blog of Joe cz Liao

I am writing this on the last day of another year.

It has been a year cruelly short yet impossibly eventful.

This year began by returning to ‘home’ home in Hong Kong, after four years in LA and six months in Tanzania.

The year has allowed me to live off of money I made by doing the trades I simply enjoyed doing. Thanks to people’s recommendation and appreciation, I was given a great share of opportunities.

The year has also taken me to many new places outside and in Hong Kong, where I thought I knew well. Every fresh piece of land I lay my foot upon gives me a sort of comfort that I am, literally, not stepping on the same ground.

The year has connected me with many friends old and new, whom are often inspiring and uplifting, and without whom to share my life would not be half as interesting.

The year has taught me many humbling lessons and helped steer my direction. I myself am very excited about this coming year.

Thanks to all of my family and friends who have cared about me even I might not have been able to tell you directly how much I care about you too. Thank you, if you are reading this, you know I am saying this to you.

Wish you a happy new year.

More at my flickr.

1.
Revisiting the UCLA campus surely recalled a scores of memory. The college life – some call the best time of their lives – was over for me. Not that I haven’t done much in those years, but who doesn’t feel like there was more that could have been done, looking backwards? I started noticing things I never noticed: clubs that I could’ve joined, classes I could’ve taken, and people that I could’ve met.

2.
Crashing the end-of-year party at Caltech was something I did not anticipate myself doing. Looking into the pool of people dancing and enjoying themselves like any other party I had been to, I couldn’t help but also understand that that was probably the pool of people with the highest SAT average in the whole world. We all just wanted to have some fun though, from time to time.

3.
Sitting in one of the many libraries at Stanford, observing people passing by or concentrating on whatever at their hands (while I am distracting myself from what I told myself I would do in the library by ‘observing others’), I wondered whether life would’ve been much different had I studied at this school. Would the prestige of its name make me a different person? Better or worse? Would the student there be that clearly smarter than those that I peered with? Of course these are overly-simplified questions, but then outside the shield of a campus, who doesn’t simplify the product of college education down into the names of institutions? (Some even only TLAs!) Ting told me his company wouldn’t even interview a person not coming out from one of the big-name schools…

4.
The spicy salmon and unagi hand-roll, baked salmon, organic salad, nachos with guacamole, and the mangolicious smoothy were the only food I got to try out of the many many options at Charlie’s–one of the many many restaurant options at the Google campus. The shark fins that comes out from the ground, the T-rex with a flamingo in its mouth, the coffee shop with bean bags, glass conference rooms with cartoonish hand drawings all over the inside of the room (clearly seen from outside) and the bookshelves that stores Legos quite successfully convey what life is like there for me.

5.
I wish I belong to a campus, or have a campus that belongs to me. Soon again, hopefully.

I have an urge to write very badly, all of a sudden. So I am writing as I am riding the MTR.

I want to write about my work, my friends, my thoughts. None of those seem interesting enough to publish on the internet. Day in day out I read blogs on design on coding on all sorts of things. I hardly spare anytime for personal blogs. Then, I have this urge that I just want to write. This is the ‘culture’ of blogging. Mundane, personal things suddenly become somewhat of interest to other people, if not, it is at least somewhat interesting for the owner of those mundane things to share them.

條件反射這個名詞我是初中年代認識的：同班有某同學每逢中文課就要上厠所，一次老師忍不住要問他為甚麼總要在她課堂上厠所，是不是欺她比較仁慈。同學答：「非也，這是自小的問題，中文課總是要去小解，是一條件反射。」

我也有一個條件反射分享：

當年十三四歲從圖書館借了教造網頁的書，看了一個通宵，又造了一個通宵。夜闌人靜，腹中有悶，到七十一買了一包華園候柱齎燒鵝，整晚吃的津津有味。自此，每逢要造網頁，便想吃齎燒鵝了。

A rather disturbing news article shed light on yet another issue between the two colors.

Albino girl murdered in Tanzania

*Thanks Wendy for sharing.

(more…)

One of the things that us volunteers of OHS are doing now is helping to solve the situation of the growing number of street kids in Arusha. We came having the impression that most of them are orphaned by HIV/AIDS, but we soon found out that was not the case. I went onto the internet hoping to educate myself a little more about the situation and here is one excerpt from an article that I found which agrees with my own experiences so far.
——————————————–

What causes children to run to the streets?

A child’s departure from home is seldom sudden, despite common conceptions to the contrary. Rather, it usually takes the form of a series of steps in which individuals find out more about the urban environment, investigate work opportunities and make contact with homeless street children. Similarly, the factor prompting departure is less commonly a single event than is often thought – rather, it is often a combination of stressors on different causal levels, as suggested in a recent ILO report:

Immediate: the reason why a child may leave home and go to work or live on the streets could be a sudden drop in family income; loss of support from an adult family member due to illness, death or abandonment; or an episode of domestic violence.

