a moment that the Western notion of the UDHR holds water, then must we believe that human rights are really a regional set of beliefs, that each region of the world should have different rights? If that is true, then there is no universality of human rights at all. But then, is regionalism good enough? After all, technically Asia consists of the majority of Russia, the Middle East and China, India and Southeast Asian nations. Can a “regional” set of human rights really encapsulate all major world religions found in Asia as well as Russia ….? And if that answer is yes, then arguably that’s a point for the universality of rights and not for regionalism.

While I learn more and more on a daily basis, I am still yet unsure how to ultimately weigh all of this knowledge. I think my curse is that I can see both sides of the human rights issues. I see the contradictions, I recognize the weakness of some ECHR cases whereby the rationale is deemed to be based upon self-evident truths rather than historical legal maxims, I can detect frustration with the south being bullied by the north through means of human rights, and yet at the end of each day I come back to the notion, perhaps a naïve one, that every person matters. No person chose to come into this world and in that sense we are all equal, not matter what we produce or do not produce, no matter if we live under a tyrannical dictator or in a free society (which some would also consider a tyrannical prospect). In that sense, if we are all equal, should we not be equally protected? But then does equal protection require regional sensitivities? You see, I come full circle and cannot decide if regionalism flies in the face of a belief of the universality of human rights.

Hopefully my beliefs will crystallise in the not too distant future, or I will decide that the contradictions are not fatal.

Durios.....

I have been most remiss in blogging lately. I've been in more of an "experience" mode than a "reflection" mode.

One thing that caught my eye a couple of weeks ago in HK was a yellow package of cookies. Now if any of you know me well, you'll know I am a cookie fiend and even got grounded in middle school for sneaking cookies from the kitchen and stashing them under my bed to eat while reading books late at night from the comfort of my sheets. However, as undiscerning as I tend to be about cookies, I cannot decide if this yellow package of cookies is worth trying. You see, they are Durios. Much like Oreos, Durios are sandwich cookies with a creamy filling. Only instead of that uniquely-flavored white Oreo filling, Durio cookies flank durian flavored creme.

I pride myself on being an adventurous eater and once even ate a fried scorpian on a stick in Beijing. But durian sandwich cookies, masking themselves as Oreo wannabes may just go too far for even me. But you say...it's only a cookie? Well you see my memories of durian started in grade school in Indonesia. First came the tshirts sported by 10-year old classmates from Singapore with the slogan "Singapore is a F$NE city" and one of the fines included bringing a durian into subway cars for fear some tiny lady would drop the scorned fruit and the odor would noxiously waft throughout the car. Then, as a child in 4th grade my classmates and I studied "things from Indonesia" (handy b/c we were all living in Indonesia) and my mom offered to help with "fruit day". She and I went out to the markets and collected starfruit, dragon fruit, rambutans, jeruk bali (think giant grapefruit), mangos, jackfruit, and......DURIAN. When my mom cracked that fruit open in our classroom, we all ran for the door. I would have rather stuck my nose in my gym shoe than have to continue working in that room with the durian smell.

So the question of the moment is: am I finally over my durian phobia? I have many friends that adore the stinky fruit, shamelessy eating it in the form of popcicles, freezed dried slices, hard candy, and right from the spiky rind. If so many others can get over the smell, why can't I.

Will the cookies smell like durian?

Stay tuned for the post-taste-testing sentiments.

Like an old friend some things never change.

3 years and 3 months. It has been three years and 3 months since I last posted anything to this blog. A return year to China has prompted me to dust off the old passwords, look for the defibrillator paddles and see if electricity can prod anything of substance out of documenting a year in Hong Kong. Three years wiser, a little tanner and a post-graduate degree to boot, I return to China for a final year of education ..... yet another post-graduate degree, or will life's experiences in Asia educate me more than any professor will ever do?

Goals for the year:

(1) Return in July with a job that I feel strongly about

(2) Brush up on my Chinese language skills (translation: relearn)

(3) Be open to any and all experiences that may cross my path and seek out those experiences that will enrich my life.

(4) Be brave.

There is a certain amount of trepidation swirling around in my brain, but I hope that will be quickly replaced with confidence and a renewed sense of adventure when I set foot back on the Asian continent.

For the next 12 months I will be more or less studying human rights law from all possible angles: national interpretations, international understanding of the phrase, impact on refugees, historical context ..... the list goes on. What will I do with all of this knowledge? I'm open to ideas if you want to leave any. All I can hope for is that all I've learned in my short life can be used for the betterment of the world and that the world might be a little bit of a better place when I leave it as compared to when I entered it.

As I sit here in the Vancouver airport awaiting my lengthy cross of the Pacific, I find myself already feeling as if I am in China. I am certainly already the minority and English is not the language of choice. I almost feel at home; ironic is that feeling where "at home" is somewhere between fitting in and being totally out of place, that awkward position where the heart feels at peace but others question how you could be happy somewhere so "foreign". Haha, I guess that just reinforces how much I like China and Chinese people. I think I'm headed to the right place.

