LGBT Story Project
Power of a group
GISTers met again after the launch in January. Different than last time, we had much deeper and meaningful conversations about the content, technology being used, goals and challenges each of us experienced along the road. There were actually different rounds of conversations. The first round was a group debrief in Bangkok. I somehow decided to save the content for candle light talk in Chiang Mai and started sharing something more in general, about challenges and need I have. I actually had many questions before I came to this rendezvous. I wanted to pick up my peers’ brain and learnt from their best practices. It went surprisingly well. Some of the major challenges I had were: Information management · How to keep track of contacts · Building a self-owned research database · Manage different channels, e-mail, Facebook message, WeChat messages and LinkedIn mails · How to document and present people’s stories · How to manage notes · Transcription · How to keep up and digest all the background information · How to present final result—writing · How to draw the best out of the people you interview · How to make analysis · How to find right parameters for final matrix Time management · Purposes of this trip have shifted/sharpened · GIST trip planning · Next step and the time division of current schedules Relationship building · How to build valid connections with massive contacts · How to keep in touch with people in a meaningful way · Gifts and appreciation Emotion management · Different emotions I have felt · How do you deal with them Trip arrangement · Budget · Logistics Surprisingly, people threw out all kinds of answers and suggestions. The feeling was really good to see the power of a group. I still remember that during one of the first few lessons in APLP first semester, we played this game to answer questions. A group did get more answers right than what each individual can get. Some of the new ideas I can look into are: Wonderlist Evernote Google tag One note Ask what PhD students use (in general or who are from the schools I am hoping to get into) How to take notes---make your notebook indexed Access … I felt deeply appreciated about everyone’s suggestions and contribution. At that moment, I really felt the power of the group. There were more moments later during our group project in the mountaintop school. Hope more people can enjoy this.
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Trip Diary 2/23/2015
On sharing I am actually not used to sharing. I have a very strong sense of territorial boundary and possession of stuff. I ask for a lot and give back a little. I feel I am mean. I don’t like this side of myself. I wanted to do something about it. I have been wondering where this strange habit comes from. I remember in my childhood, I didn’t possess many things. I never had any serious toys besides grass, tree, flowers, dirt, and bricks. They don’t belong to me so I never need to share them with others. I only had four thin cartoon books that were exactly bought for me from my parents. I cherished them so much that I would hide them somewhere and take them out for a heart orgasm. I remembered I only showed these books to my cousins when they came to play in my house but I never lent one to them. And for neighbors’ kids? They didn’t even know what I had. Simply to say, I never learnt how to share a toy with other kids who are not from my family. Given it a second thought, I guess all these facts can find roots in poverty in my early development years. Poverty helped shape some of my resilient characters, however, it also casted a lot of shadows. Unfortunately, I haven’t really gotten rid of poverty. After I started working, I began to earn some stable income. I spent most of my post college years working in the nonprofit sector. I like my job but I barely have any saving. My lifestyle also makes saving challenging. I can’t live without buying books to read, travelling, and meeting people over meals or drinks. Six years after I graduated, I am in debt, again. It was not too much a problem. Young people don’t have enough money, that’s normal. But my point is why someone else who is in similar situation can be so generous. They are happy to share little resources they have with me and others. I am always moved and shamed. I admire them. I started to learn let it go. Don’t let material and monetary values stop me being a generous and kind-hearted person. I tried some technological solutions, but I don’t feel particularly impressed by myself or clearly feel happy about what I did. To my surprise, on this trip, I feel so happy to share the only resources I have with people I meet for the first time. The small grant comes from East-West Center and the final portion of my little saving. I didn’t feel any pain when I treat people to lunch, dinner, tea, coffee, drinks. Rather, I like it so much. I am genuinely happy about sharing. This happiness, I think, comes from many directions. Sometimes, I feel I learnt way more than what they can get from me. It’s a great deal and I am more than happy to pay a little money to show my gratitude. Sometimes, I am happy I can use the power of consumption to support a community member with their business. Sometimes, I just feel I’ve become part of Southeast Asia culture, to care about your friends, and to share whatever you have. 1/25/2015
