Category Archives: International

Political apathy

Posted on 18 January 2008 | 1 comment

For someone who is very unpolitical, even I have felt the impact of AMS elections: one person made a speech in a class, I heard a couple of introductory speeches while eating lunch in the SUB, and most tellingly, I’ve received a few invitations to join Facebook groups voting for their favourite representatives.

Turning them all down made me question, perhaps for the first time, why I am so politically apathetic in not only the AMS, but HK and Canadian politics as well.

Actually, I can answer the one about Canada. I know nothing about Canadian politics beyond who the current Prime Minister is, and that takes me five to ten seconds to recall at any given time. I can name the President and Premier of China much faster. Like Canadian politics, I think it would be a step worse for me to vote randomly for people I don’t know than to just not know and to abstain from AMS elections altogether. Not that where I am is particularly sensible either. I should really know how things work.

Wherefore this political apathy? None of my family is political. None of my friends at home were. In fact, no one I knew in HK was actually political. Is this because we are rooted in being an ex-British colony when we didn’t have the vote? (One of those niceties that no one ever mentions when people criticise China for not allowing democracy in HK: Britain didn’t either.

Is it because we don’t have universal suffrage right now? The current system is to vote for representatives for your district and/or profession/industry, and these representatives will vote for the Chief Executive (who governs the city, and who reportedly has a higher salary than the US President, which is just ludicrous). I’m not sure how voting for legislators (LEGCO) works but it’s similar I think. People have been going on marches for “democracy” (i.e. universal suffrage) for a few years now. Of course, another one of those things which media (at least the main English broadsheet I read) stopped reporting on after the fashion for calling for universal suffrage came into being is the fact that when surveyed, the vast majority of the population doesn’t actually know how the HK political system works. It all makes me skeptical of whether people know what they are really demanding for when they go on democracy marches. In fact, people seem to be doing protests all the time now and they’re more often than not insignificantly small.

People went on another march when I was in HK over the break. Why? Because the Chinese government — and get this — has agreed to allow universal suffrage for the 2017 Chief Executive elections. But no, some people (politicians who want to have a pro-democratic reputation, perhaps) want to have universal suffrage for the 2012 Legco elections, so they had a little protest. Even though most people still don’t know how the system works. I dunno, but I always thought that democracy only works nicely when those who are voting are educated and well-informed about the system…

Still, I was delighted and surprised when I heard the news. I don’t think I expected the mainland government to be so supportive of universal suffrage so soon, just ten years after the original handover. It also efficiently squelches the previous raging (mostly foreign, I noticed) criticism that China would never allow universal suffrage/democracy. Teehee. I seem to have this streak of disliking other countries telling mine what to do. (Hey, I just discovered where I hold allegiance to!) But then again, how much would America like it if China started saying how they’re wrong and this this this is how things should be done?

1 Comment

Posted in AMS, International

On Being Pooped

Posted on 13 January 2008 | Comments Off on On Being Pooped

I am pooped. I kept trying to think of some other way to start this post but those words kept coming out of my fingers, so I won’t deny them. I am pooped in a very happy way.

Right now I’m doing six courses because the one course I want to be in but am not currently registered for — American lit — is full. I’m going along to it and watching the course seats online like a hawk. (I’ve even bookmarked the page and refresh it every so often.) Meanwhile, I’m still going to all of my five official courses just in case it doesn’t open up: it’s a wildly popular course and I’m fighting with ten other people to get in. I can’t drop the one course that I don’t want, otherwise my President’s Entrance Scholarship is void, and that is worse than not getting into American lit. I’ve never done American lit before and I have my heart set on it as there is just so much great literature I am missing out on.

Well, I only need to keep doing this for another week. Monday, January 21st is the last day for withdrawing from Term 2 courses without a ‘W’ (Withdrawal) standing, so if I can’t get in by then, I’ll just stick with my Linguistics class. Apart from the sheer work of keeping up with six classes — Miranda mentioned this before, but don’t do six courses if you can help it — I’m actually enjoying them very much. It’s nice to be doing subjects that you actually want to do and with good professors. While I take ratings on www.ratemyprofessors.ca with a grain of salt, it’s still nice to hunt down the profs with good reviews.

