Nanjing: 300,000 at the Gate of China

After freshening up at the hotel for a bit, it was only 3:00 PM, so we decided to get a bit of sightseeing in. The major thing that Nanjing is know for outside China is the Rape of Nanking as termed in American history textbooks, now seemingly recognized properly at the Nanjing Massacre.

To this effect, we went to the appropriate memorial, named the Memorial for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression (侵華日軍南京大屠殺遇難同胞紀念館/侵华日军南京大屠杀遇难同胞纪念馆) after eating at a western restaurant. The food was quite good, there was just too much of it, so we ended up overeating.

The whole memorial was quite somber, as it was designed. The memorial was designed on a black and charcoal gray template, with the death toll on a cross made purposefully dirty juxtaposed with walls across a gray-pebble courtyard (evocative of Zen gardens) from the museum.

One point popped into the back of my head. It probably would have just gone away if my friend didn’t say anything about it. This memorial wasn’t built over any sort of ruins. The museum had fake ruins adorning the materials about the conflict and in no way was this site more historical than the rest of Nanjing.

This friend happened to have seen some of the major holocaust sites in Germany. She said that the Nanjing Massacre Memorial lacked the same authentic feel that Dauchau concentration camp did. I could see her point, but being that most of the museums that I’ve been to in the United States have been built on nothing more than their foundations of concrete and steel, this fact didn’t irk me.

The museum was more informative than anything else. Everything stated was presented as fact, and though the words “Japanese Invaders” were used more than once (or twice), artifacts from the conflict seemed to be displayed in a very impartial manner (though at the same time it was quite clear what country you were in).

It made me realize how much about Asia, and for that matter the world outside Anglophone North America and Europe I don’t know. I construe it as a simple statement on our Eurocentric public educations. I remember that in sophomore year of high school, the state set up a curriculum based on “World History,” but with our class being European History Advanced Placement, we were going to wait until after the AP test in May to cover the rest of the world. Thought it seemed to be a daunting task, covering the rest of the world in less than a month, we failed to accomplish anything at all. Instead, we watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail as well as Forrest Gump.

I do understand that in comparison with the eleven million people (six million Jews) that the Nazis killed, a simple 300,000 doesn’t seem like much by the Imperialist Japanese. The fact of the matter is though that 300,000 people make up still 300,000 lives, each one precious in its own regard.

To make matters special, whereas Germany likes to distance itself from its Nazi past, it is highly questionable whether Japan cares to do the same. Maybe 300,000 is a high estimate; “impartial” observers estimate 260,000; but Japanese historians head down to 100,000. I suppose the number isn’t important, but some Japanese officials say that all the deaths were military-related and that no war crimes occurred (being that you aren’t to target civilians nor attack when civilians are known to be present). Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi decided to go pay respect to the Japanese memorial honoring their fallen soldiers in the conflict.

The fact of the matter was that Japan was clearly the one that violated the well-established international law principle of territorial sovereignty, and in doing so continued to murder innocent civilians. I don’t hold anything against the Japan of today, because what’s past is the history. And though you are supposed to learn from your mistakes, I well understand many Chinese people’s anti-Japanese sentiment.

I suppose in some ways I’m a product of the whole conflict. Had Japan as well as Germany not started their courses in history in World War II, I, James Philip Jee, as I know myself would not be here today. People like to take guesses at my families’ histories. In Guilin, one American tourist decided to guess without solicitation that I have relatives who moved to the United States to build the railroads. Almost everybody assumes that having parents that are Chinese (meaning ethnicity) means that you can speak Chinese. To them it makes so much sense when I say that my mother’s from Hong Kong yet so much humor when I say my father’s from Detroit.

Because my parents didn’t meet in China, I don’t say my family’s from China, though I am proud of my Chinese heritage. In fact, my father’s never been outside of North America, so to say so would be an inaccuracy. If the conflict never started, would my mother’s parents have moved from Hangzhou? Would I have a much different set of relatives? Would I even exist? Could I be an only child?

Though my circumstances are rooted in a history so ugly, I guess I can say that thanks to my parents I have reestablished my roots in a way that they never would have predicted. In a way, I like to think that no one predicted it would come out this way.

I understand that I am one privileged individual. While I wouldn’t call myself filthy rich, I understand my circumstances well as being well, and it bothers me to see wastefulness in life and in spending.

So there is a reason I went to visit Nanjing, and it’s fitting in a way that it happened to be my last trip out of Hong Kong before my time here. Never should I forget where my past lives have been lived out, never should any one forget the horrors that we people have placed each other under.

I’ve come to appreciate my roots for my culture and my heritage for my traditions. I’ve come to respect my nation as something to subscribe to and my state as something to rely on, and though immigration regulations places restrictions where people are allowed to reside and work (which most notably means that certain places are more prosperous than others), we are all ultimately people, and the future of who we are and where we are lies nowhere else than with us.

Hong Kong

For Hong Kong and the World, I have the same professor as the one who recognized me by this blog in Humanity in Globalization. Now that I know he recognizes me, I’ll admit that it is a little frightening to go to (either class), though of course I do. As a matter of fact, actually, I have not even been late to a class yet, much less been absent from a lecture or a tutorial. This is not to say that I’ve never known a professor who lectures a class I'm in before. It’s happened before—the only difference is that I became acquainted with that professor through contact face-to-face so to speak, not through this cyber world, which I’ll admit I do not feel the safest in—but enough of that.

As I write this blog, I’m wrapping up from my term paper of sorts for this class and currently taking a break. This assignment for this class is not long at all—about 800 to 1,000 words as a guideline—but as the syllabus says, “don’t let the length of this assignment lull you into complacency.” So much to the delight of people who care about my academic well being (namely my parents and myself), I’m almost done with this paper, a full week before it’s due.

Not that this is a hard paper—as the professor is a (former) journalist now doing consultant work, he assigned us to write an editorial of sorts. Never in my formal academic education in English classes had I properly taught how to write an editorial. But for me, that’s okay, because I was part of the Journalism class throughout my four years in high school, culminating in my being editor-in-chief for the monthly publication.

In Beginning Journalism, we were told the basics of how to write well-structured, concise-yet-adequately-descriptive piece, later specifying the specifics of news writing, opinion-editorial, sports, feature, etc. So, while I never became the best of the best while I was in that class, I definitely became a good writer in self-development after high school.

Part of it was the fact that my high school actually had a good writing program. When I arrived at UCSD, I found that many people had no idea how to form a thesis and that many more could not make their papers flow smoothly in both the stylistic and logical senses. (Though I have no idea how my blog posts read since I don’t take the time any more to go read them over again before publishing. I like to say that it makes it more real, since a lot of what I write is in stream-of-consciousness, but ultimately, when, and not if, I read this entire endeavor again, I might have to reevaluate that past statement.)

Editorials have never been my high point though, and in the syllabus, the lecturer expressly states that the paper should read like an editorial and not a research paper. Cool; not a problem—I went to latimes.com and read a few to get me back in editorial writing mode, and the style flew back in.

The topic of the editorial itself is up to us. The criteria are that it has to be about Hong Kong and that it has to be about Hong Kong in the world. Fair enough. So far in class, we’ve only been talking about Hong Kong’s role in the world mostly in economic terms and less in political terms. Weekly topics range over several aspects of Hong Kong, each one being put into terms of Hong Kong’s economic future and viability into the future or Hong Kong’s relations with world sovereigns, including China.

