thirty first issue
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4. “How it feels to grow up in
Latin America” Sharon Tirado
8. A Reflection On Memory In a Floating Life Madison Melton
14. THE RETIREMENT OF IMMATURITY 20. Impressions From And Zareen Chiba
Repercussions Of Childhood Edgardo Schiena
24. how i learnt to adult Bianca Bârsan
childhood memories
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“How it feels to grow u Image: www.dawn.com
“How it feels to grow up in Latin America”
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Sharon Tirado
up in Latin America” Sharon Tirado
T
hat day it was my best friend’s birthday. It was a big celebration full of balloons, candies and happiness. At that time, I was seven years old, and loosing a game was the worst of my problems. The best part of being seven years old is that generally your mind is free of problems, worries or preoccupations. On the other hand, the worst part is that you do not realize how important is the moment you are living.
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I was living in Cuba when I was seven years old and my childhood is one of the most important pieces of my life until now. Normally, nobody believes how important childhood is but for instance, it has been proven that psychologically, childhood is not only an important part in life but also the most important. We develop beliefs, goals, and our entire adolescence is completely based on our childhood. As in any other culture or country, being raised in Latin America helped me to create my own thoughts throughout life. Back in the late 90’s and at the beginning of the year 2000, there was a big inexistence of mobile phones, computers or any kind of connection in Cuba, as we know it today. Somehow this situation was good but bad at the same time. Bad because it was impossible to connect with other people outside of Cuba, and good (for children of my age) because we did not know how it felt to be on line on Whatsapp all the time. The only way to meet your friend was by simply going to the park and finding him there.
In a communist country as mine is, there also is a big lack of news about the world and even about Cuba itself. The fact that we had no idea of what could possibly happen somehow helped many families to raise their children without any fears. This fact brings me to the conclusion that when people grow up in an underdeveloped country they live under so much uncertainty and insecurities that just when they have their basic needs covered, everything else is in fact covered. In other words, even though we do not really look at these facts when we are children, once we are adults we realize that the people that were raised with so little, are in fact people who are able to be happy with really little.
“How it feels to grow up in Latin America�
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Sharon Tirado
Obviously, there is not only Cuba in Latin America but there are many other countries. All of them have three things in common: the way of living, the music and the incredible taste of food. My childhood was completely based on all of these three concepts, just as in any other Latin-American country. I started to learn how to dance when I was eight. I remember that my uncle and my dad were my favorite partners every time my favorite song came out. Of course I was not an expert, but the beauty of dancing with my family was wonderful. To conclude, I must say that growing up in Latin America, is not only different from growing up in any other part of the world, but it definitely is a place that will change your life.
image: http://edwebproject.org/
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A Reflection On Memory In a Floating Life Image: http://propertyadviser.weshare.hk/leunggillian
Madison Melton
I
had known one of my closest friends Mia for almost eight months before we took the hour-long ferry ride from the home that we shared in Hong Kong to her childhood home in Zhuhai, China, just across the Pearl River Delta. Over the months that we had known each other, she had told me many stories that remained rooted in that place. The embarrassing results when she tried to wrangle her wild curls into the hairstyles popular amongst her straight-haired Chinese classmates in primary school, hours of conversation with her younger sister each day as they crossed the border between Mainland China and Macau on their way to and from school, and being fifteen years old and walking around the underground mall in a gypsy skirt with a guitar slung on her back because she just wanted to see what it felt like. Over the next few days at her house and in my many subsequent visits, we drove past her primary school, we walked
A Reflection On Memory In a Floating Life
| Madison Melton
through that underground mall, and we laughed for hours as we poured through her early teenage diaries. I have made the most incredible friends since moving away from my home country, the United States, five years ago, but what is unique about these relationships is that it might be years before I meet their families, travel to the places where they grew up, and walk the same streets, trying to imagine how this has impacted the person I know in the present. With many of my friends, these moments have not yet come. This January I stayed up late with my friend Nashwa while she told me in great detail what it was like to walk through the old city of Sana’a, Yemen, but I have not yet been. And I can still only imagine my friend Joe waving dozens of escaped cows out of his yard in the British Midlands.
