The Sigur Center annually supports GW undergraduate and graduate students in pursuing summer research and language learning opportunities in Asia. Check out the entries below to read about Sigur Center Fellow adventures and experiences!
Hi everyone! Last weekend some classmates and I made the trip to Qingdao, a relatively famous city in Shandong Prefecture known as the home of Tsingtao Beer, to experience the city’s annual beer festival and get a taste of life in Qingdao. I’ve made a short travel video covering our experiences, hope you enjoy!
Katherine Alesio B.S. Civil Engineering, B.A. Chinese Language and Literature 2020 Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Study in Asia Grant Recipient Minzu University of China – Associated Colleges in China Program
Zeynep Hale Teke, B.A. Applied Mathematics 2019
Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Fellow
Taiwan Mandarin Institute, Taiwan
Hale is a rising senior studying Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences department at GW. She fell in love with Mandarin and Chinese culture (especially the bits involving food) after her first Chinese class freshman year and does not plan to stop studying it until mastery. Her eyes not only opened to the infinite wonders, sounds, and beauties of Taiwan, but also how deep the Mandarin language really is.
Art District featuring famous MopedsMaoKong Village from the cable car!
Sometimes I ask myself: What did I gain the most, so far, from my time here?
I could, of course, take a shortcut and give myself the obvious answer. I could say that my Mandarin language ability improved tremendously. That I learn about 200 to 250 words a week. That I can understand roughly 75% 0f what the locals were talking about on a bad day. That I no longer feel the horrible, incessant nauseated feeling in my stomach whenever I have to speak with someone who I can’t speak with in English. That, at some point, I wasn’t just talking AT people or vice versa, but actually having a conversation. However, this would not even be breaking the cusp of all that I learned in Taipei.
If you learn something from every piece of dialogue, interaction, or experience, then my time here has been an unending flood of information.
I assimilated to the food etiquette and committed to memory the names of dishes, crazy snacks, and beverages. Embedded into my mind is the sunset at Tamsui River and the Lovers’ Bridge. I was taught how to drive a motorcycle/moped cross-country without a care in the world. I was schooled on how to bargain and had to (literally) pay to get to that level. Most importantly, though, I learned to listen.
I listened to the long historical and nostalgic recounts of the elderly or the street vendor owners. I listened to the sound of the wind, easily foreboding a flood or storm. I listened to the sound of high school girls giggling on my metro rides. I listened for the swipes of the paintbrushes or the drums in the artsy districts.
I listened for love, vitality, humor. I listened for life. And I heard.
This may be a romanticized and possibly vague way of expressing myself, but I truly want to impress in you that each soft whisper, scream, or mumble you come across will be unique to your own perceptions, your own colorings of the world around you.
Each of the small, even boring events of day to day life just tickled my fancy. I know for certain that I will miss the smell of the rain in the trees of Yangmingshan National Park. I will miss the bubble tea I buy every day from the same auntie and her daughter down the street. I will even miss my 9AM classes, where my teachers would break out into grins after seeing me arrive panting.
I think… I have gained a happiness that is exclusive to my time on this tiny island and that will remain a part of my youthful memories. AH – so fresh.
Zeynep Hale Teke, B.A. Applied Mathematics 2019
Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Fellow
Taiwan Mandarin Institute, Taiwan
Hale is a rising senior studying Applied Mathematics in the College of Arts & Sciences department at GW. She fell in love with Mandarin and Chinese culture (especially the bits involving food) after her first Chinese class freshman year and does not plan to stop studying it until mastery. Her eyes not only opened to the infinite wonders, sounds, and beauties of Taiwan, but also how deep the Mandarin language really is.
Though it hasn’t been long since I last posted, my time in Taipei is quickly drawing to a close. Soon I will return to the arduous life of a graduate student. Time passes surprisingly quickly when you are bent over your textbook, trying to discern the delicate strokes of each 繁體字 (traditional character). There’s no shortage of things to do in Taipei and the surrounding area but on a weekday I usually end up doing this:
5:45 a.m. I wake up every day at this time despite my repeated attempts to sleep in until 6:30.
6:45 a.m. I walk under as much as shade as possible to the Being Fit x 7-11 Gym on Songjiang Nanjing Road. Though it’s pretty cool at this time of day (84 degrees qualifies as cool at this point in the summer), the sun is brutal. Luckily, the gym is air conditioned and according to the TV screen at the entrance, has extra clean air. I’m wondering when American 7-11’s will open gyms and if they could ever be popular.