Because of this weighting, guest speakers for the class have been businessmen except for two members of the Hong Kong Government Legislative Council, one of whom a (former) journalist. All have been very insightful, though the businessmen not so much into political matters. All were prompted about what makes Hong Kong special, to which they answered our weekly topic, like Rule of Law or Free Flow of Information slash Freedom of Speech. They were also all asked about Hong Kong’s future, to which they replied positively and almost whole-heartedly optimistic. The problem is that big CEOs are paid to be optimistic—it keeps their share prices up.

Needless to say, I did my topic on Hong Kong’s viability economically as Asia’s World City in the light of growing Chinese cities and an increasingly favorable climate as contrasted with Hong Kong’s disadvantages. I make my case for Hong Kong needing more creative industries, sponsored by the government if need be, to create a identity for Hong Kong that goes beyond former British Colony and international financial center.

But more about my term paper later. Right now I have to send a birthday card to my brother so that it’ll get there before next Wednesday. Tomorrow I get to go to the United States Consulate-General in Hong Kong to add more visa/entry/exit pages, since I’m running low and planning to travel several more times before I fly back home right before Christmas.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Taipei: Communists and Nationalists

We started our first full day in Taipei at 8:30, leaving at 10:00 after eating hotel breakfast. First on the list was the National Palace Museum. The hotel that we were staying at was about a ten-minute walk from the closest metro station, and that little walk there forms the basis for much of my perception of Taipei away from touristy areas. First off, the streets were almost as wide as they were in Beijing. The way the upper stories of buildings hung over the street was like Macau. And on a side note, the electricity plugs are American in shape.

Taipei seemed a peaceful town. While relatively crowded, the drivers were tamer than those in Hong Kong and honked a whole lot less than in Beijing. People were friendly and the whole area seemed safe. Restaurants of all types dominated the selection of storefronts. It was apparent that Taipei was a lot more westernized; at the superficial level, a lot more people had their hair dyed to brown or purple and presented themselves in what they likely thought was high fashion.

The subway system, deemed Taipei Metro or the MRT (as opposed to the MTR in Hong Kong), was relatively clean and very efficient. It was more apparent that it is common courtesy to stand on the right of escalators and walk up the left. Out of the station in Shilin, more food stands dominated the scene, charging very reasonable prices for good food.

The bus from the metro station to the National Palace took just around ten or fifteen minutes and was surprising in its setup. Whereas in Hong Kong, you pay when you get on, the rate being charged based on where you get on the bus, in Shenzhen the bus fare was calculated on where you were to get off, as you’d tell the ticket seller on the bus where you planned to alight and get charged the appropriate fare. In Taipei, the fare was based on destination as well, though this was done by people entering the bus through the door towards the back and exiting out of the front, where payment is made right before leaving.

As we approached the National Palace Museum, the frequency of ROC flags increased along the median of the road. On arrival at the National Palace Museum, the motivators of its creators were highly apparent. Whereas the building used Chinese motifs to evoke a national and cultural past, it was clear that it was more modern in some of the stone used, because after all the building was completed in the 1960s. In particular, the building evoked the Forbidden City in Beijing, from where many of the artifacts were taken by Chiang Kai-shek were removed.

Entering the museum, the joint ticket with the National Aboriginal Museum caught my eye. It was just a couple hundred meters from museum gate to museum gate, so I figured why not. Going though the place, it was apparent how much was removed and how much stuff there was in the Forbidden City. Many of the buildings in the complexes stand just that now—buildings devoid of treasures. To this effect, the exhibition rooms in the National Palace Museum often have a map of the Forbidden City with a note on where the objects in that particular area were removed from.

The content was amazing. Some parts of the museum didn’t have cream of the crop works, but overall, it was good to see a museum so full of authentic Chinese artifacts collected over the dynasties.

From there we wandered on over to the National Aboriginal Museum, which completely lacked people (if that says anything at all about how people feel about the Taiwan aborigines). We got through the four floors of the complex in a relatively short time, but the disinterest exhibited by my friends prevented my stay from being longer.

From there, we decided to walk back to Shilin metro station, stopping along Chiang Kai-shek Residence along the way. It took longer than expected to reach that first stop. We passed by the national university en route, which was accompanied by a green river. Oh, I forgot to mention that it was raining that entire day and most of the next.

Arriving at CKS Park (as I remember it being abbreviated in English) was worth a gander, though only worth it because it was free. There were a couple gardens in park that stood out. One contained a face carved out of a relatively large shrubbery surrounded by a colorful assortment of flowers. The other was indoors and obviously aimed at kids with its large anthropomorphic insects and fauna. Neither was entirely impressive. Also there was Chiang Kai-shek’s Taipei residence, which was under renovation (and likely remains so as I write this) but still good to see from the outside.

By this time it was only 1:00 or 2:00 in the afternoon, and we were planning on going to the Shilin Night Market, so we did a bit more sightseeing before then, which was said on Wikitravel to begin around 4:00 or 5:00.

To this effect, we headed down to the neighboring Confucius Temple and Bao’an Temple. Confucius Temple was more of a park whereas Bao’an Temple was a functioning place of worship. Both were notable in their relative newness. Roof bricks glazed blue and green remained blue and green whereas in places with more history such as the Forbidden City, the darkish yellow roof bricks were fading and in some places weeds were glowing out of the tops.

We then took a taxi to the Grand Hotel, whose history I haven’t fully explored. It’s basically an interesting building because its twenty or so floors have traditional-looking façades, though no authentic building of such a style had been that tall. It was interesting as such, though its overall appearance looked more busy and overly done than authentic. Like I said, I have no idea what the people involved had in mind during its overall planning and construction.

From there we took a leisurely walk to Martyrs’ Shrine, which is, in essence, a memorial to all those fighting in the name of the Republic of China. Along the walk, the ROC flags increased as we became closer. Like gravitating towards groups of tour buses, it became clear that in Taiwan, many of the sites to see were accompanied by copious quantities of national flags along the street median.

Martyrs’ Shrine was indeed impressive, largely because of its sheer size. It took a very notable period of time to walk from the front gate and entrance to the actual content of the memorial (a complex of a handful of buildings) on the other side. There was the first time we witnessed the military decorum of ROC officers. First off, when doing honor guard stuffs, they dress as such, looking stern and straightforward, never blinking, never moving. On more than one occasion, other employees came around to adjust their clothes and spiff up their uniforms.

At one point, the soldiers in the memorial came ceremoniously marching down the center of the plaza to the entrance gate. We watched as they marched down in step, the guards at the gate spinning their rifles and exiting with them. Check the pictures out. It was impressive (and scary at the same time.)

Last for that day was the Shilin Night Market. Taking a taxi there, the driver was adamant about the market. Granted, we were going to the one that was likely the most touristy; however, the driver kept going on about it stretching on for four city blocks (though it seemed bigger than that) and how you can buy anything there.

Actually there, there were mostly souvenir-selling places and street food vendors. Taiwan is supposedly famous for its snacks, and one of the best things that I had in Taipei was actually this breaded, deep-fried octopus cut into pieces and accompanied with something of a topping (seaweed in my case). After our first full day, satisfying as it were, in Taipei, we went back to the hotel to prepare for an equally productive day the next day.

In my case, preparation was working on a research paper of 2,000 words and accompanying presentation that I’ll talk more about later.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

Seventy-eight, Part 1

Continuing on talking about classes, I figured I’d come back to Humanity in Globalization, coded POLI0078. This class has been by far the most applicable to what I studies overall, and continues to surprise me (and did surprise me, see part 2!) every day.

