The US and China's semiotic politics

I get my news from online sources and word of mouth, so I definitely don't know what's currently the buzz in American news, aside from of course the Democratic primaries, which even makes the news here in Hong Kong consistently.

But what about the violence in Tibet? Here's my take.

Recently, Chinese news media revealed that they had foiled a "terrorist" plot to sabotage the Olympics. They are specifically referring to the Eastern Turkistan Independence Movement (ETIM), which is a movement fighting for the independence of Xinjiang province, the Muslim Uighur territory that I backpacked to a couple years ago. Similar to Tibet, the territory has got its own cultural, political, and historical realities that, in my opinion and in the opinion of many Uighurs, should make it its own nation independent from China. Unfortunately, the Chinese government has flooded the region with Han Chinese, and also strategically take advantage of the oil sources in the Taklamakan dessert.

But why is this movement being labeled

terrorism

when the Tibetan movement is not? Is it because Uighurs are brown, and Muslim, while Tibetans are not?

My point is not that Tibetans should be labeled terrorists, but that this fact exposes how events are co-opted by governments to represent "reality" the way they want it represented - that news is a semiotic tool. Beijing after all didn't label ETIM a terrorist organization until after 9/11, when the US really started circulating a vocabulary of anti-Muslim ideology - embodied by the word "terrorist".

But while China jumps on the US bandwagon and uses their political vocabulary for its own interests, the US simultaneously circulates anti-Chinese ideology epitomized by the phrase "human rights abuses." Let me get it straight that the Free Tibet groups and activists, as well as the Tibetans themselves who are leading an inspirational struggle, I think they are commendable, their hearts are true, compassionate, and just. The way that the US media and government piggy-backs off of this to deal with its fear that China is challenging its dominance is what's unjust. We have to ask, after all, why didn't the US get as much Olympics criticism for its own baggage of indigenous rights issues - in regards to Puerto Rico, or Pacific islands like Guam or Hawaii? Human rights abuses? What about Guantanamo Bay? Iraq? Afghanistan? And immigrant detainees in the US after 9/11? The US has got a lot of human rights baggage...where were the Steven Spielbergs of other countries boycotting the US?

The West should support Tibet with a true rather than corrupted heart; Tibet should continue its struggle; and China should respect Tibetan and Uighur sovereignty.

1 billion people playing musical chairs in a foot of snow

Chinese New Year is the most festive time of year in Hong Kong, and in China. Cherry blossoms and other colorful flowers are going up in malls, on streets, in apartment buildings, and all sorts of places here in Hong Kong. Red is the auspicious color, Christmas lights are everywhere bright, and facades of buildings on both sides of the famous Victoria Harbor are lit.

Chinese New Year takes on more sociological interest in Guangdong province, which is called the factory floor of the world because that's probably where 90% of what you're wearing and using and blogging on were manufactured. Mountains and seas of rural migrants work in Guangdong, and this is the busiest time of year for them, because they all crowd the train stations to go home.

What horrible timing!

80,000 people are stuck at Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong. That's like the size of a city! China is practically paralyzed because of a blizzard that swept through and continues to sweep through China...storms that haven't been seen in 50 years. And these are storms in the South, which are ill-prepared for these things. Think of a foot of snow in Virginia and the Carolinas. They have no equipment for this...they're sweeping the snow away with brooms.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jvk7Cm_LiUKmk09LgSM7wXayDzlwD8UG5MJG1

On the Silencing Effect of "Getting It" and the Domination in “The Social Justice Movement” (and other personal and critical feelings)

…(got to thinking about this stuff from reading Asian Am studies stuff for my thesis. I feel that I’m coming full circle in my relation with social justice)…

After the past several years, after taking a much needed breather, a hiatus, from so-called “social justice work” and the ambiguously defined “interest in Asian American ‘issues’,” I’ve finally come to realize what was so alienating and undemocratic about “the community,” and what caused me to distance myself so far away from it for years. It was because even though these counter communities were meant to act as safe havens from the white/male/hetero mainstream society, as well as points from which to resist and counter the dominant discourses in mainstream society, they in fact were very stifling of difference, and simply reproduced the same structure of dominance. For example, there was emphasis on whether he or she “gets it” or not. Saying that someone doesn’t “get it” was the most damning insult you could say behind someone’s back. On the other hand, admitting in emotional outburst that “I finally get it!” (as happened at the leadership training I was a counselor for in Boston over the summer) was a way to valorize yourself by evoking reflectiveness and being a part of the in-group. There was this overall atmosphere and culture of “I’m holier than thou” or “we’re holier than them,” from which I or we are supposed to preach and convert others, almost religiously, to “get it.” But this implicitly controls and stifles anyone who disagrees or sees it differently, since they were excluded for not “getting it.”

