Getting a feel for Korea

It took me a while to find Korea. I came as a China Scholar. I still think of myself as a China Scholar. But I came to Korea to be with Christian, to broaden my view of Asia, to calm down and figure myself out, and to earn money. I had a hard time separating my understanding of Korea from my understanding of China-- most of what I saw in Korea were things borrowed from China. I knew that a lot of what I understood as China I should really understand as Asia, but at the same time China has been an 'exporter of culture' for thousands of years in Asia. A lot of things that seem Chinese here are, or were.

... I started this post in a coffee shop in City Hall. I am now sitting at a kind of play/gathering ground (explanation in a moment) by the coast where, bless Korea, there is public wireless internet. There are coffee shops and bakeries popping up all over the place-- a Western fad. (There is also SPAM everywhere-- a product of American military influence in building South Korea's economy after/during the war...) This is a better place to think, and a good example for me to try to untangle my ideas of China and Korea. 

There is a long concrete wall behind me. It was I think recently painted a pale yellow, and has raised sculptures of fish and octopodes and Jeju Women Divers. On the other side of the wall is the ocean, which just switched from a deep turquoise to almost black with the setting of the sun, though there were clouds blocking the sunset for an hour or so.

I am sitting on the top of four large concrete steps that lead down to a large concrete court. The concrete is swirls and blocks of color-- blue and pink and yellow, I think, though I have almost always been here when the sun has been low and the yellow streetlamps distorting the color scale. This court ends maybe another hundred feet in front of me, and stretches probably half a mile from side to side. The area far to my right has basketball and other courts. Along the other edge are vendors. Some of them sell food, and most of them are renting some kind of equipment. Bicycles (for 1 to 4 riders), rollerblades and skates and pads,  child-sized electric cars, balls to throw around. There is only a small crowd out tonight, as it is Sunday, but there are still lots of families and more than a few sweethearts walking up and down the seawall or riding something around in circles. There is a constant murmur of parents telling their kids not to get so far away, or laughing or cheering their approval of some feat of balance, or children who have run out of feats and need a hug. It sounds like a community.

To get here I walked 20 minutes or so downhill from City Hall. The road I took was full of shops-- bags and shoes and pets and clothes-- and to cross the last main road I had to go underground and walk a hundred feet through the shopping strip that runs for a mile (I think?) under Jungangro. I am drinking a bottle of Tropicana Spirit: Juice100 &Sparkling, White Grape flavor. It was part of a 1+1 deal at the FamilyMart (a Japanese chain which competes with the Korean GS25) near my house. And, you will recall, I have my new black netbook on my knees, surfing the web and writing this to you fine people.

Okay. So, this court/public square feeling area could be in China, more or less. I have seen similar places at the center of cities where rollerblades are rented-- it is a good time in any country! But of course, in China the paved public pedestrian areas big enough for this are the People's Squares in the middle of cities (generally in the place where Something Else stood before 1949). But they are used in much the same way. I didn't ever live near the coast in China, and most of Korea is near the coast-- so we can chalk the salt tang in the air up to geographic differences.

Korea went through its lightning fast economic development in the 60s-80s, so the air here feels calmer as well. In China I often feel heavy with the emotional intensity that comes from Chinese people trying to keep up with the changes of the last century and keep track of their identity-- I say that or something like it often and am never sure if I'm getting quite what I mean across. This feeling is a lot of what makes China fascinating for me, though I struggle with it. I know I still do not have a good feeling for Korea's changes in the last century, because so many people here are so comfortable with them. I don't feel that struggle, but I know I also don't feel whatever was lost in it.

Korea is one of Asia's "four tigers" of economic development, and they* are conscious of being taken as an economic model by other 'developing' countries. My East Asian Economics/Economies** professor liked the description of Asian economies as a flock of geese-- Japan is the lead goose, and Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong flank it.

As an American (particularly as a white person, sadly) and walking symbol of the economic development that  both of these countries are aiming for, I am treated differently here. Differently from the way I am treated in American and differently from the way that most people are treated here. Overall, I am not given as much attention here in Korea, but I am definitely noticed. Understandably, not everyone is sure what to do with me. Do they like what my identity represents? Can they interact with me like a regular person? Can I understand even one word of their language?