In response to genocide (specifically talking about Rwanda), we began talking about the Responsibility to Protect, lovingly abbreviated as R2P. This article itself came as, in part, a result of the Rwandan Genocide. Apparently, it seemed, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights drafted back in the day (itself a response in part to the holocaust), forming an integral part of the United Nations, was no longer effective, so another piece of whatever you’d call it was drafted same in scale, larger in implications, would remedy the situation.

It reminds me of a problem that we have back in Los Angeles. It isn’t dealing so much with human rights as with convenience, but the same logic can easily be applied for both. In Los Angeles, we lack serious public transportation. Yeah, there are tons of bus routes that I’ve yet to hear any one I know of take, regarding what I’m talking about, buses crowd the roads too. It’s pretty apparent that we love our cars in (Southern) California. We have our sprawling freeways that traverse the landscape that frequently get clogged to the point of stopped traffic. For years and years, the solution has always been to expand the freeways, costing billions of dollars in the end, more often than not requiring the acquisition of additional right-of-way to accommodate the additional 12-foot-wide lanes.

In Thousand Oaks, California, my hometown, the secondary freeway was expanded from two lanes to three just a year or two ago and just a few months later began experiencing massive congestion again. Yeah, cars moving off surface streets onto freeways create a lot of the additional traffic, but the fact of the matter is that cars are big and roads are bigger, and creating more efficient infrastructure by expanding roads rather than building light rail/a subway system proves both illogical and inefficient.

For a city of Los Angeles’s size, it’s amazing that there are only a handful of light rail/subway lines. There is one dedicated bus route running at street-level that encountered more than its share of accidents in its first year of opening as well. The one (or two as they’re labeled) subway lines barely go anywhere, though I think that in the last I’ve read they’re in the process of being extended.

The Responsibility to Protect is, in essence, an expansion of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and while it purports increased accountability for states failing to intervene in critical situations, the fact of the matter is that in the current state-system set-up, it really can’t.

Take what France and Belgium did during the Rwandan Genocide. As people were being slaughtered in the country, they sent a surprise mission to rescue all the French and Belgian nationals, despite the fact that the Tutsis were in more dangerous than either.

Take what Bill Clinton, president of the United States of America did during the Rwandan Genocide. After all the Americans were successfully evacuated, he managed to say that there are no more American interests in Rwanda, so it would not be necessary to continue any further in the Rwanda conflict.

So what makes this piece of pseudo-legislation any different from the former? As I posted on the Humanity in Globalization class blog in early October, I said:

“What stands out to me the most in reading about R2P and watching Lloyd Axworthy go about this ‘responsibility’ is the thought that changing the words regarding such acts does nothing but change the words regarding such acts. Codifying rather than broadening the scope of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted in 1948, it seems, in my opinion, to serve as a feel-good measure ultimately lacking teeth.

“I would have to agree with Hannah[, friend and fellow blogger,] in saying that R2P seems rather difficult to fully implement. Ultimately the differences between a ‘right to intervene’ and a ‘responsibility to protect’ dissipate as leaders contemplate spending resources on something that has little national benefit.

“In the documentary ‘Ghosts of Rwanda’ that we watched in class, change of wording would likely do little to push states into protecting another state’s nationals. The original wording of the term ‘genocide’ was a majorly insignificant issue that turned politicians into lawyers as while people were being murdered, the official line of United States leadership was that what was happening were “acts of genocide” but not genocide itself, hence no right to intervene.

“To say that countries now have the ‘responsibility to protect’ would then have bureaucrats defining ‘responsibility,’ no matter how well or narrowly defined the term is in the appropriate documents.

“Not to sound overly pessimistic, but it appears that in the international community it is easier to do nothing and then apologize afterwards. And it makes sense (devoid of morality). If country A intervenes in country B’s business, it would be difficult to justify, not to mention resources would be diverted to something that may not have any benefit for country A. Alternatively, country A, not having any interests in the affairs of country B would not intervene, choosing instead to abstain from the conflict and apologize for not having done something after the fact. Apologies cost no money.

“And as a last point, to say that there would be some sort of framework so that developed countries intervene when appropriate, such as fines, would be to say that an organization such as the United Nations is entirely effective. Ultimately states are their own sovereigns and do what they please in our accepted international law framework.

“So in my logic, where would the solution be?

“Well, there is no easy solution of course. In order for us as a people and as a world to be entirely effective at preventing such events from occurring, we must see ourselves as a collective whole in the cosmopolitan sense, and by extension, the government.

“And unfortunately, there is no legislation for this. (Though R2P seems to promote cosmopolitanism.) We can try our best, but ultimately only time and our future history will tell.”

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Taipei: The Republic of China

A week and a half after I got back from Beijing, some of us jetted off to Taipei for a three-night weekend trip. It was honestly a spur-of-the-moment trip, as we planned and booked the trip all of about four days before we left. Leaving on Thursday night, we picked up our itinerary on Wednesday morning and checked in for the flight on Wednesday night via the very convenient Airport Express Station in Central.

The reason why we had to check in so early was that I needed to make it to my last class on Thursday (Cantonese) to make a presentation. It ended at 5:00 p.m., and with the flight leaving at 8:55 p.m., I felt pressed for time. Back home, the main international flights leave Los Angeles International Airport. You leave super early because there is no subway/light rail system to get you there efficiently from my suburb, so you have to drive—and since everyone drives, you get stuck in traffic. Depending on your route there, you either go along the Pacific Coast Highway and hit traffic lights or you go on the 101 and 405 (which happens to be “at capacity” a.k.a. congested for fifteen hours of the day). On top of that, with such high security at airports, it’s not uncommon to wait for an hour to get into the terminal.

It’s different at Hong Kong. First off, there are airport buses going everywhere in the territory. The one from my dorm takes about an hour and costs half of what the Airport Express does ($48 HKD vs. $100), and after you take a bus to get to Central, which is where you’d pick up the Airport Express from, you’ve already lost half an hour, which is followed by the much-advertised 24-minuted train ride to the airport that would take 24 minutes if you didn’t have to wait so long for it to depart. So thinking time was in a crunch, since I had four hours to get to the airport, go through immigration, customs, and security, I opted for the Airport Express. It took me about an hour total to get there, and forgetting how efficient Hong Kong International Airport is in comparison to Los Angeles International Airport, I got through security in five minutes and immigration in four, not to mention that I forgot that Hong Kong doesn’t have exit customs (because I remembered China does). Basically, I ended up rushing to the airport, and after everything was all said and done, I waited two and a half hours for the airplane to leave. But enough about that…

Honestly, when I came to Hong Kong I never thought I would visit Taiwan. I remember looking out the airplane window when we flew over a corner of the island, never thinking for a second that I’d get my way over there before the semester was out. Lo and behold I did.

Taiwan holds a funny place in my mind. Partially because of my upbringing, I’m of the One China mentality—that is that there is one China (which includes Taiwan), which is the standpoint for any state that hopes to have relations with the big China. Before I get in trouble with some of my separatist friends back home, just read this post out. So in off-the-record contexts, I would likely suggest that Taiwan is a part of China, though I realize that in practice it is not.

After landing in Taipei Taoyuan International Airport after a one-and-a-half hour flight, we stepped of the plane. Officially the Republic of China (with China being the People’s Republic of China), immigration put a nice ROC stamp on our passports. The entry card was carbon-copied to a departure card, the latter of which was stapled into our passports. One of my friends drew political swords when his passport was stapled right through his Chinese visa.

