1. It is as important to hold back your words as it is to speak up.

It requires a tremendous and commendable amount of self-control. I know it’s popular to be loud about things, but the loudest voices aren’t always the wisest. It really is okay to think first, and react later, even if it means appearing like you don’t have an opinion. And if it hurts someone unnecessarily, maybe it really isn’t worth saying.

2. Your firmest beliefs will be challenged.

I came into Tufts with a Christian faith that looked very different than it does now. Nothing stays stagnant if it matters to you – you probe it uncomfortable with second opinions and questions. Sometimes this leads you towards conviction, and other times your convictions get pried out of the ground, completely uprooted, with a remaining “what now?” hanging in the air.

3. Your race matters. 

It really, really, does. Speaking of which, there’s a new initiative to get Asian Diaspora graduation stoles, which I am behind fully, and you can sign up here. Coming from Chinese majority Singapore, race is hardly, if at all, a topic of dialogue, which inevitably made for a lot of pondering during my 4 years here.

4. ”You can’t control how other people view you, but you can control how you view other people.”

A quote picked up from my wonderful friend Ruth. No matter what you do, some people will always think you are lame. And that is okay, because there are others who love you for who you are. And you can be the bigger person.

5. There are many ways to get to where you want to be. 

Not just a certain job with a certain car with a certain apartment with a certain spouse and a certain number of kids.

6. Be grateful.

Sometimes I close my eyes and think about the opportunities I have and the people who have shown me care and it makes my day.

7. You are not always right. 

Believe it or not. And just because someone disagrees with you, doesn’t mean they are wrong.

8. Your parents are human, too.

9. Be faithful in the little things. 

Sometimes, the desire for greatness can get in the way of goodness. I was talking with a friend about graduation and she mentioned how we have such cool friends who are going off to India and Haiti and other far-off countries. While I agree, I think serving a small group of people faithfully and locally is just as important. If that means having a bible study with 3 people, or being a housewife, or doing administrative work for an NGO that you care about, so be it. The value is in life itself and how firmly you grasp it, not necessarily its expression.

10. Listen.

Once in a while, someone trusts you with their life story. Don’t take it for granted.

I’m thankful for my little nephew. He’s brought life back into the family. Over winter break, I noticed that my parents seemed lighter when he was around. A child requires nurture, and nurture requires purpose. They’d never say it, but I know that he’s given them a reason to wake up each day.

It’s a sweltering Tuesday, and my nephew insists on going for a walk. He loves running around the parking lot and looking at the cars. Whenever he gets the opportunity, he goes up to a license plate and starts shouting out each number or letter. “E! F! 9!” he yells, pointing. My father grins back at him.

I watch them, a hunched figure and a little tottering one, as they make their way around the apartment complex. I can’t provide my parents the comfort this tiny one can, so I hope they find whatever they need to find in him, and I hope that it’s enough.

Some snapshots of what I was working on and thinking about until April 20:

To think that it started in a dorm room with three girls and is an official student organization that is going strong three years later is amazing to me. This concert is a culmination of so much hard work and is something I’m proud to have done at Tufts. It’s my small contribution to this campus and I couldn’t be happier knowing that I’m graduating with this as my last big project here.

“It’s alright, there’s Skype!” you say, as you and your best friends hug each other, promising to stay in touch.

“You’re going to have so much fun!”

“Remember to tell us if you get an angmoh boyfriend!”

“Let us know once you’ve touched down!”

You walk through the glass doors at Changi, passport firmly in one hand, a bag of last minute farewell gifts in the other. Your two gigantic suitcases, stuffed full of sweaters and Prima Packs, have been checked in and are lounging somewhere on the airplane. The desk officer checks your ticket and you march through the gates before turning around one last time and offering a big wave, as if to say, ‘Bye! I’m off to see the world!’ They wave back through the glass, “Bye, take care, we’ll miss you.”

While on the plane your hands tingle with excitement – you’re on the biggest adventure that your 19 year old self can muster. I’m moving countries, you ponder, smiling at your accomplishment.

In the first few days of fall, you find your new reality as awkward as it is exciting. It’ll be the first time you’ve made friends with Ghanaians, Kenyans, Egyptians – what a global community, you marvel. It’ll also be the first time that someone tells you, in pleasant surprise, “you speak English really well!” (In two years, good friends will make a joke about your accent and you’ll find yourself sitting in a dining hall, tears pouring down your face, apologizing for the overreaction. Later, a friend will say that you had a part in it because you hadn’t said anything before and you will dry your tears and promise yourself that you’ll move past that. You don’t cry like that in front of anyone again.)

