孤單的火

19Nov11

孤單的火，自強不息。
但求照亮黑暗，無畏風雨天寒。
淡淡散發著，那暖暖的熱。

孤單的火，自相矛盾。
多想靠近動物，卻怕燃燒生靈。
淡淡散發著，那無奈歎息。

孤單的火，自求多福。
命該如此，自生自滅？

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The air we breathe is yellow

15Oct11

I’m taking a rhetoric of legal discourse class this semester, and the professor is definitely one of a kind. You get called on without warning in class, and as you attempt to craft your answer, she challenges every term you use in your response and breaks it down into its original Latin, Greek, or Germanic roots.

She then continues to pursue your logic with follow up questions, sending your mind rushing and adrenaline pumping for an appropriate answer. Your breathing quickens and you could hear your heart beating. It feels as if you are being chased by the rhetorical police who are investigating you for verbal fraud. You feel yourself running out of intellectual breath, and as you turn a corner into a dark ally, you find a long road that leads to a dead end. At this moment, as your mind is in disarray in an attempt to scramble up a cold wall that is too tall, you hear her say to you in front of the whole class, “Think far more on this”. At this, you feel your body go limp—-your ego just got arrested on charges of inadequacy and will be kept in custody for 15 weeks, released only upon conditions of satisfactory behavior. And in the back of your head, you’re thinking, “I hope this doesn’t get on my record”.

It has been 7 weeks since that first experience. We’ve had many homework assignments, each about 100 words long. Every assignment thus far has been brutally marked up. Most were filled with green or purple markings that circle, question, cross-out, or directly challenge every word we use or say.There seems to be more color from her markings than the content of our writing itself. I’ve gotten “unsatisfactory” marks on every assignment, accompanied by comments that read “think far more on all of this” at the end. Most students in this class receive the same colorful array of markings and comments that gently remind us to “think far more”.

But what’s actually more shocking was the midterm we just took. Everyone walked out of that midterm shell shocked, bleary eyed, and slightly disoriented.  We got our scores back this week, and while I’m not completely certain, it seems that more than half the class performed below a “C” level, with quite a few “D” and “F”. I scrambled out of that mess with a meager “B”, and thus far I only saw one person who managed an “A-”. I’ve never been treated in this way in my four years of Rhetoric classes at Berkeley.

This morning, I decided to sit down and figure out what the heck is going on. What is it that is making this class so hard to ace? Why is my past four years of writing experience falling upon deaf ears? While I read through each comment and examined every circle on my midterm, I came up with a hypothesis:

WARNING: The following paragraph will be abstract and theoretical, and generally confusing for the casual reader. Read at your own discretion.

So my conclusion is that the professor has a philosophy of metaphysics (way of understanding the world, a paradigm) derived from Kant and Heidegger, and that metaphysics requires you to be immersed within its discourse and not to see yourself as separate for distinct from its worldview. This worldview takes a step back from the conventional rhetorical position of the particular and sees everything as essentially connected. You cannot “analyze” this. You must suspend your habitual way of looking at the world and be immersed in the fabric of its logic/metaphysics.

You must actually SEE and attend to matters in the way that the philosophy would like you to SEE, and you can’t speak as if you are removed from this phenomenon. There is no other way to be in relationship with this philosophy than to be completely IN it, and the professor expects us to express this understanding not just conceptually, but also formally in the very way we speak through our writing. We need to PERFORM this understanding, not PRESENT it in the form of analysis, since a purely analytic worldview is precisely what is being challenged here.

This demand is particularly challenging for two reasons. First, it is a position that expects you to see the air you breathe as yellow. Our Rhetoric department is very much about “critical theory”, about breaking things down, seeing how they are constructed, and understanding them as dynamic and unstable. We’re so used to this process that it’s like the air we breathe, and we don’t notice because it’s invisible. However, our professor’s metaphysics challenges the way we see the world and how we’ve learned to think in the last four years at Berkeley.  It requires us to SEE the air we breathe and to notice that it is yellow. In that way, we are able to better attend to the (invisible) matter around us.

