decided i wanted that illusory fresh start after all.

i began blogging when i was 13. i remember writing my young heart out, trying to be cute and funny. i don’t remember if i was trying to please all my readers, but i did enjoy a decent span of young bloggers’ popularity. when i turned 17 though, i increasingly felt like i no longer had a personal space for my writing. the number of strangers that left messages and links in my flooble chatterbox was flattering, but i could never make up my mind if i completely enjoyed the attention. on the one hand, it felt nice to be a mini-celebrity; on the other, i didn’t feel like being as open. my writing became opaque. i drew on strange poetry-like syntax to avoid clarity of thought. i used metaphors to obscure my emotions. at the same time, so much of my writing became navel-gazing that it made me feel claustrophobic.

ultimately, i decided that if i was going to navel-gaze i would at least do it privately. i started a blog privy only to myself, cow and a few best friends. there, i could be as honest and transparent as i wanted without fearing judgment. i could rage about my insecurities, mope around in depression, experiment with my writing and ask stupid questions without worrying about the answers i would receive. sadly, this later led to complications anyway. when cow and i started falling out with each other, i found that neither blog was sufficient for expressing myself anymore. i needed space not only from the public, but also from him. it was at this time that untold untruth was created.

untold untruth has long since outlived its original purpose. i have nothing to hide from him anymore. at the same time, i have nothing more to hide from Z either, who knows enough now. some friends have been reading this for a while and i like keeping them up to speed on my life. still, i am uncomfortable with the idea of trying to redefine the original purpose of this blog. for whom do i write now?

my old blog has long since fallen into disrepair. Z recently logged in to write a post there and change the layout, as a mark of sealing off my past. i wonder at what point did i move on from this blog’s original purpose, and whether i should have created a new one for my current purposes instead of trying to revamp this one. perhaps it is this which i am most uncomfortable with. my past is still lurking in the backlog of untold untruth and it undermines the idea that i am truly starting afresh.

though i guess all fresh starts are illusions, anyway.

i did make some progress compared to my first IV, but it’s becoming clearer to me that no amount of training will make up for my clear lack of general knowledge. even given a crazy amount of practice, i’m growing uncomfortably aware that i will eventually meet my own glass ceiling of ignorance. i’m not going to write a lot on this one as i didn’t really feel like the experience was particularly novel or personally rewarding. if anything, i felt like a burden on z all the time who kept our arguments afloat. he did assure me that i was doing fine for a beginner, which was mollifying, but the truth is i relied so much on him that i felt i performed worse than even at my first tournament. my speeches were probably better, but they certainly were not my speeches.

some personal notes:

1. POI more – too slow, too hesitant
2. more original content – not enough general knowledge and still have a weak grasp of principles
3. structure – require a lot more practice
4. less rhetoric, more analysis – again, more practice
5. better speech notes

strangely, my favorite part of the tournament was the small gathering we had at Bombay Blues after the grand finals, which i guess was intended to be the equivalent of the usual debate social. i say “strangely” because i don’t usually enjoy debate socials. the acquaintances i meet never feel like genuine friendships and there always seems to be a need for enduring a barrage of small talk, which has a place quite high up on my “things i detest in life” list. but here, we were a small group of six, including the Chief Adjudicator, who despite his alarming appearance turned out to be an incredibly nice person.  the bar was in the middle of a quiet alley and we were out on the balcony under the husky night sky. it was an Indian oasis, with waves of party music and shisha fumes hanging sensuously in the electric air of Bangkok’s darkness. we sat on exotic cushions placed around low wooden tables. the atmosphere was so light and alluring that for the first time throughout the tournament, i actually felt comfortable being myself. clearly, the alcohol helped as well.