I had to get a new passport for this journey b/c my old one expires next July and the HK immigration department did not want to issue me a 12 month visa on a passport that was not going to be valid for 12 months. The pristine new passport got a stamp from Canada today and it is no longer empty. While it does not have the 25 pages of Chinese immigration stamps pressed every-which direction one on top of the other from previous trips to the continent, I'm confident that many exciting journeys will be documented within the pages of the new passport.

Welcome back blog......let the new adventures unfold forthwith.

doctor, teacher, policeman and......Mrs. Claus?

Colleen from Junior 1 Class 8 made my day today. During her oral exam with me she answered the question "What jobs do you think are most important in the world today?" with "Scientist, Doctor and Mrs. Claus." Now you might find this quite unmiraculous....but when I've heard 300 students say "doctor, teacher and policeman"....mrs. Claus becomes quite wonderful. Colleen liked Mrs. Claus because her primary school teacher asked her to dress up as Mr. Claus' wife when she was 8 years old and she liked wearing the white hair and thought it was important the Mrs. Claus be a good cook to keep Mr. Claus looking fat so his suit of red would fit. Hahha.

Ewww Bugs and Yummmm Zongzi

It's raining....again.

I have bed bugs, or dust mites or some other random invisible bug that bites in a series of three in my room and my school thinks that a can of Raid will solve the problem. I yelled and they're working on an alternative solution; until then I am staying with Andy and Barbara at their apartment across from school. My mom was nice enough to remind me that any and all of the above insects can carry Hepatitis B....awesome.

My contact teacher told me air out my bedding in the sun....convenient as it hasn't been sunny here in 13 days. I also read somewhere that you need to wash linens in 100+ degree water to kill the insects and then dry them in a dryer. That kind of thing just doens't fly here.....washing machine works on cold water only and my dryer....it's a metal pole on the balcony...quite novel, hanging up washing.

Exams are going good with the kiddos.....some of them really surprised me and prepared well. Perhaps my threat of an F scared them. I told each class that if they walk out to their exam and say "Uhhhhhh Ms. Nelson, I uhhhh don't know uhhhh what to say," then I will respond with "Uhhhh Snoopy (Light, High, Cornelia, Fish, K, No Name #1, No Name #7, etc) I'll uhhhh just uhh give you an F." They all laughed and seemed to remember to prepare something.

I'm going to miss my Chinese tutor....I'm just going to have to hang out in LA's chinatown this fall. However I was shocked and saddened to find out during my visit to CA last spring that the chefs in the kitchen in Chinatown that make jiaozi are Mexicans.....resourcing, outsourcing, alternasourcing everywhere!

The Dragonboat festival is today, but the big races are in Shatin in HK on Saturday; I'm thinking of going. I've been eating lots of zongzi here lately in deference to the holiday. It's a treat of glutenous rice and sometimes meat and sometimes sweet, wrapped in a triangular shape inside of a bamboo leaf and then steamed....yum.

I got the photobook/brochures of the mattress company I lent my face to earlier in the spring. They aren't too bad....tooo much makeup, frumpy clothes and the proclivity for choosing the worst photos to stick on the cover were all part of the finished product...but hey....who is ever going to really see it?

Does that mean I've been in China too long?

The calendar on my wall indicates that I've got under three weeks left in China which in reality translates into increasingly busy days trying to get in "one last time" of just about everything around here. In addition, since I have left souvenir shopping to the very end, I find myself busy scouring shops and markets for unique presents to bring family and friends back from this great nation. This also means that my luggage accumulation is becoming somewhat substanial....ooops.

It would seem that my kiddos are getting sad that I am leaving, for the most part. I've had some criers, some asking for my phone number so they can call me in the states and some that are even cuter. We studied time capsules this week in class and I showed them ten or so things I would put in "Ms. Nelson's" time capsule (truly important things like a passport, peanut butter and M&Ms) and then asked them to make a list of the contents of their own time capsule. One kid said, "and last I would put Ms Nelson in my time capsule and bury it in the school garden so she will not leave us." They're super great....sometimes. Then I finished the week with a class who is usually my favourite, but this week 13 out of the 30 students were missing....they ditched my class to stay with Mr. Bowdoin's half of the class to watch movies. I was really angry, plus I was explaining the exam format for next week, so they missed out. We'll see how they do next week. The annoying part is that they have the best English of any Junior class and so even without studying I am sure they will still get close to full marks.