The vast majority of people I have encountered in both countries have been incredibly welcoming-- embarassingly so, when I think of the way that foreigners, and especially foreigners who don't speak English, are talked about and treated in America. There are cases of discrimination, but they are not the rule. Definitely the main difference between China and Korea is that in China-- at least if you get away from big tourist areas like Beijing and Shanghai-- people are much more intrigued and excited to see a foreigner. Though I have had people in both countries tell me that I was the first foreigner they had ever talked to, or sometimes even seen in person.

Hmm... I think I'm going to stop here and try to come back with another entry just on Korea in the near future. It's I'm still struggling to put my finger on words to describe how these countries feel so very different. There are here, I'll just keep writing til they come out!

*I say 'they' and mean it in a way that is so general as to be pretty much inaccurate. There are plenty of people here who are contentedly clueless about politics and economic development in a lot of ways, just as there are most places.

**I really love that the lines around concepts are different in every language.

Beginnings and Endings, right?

The end of my two-and-a-half-year relationship last Saturday was not out of the blue or in anger, and though I have had some pretty low emotional points about it in the last week, overall I'm feeling very positive that it was the right decision and I am moving in the right direction.

This week has been an explosion of options. I realized that boyfriend-man was a major, though not the only, thing pulling me back to the US. I think I am not moving back this year, and I am re-exploring options for the next few years. Here are some of the options on my mind:

For the rest of this year and the beginning of next:
1) Stay in Korea and keep earning my Native English Speaker dollars and paying off my student loans
2) find a job in the Midwest to be close to family and friends, and keep paying off student loans

For the year after next:
1) Move back to the US and pursue grad school/teaching certification. This has been the plan I've been building most of this year, though I've been having trouble deciding whether to pursue Montessori or a state teaching certificate, or both.
2) Move back to the US and pursue grad school in Environmental Science or Engineering. I could still make tutoring a regular part of my life, and perhaps have the more individual affect on their lives that I would not be able to have if I only saw students in classes of 30.
3) Move to China under a Chinese Government Scholarship and pursue Environmental Science or Engineering at a Chinese University. This would put me in China with some long-term stability, and I could make/continue solid friendships and start a life as an international science liaison.
4) Move to China and get Montessori certification at the teaching center in Hangzhou. Teach in China and return to the US when/if the job market increases with enough teaching experience to be competitive
5) Other things yet unthought of that will give me opportunities to teach, travel, and keep involved (even vicariously) in scientific studies.

I posed a couple of these on facebook the other day and got a lot of excellent feedback, much of which supported my feeling that I don't want to teach in the US right now. I really, really would like the right answer to bring me closer to home, but I also don't want to move home and feel stuck. So, right now I am leaning towards things that will keep me on this side of the globe for a while longer.

how do we show each other who we are

I have always disliked labels. I owe this largely to having been raised and homeschooled by an anthropologist, as well as the Baha'i community. I learned early that they are often a deception; they whittle down complex identities to one or two words. Labels are generally static in the minds of those defining them, while the identity of anyone being defined is a dynamic thing, daily growing and being pruned. They are often assigned or inherited, and can be a constant hindrance to a person’s being seen by others or even understanding themselves.

One the other hand, they can be powerful and beautiful tools when they are self-chosen and self-defined. A dear friend has recently begun demanding that the people in her life let her define her Chinese-Americanness for herself and be willing to learn (as we so desperately need to) about how our behavior and attitudes might be racist without intending or often even realizing it.  You can find her words on this here in her blog. She has been a strong inspiring force for me to keep examining myself, and to see positive and negative aspects of my mind with confidence to best become who I want to be.

Knowing these things has made my feelings towards labels complicated. I am sometimes too wary of  the judgments I will receive from others for identifying myself with an idea or group, and sometimes wary of the problems that I might be allowing myself to sweep under a rug and ignore by placing a label over the areas of my identity involved.

I am lucky that in the Midwestern US the notable elements of my identity are chosen, invisible, or both. I do not wear my minority religion in my skin; I do not wear my parents’ divorce in my face. One cannot tell by looking or even talking to me that I was homeschooled, however much of the stigma against homeschooling they may buy into. I blend very easily into the white middle class majority. I cannot escape from being labeled female (my boobs have seen to that since seventh grade, and my love of dangly earrings rather reinforces it). I spent a lot of time in middle and high school experimenting with how 'female' I dressed and how people reacted to me. I hate how big of a difference there often is in how well people treat a feminine-ly dressed woman verses a more androgynous-ly dressed one, but I nevertheless am usually in the well-treated category.