An idea came to me this morning suddenly while I was half sleeping. Why don’t I start an Asian Pacific LGBT Leadership Project? The idea comes from three sources: APLP/EWC: I’ve gone to APLP, their concept of Asia Pacific has a lot of impact on me. My work, especially the study tour in SEA and Greater China is carried out based on the idea that Asia Pacific is interlinked and a critical region to the world in the future. · APLP has a long history of leadership training and claims to be the best of its kind in Asia Pacific region. You can argue with them about their pedagogy, but definitely they are someone who has started this work long time ago. Question: will the general leadership training have enough positive impact on LGBT community? Maybe I want to ask Zhu Laoshi and Qu Dong re their training to Huangpu Leadership camps. · I have access to APLP training team. They will travel to Asia frequently. There are some possibilities to have a few days workshop somewhere in Asia. Or even, participants can go to Hawaii. Another possibility is that LGBT participants can either get the training through APLP courses like MARA people did. Or join our specific program. · EWC network is strong in SEA. Will there any possibility to explore into this community and form a supporting network for participants? E.g. they could provide mentorship, become allies, information carrier, volunteers, or even donors. My previous work: · At RBF, we have supported two programs aiming to support the talents and leaders in the nonprofit community. The first level is then ICS’s training. They have a renowned training program called Huangpu Leadership Training Camp, attracting all key figures in Southern China and help form a wide network of community leaders. It is a yearly program. Participants meet 4-5 times a year and attend their training courses in various sites. · Later on, ICS discovered some leaders have more demands in learning and developing. So CUHK, together with ICS designed a visiting fellowship program for more mature leaders from Southern China to visit Hong Kong and visit other organizations there. This might be an example to learn. My trips: · People need networks, especially who are from a broader LGBT community. They need support, sharing of information and resources, and bumping ideas with each other. · They need open their minds a little bit. Being open-minded, knowledgeable about what’s happening in the field are important. It is good for them if they could get more money. More questions to follow up: · But they do have existing networks, e.g. ASEAN LGBT network. What do they do? How is it going with their network building? Will a new network add any good to the current participants? · Target at who? This is the hardest question. Who’s leadership capacity have I been talking about? There’d better be a standard. The leaders of the organization? Do we need to consider how many years of their working experiences. · Personal profiles and their similarities: if I put all LGBT activists’ profile into a single matrix, what will happen? What I will discover? Conflict in a group
Group seems to be a very interesting space to examine human interactions. Among all these interactions, I recently paid particular attention to conflict. Before I tell my stories, I feel it is necessary to point out that a group can be defined by many different characteristics. They may vary because of size, time and physical space when and where this group forms and exists, and who comprise this group (their demographics, social backgrounds, intentions, ability to carry out cross-culture commutations, etc.). It is extremely difficult for me to conduct scientifically comparative analysis of two cases since I feel any small variance may affect the final result. I won’t pretend trying to make this sharing conclusive or scientific. In the past five months, I was fortunate to have participated in two groups, both comprised of about 25 people from more than 15 countries/cultures. Among all kinds of conflicts, there seemed to be a major one that concerned almost all members of these groups. Interestingly enough, these two groups developed a totally different strategy to cope with the major conflict. The most recent case came from my study trip in Southeast Asia. I signed up for a regional gay men spirituality gathering. There were about 20 of us coming from German, Greece, Israel, Holland, UK, Canada, USA, Thailand, Indonesia, China, and etc. We were going to spend about 10 days together in a bungalow styled resort on an underdeveloped island near Phuket in Thailand. So the group was formed on the day everybody convened near a little peer. A few people knew each other from previous gatherings, but the majority actually felt strange about the whole group. People were so different in any possible ways, but the only thing in common was they were all men who love men. During the first three days, people treated each other in a very kind, welcoming, and gentle way. Through conversations, hang-out, and observations, people got to know others better and better hour by hour. This is similar to any others groups how group members form relationships. However, there is one thing I want to mention that is quite unique. The group practiced a daily Heart Circle. All members were strongly encouraged to join. People would sit in a circle on beach or any place the group felt like to use. A member would voluntarily facilitate the circle. People could use different approaches to bring members into the circle, but usually people would hold hands with eyes closed, meditate a little bit, and tried to feel their heart and true feelings. The facilitator would put a Talisman in the center of the circle after walking everybody into the spiritual circle. Whoever felt ready could take the Talisman to share his real feelings at that moment. Others couldn’t interrupt or make any comments unless they held the Talisman. People were expected to talk through their heart, not their mind. Of course, anything shared in the circle remained in the circle. Confidentiality would help create a sense of safety for sharing. In the beginning, I doubted the Heart Circle and thought it too formalistic. However, I found the contrary after three circles. Some people could