Walking through their capital’s international airport, it seemed dark and dingy, which, while not speaking to the vibrancy of their city, did not bode well for first impressions. It seemed like this airport, which was built in the 1960s, was thought of as a temporary venue until the Nationalist government could return to Beijing. This sense of temporary placement seemed to follow me through Taipei. Having been mostly developed in the 1960s, it seems like everything was a little too new and that things weren’t built to last. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist when they were exiled, is not even interred; his body is in an above-ground casket, ready to be transported back to his proper burial space in Mainland China “when” the Nationalists capture back all of China.

Another thing that I reminded myself of was that more than a handful of my friends back home are on the Taiwan side of the cross-strait relations, which, while having warmed up lately, are still unstable at the core and in principle, which either party claiming the entirety of the other’s controlled territory. Many of my friends spend their summers there in Taipei and say that they are not (ethnically) Chinese but Taiwanese because they aren’t communist. Fine, but when I told them about Taiwanese aboriginals, they said that they weren’t that either. It seems they’ve lost the fact that Taipei looks very similar to Mainland China and that they speak the same “national” language, not to mention Taiwanese is mutually intelligible with the Fujian dialect of Chinese on the mainland.

That’s fine and all. We weren’t there anyways to talk politics.

Like my serial about Beijing, I have two more text posts about Taipei and two photograph posts. As for now, I need to call the United States consulate and see about getting refill pages in my passport.

More to come.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: The Productivity of Communism

Everyone knows China’s growing at a rapid pace. It scares many Americans that China’s economy will, in all likelihood, become the largest in the world. But is it really any surprise and are the fears well-founded? Would it really be so bad for the United States to be second?

Many rationalize their fears by saying that it’s because China’s ultimately a communist that its power should be controlled in some way (though it can’t be). I’m going to turn the coin over and say that it’s because China’s got a communist (or at least authoritarian) base that it’s growing at such an alarming pace.

Let me start off my saying a few things: I like my (representative) democracy, so don’t go pulling a McCarthy on me. Second, is it really any surprise that China’s economy will be the largest in the world, considering that a fifth of the world lives in China? One has only to look to the past to see that since the beginning of civilization, China’s always been a great state. Even at the same time as the Roman Empire was at its peak, a third of the way across the world, Han China was more productive in the economical sense. In the United States, we just happen to glorify Rome over China because of our western roots.

Even during this global crisis, China is still growing at an impressive pace. Though not quite at the double digit increases that it was experiencing before, the fact that China’s economy is still growing over 5% annually is more than notable.

Just look at the Olympics. Many of the things that the government did would not have been accepted in other parts of the world. Overnight, neighborhoods were knocked down to give way to sports arenas. Factories and plants were told to shut down to help clean the air. The poor were bused out of the city to show a picture of harmony to the world that many feel, in light of its human rights records, just doesn’t exist.

The concept of face is amazing. We all do it, but here in Hong Kong and in China people are renowned for their sheer adherence to it. In seeking to keep a positive, or at least neutral image of oneself towards others, there is a tendency to stay removed from new social situations and new people. This is highly visible on both the macro and the micro levels.

China wanted to show the world that it’s here again, and that’s its ready to join the world again. In its “coming out party” that is the Olympics, it sought to create a spectacular event for a reputable organization steeped in ancient philosophy, and in many ways it did. In many ways it didn’t. In attempting to show the world its harmonious face, it displaced many people and gave itself a facelift that was both highly expensive and highly publicized despite the notorious lack of freedom of press.

As it repaved sidewalks and built a hundred new subway stations though, everyone remembered China’s record. People found brought up Tibet (an issue people are not fully informed of) to show the great disparity of many sorts in China and found the audacity to disrupt the mission of the Olympic movement in the name of politics.

In trying to create a harmonious picture for the nation, it succeeded in created a great Games but failed in creating a new world image. It failed to address many public issues that should have been addressed. The blame is placed on the government and its lack of accountability, so to speak.

Here in Hong Kong, there is freedom of speech; there is a transparent government; there is also face. In local students trying to retain face by only speaking to their friends, many alienate exchange students. This lack of integration and their unwillingness to approach others actually damages their face in many opinions, and while they think they are projecting harmonious face, they happen to be demeaning themselves.

Right now, many people in China do want a say in government. Many outside China wonder then why they don’t get it. Most people in China put economic well-being and economic growth in front of such a say, and I saw one documentary where a man said that while he doesn’t like his government, he has to trust it.

Right now, it seems that the government is acting in the economic interests of the state as a whole. It has managed to keep its economy in good shape and its people relatively happy. At some point though, communism will fail to serve China. For the country to keep progressing, something will eventually have to happen. Just look at how far China has come since 1949. I believe that eventually, democratization with come.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Beijing: Ten Percent Annually

We ended Tuesday at the Olympic Village. Basically, it was an impressive site for an impressive country. Well, what do I mean by impressive? For one, the Beijing Olympics were massive. With everything involved, including the actual events and the trademark stadium involved, there was also the fact that Beijing’s bid including massively upgrading their mass-transit system and that most of the sports venues had to be built from the ground up.

For those who don’t remember, the games ended up costing somewhere along the lines of $47 billion USD. The opening ceremony alone, directed by the renowned Zhang Yimou, cost about $300 million USD. With China’s reemergence onto the world scene, the Olympic Village shows all the money put into it.

For one, the grounds are huge. The commonly-called Bird’s Nest that served as the centerpiece of the Olympics and was used to hold many events. The architecture is astounding and bold, with the seemingly crisscrossed beams making their way over the functional part of the stadium. Much like the Coliseum in Rome, the events held inside were as impressive as the façade on the outside.

Across the massive plaza there sits the Cube, which is groundbreaking in its own right. Serving the aquatic events, the building’s frame is filled in with filled, custom-cut plastic sacs and lit on select nights to a variety of colors, the least of which being blue, of course.

The subway system is now world-class and still growing. All but a few of the sites that my friends and I saw we got there by the subway system. It’s clean and efficient, and the voice speaks English in addition to Mandarin (albeit with the most annoying way of saying the [æ] in “trANsfer”).

The second reason I feel China is one impressive country is the sheer economic growth they’ve been experiencing—and it most definitely shows. Before the economic slump, the nation’s economy was growing at over 10% a year, year after year. Now, it’s probably under 10% but still positive, largely because China’s stimulus package was so effective.

When I visited in 2007, we flew into one of the two old terminals of Beijing Capital Airport. They were dingy and dirty and as soon as we walked outside, the rampant pollution permeated every piece of clothing you were wearing and burned the back wall of your pharynx.

Yeah, Beijing is still polluted, but whatever they’ve been doing, it’s been making the air cleaner. Of course, doing so was one of their promises in their Olympic bid, but for a metropolitan population of twelve million, it’s no easy (or small) task.

Most of the days we were there, the air was remarkably crisp and seemingly clean. At the south side of Tiananmen Square in the morning you could see all the way across to the north side and the entrance to the Forbidden City and Mao Zedong’s portrait. At the Summer Palace, it was easy to see the life of luxury and relaxation that the emperors lived in as the wind brushed against your face and the water splashed against the shoreline.

Just two years ago, the weather at the Summer Palace was horrific. After seeing the water in that lake, we decided never to eat fish from China again. Though still polluted, that water has definitely improved; and looking back and pictures from my last time in Beijing, where there were dead plants there are now thriving lilies.