The Baha’i Faith has often been central in my thoughts about chosen and denied identities. When my parents separated and my family identity shifted radically, and I began public school and lost the present tense in my alternative-schooler identity, I took a big step away from my identity in the Baha'i community as well. Partially this was confusion; I didn't understand the change in my other identities and thus didn't understand how this one could stay the same. I could also feel a strong desire in myself for stability, for something that I could rest my identity on and stop thinking about it, and it frightened me to think about how much I would stop thinking about if I gave in to that desire.

I did not identify with religion at all during middle and high school. I investigated quite a few philosophies and religions and learned a lot about myself, largely through counselors and support groups. The removal of my primary identities gave me an excellent and rare opportunity to look underneath my labels and clean out my definitions of myself, and the help that I received allowed me to take advantage of it. 

During my freshmen year of university I decided that I was far enough from my former identity as Baha'i to investigate it again. I started looking through the books I still had and eventually decided to try praying and see if it made a difference in my life if I didn't tell anyone else about it. I did and it did, and after a while I decided to call myself Baha'i. I think this was one of the best decisions of my life. I affirmed my ability to define myself and was able to grow all over my mind and spirit with the ideas and discipline of Baha'i teachings.

Lately, however, I have been realizing that my Baha'i identity has been becoming more negative than positive. This is partially because I have been far away from my home Baha'i communities and thus haven't had as much input available on how to keep myself moving in positive and intentional directions, religion-wise. And mostly because it has begun to get tied up with my insecurities and other mental and emotional shortcomings. I have been feeling this label pulling me away from other people, making it hard for me to understand them rather than respect them for who they are. I do not think that this is inevitable with religious identity, but I don't think I'm the only one who has these struggles. There is a Truth in the Baha'i writings that I experienced pulling me up to a place above labels, where I could see more clearly what people around me were offering and the burdens they were carrying and how beautiful they were. But more recently I have been feeling myself holding this label up as proof that I don't have to look (and simultaneously being frustrated for lack of beauty in my life), that obviously if I am Baha'i I am seeing what's important.

Because of this I have decided that I need to take off my Baha'i label for a while. I am looking at my other identities and trying to figure out what I should do with them. I don't know if I am taking off my religious label forever. I don't think so, but I think to be honest in the self-investigation I need right now I cannot make any promises. 

I am so grateful for all of the sincere people in my life who constantly inspire me to look at myself and what I am giving to the world carefully, and for all the love in my life.

My Education, part 3: Beginning Public School

My mother taught my brother and me at home until 1998, when I was finishing 6^th grade and Isaac was finishing 4^th. My parents separated that year, and both Isaac and I started public school in the fall. I had attended I think a month or so of first grade (after which my mother decided it wasn’t the best place for me to learn) and I believe two weeks of fifth grade (after which I decided it wasn’t the best place for me to learn) in public schools. I had just lost my identity as a family and my identity as an alternative-schooler (and moved house twice in five months), so for me a sharp identity-less panic was cast over the general malaise that is middle school adolescence. *

Even while I was attempting to just keep my head down and get good grades so no one would look at me and I could try to find some solid mental ground to stand on, I was horrified by some of the things I found in public middle school. Not that it was a bad school or that I had bad teachers. Many of my teachers were good, a few of them were excellent and there is only one who I would credit with increasing my anxiety. For one thing, I found that cliques were real, even though every book or movie or anecdote I had ever heard of seemed to prove that all cliques did was build walls between people who should have enjoyed each other.

More than that, I found that I had trouble relating to how the students learned. They were not used to having any control in their learning, and so didn’t often seem to evaluate the worth of a piece of learning outside of what it meant for their grade.

The experience that stands out most illustrating the difference I felt between our minds was a lecture by the eighth grade Social Studies teacher while I was in seventh grade. I don’t remember if it was just my grade or the whole school that was required to attend, but I remember being sent rather unexpectedly to the auditorium first thing in the morning instead of to my first period class. This teacher was originally from Laos and he told us the story of his family’s escape from their probable deaths in that country. I have never been a morning person, or terribly fond of changes in my schedule without my consent, so I don’t remember being thrilled to be in the auditorium at 8am when I was expecting to be in Reading class but I was moved by the offer he was making of such a personal experience. And I was impressed by the odds against this kind of story coming to me in Ames, Iowa. So I resolved to thank him for it.