suddenly open up and share some of their deep feelings. Many issues could be raised up in the circle and members could think how to deal with them. Then finally, I can bring this story out after so many words about background information. In our group, there was a young guy with a beautiful face and body, energetic, sweet, and playful. Many people liked him immediately they saw him. However, after first three days, more and more complain about him could be heard during private chats. People still liked him but just didn’t know how to deal with his mercurial emotions and energy surplus. He broke their glass on the door to their bungalow. He would play with someone’s sunglasses for a while and simply left it some random place after he got bored. He would carefully play with little crabs, shells, and sand or suddenly disappeared when someone else was sharing. He would try drawing attention from others whenever he was in a group event. He would forget to pay for beers. He would suddenly yell at someone and became furious. He would suddenly jump out and make a swirl around a small tree in the center when we had a dancing session which resulted in the crack of that poor tree… People just didn’t know how to work with him. We sympathized him because we figured out he probably didn’t realize the consequences of certain actions or he just lacked of social life skills. Even though as a person, he was someone who we wanted to adore, his actions had actually caused pain in the group. Till the fifth day, someone shared his frustration of not knowing how to deal with this guy’s fluid energy in the heart circle, in a very peaceful and calm way. This young guy wasn’t in the circle that day but he happened to overhear part of the sharing when he passed the circle. He became furious and asked for the Talisman to talk. But the guy who was holding the Talisman refused firmly not giving it to him with the argument that he wasn’t in the circle so he was not entitled to receive the Talisman. The only way he could talk in the circle was to sit down, join the circle, and wait till the Talisman passed along to him from his neighbor. This young guy left. We could hear screaming and yelling in his room’s direction. To my surprise, many people in the circle picked up the topic and shared the same concern. I began to understand it had been a prevalent feeling among group members. More interestingly, none of Asian participants shared anything relating to this case. We both said something else. Finally, a guy who had tried to bring him into the circle and let him an opportunity to talk managed to grab him into the circle and passed him the Talisman. This young guy said something not very logical. He decided to leave early. He complained about the owner charged too much about the broken door glass. And something else a little bit awkward. After talking, he suddenly left again. The group continued to talk some more time about this. Some showed their compassion to him but thought leaving might be good for both him and the group. Some disagreed with the guy who let him in; they thought it was a breach of rules and it probably wouldn’t do any better for that person’s growth. And some people felt sorry for both him and the group having to deal with this conflict. It’s very interesting that this whole group didn’t like conflict at all. Everybody tried to avoid directly confrontation with others. But when something happened that deeply infringed these people’s bottom lines, they had to find a way to say it. And they had to find a way to deal with it. Even with shivering shoulders and pounding hearts. Today I faced the first time content related frustration during my GIST project...
I usually consider myself a people person which I think means it is easy for people to like me and talk to me. There are several reasons why I think this way. First of all, both at work (different positions) and during anthropological field study, I find most of the people I talk to are quite happy to share and talk more with me. There are of course sometimes that both the other party and me don't know what to say and have to end the conversation quickly, but the majority people I have talked to are all very nice to me. They usually could share more than I expected. Second of all, people have been assuring me that I am likable. Even though I don't really believe that (otherwise how come I am still single...), I feel maybe that's how I look like to many of my friends. Lastly, since I started traveling in Southeast Asia in last December, I have met and talked to about 150 people. In 99% cases, we will have a one-on-one conversation for at least one hour. We all feel happy afterwards, and some new collaboration ideas, more suggestions about who I can meet up later, and it is not rare that both of us feel we haven been long time friends. So that's how I have gained my confidence, or maybe I have grown a little bit more complacent. Then the first major frustration came today. After about 1.5 hour talk, I felt I had wasted my interviewee's time and I felt sorry for myself that I hadn't been able to draw the best out of him. I was referred to this guy by an alum. I reached out to this alum who I am not familiar at all with all my GIST project introduction and my bio. He couldn't meet me because he is currently out of the country. But he introduced me to another contact. I actually had no idea why we need to meet, especially after I googled who he is. He has a rather high social status: received his education overseas, did research and published a lot of articles, started his own think tank. I feel he must be well respected. His professional background is about politics. I don't know much about politics, but I think I can use this opportunity to learn situations here. You know, usually I can make the conversation fluid