i found out some amazing things about the CA which reminded me of the world i used to be more familiar with. (i can probably only best describe this as my ISKL times of art, literature and a lot of wondering.) we talked about graphic novels, Waiting for Godot, Haruki Murakami and tattoos; we asked him many questions about his life and his line of work, and learnt a lot of astonishing things in return. i felt that my world expanded slightly by the force of his presence. he was so different from me and yet so like me. i felt guilty for not being more myself at all times throughout the year since i left ISKL. of course things are different now and i believe i am quite positively changed by the past year, but i don’t know, i often feel like there is a part of me whose needs i have grown to deny. in a way, i think these needs were being met by having such an open conversation with this giant man.

saying goodbye to Z for the last time was very painful. we clung to each other in especial desperation during our last hour at the airport, almost completely ignoring eugene and sandra. we held each other close and rubbed our hands all over each others’ bodies, trying to memorize the touch, smell and taste of each other. eventually we had to head toward different terminals, so the last i saw of him was his back while he was walking through the security check of Suvarnabhumi’s terminal F. i missed him terribly that day and night, and woke up extremely depressed yesterday morning. thankfully, that phase of helplessness has passed now. why, though, should merit its own post in itself.

the website design company which created the website did so out of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) quota for the year. they created a pretty, professional design template then outfitted it with the most basic and powerless admin interface ever (equipped enough only for us to edit the content and sections), and left it at that. so now if we want to edit or add a section header which stays at the top of the webpage at all times, we would have to pay for their services. with no budget allocated for website maintenance, the result is we are now stuck with, to use a metaphor my mentor grumbled all the time, a ferrari without an engine.

several interns have been here before me who have also been set upon this sadly underrated task of maintaining the site through the admin interface. strangely, although the interface is so stripped of organizational flexibility that i can actually do more things on my blog than with the company website, my predecessors seem to have, in their inability to grapple with the idiot-proofed admin interface, made a grande merde of things anyway.

in my initial tour through the various sections of the website, i unearthed two Calendar of Events, each one under a different section of the site and each listing different events, one of which seemed more excited about Malaysian holidays than parliamentary sittings as it mentioned Hari Raya Adifilfitri four times. none of the calendars actually bring you to a calendar, but a click on any event brings you to a whole blank page dedicated to one threadbare sentence consisting of (1) the event (or holiday), (2) the date.

i’ve managed to delete the holiday-obsessed calendar, but the calendar conundrum is a problem i have yet to deal with thoroughly because right now i have a whole other goliath to deal with – organizing our press statements by year. to divulge unnecessary details, i’m trying to delete the 2008 section and replacing it with the new 2008 archive i created. unfortunately i cannot do this because i need to remove all the articles under the 2008 section first, but because the admin interface does not let me search for articles under one specific section nor apply an action to several articles at once, i will spend at least 45 minutes painstakingly digging up each article and deleting it manually. and this is only the mindless part of my struggle.

the website has been so poorly updated that several events have already come and gone but never brought to the light of cyberspace. 2009 has been decently busy, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at their homepage. i don’t know how long it will take for me to unravel the mess, but i foresee a long-term investment of effort on my part. the task is unintellectual yet requires enough logic problem-solving that you actually need to concentrate. the result is unimpressively simple, but the effort put in can be so physically and mentally draining that you just want to throw the whole interface out of the frame of its computer window. on top of all this, my eyes are puffy from lack of sleep and recent tears and staring at the screen all day trying to reorganize the website is making me look like death.

may lee kwan yew and mahathir’s so-called asian values grant me patience and fortitude!

hey

need to re-word this section

“Upon assuming office, besides the challenges left over from Badawi’s administration and the economic downturn, Najib faced a lack of credibility and public faith in him due to major allegations of corruption and suspected involvement in recent scandals.”

“less severe?” i asked, somewhat amused.

it sounds a tad too controversial….

yeap

“ok” i unbolded some of the text.

gosh….that I’m saying this is a miracle!

i laughed, a little drily. neither of us share much love for the administration of this country. a few moments later, he wrote again.