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want his attention when I talked to him. I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. I didn’t really want anyone to look at me. I just wanted to get through my classes so I could go back home. But I finally convinced myself that, even if not because of the magnitude of what he had offered, I had to thank him because everyone else would and I would be the obvious one missing.  So I wrung my hands for a while when everyone was milling around in the cafeterias afterwards and finally walked up and thanked him for what he had shared. He said I was welcome, and I think said another warm-hearted thing, and then as quickly as I could I made an awkward retreat.

A week or so later during a break in my Social Studies class, my teacher asked me (in front of everyone) if that had been me who thanked his colleague who had made that presentation. I said I had, and he thanked me and said I had been The Only** student who had thanked him, and that the presenter had been very moved that I had spoken to him.

Aside from this total backfire-- attention-wise-- of what I had been trying to accomplish, I could not believe this. I could and can hear some homeschool parent voices in my mind saying that public school kids don’t have manners, but honestly I think those voices can be dismissed pretty quickly. There were many students who were at least as worried about looking good as I was, and many also who were genuinely kind people. Somehow this just wasn’t personal for them, somehow they didn’t relate to him enough to want to talk to him. Or, if they wanted to, some other social force stopped them.

*I realize this is more or less a demand for pity, but this had a huge effect on the way that I experienced public school and I haven’t found an honest way to talk about this phase of my education without it. It probably also made my opinion of middle school much more negative. Please bear with me.

**I remember “The Only student”, and it may have been “one of the only students” or “one of the only students who wasn’t in his own classes.”

A note on home and public schooling

Writing about homeschooling and public school I am afraid that I may seem to be criticizing teachers in the public education system. That is not what I mean to be doing. Teachers attempt to be the living spark that crosses the distance between the institutions and necessities of public education (separation of learning into subjects, standardized tests, large classes with one schedule for many minds, and many more that public school teachers can identify more accurately than I) and the needs of living breathing students. The fact that teachers do this and even do it well is nothing less than incredible, and they have my constant respect.

On the other hand, homeschooling is highly stigmatized. Most people seem to think that parents who choose to homeschool their children are religious fanatics, abusive, or both. I'm sure there are families who sadly choose homeschooling for both of these reasons, but I don't know any. I knew a few homeschooling families who were sheltering their children more than I would have been comfortable with, and some families including my own who were not entirely functional emotionally. But I found a much higher percentage of children who thought badly of their minds when I started public school, and was shocked to find that only a few exceptional public school students even seemed to have a clue about how they learned and what characterized their individual minds. I think every homeschooler I know could have explained pretty confidently by the time they were eight years old whether or not they would learn from a lesson, and how they would need to supplement what a teacher or parent did to make sure that they did learn from it. 

Obviously it is possible for a public school experience to lead to developed and fulfilled minds, but I am hoping that my voice as a former homeschooler can help me and others to think about some of the reasons that it often doesn't. Because, honestly, I think that I received one of the best elementary-age educations in the country.

Movement and Stillness; Silence and Sound

There is a magic in traveling, whatever the distance. It takes me out of myself and gives me permission to look at the world. Even taking the bus home from my school a few towns over, feeling the landscape rolling past me puts my place in the world into more perspective. I can see more clearly how far I have traveled and how much world there will always be left to explore.

In part I owe this to the motion sickness that I sometimes view as a tragic irony. I can't read in cars or especially on buses and only sometimes on trains or planes. I sometimes can't hold conversations well because I can't keep turning my head to look at the person I'm talking to.* I have always gotten motion sick, as far as I can remember, which has meant that car rides (and more recently plane and train rides) have left me with nothing to do but be in my mind. It makes me a less-than-ideal travel partner; as soon as I sit down in a car, my brain sets to meditative work.

I love thinking about the world without being altogether in any one part of it. I love tracing a line that has connected who knows how many other people. And I love that my responsibility is just to be wherever I am. "I'm on the bus, dude." or "I'm on a train, dude. In China." and "I'll deal with it when I get there." It is an opportunity to turn off my responsibility/stress mind and just think about whatever comes.

It is often when I am traveling and staring absent-mindedly into the distance that I am able to articulate myself the best.

