Sunday, May 16, 2010
On May 15 (Sat), I attended Pink Dot at Hong Lim Park for the first time. For those of you who don't know what Pink Dot is, it's an event where people, regardless of their sexual orientation, wear pink clothes to the park and gather together to make a giant circle to express their commitment to the freedom of LGBT individuals to love who they want to.
I'm really glad that I went for the event. As Yisa said last night, you could feel your cynicism retreating into the background for those two hours you were at the park, and for that moment Singapore seemed like a warmer, kinder, more inclusive place, and you were genuinely happy.
And because I was reminded last night to make my position as a reader of any text and practice clear, I'll have to admit that I'm bisexual (but still leaning closer to the heterosexual side) and so I do have a vested interest in the success of events like Pink Dot. But apart from my position, it's a good thing that Singaporeans are becoming more accepting of non-heteronormative Others as fellow human beings who want to love and be loved just like everybody else.
And as a student who works on gender and sexuality issues, I felt that Pink Dot was an especially meaningful event for me, personally, as a 'supplement' to my research and politics (and I mean this not in the sense of the 'auxiliary' but in the Derridean sense of 'adding on and qualitatively changing what the new thing was added on to'). Scholarly research is important, but Pink Dot helped me to walk out of the ivory tower for an evening and SEE and FEEL and REMEMBER the presence of the ordinary women and men I'm writing about, and writing for, and writing with. And that really puts the heart back into my research and pushes me to make what I do more than just a hundred pages of type-written text to be handed in, graded and then left to moulder in a forgotten corner of the library.
kaoru said at 12:34 AM
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Tuesday, May 04, 2010
To those of you who knew I was going abroad, I’m back in Singapore (I’ve actually been home since Sunday evening) and I’m finally in the mood to blog about my conference trip to Taiwan.
29 April, Thursday, Day One:
I arrived in Taiwan around one o’clock in the afternoon, and because NUS is hardly paying for anything other than the airfare, my mother and I took a bus from Taoyuan international airport for TWO hours to the Taipei train station, and then sat in a slow train for ANOTHER TWO hours till we finally reached Hsinchu in the evening. I consider myself someone relatively accustomed to long travelling times as I take about one hour and a half to travel from my house to NUS, but the journey to Hsinchu was really trying.
But I was glad I got a chance to see a side of Taiwan I probably wouldn’t have seen if I had taken a taxi instead. The houses lined along the railway tracks were in a terrible state of squalor and disrepair, and it was really sobering to remember that beneath every glossy image in a tourist brochure lies a gritty underbelly of abject poverty and human misery.
The city of Hsinchu itself was an eye-opener. Coming from orderly, highly regulated Singapore where almost every traffic violation is recorded on a surveillance camera and a summons sent to you immediately, I was astounded and pretty frightened by the sheer chaos on the roads of Hsinchu. Firstly, there weren’t pedestrian walkways, so I had to walk on the road itself. Secondly, traffic rules seemed non-existent. Cars and scooters simply zoomed all around you regardless of the fact that you were standing on a zebra crossing with the green man flashing. And my heart nearly jumped out of my mouth when the taxi I was in swerved across three lanes and carelessly cut in front of a bus mere centimeters away from the taxi driver’s head half-hanging outside the open window.
When I was at the conference the next day, my mother attempted to walk down the main road from the hotel to the city centre, but she turned back at the main crossing between Section One and Section Two of the road because the traffic simply terrified her. Hsinchu is definitely not flaneur-friendly.
30 April, Friday, Day Two:
Although the roads in Hsinchu were not friendly, the people certainly were. Dr Yeoh was absolutely right when he told me that Taiwanese people were known to be one of the friendliest people in the world.
The conference was a very small-scale affair, with the audience mainly consisting of the presenters and the students involved in the organization of the event, but it gave me the opportunity to experience for the first time what a conference was like, and to meet really nice fellow graduate students from other countries around the world.