“Racial polarization due to the existence of vernacular schools” could potentially be contentious…

1. Freedom of speech and expression is curtailed by a myriad of laws (you can ask me for the list). As of 2008, the Ministry of Home Affairs listed 1 434 book titles banned in Malaysia. 57% of the country’s total print advertising is controlled by Media Prima Berhad, which has close links with one of the parties in the ruling coalition. Ownership and control of all mainstream media are also by component parties of the ruling coalition. Journalists and bloggers who portray the government negatively are consistently arrested for sedition.
2. The US State Department has blacklisted Malaysia as one of the 17 countries which do not “comply with minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so, despite some progress in enforcing the country’s new anti-trafficking law”.
3. The Internal Security Act (ISA) allows for the arrest of any person without the need of trial for an indefinite period of time under the allegation of threatening national security. It has been consistently used against political opponents. Since 1960, 10 662 people have been arrested under the ISA.
4. The Royal Police (PDRM) is considered to be the most corrupt institution in Malaysia, according to polls by Transparency International. In 2008, there were 44 deaths by police shootings through media monitoring, while the government disclosed 13 cases of deaths in police custody. In 2009 alone, there have already been two deaths in custody, one of which has been declared a murder.
5. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) is selective and discriminatory in its investigation of cases. Besides this, other major allegations against the institution today are (1) that it uses methods of interrogation akin to torture and (2) the death-in-custody of the political secretary to an assemblyman of the opposition party.

After reading stuff like this you really have to wonder: which makes better couch surfing material – the book or the country?

feeling pleased to be consulted on our local culture, i went over to take a look at the names he was wrestling with. your resident malaysian blogger realised very quickly that she was as clueless as he was. a quick shortlist of our tongue-twisting bureaucratic monsters:

Dato’ Seri Utama Dr. Muhammad Yudin

monster no. 1 had six parts. clearly more parts than is desirable for a report in which you will repeat his name at least as frequently as the number of syllables in his name. the first three parts of the name are honorary state titles, the Dr. indicating he is holding a PhD. as this is a malay name, you do not discount the first name in favour of the last name, because the first name is inherited by the offspring of a malay family as their last name. the dilemmas we faced? (1) not being able to abbreviate Dato’ Seri Utama to DSU as it is not the norm, (2) not being able to discount the Dr. because it gave him academic authority in the report and (3) not being able to use his first name only as there is another muhammad lurking somewhere in the report. the solution to this dilemma? we used “the speaker”.

Tan Sri Dato’ Uhammed Haji Zainal Abdul Razak

monster no. 2 had nine parts in total –  two titles with the remaining six parts being his full name. intuitively it wants to send you running for cover, but is in fact a simpler conundrum to solve than monster no. 1. there is also no way to abbreviate Tan Sri Dato’, but we hazarded a guess as to where his last name begins and then eliminated it. a safe bet is that the first two parts after Tan Sri Dato’ are his first name, so we kept that and deleted the rest. monster no. 2 was thus abbreviated to five parts, a big discount of 44% off the original monster.

haha. of course these names are not the same ones as those in our report, but the numbers are factually accurate. more updates from work soon!

friday, 10/07/2009: day 1 in seoul

Même en Corée on aime la France!

after a sentimental round of final goodbyes at woosuk university, we took the bus woosuk provided for us back to seoul. we reached around mid-afternoon and parted ways in the heart of the city. some people stayed back in jeonju, some had flights to catch and others stayed together in a hostel they had booked a bit earlier. i had already made plans to stay with lina (korean) and andreas (german), so i didn’t join them but waited where i told lina i would meet her. i ended up being a little lost because i was misled to believe that i was in front of the intercontinental hotel, where i was told i would be. after 30 minutes of confusion and mild panic, it turned out that i was on the other side of the river which divides seoul into north and south. i ended up needing to drag my luggage across the street through the underground tunnel in order to catch a taxi (20kg and 3 extra bags is not an easy feat for me! thankfully, a nice man offered to lug it up the stairs in the end), which i didn’t even have enough won to pay for! when i finally got to her place, she and andreas were already there and i felt really happy and relieved to see familiar faces again. the AU15 people were nice, but my sciences po darlings are irreplaceable.

