Category Archives: International

I confess: I only just looked at the death toll in Burma and am horrified. I did not expect it to be at least 22 000 and with the possibility of being as high as 80 to 100 000. I honestly wasn’t thinking at all.

After trawling through some different news sites, though, I haven’t got an answer to the question I really want to know: How can I help? Barring the aid workers issue, what can I do? I’m not sure if this is due to different geographical location, but when the Boxing Day tsunami hit Thailand, there was a lot of local coverage on what citizens could do to help, the like of which I can’t find just now.

Despite living in Canada for some eight or nine months now, I still sometimes get thrown off by the switches. To switch on a light or whatever, you flick the switch upwards. Sounds like a no-brainer, huh? I got the hang of my room after a while and didn’t think twice. Then I moved and had to rediscover how switches are up for “on” and down for “off.” I get confused by the occasional switch that has been installed incorrectly and goes the other way — the wrong way around, I guess.

I was flicking switches on and off so happily in the UK that I realised something was different and had to check. And yes, HK switches are modelled after the UK after all: you flick down if you want to switch something on and up if you want to switch something off. It made me laugh — I wonder how many born-and-bred Canadians are having trouble with the switches right now? I know a lot are having trouble remembering which side of the road to look at first when crossing; it’s actually a little dangerous when people get off the coach and hang around the side of the road they think no one is going to come and then have a coach honk at them. It’s also dangerous when people assume pedestrians have right-of-way. I think the safest thing in the world is to always assume that pedestrians don’t have right-of-way unless told otherwise. One of my friends, when heading back towards the coach/bus to get on, started going towards the wrong side while I kept walking — because in North America, you get on the right-hand side and in the UK, you get on the left-hand side. It’s funny to see how deeply enculturated we all are. I bet I’m going to take a couple of days to get used to Vancouver again when I get back.

It’s too easy—and understandable—to go to extremes. Apparently, some angered Chinese people are now hunting after protesters.

Seriously, this is not the way to go. People are entitled to their own opinions, okay? This is exactly what you complain about—being harassed by people who disagree with you—and then you harass them back in a very big way. No. No. No.

Yes, I know that people are liable to lash out when they’re feeling besieged. I think everyone should read those interpersonal relationship guides at one point or another—you know: “How to Use Non-Accusatory Words to Get What You Want Because It’s So Much easier to Convince Someone of Your Point of View When They’re Not Emotionally Attached to Whatever’s Being Said.” But just because people haven’t learned the art isn’t a justification for hurting them in return.

I realise that this post is coming quite soon after my previous one. If you’re wondering, I’m not being mercurial. I don’t think this is a good way to react at all; it achieves nothing constructive whatsoever and causes more harm than anything else.

Right now, I’m devouring global news and am remembering why I never read the news regularly. I go through stages of diligently reading the daily paper, and then long periods of not reading anything at all. The news depresses me. It makes me despair of ourselves. When it gets particularly bad, I become an emotional rag and stop reading for a while again. This has been going on for years. It doesn’t get any easier.

But I can live with it being hard a little better now. Wasn’t it Stephen Lewis who said—forgive me, I’m going to mess it up—something along the lines of:

“Stay angry. Be angry, and do something about it. Because what would be worse is for you to become emotionless, to stop being angry, to stop caring, to stop doing anything at all because you think nothing can be done.”

This is too much.

Are our opinions really so wrong and worthless?

Someone decided to let me know, the other day, how messed up they think China is. They weren’t even telling me this because they wanted to have a discussion about it; they just wanted me to know. Is it really so hard to be respectful of someone else’s heritage? I don’t want people to make generalisations or to stereotype my country. I never, ever said it was perfect, but it’s still home. It’s where I’m from, it’s where my whole family and the people I care most about are from.

The government is not the same as the people, but it is still very much a part of the country. It’s at least a part of Chinese history and culture, whether we like it or not. It’s not a historical or political anomaly that can be ignored or criticised as an entirely different entity. It affects millions of lives on a daily basis. People care very, very much about what happens within and without. Not everything it does is wrong. Not everyone shares the western viewpoint, and a different viewpoint can be equally valid—is this so hard to accept?

I had a friend (now elsewhere in Canada) say how someone went up to her just to say what a mess China is making, and because my friend disagreed, that someone could not believe it and thought worse of her for it. Did that someone even ask why my friend thought that way? Did the person who implied to me that my country sucks even want to know how I feel about it? I wish so much. No one even asks why it’s like this; they just assume we feel the same, or that we at least should.

To have people exhibit this much disdain for a place so important to me is very painful. Straight-out hating would be easier to deal with. What happened to multicultural, globally-sensitive citizens? What happened to just being human and recognising others as people with feelings and values as well?

I don’t wish to apologise for talking about this so frequently anymore. I don’t like this topic, but it’s harder still not to say something when, in person, very few listen. Why did I ever feel the need to apologise in the first place? I didn’t want to bombard you with political rants. But I’m being bombarded online, offline, in the media, in person. What difference does it make whether I discuss this or not?