Equally problematic and stifling was how stereotypes and positive/negative media representations were understood. According to many Asian American student activists, to counteract stereotypes meant having representations that were just the opposite of Hollywood stereotypes. Hence, you have companies like Black Lava with T-shirts reading “I suck at math” or “I can’t speak Chinese.” I always felt uncomfortable with these, but never understood how to articulate my discomfort. The problem with these is that by taking Hollywood stereotypes as reference points in constructing our own identities, we’re not really challenging the stereotypes, we simply reaffirm them because we’re reinforcing binary possibilities: you’re either the conformist Asian who is really good at math, speaks Chinese, is passive and reserved (read “FOB”) or you’re the “political” Asian who “gets it” and proclaims loud and proud that you suck at math, you suck at Chinese, you’re loud and you’re damned angry. Unfortunately, those who take on the latter identity are still letting stereotypes define and limit who they can be. Not only this, but other problems arise such as being sexist against Asian Am women in order to “counter” stereotypes of Asian Am masculinity; or antagonism against “Asian-Asians” who “don’t get it” and are too FOB-ie, and ignorantly perpetuate stereotypes. And then there’s the incredibly denigrating feeling of being criticized for “being the stereotype” just because I like to teach Chinese (for example tell some white guy that the tattoo on his arm means ‘loyalty’ 忠, and is amazingly poetic because it’s the “center character” 中 above the “heart” character 心 – meaning your heart is centered, hence loyal), or because I see the relative value in non-confrontation when it comes to personal interaction. Restricting the possibility to being someone who “is the stereotype” to someone who is “counter-stereotype” is repressive, and conservative. But these problems aren’t unique to Asian Americans of course, I just reference them because of my familiarity, and out of genuine care for Asian American identities.

On a public level then, it seems to me that the definition of “social justice” in America has been too rigidly defined, and therefore is an exclusive community with low tolerance for conflicting views. In my opinion, any organization that labels itself as a general “social justice” organization has to be inherently open and allowing of multiple conflicting views. A commitment for a more just society that seeks to resist dominant systems should be the only unifying principle. Anything more specific should have their own interest group (which of course would always interact with the broader social justice public). Social justice, then, would be a “movement of movements,” rather than “the movement,” which is too homogenizing and silencing of difference. A “movement of movements” in the Asian American communities would cause less alienation against Asian adoptees, GLBT Asian Ams, Hapas, Asian Ams with disabilities, South Asian Americans, even Asian Am women who date white men, and all sorts of outsiders of the outsiders. Not only would people feel more included, but the movement of movements would be fuller; the process of understanding systems of oppression would never stop (since the moment it does stop, the radical political nature of the movement ceases in my opinion). So instead of thinking of a pan-ethnic umbrella, we should think of pan-ethnic umbrellas.

On a more personal level, I think it’s more radical to simply be yourself (taking influence from all and everyone that is around you), without regard to what the stereotypes are, or how to be their opposites. Being yourself might overlap with Hollywood stereotypes, it might overlap with their opposites, in the end, your identity should overlap with several commons (Asian, women, Asian women, women of color, lesbian, classical music enthusiasts, salsa dancers, social justice agitators, educators, student), but taken as a whole is also uniquely you. This is the only way to truly resist the violence of stereotypes, cultural oppression, and domination.

Christmas in Hong Kong (and layers of technology)

"Kev Jumba," the fan asked in his video response to the number 1 most subscribed comedian on Youtube. "Speaking of names, and race, you're Chinese right? Why is your name Kev? It makes no sense to me...you're Chinese!" (not an actual quote...just an approximation pieced from my memory)

Mark Poster in his book Information Please thinks of the internet as a way to bring chaos to your soul. Bringing chaos to your soul was conceived by Nietzsche, basically as an exploration of self-identity, putting yourself out of your comfort zone, out of your familiar world-view, almost to the point of a masochistic psychology, all in order to emerge out of this interior battle with a new cultural innovation. "One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star." Poster thinks that the internet is a system that brings all sorts of individuals into exposure to other unfamiliar individuals, bringing the whole global society into chaos, producing cultural innovation in the end.

