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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Sunday, March 28, 2010
Latest update on my very boring life: I'm going to Taiwan for my first conference at the end of next month.
It's only a graduate student conference organized by a not-very-famous university with a funny name in Hsinchu (so you know it's not Tsinghua), but it's an international conference nonetheless, and since the conference has no specific theme and I know very well how unimpressive my paper actually is, I decided that was the best bet for a first-time experience. And since I thought I would be going on my own, I knew my parents wouldn't freak out since Taiwan is only four and a half hours away from Singapore. Moreover, thanks to ten years of compulsory mother tongue classes, I can manage moderately well in a Chinese-language environment (I think).
But it turns out my mother has decided to accompany me. I have rather ambivalent feelings about this. On the one hand I do appreciate the presence of someone I know when I'm lost in an unfamiliar place (and I'm bound to be lost half of the time) but on the other hand, I was rather looking forward to being a 'big girl' and taking up the challenge of travelling to a foreign country on my own. My mother has promised to treat this trip as a test for me and to let me take the lead, but within 2 minutes at the counter of the travel agency (more will be said about this in a later post) she intercepted me and began talking to the agent even though she had hardly any idea of what we're going to do in Taiwan... =__=;
But my mother isn't half as annoying as my father. Once again he is reminding me how much I can't stand petty men who feel that they absolutely must be in control of everything in order to believe that they haven't already been castrated down there. Almost immediately after telling me parents that my abstract had been selected (I had chosen not to tell them I was submitting an abstract until I received confirmation because I knew the alarm bells would have gone off prematurely), my father went into Mr Ramsay mode. I seriously think he actually regards planning for overseas travel as an affirmation of his personal worth as a man.
So my father started making all sorts of plans and talking to my mother at the dinner table the day after the announcement about what he was going to do as if he were the one going for the conference, until I stopped him and told him I wanted to deal with the preparations myself because this was MY personal affair and I didn't want him to spend his time doing something that was supposed to be MY responsibility. I also told him (quite politely, I thought) that I would ask him for help when I needed it.
He ought to have been glad to be relieved of extra work and to see his daughter becoming independent but instead he took it as a personal affront and gave me the most hilariously disgusting show of wounded male pride I have seen in recent days. He had printed out some maps of Taiwan from Google at the office but because he couldn't remember which county the university was located in (then why print the maps so soon, darling?), he printed out the most general map of the whole island and another where he partially zoomed into the wrong part of the general map. So, after I told him that I wished to handle the preparations myself, we had this very interesting exchange:
Father (with patented wounded-male-pride pout): So, this means you don't need these maps anymore ah? So I can use them, right?
Me: Yeah, those are too general to be useful. You can go ahead and use them as rough paper.
Father: So you really don't need them anymore ah? These maps (points to printouts) can ZOOM IN one you know.
Me: ... ... ... Erm, you didn't print out the zoomed-in version...
Apparently my mother spoke to him later that evening to tell him to let me handle everything by myself. Nevertheless, he is bugging me at every meal (in the most friendly manner possible) to check-in online NOW so that my mother and I can pick our seats, and telling me what I should and should not do once we reach Hsinchu, and shoving thick stacks of information printed out from the websites of the hotels that I have booked, as if I'm not sick enough already of looking at those websites from the days I struggled to find cheap hotels with available rooms at such short notice.
And the only reason why the conversation is remaining civil is that I'm busy writing the introduction of my thesis and I want as much peace and quiet I can get right now.
kaoru said at 8:34 AM
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Sunday, January 10, 2010
It's the beginning of a new year again, and it's time for me to officially start work on my MA thesis. This is the first time that I'm embarking on a long-term research project, and it does feel rather daunting, but I've come to terms (for the most part) with myself and have decided that it's not a grave sin if my working speed is slower that that of the average graduate student and if I need to extend my stay in NUS by one more semester. I'm still rather sore about this, but ultimately I would rather the research and writing process be an enjoyable experience than an insanity-inducing horror.
I was called up in November to choose which module I would like to tutor this semester, but, for some strange reason, the department has again decided to let me off the hook and has not contacted me since November. Even though I was a very willing fish this semester.