8:00 a.m. I like to eat some surprisingly fresh fruit in the 7-11 (coming to store near you in America?) then walk over to the local breakfast place. Though many Taiwanese breakfast places are now offering Western style breakfast in the manner of peanut butter toast, sandwiches, or eggs and bacon, traditional Taiwanese breakfast for me is what is called a 蔥蛋 (Onion Egg). Sometimes, this delicious egg wrapped in a mysterious Taiwanese tortilla. Another choice for breakfast is 蔥抓餅 (green onion pancake) that I can grab on my way to class.
10:20 a.m.-1:10 p.m. For three hours, my 9 classmates and I work with our teacher, 吳老師 (Ms. Wu) to improve our Chinese. This usually includes forming sentences with new vocabulary, reading, and learning new grammar.
2:20 p.m.-4:10 p.m. For lunch I like to go to the cafe right next to MTC’s building or a vegetarian 自助餐廳 (self-serve canteen). After lunch, I usually return to the library and study some more.
4:20 p.m.-5:10 p.m. Since my class is after this, I have a number of options to learn Chinese. I can go to the library and study amongst my peers (which include students from countries all over the world, professionals, monks, nuns, retired folks, and people from any occupation you can imagine).
If I don’t have anything in particular to study, I can head to one of the required classes. There’s a number of options available, from Chinese in the Media (last class we discussed a famous Youtuber’s visit to the hidden 小吃店 (snack shops) of 淡水), Chinese Cuisine and Dining ( last class, we discussed 東坡肉 -a cut of pork marinated with a strong history behind it), to Taiwanese for Beginners. Participating in these classes usually involves answering questions or roleplaying.
Sometimes, MTC has a showing of a famous Taiwanese TV show called 光陰的故事 (Time Story). This series spans several generations of five families in a small village. Expect high drama with occasional public service announcements (the last one encouraged people to donate blood). Otherwise, I stay in the library or head out to a cafe (a cafe that preferably has a resident cat) for tea where I can study or read (see picture for my reading list).
I like to pretend I look super smart when reading 瑪蒂達 but this book is at a 10-year-old reading level in Chinese as well.
Finally, after watching Time Story, I head back to my humble apartment at then to another self-serve vegetarian buffet.
Lexi Wong M.A. International Affairs 2019 Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Fellow National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei
Lexi Wong is a Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Fellow studying Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan at National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center. Lexi is currently a first-year graduate student at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs where she is studying International Affairs with a regional concentration on Asia.
After the 2004 tsunami, aid workers from all over the world flew into Aceh. In the aid world, “Aceh” is still associated with the tsunami, beneficiaries of the world’s largest humanitarian response in human history. This narrative not only reduces Acehnese to victims, it also overlooks the role of many Achenese in humanitarian efforts that began even before the tsunami. Aceh’s culture of humanitarianism thus evolved very differently from the rest of the international aid industry – one with important lessons on localization and humanity.
This humanitarianism was on full display when over a thousand Rohingya refugees arrived on Aceh’s shores in 2015, after 7 months of being ping-ponged between different Southeast Asian countries, each refusing them permission to disembark.
Although the Indonesian coast guard were under orders to not let the refugee boats land, the Acehnese fishermen deliberately helped the refugees evade them to get to land. When asked why, the fishermen explain that this is their customary law, adat nelayan Aceh, or the custom of the Acehnese fisherman. Namely, when at sea, if they encounter anything that is in need of help, they are under obligation to offer assistance. This is mandatory for injured animals, what more fellow human beings.
Hence, contrary to the narratives in Malaysia and Indonesia, the fishermen are adamant that they did not simply offer help to the Rohingya because they were fellow Muslim brothers. As one of my interviewees put it:
“If we [Acehnese] only help these Rohingya because we come from the same religion, what makes us different from the Buddhists that are trying to throw out these Muslims from their own land?”
A spacious refugee camp in Aceh
Aceh’s humanitarian response to the refugees did not stop at the initial rescue. They were given medical treatment, housed, fed, given language lessons, livelihood training, and even access to the local schooling system.
An Acehnese teacher volunteered to teach the Rohingya English and Indonesian.
One of the most important things about the refugee camps in Aceh is the way they treat the refugees with dignity. While most refugee camps are renowned for confining refugee to the camps (like prison cells), I was pleasantly surprised when the Rohingya children brought me out of the camp to this adjacent swimming pool which they could freely use.
Rohingya kids led me out of the camp, right past the security guards to the nearby swimming pool.
This has not been costless for the Acehnese community, who have their own history of conflict and disaster. In part, it is because the Acehnese know what it is like to be a victim of disaster or conflict, that they understand the importance of treating refugees not as objects to be managed efficiently or securely, but as fellow human beings. Moreover, given the large internally displaced population during Aceh’s conflict years, there is no shortage of Acehnese who have had years of experience organizing camps, aid distribution, and engaging with victims of conflict.
