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Differences

Difference is everywhere. To start broadly there are different cultures, and different people, and different languages, different ways of using the same language, different ways of living, different ways of seeing the world, different ways of storytelling, different ways of thinking, different standards and differences in the things we notice. Simply, humanity consists of many different habitus . What writing can achieve is taking us into those differences. If we are willing, and we understand that our way of seeing is not the universal, we can tilt our perspective and see the world slightly differently. Before this course I believed that if humanity could bridge all differences and unite then people could live much more happily. But what does it mean to bridge differences? If bridging means to connect then how do we connect? Let’s say that connecting is the same as understanding. So to bridge means to understand differences. But what does understand mean? Is it to know and accep...
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Habitus 2

With exposure to new things and new people my habitus has changed. My exchanges with people have given me more to think about and broadened my understanding of the world. Learning about a different place and watching movies about a place is one experience. This is the first step towards understanding. Actually talking to different people gets you an understanding on a different level. There is a lot of learn from the exchanges themselves and how you relate to one another. You get to know how similar you are, you see yourself, and you see the differences. My experience has made me more aware of my own surroundings. Me and my HKBU partner have being sharing pictures and stories from our daily life to go towards her assignment. We were sharing these things before, just casually as a way of getting to know each other but now it’s more deeper. She is planning for us to write “a day in the life…” type of story, where we write a story from each other’s perspective. To do that we send ev...
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Interaction with HKBU partner: Thoughts and Inspiration

Reindeer had just finished a yoga class when I WhatsApp video called her. The English Major student at Hong Kong Baptist University calls herself Reindeer simply because she likes reindeer. We laughed easily and were able to speak to each other for over an hour and the time drifted away. She spoke from her yoga studio and I was inside my bedroom. We found little similarities: we both poster our bedroom walls, like yoga, have similar taste in movies, enjoy contemplative walking. When we talked a bit deeper we found some of our thoughts and values to overlap. She was concerned with childhood, innocence and growing up in a similar way that I was. But she had a different kind of insight. She feared the loss of innocence of her young cousin who is about to enter primary school. She feels that the pressurised school system in Hong Kong will rob him of his time. His playtime will turn to homework time, and then she won’t be able to spend as much time with him. She wants to treas...
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The Spirit of Multi-Culti

A Response to Xu Xi's Multi-Culti Literati: There is multi-cultural and then there is multi-culti or “moolti-koolti,” as a German arts promoter said it. According to Xu Xi, the first is PC (politically correct) and clouds understanding by the illusion of universality. While trying to be inclusive and reach out to different people in the PC way, universality or a false sense of universality is ruling over our differences. She claims that this PC idea of multi-cultural “might prevent us from understanding other worlds as a distortion of our own way of knowing and being, just as we are, as well, a distortion of theirs” (pp136).  She talks about true understanding of different cultures, not as an act of bridging divides, but as a process of distortion. To understand someone or some place that is “other”, we have to go beyond our way of seeing things and “tilt our vision slightly askew to see and reflect those myriad humanities as ourselves” (pp135). This is the multi-culti visio...
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Foreign Memes

1. Cut Popular culture resides in our hearts, take me into the world of your memes     – I want to know you, all of you but I know your mind is far. Your social media feed is alien to me: unfamiliar faces foreign language jokes I can’t understand. You say we’re impossible       cut  – by the habitus we were raised in, the references, memes and habits we don’t share. You ask Have you ever watched Running Man ? How often do you go to karaoke? Do you know Big Bang ? 2. Same But take away our contexts and we are almost the same: writing diaries every day in Muji blue 0.38mm bound by the fundamentals how we love, fail, struggle, dream, we choose the same coffee bean, –   but it’s the details that make us unique. 3. Learn The stories, the idols that raised you: a lifetime to catch up on from an ocean away, I diligently study night and day   –   still not fluent in t...
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On Silence

I’ve been considering what Plato said: “wise men speak because they have something to say, fools because they have to say something.” But can we all sit around waiting for something useful to say? We feel uncomfortable and so we feel the need to fill the gap with empty words. But why take up space with something meaningless? Perhaps it’s the illusion of progress, illusion of meaning, the notion that this conversation, this life, is going somewhere. We’re so scared it could all be nothing. I don’t want to fill the silence for the sake of it. I want the words to have meaning. Or just listen to the eloquence and depth of silence.   You shake your head, in disbelief that silence can have meaning. To you, silence is only a barrier, an awkward space, the evidence of a lack of connection, a lack of intimacy, a lack of identity.  I tell you of a silence I know. Two people sitting together, comfortably, without a word: bound by a connection so deep they can let their li...
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Ink & Memories

1.  Only ink is immortal. The flowers wither: life is a vicious cycle. They will never live again, like our childhood together. Those days are dead, but living in my mind. I wonder if your head houses those memories in a palace, or if after the years went by they were swept away into a crammed storage box, or a dusty corner. I keep them safe, clean, ready to replay. But how do I know it will always be like this? One by one I may disintegrate. And I know; only ink will save me. 2.                   A memory falls away and I am a little less myself, I want to catch it, cherish it, keep it forever. Who are without our memories?   Sentences wander and form in my mind I fall asleep to the padding steps of ideas and words: the task of making a straight line in my head. Morning comes and all I see are footsteps something was here before –          a little piece...
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