This year has probably been my richest ever in terms of travel. I was on Jeju staying with Christian for six weeks just after the year began, then I went 'home' to Nanjing for Spring semester. Afterwards I traveled to Chongqing by 25 hour train, then to Yichang by three-boat on the Yangtze river, then by 13 hour train to Beijing. There I was picked up by Xiaoxuan and her father's entourage, and hosted in Langfang and Guyuan, near Inner Mongolia. I went home for three and a half short weeks, and zigzagged my way all over the Mighty Midwest seeing people I love. I've been in Korea for a few months now, spending most of my time on Jeju but some in Seoul, and Christian and I have another trip to Busan and Seoul in just over a week. **

What matters the most, of course, are people. It is wonderful to travel with or towards people I love, but I also like to travel alone. I have had some lovely conversations and even made friends on trains and waiting for them. It is very easy for me to feel isolated sitting home alone, or when I am at work with no one to talk to. But even if I am by myself on a bus, I feel connected to the people riding it and to the places I pass. And as I begin to learn the history of whatever place I live in, I begin to be able to trace lines back through the reasons for and implications of what people say and do, what kind of work they do and where. It is magic that there are so many lines to trace and to continue.


*I was recently lovingly reminded that much of this may be in my head. I am better in motion if I am not struggling with anxiety, if I have been taking care of myself mentally and physically. I am better if I have someone's hand to hold, and that has little to do with my inner ear.

**that was a really long brief overview...

Thoughts on 'race' and living in Asia

Living in Asia has been a lesson in living as a minority-- on getting extra attention and being treated as not quite a real person. Don't get me wrong: My experience bears little or no relation to the experience of underprivileged minorities in their home countries. I am a very privileged minority here. And there's something more than that: this is not my home. I do not have to take responsibility for the demons here, and even if they did affect me negatively, it would be more like the misunderstanding of strangers than the disapproval of a parent.

I learned during my first two months in China, over the summer of 2006, how much I used 'race' to define people in my mind, despite education and good intentions to the contrary. You see, whatever the majority of people in a person's life look like is what they will spend the most time defining. Growing up in predominantly White Iowa, I noticed a lot more about the variations in skin, hair, and eye color in white people I met than I did about others. For the most part, I probably would not know more than a couple people in a given minority in any particular social group, so their being Black or Asian or Latino/a or Native was enough to give them a unique identity in my mind.

I'm not sure that this tendency itself qualifies as racism*, but it is definitely a convenient jumping-off place for discrimination. When I have put everyone who is not The Same As Me into handy categories, it is very easy to attach any label or stigma to all of them at once, instead of having checks built into my mind to remind myself that no one characteristic, even one as defining as heritage, can tell you what is most important about a person.

So, when I came to China, at first everyone just looked Chinese to me. Everyone had black hair and skin a different color than mine, and my mind was overloaded. There were simply too many people to fit into a convenient Minority category, and I had to start paying attention to what they actually looked like.

What I realized was that Chinese people look a lot like the White people I was used to describing more carefully in my mind's eye (and, I have since had time to confirm, a lot like people from many other races and backgrounds). There are Chinese people with long faces and thin noses, with melancholy eyes and mouths that droop in the corners. Tall and wide with booming voices, thin and pale so that it seems an unkind word could knock them over. Over and over again I looked at someone and realized that if their skin was a just a little lighter, or the lines in their face had slightly different angles, I would think of them as White rather than Chinese.

I am always afraid when I attempt to voice realizations like this that it will sound like I have been amazed to find that other humans are human, which feels horrible. What amazes me is to find that despite always having known and professed that all humans are human, I still use racist shortcuts in classifying people in my mind. I am sure that I do this is all kinds of ways. Living in China and Korea, and especially trying to function in Chinese, has made it easier for me to remember that a persons ability to express themselves in a language I understand is not a good indicator of their intelligence, but it is still much easier for me, in a frustrating situation, to think of people who I can't communicate with as stupid. I know I make assumptions about people's gender or intelligence or even just interests based on things that are simply convenient and not all that meaningful. Perhaps all of the evidence I use does mean something about a person's identity, as race certainly can, but they are not all-meaningful.  I am grateful for my constant opportunities to re-learn how to pay attention to who a person really is.

*so I'd love to hear what you think!

It's the room the sun and the sky

Writing goal number three* for this year is the most informal. It's basically just to keep my pen on paper; not to let things I need to express pile up because I'm not sure how or when to say them. I've journaled to keep myself sane since I was about ten years old, I think. I have a paper journal for which this might often be more appropriate, but I'm going to try to just write down something about HOW my life is every week. This will also allow me to keep titling entries with song lyrics that probably only relate to the post's content in my head. Win all around, really.

