[I'm scraped and sober but there's no one listening.]
So, Olympic youth ambassador, interesting. Chinese government sure thinks highly of us, nice. But If I do go for this, there will definitely be talks about Taiwan is not a part of China thing. Sensitive issue for this island, whatever. I've always considered myself as both Chinese and Taiwanese. I grew up in Taiwan, I speak Taiwanese, I love Taiwan, yeah. But at the same time I am also proud of the Chinese culture that we Taiwan people are apparently a part of. I don't care the whole "Americans wouldn't consider themselves British" thing, that's a completely different thing. We speak Mandarin, we recite all the poetrys we hate memorizing but still think they are beautiful, we watch TV shows about historic characters with funny hairstyles and we understand jokes that play with Chinese proverbs. If this is an analysis with the fantasy theme approach, I'd say we are all symbolically converged. We are, in a sense, Chinese. We are even more Chinese than people living in mainland China because we use traditional Chinese characters which are totally better and more beautiful. We are the lucky Chinese, because we are also Taiwanese with all the good stuff. We have democracy and freedom of speech and we can egg the government when they're doing a lousy job without being run over by tanks. We should totally be proud.
Speaking of tanks running over people, today is June 4th. It's been 18 years since the Tiananmen Square protests. This should never be forgotten. Ringmar is going to talk about it tomorrow in class so at least I know I won't.
I really want to stay in Taiwan for summer, I don't want to miss out the music festival. I know it sucks a little now that Explosions in the sky are not coming, but still, OKGO, Mercury Rev, Sylvain Chauveau and Yo La Tengo. Please let me stay in Taiwan, please.