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When I moved abroad for the first time five years ago, I was looking for an adventure and knew only that the study abroad pamphlets I poured through assured me that my time living in this great, foreign, non-American ‘other’ would help me to “understand and appreciate new cultures.” The common misrepresentation of this ‘culture,’ however, is that it is often spoken about in static and abstract terms: an ordered collection of holidays and traditional food, united by a shared belief system and single history. What I’ve experienced, however, has been nothing like the pamphlets promised. These histories and traditions are rooted in the changing and interpretative memories of the people they affect, and who affect them. They are also not disconnected, hanging out somewhere in the past to be recalled
as if they never truly existed. No, the gift in seeing the places where the details happened is to ground them in somewhere tangible and to ask: “where was I when that happened to her?” While I was sitting in my primary school French class bored and confused while we learned to conjugate verbs, a Chinese friend was feeling the same in an English class on the other side of the world, learning one of the languages that she and I would one day use to communicate. Maybe at the same moment that I fell over while I was snowboarding and broke my wrist, he cracked open the novel that would soon become his favourite book of all time. Maybe at this very moment a photograph is being taken that will one day hang on my wall and become a part of the landscape where future memories will take place.
A Reflection On Memory In a Floating Life
| Madison Melton
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When people talk about places far away, the focus tends to be hallmarks and easy differentiators. But it is one thing to know that fish is commonly served at Nian Ye Fan, Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, and quite something else to know the lingering smell of smoke in the sharp winter air from the firecrackers that explode outside the widow during the dinner and late into the night, and how it
| Issue 31 Aug 2015
A Reflection On Memory In a Floating Life
mixes with the smell of sesame oil and soy sauce and MSG that fills the apartment. And even that is quite different to knowing that on Chinese New Year in 2011, the year of the rabbit, I walked home from a friend’s apartment underneath that smoke and those smells. I stamped my foot in a particular way when I climbed the concrete steps to my third floor apartment to turn on the soundautomated lights, and unlocked the dark wood door of the apartment with a key on a blue lanyard that had ripped a few months before when the key got stuck in the door. Meanwhile, friends I have now that I had not even met yet on that night were living their lives in just as vivid detail, creating memories that we may have later shared with each other and maybe were just lost to time.
| Madison Melton
Friendships made abroad easily become families because new places are brimming only with possibility, and everyone wants to fill them up with meaningful late night conversations, to make unfamiliar foods familiar, and to create new associations and memories where there were none before. At the same time, people are often left only to imagine each other’s pasts until a rare opportunity comes along to see a tangible piece of their history. These relationships, the ones not bound by a shared history and place of origin, are the real window into whatever people mean by ‘culture’: created, creating, and understood in all the details of smells, textures, images, and personal meaning.
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THE R Image:businessinsider.com
C
hildhood memories are more often than not reminisced with a rosy undertone, for those of us who were fortunate to be raised in politically and economically secure regions to stable family units. Coming from one such background, I recall in retrospect many good people and experiences in my childhood years, and with fondness the games I used to play with my parents and childhood friends. Play, as stated by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights, has been declared the right of every single child. In paediatric medicine, play is imperative while the child is highly imprintable—you who are cognizant and literate in your ability to understand the syntax of this article, can attribute some of your mental development to it. You may think that the children deprived of play are predominantly victims of emotional abuse, in labour camps and conflict zones, but it is also prevalent in the South and East Asian regions with a paradoxical aetiology. It is tacit that parents of Asian sub-cultures want the sky for their children and drive them beyond to get there. The results? An abundance of Chinese students popping up in Ivy
THE RETIREMENT OF IMMATURITY Sharing|a Travel Zareen Journal Chiba
RETIREMENT OF IMMATURITY
WHEN PARENTS FLIRT WITH THE NOTION OF BIRTHING GENERATIONS OF ACADEMIC ANDROIDS Zareen Chiba
League colleges, a spike in suicides among student populations and a crescendo of incidences of mental illness in younger and younger demographics. The College Scholastic Ability Test, for example is an established risk factor for student suicides in South Korea—as reported by surveys conducted by local teachers’ unions, up to 48% of students entertained suicidal ideation. A plethora of students still in primary school are armed with two musical instruments, two sports (preferably aquatic or track), two local and one foreign language and as many humanitarian service trips as their parents can afford to pack them off to (“Africa? Imagine how great it’ll look on your CV, son!”), because everyone else is doing it, and why not? The notion of play is inadvertently eliminated from these activities because it is not valuable enough—there needs to be a competitive edge, instilled either via parent, school or coach, and the solo or house trophy, not physical health, is the endpoint. In the living rooms of most well-to-do Asian households, one can observe, (usually strategically positioned next to the TV), a cabinet of sports and public speaking trophies in all its shining glory for family friends to ooh and aah at.