But it is not just their experience as victims that informs the Acehnese of how to do humanitarianism. The Acehnese insist that it is their custom to honour their guests, adat pemulia jamee (literally, custom of honouring the guest).
A cute Rohingya kid pays his respects.
Contrary to the hyper-professionalized international humanitarian industry, everyday acts of Acehnese hospitality like these regularly disrupted my hyper-modern, efficiency-oriented, cold-hearted-optimizing sensibilities. It makes me think that the professionalization of humanitarianism (such as the SPHERE standards) often appears so obviously attractive because it promises tangible, visible, physical benefits, while masking what it takes away – the practical, intangible, human parts of everyday living. That doesn’t make professionalization inherently evil. However, hyper-professionalized projects, designed in the absence of relationships with the very people one wishes to help, become deeply suspect.
Acehnese volunteers share their experience.
As one veteran humanitarian (pictured) put it:
Hermanto shares how Aceh’s culture and humanitarianism during the conflict period and the present (over coffee of course).
“The NGO world is a world where trial and error is always involved. You never have the peak of knowledge in this work. What’s best practice today may not be best practice in the next ten years. Best practices are always relative. Failure is always relative, and we are always learning.
For example, when the (Acehnese) fishermen rescued the Rohingya – that wasn’t the international standard. In fact, they were taking the risk to rescue them because it was illegal. They did it because of their local custom. That suggests that their local custom was better than the international standards. So why stick with the international standards when there is something better? If this best practice is better than the one before, why not change it?
The problem with professionalism is that it kills the inspiration to learn. How do you know something is done correctly if you’ve never failed? You should do first, and learn. Of course, don’t close your eyes when you do it. Keep your eyes open, be watchful, and you can gain new knowledge.”
Amoz JY Hor is a PhD student in Political Science at the George Washington University. His research explores how emotions affect the way the subaltern is understood in practices of humanitarianism.
Jane Bennet, author of Vibrant Matter, might agree with me when I say that documents in the archives have thing-power. Thing-power, to her, is “the curious ability of inanimate objects to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennet 2010: 6). A map is an inanimate object imbued with such thing-power. I do not refer here to the sense of exhilaration that a map is able to elicit in someone perusing the archives or an atlas, but rather to the capacity of the map to produce spatial order by locating things and people in relation to each other.
The map above makes the territory of Assam visible by positioning geographical features such as hills, mountains, rivers, and islands in relation to each other. The geographical features that are not sketched are almost as important as those that are sketched on the map. Together, they give this emerging territory of Assam its shape. Assam runs east-west along the river Brahmaputra, delimited in the north and the south by hills that are not fully sketched. The “outside” is allowed to remain an absolute space while Assam is sketched into existence.
Published in 1847, a century before Indian independence, this map sits within a book entitled Sketch of Assam. The author of the book only identifies himself as “an officer… in civil employ.” But he is identified in the archives as Major. John Butler, who was posted in the East India Company’s Bengal Native Infantry. Sketch of Assam is the author’s attempt to sketch—and by this I mean describe and typify both in writing and through drawings—some of the tribes that he encountered during his travels in Assam. By locating these tribes in the hills and in the valleys that fall within the delineated region of Assam as well as outside this demarcated space, he produces a sense of spatial relation between these tribes. For example, the hills to the south of the sketched region of Assam are occupied by the Nagas, locating the Nagas outside of Assam. To the north in another sparsely sketched section are the Abors. On the other hand the Meeree (spelled Meree elsewhere in the book) occupy a huge territory along the Brahmaputra within the territory of Assam. Today, the Nagas are understood to be indigenous to Nagaland and the Abors to Arunachal Pradesh both of which fall outside the territory of the Indian state of Assam. The Meeree are still understood to be a river tribe that live along the Brahmaputra in the state of Assam. Today, they are called the Mishing. I work in Mishing villages along the island of Majuli (Majouli, just south-west of the Meeree territory in the map), and am often reminded by my interlocutors that I should look for the word Meeree/Meree or Miri if I begin to dig into their history.
I was indeed digging for history, and I was excited to come across this book—and this map—in the Nehru Memorial Library this August. I was even more thrilled when I was able to locate it in a digital library and download it into my computer. For several reasons this map is a pleasure to examine. My dissertation examines how the Mishing deal with the massive erosion that haunts the island of Majuli today. This erosion forces them to question how they came to be on Majuli, where they came from, and where they were located before they were located in Majuli. Some of my interlocutors talk about the migration of the community from the hills to the north. Traveling down from the area marked “mountains inhabited by Abor Tribes” the Mishing believe they travelled down the river Subansiri, a tributary of the Brahmaputra to settle in both the territory marked as “Meeree tribe” on the map as well as the island of Majuli. No one has a living memory of this migration. But it is collective memory, transmitted orally from one generation to another. This story allows them to claim relatedness to the Abor tribes of the north. In fact, in my first year I had a translator who came from the town of Ziro in Arunachal Pradesh. He was from the Apa Tani tribe. My Mishing interlocutors immediately took him under their wing, telling me he was “their own” while he was away from home, because of the historic relations between these tribes.