In the Forbidden City, much of which covered by scaffolding being restored for the Olympics, now shone in the clean air. Once temple once rumored to have good views of the Forbidden City you could now see from the Forbidden City. The funny thing that I noticed though was that not all of the intricate painted surfaces were restored. While some were left put all together, others were restored only on the front—the areas that show up in pictures. Much of the roof undersides were left showing their age.

Going through the Forbidden City though, one had to think that on this massive scale how many people were displaced. Going through the Olympic Village as well, how many hutong were demolished and how many people were displaced?

A hutong (胡同) is a more traditional aspect of Beijing. It’s a neighborhood comprise of interlinked buildings house many families, and as of recent, have been disappearing to skyscrapers and more monumental structures. There was a time in Beijing when there was the palace, which was surrounded by hutong. Now, you have to into backstreets to find them. The ones that aren’t in the alleys have had to find their niche (usually alcohol) in some way.

Two years ago, the hutong that our tour group showed us was interesting to say the least. It was rundown and needed a bit of revitalizing. Coming back two years later (and on accident to this particular area), it’s now the bar district. It all came back to me when we crossed this one small bridge over the main canal. In one fell swoop it all came pouring back in. I have no idea what it was called back then, but it was probably named the same thing as now—Houhai (后海).

Just a few years ago, these storefronts were just storefronts. Now they were relatively well-appointed bars with music blasting out of their seams. I’m not going to assert that the change was bad, but it’ll at least say that it was different.

And back to the Great Wall. I visited it two years ago because that’s just one of the things you have to do in Beijing. Back then it was impressive, though the pollution came all the way out there.

And so it turns out that we went to the same section of the Great Wall that I went to two years ago. Badaling (八达岭) is one of the most popular tourist spots on the Great Wall, and when I went there in 2007, there was a dirt parking lot in front of the wall with vendors nearby. For a price, you could dress up as a Manchurian emperor and pretend to be coming through the gate to Ming China.

Today, the wall itself remains the same. The environment changed. Of course, it’s now fall and the leaves were a different shade. It was windy and the air was crisp and clean rather than hot and humid.

I basically had another Houhai moment. I was standing right in front of the Badaling gate and it all came back again. The unpaved parking lot and ground peddler shops was now an elegantly-tiled, well-arbored plaza with a memorial-style retaining wall commemorating the Great Wall. The retaining wall was covered with a bronze relief of a Ming general in the foreground and a mock outline of the Great Wall in the background. The actual Great Wall had flags on the watchtowers with the character 明, as in Ming dynasty.

This makes me wonder, how does the People’s Republic of China view its past? Most people would agree that the Cultural Revolution led to the destruction of history in many regards. Does the fact that they’ve refurbished the Great Wall to suggest the Ming Dynasty show that they venerate the past, or do they do it just for tourism? I can tell you most of my friends didn’t know what the 明 on the flags meant.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Peux ce que veux

I am one disgusted individual and I know it.

Throughout most of my life I had been an incurable pessimist. I don’t know if I can say that I had that childhood sense of fantasy and imagination that many adults so intensely envy. I can say that as an adult, I’m glad that I didn’t have it, because while I’m willing to pick up the slack, I don’t like creating that slack for everyone else to pick up.

Parents say things that they don’t want their kids to hear and they know it. Fights happen, and while many kids would have ignored what’s happening and go back to their plush toys and action figures, I guess I’ve heard everyone argue, least of whom parents.

And therein lies my origin. I’ve been surrounded by more reasonable-sounding pessimists than logical optimists. And in weighing those two options, I joined the pessimists’ side in an attempt to follow reason.

Despite my pessimism, I’ve always had a positive outlook on my life personally. I grew up in a good neighborhood, always attended good schools (and still do), got to experience my share of extracurricular activities, and was given the opportunity to find my imagined niche.

My parents had always said to learn from their mistakes and learn from them the easy way rather than go and make the same mistakes and learn the hard way. I believed them, though the hard way seems to have a more everlasting impact than the easy way.

I had always been told by friends that moved away with family or for college that the world outside of East Ventura County is a different place. I believed them, and for that I prepared myself for an outside world of despair.

I’ve always complained about my hometown. I found drivers abnoxious and dangerous. People too snobby and pretentious, and kids to drowned in their alternative realities of perpetually green grass that cuts itself for $300 a week. The thing is though that I’ve stopped complaining about my hometown because I’ve begun to realize how trivial that is.

Basically, we’ve got bigger problems on our hands. (Well duh, James, you must be thinking.) The thing is that everyone says that. But who actually does anything?

Certainly but a few in the case of Rwanda. The reason I bring this up, first of all, is that we discussed the Rwandan Genocide in my Humanity in Globalization (political science) class. The second is that this topic serves as a catalyst to bring up this aspect of my personality not yet quite mentioned, and worth mentioning now in case circumstances change.

The title of this post comes from Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general heading the peacekeeping force in Rwanda for the United Nations during this conflict, who ended his letter requesting to use force to prevent major loss of life with “peux ce que veux,” translating idomatically to “when there’s a will, there’s a way.”

This has been something of an upswing to me. Though there were other factors in my upturn from a pessimist to an optimist, namely religion, “peux ce que veux” has become something of a motto for me.

And those of you who know the specifics, this sentence did nothing for Dallaire’s efforts. Up to a million people were killed for immoral reasons and no state saw a reason to intervene because of a lack of state interests.

In short, maybe I’m too idealistic. I understand that I’m still young in my years, but some things I hope don’t change; some things I know won’t change.

I feel that money is only worth as much as the people without it, and to live a life past what could be called comfortable is not a goal for me. To spend money on lavish curtains rather than give to those in need is a simple moral dilemma in my view. I study political science and aspire to be a leading academic someday. I wish to attain a law degree to help advance and guarantee human rights, but where would I start?

Not caring so much about money is a start. With all the garbage that I had been fed by people like Bill O’Reilly, I had to re-evaluate my opinions. Yeah, lower taxes would be nice, but if we get see the social services we get in return (which we often look past) would accepting that some things are better than wealth be all that bad? If all illegal immigrants are trying to do is live and feed their families, would it be so bad to view them as fellow humans than non-Americans and see about helping them out as well?

I am an optimist, but not in the current framework. And within my optimism I remain a pessimist. I feel that in our current state system, with the artificial concept of nationality and citizenship now being so engrained in our lives, we have lost our common humanity. This is not a system that is coming apart any time soon in our realist world created my neoconservatives and the like.

I have made the little efforts that I can right now. Of the 44% Asian American population of UCSD, I do not belong. I always check “Other” or “Decline to State.” I don’t care about race and ethnicity statistics. We’re all human, and until we all thoroughly understand that, we as a people are going head-first into a glass wall comprised of seas, fences, and demilitarized zones.

But hey. Peux ce que veux. Y cuando la gente pueda y quiera hacer lo que nosotros, los serhumanos, tenemos que hacer, quizás la Tierra pueda entrar la nueva época.

你们要不要哏我去?

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Nationality and Ethnicity

I should start out with an apology. I’m having trouble keeping on schedule with my posts. This one in particular was supposed to coincide with National Day, celebrated October 1 to commend the founding of the People’s Republic sixty years go.

