What was Important?

The Artifacts of a Chinese International School Education

In the closet of my childhood bedroom, I keep two large plastic MUJI bins labelled
“School Stuff.” And by school stuff, I mean the documents, essays, notebooks and
readings that I’ve accumulated over the years — the paper trail of an educational
experience.

This September, returning home after graduating college, I went through all this
stuff. Going through the papers, I felt less like a teary-eyed graduate wading in
nostalgia and more like a curious historian on an archeological dig, hoping to unearth
and pick apart the thirteen years of my life spent at Chinese International School.
Like any historian sorting through the rubble, I was driven by a question: what was
important?

But the act of excavation was as forward-looking as it was a turn to the past. Today,
my little sister walks through the Moongate every morning, a lankier, smarter,
shrewder doppelganger of my fresh-faced Year 7 self. I wanted to know what was
important to my experience so that I could know what might be important to hers,
or perhaps to any young person graduating from this school in the near future, spat
out into a city in flux, a society of fake news and Harvey Weinsteins and
technological disruption and orange-haired Presidents.

So here it is. Raw evidence, accumulated, archived and analyzed. Physical artifacts,
some of which would perhaps yield clues. What was important to shaping my
experience as a CIS student, in determining the person that I’ve become today?

[Disclaimer: I draw personal conclusions from the life experience of one — an adrift
22-year old with minimal life experience and little idea of what I will be doing with
my life months from now. So I hope you take everything I write with a grain of salt.]

***
Footholds of Solace — Every English Paper and Reading

Inside the white-walled, 8th-floor English classrooms, I learned how to read. I

learned not only to read for the sake of analysis, for the ability to think critically and
for the cadences and rhythm of language. I learned to read for guidance and solace.
To figure out how other people lived their lives, so that I could better live mine.

I also learned how to write, which I now know to be a very tangible, practical and
urgent skill in the business of life. I learned to write my way out of confusion, to
write order out of chaos, to use words as my primary way of making meaning out of
experience.

I’ve kept all of the texts that I’ve read and written, remember each poem, novel and
essay with perfect clarity. The ideas that were introduced to me then became maps to
navigate myself with as I stumbled through college and now through early adulthood,
footholds to hold onto so that I could stumble just a little bit more gracefully.
I am forever indebted to the English department, which always seemed to be a hub of
creativity, independent thinking and infectious enthusiasm. I learned to love things I
never would’ve touched (18th century provincial France, the domesticity of giraffes,
poems about dead people in bogs.) Every single English teacher that I have had at
CIS, given the autonomy to teach what they were the most passionate about, has left
an imprint not only on what I read and write, but also how I behave as a human being
in this world.

Take Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to an Artichoke,” recommended by Heather Brubaker,

the second week of Year 8 when I told her that I liked poems “about random things
like potatoes.” To this day, I have turned to Neruda, but also Billy Collins, Francis
Ponge, On Kawara, as reminders to cherish the banal, the everyday and ordinary.

W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” about a painting called “The Fall of Icarus,”
brought to my attention by Brian Kern, continues to inform how I understand
collective pain and how I aspire to navigate the world, not as a passive bystander, but
always, always as an active observer.

And of course, every single text introduced to me by Claire Yeo, I have carried with
me to this day, but especially Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, a book I
ended up writing a senior college seminar on, under the guidance of Caryl Phillips, a
good friend of Ondaatje's. I remember one moment in Year 13 English class, Ms.
Yeo read an opening passage from the book, about missing the humidity of Asia. She
started to tear-up, and I felt myself starting to cry too. Ondaatje anchored me, year
after year of flying back and forth between Hong Kong and New Haven, a source of
comfort when I felt the my most untethered.

***
Community reared on Conflict and Compromise: The CIS Human Rights Group

Half of the “School Stuff,” comprises of posters and notes from a group I was part of
that would shape and continues to shape my life: the CIS Human Rights Group.