Chicken with rice, vegetables and spicy sauce served on a hot plate

upon my arrival, lina briefly explained that things were kinda complicated and that she would be staying with her real dad, while we stayed with her step-dad in this posh french expat area where the lycée français de séoul is. with the number of taxis available in seoul, however, the separation in logding wasn’t very difficult to overcome. we had an incredible dinner with raphaël (sadly i cannot for the life of me recall the name of the dish), over which we got a bit tipsy because we had so much beer and soju. by the way, beer and soju is to south korea as wine is to france. you have it with your meals and over hangouts with your friends. soju is drank in shots, but what the koreans like to do (or so i hear – i never actually saw anyone else apart from my happy european friends do this) is to drop the entire shot into a glass of beer and then drink the two together. despite the shots i drank and the bottles i brought back home, soju is really not my poison. it tastes a lot like watered down vodka. i personally preferred drinking it with beer, but raphaël thought it just made the beer taste exceptionally bad. a much better combination is soju with fruit juice, which only tastes good because you cannot taste the soju anymore.  andreas just seemed happy to have anything korean to try, so i’m not sure how much he really enjoyed the alcohol, haha. overall i think my time drinking in korea taught me how enjoyable a good jug of beer can be, relative to soju. whoever said it was a man’s drink?

saturday, 11/07/2009: day 2 in seoul

Martial Arts Performance outside the Palace in Suwon

everyone got up super early because lina wanted to bring us to suwon, where she had a lacrosse game (our little korean friend is one of the republic of korea’s national lacrosse players!) raphaël came over to where we were staying around 8am and lina picked us all up in her BMW which, like almost every other car in seoul, had this super nifty GPS system she used to navigate with. while she went for her lacrosse game, the rest of us went to the palace where dae jangeum, the superhit series about korea’s favorite heroine, was shot. it was quite unimpressive though. it was very small and quite bare, with most of the buildings partially under construction. the most interesting parts of it were probably the cardboard print images of the actress who played dae jangeum scattered around the palace buildings, depicting various scenes of the movie that had taken place where and when. there was a martial arts performance after that outside the entrance of the palace, which was interesting enough, but a bit unbearable to watch in the sweltering heat. we met up with lina back at the university where she had a game afterward, but not before getting lost in a cab whose driver had misheard raphaël’s directions haha. fast forward to night-time: we joined some of the AU people for dinner, but didn’t stay with them for drinks because i felt like being on our own. i didn’t feel exceptionally close to anyone at the AU dinner, plus i felt awkward facing someone i now had problems speaking to normally, so the three of us just went for a short drink (beer again!) at a bar nearby before heading home.

Drinks and dinner in Insadong

sunday, 12/07/2009: day 3 in seoul

this was probably the most tragic part of the trip and the one that left the largest impression on me. i’d wanted to see the 38th parallel for quite some time, not realizing that it wasn’t actually possible to see it unless you (1) were not south korean, (2) registered for a tour with an authorized tour company and (3) paid extra to go on tour C, which was the only one which would bring you into the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and right up to the 38th parallel itself where there is a small north korean village situated right on the border. unfortunately, certain nationalities were prohibited from entering the DMZ altogether and malaysia happened to be one of them. the others would probably have gone on tour C without me (which i would have been extremely annoyed about) had the tour been available on sundays, but as that was not the case we stuck together.