Butler too was interested in these relations. Despite his tendency to homogenize entire communities, he pays attention to nuanced power relations between these communities. He notes that the Abor were a powerful tribe and often lorded over the Meeree. While the Meeree migrated south in order to avoid being subjected to Abor lordship, the coming of the Khamtees from Burma into Assam, threatened their sense of independence. Afraid of being enslaved by the Khamtees, the Meeree sought help from the Abor. Butler notes that these tensions resulted in a violent conflict:
This treatment being less endurable than that, of the Abors, towards whom a friendly feeling had been created by long intercourse, the Merees were induced to implore the protection of the latter to save them from being cruelly taken away from their homes to serve as slaves amongst a strange tribe. The Abors, on their side, perceiving that they were about to lose the greater portion of their slaves by the aggressions of a formidable foe, lost no time in preparing for war; and descending from their mountain fastnesses to the plains bordering on the Dehong river, a furious battle was fought between them, and, it, is said, two or three hundred Khamtees. The contest terminated in the Khamtees being defeated and dispersed with great slaughter, upwards of one hundred men being left on the field of battle. This trial of strength and courage with their warlike neighbours, rendered the Khamtees ever afterwards more circumspect in their demeanour towards the Abors, and the people subject to them. (Butler 1847: 41).
It is interesting to see that while Butler locates the Abors and the Khamtees outside of Assam and the Meeree within Assam he avoids the use of militarized terms, i.e., language that implies a breach of Assam’s borders and its sovereignty. Instead he is very careful to note shifting alliances and the power relations between these communities. While he sketches Assam as a delimited territory, he is not too keen to treat migrations as breach of territorial sovereignty. Instead, he seems to indicate that territories are shaped by migrations. This emphasis on migration rather than invasion is similar to the emphasis on relatedness and territorial interconnectedness that Indrani Chatterjee (2013) makes in her study of monastic governance in Assam. Addressing the need to study the shifting relations between Hindu monasteries and the tribes rather than the supposed differences between them, Chatterjee critiques British historians such as Edward Gait for introducing a language that replaced relatedness with sovereignty and connectedness with isolation.
In further research, it would be interesting to see when exactly this language changed in the official British narrative. When did it become, for example, significant to speak about the invasion of Burma into Assam? How did this shift in language shape British narratives of the expansion of British rule into Assam? How does this new narrative treat the Meeree and their relations to Majuli and other places along the Brahmaputra? What differences does this produce in cartographic attempts to sketch Assam, and locate the Meeree within Assam?
References:
Bennet, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter. Durham: Duke University Press.
Butler, John, 1847. A Sketch of Assam: Some Account of Hill Tribes. London: Smith, Elder and Co.
Chatterjee, Indrani. 2013. Forgotten Friendships: Monks, Marriages and Memories of North-East India. London: Oxford University Press.
Shweta Krishnan is a PhD Candidate in the department of Anthropology at George Washington University. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, science and the environment. Her current project explores religious revival amid riverine erosion in the island of Majuli, Assam.
Last year, thanks to a Sigur Center research stipend, I spent my summer on the river island of Majuli in the Indian state of Assam. In late May, my friends in the Mishing village of Sitadhar invited me to join them in celebrating Dobur, the festival that marks the end of the harvest and the beginning of monsoon. We gathered in a bamboo hut in the middle of the field, and offered thanks to the deities of Donyi Polo, the indigenous religion that several of the villagers observe. Not far from where we sat, ran the Luhit, a tributary of the Brahmaputra, that connects these villages to the town of Lakhimpur to the north of Majuli island. Between the prayer and the annual feast, I walked along the banks of the Luhit, observing the rising waters and the swift current. That day cyclone Mora hit the coast of Bangladesh, and while Majuli was not hit by the storm itself, heavy rain pelted down all night and for most of the next day. Soon after, the north-east monsoon hit the shores of the island. I was scheduled to do some archival work in Delhi and as I headed from Majuli to the port of Nimati in Jorhat town, the currents got stronger and the river tore away the dock where we were supposed to land. Our boat was forced to make an emergency landing. When I called my friends in Majuli that afternoon, they seemed alright. The rivers were full, but they were simply wrapping up the harvest. But the next day, Luhit overflowed its banks and its waters ran ferociously into their fields, wreaking havoc. The Ganggin where we had prayed collapsed, shacks used to keep cows and pigs were damaged and several farmers lost their crop.