I guess you could say that my style is not that of impulse blogging. I wouldn’t go so far in the other direction to say that I maul over my posts for days on end, meticulously correcting mistakes, wittily adding in bits of symbolism every which way the reader turns. The way I’ve been working with the task that is this blog is to decide what topics I want to write about and queue them up to be expanded and finally published.

For example, this post has been in planning stages since mid-September. I felt that this timing would be appropriate to elaborate on the ongoing topic here of identity and nationalism.

I started out by saying that I would first identify myself as American before Chinese American and never Chinese except in ethnicity or ancestry. Regarding my trip to Italy, I explored the perceptions of those locals towards nationality and how it relates to ethnicity.

Some background—I would be close to the first to tell you that nationalism is an entirely fictitious concept. Ultimately we are all humans, and scientifically speaking there is more genetic variation within ethnicities than among different ethnicities, hence the terms “ethnicity” and “race” have no scientific basis. Nationalism, a concept that I push as a separate from race and ethnicity, then, would be even more artificial, especially since we are taught in primary school that Americans all have immigrant backgrounds (minus the Native Americans) and come from all walks of life.

I also have to say that I follow nationalism quite a bit. I feel I share a great deal more in common with a fellow American than with, say, a Chinese national. With common upbringing and (most likely) a common mother tongue, there just seems to be more to relate to whether there really is or not.

In the hand of irony though, the first person to question my nationality, requiring me to defend myself, was at the opinion of a guy from Massachusetts. Of note is the fact that I haven’t had to defend myself against my roommate, who, in a fell swoop of fabricated statistics, quasi-neoconservative opinions, and resistance to learning a single word of Cantonese, has found my being in the four percent of Americans in the Asian minority an acceptable thought.

And here I present two events: the first in my Traditional Chinese Society class, and the other with a good friend of mine here.

This little discussion in my sociology tutorial actually took place something like a month ago. Usually, it’s an insignificant occurrence when something like this happens to me because it happens more often than I’d like, but this time it was in an academic environment, involving an offensive on my perception of myself.

In discussing nationality and ethnicity as the topic of the week for that class, the topic over overseas Chinese came up. I made my point that while I have no problem identifying my ethnicity as Chinese, I would always stop short of calling myself Chinese in the general sense and overseas Chinese in that it appears that I have some sort of allegiance to China.

I don’t.

To say that I do would imply that I have Chinese nationality or citizenship, that I have the right to be in China, or that I have parents that do. A typical conversation would go like this:

“Why don’t you call yourself Chinese?”

“Because I’m not from China. I was born, raised, and educated here in California.”

“But your parents are from China.”

“Not really.”

“But your grandparents are from China?”

“And where are your grandparents from?”

The answer to that is rarely the United States.

But in class it was a bit different, it was a local student trying to convince me that I could not be anything but Chinese. This was weird, because all my life I have found that Chinese and Chinese Americans hesitate to call me one of them due to my lack of fluency in any Chinese language, yet prototypically perceived Americans refuse to see me as one of them as I look different from them.

If you couldn’t tell already, I identify more with the prototypically perceived Americans, though I like to believe that everyone who wants to call him- or herself American living in the United States is entitled to do so regardless of (primary) language spoken or customs or practices that happen not to be the societal norm. This guy though was using my appearance to say that I could not be anything other Chinese, which, while it happened a few times back home, was less common than not.

So with a different audience I had to defend myself in a different way. I used Chinese nationality law. Being an American both by birth and by blood, I figure to call myself Chinese in the same way, I would be able to be granted Chinese nationality in some form—but I can’t.

My father’s parents were Chinese nationals, though left when the Nationalists were in power. As a result, it would appear to be virtually impossible to find all the appropriate documents to prove that they had citizenship, then that my father had citizenship because of them. But even if my father were to have citizenship, it would likely not be conferred to me. My thinking is that even in U.S. nationality law, a citizen (natural-born or naturalized) must have lived in the U.S. for a certain period of time before his or her citizenship can be given to his or her children born outside the United States. And my father has never set foot outside of North America, much less lived in China for any period of time.

On the other side, my mother’s birth in Hong Kong to Chinese parents makes her a Chinese national in theory as of 1997, when her British National Overseas status was commuted with the handover. However, she was naturalized as an American long before I was born, and has made no effort (understandably) to claim PRC citizenship. In addition, as she has been naturalized, she may be rendered herself ineligible for PRC citizenship.

So me, being born American by virtue of being born in the United States and by virtue of being born to two American parents, makes me ineligible for PRC citizenship under nationality law that makes clear that children born abroad to Chinese parents (which mine were effectively not) are not Chinese if they gain a different citizenship on birth.

And another reason why I hesitate to grant myself allegiance to China is the fact that my mother’s family emigrated from China specifically because of the Communists and what they did to the family that I never met.

So when my roommate bought a deck of playing cards that sported Chairman Mao Zedong on every face, he slammed it down on the desk in front of me to show what he had just done. His motivations behind why he bought that deck of cards, as well as a stereotypical People’s Liberation Army hat I don’t agree with and feel are quite crude, but that’s no matter as long as he doesn’t bring it in front of me.

As I pushed my hand across my forehead, sighing in a miniature fit of displeasure at my roommate’s misguided intentions, he mistook my disgust and assured me that “James, they’re not offensive or anything.”

Yeah, he didn’t get it, nor do I expect him to.

In my second note, we were all at Lamma Island enjoying some seafood after a long hike in hot weather. A good friend of mine asked me about how my family hierarchy works if I claim to be so American.

I think my response satisfied her question.

I had no idea what she was talking about.

She said that at funerals, for example, the Daoist priest would call up nuclear families one at a time, in a certain order, based on their family hierarchy. I told her that at the last funeral that I attended, which was my maternal grandmother’s, we didn’t have any of that. The service was presided over by a Methodist leader and at the end we went up to say our goodbyes in no specific order.

This reminds me of when I was little and asked m mother about something to that effect. I brought in family hierarchy in the same manner as the English royal family and she just brushed off my question, because it really didn’t matter.

And so national day is celebrated—this year the sixtieth anniversary of the Communists taking over China, the founding of the People’s Republic. Out in Victoria harbor a half-hour fireworks show of massive proportions started at 8:00pm.

Good luck.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Four More Stamps: Fabulous Macau

For the first time since I arrived here in Hong Kong, I left the Special Administrative Region to visit Macau, another SAR of the People’s Republic of China. With different immigration schemes and regulation, leaving Hong Kong got me one stamp in my passport, entering and leaving Macau got me two more, and my reentry into Hong Kong got me another large student stamp.

In addition to controlling immigration separate from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau each maintain their own currencies. Macau’s is the Pataca, which is pegged to the Hong Kong Dollar (which is in turn pegged to the U.S. Dollar). Being such as small currency zone though most everyone takes Hong Kong Dollars there, which means that only as much as 30% of currency in circulation in Macau is the Macanese Pataca.

For those who don’t know, Macau is often referred to as the Monte Carlo of China; and for those of you who don’t what Monte Carlo is, I refer to Macau as the little Las Vegas of China.

Situated on an island and a peninsula (which I believe is technically another island), it’s quite a bit smaller than Hong Kong SAR and has an industry heavily based on the gambling and entertainment industries. However, in comparison to the Strip of Las Vegas, many of the casinos appear smaller and less in number. Like Las Vegas, there were many not-so-ritzy areas that appear in stark contrast with the shining lights of tourist Macau.

Though more than anything, I went to Macau with some other exchange students to simply see and be there, I found the cultural items, most of with heavy Portuguese influence to be the most interesting part of the whole expedition.