However, I did feel a little out-of-place, as the conference participants were either Chinese students who spoke Mandarin with their peers, or Caucasian students who mingled mainly within their own racial group. Even the Chinese-Canadian student from Toronto spoke Chinese more fluently than I did (and here I can hear all my Chinese language teachers banging their heads on the wall). It was a rather strange and dislocating experience (incidentally, one of the papers presented was on cultural and racial dislocation) because ever since Junior College, I’ve gotten so used to the fact that many Arts students, and especially Literature students, do not speak Chinese well, and are usually not expected to. In fact, it’s even a perverse source of pride for some of us: we don’t speak Chinese well, and the implication is that we’re fluent in English and therefore better educated, more cultured, more ‘cool’ etc. etc. So at the conference I felt for possibly the first time in my life like a total ‘banana’ that’s not just yellow on the outside and white on the inside, but with little incongruous bits of strawberry chocolate Pocky thrown in as well. It was rather discomforting and I felt that I was letting down my ethnic heritage in some way… I don’t really know what to feel about this. On the one hand it seems a pity to have wasted all those years of studying the language (and it was a real struggle, especially in the early years when I actually believed I was English and couldn’t understand why I had to study Mandarin as my ‘mother tongue’), but on the other hand, it also seems inevitable that I would have lost the ability to use the language after completing Higher Chinese in secondary school since my family speaks mainly English at home, and my research is conducted exclusively in English and Japanese.
I was really nervous during the presentation and I didn’t have enough time to finish reading out the entire script, even though I had already cut down the 9,000-word ISM it was based on to a 10-page paper as Lorraine and Dr Yeoh had recommended. Furthermore, I’m actually quite incompetent in thinking quickly on the spot, so I think I was rambling instead of answering the questions put to me during the Q&A session properly. But some of the participants came up to me after my presentation to tell me they were impressed with my paper and the answers I gave, and words could hardly express how honoured their undeserved praise made me feel, and how happy I was to have done NUS proud. I’m eternally grateful to Dr Yeoh for guiding me in the right direction and giving me advice on how to make the ISM ‘publishable’, to Prof Bishop for his help with Baudrillard (even though that part of the paper unfortunately had to be omitted to fit the page-limit), and to the conference organizers for giving me the opportunity to have this experience.
1 May, Saturday, Day Three:
I left after breakfast the next day with my mother to travel by train (another loooong ride) to Taipei. The train ride was tedious, but it did enable me to travel with the locals and to catch a glimpse of their ordinary ways of life.
As we only had less than half a day to visit Taipei, we limited our activity to Ximending, which Curren had recommended because he knows I’m interested in Japanese popular culture. However, it would be more accurate to say that we limited our activity mainly to Wuchang Street and a bit of Zhonghua Road because my mother was tired (she gets tired easily) and wasn’t willing to explore other areas (this was one of the reasons why I didn’t really want her to follow me to Taiwan, but you can’t go against your parent’s wishes when they’re convinced you’re going to get yourself into every conceivable form of trouble when you’re overseas alone).
Nevertheless, I did manage to visit the Animate store (the only outlet outside Japan in the world!) and buy some BL and YAOI manga for myself, and a really cute Hetalia notebook in the shape of an EU German passport for my sister who is going to Germany soon for her Physics students’ immersion trip. My mother and I then had dinner at a maid café situated next to the Animate store. The maids were quite kawaii and the food was delicious and unbelievably cheap. There was also a solitary male otaku seated in front of me who positively beamed when the stereo in the cafe played a song most probably from some ‘moe’ anime. He really looked like he had seen the Light and was going to transcend to heaven at that moment. Well, there’s otaku globalization for you.
Although I didn’t get to see much of Ximending, I liked it a lot for its young, vibrant, energetic vibe. There was a rock band performing at the Cinema Park in the afternoon, and later in the evening I watched a teenage boy playing the drums at the intersection between Wuchang Street and Zhonghua Road in the evening. They were really talented; far more talented than the Dir en Grey wannabes we see at the Street Fest every year… =___=;
2 May, Sunday, Day Four:
Because I was sick of lugging around the luggage, which inexplicably seemed to have expanded in size and weight even though I bought a grand total of two manga books, a pair of earrings, five pairs of socks and one jumper-dress, and my laptop, and my bulky jacket, and a paper bag of souvenirs, my mother and I decided to take a taxi from our hotel to the airport. After milling around for a while in the shopping area where I saw the same few brands repeated ad nauseum every few metres (there’s globalization for you again), we got on our plane, were plied with more food in a single meal than three of my school lunches combined, and finally arrived home in the evening to be greeted with sweltering hot weather and a karaoke-crazy neighbor squawking away louder than ever.
So here I am and it’s back to the usual routine again. The trip to Taiwan was a welcome break from my thesis, but it does feel good to be in the graduate research students’ room again, with the window open to the familiar sounds of the canteen vendors laughing and the distant harbor, eating crunchy purple grapes while reading Rosemary Jackson and having a good chat with a good friend (in English!) in the late afternoon.
kaoru said at 10:02 AM
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