What is courage?
Courage means leaving a cult-like system of beliefs that trapped you into being a religious automaton and choosing the life you love.
Courage means moving away from the comforts of home in pursuit of a life that is meaningful and beautiful.
Courage means cutting ties with toxic people and choosing to forge healthy friendships instead.
Courage means saying no.
Courage means digressing from the cultural norm of marrying someone from your same culture. Courage is to marry someone you love.
To love is a courageous act.
Courage is to travel to a foreign country by yourself. It's liberating.
Courage means speaking up.
Courage means finding your path and following it.
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Thursday, September 5, 2019
The depths of love
It's been a while since I posted on my blog. Life, a Masters degree, planning a wedding and starting a new job has kept me busy.
Love has been a recurring theme in my life, and I am strong believer that finding love in life is a birthright. My dating experiences in the past have not been very pleasant but I was wise enough to get out of those situations fast. Looking back, those experiences were fleeting and insignificant. And the pain that I had to undergo made me to start losing hope in romantic love.
Since my last relationship, I stayed three years single...happily travelling around the globe with a non-chalant attitude towards love and dating. I worked, studied, made friends and chased my own kind of happiness. Asian parents were naturally worried as I remained single during my late 20s while my cousins and counterparts were getting married and having kids by the bunch.
Then came The Sculptor.
It started with a "hey, let's grab a beer" to hiking mountains in Heredia while talking about artistic movements and Philosophy, late afternoon coffees and watching The Avengers (hated Infinity Wars btw). It then grew into having The Sculptor taking care of me while I was sick, cooking together and watching Netflix on rainy days. The sense of familiarity and warmth made me feel safe to love and experience love again. The feeling of familiarity soon blossomed into a feeling of home. We belonged.
Love is like coming home.
And this brings me into deeper thought about love. When I was younger, I used to be caught up by the thrill of the chase, looks, the infatuation stage, etc. But now I've come to understand that love is spoken through actions. Just a few days ago, I was very sick and had to go to the hospital. My partner rushed into the emergency ward after work to pick me up. He then cooked me dinner and made me tea. We cuddled in our Pjs, watched La Casa de Papel and laughed at our stupid jokes.
We are getting married in December and I feel so lucky to have found a life partner.
Love has been a recurring theme in my life, and I am strong believer that finding love in life is a birthright. My dating experiences in the past have not been very pleasant but I was wise enough to get out of those situations fast. Looking back, those experiences were fleeting and insignificant. And the pain that I had to undergo made me to start losing hope in romantic love.
Since my last relationship, I stayed three years single...happily travelling around the globe with a non-chalant attitude towards love and dating. I worked, studied, made friends and chased my own kind of happiness. Asian parents were naturally worried as I remained single during my late 20s while my cousins and counterparts were getting married and having kids by the bunch.
Then came The Sculptor.
It started with a "hey, let's grab a beer" to hiking mountains in Heredia while talking about artistic movements and Philosophy, late afternoon coffees and watching The Avengers (hated Infinity Wars btw). It then grew into having The Sculptor taking care of me while I was sick, cooking together and watching Netflix on rainy days. The sense of familiarity and warmth made me feel safe to love and experience love again. The feeling of familiarity soon blossomed into a feeling of home. We belonged.
Love is like coming home.
And this brings me into deeper thought about love. When I was younger, I used to be caught up by the thrill of the chase, looks, the infatuation stage, etc. But now I've come to understand that love is spoken through actions. Just a few days ago, I was very sick and had to go to the hospital. My partner rushed into the emergency ward after work to pick me up. He then cooked me dinner and made me tea. We cuddled in our Pjs, watched La Casa de Papel and laughed at our stupid jokes.
We are getting married in December and I feel so lucky to have found a life partner.
