Nothing But Regrets: Learning Chinese, Leaving China, etc.
18 October 2017 [link youtube]
Reflections on the last two years or so, and why basically ALL of the decisions I made were wrong, given what I know now (and didn't know then!).
Included here: why I moved to Kunming (China) in the first place, Why I moved to Mangshi / Dehong in the first place, what the assumptions were about my career and education that guided these decisions —and what's involved (now) in my long, slow road back to western academia.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
it's really easy to mislead yourself
when you're looking back to your life about what the decisions were that you made in relation to your own career in education about short-term decisions that had long-term consequences but one information you had at the time of what information did not I have known a lot of people who consciously and intentionally cultivated sort of Mythology around themselves who invented lies about the decisions they made why they took on the career and education directions they did but even if you're not in that school of thought even if you're not intentionally lying to yourself and others it's really easy to remember your own life as if you had access to information at the time that you did not in fact have I made a lot of decisions last two years that I regret but in talking about them I have to be really clear about what I knew what I assumed what I thought I knew and you know what my hopes and aspirations were sure but how differently I now perceive the situation from how I were pursued at the time very easy to go back and rewrite your own personal history with no bad intentions because you forget what you didn't know you have to tell the story placing sufficient emphasis on what you did not know so in terms of career in education right right off right off the top here I'm now living in de Hong cheyna de Hong is in Yunnan Province on the border with Myanmar when I first moved here when I first made the decision to move here my employer asked me to stay for three years minimum and said I they would be happy to have me for five years as a professor so that's pretty long-term employment and they did one of the questions they asked and the job interview was how many years can you stay and I said five years no problem and they said okay great they would probably do a contract off the bat for three years that it commits to employing me for three years so already it's it's very easy to forget that in retrospect right so I've been here for you know like ten months like a 10 month period and again one academic year is almost never 12 months you know an academic year can be eight months but this is less than a one-year gig for me it turns out and that I'm going back to Canada so there's a lot already packed into that why would I have made the decision to move from Canada couldn't mang why did they make the decision to move from Kunming to Hong and why do I regret it now one of the things that really shaped this decision was the pressure on me which I felt profoundly to have a home or I could host my own daughter visiting me so my daughter is now four years old she was three years old when I was worried about this I felt that I was in a situation where any time my lawyer could tell me hey we made progress on your case now you've got visitation rights for your daughter visitation rights means temporary custody you know for a few weeks here or there your daughters coming over so now guess what all of a sudden your daughter's coming over to stager at your house so I did not want to be in a one-bedroom basement apartment in Canada when that happened when I lived together was in the basement apartment free I was on the fourth floor the way I was in an apartment building I wanted to be in a real home with real facilities in real space just you know a beautiful home where I could really host my daughter so this job offered me that it is a beautiful huge apartment it's big enough for a family of four five or six it's big enough for a family of four at least and I know other professors who live in this building who live in identical apartments and I have a family of four or more so that's that's no joke it's a beautiful apartment it's in a beautiful place it's in a location where I'd be proud to have my daughter here there's a fabulous swimming pool down the road I remember when I first moved in here for first visit here actually I took photographs of this swimming pool and sent them to my ex-wife there are palm trees there there's a beautiful mountain you can walk up the side of there are a lot of activities here for a three and four year old that'd be fabulous and also fundamentally I just have the floorspace of a great kitchen at great floor space where I can have a three-year-old or four-year-old sitting and playing with Lego on the floor this is a home where be happy to host my daughter so right away in terms of the offer to come here for like five years this is a huge incentive for me and now with the information I have now I totally regret that decision because I now know it was basically impossible for me to be in the situation I was fearing and preparing for practically right because the reality is what the French court system did to me and I think a good lawyer could have advised me this would happen or anyone with a lot of experience in French divorce court could have advised me the reality the situation I was in was that ah my daughter wouldn't come here to join me instead I would go there I would have to rent an apartment in France going hang out there now another thing that really motivated me which again is now hard to remember it in retrospect is that prior to learning Chinese I had years of experience working on the related Southeast Asian languages of Palli lao tai cambodian even burmese i had worked on these Southeast Asian languages that are very closely related to the local language here which is called Daiyu de Hong died the de Hong Tai language so the idea of moving here and living here for several years was not just to learn Chinese as a language but would have opened the door to my being engaged with a language that incredibly few Westerners have studied and that I was incredibly well prepared for having worked on Lao having worked on northern Lao aka tightener and having worked on poly as a written language as a dead language moving to Hong presented me with the opportunity not only to sort of complete my Chinese language education but to also to move forward and move backward in my career at the same time to move forward to a new area of language study because I'd never worked on de Hong died specifically but in a sense it was also moving backward it was capitalizing on it was me he's something useful out of more than ten years of research in my life more than ten years of research that I did while living in Canada also a living in Laos Thailand Cambodia and while living in Jing Hong Jing Hong Yun and while living in kunming yunnan back in 2002 seven two thousand two thousand seven two thousand eight you know here was an opportunity for me not just to progress further with my knowledge of the Chinese language but in a sense to regress to go back to a group