The second reason this demand is challenging is because it expects us to ACT and SPEAK in a way that demonstrates that we understand that the air we breathe as yellow. To simply “analyze” is to demonstrate that you are still unaware of the color of the air. You must disrupt your old habits and engage in a much more deliberate and careful way of speaking that reflects an understanding of the metaphysics. The difference between CONCEPTUAL knowledge and HABITUAL knowledge is being tested here, and you must modify the way you use language to reflect that understanding. This second level is probably why most of the class is having a difficult time with doing well in the class.

In fact, the way this blog post talks about the entire situation is exactly WRONG. I’m analyzing the situation, and i’m not treating it as a part of my being. The way I TALK about this issue already demonstrates that I’m outside of the metaphysics. And so, if for some disturbing reason, my professor comes across my blog post and decides to grade it, I will most certainly see it filled with colorful marks and a gentle reminder that reads,

“Think FAR more on ALL of this”.

And this will certainly go on my record.

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Essay on an Issue in Education

13Oct11

One of the most important determinants for high quality education is the quality of the teacher, and accountability is important for ensuring that current teachers are equipped with the necessary attitude, tools and skills for teaching well. And yet, public schools currently do not have an effective system of accountability to ensure the quality of teaching. Administrators cannot check on teachers without prior notification, which seems to defeat the purpose if lackluster teachers are then able to prepare a passable lesson for the day of checking.

Many efforts on the federal and state level have focused on student performance in schools as a measure of accountability (California’s Public Education Accountability Act, No Child Left Behind). However, they do not directly address accountability for teachers, whose teachings affect the quality of education in ways that measure beyond test scores. In the traditional public school system, efforts to improve the way that teachers are prepared and supervised remain difficult due to financial, organizational, or regulatory reasons. Larger policy reforms are also costly and difficult to deploy.

One model to address these challenges is the charter school system, which operates publically but is accountable to its students and freed from the policies that stymie traditional public schools. Organizationally, charter schools are nimble enough to experiment with different pedagogical approaches and have greater flexibility with funding. Thus, charter schools provide a possible platform for teacher accountability as a means to quality education.

The charter school system, however, has two important critiques. First is the claim of privatization, in which people claim that public money is being paid to private for-profit entities that run charter schools. Second is the claim of false promise, where many charter schools aren’t shown to be improving the test scores of its students. These, among other concerns, bring many people to doubt the efficacy of charter schools.

While the charter school system isn’t perfect, it offers new possibilities to attempt reforms that may address the challenges of its critics. One example is the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), a nation-wide, nonprofit network that has succeeded in providing a high quality education for underserved students. Through its focus on teacher training, KIPP not only nurtured high quality teachers, it demonstrated this through achieving high standards of excellence as well (with 85% of KIPPsters going to college).

There are many nonprofit organizations that collaborate with or manage charter schools. And because of the way they are structured, charter schools provide a good platform for collaboration with other organization to provide more support to charter school teachers throughout their career. Thus, increasing collaboration between such nonprofit initiatives and the charter school system can increase the quality of teachers while ensuring that public funds are being used for non-profit purposes.

Ultimately, charter schools represent an economically and politically feasible way of supporting teachers as a means to improving quality of education. Through working with nonprofits, charter schools may benefit from providing teachers with more training and support. Charter school networks like KIPP represent a model to helping hold teachers more accountable with delivering a high quality education. Hopefully, small-scale successes like these may in turn inspire larger policy reforms to support more of our teachers in the future.

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We Feel Fine

24Sep11

When we began to discuss the segment of “beyond chat” in my Rhetoric of New Media class, I was reminded of a website I saw a while back called “We Feel Fine”. In asking the question of “What does a Very Large Scale Conversation Look Like?”, theorist Warren Sack tried to schematically represent the network and relationships of chat through the Conversation Map of people’s conversational threads. In the case of “We Feel Fine”, Jonathan Harris also sought to map out some property of human interactions on the internet, except his question of interest was, “What does a Very Large Scale Sample of Emotions across the Internet Look Like?”