Last Thursday, I began volunteering with One-to-One Literacy, a children’s literacy programme based in elementary schools where volunteers read with struggling children on a one-to-one basis. My kids have a wide range of personalities and are all adorable. I’m planning what kinds of activities we can do to further their reading experiences. Since reading’s always been a favourite activity of mine, and since I like children a lot, I thought it would be a good idea to combine these two things and help children improve their literacy. Helping’s another thing I try to do. I found out about this organisation from a local opportunities fair that was in the SUB earlier last term. That’s another thing I encourage: make use of free information! You won’t use most of it, but it’s good to have a look around.

Yesterday, I went to the Student Leadership Conference and had a wonderful time. It is definitely one of the highlights of my first year at UBC thus far, and I highly recommend everyone to go next year. I know I will be going.

The presentation on Global Citizenship that I went to featured presenters covering homelessness, particularly in Canada, and the Darfur crisis. It was an amazing and personally much-needed experience to see passionate, idealistic speakers despite all the obstacles that they inevitably face.

One of the workshops I went to was on the topic of how to choose which activities to do from the wealth of opportunities that is available here at UBC. As anyone who keeps up with my blog knows, I joined something like nine or ten clubs last term and only stuck to two. Contrary to evidence, I’m usually the kind of person who sticks by her commitments. The problem at UBC is not whether you will find anything to do, but how you will decide just what to do, so that workshop was very helpful for me. The second was less so. It was slightly misleading when it said it would help people understand their passions and how to transform those into something you actually do. I didn’t enjoy that one very much.

Stephen Lewis’s speech made up for everything and more. I’m one of those people who teared up during his speech that Genevieve was talking about (and setting my friend off in the process): when he was talking about the femicide in the Eastern Congo, and the effect of AIDS in Africa — of children watching their mothers die from AIDS without understanding why, and their grandmothers having to raise scores of children in their old age, hoping to save and support them. Guilt wasn’t my predominant emotion, though, as that is a feeling that persists throughout my daily life because I’m so frequently reminded of how lazy I am of undoing my own ignorance. Without wanting to sound grandiose, I think grief is the closest word to how I felt: How can we do these things to each other? was the rhetorical question running through my head.

I don’t know.

I ended my evening by going with some friends to Richmond and ate at a Chinese restaurant (YAY!), before we went to someone’s house and played Monopoly. I’ve never finished a game of Monopoly before and am impressed I got so far into the game. I had to mortgage almost everything I owned, but I’ve never managed to even get to that point before, so I was content. (Then we remembered the busses don’t run all night and had to end suddenly in order to get back to UBC.)

So I am contentedly pooped.

Comments Off on On Being Pooped

Posted in Academic, Commuting, International, Involvement / Leadership, Recreation

Project Poppy

Posted on 9 November 2007 | 1 comment

It’s a new concept to me that many young people actually care about Remembrance Day and aren’t jaded, cynical individuals. So with that background, I’m torn between thinking that this is just another example of how different things are in Canada and the rest of the Western world, or if it’s partially a whole lot of teenagers jumping onto the bandwagon and turning this into a trend. Would it be too good to be true that every person who is joining this Facebook group is doing it out of a sincere belief in the importance of remembering and not because it’s a short-term, fun thing to be a part of?

Anyway, giving the benefit of the doubt, I wanted to talk about Project Poppy for another reason. (Facebook search the group to see it if this link doesn’t work for you.) Its aim is really extremely simple: they want 9 720 453 members on Facebook to change their display picture to one featuring a poppy by November 11th. Presumably this is as many people who died in WWI, although I’m not sure where they got such an exact figure.

Currently, with less than two days left, they have 38 384 members at the time of posting. They began on November 2nd, so the rate of joining is extremely high. They still need more than 9 million people to join to reach their goal, though. I’m doubtful that it will happen — are there even that many people on Facebook?