Eroded Fields, Sitadhar Majuli
This May, when I visited Majuli—again, in time for the festival—I was asked if I could spend some time helping the villagers set up their new Ganggin. Built close to where the old bamboo structure had stood, the new Ganggin, made of concrete conveyed a sense of sturdiness that seemed to assure them. The grounds we had very casually walked across only in the previous visit now had shallow craters. Large chunks of earth had been carried away, and even if the river had deposited a fresh layer of silt on these grounds, the uneven land was not as conducive to farming as it had once been. One of the farmers told me that he had not finished harvesting his crop when the floods hit. He had lost over 6000 rupees worth of rice, and had also been unable to salvage the corn he grew for personal use.
This year, working with his wife, daughter-in-law and son, this farmer planned to harvest faster than he had the previous year. But as the day for Dobur came closer, he also had to finish building and decorating the Ganggin. The concrete structure had no paint and it looked pretty stark amid the lush green fields. Hoping to brighten its facade, he asked me to make him some flags with coloured paper. The cheery paper, he hoped, would help people who shared this Ganggin forget that they had lost so much only a year ago, and instead remind them to celebrate the new place of worship and the good harvest.
The new Gangging with some of the flags we made.
I—and the good friend whose help I conscripted—spent a good three days making paper flags. Unable to find good crafts material in Majuli, we planned a trip to the Gar Ali market in the town of Jorhat, where we picked up brightly colored paper, scissors, and tape. Back in Majuli, we wandered around the Goramur market looking for the right kind of chord to hold the flags together. As we sat sipping tea and cutting flags, we invited several questions from curious onlookers. After three days of cutting and tying and more cutting and typing we had flags of three different sizes and styles ready. On the morning of the festival, we worked with the farmer and his friends to decorate the place of worship. After the prayer, he gave us a locket with the Donyi Polo sign on it as a token of his gratitude and friendship.
The day after the festival most of my friends went back to the fields. The festival had come and gone, but the harvest was not quiet over. They worked with an eye on the sky, watching out for signs of the monsoon. I headed to Delhi for archival work, but called to check in when I heard that the monsoons had hit Assam. “This year, we had no trouble from the rain,” one of my interlocutors said. “In fact, we are going to be in trouble because I fear we did not have enough rain.”
I write this blog to call attention to the myriad ways in which people make life amid the erratic climatic patterns in the Brahmaputra Valley. Last year, the rains were heavy in Majuli, and the floods devastating. But where land wasn’t excavated by the flooding waters, the harvest was good. This year, the rains were not as heavy, and the floods not as fierce. But the farmers might have to be concerned about the crop. This uncertainty may not seem entirely uncommon; after all, farming communities have always had to deal with differing patterns of rainfall.
A large crater created by flooding waters in the Sitadhar fields.
But the excavated craters in their fields tell a different story. When Majuli becomes subject to devastating floods, it loses anything between 3.1 square kilometers to 8.5 square kilometers of land (Lahiri and Sinha 2014). Sometimes—like in the year 2005—entire villages have been washed away. Thus, uncertainty in Majuli is not simply a product of capricious monsoonal rain; it is tempered by the erosion of lived places. My dissertation examines how the Mishing draw on their religious ethical ideals, local knowledge, and other resources available to them to build a life amid erosion. As I get ready to wind up my summer, and start a whole year of fieldwork in Majuli two questions come up for me: What will it take for the bureaucratic institutions involved in the prevention of erosion in the Brahmaputra valley to begin seeing erosion, the changing rainfall and the floods as connected phenomena? In other words what will it take for them to recognize these events as part of the global phenomenon called climate change (Ghosh 2016)? When they intervene will they learn from local efforts or will the techno-scientific machinery of the state efface local knowledges and practices that allow local communities to make life in this damage planet (Gan et al. 2017)?
References:
Gan, Elaine, Anna Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, and Nils Bubandt. 2017. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lahiri, Siddharthand Rajiv Sinha. 2014. “Morphotectonic Evolution of the Majuli Island in the Brahmaputra valley of Assam, India Inferred from Geomorphic and Geophysical Analysis.” Geomorphology227(2014):101-111.
Shweta Krishnan is a PhD Candidate in the department of Anthropology at George Washington University. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, science and the environment. Her current project explores religious revival amid riverine erosion in the island of Majuli, Assam.
In the modern (read: neoliberal) world, coffee is a part of everyday life, the morning drink one picks up on the way to work. Coffee, or kopi in Indonesian, takes on a very different significance in Aceh. If in the modern world, coffee is an individualized drink that gives one the energy boost for the solitary work in the office, kopi is an inherently social drink in Aceh.