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Tuesday, May 7, 2019
Sketches
1981. A young Chinese man travels from The People's Republic of China to El Salvador
"Five years of dreaming and waiting. Five more minutes until landing. I have 7 dollars in my pocket, a big brother waiting for me at the airport and a handful of dreams to fulfill. Dreams. I want to be rich."
He sighs and smiles, the sides of his eyes wrinkles as he sees the green tropical landscape from the skies.
Landing.
Picture this: Comalapa airport in the early 1980s during the brink of the Civil War. A young Chinese man going through customs with bell bottom jeans, aviator glasses and a simple shirt. He sees his brother waiting for him on the other side. They embrace and talk. Someone from the same hometown is with his brother. Same dialect, same custom. He was my mother's brother. Little did he know that this connection would change his life.
Growing up, my father used to tell me his first impressions and stories about when he immigrated to El Salvador. How he met my mother. How he tried to save money for his first business. How he struggled to learn Spanish. Yet, in spite of so many difficulties, he always hoped for the best.
I am trying to piece every story and every anecdote together.
"Five years of dreaming and waiting. Five more minutes until landing. I have 7 dollars in my pocket, a big brother waiting for me at the airport and a handful of dreams to fulfill. Dreams. I want to be rich."
He sighs and smiles, the sides of his eyes wrinkles as he sees the green tropical landscape from the skies.
Landing.
Picture this: Comalapa airport in the early 1980s during the brink of the Civil War. A young Chinese man going through customs with bell bottom jeans, aviator glasses and a simple shirt. He sees his brother waiting for him on the other side. They embrace and talk. Someone from the same hometown is with his brother. Same dialect, same custom. He was my mother's brother. Little did he know that this connection would change his life.
Growing up, my father used to tell me his first impressions and stories about when he immigrated to El Salvador. How he met my mother. How he tried to save money for his first business. How he struggled to learn Spanish. Yet, in spite of so many difficulties, he always hoped for the best.
I am trying to piece every story and every anecdote together.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Education
Forty years ago, my father tried to cross the Shizi Ocean in Southern China with the hope of escaping to Hong Kong. “It was late at night, my brother and I borrowed an old boat and tried to row our way down to Hong Kong. The next thing we saw were the Communist policemen pointing their guns at us and taking us to jail,” he recalls as he lights a cigarette. “But that did not stop us. We had to get out of that oppressive system.” As a child of the Cultural Revolution, my father withstood countless trials living under the Communist regime. He witnessed how the Communist government took over his family’s business – a Soy Sauce factory which previous generations had worked really hard to build and keep running, and the burning of precious family relics. He was constantly bullied in school because of his supposedly ‘Capitalist’ family background. “No one played with me, except little Wai. Oh, Little Wai was so good…but he never had the guts to get out of that system. He still lives on the farm.”
The death of Mao Zedong marked a new era for my family which had an impact on my own personal history. Deng Xiaoping came into power and his economic reforms allowed people more freedom to travel. My father had a brother who started a business in El Salvador. In 1981, with only seven US dollars in his pocket and a one-way ticket, he flew over to El Salvador, a small country in Central America; a country that was ransacked by a civil war at that time. Nevertheless, he worked hard ---making Chop Suey and Chao Mein in his brother’s small restaurant with the sounds of bombs and guns in the background. He and my uncle faithfully sent money over to China to keep their starving relatives alive.
In the late 1980s, I was born into this humble Chinese family during the height of the Salvadorean Civil War. Even though my family did not have much at the time, they invested what they had into my education. My father enrolled me into the British School, one of the best schools in the country. He said that Education would open many doors in the future. Thanks to the British School I began to grasp and understand the world with a more holistic and critical perspective. The IB programme opened my eyes to the literature and rich experiences of other cultures.
After graduating, I was accepted into the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. While there, I joined a NGO which gave me opportunities to travel to the far ends of the world. For three Summers, I would go to the Fiji Islands to help lead and direct an after school tutoring club. From this experience, I learned that Education is a transformational and a powerful tool which helps build communities. It was so enriching to cultivate positive and inspiring relationships with my students. Many of them have become teachers to this day.
