Perspective.

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

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


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


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

The elusive succinct and neutral application.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A community for surviving....barely.

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

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


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





.
.....this still happens.





 Check out other photos from this series.


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


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


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


Where is your community? 

The reluctant leader.

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

Washington D.C., 28 August 1963:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have a dream today.

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

I have a dream today.

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

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

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

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

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

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

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

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

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

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

The beauty of Culture.

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

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

Let's make the world beautiful

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

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

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

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


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


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

It happens even where freedom and opportunity are coveted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair weather weather lover.

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

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

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

An unjustified reason not to feel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.