That's the abstract theoretical background I provide for now. If somebody can't conceive of an Asian person having an English name, then they'll have to learn to conceive of an Asian person with an english name. Likewise, Christianity, Christmas, and Christmas caroling all find their origins in the west, and sure, we could link it to the evils of European imperialism - but we shouldn't think of it as globalization as much as we should think of it as glocalization.

In Hong Kong, Christmas time is not time for family, but time to go out with friends, walk amongst the crowds, get drunk, party, etc.. That's how Western-imported holidays are like (esp. Haloween and Xmas), family-centered holidays are of course the traditional Chinese ones.

During Xmas, unlike for New Year and Chinese New Year, there are no fireworks, people are just walking around on the streets. But since Christians in Hong Kong are more firm believers than your average Christian in the US, you get caroling with strong religious overtones ('caroling' in Cantonese, bouh gaai yam, translates as spread the great gospel)
[please bear through the beginning...I walk around later]


And finally, I end with video of an event taken a couple weeks back. The layers of technology involved here are a bit much! There's my camera which is recording video of my nieces and nephews in Hong Kong webcamming with their cousins (my nieces and nephews) in America who are playing videos from their camera of sledding into their webcamera. Did you get that? Video from their camera->their webcam->our computer screen->my camera->youtube video about transnationalism and childhood friends reuniting through webcams and cameras.

Putting life on the market, Book Review - Multitude

Perhaps the most celebrated and controversial new example of bioproperty is OncoMouse, the only animal type to date that has been patented. Du Pont laboratories together with Harvard University created OncoMouse by transplanting a human cancer-producing gene into a mouse. The mouse is predisposed to developing cancerous tumors and is thus useful for oncological research. Du Pont sells individual mice as research tools, but the novel aspect here is that Du Pont does not merely own individual mice but the type of mouse as a whole.

- Multitude, 181

In 1976 a patient at the University of California medical center began treatment for hairy-cell leukemia. The doctors recognized that his blood might have special properties for the treatment of leukemia and, in 1981, they were granted a patent in the name of the University of California on a T-cell line - that is, a sequence of genetic information - developed from the patent's blood; the potental value of the products derived for it was estimated at three billion dollars. The patient sued the university for ownership of the T cells and the genetic information, but the California Supreme Court ruled against him. The court reasoned that the Unversity of California was the rightful owner of the cell line because a naturally occuring organism (on which his claim rests) is not patentable, whereas the information scientists derive from it is patentable because it is the result of human ingenuity.

- Multitude, 183

These days a lot of graduates coming out of school, unlike their parents, aren't expecting to find a big company to be loyal to and work long-term, with all those pension and retirement benefits. Instead, they work at this company for a year, and then that one for a year. Our generation in our current economy is increasingly mobile.

So what does this have to do with the above quote about Oncomouse and patenting somebody's T-cell sequence? They're both part of a similar global trend towards the hegemony of immateriality: technology, informationalization, and globalization.

"Immaterial" production such as music, stories, services (such as retail or medical care), and knowledge, have always been a part of the societal commons. But because technology has made these things so easily reproducible and transferable (think mp3s or bit torrents, google books, financial networks, on-line higher ed., etc.) immaterial production has become hegemonic, displacing industrial production as the former hegemonic mode. Huge sums of money can disappear and reappear across the globe, the separation between work and private life is becoming blurred in postmodernizing societies, and information transfers in literally zero-time. Castells theorizing network society calls this timeless time.

In other words, the postmodern era is one of networks. Even US military ideology recognizes this, and instead of the old model of war where the objective was to destroy the enemy, now the objective of war is to "create" the enemy, in other words to maintain the global capitalist network and create the global geopolitical body that most privileges the US and the West.

So, back to my point about the labor market...
In the modern, Fordist era, businesses were built on the idea of economies of scale. In other words, armies of laborers for mass production. You keep your laborers long-term, attracting them with benefits like healthcare and pensions etc. But this Fordist mode of production couldn't compete with the Toyotaist mode of production. The problem with economies of scale was that all these products were produced, and sat on lots waiting to be sold. Not all of them got sold. Meanwhile the company had large workforces to pay. It was too inefficient to remain competitive, and so would get debunked by Toyotaism, which took advantage of computer technology and the ability to rapidly transfer knowledge and information across networks. Large work forces were no longer needed, nor the imprecision of blind mass production. Production is now done in timeless time as a rapid response to demand. How much of this car is demanded in the market? Okay, produce that much now and put it out there.