of languages that I really worked very hard on in the past and that I could now develop specialized expertise in and I knew just one white man who had a PhD in that area one white man who was a PhD into home dye and I think he's the only english-speaking man to have a PhD in that language in don't I so I say white man to be brief obviously you know totally happy to work with a you know a black person or you know anyone who speaks English ooh who's that language but I'm using that as a shorthand to mean he's someone who's a scholar in that field who doesn't speak you know Chinese as his first language or doesn't speak Southeast Asian languages first language he's he's a white Australian who comes out of that academic background so there seem to be unique opportunities long term opportunities linked to moving here and I now know that absolutely all of them are Hollow all of them are unreal based on the information I have today I completely regret my decision to move here in reality after six or seven months and could mang learning Chinese I had already accomplished the purpose of this trip and the smart thing for me to have done would have been to move back to Canada as soon as possible get back into a master's degree in Canada as soon as possible finish my second BA University of Victoria I have one BA from University of Toronto finished my second ba University of Victoria go on to get an MA at University Victoria and then go on to get a PhD ASAP what really made sense with all the information I had now would have been to go back to Canada and get on the PhD track absolutely as soon as possible but there was another motivation a kind of short-term motivation that has long-term implications my father was dying my father was dying a long slow death and he's now deceased and I did feel the pressure to get a job here in China simply because that was what I promised to do in the first place when I came over now there's a really funny story there that I'm not gonna tell it's a really funny story that's hard to summarize and make brief but when I first moved to come in it wasn't just to become a student I was supposed to be a student temporarily for just a couple of months and then I was supposed to start this job as a university professor a university instructor teaching English in a small university in Kunming so could make as a much bigger city that's coming into Hong or two different places the bus trip between could Ming and de Hong is about 12 hours they're far apart and there are a lot of mountains in between all right but just for that reason I did feel as though as soon as I came to Kunming as soon as I came here to China I had to kind of pound the pavement and find a job here because my father who paid for my airplane ticket over here my father who paid for me to be in Chinese language lessons in conveying and who to some extent I think really did understand the situation he assumed that I was not just coming here to study but it was also coming here to work and you know again it's really easy to get these things mixed up in your own mind in your own heart at the time and in retrospect the truth is the only reason why that job was worth taking was the short term opportunity to learn and practice speaking Chinese so after six months in China there was no point in accepting a job that kind anyway there was no point in pursuing or applying for job at that kind anyway my reasons for doing that were already defunct they were already obsolete I should have gone back to Canada right away got back into a master's program in the back into a PhD track as soon as possible that would have been a smart thing to do but again there was this looming pressure on me to have a home a real home and a real job for my daughter to be a host to my daughter there was this looming pressure on me which again is partly just in my own imagination but partly was something explicitly discussed with me and my father who was on his deathbed to have have a job here in China to be employed here not to just study here and then go back and go back into a you know university education in Canada there was this prospect of studying these more obscure languages till Hong died and also to make use of the education area in Pali which you know Mancha seemed to present to me and thought there was there are a few more factors that are slipping my mind now and I really wanted to get this down in video I really wanted to get these reflections down in video because I know this is something my own mother doesn't understand my mother doesn't understand what what kind of went into this these decisions and I'm even afraid that I'm gonna lose sight of this I'm afraid that I'm gonna forget why it was I made these series of decisions for such peculiar short-term reasons that are now going to have such a long-term impact in my life there are some people on live streaming right now and you know [Music] now in going back to Canada I'm looking at enrolling in a course in cuisine to train to become a baker I'm looking at getting education in baking bread baking pastries so that I have a basis both for the future of the vegan movement and for my own financial future so that I could one day open my own bakery or indeed obviously work in other people's bakeries maybe run a catering service on the side it's really easy to imagine baking and catering whether it's bread or pastries or what-have-you being a vegan Baker it's really easy for me to imagine that being something positive I could do while engaged in getting an MA and PhD well engage in long years of research and education before I get my next real paying gig I can imagine it being very positive thing however it's misleading to look at that as like a well-put-together plan or a decision I made rationally and thinking thinking long-term the reality is I was forced into a short-term crisis just because of the court-ordered dates on which I have to go and visit my daughter my ex-wife could negotiate with me to change the dates I would have only wanted to change them by about two weeks or something one way or the other but max wife refused to do so and I had a really brief window of opportunity between when this job ended in China when then I would have had to leave this job in China fly back to Canada where I have no apartment I have no home find a new apartment rent a new apartment furnish a new apartment start a new life with nothing kind of thing and roll in classes at UVic get back into the school start that again and then fly to France and then fly back from France to Canada the timeline was almost impossible because of the court order dates for when I had to fly to France and see my daughter for the second time I've already visited her once I had no choice about that my ex-wife refused to let me you know just move the dates by a couple weeks to make it possible and I had no way of knowing that in advance I had no way of planning around that in terms of this job or going back to University of storia so I suddenly had this hole created in my schedule where I can't go back to Victoria and resume my education now so again if I had known this if I had known any of this I never would have moved to doe Hong I never would have taken up this job in China I