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I myself was a part of the system. Reared in Hong Kong to glitzy billboards of superstar tutors waving their neon diplomas at the crowds below, in an elitist school system where all-roundedness is the norm, I can tell you it is a system that produces results. It churns out hundreds of As and potentials for Ivy Leagues and other celebrious universities, and drives youth incidences of mental illness through the roof. I received tutorship for 7 years before I said I had enough at the age of 15. At age 19 I started tutoring kids a third my age with timetables almost as full as mine (and as a medical student, I get to bed at witching hour). At age 19 I had a five year-old student, a pale little girl who had just discovered primary school, fall asleep in every session from sheer exhaustion. At age 20, my final tutee broke down in tears after her mother announced she had added an extra-curricular activity to her schedule, and in defiance (and insolence, for it was not my place), I quit and told her mother that what she was doing was unhealthy and inhumane. She then attempted to raise my fee to bribe me to stay. This is the mentality of many parents in my locale, and there is no improvement in sight.
THE RETIREMENT OF IMMATURITY
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Zareen Chiba
These parents are called many things, from tiger moms to helicopter parents, but they are all motivated by the fundamental urge to nurture their children to the very best they can be. It is an admirable notion, but the same parents also forget that tutorial classes and exam grades do nothing to sow creativity and confidence (or even street smarts) in children. These children enter university with the same inoculated mentality, and upon graduation get thrown into three things: 1) the job world, 2) a lack of awareness of selfautonomy and 3) an existential crisis. Many of my fellow classmates in professional degrees question what percentage of their drive comes from within or without. I do the same, and I cannot answer either. Perhaps the damage is done.
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THE RETIREMENT OF IMMATURITY
I hope that you, my readers, may leave this with an alternate understanding of the chidhood moments your parents, peers and caregivers invested in your younger self, the moments of playtime, a vanishing resource, because these moments did not diminish your competitiveness ,they made you and I who we are today. To those of you who are already have children of your own, give them the extra-curricular leeway they need and you know they enjoy—it will be an investment with unquantifiable but undeniable returns. And finally, for our youngest readers who have yet to anticipate the obligations that adults saddle themselves with, turn off your screen, put down your phone, and give yourself the sun and time off that you have the right to. I appeal for the above, because the moment in time when a generation looks retrospectively at their childhood and recalls a series of premeditated educational decisions and not carefree, youthful disinhibition is the moment when childhood innocence goes to die. Give them back the notion of discovery and curiosity in their purest forms, and watch as our future cultivates itself and bears contented fruit.
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Zareen Chiba
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Impressions From And Repe
Image: https://mannfolkpr. wordpress.com/2013/11/06/ kids-fall-fashion/
Impressions From And Repercussions Of Childhood |
Edgardo Schiena
ercussions Of Childhood
Edgardo Schiena
I
am really lucky to say that my childhood has been an extremely important path for me that mostly formed the person I currently am. Many teenagers say that they do not remember much about our childhood, but I still believe there are some episodes people will never throughout their lives. The first toy, the first love or maybe the first taste of beer. Independently whether these episodes are positive or negative, I truly believe that they are episodes with life long effects. They shape the person we desire to become when growing up.
Many things can influence our childhood; our parents, our friends or places where you grow during childhood. In my opinion, our own childhood is a secret that we have to treasure with care and love. It is something personal. It is the possibility and the great privilege of learning every tradition and secret of your family, to receive a special and unique education from the people that love you the most. I do not have many memories of my childhood, but I am sure that it was full of happiness.
I had the possibility to spend most of my childhood with my brother, a really important figure in my life. We used to spend hours outside playing football, exchanging PokĂŠmon with our huge and colorful Game Boy Color, run around and race with our bicycles. But times have changed due to the technological advancement. Children these days have other interests. IPods, phones or Louis Vuitton bags are now their favorite toys. I remember when childhood was a synonym of freedom, liberty and happiness- happy about the smallest and simplest
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Image:.tumblr.com/
Impressions From And Repercussions Of Childhood |
things; an ice cream, a football, basketball or a bicycle. Unfortunately things have changed and sometimes I do really look at those times with a certain sadness and melancholy. The best moments of my childhood I mainly spent with my school friends. I had the opportunity to attend an international school since the age of three and meet people from all over the world. I had the luck to spend my last 15 years of academic path with the same people, which now I consider a part of my family. I spent the best and the worst moments of my life with them and I will never forget anything I experienced with them, even the worst moments. I believe that
our childhood is not just shaped by ourselves, but also from the people that we are surrounded by. I will always be thankful to my parents for the education they gave me, for everything that they taught me, with the good or the bad manners. Being parents is a very difficult job, yet most of our childhood is shaped by them. The day I will have children, I want to transmit to them all of what my parents transmitted to me, and make them understand how important childhood is in order to your future affect in the best way. I do not know if I will succeed in that, but I am sure I will do my best to hand down what real childhood is all about to my sons or daughters.
