In 2006 I met a remarkable 90-year-old woman in Hong Kong. She was a Chinese herbalist who once worked in the Kowloon Walled City — the infamous, anomalous zone of Hong Kong where no government actually ruled, with all the possibility and danger this might imply in such a context, and where life was a series of alleyways and tunnels that burrowed into an almost solid mass of interconnected buildings. I wrote about it here.
I interviewed her for a new media oral history project that approached this area of Hong Kong in terms of people’s memories and feelings of space, place and movement. What are our histories of coming to a place that becomes home? What do we bring with us, and what do we leave behind? What moods does our home have? This old woman had remarkable stories. Of being a field doctor during the Second World War, and seeing rivers of blood in the wake of battles between the Kuomingtang and Japanese armies. Of arriving in Hong Kong, and carving out spaces in the Walled City for her extended family to live. Of having patients who still saw her, decades after she cared for them as kids growing up in the Walled City.
After recently sending her a belated birthday card, this week I found out that she died last year. I’m still working on my project. I think she has finished hers. I guess this is a reminder to keep our links alive, in all the ways that this could mean.
“Parkour gives them a way to use their energy in a positive way.”
When you look at an obstacle or something big, you prepare yourself. It’s the same with life. When you come up against something, you look at it from all angles, see what is the best way ti overcome it – up, down, around or over. You slowly build yourself up until you can accomplish it or work around it to find a solution. It’s about having the courage to overcome fear.
Inspiring stuff…
How to find out what they want
Todd, Ploy and myself created this eBook yesterday based on the brain bubbling topic, “How to find out what they want.” Rather than being a polemical piece or an essay-style study of the topic and techniques used “to find out what they want”, this is a near verbatim transcript of a conversation between ourselves about our immediate and long term goals.
My personal favorite aspects of this work are how casual and quick it reads, so hopefully people are more receptive to reading it than something instructive or formal. It might come across as lightweight at moments (which possibly puts it in danger of being dismissed) but our awareness of the conversation’s recording comes across in the eBook, especially at the beginning when we were finding a way to get the conversation going and at the end when we tried to wrap it all up.
The opportunity for discerning readers to identify when we’re being more genuine or self-conscious of what we’re saying is a commentary on the (in)effectiveness of “finding out what people want” when information is gathered -
- directly from participants/samples;
- in an informal and casual environment;
- with the participants’ knowledge of the recording; and
- with the participant’s knowledge of the information’s application and public distribution.
(cf. census info, statistical data, vox pox, phone surveys, door-to-door, random sampling, anonymous commentary, etc.)
Download the eBook today, it’s a modern classic!
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Originally uploaded by Alice Angus