The type of workers in demand in this kind of economy are the highly educated, with general knowledge and skills in many areas, so they can fill different responsibilities when forming different teams to do different projects. So then, there's been a "shift from an economy characterized by the stable long-term employment typical of factory workers to one marked by flexible, mobile, and precarious labor relations: flexible because workers have to adapt to different tasks, mobile because workers have to move frequently between jobs, and precarious because no contracts guarantee stable, long-term employment" (Multitude, Hardt and Negri, 112).

The hegemony of immaterial forms of labor doesn't mean that industrial production is gone. It just means that immaterial production is hegemonic, just as industrial production used to dominate even though it was in the minority and greatly outnumbered by agricultural production. The hegemony of immaterial production simply means that it dominates the economy, and its characters spills over to other sectors of economy, like the agri-businesses that are patenting the genetics of crop-seeds. In order for capitalism to continue to exploit, it more and more focuses on exploiting "surplus value" (a Marxist term) not from the factory laborer, but from the creative, immaterial commons of the multitude. The global south, for example, is much wealthier in terms of the biodiversity of plant life. But it's companies of the global north that own the rights to the knowledge of the plants' genetics, which makes the north wealthier in the capitalist system. That primary issue is "that nature is ceasing to be common, that it is becoming private property and exclusively controlled by its new owners" (184).

socialism just another version of servitude

A forcing-up of wages... would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity.

...the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and every relation of servitude is but a modification and consequence of this relation.

- Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

And this was confirmed for me when I saw mass production of shoes in China - it dawned on me that even if these workers were given a "fair living wage", even if their working hours and other working conditions were ideal, it still wouldn't change the fact that the work they did was the most extremely redundant and reducing of human status and dignity that any job could ever be. Just imagine having to push a machine lever or other part back and forth 20 million times a day, in the same direction and manner every single time.

It's not a question of Capitalism vs Socialism then when talking about exploitation. If we wanted to eliminate exploitation, then we'd have to get rid of the division of labor. It's the division of labor that forces some people to have to churn out millions of completely identical shoes, robbing them of their creativity and the embodiment of their work and their selves in the thing they produce. But there's no going back to that kind of a society, so why continue down this road of thought? There are no simple answers :-/

Kite Runner (movie)

Speak of globalization, not only is most of our clothes (China is the #1 manufacturer of bras) being produced in China...our movies are being produced there too. Kite Runner was shot in my favorite province of China: Xinjiang. Can you believe that!? Not only is Kite Runner my favorite book, but the movie was shot in my favorite part of the world! This makes me doubly high in expectation!

"We had four languages on set. It's difficult because you have the Uyghurs that live in that area and the Uyghurs speak Uyghur, the Chinese speak Mandarin, and then you have English, and then you have the cast that speaks Dari. You're constantly around translators from all languages because the Chinese can't speak Uyghur, the Uyghur can't speak Chinese. Some of them couldn't speak any English, so I always had a translator."

That's globalization for ya. For the rest of the article:

The Harsh Real World - thoughts on the practicality of Buddhism, and thoughts on Capoeiristic 'buy da game'

I'm a nice guy. Too much of a nice guy, and so people roll over me. Is it relevant to subscribe to the Buddhist belief that: it's okay, they'll get their come-uppings...and be nice to everyone? Is it that only love and compassion can pacify those who are angry and hateful?

(I've made up my mind to start a you-tube video blog in the near future)

I still subscribe to this. Hating others who hate you is simply like holding hot coal to throw at somebody. But what I need to learn is to become a good actor. Paradoxically, being self-less and considering the well-being of others can sometimes mean being firm, or being outspoken, or vocally shooting others down.

"Your car has 150,625 miles on it Mr. Poon" she said with a firm unwavering voice. "Do you know what I'm saying?"

"Yeah, I understand what you're saying," I said.

"I mean, I have pictures of your car here. Does your car have a spoiler, alloy wheels or something? No. You haven't even looked at the market have you? You haven't even looked to see if our offer can buy you a car of similar quality as yours? You just want more money because you want more money."

I'm speechless. Silent.

When I looked at cars with my father over the weekend, and test drove a manual Toyota Corolla, and then an automatic Hyundai Accent at another dealership, my father kept saying to the dealer agent (who was a really nice friendly guy), "yeah, the Corolla was better, less noisy." "Yeah, the Corolla was cheaper. Their rebate was more"

"Jeez," I said to my dad after Mike, the agent, left us in the room. "You notice that? He's all down-beaten and unhappy now because you said all those things!"

"You gotta do that," he said to me. "How else are we gonna get a good deal?"