Through the Human Rights group, I understood what it meant to take part in a
community. Participation. Contribution. Community. Writing these words down
makes me instinctively cringe, because of how hackneyed they have become from
overuse, thrown around so casually that they have all but lost their significance,
buzzwords without substance.

What does it mean to be part of and contribute to a community? To enact real and
substantial change?

With the HRG, we started conversations on how we could improve Hong Kong, but
also the very space we were inhabiting — the school itself — in the realm of LGBT
rights, labor rights, and foreign domestic workers’ rights. We collectively wrote a
thorough and critical human rights audit on CIS itself, outlining areas we believed the
school needed to improve (and still does): democratic decision making and socio-
economic diversity to name a few.

In each of these initiatives, I found that real change is born from honest criticism of
our most immediate communities, through disagreement and compromise, conflict
and collaboration. I spent many an hour arguing with fellow members, and now
realize that it was through argument that we were able to better stand by our own
convictions, change our minds, weave together different ideas and arrive at
something better — a voice that was truly communal. Only through constantly
engaging with ideas that challenged our own and made us uncomfortable, were we
able to grow.

That kind of honesty was also the bedrock of long-lasting friendship. Many of the
peers I have remained most close to, with whom I continue to have unfinished
conversations with, were those I had met through HRG, because so many of our core
values were formed during those years.

To this day, we continue to visit Brian Kern, our group leader at his warm home in
Lamma Island, where we join his family for dinner and conversation. My inbox flows
with emails sent to and received from Brian, brimming with exchange on everything
from the novels of Min Jin Lee to the dangers of a social credit system, from the
future of Hong Kong to the cultural diversity of Minneapolis.

***
Trilingualism and a Mongrel Identity: Language Skills and Limited Cultural Literacy

The haphazard smattering of Chinese and French readings in the box of School Stuff
reflects the equally fragmented grasp of two cultures that CIS had given me.

Linguistically, I am in debt to my CIS education, for giving me the raw tools that
would allow me would further explore two deep wells of cultural tradition. But I
continued my studies of Chinese and French in college for two distinct reasons.

The curiosity sparked in French class at CIS drove me to study abroad in Paris to
more deeply immerse myself in a culture wholly foreign to me. My limited exposure
to Chinese literature, and my dissatisfaction with how little I knew of the nuances of
my own mother tongue, propelled me to spend a summer in Taiwan to better
understand a culture that I called my own.

Reading six hours a day of Chinese literature, from Quyan to Tao Huayuan to San
Mao at the National Taiwan University, I was shocked by how little I knew.

I was not totally clueless. My understanding of Chinese history, for example, was
solid, thanks to the careful tutelage of Mr. Caves and History Higher Level Paper 3,
which gave me a comprehensive developmental arc of modern Chinese society, from
Qianlong to Mao. But still, everything I read and wrote was entirely in English. And I
knew next to nothing about Chinese poetry or its philosophical tradition. A little
about Confucius, and nothing about Zhuangzi. Absolutely zero about Hong Kong
literature.
Which brings me to point out a glaring absence in the box: any kind of substantial
and coherent understanding of the city and culture of Hong Kong.

To this day, I feel like an outsider in the city, a status that I feel even more acutely
having returned as a journalist, coming to terms with just how little I know about a
place that I have lived in for 18 years. How does the Basic Law work and how is it
being challenged? How does this city in flux fit into thousands of years of Chinese
history? The CIS Human Rights Group left a small puncture in what we refer to as
the CIS bubble, but it certainly was not enough.

Detachment from the home city is common among international school “third
culture kids,” the term coined by sociologist Ruth Useem to refer to young people
reared in a culture different from that of their parents.

But Chinese International School does not advertise itself as the breeding ground for
embassy brats or Skibs the Kids. We are allegedly a pioneer among Hong Kong
schools that navigate biculturalism and bilingualism. We allegedly come from both
the East and the West. We do not need to learn about the way LegCo works like
American kids learn about Congress, because we are being nurtured for an education
abroad, being reared into “global citizens.”