I am currently questioning whether or not I have been in China too long, b/c my gross-out factor is reaching an all new threshold. I met a bunch of friends for Indian food last night after I spent the afternoon bargaining for pearls and pashminas (I got exact copies of necklaces that anthrolpologie is selling for $298, for the insane price of $8....now who in the US is pocketing all that profit). So we did dinner....yum yum arabic salad, palak paneer and chicken tikka and as we're finishing a cockroach scurries across the table. One of my friends screams, but the other 7 at the table make a motion to kill or corner it without the extra blink of an eye. I smush him with a napkin and we continue the evening. However, he revives himself and starts his table scamper again, Meagan then traps him under an ash tray and we finish dinner and leave. Later this same evening I'm on a 2 hour bus ride (50 cents) with 4 other pengyoumen and cockroaches are coming out of the window jam in force and I'm just sitting there watching them and squashing them as they approach striking distance. Now, someone back me up on this....that's gross right? To not be bothered by a roach army? These last two weeks have been the beginning of the real feel of rainy season......it has rained every day for the last 9 days. And by "rained" I do not mean a once a day and then clearing in the afternoon type of situation. I mean where it rains and pours all day and all night long. The slick pavement has caused all sorts of unfortunate situations as well. I have wiped out in front of the school guard house twice in 5 days as well as my finest moment which resulted in me having to go to class pulling twigs and bark out of my hair. To clarify on the last point, it was raining quite hard last wednesday so I thought i would be smart that day and wear sneakers with my dress to class (however unattractive that visual may be, the thought of falling again was even more grim to me). As I'm walking across the tile and granite quad (totally logical building materials, yes?) I felt my foot begin to slide and then I was sort of doing a Saturday Night Fever type boogie in attempt to regain my footing, but before I knew it, my umbrella flew out of my hand and I slipped and slid into the school flower bed (hence the twigs and bark). The upside of the situation, the students were really nice to me.

I've got one class now that wont speak English to me....I guess it's good that it took them a year to figure out I understand them, but it really hampers the teaching of English now.

I started text-messaging my Chinese teaching colleagues in Chinese recently instead of using English and boy....I've made like 100 new friends. Now all of the teachers who don't know English want to send me messages and be my friend. Perfect, three weeks left and now everyone is pleasant as pie :-)

I'm going to miss it here. As odd as it seems and as fatigued as I am sometimes with China, I fit in here. I love it here; I have to come back. But.....I am jumping out of my pants with anticipation for law school; reason enough to spend three/four years in Southern California.

"No school madam....the Typhoon...it kuai daole (comes soon)"

As a little girl in Jakarta I remember leaving school early and not returning for a number of days because of bomb threats. One time a real bomb was even delivered to the US Ambassador’s house and school was dismissed for almost a week. As a third grader, these impromptu holidays were amazing as I really had no grasp of the concept of being sent home because someone had called claiming to have planted a bomb at an international school with 2000 kids on campus. Even the bomb-sniffing dogs that darted amongst students as they piled on buses headed for home at 9:30 in the morning didn’t phase me.
Well today I can add a new kind of “day-off” to the repertoire that formerly consisted of snow days (in Dallas this was really more of a “threat of snow and perhaps a bit of ice” day) and bomb-scare days…….today is “typhoon day.” Apparently Tai Feng (Typhoon in chinese) Pearl is swirling her way between HK and Taiwan at this very moment aiming to smack into Guangdong province (where I live) this evening. I had heard some hoopla from teachers and in the newspapers here, but didn’t really take it seriously especially not to the extent of school cancellation because lets face it, Chinese kids go to school 7 days a week now, when are they going to make up this day (possibly 2 days) of school? I got up this morning and as I brushed my teeth and got ready for my 8am class I heard the headmaster over the loudspeaker and despite my diligent efforts at Chinese I continue to have a fiercely difficult time understanding anyone speaking Chinese over a loudspeaker….it gets really garbled. What I did catch were snippets of going home, safety, typhoon this evening etc. didn’t catch the “class is over now” part apparently. I head to class and my kiddos are sitting in the dark with the head teacher in the front of the class. A few words exchanged in Chinese (much to her surprise….apparently word does NOT travel around school that I speak Chinese….but that’s good though, only a few classes know that and the rest diligently speak English to me all the time instead of a steady stream of Chinglish just b/c they are lazy and know I understand) and I learned that class was cancelled. It’s all very strange to me. The storm isn’t supposed to come until after 8 tonight, I walked around my neighborhood this morning and it was truly business as usual at every store. I suppose time will tell as to whether or not it was worth sending the kids home or not. All I can say is that the administration will make me really mad if they try to get me to make up the missed classes on Saturday and Sunday this weekend, b/c my 3 close friends and I have planned a birthday (mine)/engagement bachelorette (not mine) outing to Macau for those two days. We want to see the gardens, architecture and eat Portuguese cuisine…..not visit the caninedrome (dog races), formula one racetrack, or the casinos.
In other news, I met a really interesting fellow last week. I went with my friend Andy to teach an English Corner lecture at the University here in the city and I happened to meet the university’s president (a good friend of Andys). But…he is not just a university president, he is also the equivalent of a Senator for Guangdong Province and……he’s a world champion Scrabble player. Yes that is right….world champion, apparently there are competitions on a scale greater that your kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon. He has this idea that he can further English education at the university level by teaching students to play Scrabble. If not for the typhoon, Andy, his wife and I were going to head out to the university tonight and Scrabble it up with the English students.
I had the most wonderful holiday in Beijing at the beginning of this month. At the start of the holiday I was ready to admit that I was ready to go back to America. But after a week in Beijing with my good friend Tammy, I have now changed my jig…..I don’t want to leave here. There is so much China has to offer and while I don’t think I will return to live in Shenzhen, I certainly want to come back and live somewhere in China (hopefully Beijing, Shanghai or HK, but Kunming where all the NGOs work out of is also wonderful). After talking with the University Pres, Ben, for awhile I felt that there really is a place for me here. He asked me what kind of law I was going back to the states to pursue and to be completely honest, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to tell him about aspirations for practicing human rights law in China, but I was feeling sure of myself that day and so I told him. He laughed and then said that would be a good job for me. He said that there are many people who know a lot about China, and conversely many people that know a lot about America, but very few that understand both and can speak both languages. But he seemed to think that I did and thought that people who understand both sides can do a lot more good.
Writing about leaving China reminded me of a funny episode in Beijing. Tammy and her friend Kevin and I were hanging out downtown and we decided we wanted Korean food for dinner (Kevin and Tammy are originally from Korea). Well Tammy decides that we need to check out this North Korean Restaurant in Wanjing (just northeast of downtown Beijing). The place is one of two restaurants owned by the North Korean government outside of their country and whenever gov’t officials from NKorea head over to Beijing, they eat there…even Mr Kim Jung Il. The fuwuyuan are brought in from North Korea as well. The food was wonderful and not expensive…the ambience was completely over the top and the evening ended with a 4-woman North Korean “rock band” belting out Korean tunes while wearing sparkly green tops. In the middle of the meal Tammy and I felt compelled to make a little small talk with the fuwuyuan and turns out they don’t stay in China too long, the gov’t keeps sending over new servers every few months, and…..I was the only waiguoren (foreigner from western country) that had been in there in months. That led me to think for a moment that perhaps CIA peoples were camped out in the apt. complex across the street, seeing what kind of rifraf came and went in the restaurant and that would make them suspect me as a spy or something, haha. Hmmm, we’ll see if the US wants me back in a month when I attempt to return via LA. Also, in the middle of dinner Kevin’s mum called on his cell, from NJ to see how he was doing. When he told her he was in a NKorean restaurant, boy she gave him quite an earful. She told him not to go the bathroom alone otherwise someone might bang him over the head with a pot and take him as a prisoner back to NKorea. We really had our wild imaginations going that evening.
I am in the middle of reading an excellent book at the moment called “My Country and My People” by Lin Yu Tang (Last name is Lin, in Chinese the last name goes first). I was written in the 1930s but does much to explain why China and the Chinese are the way they are. It got a lot of criticism in China when it was first published b/c it did point out elements of Chinese culture that were perhaps slightly unfavorable but he defended his work by saying that he could criticize b/c he still had immense faith in his culture. I strongly recommend it.
For some reason I’ve only recently put my college classes on China to use in debunking why things in this country are done is such a gosh-darn illogical manner. Then I remembered that the President (Hu Jintao until 2012) is the head of the Communist Party as well as the government, which would be kind of like having the head of the church in the US be president for ten years. While people argue that this really isn’t an issue b/c gov’t postings are open to people not in the Party, the reality is that the Party is indelibly intertwined with every element of the gov’t. What is even more unique is that for every post in the gov’t there an equal ‘shadow post’ in the Party….a behind the scenes fella. Then what becomes even more astonishing is that a Party member with a lower ranking than a gov’t official of a particular province, prefecture etc. will always outrank the gov’t officer despite the officer having a technically ‘higher’ post. Thus education and rising in gov’t ranks is not terribly important; it remains that Party affiliation is the most prevalent marking of power.