Edgardo Schiena
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How I learnt to ‘adult’ Bianca Bârsan
O
n June 1st this year, I finally finished my undergraduate studies. It had been a long time coming - it took me five years! Five years of pure joy, sometimes sadness, at times even loneliness, but most importantly sweat and blood! No, I am joking - my degree was not all that bad, it was actually more joy than anything else; yet now comes the hardest part: adulthood. Being an adult is about making responsible decisions, knowing when the party has to stop and, basically, knowing and doing what is expected of you at this age - which can be scary, and by that, I mean really scary. Inevitably, this phase of my life I am now about to enter makes me think of times long past, of when I was a child and when everything was simple. Childhood memories are what keeps me motivated, what keeps me
how i learnt to adult |
Bianca Bârsan
going. I think the most important thing for anyone in this moneydriven, corrupted and at times disappointing world is knowing that despite physical, social, financial and all sorts of other developments that we are going through, there will always be that one thing no one can take from us: our memories. Remember when money was not really an issue, because all we wanted to do was go outside and play with our friends? Or when relationships were not all that complicated - a simple “Do you want to be my girlfriend / boyfriend” would usually do the trick? Or even when our biggest problem was doing that maths test or writing that one page “essay” in literature class? Remember when we had dreams of the highest sort, like wanting to become an astronaut or a doctor, lawyer, princess, art-
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ist and so on? I remember it all. All the time. The most vivid memories, however, are of 5, maybe 6 year old me. It is nothing particularly amazing, it is the most casual playdates you can think of, with my then best friend from kindergarten, Alex. I remember we used to play hide and seek outside her house, with her friends - which I would probably not dare do now, I have grown so shy and self-conscious (See? Adulthood is kicking in)! As I said, nothing amazing, not in the slightest; but it is simple things like these that would make me so happy and content. I did not need much as a child, I think none of us did. Making friends was easy, we had no worries and we had everything in common: we just wanted to be around each other, for girls it was always
our dolls that kept us together, for the boys, cars and video games. Of course, there was common ground in playing outside, in sports and so on. And that is my point: simply being - and being happy on top of that - was so easy. And despite me trying to think I am a sociable person, I still find it hard now to find a good friend or trust people, growing up comes with a lot of insecurities along the way, the ones we make up in our head or the ones we cannot but recognise in others’ behaviour towards us. Growing up comes with realising differences between us, it is about politics and social standards, it is when we are told that as women, we cannot achieve as much as men do, for instance. Growing up is not easy. But if there is one thing that keeps me going, as I said before, it would
how i learnt to adult |
be my memories. Playing outside with friends, or doing homework together, or that boy in fourth grade who shyly kissed my cheek and asked me to be his girlfriend – that is what I always think of when I am dealing with my typical adult insecurities and life challenges. That little girl I used to be had such big dreams, I always think of her when I am told I cannot do this or I cannot do that, when I am told I am not strong enough or good enough. That little girl would have done anything in her power to grow, to strive. That little girl was so positive, that little girl makes me have a more positive outlook on life, relationships, career etc. And even though my goals have changed and people have come and gone in my life, the child that I was, and the memories that I have of those time will always, always, give me hope.
Bianca Bârsan
So next time you are faced with difficulties, dear Adult, no matter how big or small they may seem, remember that child you used to be. Remember your innocent soul and the pure joy you got out of the most ordinary things, like going to the park with family or friends, smelling a flower or that first time you played with a dog (one of my personal favourites). Remember that nothing is too difficult and think of what that child would have wanted from the now grown up you. Remember your playfulness, your spirit of adventure, take risks! Do not be afraid, Adult, to live a little. Also, remember your manners. Remember to stay honest and kind to others, but most importantly to yourself. In short, stay true to that child that you once were, make yourself proud and worry less about other people’s expectations.
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Yes, everyone will expect something from you, as they probably did back then too, but remember, as long as you are true to your soul and your own values and morals (remember when we were taught the difference between bad and good or about lies and how hurtful they could be? That sort of thing) because those are the most valuable lessons we ever got. And those are the memories that will most likely never fade from our memory. So keep your head high, you Adult you, and nurture those memories, as they are the truest form of who you were, who you are and who you could be. Let that child drive you to your highest potential and you will see that life is actually quite beautiful. Just make that leap of faith and I promise you, your life will be a truly amazing journey.
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