The website survey all of the blogs across the internet, searching for terms or sentences that include the phrase “I feel…”.  Once found, the website grabs the sentence including the phrase and records the demographics, including the time, place, date, weather conditions, age of blogger, coountry of origin, and more. It then maps all of these emotions onto a pallet of colorful balls that float in a soup of emotions that you can click on to find out more. The diameter of the ball corresponds with length of sentence, and the colors match the emotion being expressed. The emotions can be filtered by the particular demographics, and it can also be expressed in different formats, including montage, interaction, and more.

This may sound like an obvious question, but what exactly is “beyond” element of mapping out emotions in this way? How does it comment on the medium through which we express our emotions on the internet, and what interesting things can we derive from seeing the snippets of stories of random people?

http://www.wefeelfine.org/

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How Hypertexts Stumble

12Sep11

I haven’t read the DailyCal for a while, but for some reason, I decided to pick up a copy this past Tuesday. On the second page in the opinion section, I found a light-hearted article exploring the “perils” of StumbleUpon. The writer (Annie Gerlach) essentially analyzes her obsession with StumbleUpon by looking at how it organizes her relationship with the digital world. The article can be found here:

http://www.dailycal.org/2011/09/06/off-the-beat-the-perils-of-stumbleupon/

There were two points that I found interesting about finding this article. First is how the formal features of StumbleUpon takes on the features of hypertext and keep the writer coming back. In CardShark and Thespis,  Bernstein looks into how the medium-specific qualities of three programs (Card Shark, Social Shark, Thespis) provide both an instrument and environment for users. StumbleUpon seems to also be a kind of “hypertext”, except that instead of clicking one out of several choices, you only have one button: Stumble. From there, the website randomly generates other pages from around the web that allows the user to explore the digital world via jumping from one unfamiliar site to another. There is a kind of agency here with customizing what types of websites show up, but there is also an element of mystery with what comes up. In this way, StumbleUpon helps the user organize the experience of exploring the Internet in a randomized, hypertext fashion that is reminiscent of CardShark and Thespis.

Second, I’m interested in the inter-medial qualities of reading about StumbleUpon on the DailyCal. For one thing, I first came across this article in print before I found it digitized and published online for dissemination in the digital world. With this article available online, it takes on a new life where it can be rescued from obscurity through a search and a click on Google. In print, the article would be less easily stored, accessed, and talked about. In print, this article is easier to forget, lose, and dispose (as I did with the original print article). So while the content of the article remains the same, the form it comes in affects how it can be organized and used beyond the first viewer.

Moreover, the way that texts interact online seems to also influence the discourse of writing itself. In the end of the DailyCal article, Annie says goodbye to her readers: “So if you’ll excuse me, I’m signing off. I’ve got a Means Girls/Harry Potter gif website that’s calling my name”. The notion of “signing off” seems to be an action that belongs very much to the digital realm, in which a user “signs-off” of online chat or their Gmail account. In this way, Annie has essentially oriented her writing in the form of a kind of “chat session” while at the same time positioning her readers as the person behind the chat box.

Given that the interactions on the internet can shape the language we use to describe our interactions across different media, does it also shape the very interaction itself? If so, how?

Also, given that writing takes on a kind of “new life” online, what are the benefits of continuing to access writing through actual print?

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It’s Now or Never

14Jun11

I figured it’s about time.

For about two weeks I’ve been thinking about my first blog post about my time in India. I thought about starting the conventional way, where I would give plenty of context and introduce my purpose for being here. I also thought about starting from the beginning, when I showed up at the airport in Mumbai at 2AM without a driver, almost got duped by the currency exchange guy, and almost hit a cow getting to my hotel at 4AM. I even thought about starting with a vignette, rich with the colorful flavors of curry, mangoes, and cold shot of creamy lassi (which I have almost on a daily basis).

But there is no way for me to “start” talking about India and feel that I’ve done justice to my experience here.