You Skype your friends, squealing about every detail – the liberal arts curriculum, the dorm room and its brick walls, your Puerto Rican roommate – and in so doing cling onto a home that only exists through the mysterious portals of the World Wide Web.

What you don’t realize is how the multiple Skype conversations you envision gradually turn into a Skype occurrence once, maybe twice, a year. Freshman year sees you getting snail mail; the next sees a couple of email exchanges; the regularity of conversation diminishes with the passing of time. Once in a while, most likely in the middle of the seemingly never-ending winter, you post a Facebook update lamenting the lack of good Singaporean food here. It’s your way of saying, “I miss those suppers at Al-Azhar. I miss the sound of its plastic chairs scraping against cement. I miss the whirring fans and the uncles yelling orders – ‘kopi bing, siu dai! kopi-o, lai, lai, yi kuai wu mao!’ I miss being called out of the house at 11 o’clock at night and getting plonked in a car to spend time with you.”

The cold gets to your bones; you buy far too many jackets and wrap yourself in blankets constantly, whining, in response to friends who laugh, “I’m from a tropical climate!”

Yet in the four years that follow you find yourself wedging in your consciousness the curious temporality of home in the form of Boston, landing spot of the pilgrims, people you’ve no personal association with other than childhood memories of Pocahontas, people that you soon learn have made indelible marks that go especially unappreciated during Thanksgiving. You discover the city’s nooks and crannies – you find yourself in the cramped apartment of a Nepalese immigrant, then in a protest with Tibetans, then in a refugee center in Worcester. You make friends with these people who are living reminders of a world that extends beyond the cushions of college life, people who have lived through war and persecution and moving countries, as you have done. They are the pursuers of the American Dream, which you had only heard about but never really understood, and now that you have it is much less American than it is universal – it is the dream of an elusive Something Better. You’ve learned and discovered so much through knowing these people but these thoughts are almost impossible to string into casual conversation for the ones that you so love so you string sentences of stories together instead and type them in Georgia, font size 12 and publish them on WordPress, hoping that these paragraphs are enough to bring them close to where you are.

Somewhere along the way you pick up a camera and figure out how to use it, its knobs and meters and buttons becoming familiar nodes under your fingers. You grow to love it and what you can do with it, because when you are capturing life you forget about your own for a fleeting moment, and life is paintable in all sorts of Reds and Blues and Greens, colors of heat and cold, shadows and light mixing together to form a life worth seeing.jpg.

You get involved in multiple activities on this hilly campus, some of which are more fulfilling than others, and when the student organization you’ve founded has its big concert you want to iMessage the ones you love but you stop halfway because of the reason of because. Even the conversations that fight their way through are dragged out over the course of days, because if you reply too quickly one of you will tire out and that will be the end of that. But no matter, because sometimes there are nights when you and your friends sit in cosy rooms and order in Chinese food that comes in little white packets like you’ve seen on American TV shows and the inevitable happiness that ensues reminds you that you are lucky, so very lucky.

When your friends stage a surprise for the administration by handing out leaflets about the importance of Africana Studies you join them even though you feel queasy throughout. You wear their T-shirts and you walk around the academic quad talking to students about race because you love your friends and you want them to not feel this injustice and that seems more noble than comfort and you just want to do what’s right. You find that your years at this school see endless students taking up endless causes and you also see these defenders of human rights unable to treat their fellow human beings with kindness and respect in light of differing views and you question why and how and what for.

And now, in just under a couple of months, you’ll find yourself walking up on stage in a billowing black gown, about to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, which sounds grander that it feels. You’ll look back on all the classes you’ve taken and the papers you’ve churned out and you’ll wonder why you don’t feel prepared or very much educated at all. The supposedly famous commencement speaker will encourage you to do big things and follow your dreams. The student speaker will do likewise, but you will cheer, because it is probably someone you know. He or she will encourage you, as they encourage themselves,to believe that life has limitless possibilities, and that home is the world.