But am I a global citizen? Five years out of CIS, I can hardly hold claim to that title.
What I do know is that I did not come any closer to global citizenry because I went
on a project week trip to Sri Lanka to paint a slide for local primary school kids. Nor
am I a global citizen because I have sampled various culinary delicacies from different
cultures, or can navigate my way through the various SOHOs and NOHOs around
the world.

In striving for cosmopolitanism, we have fallen into the danger of producing a

rootless mongrel, with little idea of the deep well of tradition and history that we are
born into. This is not some kind of patriotic, neoconservative back-to-your roots
rhetoric. What I saying, rather, is that when peers from around the world ask us
about the place we are from, we need to be able to answer them and answer them
well. It is the fine line between belonging everywhere and belonging nowhere.

It also means that we must take the word “diversity” seriously. The most basic neural
structures in our brain thrive and develop as a result of exposure to thoughts, ideas,
belief systems and ways of living that are different from ours. We must actively
engage with difference and strive always to see through the lens of the other or we
will be unable to live in a world that is constantly trying to tear us apart.
No Report Cards: A Shift from External Validation

There is another absence in the box: report cards. I’ve kept not a single one.

But this absence is a good thing.

Grades were one of the greatest sources of anxiety for me at CIS; now I have no idea
what the difference is between criteria a and b and x and y and z.

At college, I realized that I couldn’t give two hoots about grades. I tried to wean
myself not only off the satisfaction derived from grades, but all sources of external
validation: grades, salaries, awards, accolades, MVP medals, sports day medals,
Instagram likes, Facebook likes, approval from anyone else but yourself.

I attempted to anchor myself, slowly and steadily, in some kind of ad-hoc, self-
fashioned system of internal validation — hazier, difficult to quantify, and something
that each person must arrive on their own. The makeshift definition of “internal
validation” that I’ve arrived at this point in my life is: 1) to tell stories about stuff that
matters 2) to belong to a community of people excited about what the world has to
offer 3) to push my capacity to love.

I’m not immune to the pleasure derived from external validation. I love praise, love
seeing my name in print and get a little sickening flutter in my heart when a social
media post starts raking in the likes. But I also realized that if these things were to
serve as primary engines of motivation, at some point down the line, I would be
screwed.

The default way most schools present the experience of learning is as a mountain that
must be climbed, with final peak and destination. A friend that I met last summer,
who works as an educator, compared the experience of learning rather, to steering a
ship at sea — one that must be constantly navigated, with no clear end goal in sight,
towards a shoreline in the misty distance. It is hard to know what the shoreline looks
like, and sometimes you need the wisdom and humility to allow someone else to give
you a hand and to point out a better direction of course. But at the end of the day, it
is your two hands that must hold the steering wheel.

***
Letters and Cards: A Beautiful and Messy Web of Relations

Buried at the center of all this stuff is another tin box with a metal clasp, where I have
kept every letter that I have received, every birthday note and every postcard.

It is the beating heart of all of all this stuff, residue of old friendships that have faded,
evidence of new ones that have blossomed, reminders of the people that I met at CIS.
These are people with whom I transformed from barely-recognizable fetus to fully-
fledged human being, people that I will call up after months of not talking and feel ok
being my most ridiculous, embarrassingly weird self with.

Friends. These are people who give me a sense of belonging to a place that I no
longer recognize. Both the handful that I have kept in touch with, as well as the
countless more that I have lost contact with, have left a lasting imprint on the person
that I am, have been, and will become.

David Foster Wallace said in his over-cited but nonetheless ever-relatable speech at
Kenyon College that the purpose of education is the freedom to choose what you
want to worship. What do you worship? Worship is a lofty word taken out of
context, so a better way to understand worship is the word prioritize. What do you
prioritize? What do you spend many a waking hour thinking of, fussing over,
working on, seeking to improve, deriving happiness from?

What I “worship” will be subject to change; I know this. If there is one thing that I am
certain of — it is uncertainty. But for now, as it has been for the last few years, I’ve
held onto these letters and postcards as my totems, and have chosen to worship
community, friendships, love.