naturally and will be able to learn some new stuff, even if I have no idea what their work is about (e.g. oceanology and microbiology). Or we may not need to talk about his profession at all. I find people often refer me to other contacts because they are either part of LGBT community or have some working experiences in this field, or at least in the development in general. That's how we met. After we sat down in a cafe said to have the best bakery in town, he told me he had very little knowledge about LGBT community here and started introducing his work. He was really eloquent when speaking, starting from issues and gaps, how did his think tank start, what did they see as priority, and what they had discovered through research, and what challenges they had. I suddenly realized I absolutely had no idea what are politics or political science because I couldn't follow what he said. The only thing I can do is to scratch likely words on my note book really fast. After a long while when he decided to pause and drink some of his smoothie, I grabbed the opportunity to talk. I first apologized for being really ignorant both to his profession and this country, and then asked if I could ask a few follow-up questions to clarify some basic facts. He said yes, go ahead. And then I asked all the wrong questions. Those questions themselves were not wrong. They were probably common ones when a stranger tries to understand the general story line of this society. However, he is not the right person to be asked. He was kindly enough to explain some of the basic facts of this country, however the conversation became less and less passionate and specific. He mentioned at the end of session that he had crossed the line by trying to give me a history brief and talking about economic development in this country. I felt it. I sensed each question I popped out is not good enough to ask more about his real expertise. I apologized again that I wasn't able to ask the right questions and draw the best out of him. He said, that's fine, after all, you are seeking the information, as long as you feel helpful, that will be fine. I felt hurt a little bit, like a kid tried really hard to get something from others and once he had it, he suddenly realized that it didn't mean that much to someone who originally owned it. I also felt sorry for both him and myself. I didn't make the best use of our time. I could have read more thoroughly online and get a list of questions beforehand, or being smart enough to grasp some of the key words during our conversation and started from there. However, besides all these technological solutions, I realize something more important. I have touched one of my limits-----I just don't know politics and power, and probably, I am not that interested in learning about them. That's a good self-awareness. If I ever want to use the perspective of politics and power to examine social issues (e.g. the living space for LGBT community), I'd better talk to some real experts from a set of basic questions to understand basic concepts of politics. Please make some time for me and share your stories, observations, analysis, and practices. Everything you tell will certainly help me understand more of this field.
It would be great if you could kindly help connect me to more people who might be interested in this project or who might be able to refer me to someone else. You are more than welcome to join me in this adventure and travel and learn together, if you happen to have some time and interest. If you are really interested in this project and would like to help me even further, any suggestion, donation, and host are most appreciated. · December 15-20, 2014 Manila
· December 20, 2014-January 2, 2015 Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong · January 16-29, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur · January 29-February 5, Koh Yao Yai and Phuket islands · February 5-15, Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi · February 20-March 2, Bangkok and Chiang Mai · March 5-April 30, China · May 1-3, 2015 Yangon I want to do something for my community, professionally, in the near future.
Since I had been working with private foundations in China in the past five years but primarily focusing on other social issues, I felt an urge to map out the field a little bit before taking actions. I started a literature review of China LGBT community development in the past decades in early 2014, trying to have an overview of this field through dimensions of chronology, geography, and what initiatives have been done by different social sectors. It is a very interesting process and no doubt I have learnt a lot new knowledge. However, more and more questions pop out along the way. To further understand LGBT related issues, with partial support from the Asia Pacific Leadership Program of the East-West Center, a research and education institute based in Hawai'i, USA,I will travel within greater China and Southeast Asia between December 2014 and May 2015, meet with thoughtful leaders from a wide range of backgrounds (nonprofit, academia, media, health care, public policy, pink economy, art & culture, and etc.), and learn about their experiences, thoughts and practices in regard to various LGBT topics. By reading, conversations, site-visits, volunteer work, and possible workshops, I hope to be able to have preliminary answers to the following questions at the end of this months-long trip: 1) what's going on in the LGBT field in China and Southeast Asia; 2) What are some of the possible future development trends; and 3) Where do I fit in this big picture. |
AuthorHi this is Martin. I am traveling in greater China and Southeast Asia. Looking for conversations, adventures, and more. Archives
April 2015
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