Subway and Sandstorms

It's May 1st and that means that it is the start of the 7-day Labour day holiday here in China. My friendly, neighborhood Party friend (and by this I mean person working for the Communist Party and my school simultaneously, whose job it is to spy on my and report back to the government...making sure that I am not touting some negative information to students or something) sat down and had a meeting with me to tell me that the Party wants me to be safe over the holiday and to watch out for thieves. Her speech fell on deaf ears though b/c that's my daily life here.....making sure to be smarter than thieves...... otherwise I'll be down another Ipod and that would just be monumentally unfortunate.

I was having dinner in Shekou (where all the foreigners in the city seem to live, esp. those with children b/c the two International Schools are there) with some friends last week and was witness to the very reason that Americans have a terrible reputation as foreigners. We were finishing up at Subway when a boy of about 15 strolls in with a friend. He's on his cell phone practically yelling into the speaker that he is about to get a "free soda" and that he is "so thirsty he could drink all the soda in the store." He tears the phone away from his ear to tell the person behind the counter that he'd like a da (word for big in chinese) coke "give me a da coke now." The kid got the cup, filled it up, drank it down in one gulp while spilling soda out both sides of the cup and onto the floor and then repeated the disgusting act b/c according to him "We're in America if we're eating in Subway and that means FREE REFILLS." Then he yelled to his friend across the store that they should get going. But.....not before the final atrocious act. The kid sees that in Subway there is a sign that says "Baked Fresh Daily" and by this they are referring to the sandwich bread. He then goes on about how he loves the smell and taste of fresh bread. So instead of ordering a sandwish to taste said wonderful fresh bread like the rest of us patrons did in the restaurant....he reaches behind the counter to where the display breads are housed (a glass case of the 5 bread options that patrons can see and choose from ie not meant for eating) and picks up a loaf, takes a big bite out of it and leaves! In what universe are things like this ok to do? Jenny and Tim and I were thoroughly appalled!

