Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Hanging out with the masses of different foreign students here in the LSE and in London, there is often a very clear trend when communicating in English. While people of every other nationality makes a concerted effort (or at least, do not mind) to pick up the standard British accent, the Americans not only makes a concerted effort to reject British English in every single way, they actually, at times, accentuate/highlight the peculiarities of American English so as to make their audience be perfectly clear that they are hearing from an American. As the Americans get together in the local pub, and start lashing out about how "weird" is the English they hear from English people in a place called England, one has to think about just exactly what makes the Americans so confident and bold (to put it positively) or so arrogant and reckless (to put it negatively) to actually criticize a language at its very historical origin. It is as if the Americans are somehow perfectly conv...

We all concede that drunk people tend not to watch what they say when they are drunk (and surely they will not remember what was said a day later), but sometimes certain drunken comments can simply destroy a good "drunkenly euphoric" moment in, literally, an instant of time. The speaker tries to bolster his own credentials by sprinkling some, what he himself conceives to be, strips of pure gold on a night of gradually built up good impression over hours of genuinely friendly conversations, only to destroy that image by, well, trying a little bit too hard. Few comments can galvanize a group of young professionals and grad students to resort to pure hatred and the most vulgar profanities being used in their minds as talks of the "future." Whoever that touches the topics of what we are going to do after graduation and/or few years of entry-level work better keep the conversation focused on the general, non-personal, humble variety...or the result is a walk straight ...

Just another of the grind here in the LSE Library, on the gigantic working table with six strangers coincidentally sitting quietly, each intently focused on his or her little section of the table in front of them. Each buries his or her face in the massive pile of academic books, journals, and/or a notebook computer opened to some online journal article. Each person invariably takes out a notebook, frantically jotting down lines after lines of neat notes as they flip through pages or scroll through screens... But they all do zone off, very inconspicuously. Their eyes are still on the books, journals, computer screens, but their minds are obviously somewhere else. Their eyes no longer keep moves along with the endless mesh-mash of words and sentences. Its like staring out of the window or the wall back in the classrooms of high school, only we here at the library table, perhaps because of the six others (plus however many at the adjacent tables) watching over the each of us constan...

People often say grad school is the scion of "flexibility," an almost sacred place where people can genuinely pursue academic interests of their fancy, at their own pace, in a sea of endless resources. It is sheer independence, on one hand reflected in the I-don't-give-a-damn-what-you-do-as-long-as-you-pay-your-fees attitude held by the school administration , and on the other hand illustrated by just how much leeway the students are given to "pursue their own studies" as long as assignments are turned in at the proper deadlines. ...Or perhaps, not even. While crazy weekend all-night dance parties seems to become more and more far-fetched for the "mature" (i.e. older and less energetic) grad students, in their place came literally any excuse to have an alcoholic gathering under any occasion . Every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday became Friday and Saturday nights, and stepping into the local pub at any moment in time no longer brings any s...

The smell of the ooze being squeezed out of the massive lump on my face was simply nauseating. The milky yellow juices of the oil gland, trapped in a bubble for more than two weeks, burst out when the doctor's knife slashed across the soft lump. The whole scenario, even with painful local anesthesia that took away all sense of pain, still was discomforting enough to make me cringe, frown, and pinch myself just to have my attention transferred to self-induced pain from the discomfort. My face turned sharply white, and the mental toughness I am so proud of suddenly became completely nullified. And the doctor was not done. "To stop further infection," he calmly and nonchalantly mentioned, "we need to cover the cut with some anti-infection liquid." What appeared was a a foot-and-a-half-long piece of surgical tape soaked in a purple liquid. He proceeded to shove the tape, bit by bit, into the empty space left behind by the squeezed out pus. Slide in, twist, s...

As the tower clock far away far far away struck 11am, and began its eleven loud chimes echoing across the city, a dead silence blanketed the elementary school next door to my dorm. The young kids, usually shouting and screaming as they run around the courtyard with their friends, stood motionless in formations with their eyes to the ground, not uttering a single word. Traffic around the school stopped, and everyone had their badges of red poppy flowers quietly flapped to the cold autumn winds. It is as if the entire community flashed back to that day in 1918 ending of the bloodiest conflict in human history. For many, the collective mourning marking Remembrance Day is not simply a tradition or something that is normally done, but much more personal. Millions of young men, from a nation not so populous, fell in the battlefronts of France and Germany. Every person mourning may think back to a distant relative, an uncle, or even a grandfather who suffered directly from participation ...

As the night falls on another Saturday night, the British metropolis was by all means ready for another night of inebriated euphoria. Just give the crowd an excuse to gather, and gather, they certainly did. Perhaps when Guy Fawkes got caught more than four centuries ago on the night of November 5th, 1605, he (or those loyalists who celebrated the foiling of the attempt on the life of King James I and the parliamentarians) could have imagined the event's annual celebration becoming a sheer mayhem of singing, burning colors, and of course, tons and tons of alcohol. And when the celebrations happen to fall on a weekend (as is the case this year), the energy and turnout just becomes unstoppable. In just one instance, despite its rather dubious reputation for being an East London neighborhood , the normally quiet bedroom community of Bethnal Green still received a horde of hundreds from across London to see a 15-min firework show in the local park. It is hard to imagine what the res...

For some reason or the other, a Chinese guy ended up becoming the main teacher for the advanced language class offered by the Japanese Society here at the LSE. At such a "joyous" occasion, it is perhaps a good timing for me to finish my "foreign language trilogy" with a post in Japanese (after the Chinese and the Korean ones). It is, like so many other ones before , another rant detailing my struggle with a constant, lifelong identity crisis. すらすらと日本語のレポートとメールを書いてた 楽天時代 かわずか５ヵ月後、まさに一センテンスを打ち出すことさえ困難となっているこの私がまさか日本語教師と変身するのは、正直、 自分の結構変わった頭 でも創造できないものでした。もちろん、ここで突然自信をなくして、自分の能力を疑っているわけでもないのですが、この状況はどう考えもどこが「変」です...と言うか、息苦しい日本の企業文化を代表する所謂ビジネスマナーを日本に対して理想を持っている外国の方々に教えるのは、「風刺」と言うしかないかとも思ってます。 シニカルになる一方、逆にこのような「珍しい」機会もまた「自分は一体何か」を再度深く考えてみるチャンスでもないでしょうか？韓流ポップを聞きながら、中国語のニュースを読みながら、アメリカにいる友達について考えているこの自分が日本語を教えるなんてまさに能力はずれの「光栄」ではないか...そして、いざその意外な熱心で「授業」を準備し、行う自分を見て、本当の、もう一人の自分はバイアスなしで判断するとどう表現したらいいのか？その答えはこの砕け始めている日本語のレベルでは、言い切れないものであるのかもしれないようだ... 社会理論者は「民族」を個人アイデンティティ...

A brief survey of the leading magazines and newspapers on the Indian subcontinent often leads to an outsider confused by the excess obsession with China. The foreign affairs section sees sensationalized reports of Chinese military or economic superiority splashed across the headlines, filling pages with gloomy analysis of Indian doom in case of open competition with China. And brief chats with scholars from the subcontinent here in London illustrates that China does indeed loom large in the subconscious of the Indians and the Pakistanis, who often mentions China in the framework of subcontinental affairs. The growing influence of China in global affairs, after years of economic and military expansion, is no longer a surprise to anyone. American, European, and East Asian media cannot live without giving their readers daily reports of China's growing threats and problems . But there is still a key difference to them and the South Asians. Compared to the floods of Americans, Jap...