The insurance companies are unfair. Their employees get promotions and pats on the back if they can minimize claims, give 1000$ for cars worth 2000$, 3000$ for those worth 5000$. In the end, they go home happy that they'll be promoted, and be able to put the kids through college and buy that nice boat. Why don't they go home with a guilty conscience? Is it good if I stand up to them and stop being nice, try to make them see me as a person, as a human? Maybe that way she'd reconsider the ethical nature of her job?


The point is to stay peaceful, compassionate, and joyful on the inside, but to act/perform/pretend/bluff/dance/exaggerate/flare/'buy da game(in Brazilian accent).


Future plans：
I've made up my mind. I really have. This is my last semester at Albany. I'm moving to Boston around January. Academia prevents me from reading fiction, and prevents me from writing. I already have ideas for 2 books, 1 of which I've been working on for most of the year. Academia also prevents me from interacting in the 'real world', the world of "real men" as Marx puts it, with real social interactions, real activities, not just ideas and thoughts conjured in the minds of idealists. My Capoeira Batizado on November 17th will mark my graduation, even if Batizado technically means baptizing, a sort of beginning, and this works, because every day, every second, every karmic moment is a beginning.

Peaceful Uprising and Violent Repression in Burma

If you haven't heard, there have been massive peaceful uprisings in Burma against the dictatorial government, which has responded with violence and repression resulting in 9 killed thus far. What interests me the most is that the Buddhism monks are at the forefront of the uprisings. This is really interesting, especially in contrast to my previous blog entry linking to an article by Zizek (a renowned cultural studies academic with Marxist persuasion) who critiques Buddhism for being passive and complacent and going hand-in-hand with exploitative Capitalism. Here are some quotes I've taken from this BBC article:

"monks in Pakokku briefly took government officials hostage"

"Tens of thousands of monks are now involved."

"A group called the Alliance of All Burmese Buddhist Monks has emerged to co-ordinate the protests, and on 21 September it issued a statement describing the military government as "the enemy of the people".
They pledged to continue their protests until they had "wiped the military dictatorship from the land of Burma", and they have called on people across Burma to join them."

Wow. It'll be exciting to see if anything progressive comes out of this.

Slavoj Zizek's Critique of Star Wars and (Western) Buddhism

Revenge of Global Finance

An interesting article criticizing the pop-buddhism in Star Wars Episode III, and how Buddhism, according to Zizek, goes hand in hand with neo-liberal Capitalism.

Thoughts?

Movie Review - No End in Sight

Documentary "No End in Sight" exposes the lack of planning and downright ridiculous screw-ups of the top engineers of the Iraq war. It was a pretty interesting movie that I learned some things from that I didn't think about before. Like the fact that American soldiers were told to ignore the chaotic lootings that ensued immediately after the toppling of Saddam's government. This wasn't just petty stealing of "vases" as Rumsfeld purported in a press conference. This included breaking off of whole chunks of concrete from major buildings. The most heart-wrenching of it all was the destruction of the museum and the library, and in the documentary a man poignantly weeps that his country no longer has a heritage. Those artifacts and books were records of thousands of years of civilization. US troops did nothing to protect things of value to the Iraqi people, while the oil facilities were the most heavily guarded in all the country.

This was big mistake number 1. Big mistake number 2 was the blacklisting of all those civil officials who worked under Sadaam's regime. But a lot of these people were simply bureaucrats who had no ideological alliances with Sadaam. They became jobless, and humiliated. Big mistake number 3 was to disband the Iraqi army, hundreds of thousands of individuals who literally went to the US army and volunteered to fight with them, but no, they were disbanded, and became unemployed. These breadwinners trained with military skills, frustrated and down-trodden, and the only organizations willing to take them in were insurgent groups.

And so the movie is a great almost exhaustive look at all the mistakes made in the managing of the war. But conspicuously absent from the documentary was a discussion about the biggest mistake of the war, one that trumped the three I summarized above. And that is the war itself. A critic quoted on rotten-tomatoes puts it perfectly: "A documentary that rues the fact that the US was not able to impose its will on the Iraqi people, but never questions the right to do so."

I also found myself towards the end of the film hoping to see some sort of discussion about "okay, we fucked up. Now what? Where do we go from here?" But this issue never surfaced.