The deluges that characterize southern China spring have finally arrived in full force, meaning that it rained for 48 hours straight this week. I happened to be downtown buying a carry on rolling suitcase (looks like a real Swiss-army suitcase, but I paid $16 for it....let's hope to gets me to and from Beijing and back to the US) and the case and the rain created an interesting trip home. It was rush-hour and I decided to wait for a bus that usually isn't as crowded as the main bus into my part of town. I stand under my umbrella trying to protect the suitcase and keep an eye out for the 311 on the road. Well I wait 50 minutes and no bus....not one 311. This is monumentally strange b/c during rush hour they come every 2-5 minutes. By this point i'm soaked b/c the sidewalks are flooded and then people entering and exiting buses are squeezing by with umbrellas and the run-off is getting my clothes all wet. I trudge down to the next stop and cram on an overcrowded 113 bus and head home. But oh the evening isn't over. Some little kid is eating a hamburger near me and crazy bus driver makes 1 of 90 sudden stops and the kid's burger flies from his hand and lands ketchup side up on....my skirt. Awesome. What a long evening.

My classes at school have been cut in half because the Junior 3's are now studying full time for their high school entrance exam, so I have a lot of free time during the day, but my evenings are still busy. I take chinese lessons two nights a week, tutor a corporate exec two nights a week and starting when I get back I am going to teach an English corner at Shenzhen University.

I'm heading up to Beijing tomorrow to see Tammy for a week and am very excited to be going back to my beloved Beijing. Though....I'm not so excited about the massive sandstorms the city has been suffereing from. 300,000 tonnes of sand from far western Xinjiang Autonomous Region 'fell' on the city on Monday two weeks ago! My friend said it looks like yellow swirling fertilizer in the air and forces daily dry-cleaning of work clothes if you're out walking in it for even a minute or two. You can blame deforestation for this problem; there aren't forests to prevent the sand from sweeping across the north of the country. Apparently the sand was seen as far east as Tokyo.

Keep your black cowboy boots and stripey underpants under wraps lady!

Time for catching up on a lack of loquaciousness in recent months. Last night, after classes were over and errands had been run, I found myself with an empty Friday evening. What better way to presumably fill such a chunk of time than with a movie or two for my local dvd family. I hadn’t been there in quite a time and so there were so many new films to choose from. I ended up with 5….A movie with Antonio Banderas where he plays a ballroom dancing teacher who teaches detention students in NY how to dance, Goal, The Pink Panther, Match Point…a Woody Allen film with Scarlett Johanassen, and Spanglish. I watched two last night…..the one with Antonio Banderas and Spanglish and I really liked both and I think part of the draw is that are movies that mum and I would love and Dad and Adam and any other male specimen would absolutely abhor.

After a Nyquil knock-out sleep I arose and went out for a run. 5 minutes into the run as I was going up a hill I hear “Kristen Kristen Kristen!” Now this is seriously peculiar seeing as no one who knows me as anything other than “Ms. Nelson” lives in my neighborhood. It was my friend Xiaosha and some of her teaching colleagues. They were going for their now weekly trek through the hills and mini-mountains of Shenzhen. Xiaosha thinks it will make her slim (she’s 45 and looks perfect to me, just FYI). Well she begs me to join them since our mutual friend Qingling couldn’t go this morning and she wanted a friend to talk to. I agree, thinking we will following the major road up the hill, go down by the reservoir and be done. Oh how I was wrong. We make a sharp right at off the beaten trail and don’t turn back from there. We climbed up steep orifices, walked under some serious sets of high tension wires skirting the side of the mountain, and went down near-90 degree drops by only holding on to trees. We ended up inside Fairy Lake Park after jumping down off a 15-foot ledge. Xiaosha and I spent some time tramping up and down the manicured hills of the park before we headed home. The park was beautiful; I had never been there before. It’s one of the main tourist attractions of the city and costs 20 kuai to get in. I have just been frequenting all of the free parks lately. However, because of our sneaky death-defying manner of trekking earlier….we ended up inside the parks gates without having to pay….we cheated ( and all I had to do was risk my life). It was a nice surprise for a Saturday morning.

I went down to the tailor today to pick up a shirt and a dress that had to be altered after the initial fitting. I am hoping to wear the dress to Easter church tomorrow, if the temp. Doesn’t continue to fall towards freezing (this is after 7 consecutive days of 80+ degree weather with 90%+ humidity). When I got to Molly’s shop there was a lady inside being loud and obnoxious and throwing clothes everywhere. She was there to pick up clothes as well, except she refused to put on the garments behind the cloth in the corner that is the makeshift dressing room. Instead she was taking skirts and pants on and off in front of a large glass window that 100s of people walk by every 5 minutes, not to mention the other tailors sitting outside their shops waiting for business that were very much distracted by an overly-fake-tanned foreigner in black cowboy boots and stripy underpants who could seriously benefit from a daily regiment of crunches. I took a breath and walked into this madness and told Molly’s son Tarly I was here to pick up two things and Miss Cowboy-boots proceeds to spit out to me that “I’m going to be awhile dear….sit down and wait awhile.” I coughed…ok. I sat outside for maybe 5 minutes and listened to the other tailors a) talk about me and b) talk about the crazy lady in the underpants in Molly’s shop and then Tarly came out and had my clothes to try on. Luckily they fit perfectly this time and there wasn’t a need for a refitting that would have cut into Miss Fake-and-bake’s private fitting time.