To begin with, here's a bit about what it feels like to teach afterschool English at Hado Elementary School on Jeju Island:

The fifth and sixth grades are often the easiest to relate to, but also the classes where power struggles are most likely. I'm hoping this will continue getting better as I figure out what games they like and they feel they can trust me to have a point to what I want them to do ("point" here probably also being a game). Sixth grade was excited about the game "four corners" for about two solid weeks. I haven't played it in a little while because I want it to still be exciting. The only thing I've gotten the fifth grade excited about so far is telling scary stories. Which was awesome-- I said "What is a scary story?" and they immediately listed about twenty possible characters, starting with Dracula and kumiho. I've been using them to teach the past tense, and am hoping I can find some more things they'll be interested in so they don't get tired of them. They are the class that chose names like "Valkyrie," "Black Hole," and "Dark Knight," for which I can do nothing but congratulate them, but they are clearly too cool for school most of the time. There's hope for a future full of English practice involving video game characters and tales of violent death, but there will be rocks along the way.

Fourth grade is my smallest class and third grade is my largest (with 5 and 11 students, respectively. All my classes are beautifully small). Fourth grade has been the easiest so far-- they've been happy with the activities I've planned for them-- they've been feeling the power of being able to spell things by sounding them out phonetically, I think, and really like playing Uno even if they have to describe their cards in English to play each turn. The range of language level in my third grade class is challenging. There is one girl who has complained a number of times to my co-teacher that she ALWAYS raises her hand and ALWAYS knows the answer and I NEVER call on her. I do call on her, sometimes, but I know that she really does always know the answer very fast, and a few of her classmates generally need the question repeated and/or re-explained.

First and second grade have the most trouble finding value in sitting in a chair for forty minutes at a time, but they might still be my favorites. They are all young enough to just "know" that all adults understand everything they are saying all the time, so they speak to me in Korean all the time. I have them kind of fooled so far, by luck. I always have a Korean co-teacher in class who fields their relevant questions, and thus far the only questions they've asked me outside of class concern where I'm going-- one of the ten or so things I understand. Thus far they still believe that I respond in English to challenge them and make them keep practicing, and not because I only speak about twenty words of Korean.

Only a couple of the other teachers in my school have had real conversations with me. Most don't speak English well enough (or aren't confident, at least). But a couple of teachers who don't really speak English have brought me coffee a couple of friday afternoons while I lesson plan in the library, so overall it's nice to be there.

*er, goals one and two start next week. They're more scheduled. You'll be seeing them. Transmission ended.

Title is from "Lazy Eye" by the Silversun Pickups

To People Living With- living with- living with- NOT Dying from Disease

I'm sure not what's caused this recent eruption in thoughts I want to share here but I think it portends good things about my mental health, so let's go with it.

The title is from the song "La Vie Boheme" in RENT. I can't say that I am a proponent of the 'bohemian' lifestyle, but I am very much a proponent of the fearlessness and freedom in this soundtrack. So, I guess, if the choice is between la vie boheme and condemning those who choose it, color me bohemian.

The oft-quoted "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle" (or something like that?) comes to mind. We are all living with disease, and it has only been in reminding myself of this that I have recently started climbing further out of it. All of us have things that drag us down if we don't name and face them. We're much like the witches of fairy tales that way; "tell me your true name, and you are in my power." To addiction, fear, and self-loathing and I say: we are stronger than you.

The thought has often occurred to me that those of us with something to recover from- disease, addiction, war, divorce- are the lucky ones (that is, of course IF we get help. otherwise we are just spectacularly in the dark). I think that lives are measured more in direction than in places, and it is easier for us to see the low we are coming from and point ourselves up. If we started at Content, how would we see which way fulfillment lies? Really, though, I think the challenge is for people who think they are supposed to be content, and can't see why they aren't. There are so many shades of pain and struggle that go unnamed and untreated. Let me say this (to myself as much as anyone else): if you are unhappy there is a valid reason. You deserve help, and help is possible. Keep looking for it.

I think that sometimes addiction and disease are almost attractive because of that earlier thought, though. If you have a problem that obvious, it can (from the outside, at least) make it easier to see what would make your life better. And I have seen the depth of love and wisdom that many survivors have been able to reach through their circumstances. I am grateful for all of my struggles, as they've pushed me into the direction I'm going. At the same time, I don't really think it is pain that makes us beautiful. Perhaps pain is just one of the things that shows us our beauty most clearly.