Indeed, I did feel a bit uncomfortable by the film's contribution and partaking in Orientalism. Orientalism facilitates the idea that Arabs are irrational and can't govern themselves. According to the Orientalist psyche, it is the duty and responsibility of the West, because the West is rational and scientifically advanced, to impose its will on Oriental peoples. The film then is Orientalist in that it looks at where and how we went wrong and failed in this Orientalist project, not so much lamenting the oppressive actions we took against Iraqi people, but lamenting that we, the West, could fail, and not questioning the "civilizing mission" itself. And that's the problematic thorn in the side of this otherwise good and informative documentary.

Photos from around the world

The Assault on Reason

"Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving senator, Rober Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: "This Chamber is, for the most part, silent - ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate."

This is the opening of Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason." He goes on to explain that the US made the mistake of invading Iraq not entirely because of George W. Bush, but because the American public sphere has changed. TV no longer broadcasts congressional debates about important policy decisions like it used to in order to inform, debate, and make the right decisions. Instead, to win the votes of the American public a politician needs to be rich (ie donations from special interest groups), and buy precisely crafted TV ads:

"I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent...was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a long and detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent's campaign and the planned response to the response, my campaign advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: "If you run this ad at this many 'points' [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we perchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5 percent in your lead in the polls." I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5 percent."

Democracy is failing because, according to Al Gore and I would agree with him, because of the dominance of television in the way our society thinks. It's a one-way medium, there is no involvement by the audience in the "exchange" of information, which means that whoever is in control is free to put their ideas in the sphere, and this is mostly determined by who's got the most money. In fact, watching TV stimulates a certain section of the brain, whereas reading stimulates a different section that is more involved with reasoning and logic. People who watch several hours of TV in a day have fundamentally different brain processes than those who read several hours a day because they're exercising different parts of the brain. When reading, words are merely symbols with no inherent meaning...as readers we take part in the creation process when we string together the symbols and make meaning out of them. Our TV generation of people have brains hardwired with different thought processes. And it's for this reason that the majority of Americans still think Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and the reason why democracy does not exist in America.

Stories that connect us.

In January of 2004, I conducted some research in shoe and garment factories in China. As I'm now writing my travel memoirs, I've been thumbing through anything to jot my memory - photos, old blog entries, and other writings. This was something I wrote back then after my factory research experience. I post it because I like the theme about knowing people's stories, even though I don't agree with the way I wrote about sweatshops and exploitation.