I actually emailed the person in charge of assigning TAs in late December to ask whether I could find out which modules I was supposed to tutor for (so that I could start preparing earlier) and up to this very moment I still have not received a single reply.
At first I was pretty miffed at being so unceremoniously ignored, but I've since decided that there's little use in feeling frustrated and imagining all sorts of possible justifications (some of which were really improbable and did nothing but make me feel miserable about myself). I should take the opportunity to concentrate on my thesis and get a good amount of work done.
And if the department wants me to tutor for EN1101E next semester, well, there are things in life we can't change with individual willpower alone and I'll simply have to make the best of the experience.
I hope 2010 is going to be a good year for myself, for all the people important to me and for everyone else out there too. Till the next blog post then...
kaoru said at 7:04 AM
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Saturday, December 19, 2009
". . . She did think it mattered, her party, and it made her feel quite sick to know that it was all going wrong, all falling flat. Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than people wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch in a corner like Ellie Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves upright.
Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew out and it seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out, then sucked back. (For the windows were open.)
[. . .]
The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradies blew out again. And Clarissa saw - she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking. So it wasn't a failture after all! it was going to be all right now - her party. It had begun. It had started. But it was still touch and go. She must stand there for the present. People seemed to come in a rush.
Colonel and Mrs Garrod... Mr Hugh Whitbread... Mr Bowley... Mrs Hilbery... Lady Mary Maddox... Mr Quin... intoned Wilkin. She had six or seven words with each, and they went on, they went into the rooms; into something now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had beat back the curtain. . . ."
--- Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Thanks to everybody from the NUS Comics and Animation Society alumni for supporting and making today's party a great success! It was a real pleasure to see and talk to all of you again. I wish I could have spent more time with each and every one of you, but I'm sure we'll meet again in the near future =)
kaoru said at 4:20 AM
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Thursday, December 03, 2009
I am so, so sleepy.
I spent about 6 hours today reading a measly 20+ pages of Azuma Hiroki on the "database model" of postmodernity and getting into time-consuming theoretical wrangles with him on what I thought to be his misreading of Baudrillard before realizing he meant something else. Shit. Was Azuma being unclear in his argument, or am I just getting dumber?
Then I rushed down to Somerset to meet Diana, MW and Calvin Xie for dinner and got lost once I stepped out of the new 313 Somerset, which just opened today. Orchard Road is starting to look very unfamiliar.
Nothing of great interest has been happening in my life, except, perhaps, for the fact that I watched 2012. Yes, the day I watch a Hollywood apocalyptic movie is the day the world comes to an end. I decided to sacrifice $7.50 for it because I'm working on apocalyptic narratives in Japanese shoujo manga for my thesis, and I need to have at least a rough idea what the Hollywood conventions of such narratives are.
Anyway, after watching the movie, I think I can summarize the essence of 2012 (and perhaps of other similar movies in the Hollywood tradition): lots of spectacular explosions (and I use the word with its full Debordian connotations); some guy makes some inspiring speech about 'humanity' (which is really a disguise for celebrating the GREATNESS OF AMERICA); an indirect nod in the direction of China's burgeoning technological power (but you're still going to be castrated so that you don't compete with the white hero who saves the day by undoing the mess he created himself); some minor characters die, major characters look sad for 5 seconds and start making out with someone else; hooray for (American) humanity, Africa is now free for you to colonize all over again.
kaoru said at 8:56 AM
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
After 24 years of having prawns appear before her on a plate with their shells magically missing, the Ojousama has finally learnt how to deshell prawns on her own.
Thanks to Kevin's instruction today, I now can remove the shells of prawns (rather clumsily) with a fork and knife. Hooray! I've added another life-skill to the list of "Things You Must Know If You Want To Do Your PhD Overseas and Come Back Again In One Piece". Now I just need to learn how to cook more than 5 dishes, how to peel off the skin of fruits with a knife, how to wash my clothes, how to iron my clothes, how to do grocery shopping, how to clean the toilet etc etc etc...
kaoru said at 7:58 AM
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