Alex Trebec...you are my hero

A Grab-bag week of events. Sometimes there are just those weeks in China that fly by with no real coherent thread of logic, but instead are driven by days filled with random moments and memories strung together. The utter randomness of life in Asia was a distinct characteristic of this particular week.

In order to properly contextualize the week of April 9-15,you must understand that in three weeks, during the first week in May, all students and workers (technically speaking) have a 7-day holiday….called Golden Week (7 days only…not 5 work days and two weekends; they make you work thru one of those weekends leaving 7, yes 7 days of holiday and not 9). This means that over that last month people that I know have been batting different destinations back and forth from India to Singapore and when it was all said and done, Bali seemed to be the preferred destination by the majority. Awesome, that’s the one place in the world that my mum and dad are vehemently opposed to me revisiting for the 6th or 7th time in my life because of the unstable political nature in Indonesia. Well, it seemed that all of my friends had decided to cash in a some great round-trip ticket/hotel in Bali deal and those who didn’t were planning on visiting the terracotta soldiers in Xi’an, something I had already done and didn’t really have a desire to return to see once again. Thus, I talked to people around here, both foreign and Chinese and asked them if they had to choose a place to go by themselves for 5 or 6 days, where would they go. The overwhelming answer was hands-down……Bangkok. Now I’ve been to Bangkok before, but I was in 5th grade and my overwhelming memory aside from the royal palace and a sampan ride was the butler who would bring Carly and I movies at night while we stayed in Bangkok’s Dusit Thani…..my first viewings of Showboat and Singing in the Rain were viewed during that week. Ostensibly I thought, hey maybe it’s time to return. Apparently it’s really easy to get around as a foreigner and things are really cheap….and (here’s a major draw)…..they’ve got banana pancakes served as 10 cent street food….who could pass up an opportunity like this? Additionally…..the Thai demeanor is terribly friendly and many many people speak English. Ok, so this is Tuesday that I’ve decided that I will mosey around Bangkok and N. Thailand for a week and I decide to not run this idea around mum and dad asking for permission to travel, but merely send them an email outlining my plans. Wellll……no more than 5 hours after this email was sent, I got a wake up phone call from mum telling me NOT to go. She claims I’ll be ‘stolen’ and sold into slavery! Then she tells me she’s conferred with other members of our extensive international friend contingency that we’ve developed over the years and everyone agrees that a female such as myself cannot go alone to Thailand. Then, no more than two hours after this wake up call, I go down to my classroom and check my email. Dad has been alerted by mum of my travel plans and from the oil fields in Shreveport decides to use his Treo to send me a message saying ‘ok Kristi, you’ve called our bluff….Bangkok is the WORST place in the world to go by yourself….we’ll let you go to Bali with friends.’ Ha….what a stir this has caused. By this time my opportunity to go to Bali cheaply has come and gone, so Wednesday rolls around and I’m still without a holiday destination. Mum is pushing Taiwan…b/c hey at least I speak the language. I finally decide to give my friend Tammy in Beijing a call and see if we can make our holiday plans mesh…and voila! After bouncing between Phuket (too expensive), Taipei (she’d been there), Cheju Island in SKorea (too expensive from HK) and Shanghai (I’ve been there)…..we settled on Beijng. I’m going to come up and see her, see some friends that I haven’t seen in two years, see some fellow Washu alums and just relax and have fun. The weather is beautiful in May in Beijing (think cherry blossoms in DC kind of weather).

Alright, destination Beijing leads me to my next interesting moment of the week. I have two travel agents that I work with, one in HK and one in SZ. When I decided on Beijing I emailed both and asked for price quotes. Both were roughly the same, except it costs way more for me to get to the HK airport and if I were to fly from HK I would end up going through customs 8 times in 7 days (1. leave Shenzhen 2. walk over stinky sewage moat and enter via HK customs 3. go through customs at HK airport as I head to Beijing 4. Upon arriving at Capital Airport go through customs again….repeat in reverse on the way home) and I just don’t really have the need for 24 more passport stamps…..so not worth it. That means that my Chinese travel agent friend, Jackson, who works downtown got my business this week. He was so funny, after I emailed him he responded with an email that had some sort of goofy stationary template that that said “I’ve missed you” and had hugging caterpillars on it. In his note he said that he was very glad I emailed him and that he’d tried to contact me various times since the end of lunar new year (I moved apt). Jackson was able to get me a decent deal and I told him I’d be downtown to pick up the tickets on Friday afternoon. I received a confirmation email…this time on “I’m so excited” stationary with smiling daisies on it. At the end of it he asked me ‘for a favour.’ He wanted to know if I would be willing to take a photo with all the people in his travel agency. Ok…kinda weird, but whatever. I head down to Tehang Air Company today and as soon as I step through the door the man at the front desk yells in Chinese “Jackson your foreign friend is here” and Jackson come sprinting out and shoots front-desk man a death-ray laser eye look and says, “she understands you.” Then as we walk back to his office to get the tickets he reminds all 20 people in the office to put on their uniform jackets…kinda strange? After I pay for my tickets and get all the business squared away, Jackson positions everyone in the office (all twenty of them) around me, in front of the company sign. One minion-like man had the job of standing with one foot in the hall, one in the bathroom in order to take the picture. We took 5 or 6 and everyone at the office looked so happy. Nothing like a semi-mandatory photo-op in order to get tickets to Beijing.

