Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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...

The view outside the large, cleanly wiped windows was absolutely spectacular: across the River Thames on the Westminster Bridge is a full panorama of the House of Parliament, with Big Ben proudly standing on one side as if an attentive soldier on guard. As the afternoon sun began its descent, a bright red hue lit up the sculptured details of the historical building, giving us, right on the spot, an artistic feast of representing the glorious heydays of the British Empire . And as bright red hue disappears into the darkness of a typical autumn night, subtle yellow and green lights around the building project the fullness of the imperial beauty into the River. And all this, from a well-maintained bed on the 8th floor of one of the most reputed comprehensive hospitals on the British Isles. Dinner is served as we messed around with the fully functioning bedside Internet system. You may ask just how much were we, the poor students of LSE, were willing to pay for this experience (not to...

Amid the ongoing economic downturn, it is easy for people to start believing that a certain degree of globalization has to be temporarily rolled back. Ever since moving to the UK, we the foreign students have been living the fear of not being able to remain on the island after graduation due to the recent government decision to stop automatically issuing 2-year Post-graduate Work Visa. Every time one sees "do you have full authorization to work in UK?" on a job application, an overwhelming sense of anger often boils over, leading to practically meaningless self-blame of living in a wrong country in the wrong age. It is, however, a bit premature to conclude that a country's ruthless reduction in acceptance of foreign labor, even highly educated (and hopefully, skilled), is equivalent to a country becoming more "selfish" and focus on concerns for her own citizens at the expense of others living within her boundaries. After all, the tide of human migration, in a...