Uprooting

I’m currently sitting in my hostel bed, jet-lagged, tired, bored, and quite frankly torn between the juvenile five year-old who wants to judge everything in a couple days and the supposedly wiser six year-old who says to wait until you’re at least two weeks into school. Since school doesn’t start for another week that means wait three weeks, technically.

If I’m even partially objective, Taipei has more to do and see than even second-home Hong Kong. I mean there’s actual hikes, museums, sight seeing spots, etc.* It just seems to lack, for lack of a better word, some form of character. Perhaps the problem at large is that for all Taipei has to see and do, I have no one to do or see anything with. I have no friends at school because school hasn’t started. The majority of people at my hostel are either interested in their own life (fair enough), aren’t interested in me due to age or what not, or have been here for so long they don’t share my desire to explore. It wouldn’t be exploring to them anyway. Short version: I need friends.

I have to admit for all my talk about my love for exploring new areas and meeting new people, sometimes it’s nice just to stay home around something that’s familiar. I think in a sense there’s a longing in all of us to want to stay with what we know, who we know. I wonder if in a broader sense, that’s why we are now so attached to things like e-mail, Facebook, anything that allows us to stay connected to what we can call home. After all, what difference is it for me to chat with someone on the internet 7,000 miles away, and 30 miles away?

Cue the moral of the story. Like all things, I think there should be a healthy mix of being comfortable and leaving said comfort zone. Stay comfortable and you never grow; stay too uncomfortable and you risk superficiality, forever. I’m quite certain by June I’ll come away loving Taipei and will boast of all the fun I had here being adventurous and exploring. Still, I think what I’ve always loved about Hong Kong that Taipei can’t match was that it straddled that perfect balance between comfort and adventure.*2 It was both simultaneously familiar yet unknown. There was always something new to learn, even in the midst of a place I could call home.

The only other place that could probably be that way to me is New York City. Here’s to hoping that’s where I go for school.

* – I guess truthfully Hong Kong has these sorts of things too. I’ve never been to say “Taipei Special X wetland park” but I imagine despite its Hawaiian appearance on paper it’s probably as exciting as Cheung Chau. Without the EAP people.

*2 – Which isn’t to say Taipei couldn’t be that kind of city for somebody else. But ‘home’ is so subjective, and everyone of the 6 billion people in the world practically have a different feeling of what it is.

The Two Towering Ideals

Do you remember being a graduating senior–of high school? Remember how everyone rushed to give you 11-page single-spaced lists of things to do, things to see and things to avoid? Remember how everyone told you how college would open your eyes and change your worldview?

They should also add that college will plant ideas in your brain that are like poison. Wait, poison is too harsh of a word. Maybe something like, pain-killer; it’s something that’s good for you in small periodic doses but will kill you if you take too much.

There were two ideas I bumped into in college that were like overdoses of pain-killer, both conveniently start with ‘D’, and only within the past year have I finally figured out how to fix. Determinism, and diversity.

I don’t know that I necessarily dislike determinism.* But I do know that it destroys people’s motivations towards accomplishing things, and saps them of any energy for discovering their goals. Rather than figure out what they want in life for themselves, they run in endless mental cycles of, ‘What was I meant to do?’ as if it were something written in a book ten-thousand years ago and we have to live it out correctly or face imminent doom. They don’t take any charge of their lives, not that they should believe in being the sole driver and be subject to no one; there needs to be a balance between being passenger and being driver, some holy grail combination of both, and determinism isn’t very good at a being a team player towards that goal.

And then there’s diversity. I remember going to various conferences and meetings, and constantly being told that I needed to embrace my ethnicity and culture. Sounds great, until I found myself being shoehorned into a cultural consciousness that didn’t exist and one I probably wouldn’t have fit in if it did. It would have been a billion times more effective (and a billion times less costly), to have me learn about “where I come from” and less of “therefore you should be like this.” I think I ended up more confused about my cultural heritage and didn’t fix my foggy brain until I actually went to China and realized I was nothing like the people I was told I was like. I’m proud of my Cantonese Chinese heritage, but that doesn’t mean I need to make a bigger deal out of it than it really is. Ethnicity is only one part of everybody, and to give it too much attention can be damaging.

Like most things, it’s more like over-correction than it is a problem or a blight. One you swerve to one side you tend to over compensate when you swerve back. Diversity is always a good thing, but sometimes I think making diversity a focal point sometimes defeats the purpose. It’s telling that some of the most diverse groups are the ones that focus on a unifying ideal, topic, activity or goal–not the ones who are all about diversity.

And quite honestly I don’t see anything wrong with homogeneity either. Just, keep the exclusivity off the guest list.

* – I believe in a determined world, but not one where everything was written in a book and we simply live it out. I believe more in a mix of free will and determinism; they coexist quite nicely, much like in an improv show.

Resident Evil 5: African Safari

Gosh, what a breath of fresh air it is to not talk specifically about political issues. Well, almost.

As a small videogame nut, I do make an effort to stay up to date with the news of the videogame world. I guess it’s fitting that I bring up an issue that is sowing the seeds of uneasiness which could very well blossom into an ungodly upheaval by March, when a certain videogame releases.

I’m of course, referring to Resident Evil 5, the fifth iteration of the Resident Evil franchise, a series rooted in survival horror and has recently evolved into more of an action horror genre.

The series stars several protagonists who must survive against hordes of infected humans turned zombies. So what’s the big deal?

This iteration happens to be set in Africa. Because of its African setting, most of the zombies happen to be black. You star as white-man, Chris Redfield.

See the issue?

Lots of gamers had risen to the defense of Resident Evil 5 with a multitude of arguments:

-The team that made the game actually went to Africa to do primary research, and so this game is merely staying true to their first-hand observations.
-If you starred as a black character killing white zombies, nobody would give a wooden nickel. It’s unfair and a double standard to single this instance as racist.
-People who call this racist live in the past.
-It’s just a videogame.

I think that this issue exists goes to show despite how far we’ve come in terms of race relations, just how far we–as a whole world–have yet to go. Let me get this out there: I do not think this game is racist, but it is still guilty of something substantial–insensitivity.

Let’s lay some background first. The game is made by Capcom, a Japanese company famous for other titles like MegaMan, Marvel vs. Capcom, Zack & Wiki and others. Before we continue, let’s review an important fact: Capcom is a Japanese company. Capcom isn’t some company made up of overseas white Americans trying to secretly live out their unfulfilled ambitions of enslaving Africans. They are a Japanese company. They were not involved in Europe’s colonialism nor the slaves who were brought from Africa to America.

In other words, this isn’t an issue to the Japanese. Period. How can I be so sure? Look at previous titles. Resident Evil 4 starred another white character in Spain, fighting against…Spanish zombies. To the developers at Capcom, moving the setting to Africa meant an equally logical choice; make the zombies black.

It is also common on Japanese TV to have people to over-the-top impersonations of famous celebrities, including blacks, and in the USA would never be aired because it would be racist. Because with our history and our context, it is. But for them it is not. They do not inhabit the same historical context that we do.

Their fault then is, they didn’t do their homework. All Resident Evil games have been released worldwide, and as such, they must be mindful of the entire world as their audience. They didn’t realize that making the game this way could set off a potential firestorm because they are unaware of the history of race relations in other countries.

No one intended this game to be racist. But intentions can often be irrelevant in many peoples’ eyes, and unfortunately Capcom’s lack of diligence and thorough thinking make this game about as insensitive as they come.

If we lived in a vacuum this wouldn’t be an issue. But history and context exist together and they do affect how we view the world. Videogames are not just videogames.