But you know what? I don’t think it matters if they don’t get their nearly 10 million strong members. It would be an incredible achievement and I hope that they will continue to grow (and faster) than they already have. But already they are making their point — does anyone not have at least one friend who has joined or heard of this group yet? (My friends, by reading this, are predestined to fall into the category of having heard of it.) Splashes of poppies can be seen everywhere if you crawl around Facebook for a while. And that is one of the greatest points that is being made: you begin to see the soldiers as individuals instead of figures.

Here is an individual with a poppy, representing one of the dead.

Here is another.

And another.

And another and another and another.

You know some of these people with poppies in their pictures. You know something about what makes them tick, about their family, their friends (definitely their friends with that useful button on Facebook), maybe something of their past, present, and dreams and aspirations. And though you may not personally know that stranger with a poppy in their picture too, they are a person regardless.

And that was only six people. The more people you see, the more you comprehend that the people — not just soldiers, but doctors, nurses, and others who worked at the front lines — who died were once living human beings. For this, I think the project will make an extremely worthwhile point.

1 Comment

Posted in International, Recreation

Poppies

Posted on 4 November 2007 | 2 comments

I feel like I am treading a very thin line.

Poppies are worn during November until the 11th to remember those who fell in wars, as a token of remembrance, said the person who gave me a poppy. To remember those who fought for freedom.

It’s always the last part that gets me. The part where you ask what it stands for.

I had a teacher in high school — one who had a great deal of compassion and humanity for others — who didn’t like how people often spoke about and wore poppies in a way that glorifies war. I’m afraid of this being a touchy point with many people who will disagree about it. I am not saying that people who disagree lack compassion; my point is, he didn’t. I remember at the time that I didn’t agree entirely with what he thought. You can wear a poppy with entire respect and regard for those who fell, while at the same time not agreeing that wars were fought in the name of freedom.  That’s the part I couldn’t always accept — that people fell for freedom.

Individuals, I think, often fought for freedom. A lot of people went to war and fought thinking of what was important to them, wanting to go back to a normal life where the things they care about can live in peace.

But I find it hard to believe that any war is fought for purely ideological reasons. Wars are fought for economic and political reasons. The three things are all linked together, but I honestly don’t believe that the ideology plays as big a part as the economics part, or the power part, for the politicians who declared war on each other in the first place. But publicly talking about economics and politics as reasons for going to war just doesn’t make as good propaganda as ideology.

It’s always the winners who get to write history. If anyone else had won any other war, we wouldn’t be the ones remembering the fallen now. This is why I get so uncomfortable when people even verge on the “us” against “them”, which is often what I feel when people start talking about freedom. “We” fought for freedom. “They” fought against it. The individuals in those other countries quite probably didn’t want to go to war either, but they were fighting for what they perhaps thought was right. It’s easy to say they’re wrong when you’re the victor, but the Allies — talking specifically about WWI now — were not as all-round good as I thought when I was little. The first time I learned that they went back on their word to another party (China, in this case, and later on, countries in the Middle East), and made compromises that created trouble and oppression for other people — I think I stopped believing in the winners being the right ones from then on.

What about the people in the other countries who died as well? I used to ask. Why aren’t we remembering them as well? I don’t want to wear a poppy to remember only the dead of one side, but to remember all the dead who had to die. The ones who didn’t like war, who didn’t want to go, who did it anyway for whatever reason partly because they had to, and for whatever reasons they found to keep them going. And a lot of people don’t differentiate. A lot of people wear a poppy for everyone. But a lot of people don’t, and don’t agree with me.

War is war is war and every side commits atrocities. No one is clean, not even the ones who claim they had no other option. Sometimes, there isn’t any other option, but that doesn’t make it the “good” one. Everyone loses in war. Every single one. Countries winning or losing doesn’t bring the dead back. It doesn’t stop people from crying. It doesn’t matter where the dead came from. They died before they needed to and we are the ones who did it. The loss of lives in war is our collective loss, for the whole of humanity, and to think otherwise — to think that it doesn’t matter if someone in another country is dead because they’re the enemy and somehow less human — is to lose something of our own humanity.

2 Comments

Posted in International

This should take you four minutes to read. I timed it.