Home is the world only in bits and pieces, lodged in the contours of my mind, you think, as you pack your bags and sit in your bare apartment. In the last few weeks, you’ve given away most of your things – to underclassmen in need of a desk chair or a space heater, to Buffalo Exchange in hopes of getting some dollars back for the expensive, impractical pair of boots you had regrettably bought online, to Goodwill for the rest of the lost causes. All that’s left, the chosen few of your personal belongings, are your clothes, letters, books, and your gifts from beloved friends. These are worth carrying over oceans to your new life, you say to yourself. You make sure to take along with you these little reminders of friendships because as with the island home that you left behind four years ago, you know that companionship will fade.

You learned once in your Media and Society class that the world is becoming smaller because of ingenious inventions like Skype, iMessage and Gmail. It was supposed to be different, you think, as your drag your luggage through the door and into the taxi that will take you to the airport that will take you to your new life on another hemisphere.

I got to photograph Tibetan Uprising Day on Sunday, March 10th, as part of a multimedia project I’m doing on the Tibetan diaspora in Boston. A few hundred people gathered together at Park Street to give speeches, sing traditional songs and march around the Commons, shouting slogans that called for the freedom of their country. Some had placards hung around their necks, each with a black and white photograph of a Tibetan who self-immolated. Others had the Tibetan flag draped across their backs, or beanies and scarves knitted in its colors. The outrage, as well as the hope, were palpable.

Every Wednesday evening, Tibetans gather at Harvard Square for a vigil. I arrived twenty minutes early, and saw an old man sitting at a bench, Tibetan flag already in hand, a lighthouse for the rest to see. The community calls him Vigil Pala, “pala” meaning “father” in Tibetan. At the end of the vigil, he tells me how he’s here every week, without fail. “Rain, sun, snow, I still come,” he says, smiling. “My life is for Tibet, until the day I die. I’ll be here every week until Tibet is free.”

∞

I reach Singapore at 5:04am on Tuesday, Dec 18th. It also happens to be my father’s birthday, a fact that completely slips my mind until he reminds me as we are having breakfast a few hours later.

My mother is suffering from a bad cough, one that she passes on to my father. As she complains about her health during the car ride home, I can’t help but think about how she sounds more and more like a grandmother. “Quite scary, later chest pain, then cancer, leukemia, then how?” she worries.

The house looks the same as it did the last time. Boxes are still everywhere, a sign of my mother’s reluctance to unpack. My makeshift “room” is, as it has been for the last two visits, one side of my mother’s bed, and a corner for my luggage. This time, my mother tells me that she has reserved space on a shelf for me as well.

I learn a couple of things about what has been happening during my semester in Boston, like how my brother is not in the country, but that my father doesn’t know, and doesn’t care. My brother is apparently in a huge mess. History, as it so often goes, repeats itself.

It’s a cool, rainy day, and I don’t do much. At about noon, I feel the effects of jetlag kicking in, and I take a nap. I’m awakened at 4 by my father. As I struggle to wake up, he starts yelling at me. “Why are you like that? I told you to wake up.” I raise my voice back, annoyed. “Why are you yelling? I am waking up.” I realise that I’m back at my parents’ house, where even naps can be controlled, with my parents – my loving, unpredictable parents.

– Excerpts from my journal over winter break.

As graduation approaches, I’m finding myself coming to terms with a reality much different than the cocoon that is the Tufts campus. It involves moving countries, packing up 4 years of life, and dumping it all onto a quietly familiar landscape. Coming face to face with a fractured reality in a state of permanence is as yet unimaginable.

While preparing to leave for college in the US in 09, I went through several old family photo albums, in search of a small collection to take with me. A lot of the photos that I ended up choosing were taken when I was way too young to have any recollection of the moments captured in them. Most don’t come close to depicting what life was like. I think I was looking for a rosy reality to remember them by. Here are a few that I picked and uploaded using trusty Hipstamatic:

My father in Italy. 

My mother looking pretty glamorous. 

I love this picture of my brother. He looks so happy. I must have been 3 or so when this was taken. Sometimes I wish the age difference between us wasn’t so big, so I would have gotten to know him more. 

Here’s my dad with baby me. As I was looking at this photo a moment ago, I realized how unrecognizably different my father looked back then. It’s a difference that goes beyond age. His eyes look so alive here, as though there is much to look forward to in his bright future. I haven’t seen this life in years.

A rare moment. 

Awkward since 1990. 