And so, as I pick up my pallet and splash a character, a phrase, and a figure here and there, I hope you will be able to have an abstract sense of what it’s been like for me.

To start off, I want you to imagine a green scooter with a yellow top, a broad body, and nice seat that can comfortably seat about 4 people. It doesn’t have any doors or seatbelts, and so you could easily stick your head out the side and enjoy the breeze. It gives off a modest little buzz as you ride it, and a cute little honk. Now, stuff 7 people of various sizes and colors into it with a couple folks hanging out the side and send it off at 30 miles per hour on a dirt road, honking incessantly at large trucks, lazy bikes, and stray animals, and voila—you have yourself an Indian Tuk Tuk.

Welcome, and please enjoy the ride.

It’s good news that these little surface transport vehicles don’t tend to be what we rely on to travel longer distances. For going into the city, we take Taxis—old English Ambassadors left over from the colonial era when India was still under the control of the British crown less than 70 years ago.

By “we”, I’m referring my roommates in Kolkata, India. First up, we have David, the white Jewish dude from Santa Barbra who is surprisingly knowledgeable and open about Asian culture. I spend a lot of time learning about American culture from him including stuff like music, fashion, movies, etc. Damn cool guy. Across from us lives two gals from England. One is a volunteer who is running her own charity (she’s only 20!), and the other gal (madam, to be a bit more accurate) is a veteran scrub nurse in her fifties. Both sport a wicked English accent that I sometimes have a difficult time understanding, but totally awesome people.

We also live with three butler/cook/waiter/houseboy/housekeeper guys who cook us breakfast and dinner every day. They take care of us and watch over the rooms we stay in, which rests in a huge gated community of over 10 twenty-story tall apartment complexes, all of which are 97% empty (still under construction). We are one of the few people living here. Around us, there are fields of grass with animal skulls and bones. The power goes out occasionally in our building. Did I mention we also only drink bottled water stored in the fridge? Sounds almost like living in post-apocalyptic ruins of a once prosperous civilization.

So what exactly are we doing here in a place like this?

David and I are part of a group of 6 UC Berkeley students who have been flown to India to work on a social entrepreneurship project hosted by the Tata Group at their local companies. For the next 6-7 weeks, David and I will be interning at the newly opened Tata Medical Center, which specializes in the diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation of cancer patients. It earmarks 50% of its services for discounted or free treatment for people from lower income and underprivileged communities.

My job specifically is to help set-up the international volunteers program. I’ve spent about two weeks now doing research on the programs of local organizations. There’s really nothing big to complain about here—it feels just like a western corporate office setting with the exception that there’s “tea time” and lots of Indian people. The only source of angst is the hospital’s firewall, which blocks websites it deems to be social, political, or entertaining. It’s quite a stoic firewall, and as much as I’ve tried to run a VPN or take a different proxy to access Facebook, nothing has worked. To give you an idea of how dumb things can get, the firewall even blocked Mother Theresa’s “Missionaries of Charity” website that I was doing research on, branding it as “political”.

Anyways.

The weekends are usually when we put our tourist hats on and make a display of ourselves in the city as wealthy foreigners. We’ve visited shopping centers and markets, museums and memorials, temples and ashrams. Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve been a source of great interest, generating the curious gazes of mothers, greying grandfathers, and young children of all ages (babies and toddlers included). We’re as interesting to many locals as the tourist sites we’ve travelled to visit. By ‘we’, I’m mainly referring to David, whose whiteness tends to beat out my Asianness when it comes to attracting strangers who want to shake our hands or take pictures with us (again, with ‘us’ referring mainly to David).  I’ve tried to raise my interest factor by insisting that I’m from the US as well, but that never works. I see nods of approval only when I say my parents came from Asia.

There’s much more I can talk about, but I’m running out of gas. There’s much more I would like to show you, but I’m running out of paint. Just as I’ve found it hard to “start” talking about India, I guess there’s not really a way to “finish” talking about it either.

But I figured it’s about time I took a break.