one would think that the DMZ is such a highly politicized and sensitive issue that a visit to the area would entail more decorum, but right now the entire affair has been commercialized quite thoroughly. there is a little recreational tourist place you can stop at for snacks and souvenirs before heading towards the checkpoint, where soldiers will check everyone’s passports before letting them through on the bus. on this particular day, we made the entire trip under the shade of our umbrellas as the monsoon decided to be particularly relentless. we went to a musuem where we could see some relics from the north-south korean war. there was also this large 3D map of the DMZ which showed us where 4 tunnels discovered to be dug by north koreans in an attempt to invade seoul were located. up till the border seperating north and south korea, there are still towns and landmarks. beyond that, the peninsula turns into a mysterious expanse of jungle. we got to see one of the tunnels by walking down this 300m tunnel which was drilled by the south koreans in order to intercept the sneaky north koreans at work. the tunnel was quite low so raphaël and andreas had to walk down the path bent-double, with one hand consciously holding on to their helmets, which everyone had to wear (for clear reasons). i didn’t realize at first the problem with walking down this tunnel until we reached the end of it – we then had to climb back up the tunnel which was at a rather steep incline. when raphaël first pointed it out, i frowned and said 300m wasn’t a lot. then he said that was roughly the height of a 15 story-building we were climbing up!

Dorason Station, visited by more tourists than trains

the most unsettling part of the tour involved us going to dorasan train station, which was built as a symbol of expectant reunification. the place is brand new, with shiny floors, clean counter surfaces and modern glass walls. the only thing out of sorts with the station is that there are, of course, no trains that ever come or go. the station is empty except for the groups of tourists who filter in and out of it throughout the day, gawking at the novelty of a station that has no use except for its symbolism. its grandest guests have been george w. bush and kim dae-joung, whose pictures are plasted up on this huge billboard in the lobby to show how important the station really is. outside the entrance to the railway platform, the electronic billboard alternates between the historical and symbolic significance of dorasan station and a fake list of departure and arrival times  between seoul and pyongyang. by the boarding area, a soldier stands there decked in full uniform and his rifle, stiffly posing for the hundreds of tourists who stand gingerly but excitedly next to get a photograph with him and the billboard flashing away in the background. you can also buy fake tickets at the ticketing counter, but if you’re too cheap to fork out 500W (less than 0,50€) for a tokenistic piece of paper that doesn’t even say pyongyang on it, there are two stamps and ink pads on the counter which you can use to stamp on whatever surface you can come up with, showing that you have been that close to pyongyang. for the naïve and over-enthusiastic, there is a sign that warns you not to stamp these fake stamps in your passport or on currency notes. to the far left of the station, i looked through the glass wall next to the waiting area and could see the security check-in area. the station is newer and sharper than KLIA, fully decked out with everything including the conveyor belts which move your luggage through security scans. the question begging to be asked was, of course,  when will dorasan station come to life?

the last part of the tour took us to a souvenir store, where we could buy 10kg or 20kg sacks of rice produced in the DMZ. if you like, you could even buy little clippings of barbed wire which is used to seal off the DMZ from civilians. it was highly amusing and yet very pathetic. my dad would say: one man’s meat is another man’s poison. in this case, one country’s tragedy is somehow one of the same country’s biggest tourist attractions.

at night we went to this nice shopping street where lina and i dragged raphaël and andreas into one of those sticker-photo shops. i’d done them before in malaysia with friends and my sister, but this time it was particularly refreshing to finally have someone go through the process fully understanding all the korean that we were being bombarded with! like in malaysia, after the sticker-photos are printed, you can pay a little extra (100W) to have them laminated. korea being korea, of course, offers a little more than just this. there are scanners and computers around for you to scan and upload your sticker-photos onto cyworld or facebook or whatever you wish! as for the rest of it…

Sciences Po Summer in Seoul 2009!

enough said!

monday, 13/07/2009:  day 4 in seoul

The view from inside Gyeongbok, framed by Seoul's cityscape

The entrance to Gyeongbok, framed by the mountain

we saw another palace in the early afternoon, this time the famous gyeongbuk palace right in the middle of the city itself. it was nothing like the dingy one we saw in suwon – this was vast and beautiful, with an amazing garden filled with elegant trees and gentle paths. there was even a little lake, in the middle of which the emperor’s “party house” was built. perhaps it was because of lina’s way of phrasing it, haha, but i couldn’t help thinking how amazing it would be to have a huge bash there. people could dive off the building and into the lake, swim amongst the lotuses, under the sensual arms of the low-laying trees and by the side of the little royal boat, where i imagine the queens and princesses must have surely sat in sober giggles. what i found the most beautiful thing about the palace though, was that it was framed by both the cityscape and the mountains. being there – you felt like you were sandwiched between the past and the future. with much persistence, lina and i managed to bully raphaël and andreas into borrowing hanbok, the korean traditional costumes, from one of the tourist guide stalls and paraded around the lake and buildings feeling like royal tourists, haha.