Which brings me to another point—Macau is an SAR because it used to be a Portuguese colony in much the same manner that Hong Kong used to be a British colony. Having been controlled since 1557 by the Portuguese, Macau has a history as being the oldest European colony in China. Having been given back to China in 1999, Macau is also the last European colony to be returned. So in many ways, Macau is more Portuguese than Hong Kong is British.

The name of Macau itself has, since I first learned about the city, always been a point of personal contention. In Chinese, it is referred to as 澳门, which would be pronounced as Àomén in Mandarin and Ou3mun4 in Cantonese, neither of which sounds like its English name, adopted through Portuguese.

Though not a problem, since many names have not been transliterated properly (for China would be written Zhōngguó or at least Zhongguo), and life continues to move on, apparently when the Portuguese first landed in Macau, the locals told them that the territory was called AMaa5Gok3, named after Matsu, the goddess of seafarers, for whom a temple is dedicated. On the other hand, the name Hong Kong is transliterated by the British from Hoeng1Gong2, which was and remains the local name of the main island.

But back to the trip, we took a ferry from Central District direct to Macau’s ferry terminal. At about 37 miles, the journey took about an hour. With how bumpy the journey was, I was glad that I didn’t get seasick on the way there.

Trying to find the way to the hotel that we booked, we went up to the taxi stand and asked cabdrivers whether they could take us to the address we had written down. None of them had any idea where it was. Apparent to us now, the bilingual street names are translations of each other and not transliterations, meaning that a street named “Praca de ponte e horta” is not understood by those who operate in Cantonese (which has a completely different sounding name for the same street).

We ended up taking a bus to the Central Square (which has an absence of casinos). Nearly all the buildings along the way showed Portuguese styling. And I don’t know how it is in Portugal, but like in France and Italy (where I have been in Europe) the street names were written on the sides of buildings instead of on freestanding posts, as they are in most of Hong Kong and the United States.

The Central Square (officially Senate Square), in addition to sidewalks along the main road, was colorfully tiled in black and ivory, with wavy stripes and designs of animals apparent (which I read is traditional Portuguese pavement). The buildings were ornate and brightly colored with traditional columns and arches. Preparing for some festival in all likelihood, large decorations in the shapes of fruits and vegetables were hung over the main square. I watched them put them up from my window when I ate at McDonalds the next morning.

Our hotel, which, while close to the square, was not as close as described on its website. Ole London Hotel was, while not located in the best of neighborhoods, not in the worst of neighborhoods, and offered a comfortable bed, bath with a large showerhead, and free air conditioning.

Once we dropped off our stuff, the first stop was Macau Tower. Similar in shape to the Space Needle of Seattle, Washington, the one in Macau offers great views of Macau (as well as mainland China across the river) in addition to the highest bungee jump in the world. I did not have the privilege to do that, though it was more like I didn’t want to spend the money.

Getting up to the observation deck cost $90 HKD, but the bungee jump would have set me back $2088 HKD for the jump and $588 HKD for an additional jump, if I wanted it. Plus, one of my friends, who works as a nurse in Australia, said that a lot of peoples eyes pop up when the bungee bounces back due to the pressure change. I did see three of my friends do it too, and though I regretted not doing it with them at first, I decided that I was in Macau not to bungee jump but to see the city.

Later, we went to a casino—the Venetian. While on the other island and away from the other casinos, it is the largest Venetian hotel and casino of them all. I saw the one in Las Vegas and I thought it was pretty cool. The one in Macau was in all earnestness not any better than the one in Las Vegas. They both had the artificial sky and the pool-water Grand Canal, along with St. Mark’s Square (incomplete without Doge’s Palace and the campanile). We went to the food court, which served average food at terribly inflated prices, not to mention the food venues were way slow.

Down on casino level, the casino was just like any other casino. I originally intended to gamble like $5 HKD at slot machines (gambling and drinking age in Macau is 18) but ended up just looking and gambling nothing. What caught my attention was how the casino was entirely shielded off and one had to go in between gates along with people with the authority to verify your age to card you. This is in contrast to how in Las Vegas, they make you walk through the casino to get anywhere and everywhere, in hopes that the combination of clicking and shining lights will get you to sit down for a bit and spend a lot.

The next day, we went back to the central square and ate at McDonalds. It was great except that it didn’t sit well with me. After getting my coffee fix at Starbucks in the same square, we set off on a walking tour prescribed by the Lonely Planet guidebook for Hong Kong and Macau.

On top of markets (which I have yet to see as any better than Chinatowns in the United States), some of the highlights were St. Dominic’s Church on Central Square, which, being Catholic, reminded me of the many Catholic churches I saw early last summer in France and Italy. The main difference was that the interior of this church, just as grand as the others, is painted a light color, which in part makes it much more bright than the others. As part of the church, one of the bell towers was turned into a museum that houses relics and the like.

The other highlight was the Ruins of St. Paul’s, which used to be the façade of a seventeenth-century church in that location. Now, the façade is reinforced and equipped with a viewing platform, from which there is a great view of Macau. In front of the façade are steps leading down to street level. Though just as crowded as the Spanish Steps in Rome, there are more of them.

We headed back to Hong Kong that day, ready for classes to start again the day after.

Shopping for Classes, Part 2

The add/drop period for class registration ended September 14. For the Faculty of Social Sciences, September 15 was when we had to turn in a signed finalization of those classes. Though I met both deadlines, making sure that classes will be approved for meeting requirements for general education and my majors and minor has been a little more difficult.

With shopping for classes done and over with, I ended up with five six-unit classes and one three-unit class, Cantonese for Foreign Learners 1. That class may actually contain the majority of the fun I have on campus. Organized to give us conversational knowledge of Cantonese, the class is simple and entertaining. For the fifty minutes, twice a week that it’s worth, I can tell that the teacher is really enthusiastic about what she does. What makes it more fun is that, since I cannot apply this class to any graduation requirement back home, I’m going to take the class pass/no pass, I can enjoy myself and the content of the class without feeling to bothered about what grade I get.

The three five-unit classes that I plan to apply to requirements back at UCSD are Introduction to Arts of Asia: Past and Present, Traditional Chinese Society, Hong Kong and the World, Humanity in Globalization, and Phonetics.

To be rephrased as Introduction to Asian Art on my University of California transcript, this is the other class that I think I’ll take pass/no pass. This is to fulfill the non-western fine arts class for Eleanor Roosevelt College’s general education requirements. Being in Asia, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do so.

The class is very interesting to say the least. As of yet we’ve been discussion Buddhist art and just last lecture we were discussing how Buddhism’s arrival to Japan reflected the native Shinto way of life and its reflection in art and architecture, particularly the design of temples. It was further related to the present day, in which reflecting the older works we went over selected contemporary works by such notables as Yoko Ono.

Traditional Chinese Society is an ethnographic, anthropologic class that deals more with contemporary Chinese society in light of traditional Chinese society. Right now, I’m trying to get it preapproved for my minor in the Study of Religion, with my case being that the class focuses on way of life, which is true religion in its essential form. Concretely, similar classes have been approved for the Study of Religion at UCSD, namely Chinese Society (a sociology class) and Traditional Chinese Society (an anthropology class). Here at HKU there is not an anthropology department, so this class is listed under Sociology. In crossing classes with UCSD, the description of my class here at HKU is in between the two UCSD classes, leaning more towards the anthropological one.