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Berkeley Ph.D on a Dating Gameshow

27Mar11

“If you are the One” is a very famous game show in China where a guy presents before 24 beautiful ladies in hopes of being able to walk away with one potential date. In this episode, An Tian (who has his bachelors at Harvard, masters at Oxford, and Ph.D at Berkeley) dances and squeals on stage to woo the ladies. I cringed for most of the process, but by the end, I was inspired.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMjUzOTQzMzY4.html

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Curious Case of Mr. Dee

08Mar11

I wrote a paper for my legal studies class about how the ancient Chinese magistrate, Judge Dee, would fare as a person living in 2011 California.

__

Your honor, on behalf of the defendant, Mr. Dee, I would like to proclaim my client not guilty and free of responsibility from all accusations made against his recent conduct, including accounts of fraud, invasion of privacy, tampering with evidence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, for reasons that pertain to his mental condition. If you would kindly allow me five minutes to explain before this jury why my client should be absolved of all accusations, I will show why there is no need to press any further with the case.

To begin with, Mr. Dee has had a clean record with no history of misconduct. While he may behave in ways that others may find “eccentric in nature”, I can assure you that Mr. Dee is an upright and moral man. At home, his parents describe him to be a “pious and respectable child” while his wife describes him as a “loving and devoted husband”. His children have looked up to him as a strict yet benevolent father, and his sibling are equally generous with their praise of him. At the high school where he works as a history teacher, the principal has spoken highly of his loyalty, and several of students have also spoken out against his accusations.

In one particularly memorable interview, one of his former students commented, and I quote: “I used to sell cocaine by the restrooms to the ninth graders. And one day, as Mr. Dee stepped out the stalls and caught me red-handed, he took me out for a coffee chat at a nearby diner. No one ever treated me with such generosity, and I was so touched by our conversation that I decided to change my ways and study hard. I started out high school as a drug dealer and gang member with a 2.0 GPA. It has been two years since my chat with Mr. Dee, and I just received my acceptance letter to UC Berkeley, the number one public university in the world.” Of all of the clients we have worked with, none have been described more positively than this man before you.

In addition to his upright character, Mr. Dee is also has shown serious signs of mental illness that can account for his aberrant behavior concerning this case. Upon finding out that one of his students has been murdered, Mr. Dee reported having several dreams that have recurred and disrupted his sleep for the follow two days. He claims that the spirits have spoken to him, and that he is now charged with the responsibility of discovering the truth to the murder. Based on literature in Psychology, this is a classic instance of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in which Mr. Dee has suffered a traumatic experience that has altered his state of being. His relationship with this student has been so strong, and this incident has caused so much distress, that Mr. Dee has been mentally derailed by the experience.

Since the dreams, Mr. Dee’s mental condition continued to worsen. At around July of last year, this deteriorating mental condition hit rock bottom when the detectives working on this case came back reporting no conclusive results. Throughout the entire time as the case was in process, Mr. Dee was aloof and kept to himself as he spent many hours locked in his room reading a series of history books. Upon hearing the news from the detective, he signed up for his first acting class with the Drama department where he practiced the role of the federal agent with the rest of the students preparing for the school play. This new obsession with acting can be seen as a coping mechanism, as Mr. Dee was reduced to a state where he had to play out his mental fantasy of solving the crime himself.

In December, Mr. Dee began to display his first signs of insanity as he took his role of the federal agent outside of class and began a series of visits to people he suspected were tied to the case. One visit that had greater legal implications was his visit to the coroner, where he asked to see the body of the murdered student. The coroner, duped by his convincing act, complied with his request but did not expect Mr. Dee to actually touch the body. This episode, in which the prosecution has accused of as tampering with evidence, was actually Mr. Dee playing out a simple but powerful subconscious need to be affirmed of the death of the student. It represents a way for Mr. Dee to move past the “denial” stage of the death, and it is unfortunate that this need overtook his ability to reason.