Imagine a gated campus of 10,000. There’s a pond with a quaint bridge across it, perfect for romantic walks for two. The pond is circled by restaurants and shops. A group of people gather at the corner of the walkway as they take turns singing karaoke songs. The campus is complete with a library, dance studio, basketball courts, a ping pong room, karaoke room, computer room, and enough dorms to house all 10,000. There are various clubs, events like monthly birthday parties, and even a newsletter complete with news items and personal ads. It all sounds like the quintessential traits of a university, right?
Well apparently the quintessential traits of a university can also be shared by a factory in China that manufactures shoes for a big brand-name American corporation. Surprised? Were you expecting a dimly lit room where there are no windows, where the walls and floors have worn or crumbling paint, and the bathroom is a tiny one-stall room in the corner of the factory floor obstructed by broken chairs and tables, and loose trash on the floor? This dismally painted image is what most Americans think a Chinese factory looks like; not surprising, given all the anti-sweatshop fliers, documentaries, and other forms of media I’ve come across depicting horrible pay statistics, desperate work conditions, and extreme cases of worker abuse. But this is not what I saw when I was in China. I don’t mean to say that these kinds of factories don’t exist; what I mean to say is that there’s more to this than the story of the “sweatshop.” My point is that we can’t just take to the streets and yell out profanities against the WTO with our arms up in the air clenched in fists. It’s not enough. Sometimes it can even hurt those we claim to fight for. We need to also understand the unique local context of what we’re protesting about. We need to know the story.
I was just that kind of protester before I went to China and saw for the very first time with my own eyes what it was I used to protest about. Within the short period of a couple days I began to realize that it was not my purpose to search in every nook and cranny for proof of worker exploitation and say “ah hah!” with an accusatory finger. Instead, it was to see the human face behind the worker; it was to learn about the “floating population” of migrants finding jobs in the city and sending their hard-earned money back to their rural families; it was to hear the stories – the heart and soul – that is too often untold and forgotten underneath the debate about capitalist production as worker exploitation or economic success. Don’t get me wrong, it is exploitative, extremely exploitative. I got a glimpse of huge halls of workers doing the most boring repetitive tasks, sometimes working with potentially dangerous machinery or toxic chemicals. Hours were long, vacations almost non-existent. And another consideration was that this 10,000 worker factory I’m describing was the best of the best. Of course! What sweatshop would let in a bunch of US students to take a tour of their factory?
So I admit that my cheery portrayal of a Chinese factory at the beginning of this article was a bit of a selective choice, and admittedly, such conditions are not representative of the average. Yet I also had the privilege of seeing an “average” Chinese factory which, although it lacked the birthday parties, dance studios, and campus pond, still didn’t fit the stereotypical image of sweatshop. As a side-note I should mention that we worked with a non-profit labor rights group called Verite that worked with many different factories with conditions ranging from “sweatshop” to cream of the crop like the one we saw. It is according to their standards that I refer to this factory as “average.”
So what is the story I found left untold amongst the debate about exploitation? It seemed that the workers accepted the difficult working conditions because it was still better than the monotony of their old rural lifestyles. A job in the city was their ticket to the outside world, a wonderland to them in many ways. A young woman new to the city is amazed by the choice and vast quantity of foods at a supermarket: fruits and vegetables that would have taken a season to grow and harvest are lying there in the supermarket for just anybody to pick up and buy. The newest and most advanced commodity items like computers, TVs, cell phones, and mp3 players are available. But the story is not just about new material commodities; it’s also about an urban culture and lifestyle. Among the workers, the most popular Verite training classes are not the labor rights classes, it’s the social etiquette class. Workers learn how to walk, like how much space there should be in between steps; how to sit, should you cross your legs? Sit up straight and keep your feet flat on the floor. When you meet people, shake their hands, not too lightly, but not too strongly. It’s all a part of presenting a civilized urban individual, and the workers loved it. But culture and lifestyle in the city is not just about professional presentation, bars and clubs offer social spaces for urban fun and/or sexual intrigue. And in the city one can encounter not just people from other villages, but from other provinces from all over the country, and even foreigners from all over the world. In the end, the point I mean to stress here is that a factory job is exploitative yes, but in the Chinese context it can also be liberating. One of the workers I interviewed said that her experience at the factory and in the city provided her with an opportunity to explore her identity and grow personally. I wouldn’t be surprised if many other workers felt this way as well.
So who are we to decide what’s exploitative for Chinese factory workers? They have stories to tell. We should listen. Some of those stories speak of exploitation, so yes, we should stand in solidarity with them fighting for better wages and conditions. In fact, according to Verite, the non-profit group we worked with, the better factories in China tend to be the ones working for big multi-national corporations (Walmart being the exception). This was due largely in part because of anti-sweatshop activists in the West putting pressure on their country’s companies. But behind the fight for better wages and conditions is a story of excitement as well as pain, intrigue as well as exploitation, personal growth, and liberation in addition to the anxiety, and fear. If we listen, we can hear their stories and see their faces behind all the chatter and debate.

News, Social Issues (1)

A photojournalism article on the threat big business poses towards historic livelihoods of Hong Kong.

BBC's day in pictures

Movie Review - Shrek 1

Sometimes I'm a little slow on picking up on a good thing, and Shrek was one of those. It had a fame of the same sort as Harry Potter. Okay, so it might not have such a cultish following as Harry Potter, but none-the-less, it was really popular, and as with all things really popular, I'm skeptical.

But Shrek is a good movie, and instead of go over why it's a good movie, I think I'd rather talk about the issue of race in the movie. The old children's classics that Shrek sattires, like Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella, all perpetuated racialized and gender normalized norms...damsels in distress were always fair, and helpless of course, and knights in shining armor were the defenders of these damsels as well as defenders against dragons, evil witches or ogres, all racial others. But in Shrek, the knight in shining armor is not this idealized white man, but it's in fact the ostracized racial other, an ogre, and in the end we even find out that the damsel in distress is also an ogre.

But what's most interesting to me is Shrek himself, and not the system of oppression...but maybe this system deserves a word or two. The "perfect kingdom", Dulock, symbolizes white suburbia. This is very easily interpretted from the film - the parking lot in front of the castle, the artificiality of the landscaping, the deadness but artificially-created 'perfection' of the castle inside, and especially the policy of keeping non-whites, such as ogres, out...because non-whites are scary...and eat weird things like slugs and eyeballs. But back to Shrek. He's a hardened guy, much like an "angry asian man", but only because everyone never accepted him. But when we close ourselves up and become angry, that anger consumes us, and racism wins in my opinion. Anyway, in the end, when Shrek said "you are beautiful," is when he begins to resolve his racial identity, because the "you are beautiful" statement also implied a "green is beautiful," echoing similar self-affirmations such as "black is beautiful," "yellow is beautiful," or "brown is beautiful.