as it was my last day in seoul, lina took us to dongdaemun in the evening to help me find a hanbok. if you’ve seen them on my facebook profile already, you’ll know how beautiful they are and maybe understand why i wanted one so badly, haha. i spent more than i would have liked on it in the end, but andreas and raphaël both assured me that it was worth it so i’ve stopped dwelling on that since. we spent this last evening in a few bars and ended the night late in a luxurious karaoke bar. the floors were made of glass and you could see teddy bears, flowers, hearts and ribbons and all sorts of other sweet delicate things below you. i had a great time but probably dominated the mic way too much as few of them really knew all the songs.

tuesday, 14/07/2009: day in transit back home

so that’s it for my trip in seoul. i left the next day at 10am and spent 12 hours flying and transiting back to ma chère tanah air malaysia. it felt extremely strange to know that 10 months had gone by and that i would be returning to the arms of family and the earful of mangled malay-chinese-english. nothing incredible happened on this day except that during my last 3 hours on the plane, i felt inexplicably uneasy. i felt so helpless to be strapped to a seat in mid-air and not be able to move around or change course. i was so desperate to wring the feeling out of me that i started scribbling in haruki murakami’s norwegian wood which i bought in incheon airport. i was suddenly afraid of forgetting all the wonderful things that had happened to me over the past 2 weeks and all the good stuff that had been added to my life over the last 10 months in general. i think in a way i was afraid i would lose sight of all of it by simply being back in malaysia. upon arriving home, there were times in the first 2 days when i felt very violent urges to run away from home and family. to go back to my more transient lifestyle where there aren’t more than 5 people of the same nationality and socio-economic background in any given space and where holidays are spent roaming around in another country.

mais ben. that is over for now. i’m back and i already have a week-long backlog of other stuff i want to blog about!

on AU15, i’ve already said so much about the academic conference here in Korea in my emails to z so i am quite loathe to repeat myself here, but i think some overall reflection is due anyway. the past week has been a flurry of lectures (twice a day), cold meals (our group sessions never finish on time), new friendships (sadly one gone stale) and an interesting weekend of field trips around the region. in general, the level of academia of the lectures has been quite high, although some of them were so ridiculously fluffy that i decided to sketch the people around me in my notebook, something i haven’t done since i left ISKL. the spanish delegate, pol, caught me glancing at my unsuspecting models and later asked to see what i drew. my style is quite different now – not very evolved technically, but there’s something worth working on still. pol liked my sketches and i, too, was fairly satisfied with their quality.

to come back on topic: as the theme of the 15th ASEF University is “migration and multicultural societies”, i guess it couldn’t be helped that some fluffiness would crop up. one particular lecturer who spoke about multiculturalism really irritated me as she harped on and on about the hybridity of cultures. she showed us a photograph of a Turkish couple snogging (her choice of words, not mine), which i think she intended to shock us with. “have you ever seen anything like this?” she asked. “a woman in a headscarf publicly snogging. people who lack an understanding of the evolution of culture would be completely appalled that a muslim woman could go against her values so blatantly.” she went on to say that the snogger (my choice of words, not hers) was not at all a typical muslim woman, because her headscarf was not tied in the traditional knot. she argued that the culture had evolved such that the meaning of the headscarf has evolved as well and is misunderstood to be a devout islamic symbol when in fact it holds newer, modernized values. “this woman,” she exclaimed passionately, “is making a statement with her headscarf. she is a statement of cultural hybridity.”