And yet, for some strange reason, Mr. Dee’s unstable mental behavior seemed to have a method behind its madness. By early August, Mr. Dee was able to find his way to the house of the plaintiff in the guise of a federal agent. In the manner which he interrogated others he visited, Mr. Dee spoke harshly to the person now confirmed to be the murderer of the case. After receiving several denials by the murderer, Mr. Dee entered into his room without permission, opened a cavity in the ground, and extracted a bottle of poison.  Mr. Dee threatened to expose how exactly the murderer poisoned the student out of his jealousy of a love-triangle incident, and his directness consequently caused the plaintiff to go into a panic attack that has put him in the hospital.

That same plaintiff, the one who murdered the student, is the person currently pressing charges against Mr. Dee on multiple accounts, including fraud, invasion of property, tampering with evidence, and intentional infliction of mental distress. While Mr. Dee has indeed acted in ways that were legally questionable, he has contributed tremendously to solving a murder case. His situation needs to be understood as coming from a place of desperation, accompanied by incredible pain and anguish. How much suffering it must have taken to bring a respectable member of this community—a loving son, husband, father, and teacher— to the point of mental instability?

Your honor, distinguished members of the jury—Mr. Dee has already been hurt once by the death of his student. Must we hurt him again by pressing legal charges brought forth by a murderer towards an admirable man made mentally unstable by trauma? Please. Let us have mercy for Mr. Dee. Such a man deserves our compassion, not severity.

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How writing is like a fish

04Mar11

Why does your writing flop? Why does it smack of dryness, like a fish baking in the sun? Because writing is not just about conveying information and getting thoughts on paper. Sure, on the most fundamental level, all writing is about communicating an idea, a feeling, a message, a performative. But you can’t just say it and expect people to take you up on it.

It’s like trying to start a protest. You can’t ever start a protest simply by telling people the facts (although it’s helpful). You need to get people roused up, you need to get one person to buy-in, who will get their friends to buy-in, etc. There’s a message there, but it’s dressed up and performed through people in a way to get a something “deeper” than information.

Same with writing. With attention grabbers, with shiny new prada metaphors, with eccentric narratives—all of these intend to “show” a certain essential something rather than simply state it in its full ugliness. It’s like putting on make-up to sell a look, or dress-up to catch someone’s attention. The pizzazz of the experience is why we don’t die of boredom going through the same universal themes again and again over all these centuries.

All material forms attempt to communicate at a deeper level, and clear direct communication in kindergarten prose just doesn’t cut it. You need to “perform” love by characters. That is what rhetoric is all about—looking past the dressing for the message, and breaking down how the dressing manages to communicate its message in the way it does.

Take that a step further and you realize that all symbolic information (pictures, movies, plays, architecture) has that hidden message. There is always a set of meanings behind what you read and see that the author hopes for you to discover. The author can’t tell you, since you must make your own meaning out of it for the content to be significant. To tell you the meaning is to put a live fish in a sun to dry.

And with that, I recognize that my written “performance” is coming to an end, so I shall now humbly finish my last summersault: to write well is not simply to write well. To write well is to tell by means of showing, and not to have the message be lost in what is shown. And gosh darn it, my fish just died.

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The Task of Rhetoric

28Feb11

I mentioned before that the every Rhetoric major at Berkeley eventually has to come to terms with his/her own definition or conception of what “Rhetoric” is. I’ve made many forays into this muddy, amorphous idea. Here is my most recent attempt, inspired after reading Homi Bababha’s “DissemiNation”.

The task of rhetoric is to wrestle control out of the imagined power that is assumed when using language to capture the world within the confines of symbolic systems. When the veil of the status quo is lifted, one stares into the incommensurable gap between representation and reality, and the powerless is revealed.

(In layman’s terms, it means “taking the red pill” and understanding that what we take for granted as “social reality” is actually arbitrary and naturalized by the way we use language. When we look in between the cracks, we see that the reality that language tries to represent is actually much more complicated, blurry, and incapable of being expressed. Our “concepts”, “words”, and “discourses”, then, are inadequate. They are often not only inadequate, but often used to serve a political purpose. Hence, to understand that political reality is to “wrestle control” out of its dominant understanding.)

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