One of the things that I quickly learned coming to Aceh is that everything happens at the warkop (or warung kopi, literally coffee shop). It is Aceh’s community and social space par excellence, but many also use it as their “second office” (which is where most people get their wifi), classrooms, meeting rooms, consultation space etc.
3in1 is a very large and popular coffee shop for youths in Banda Aceh.
Politicians, too, each will have their own “base camp” coffee shop, where their constituents can approach them freely. We even saw civil servants collecting the signature of a more senior civil servant in the coffee shop. Because the coffee shop is where everyone goes to, it is where all sorts of networks are formed.
Horas Coffee Shop is one of the most famous coffee shops in Takengon. We also got a chance interview by just hanging out at this coffee shop.
For many Acehnese, the coffee shop is always contrasted to formal spaces. While the latter are felt to be rigid an uneasy (baku), the coffee shop is a place where rank and status disappear.
Kuta Alam (City of Nature) is another popular coffee shop for young professionals in Banda Aceh
It is thus unsurprising that the coffee shop is an important site of contemporary politics in Aceh. Historically, coffee shops were important sites for the exchange of political ideas in Europe as well – it was the staging area before the actual revolutions. Perhaps in the modern world, the rental cost of land is so high that it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the coffee shop as anything other than a business. In Aceh however, the coffee shop remains an affordable site of political community and political action.
Chatting with a human rights activist (and running senator) at midnight.
This was not always the case however. Aceh’s civil war peaked in 2001-2004 when it was put under martial law. Curfews were imposed, and there were frequent spot checks on the roads. These practices, called “sweeping,’ isolated Acehnese from each other – which was part of the Indonesian’s military strategy of breaking up the separatist movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka). Ironically, it was between the years 1996-2004 that Aceh’s student activists’ networks would begin to form. A group that sided neither with the armed separatists nor the Indonesian military, this group rallied around the opposition to human rights violations from either side. They collected reports on human rights abuses and reported them to their networks around the world, hoping to use international pressure to restrain the Indonesian military; they also actively gave “political education” to the separatist combatants on non-violent struggle. Many of them also provided humanitarian relief to internally displaced people from the conflict.
A human rights activists recalled how they discovered the extent of the hidden civil war in Aceh’s interior; at one of the oldest coffee shops in Aceh
Where did these networks form? From the conversations we had with former activists in coffee shops, it seems that many of these networks began in Banda Aceh’s universities – where Acehnese from all over the province would go to (menrantau) get their degree. In the 1980s and 1990s, Aceh’s civil war had been largely fought under the radar, what the Acehnese refer to as DOM (Daerah Operasi Militer). The activists recall that nobody knew that there was fighting, or the extent of the conflict. They had been told that the Indonesian military were fighting drug smugglers or terrorists.
Human rights activists recall how they were considered to be “crazy” for doing what they did; at Lhokseumawe.
By around 1996 however, university students in Banda Aceh got to have a better sense when they compared their experiences. By 2001, it was harder and harder to meet openly under marital law. Yet, university students found ways to meet, including in the meunasah (a small scale neighborhood mosque for the village).
Coffee Shop in the Village
These meetings didn’t merely involve planning mobilization, but entailed discussions of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as one activist who majored in engineering recalled. It seems that what brought the student activist networks together was not merely shared grievances – either personal losses or a sense that the Acehnese nation was being violated. What made the movement unique was how they channeled their energy towards devouring “banned books” to make sense of what was happening, and what ought to be done. Unsurprisingly, many of these university students would take it on themselves to descend from the intellectual safe space in Banda Aceh back to the villages.
Today, these political networks can operate much more openly.
Talking to an ex-negotiator for the Aceh Freedom Movement. Today, he runs a coffee shop, coffee export business, and entrepreneurship school, believing that the economy is an important aspect of post-conflict rehabilitation.
Moreover, the preferred site of struggle is no longer with guns, but through democratic politics. Rather, the preferred site of political discussion is the coffee shop – where the likes of Marx, Friere, Gramsci or other revolutionaries are openly talked about – where political visions are born and networks made.
Kopi Kocok Telur (coffee mixed with egg)
Or, for that matter, over durians, the “King of Fruits:”
Eating durians along the roadside
Below, a durian seller helps us open the durians:
So what politics / philosophy is in a cup of coffee?
“Wine Coffee” with Cinnamon
A lot, if we learn to pay attention.
Amoz JY Hor (center) is PhD student in Political Science at the George Washington University. His research explores how emotions affect the way the subaltern is understood in practices of humanitarianism.