Progress is slow, but it is there. After all, change, ironically enough, is one of the only constants in this universe.

The Consciousness (part 2) - You can shape your own brain!

These quotes pretty much speak for themselves. They can be found on pp72-79 (Times Magazine "Mind and Body Special Issue" Jan 29, 2007):

Neuroscientist Pascual instructed the members of one group to play [the piano] as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours...At the end of each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain...In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn. The finding was in line with a growing number of discoveries at the time showing that greater use of a particular muscle causes the brain to devote more cortical real estate to it...He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise...when the scientists compared the TMS data on the two groups...they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the pysical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music - just as it had in those who actually played it...the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.

For decades, the prevailing dogma in neuroscience was that the adult human brain is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we have...But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the realization that the adult brain retains impressive powers of 'neuroplasticity' - the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience....Even when the brain suffers a trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor cortext that moves the right arm, a new...therapy can coax next-door regions to take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired.
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Something as seemingly insubstantial as a thought can affect the very stuff of the brain, altering neuronal connections in a way that can treat mental illness or, perhaps, lead to a greater capacity for empathy and compassion. It may even dial up the supposedly immovable happiness set point.
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Jeffrey Schwartz and colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles...had become intrigued with the therapeutic potential of [the Buddhist practice] of mindfulness meditation...After 10 weeks of mindfulness-based therapy, 12 out of 18 patients improved significantly. Before-and-after brain scans showed that activity in the orbital frontal cortex, the core of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) circuit, had fallen dramatically and in exactly the way that drugs effective against OCD affect the brain...concluding that "the mind can change the brain."...For the monks as well as the patients with depression or OCD, the conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way rearranged the brain.

[emphasii are mine]

My conclusion: If the average American would be as concerned about working out and conditioning the mind for greater compassion, and less self-cherishing ego, as much as they were concerned about working out and conditioning their bodies for greater abs, biceps, and triceps, we would be a much much happier nation, as well as a much much less superficial one too. Although the psychiatric practice of Cognitive Behavior Therapy is one way to condition the mind, it's very expensive. Meditation is free. You just have to learn how to do it.

Geekiest Entry Ever

Aside from being an entry about a computer game, this entry is also about popular culture, society, and a foreign country, specifically Korea.

Now...I've known that Starcraft (a computer game where you build and control vast armies in an attempt to demolish others') has been a major part of Korean popular culture. But to the extent of broadcasted, live-audience VS battles? Tournaments! Woah! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_professional_competition


Starcraft was a game I was quite obsessed about in High School. I actually had lofty dreams of playing in tournaments some day and making a career winning prize money. Now my geeky-ness is aroused by the announcement of a Starcraft2! What's even more telling about Starcraft in popular Korean culture is that Blizzard first publicly announced the game in Korea (see 2nd vid below) even before making that preview available on its website.



For those who want more geeky trailers.

The Consciousness (part 1)

"Neuroscientists find least controversial...the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain...; consciousness is the activity of the brain." - Time Magazine Mind and Body Special Issue (Jan 29, 2007)

I found some really amazing articles with profound meanings in this Time issue that I think everyone should read! So I'm going to give a little teaser here by quoting some really interesting stuff about the mind, and giving my own comments. First, let me preface by saying that science can be a precise tool to understand the universe, while spirituality can be an approximate one. I don't see how we can consider science and spirituality as irreconcilable. Some religious explanations have already understood these things that science is only beginning to scrape the surface of. The thing is just that religion usually understands these things by use of metaphors and analogies.

The Illusion of Control

Using functional MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.
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Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres, spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.
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And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence.

If we have machines that can somewhat read our minds, how hard is it to believe that people with genetic mutations can too? I've had someone "read my mind" before. What he did was he would ask me to think of and focus on my mom's maiden name, and he would write it down on a pad. He did the same telling me to think of my high school's name, city I was born in, a random word, and other things. He got them all right. I think those who can't believe this are close minded. Think: there are tons of waves and things flying around us everyday - light waves, sound waves, microwaves, electro-magnetic waves, radio waves, whatever waves that are used for phones or wireless. Our human body can only detect light and sound waves. Some animals can't even detect light and sound! We had the fortune to evolve from amoebas and develop organic sensors for light and sound. How hard is it to believe that some, through genetic mutation, have developed sensors for mind waves? Our machines can do it already.