I don't think there is any limit to joy that we humans can experience. I don't think there is anyone who cannot be happier, healthier, stronger. I think that is a blessing.

These thoughts started while I was sitting in Ecoffee (壹咖啡）reading for my East Asian Economies (东亚经济) class. I was reading the World Bank's report on the "East Asian Miracle" (yes, in Chinese. No, not understanding everything). In the last century, we have done a lot of naming. We have named inequalities and injustices, and I think many people get discouraged, frustrated, or even angry at the growing list. But I urge us all to see it as progress. The more problems we name, the more problems we can overcome.

This sentence resonated on this chord for me: “东亚经济增长最快的国家和地区，即日本和”四小虎“也是收入分配最公平的经济实体” It says that the countries and regions with the fastest economic development, Japan and the "Four Little Tigers" [Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong] are also the countries with the most equal distributions of income.

Equality is not a goal for the sake of those currently at the bottom. It is for all of us. I do not demand sanity and happiness purely for my own sake; with them I will be best able to better the world. If women's status in the world becomes equal to men's, it will not just be women who are better off. All of humanity will benefit from their knowledge, wisdom, and perspective. At the same time, all of humanity would lose greatly if men's status was dragged below women's (this same holds true for the gaps between people of different races, classes, backgrounds, nationalities, etc).

You are not doing anyone any favors by accepting unhappiness. Seek help, seek enlightenment, demand help, offer love and friendship freely. Love life, accept nothing less than wonderful.

(Not much of a travel blog, is this?)

"Say 'hello' to all the apples on the ground"

I am reading Dinesh D'Souza's "What's So Great About America," which has actually been very timely for my international politics class- I read his summary of Huntington's theory of the clash of civilization's the same day a classmate presented on it (though D'Souza and I feel differently about its ability to describe reality). I am working on articulating my thought on it. It has, at the least, pushed me to put my thoughts on my own American-ness as someone who has spent time in Germany, Egypt, and especially China into words.

I am reading another excellent article by a scholar (John Lewis Gaddis) which is tugging at similar strings of my identity. And a historian from the State University of New York at Buffalo was here last week and gave an excellent presentation on his current quest to understand world history and China's place in it. I am hoping to write a coherent post on my American identity when all of these things have percolated in my mind a bit longer, but I am thinking I will probably wait until I get to Korea after my semester ends and post then. I have started writing it three times now and am still struggling.

The essence of what I want to say is this: America has been the center of world civilization for at least half a century, and it's Western predecessors for centuries before that. D'Souza spends a lot of time on why this is justified, and makes a number of important points. However, a central civilization, a model nation, are not what the world community is looking for. As far as the principles of science, democracy, and capitalism (the three principles that D'Souza argues are Western civilization's greatest contributions, and justifications for their leadership) are concerned, they have found a model. What we are trying to find is not the country that everyone wants to live in, but a way for all of the countries in the world to work together.

I know that my voice is a very recent addition to the academic conversation on these topics, but I simply do not believe we are living in the same world as we were two centuries ago, and I don't think that my perspective can be dismissed entirely as naive. We are not living in a world where any one civilization or nation will be The Source of learning and progress- D'Souza is right in saying that in many ways that is the role the West has been playing. Humanity is developing to the point where we are learning how to function as a whole.

... I'm definitely gonna post on this again when I am not painfully aware that I have a lot of other homework to do.

In other updates: I am loving my International Politics class. I am learning so much. I am loving the many perspectives and the deep thinking in our readings and after every lecture I feel like my brain is on fire with thinking. Shi Bin is a fantastic professor. My other classes are all decent.

My Chinese is improving, but slowly. My vocabulary is still frustratingly limited but in my conversations, especially with Xiaoxuan and Rong Fan, I am finding myself more and more able to at least describe a word or concept, even if I don't know the translation.

I am going to Shanghai with Shirin tomorrow (so yes, I should really be doing homework). I love train rides. I'm very excited.

I have had a lot of lovely conversations, in English, in Chinese, through Skype, through email, and in person, this week. It has been really good.

Today's title brought to you by The Nurse Who Loved Me by Failure

Countdown to landing in Korea and seeing Christian Yetter: 29 days.