Out in the Rural: https://vimeo.com/9307557
A Gardener's Tale: https://vimeo.com/11939747

A Gardener's Tale can be connected to the metaphor of "salad bowl" to ask who attended the growth of vegetables that come into the salad bowl. Considering Raymond Williams' definition of culture as "attending to growth," then, it does not as much what a great assortment you have in the bowl as who attends to the growth so that differences remain on a structural level. Institutional racism in health disparity should really be the focal point for engaging structural and institutional differences. 

26 mini-films on racism:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/learning/lesson-plans/25-mini-films-for-exploring-race-bias-and-identity-with-students.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_ln_20170316&nl=learning-network&nl_art=1&nlid=66434461&ref=headline&te=1

Fusing Two Fields

It is great to start another intellectual journey at the middle age. In the past, the majority of the theoretical engagement seemed to lack a sense of hands-on-ness. In contrast, current learning seems to focus more on solving concrete problem. Instead of discarding the past experience, I would like to compare the two and form unique perspectives riding on both fields. Fusing the two, but not confusing the current as the past one, is important. In the end, my identity will be more from the current discipline than from the previous one. What rhetorical strategies to use to well-poise such a tension is important.   

Liu Village Drumming at Carnival

[Left Behind Families] Liu Village Dancing and Drumming

 BY CNMCARE13 JUNE 2014FIELDWORK, MULTIMEDIA, VIDEO

During his trip to the rural Liu village, Dr Kang Sun noticed how its traditional drumming and folk dancing practices are still active despite the condition of the settlement. He collaborated with the left-behind villagers to organise cultural activities as part of a healthy lifestyle and they were given the invitation to perform their drumming and dancing at the local carnival. Dr Kang documented the whole process in this short clip.

BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK.

Not Only for Memory's Sake

I dug up this piece of history, for a purpose to memorize it and to revitalize it. The following post is originally published at http://blog.nus.edu.sg/cnmcare/2014/05/ as such:

The Spurious Kang: An Ethnographic Account of Culture’s Place in a Chinese Village – A Talk by Dr Kang Sun

 BY CNMCARE26 MAY 2014FIELDWORK, MULTIMEDIA, VIDEO

Recognizing numerous elements of culture in the field can pose challenges to researchers. The concrete, unexpected, practical, and sometimes tedious issues that need to be addressed add rich and dynamic meanings as well as messiness to projects. Frequently, such recognition results from constant negotiations with history and present, first impressions and in-depth knowledge acquired through trial and error. In this presentation, Dr Kang showcases the uncertainties and negotiations of recognition experienced in a village that is both familiar and strange to him, his hometown. As an ethnographer, he argues that recognition of cultural elements is a social process that often defies simple academic categories. Only by accepting such social processes that take place in the real field, can real inquiries of interests be identified and investigated. In his case, field research has been an ongoing process in which he and other participants have discovered the importance of an old local art form and worked together to push for its revival. This presentation is marked by its visual impact.

Follow this link: https://youtu.be/49t6JeoNxFQ

Out of This World

There is this place where mountains are covered with snow at the hottest time in summer and the sea encircles the dwellers' as a womb to an unborn baby. This is a place where you can be wet-kissed by the splashing waves and astounded by subtle layers of colors of twilights. This is a place where the modern city is at its best rate of development, yet can be quickly left out of mind by driving away to the most pristine nature of mountains and sea, grass and trees, inner lands and islands, secluded huts and houses on the islands where the most ubiquitous modern conveniences such as your smartphones cannot reach.

In here, you are as close to modernity as you are to nature. Still, you are as close to the nature of nature, as you are to the nature of its human beings.

Our trip of 19 people, over six days, was transformed directly into sweet memories of precisely guided tours of the city and its surroundings, carefully prepared dinner banquets, well-coordinated change of tasks between helpers, you the owners, and as the capstone to all these, of one night of secluded living in island and one day of riding the motorboat to hunt crabs, and cut seaweeds freshly floating just beneath of surface of the deep blue seawater. And the relaxed conversations, and the caring to crack the crab shells for our ease of consuming the freshness insides, and the pictures that hold our desire of saving another yet another copy. It is out of this very world, yet it feels to be out of the world.

Too good, but still true! Good day, Seattle! Goodbye, Seattle!  





   

Great Expectations I

It was the same kind of flamboyance that I felt before my departure to the US as Pip felt when he surveyed the marshes, as the so-hinted mysterious Great Expectations loomed at large before him. So was the record:

After our early dinner, I strolled out along. proposing to finish off the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I felt a sublime compassion for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the low green mounds. I promised myself that I would do something for them one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a dinner of roastbeef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of condescension, upon everybody in the village. (Dickens, 1960, p. 148)

The condescendingly "sublime compassion" came from both a youth's impatience with the current lot of living and his inability in appreciating the ever more scarce love in the upper society that he had in his environment then. Dickens grasped this eager feeling by Pip positioning himself in the "gentleman's" perception even before his parting with the family and friends. Poor thing, life will be different, but how so? And to your satisfaction or dismay?

Dickens, C. (1960). Great expectations. New York: Holt Rinehart Winston.

What to Learn?

Yesterday I had a meeting with Rich Stephens, talking on my request about the career development services for my students. I felt that once the attention withdrew from the daily necessities like an on-call firefighter, then, one could have more freedom to speculate and to plan ahead, first by making the things interesting, then useful, and then make them even feel necessary. It was a delight to find his son's career service books written with an ethnographer's approach, which is the closest approach an author can get to his subjects.

This morning, I went ahead to search some literature on student services. The monotony of work has helped me make decision to make it interesting by knowing more about what others are doing and what theories have been developed about this part. No sooner had I dug out several books and posted link on my email to myself did I need to go for a meeting with an outsourced company for mentoring our students. They also had the idea of doing research with their data. Such a coincidence.

I have also started reading "四世同堂." It is time to start reading some Chinese books. For English books, I am reading "Great Expectations." I no longer want to read for classes, which have formed a task-oriented reading habit and deprived of much fun from reading. Now I would like to read only for fun. Good for me to try to recover fun, relaxation, and ease with myself, others, and life, from a PHD (permanent heart damage) syndrome.

So what to learn? Kids never ask such a question: They can pick up a book and start to read, or drop it down and stop if it is not funny enough. That should be what I do: to rediscover the fun of reading.