This year, I was thrown into a world of political conflicts in the architecture field. It was a very brief glimpse of what it was like to be working in the midst of it. From event organisation to attending meetings of different committees, as if it was not obvious from the very beginning, there lives a huge political agenda behind each section of the faculty. Whether it’d be who would be running the studios to what projects can go through, or who can be part of the party the circle can become a toxic bubble - let alone those who have come across it can already become part of the degrading situation.
Read MoreThe Hero Phenomena III : Conformity and Stereotype
I always pride myself in being Chinese - whether it’d be the culture or my family’s history, I’d always be happy to tell anybody about my background.
So you could probably imagine how gutted I was when I was told that I looked nothing like a person from Hong Kong - let alone have features that would pinpoint me to a specific province in China. I was simply a girl who carried the classic feature that would mark me as an Asian, and that I may look like I came from any part of Korea, Japan, China, Singapore…
Expectations vs Reality I : The Big Picture
I loved writing before I enjoyed reading.
It took me two years and a few cases of having nobody to play with during recess and lunchtime that I was able to read pictureless novels. Before a group of boys welcomed me into their group, a pile of books was readily made next to me, waiting to keep me company for the next hour on a mint concrete floor inside the toilet stalls. Back then, I heavily relied on reading books that had images to consider the book a worthwhile read (and to have a general idea of how the novel was progressing). I guess it was because the ten year old me was still coming to grips with understanding English as I was still heavily reliant on communicating in Cantonese. This constant translating back and forth between two languages as I read a novel was taxing, moreover made it difficult for me to set up the scenes the author has crafted through text.
Read MoreThe Way We Knew It Left It. Ellipsism Part I
There's a fine line between morals and doing it for your own sake. Every now and then we would be presented with some kind of catch twenty two situation that could eventually haunt us a lifetime.
It's quite a morbid situation to consider really.
Last year on a trip to Venice, we spent two days at the Venice Biennale to understand the types of issues (the exhibition was titled 'Reporting from the Front') that have been raised in the past years. Issues ranged from underpayment, exploitation to poverty and social housing.
And then there was the past.
Read More