I had fun teaching all of my classes this week and that is something I don’t think I’ve ever said in China. We played Jeopardy; thank you Alex Trebec. Barbara had downloaded a PowerPoint template for Jeopardy and she let me copy it and I made a couple easy ones, then one about jobs (because last week’s titanic lesson focused on listing many different jobs), one about China, and one about Arts and Humanities. We went over forming questions and I told them that you couldn’t get points unless you spoke in question form. We played boys v. girls and goodness it got really competitive in some classes….almost too competitive. There were some close calls where boys and girls almost got a chair in the face (no worries….they’re childsize chairs without sharp edges). I also learned something with my China Jeopardy. What is the tallest mountain in the world? Anyone from America or any other English-speaking country would undoubtedly say Mount Everest. Well there is another accepted English name for it…. Qomolangma Feng. Heated arguments about this in various classes that resulted in having to look up the truth on the internet. In one class I got some funny answers during the Jobs Jeopardy. The clue was “I work in a bakery and I bake bread and make cakes.” One student came up with “What is a Caker?” …the whole class chuckled. Then there was a set of questions regarding clothing and the clue was “If I work outside and my hands are cold, I put these on to keep them warm.” This one kid swore up and down that “What are Sloves?” was correct and when he found out that “Gloves” was actually the correct answer….he turned a funny sort of purplish colour. By the last class today (Friday) my voice was gone. I’ve caught the cold that’s wafting through school and between the weather change and yelling over the dim of 16 classes of 50+ students, I was bound to get sick with something.

….That however was not going to keep me away from Andy and Barbara’s on Thursday night. They invited me and 4 other people they work and tutor with over for a Western dinner at their place. 7 of us managed to fit around a table that’s snug for 4. They really, truly outdid themselves. Barbara made deviled eggs for appetizers (lovely thought, but will someone sometime please explain to me what is so gosh-darn great about deviled eggs….they smell kinda funny and really to me are only good for maybe egging someone’s….envision that smell on an enemy’s car). Dinner, ah, yum yum. We had ribs, steak fillets, potatoes au gratin, asparagus, salad, and mushrooms. Then for dessert we had cherry pie. I thought I died and went to heaven. I hadn’t eaten like that since mum and I were in New Zealand months ago. There was a really nice couple there, the husband works at the Training Center at school here on Saturday and his wife is a pediatric doctor at one of the hospitals downtown. They are both quite witty and have excellent English. Jack asked me about where I was born and when I said Alaska, he instantly said….’oh that’s the states where don’t forget me’s grow. I chuckled and said forget me nots. I think he knows more about Alaska than I do. I helped Barbara clean and clear, just because it was a lot of dishes and no one else was helping (I don’t think that’s custom here) and today she told me I was the best dinner guest ever and that I have to come over for dinner more often. Andy cooked the steaks medium and they were really so good, but Anna made a funny comment about them. She said “Now Andy, these steaks are half cooked, yes?” I suppose literally speaking they are half-cooked, but how often would you walk into a Morton’s and say “Hey…give me a half-cooked fillet please”

I met an old man in the park on Tuesday….well no, I got hunted down by a nice old man in the park on Tuesday. I was walking through the park after my run and smiled and two cute little boys and they waved and then I waved back. Then according to me….the moment was over and I walked on. Well there was this old man teaching them “Wushu” or martial arts and the kids were no longer paying attention to him, they were just sort of running wild. About ten minutes later as I’m leaving the park, this Mercedes van rolls up and the old man jumps out and starts talking to me in Chinese…It’s nice not to be presumed an idiot all the time. He asks me if I would like to take Wushu lessons with those boys on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays from him. We chatted for a bit and it was decided that I would come watch on Sunday (I have no intention of being shown-up by two 5 year olds who aren’t even 1.5 meters tall collectively, but I don’t mind watching).

I’m having a little respect problem with my male students lately in Junior 3. Ever since I moved onto campus they’ve been kind of hard to handle. In class they are marginally polite, but outside…..I get a lot of “Hey sexy” and “Hey pretty lady” and it’s really discomforting. I’ve explained in class a number of times that it’s not polite to say these things, but none of that seems to have stuck. Additionally I caught two boys boring holes in their notebooks so that they could be placed in front of their camera phones to take photos of me during class. Honestly upon going to America in Juen, I will NOT miss anything remotely like that. It’ll be nice to walk around in the states for days at a time without turning a single head….whereas here….it happens every 5 seconds or so b/c I’m a laowai (friendly foreigner) or waiguoren (foreigner) or waijiao (foreign teacher).