Posted on 17 October 2007 | 3 comments

“Do you know what is happening in Darfur right now?” the girl at the STAND UBC booth asked me. I was gaily clubs-shopping that day.

For a moment, I wanted to say “yes”. Instincts do not like to admit ignorance, especially when you know that it is something important. “No,” I answered truthfully. The girl’s face fell, as I had half-expected it to, but more perhaps because I am not the only ignorant one out of many.

“Right,” she said. “This is the problem. There’s basically a genocide going on right now, almost as bad as the Holocaust, and no media attention is being given to it, so most people don’t know about it.”

I don’t know about you, but the first thing I thought about when she said “genocide going on right now” is not the Holocaust, but Rwanda. I don’t even know enough about Rwanda to claim knowledge of it at all, other than seeing a few clips and hearing bits and pieces — enough to feel shame. Shame for not knowing. Shame for humanity, that we let these things happen to each other. That we do these things to each other.

Genevive has just posted about Uganda. It is something I did not know anything about either. It doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to read, so please do.

In addition to that, Genevieve is not the only person who didn’t post on Blog Action Day. In my poor defence, I didn’t receive the email I expected — but that is poor, isn’t it? Yes. It should not have mattered. That will come along later.

In October 2005, I went to Cebu in the Philippines and saw street urchins. I saw people living in rubbish dumps. So much rubbish that you could not see the end of it, and they lived there. They had nowhere else to go.

Shinerama. Agape Street Missions. Berwick (with Smiling Over Sickness). The list could go on and on, but once you take the time to look, the number of causes out there is overwhelming. There are literally millions upon millions of problems around the world. There are tragedies occurring in every country. They happen everywhere. They happen here.

But you don’t have the time to check all these links, to Google all these names, or maybe to even finish reading this, which is really getting longer than the recommended blog post. Putting it under a cut would defy the purpose, though, so I’ll keep going. And even if you do have the time, what are you expected to do? You can’t dedicate yourself to all these causes. It’s just not possible.

It isn’t.

You cannot help everyone. You cannot even do everything you want to do — at least, I can’t. My clubs-shopping fiasco was a result of wanting to help — but I have only so much time and energy. As selfish as this sounds, a lot of it is dedicated to me sorting my own life out. I must eat and I must sleep; I have lessons to learn, and even if I didn’t, even if I lived 24/7 for other people, I would still never help everyone I want to.

So it is true that more often than not, you will have to say no. You will have to weigh up your priorities, and as hard as it may be, you must make a conscious decision to not help someone. It is not an excuse to say: “There isn’t anything I can do about it.” There is always something you can do about anything. Whether it is effective is another reason. But the truth of the matter is, whenever you learn about a problem of some kind and do nothing about it, it is a choice you are making. You are as responsible for what you don’t do as for what you do. You are responsible for what you know.

Don’t let ignorance be your excuse. Do you know how shameful it is to admit I am pretty much unaware of what happens anywhere? I’m not up-to-date with local or global news. And it is something I desperately need to improve on. Here I am, a member of a developed nation with easy access to information. Not only that, I am one of those privileged individuals who is at an institute of tertiary education. And yet I still remain in ignorance. I have no excuse for it. What is the use of me — or any one of us, for that matter — graduating from UBC if all I have is a diploma and no heart?

Please care.

We don’t have the resources to help everyone on our own. But please don’t let that stop you from caring. Choose at least one thing — just one thing — you care about and do something about it. Actively participate in it, whatever it is. If all of us did at least one thing we cared about — something for someone else, or for something other than ourselves — imagine how much could be achieved. That’s really the message behind preventing global warming as well, isn’t it? If we all did a little bit to reduce our contribution to global warming, that would add up to a whole lot more. It’s the same for anything — if we all did something together, we could do so much.

We’re all on this earth together.

Go on pursuing your creative and sportive interests outside of school. They are both so important for your development as a person and for your health. But spend some of your time — and we all do have at least that much to spare — for someone or something beyond yourself, and your everyday surroundings. Stay informed. It’s hard to realize every moment of the day that we are part of a much larger world, but we can realize it some of the time every day.

3 Comments

Posted in International, Involvement / Leadership, Wellness