Underlying: chronic impoverishment, cultural expectations (such as the idea that a boy should go to work on the streets as soon as he is able), desire for consumer goods, or the lure of the city.

Structural: factors such as development shocks, structural adjustment, regional inequalities and social exclusion.

This multiplicity of levels means that few children are able to perceive all the circumstances that contributed to their decision to leave home. The reasons given by a child on the day of leaving home may anyway be quite different to those they offer three months later after s/he has rationalised his/her home situation and their actions.

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*full article here: http://www.mkombozi.org/learnmore.html

There are many friends.

There is David. He is half Tanzanian half American. He grew up in the states, studied journalism and moved to Tanzania about a year ago hoping to find his father’s roots. We met at an internet cafe and he initiated the conversation. We met again later when we were on our way to visiting the school which one of the kids from CCF – Thomas – attends. The three of us, plus David’s fiancé Kelen, became really good friends. Being possibly the only three persons in town with mac book pros, in addition to our shared interest in photography and documentary films, it was not too difficult to predict our inevitable friendship.

There is Richard. He was crashing at Arusha Project just like ourselves that night. Stephen and I were talking about a project that would require input from a properly trained product designer just an hour before we met him, a product designer who graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design two years ago. We had fulfilling conversations about the responsibility of designers, the subconscious effects of advertisements, and the measurement of quality of life.

There is Bill. We saw him driving by in his Suzuki sidekick black-and-white hard-top convertible. We asked him how much he got it for. He told us it was shipped in from Los Angeles 13 years ago. We told him about us and UCLA; he told us about Darwin’s Nightmare, and his involvement with it, we told him about us being aspiring filmmakers. That weekend, he invited us to his home and offered to lend us his car. It’s a left hand wheel and we thought it wouldn’t be safe for us, being in a right hand drive country, plus we feared damaging his car. Anyways, he told us his life story: Growing up in Tanzania always wondering why foreign businessmen do so well, he started his own hardware business and saved up enough to go to the United States of America. He landed in JFK airport, New York City. 15 years later he is now the owner of one of the biggest video and games store in Harlem, Manhattan. He is a charming person.

There are more. Lots more, but I’ll spread them out.

I think this is it. My dream – A World Without Strangers*.**

*An enemy is not a stranger either. But I personally prefer friends.

**I think Giordano might have inspired my life, Damn :-P

I doubt these three options exhaust our lives; a more common comparison is between Money and Health, or Money and Happiness.

On the way walking from UAACC – United African Alliance Community Center – out to the main road, I asked my company – Steve, Susie, and a rasta guy Mwalimu(or something like that) – how they would rank the three.

Mwalimu: Money > Time > Friends.
Susie: Friends > Time > Money.
Steve: Money > Friends > Time.

What is Time by the way? Time for yourself? Is time equivalent to longevity?

When I asked the question I hadn’t put much though into it. Now, as I think about it more, I think Time is time for yourself. Time to do what you want.
Susie would give up her money first, and if necessary her personal time, for her friends.

Of course, the context is important. There are times that we would give up one for the other and other times we wouldn’t. So for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that for the rest of your life, you’ll have to live without one of the three, and one of the three you’ll have for certain, the other will only show up randomly 50% of the time.

Me: Time > Friends > Money.

I think I can live in the woods, without any money, on my own working on my goals, and have friends visit me once in a while. It’s really a hard call, actually, friends make my life. But I would be more disappointed, I think, if at the end of my life I have only achieved half of my goals, or half of every goal.

How would you rank the three? and, if you want, why?

Yesterday, my chore duty was to water baby thorn bushes around our fence. 2.5 acre of land requires quite a long fence, and a lot of thorn bushes to surround it. It was a tedious and boring task, and with such a task, one’s ability to do the work with great attention is limited. That was my excuse. As it turns out, we were all watering the bigger, healthier and more easily noticeable saplings. Some of the already weaker ones were, unfortunately, neglected.

There are so many street kids in Arusha – 8,000 according to Hori and more-than-1,000 according to Emmanuel, an ex-street kid now staying at CCF – but the orphanage that OHS is building will have the capacity of about 25-30 upon completion. How do we make the choices? Personal preference? I suppose, the brighter, livelier, easier to talk with kids.

I personally watered 50,000Tsh and two hours onto Mohammed today.

I could not help but notice that some saplings around the fence is turning yellow and their stems curling.