Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

After years of popular films that portray Chinese patriotism in contemporary settings, China's film-makers finally turned back to the past, namely World War II, for more inspiration. Two recent films,  Dead to Rights (南京照相馆) and 731 , respectively depicting the plight of Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre and the biological weapons experiments in Northeastern China, hit theaters. It is a rather opportune time for the pivot. The Chinese government had just concluded a massive military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, reminding people to not forget a painful past.

When one asks for the wealthiest countries in the world, perhaps the most commonly used (albeit deceptive) measurement is GDP per capita. The logic is that if each resident, on average, is more economically productive, they would justify higher wages and thus more spending power to improve their livelihoods. A corollary is that the wealthy ought to also be the most peaceful. After all, crime and conflict are not good for business. No one would both investing, scaling up, and paying people to produce if they worry about their assets and very lives.

A few days ago, my neighborhood in Malta was hit by a series of power outages, blanketing the area in darkness just as everyone was about to head to bed. With the late-summer heat still unbearably strong, it was not exactly the easiest night to get through. Waking up in a sweat at 3am, I found myself unable to keep lying on the soaked-through bed in a windless room, so I headed up the balcony, just a catch whatever breeze it could offer. I expected that, devoid of the usual orange-ish streetlights, the top-down view of the streets, lined with stone buildings on both sides, would be ghastly, but far from it.

The microcosm of contemporary global politics played out on the official Facebook page of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His meticulously documented trip across saw him first touring Japanese factories, calling on the two countries to cooperate on semiconductor development. Then he found himself in Tianjin, China, openly handshaking and calling Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin his friends and partners. All this despite the US publicly denouncing their summit as a congregation of anti-Americanism, while the Japanese government called on world leaders to avoid China ahead of its end-of-WWII celebrations.

For years, I struggled with fitting in at different organizations, whether it be school, workplace, or just groups of friends. It is not that I could not function within them. As needed, I could communicate with coworkers to get projects done, chit-chat with friends to share life updates, and adhere to rules that lead to concrete results, whether it be graduation or promotion. But more often than not, these actions felt less driven by intrinsic motivation to better belong through crafting more shared goals and tighter personal relationships, but just obligations to maintain memberships.