The secret to studying a language and speaking it is to utterly stomp your pride into the ground and make a fool of yourself on a daily basis. I’m proud to say that I have mostly managed to stomp my pride into the ground and then have thrown the remnants of that pride in the trash. Why, just today, I was pretending to be, first, a McDonald’s (麥當勞) fast food worker promoting the newest promotion (又快又好吃!), and then, second, a waitress attempting to convince a customer to fill out a form for a member card.
Fortunately, the entire reason I came to Taiwan was to learn Chinese. And if I must embarrass myself while improving, so be it.
At NT$30, this is a popular dish at 曾家豆漿，a very popular breakfast place near me. While this place isn’t as famous as 永和豆漿, it delivers on quality every time.
Every day, my teacher, 吳老師 (Ms. Wu) attempts to coerce my classmates and I into making sentences using the grammar patterns and vocabulary from the textbook. Before each class, she asks us to prepare something. Sometimes we have to go and ask strangers on the street (!) about the lesson topic. I think all students, regardless of their ability dread having to 做報告 (report) and speak to strangers but since most Taiwanese people are extremely friendly, it doesn’t matter if one embarrasses oneself as I did the one time I had to report on Taiwanese people’s favourite places in Taiwan.
After class, I like to go to the cafe right next to MTC’s building or a vegetarian 自助餐廳 (self-serve canteen). Sometimes, I also head to a cafe (cafe with a cat is preferred) to study, eat, or read. Here, it is fairly difficult to stumble over my words, but in the morning, at my favourite breakfast spot 曾家豆漿 (Zeng’s Soy Milk), I had no clue what anything was until I eavesdropped on other customers and discovered the name for a delicious and messy breakfast: 燒餅，加蔥蛋 (flaky sesame bread stuffed with a fried egg and green onions). Before that I just mumbled and pointed at my desired object.
When studying Chinese one must also be willing to write characters repeatedly (see main picture). Each Chinese word has four components; the tone, the character, the Pinyin, and the meaning. When speaking, you must be very careful, as each sound in Chinese can have multiple meanings. For example, the word wen can mean “to ask” or it could also mean “to kiss”. It’s more likely that I have accidentally said 請吻 (“May I kiss?”) more frequently than 請問 (“May I ask you a question?”).
Since I originally learned 簡體字 (simplified characters), I was initially at a disadvantage. Thankfully, living in Hong Kong helped me to learn to read the majority of 繁體字 (traditional characters). I just couldn’t write the characters. In addition to teachers paying attention to those four aspects of Chinese characters, teachers are often able to discern the order in which a student writes a character, forcing students to write exactly in that order. Luckily, we do not have to learn this character:
At 57 strokes, this character, biang, was apparently once used to punish wayward students. This character is actually onomatopoeia to represent the sound of noodles slapping the counter.
Aside from the obvious option of venturing outside and speaking to locals, MTC also encourages students to attend additional sessions. From Chinese in the Media (last class we discussed a famous Youtuber’s visit to the hidden snacks of 淡水), Chinese Cuisine and Dining ( last class, we discussed 東坡肉 -a layered cut of heavily marinated pork- and its history), to Taiwanese for Beginners, all of these classes attempt to encourage students to speak and participate more but most students are shy.
My favourite class is actually the class where we watch Time Story (光陰故的事). Though it doesn’t give me a chance to practice speaking Chinese, its actors all have different accents from Taiwan and the mainland. If one wishes to learn Taiwanese, one could also attempt it by watching this series. Sadly, I believe Taiwanese is beyond me even when I am reading the subtitles.
I like to pretend I look super smart when reading 瑪蒂達 but this book is at a 10-year-old reading level in Chinese as well.
Finally, I have bought a book in Chinese to improve my reading Chinese skills. Unlike English, Chinese can be divided into written and spoken Chinese. This means that when you are reading, you’ll most likely see characters you’ve never learned or never speak in daily conversation. My choice of reading is 瑪蒂達. I haven’t read the book in approximately 20 years, but it is just as hilarious as I remembered. And it is really helping me to learn some very interesting words. It does feel slightly odd to be reading what is an elementary school level book in public, but when your Chinese reading level is at an elementary school level, that’s the only choice you have.
Until my next post, I’ll continue to embarrass and simultaneously learn Chinese while entertaining the citizens of Taipei to no end.
Lexi Wong M.A. International Affairs 2019
Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Fellow
National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei
Lexi Wong is a Sigur Center 2018 Asian Language Fellow studying Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan at National Taiwan Normal University’s Mandarin Training Center. Lexi is currently a first-year graduate student at The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs where she is studying International Affairs with a regional concentration on Asia.