After completing my undergrad, I spent three months in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa volunteering as an English teacher and team leader in an after-school programme. I witnessed how the AIDS stricken township lacked schools and after-school facilities to take care of their young people. Parents had to travel and work long hours, leaving their young behind vulnerable to strangers and dangerous situations.
The place that I made the definite decision to dedicate my life to education and empowering youth for a better future was when I travelled to Antananarivo, Madagascar in 2012. My heart wrenched when I saw the extreme poverty in the city. That 3-month trip was eye-opening as I soon learned that most of my students lived under $2 USD a day. Many of them did not have enough money for medical expenses or food.
Although, I am currently working as an IB Theory of Knowledge and a Language Arts teacher in a private school serving the wealthier community in Escazú, my heart still lies with the people from the poorer communities. This was confirmed last year when I travelled to Senegal to volunteer with Marabout children who have been abandoned by their families. One day, as I saw the Marabout children begging for food on the streets, I remembered my father’s words: “Education can give you the tools for change. Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
The death of Mao Zedong marked a new era for my family which had an impact on my own personal history. Deng Xiaoping came into power and his economic reforms allowed people more freedom to travel. My father had a brother who started a business in El Salvador. In 1981, with only seven US dollars in his pocket and a one-way ticket, he flew over to El Salvador, a small country in Central America; a country that was ransacked by a civil war at that time. Nevertheless, he worked hard ---making Chop Suey and Chao Mein in his brother’s small restaurant with the sounds of bombs and guns in the background. He and my uncle faithfully sent money over to China to keep their starving relatives alive.
In the late 1980s, I was born into this humble Chinese family during the height of the Salvadorean Civil War. Even though my family did not have much at the time, they invested what they had into my education. My father enrolled me into the British School, one of the best schools in the country. He said that Education would open many doors in the future. Thanks to the British School I began to grasp and understand the world with a more holistic and critical perspective. The IB programme opened my eyes to the literature and rich experiences of other cultures.
After graduating, I was accepted into the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. While there, I joined a NGO which gave me opportunities to travel to the far ends of the world. For three Summers, I would go to the Fiji Islands to help lead and direct an after school tutoring club. From this experience, I learned that Education is a transformational and a powerful tool which helps build communities. It was so enriching to cultivate positive and inspiring relationships with my students. Many of them have become teachers to this day.
After completing my undergrad, I spent three months in the township of Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa volunteering as an English teacher and team leader in an after-school programme. I witnessed how the AIDS stricken township lacked schools and after-school facilities to take care of their young people. Parents had to travel and work long hours, leaving their young behind vulnerable to strangers and dangerous situations.
The place that I made the definite decision to dedicate my life to education and empowering youth for a better future was when I travelled to Antananarivo, Madagascar in 2012. My heart wrenched when I saw the extreme poverty in the city. That 3-month trip was eye-opening as I soon learned that most of my students lived under $2 USD a day. Many of them did not have enough money for medical expenses or food.
Although, I am currently working as an IB Theory of Knowledge and a Language Arts teacher in a private school serving the wealthier community in Escazú, my heart still lies with the people from the poorer communities. This was confirmed last year when I travelled to Senegal to volunteer with Marabout children who have been abandoned by their families. One day, as I saw the Marabout children begging for food on the streets, I remembered my father’s words: “Education can give you the tools for change. Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Thursday, January 31, 2019
Conversations
While having hotpot, our traditional go-to celebratory meal.
"I would've never imagined that I would be marrying someone that I really, really like."
*Smiles*
"I am crazy about you."
I am engaged. And I feel incredibly happy and at peace.
"I would've never imagined that I would be marrying someone that I really, really like."
*Smiles*
"I am crazy about you."
I am engaged. And I feel incredibly happy and at peace.