Only room for 7

Ten weeks from yesterday…I’ll be back in the United States of America. It seems uncanny that 9 months have passed already and that Easter is next weekend. However, seeing as religion is still somewhat of a taboo issue to speak of publicly, not much will be happening in the way of Easter festivities. That being said recent weeks have not been devoid of entertainment.

This past week I taught a lesson on the Titanic. This was a direct result of a student asking me if we could view the movie Titanic during oral English Class. I had to say no based on two reasons, one being that the movie is almost three hours long and would take up almost all of the rest of class time this term to watch, and two, there are scenes of nudity and suggestive sexual nature that aren’t appropriate to view at school. However, I liked the idea of the Titanic, so I did a little research, found out when it sank, how many people were on board, how many survived and what kinds of people were on board and voila…..a lesson for 12 classes. I gave the students some info regarding the ship, and we worked on how to say fractions in English by deciding what percentage of people survived the shipwreck. Then I asked them for a list of all the jobs they knew how to say in English. This list varied in length and creativity depending on the level of English in the class, but they usually came up with about 30….the most interesting of the week being 1) Churchman 2) Terrorist 3) Counterterrorist 3) Pig-feeder 4)Toilet Cleaner 5) Spy and 6) Thief. The usual doctor, lawyer, teacher etc were in there and I taught them some new professions such as architect, construction worker, and president. Then I showed the class a slide of a lifeboat and said that there were only 7 places in the last lifeboat on the Titanic and there were 30+ people left having those 30+ professions that they previously came up with. It was their job to come up with the 7 most important to save and give me reasons why. With the sporty boys, the famous basketball player was always the first one to be saved. In one class a group came up with saving a model b/c she would be ‘light’ and then they could take someone heavy in the boat and eat him first. Then in one class the students knew the word butcher and asked that the butcher and headmaster be in the lifeboat so that the butcher could cut the headmaster up into pieces (oddly enough I got this response 5 times this week…people really don’t like the headmaster). One group said to save the churchman so he could talk to God and ask for help…how righteous. Then there were the ‘cool’ boys who learned that adding ‘ess’ to most jobs made it a specifically female job, so they wanted to save the waitress, the stewardess, the model, the wizardess (yes that’s the female version of wiazard), the butcheress, the hostess, policewoman and actress. They wanted everyone that was saved to be female and ‘good to look at.’

I finally got an office at school …..with 9 weeks left of school. It’s on the 5th floor, has a great view of the school, a water cooler with no water bottle and no computer. If they ever managed to put in a computer, I’ll spend some time up there, otherwise it’s merely an extra key on my keyring.

My Chinese friend Abby got me a tutoring job downtown for this month. Her boss is going to America in May and wants to improve her English. It’s nice to teach someone who really wants to learn, versus kids who verbally assault you in Cantonese and you cannot do anything about it.

It’s amazing how my mood here is dictated so much by the weather. On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday the weather was beautiful and walking to tutoring (mine in Chinese or Ella’s in English) was pleasant and I was able to run in the park by the reservoir and see all my usual ‘friends’. There is the man who rides his yellow bike around this circular path for 45 minutes everyday around 5pm. Then there is the cheeriest lady who carries an open umbrella (rain or shine), a plastic bag with her shoes in it, and proceeds to walk the whole of the park paths backwards and barefoot. There is the posse of old men who sit at the lake and fish all day long and catch heaps and heaps of fish and keep them in this tank and then at 5pm everyday they toss them back in so they can repeat the same action again tomorrow. There’s the woman who sits in the ticket booth at the entrance of the bonsai garden all day long, smiling and I honestly don’t know how she can do it….no one ever pays the 10 yuan to get in. On the weekend there is a man who always plays tennis with himself in the parking lot using a long piece of elastic tethered to his racket and the ball and there are also an uncountable number of fan dancing groups. Awesome. However the last four days it has rained. It’s depressing, and slippery. My quality of life takes a nosedive on rainy days.

I’ve got a holiday coming the first week in May. In China it’s called Golden Week. All of my good friends are going on a cheap package trip to Bali, but I’ve been discouraged by the higher Nelson powers that be not to go….plus I’ve been there 6 times. So, that leaves me with few other options. But I rang up a friend in Beijing and I think the two of us might be bound for Thailand….Phuket to be exact to have a similar beachy-type holiday. Lack of funds and the expensive nature of Japan have finally ruled out my thoughts for Tokyo and Osaka. I think, on recommendation by Jenny, that I will go with maybe 3 or 4 other friends to Macau for my birthday. I think that could be a lot of fun. Some fellow male teachers are there this weekend doing a farewell to one of the guys because he is heading back to the states the beginning of next week. They all have had suits made at the train station and wanted an excuse to wear them. The plan was to go to the casinos in Macau all decked out. Ha, as if they have any money to spend. This week seems to be a week of leavers. I think 4 or 5 more people will leave before the 15th of April.