The RPM team loading a coffin to its free-of-charge funeral transportation van
Myanmar Rescue – Kachin, locally known as Rest in Peace Myitkyina (RPM), is a Myitkyina-based rescue team in Kachin State, the northernmost state in Myanmar. It was first founded in 2012 and since then have become an integral part of the local communities across Kachin State.
When the group was first established, its initial aim was to provide free funeral transportation in the Myitkyina area. This of course is a much-needed service in all localities across Myanmar. The vast majority of the people of Myanmar cannot afford to own a vehicle of any kind. In fact, according a recent survey conducted by the USAID in partnership with the Myanmar Ministry of Health and Sports, only 5% owns a car or truck. Therefore, transporting caskets to cemetery, let alone the funeral attendees, can be a daunting task. There were church-based funeral transportation services in Myitkyina, but they typically “suggest” a donation of 60,000 kyats (about $45), which was not affordable for many families. There were also Buddhist-monastery-based funeral transportation services which were free, but religious-community-based service provisions rarely ever cut across religious line in reality even though they are not meant to be so. This is why the founder of RPM, who is an ethnic Kachin and a Baptist, had a difficult time finding an affordable funeral transportation service when his father passed away. The challenges, both emotional and physical, inspired him to start a community-based free funeral transportation service that is detached from religious affiliation. The group began with just 8 individuals who were all close friends of the founder. Today, there are more than 50 volunteers (all unpaid) ranging from teenagers as young as 13 to 65-year-olds.
Since founding the group’s activities have expanded to include ambulatory service, transportation of dying persons (and sometimes already deceased) from the hospital to their homes, and anything rescue related. For example, when two local boys drowned in the Irrawaddy River, but the bodies had not turned up, the RPM was contacted to search for the bodies. The geographic converge of the service has also necessarily expanded to regions outside of Myitkyina. That is because other localities in Kachin State lack free and reliable rescue services, and also because given that Myitkyina is the capital city of Kachin State, its general hospital, perhaps the most comprehensive and advanced hospital in the state, receives patients from all over the state. Sometimes a family in Danai, about 80 miles northwest of Myitkyina, would contact RPM to transport their loved one to the Myitkyina hospital. Sometimes, the hospital staff would call RPM to transport dying patients to Hpakant (70 miles from Myitkyina), Waingmaw (across the Irrawaddy river from Myitkyina), and Chipwi (close to the Chinse border). Because RPM responds to emergency situations, it is always ready to go regardless of the time of day (the night I talked to the group, they brought a cordless landline phone with them and warned me that they might have to interrupt our conversation and get going should the phone ring), and teams of volunteer rotate for night duty.
Such geographic expansion comes with more interaction with the authorities at check-points (there seem to be a check-point before entering any township in the state). Some check-points cannot be passed between 6pm and 6am. An RPM volunteer recalled a time when they were transporting a deceased person from the general hospital to Waingmaw around mid-night and had to wait at the check-point until 4am to be allowed to pass.
The RPM team carrying a coffin to a burial plot at a local cemetery
RPM is just one of many incredible local initiatives that grew into much needed public goods. The government in Myanmar is simultaneously big and small. It is big in a sense that its public administration span from the union government (akin to the federal government in the U.S.) all the way down to all ward and village tracts, which is the lowest level of administration unit, across Myanmar, including the border area. Its hierarchical and expansive nature allows the government to extend its presence to every corner of Myanmar (except in the rebel control areas), yet it is unable to adequately provide its citizens’ basic needs such as street lights, drains, road construction and repair, emergency service, etc. (and we haven’t even started talking about the state of government-provided welfare in Myanmar). And it is not clear when it will be able to step up to provide these basic needs. Right now, in many localities across Myanmar, it is the ordinary citizens who are taking charge to come together to dig drains and wells and even provide 24-hour emergency service.
Jangai Jap, Ph.D. Political Science 2021
Sigur Center 2018 Field Research Fellow
Myanmar
Jangai Jap is a Ph.D. Candidate in George Washington University’s Political Science Department. Her research interest includes ethnic politics, national identity, local government and Myanmar politics. Her dissertation aims to explain factors that shape ethnic minorities’ attachment to the state and why has the state been more successful in winning over a sense of attachment from members of some ethnic minority groups than other ethnic minority groups. She has won the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and her dissertation research has received support from the Cosmos Club Foundation and GW’s Sigur Center for Asian Studies.
Zeynep Hale Teke, B.A. Applied Mathematics 2019
Lexi Wong M.A. International Affairs 2019
Shweta Krishnan is a PhD Candidate in the department of Anthropology at George Washington University. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, science and the environment. Her current project explores religious revival amid riverine erosion in the island of Majuli, Assam.
Jangai Jap, Ph.D. Political Science 2021