i can buy the notion and value of cultural hybridity, but her example really annoyed me. firstly, she was equating religious values with cultural ones, which are not the same thing. there are intrinsic connections between the two, yes, but only one is malleable to the times. religious values are rooted in doctrine which claim universality because they claim to be the truth. how, then, can the truth possibly evolve? had she given a more familiar western example of nuns snogging (such a disgusting word) the hell out of each other, i doubt she would have gotten away with saying that they were hybriditisifizying their cultural/religious identity because they were wearing their habits back to front. secondly, she was not only pardoning the girl for acting against religious principle, but lauding her for defying  the image of islam, which implicitly introduced some form of judgment on islam to the entire ASEF delegation. i can accept the value of undercutting religious stereotypes, but it seemed more like she was devaluing the religious principle on which the snogger was being judged. she might as well have said: “it’s the it-thing for muslims to be defiant, it’s so passé to stick to the good old values.”

all in all, we’ve spent so much time harping on the notion of multiculturalism that no value is being added to the discussion any longer. we’re delving into cheesier and cheesier metaphors to illustrate the complexity of culture. today alone, we’ve had icebergs, a glass of mixed liquids of different density levels and onions (so much is below the surface, some cultures mix and some others stay isolated, and there are many layers to ones’ cultural identity). if i have to listen to another discussion about the definition and challenges of multiculturalism i think i will scream.

that said, we have had some extremely valuable lectures. in particular, i found the lecture on north-south korea relations really fascinating because i knew so little about it in the first place. apart from the history and description of north korea, we looked at the likelihood and (dis)incentives of reunification, the situation of north korean defectors (interesting how this is a term which the rest of the world uses in place of emigrants or even political refugees) and the south korean position on north-south relations. i was surprised at first to hear that south korea does not encourage defectors. with stability as its main priority, south korea is against the reception of too many defectors, fearing that a flood of them will try to enter the country and destabilize the economy and society. surrounding north-east asian countries such as china and japan are also against receiving defectors who managed to escape the regume, and often send them back to north korea, where they undoubtedly face torture for their disloyalty. ra jong-yil, the man who delivered the lecture, also the president of the university and previous special aide on national security to previous korean president roh moo-hyun, furthermore stunned everyone into silence when he pointedly said that advocating for human rights in north korea and talks of reunification were stupid ideas. but i won’t expand on this.

some things i’m learning from this conference have nothing to do with the theme at all. mostly, i am surprised at the extent to which one’s education really frames the way one thinks. it seems so intuitive for this to be true, but i never fully appreciated the outcome until AU15. it isn’t difficult to spot the people who have absolutely no background in political studies just from listening to their ideas during group discussions. some delegates here have neither a real idea what it means to design a policy nor given any thought to the duties of the state. this often obscures the purpose of the discussions we have and drags the whole group into very long-winded debates over tangentially-related fundamental ideas such as the individual vs. the state, universal values, national identity, absolute freedom etc. eventually i asked ana, the executive office of ASEF and the woman who organized AU15, why students with no political background were also considered eligible for the programme, and she said that it was because migration and multiculturalism were such broad topics that it covered even the fields of urban design, architecture, psychology, anthropology and other educational backgrounds. she believed that everyone would have something valuable to contribute. i guess i can see where she is coming from, but it can get extremely hampering to have a discussion on migration policy bogged down by sensational, unrealistic arguments on how the individual is more important than the state and thus they should have the right to emigrate and immigrate wherever they please.

i had some very interesting conversations with a couple of people here, one of which i found especially shocking, but i think i will leave that for another post altogether.

korea itself has not been very exciting, but this is mostly because i’m spending most of my time on the university campus. we’ve gone out a bit to the local karaoke and bar, but the region is neither very urban nor very beautiful. i managed to pick up a bit of korean and can read most of the characters now, which is nice, but the novelty of being in a new country has worn off quite significantly after this one week and i am now just aching to go to seoul, where i’m expecting life to be more fast-paced. 3 more days!