I love this picture. The End. It also just about sums up my feelings about loud squealing babies… except I’m not a 7 year old boy, so my expressions are less pardonable.

It’s strange to think about how much has happened over the last two decades or so. No one could have predicted any of it. I carry these photographs around with me, I think, because these were the people who fundamentally shaped the first years of my life, and I want to always remember that. It’s easy to underestimate how much your upbringing has an effect on you, but close scrutiny will suggest otherwise. I keep these photographs close because when familial moments don’t turn out quite the way I want them to, I want to remember them not just as my family, but as people with histories and hopes – some of which were fulfilled, and some of which were thrown into the gutter. It helps me love them.

This snuck up on me. Hope to see some of you there!

As my creative blog post title explains, here are some photos I dug up from a morning in Boston’s Chinatown.

The intrusive nature of street photography is a challenge for me, as I suspect it is for many other photographers as well. That said, I love training my eye to make instinctual choices about light, framing and information. The shadows and bright sunlight that day were wonderful to work with.

My first task of the semester was to set up a photo gallery of the work we did in Burma. Hours were spent printing, writing, editing, nailing, measuring and designing, all culminating in Burma in Transition, an exhibit that will be on display at Slater Concourse at Tufts until the end of February. Thanks to everyone who came to the opening!

Context

The person in the corner is my fellow TA/housemate Sophia. She’s awesome (and sorry about the subpar picture)!

My corner

Below is the text that accompanies the photos.

Life Along Yangon River, by Charmaine Poh

Lan Ma Daw Jetty, Yangon.

It’s 430am on a Monday morning in Yangon, half an hour before the first rays of morning light appear, but the docks along Yangon River are already bustling with people. The first ferries have arrived, unloading passengers of all types, from groggy-eyed university students to food sellers carrying basket-loads of fruit and vegetables.

Next to the ferry gates, boatmen are busy transporting passengers from Dala, a district just across the river. Each taman, or small boat, carries around twelve to fifteen passengers, costing 100 kyat per person. Many travel every day to work or school in the city. Traffic does not cease until late morning.

All along the docks, food sellers can be seen setting up makeshift stalls selling tea, fish paste noodles and betel nuts. There is a strong sense of community here. Strangers often sit at the same table, drinking tea or wolfing down their breakfast. In the mornings that I spend at the docks, multiple people approach me, offering me food and inviting me to join them.

Further down the river, a group of women spend their mornings doing exercises to techno music. At one point, The Macarena plays, booming around the entire dock as other workers stare in confusion.

Business slows down after 9am, when passengers have gone to work or school, and the dock looks considerably emptier. Coolies remain busy, rushing to and from the ferries, unloading boxes and baskets from the bigger ships that come from other parts of Burma. They carry all kinds of goods, from egg crates to sacks of bananas, onto trucks that will be driven to Yangon’s markets. Some carry coal on their backs, and as they wipe sweat off their faces they wipe black on. Their muscles strain under the weight, and their faces remain in a tight grimace.

For the rest of the riverbank, life starts to amble along at a more leisurely pace. Some men start to play betting games (Kyar), or local sports (Ching Lone). Others, tired from the day’s labor, take naps on the benches, or on their chairs. Once in a while, couples cuddle on the benches in a rare display of public affection.

Most of the time, my days here are spent capturing regular daily life in its monotonous and exhausting nature. People here seem tired but they keep themselves going; the energy of the place is not the result of abundance, but rather a sheer determination to make life work.

As  people return from work or school, things start to speed up again. Boatmen can be seen lining up their boats, which are numbered. The boatmen cannot miss a turn, or they will have to pay the company owners what they would have earned on that ride. Some even race each other to the other side to get more passengers.

One of the boatmen, a man named Khin Maung Than, tells me about the dangers of rowing out at sea. He tells me stories of Cyclone Nargis, and how he saw ships fly across the river, smashing the smaller boats into pieces. He tells me about how when he tried to get hold of his boat, but had to abandon it and flee to high ground.

Khin, 31, started transporting people when he was 17. He starts his days at 3am, and ends work at 8pm in the evening. Life has been more financially difficult since the cyclone. Independent boatmen whose boats were destroyed have since had to work under companies, which pay less, but at least offer a job.

When I asked about the boatmen community, he described it using a Burmese saying, which loosely translated means “die not different, live not separate.” He will continue to work as long as the docks are here. “It’s the only profession I know,” he says.