If the Study of Religion program refuses to see my logic, I plan to make my case to apply this as an anthropology class to the secondary focus of my International Studies-Political Science major. Unfortunately, UC transfers this course over as a sociology class by default, so I would have to prove its anthropological content through the syllabus and explaining the ethnographic methods used in analysis.

As of right now, we’ve been dealing with what it means to be Chinese (a topic which I have addressed and will address again personally in a later post). Last lecture we talked about creation stories as an aspect of Chinese culture and contrasted the shear view of culture to that of Christianity. Next week we focus on the body and the traditional Chinese view of it.

This class’s tutorial is also the only one I’ve been to so far. With such a small class, there is no teacher’s assistant and the tutorials, called sections at UCSD, are run by the professor himself. It was set up as an informal environment in which we could discuss the readings and the current class materials. In that tutorial, I had to make my case for why I call myself American, but more on that later.

Hong Kong and the World is another favorite class of mine. It is listed under politics and public administration, and rightly so. The professor doesn’t have a PhD but work experience, having a consulting firm with such clients as the William Clinton Foundation. I plan to apply this class to my International Studies-Political Science major.

In light of Hong Kong’s political situation as a highly autonomous part of the People’s Republic of China, we look at why Hong Kong as been such an economic success and evaluate its future competitiveness in light of rising Chinese cities and Hong Kong’s eventual return of full sovereignty back to China.

This particular professor organizes his classes with many guests. Our first is the current director of the InvestHK, and described his job as attracting and retaining foreign investment in Hong Kong. This was followed by an intense question-and-answer section which he handled like a seasoned politician.

Humanity in Globalization is another political science class taught by the same professor as Hong Kong and the World. This actually ended up being a substitute class for me, as I meant to take International Relations of East Asia, but was troubled by the lack of oratory skills of the professor. I opted for the more interesting, more grounded class (for IR talks about countries practically as sentient beings whereas Humanity in Globalization talks about individual people in relation to the world.

So far, we’ve talked about modern-day slavery (which most people don’t know about) with one source claiming that there are more slaves today than there have ever been before. (Though I wonder if you cast that data as a percent of the population whether the numbers would seem less dire.)

My last class is Phonetics, which at first I was really excited about, but now I’m questioning the content. With my second major being a specialization in linguistics, Phonetics is a core class for me, and deciding to take it here I thought would be a good experience.

At UCSD, Phonetics is taught in light of English, introducing anatomical features of producing speech, and focusing hardly at all at the International Phonetic Alphabet Chart. Regarding linguistics, I actually prefer phonetics and phonology over semantics and morphology because there is a quantifiable reality to the study. Semantics for me seemed a little soft because it seemed less logical than other linguistics sub-disciplines.

At HKU, Phonetics is taught much the same, with the exception that we go over sounds of Mandarin and Cantonese in addition to American English (I don’t know why we don’t go over British Received Pronunciation). It sounded good and all, but for the second lecture, we went over sounds of American English, and being that many local students (most all local students) don’t speak American English, he taught it more like a let’s-learn-how-to-speak-properly class.

This was problematic in my head because at UCSD a resounding message in my linguistics classes is that linguists (and social scientists) for that matter, being researchers, work to the effect of description and not prescription. That means that Linguists don’t dictate how we should speak, they just analyze how we do speak.

Being a native American English speaker, I had no problem, but as we have to go over that again in Mandarin and Cantonese, I hope he doesn’t continue in the same manner.

To make matters worse, the TA for the class makes all the announcements in Cantonese. I always end up raising my hand to request her to repeat what she said in English.

Though I hoped to write this post after I settled into a routine, I figured that I should get out my sentiments about my classes and reveal the results of my shopping before going any further.

Career Plans

“What do you call 5,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?”

Most know the answer to this joke is “A good start.” It is commonly perceived that in the professional world, lawyers are sly and conniving, always looking for a reason to sue, exploiting people for their hard earned money. This is the stereotype played off of in television, movies, and other media; it is also what I had in mind up until I started college. I never wanted to be a lawyer, involved in corporate politics, drowning in the multiplicity of personalities. It wasn’t appealing.

There are lawyers who exist like this, of course. But most lawyers supposedly have never been on the inside of a courtroom and are low-profile men and women who are hardworking and live middle-class lifestyles. So less lawyers are as exploitative as is commonly thought.

On the other hand, physicians are thought of as lifesavers. And I suppose it is true for the most part. After all, they do receive much more education that lawyers. A mistake by a doctor could cost a life but a mistake by a lawyer could lose some money. Alternatively, a skilled doctor can maintain life where wanted whereas a skilled lawyer can get settlements or the accused exonerated. However, I have reason to believe that proportionally speaking there are just as many bad doctors as bad lawyers.

So when people tell me this joke like it’s new news I chuckle a little. But when I decided that I wanted to be an international law attorney (hopefully humanitarian or human rights) it took awhile because of the stigma surrounding it. When I was younger, I absolutely hated politics. It looked like backstabbing and corruption to me. However, I now realize that politics, while seemingly superficial on the surface, is the main way for the government to make changes for the people. For the last couple years, I have been really interested in international affairs, and for that reason I have my first major International Studies-Political Science.

Because of my interest in learning languages and the mechanics involved in language acquisition and language itself, I found myself with my second major in Linguistics, To tailor it to my other major so that I could use skills more easily from both in the same context, I chose the Language and Society specialization, which is basically a mix of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Hence, my second major in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society).

Because of my love of humanities and Making of the Modern World, Eleanor Roosevelt College’s core course sequence, I’ve take up the Study of Religion as my minor.

If I get accepted into departmental honors programs and succeed, I will graduate with the following degree:

Bachelor of Arts in International Studies-Political Science with highest distinction, Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics (Specialization in Language and Society) with highest distinction, with a minor in the Study of Religion.

Now is when most people would ask me what I plan on doing with my degree. Well, as said before, I would like to be an attorney in international law, hopefully humanitarian and or human rights. How I get there is a different story.

So currently I attend University of California, San Diego, and plan on graduating in winter or spring as part of the Eleanor Roosevelt College Class of ’11. During which time, I will study abroad for half a year in Hong Kong at the University of Hong Kong and hopefully find some governmental and or legal internships. (I’m currently eyeing the Department of State or the San Diego County or Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office).

When I graduate, I originally planned graduate school. This is the part where is gets confusing for some people. I personally appreciate specialization, so I hope to go to a top-ten law school whose parent school also offers a Ph.D. in Political Science. Many schools, such as Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia, offer joint programs to overlap courses and reduce time to achieve both degrees significantly. Northwestern in particular offers a combined six-year program as follows:

Year 1: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 2: Graduate School
Summer: graduate research
Year 3: Law School (L1) and advancement to C.Phil. status
Summer: graduate and law research
Year 2: Law School (L2)
Summer: submission of prospectus
Year 5: Research and Teaching Fellowship
Summer: dissertation research
Year 6: Completion of Dissertation

By this original plan, I would have my bachelor’s degree at age 20 and my J.D. and Ph.D. at 26—noticeably young and without much real-world experience, unfortunately. The positive side is that the program is fully funded for those six years, so I wouldn’t need to find employment (if I were to have time for outside work).

So after that, I would like to teach as a law or political science professor while practicing law on the side. I know it sounds corny but I hope I can do something good for the world in the future.

The reason I say "original" plan is because I have something in mind that would set graduate school back about two or three years. I have told just a few people what this is, but I'll be sure to go through this experience first before I affirm any other plans.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.