would have wrapped up studying Chinese and conveying as soon as possible I would have gone back to you there and again gone on the MA and PhD track absolutely as soon as possible and it's only because of this short-term crisis which is created ultimately by my need to go and visit my daughter and my need to go and visit my daughter on a court-ordered schedule etc it's only because of that that I'm now looking at going back to Ontario different part of Canada and rolling in baking college getting a credential and possibly getting a whole new career as a in Baker before I go back to University of Victoria finish that BA get an MA in the ph.d track during which time I hope I'm gonna have credentials as a as a vegan Baker so there's there's a lot more packed into this my point is I'm making this video really trying to be honest with myself I'm really trying to be honest mental mom I'm definitely gonna send her copy of this video and you know whatever if my daughter sees this ten years now of being honest my own daughter too a lot of people make these kinds of decisions short term and whether you regret them or embrace them I mean I've got to say if somebody asked me why did I end up as a major in political science back in 1997 1998 when I was a University of Toronto when I was going through university first time the truth is there's no good answer there's a really complex story about totally surreal short-term conditions and a short-term crisis and by making that decision with none of the information I needed to make a good decision and no no source of guidance that would help me the decisions I made sincerely trying to do my best in relation to this divorce in relation to the languages I was studying in relations to my academic career and so on short term decisions where I had none of the information I needed and it's really easy with no intent to deceive and no intention with self-deception no attention to to make a myth out of my own life it's really easy for me to look back in these last two years and just get garbled up in my own mind's eye what information I had and what information I did not have when I made these decisions to move to conveying to move to de Hong concerning when I was going to return to Canada and what I was gonna do when I get there but long story short I'm not no see about this word regret and I've got to tell you I regret it all all of the decisions give the information I have now even given some of these some of the really simple information I wish my Claire had given me I regret going to University of Victoria in the first place I regret majoring in Chinese I regret switching the major to Japanese after that I regret moving to Kunming I regret moving to Mancha one of the main reasons I came out here to Kunming and then later to dil Hong well I came here to unite China was also the awareness this would be a great place for Max wife because this is exactly this is where I used to live with Max wife I live with my ex-wife in I met her in Jing Hong Yu nan and then we moved to Kunming together back in 2007-2008 we used to live together and could mean this is a great place for her and her anthropological research what she did her PhD in this is a great place for her to visit me you know if she was bringing my daughter over to spend time with me here something I now know will never happen this seemed like the right decision this seemed like a great option and a great opportunity for me and for my family in a sense of family that includes my ex-wife you know it seemed like the right decision for so many reasons but keeping it all the way real knowing what I now know it was wrong wrong wrong
when you're looking back to your life about what the decisions were that you made in relation to your own career in education about short-term decisions that had long-term consequences but one information you had at the time of what information did not I have known a lot of people who consciously and intentionally cultivated sort of Mythology around themselves who invented lies about the decisions they made why they took on the career and education directions they did but even if you're not in that school of thought even if you're not intentionally lying to yourself and others it's really easy to remember your own life as if you had access to information at the time that you did not in fact have I made a lot of decisions last two years that I regret but in talking about them I have to be really clear about what I knew what I assumed what I thought I knew and you know what my hopes and aspirations were sure but how differently I now perceive the situation from how I were pursued at the time very easy to go back and rewrite your own personal history with no bad intentions because you forget what you didn't know you have to tell the story placing sufficient emphasis on what you did not know so in terms of career in education right right off right off the top here I'm now living in de Hong cheyna de Hong is in Yunnan Province on the border with Myanmar when I first moved here when I first made the decision to move here my employer asked me to stay for three years minimum and said I they would be happy to have me for five years as a professor so that's pretty long-term employment and they did one of the questions they asked and the job interview was how many years can you stay and I said five years no problem and they said okay great they would probably do a contract off the bat for three years that it commits to employing me for three years so already it's it's very easy to forget that in retrospect right so I've been here for you know like ten months like a 10 month period and again one academic year is almost never 12 months you know an academic year can be eight months but this is less than a one-year gig for me it turns out and that I'm going back to Canada so there's a lot already packed into that why would I have made the decision to move from Canada couldn't mang why did they make the decision to move from Kunming to Hong and why do I regret it now one of the things that really shaped this decision was the pressure on me which I felt profoundly to have a home or I could host my own daughter visiting me so my daughter is now four years old she was three years old when I was worried about this I felt that I was in a situation where any time my lawyer could tell me hey we made progress on your case now you've got visitation rights for your daughter visitation rights means temporary custody you know for a few weeks here or there your daughters coming over so now guess what all of a sudden your daughter's coming over to stager at your house so I did not want to be in a one-bedroom basement apartment in Canada when that happened when I lived together was in the basement apartment free I was on the fourth floor the way I was in an apartment building I wanted to be in a real home with real facilities in real space just you know a beautiful home where I could really host my daughter so this job offered me that it is a beautiful huge apartment it's big enough for a family of four five or six it's big enough for a family of four at least and I know other professors who live in this building who live in identical apartments and I have a family of four or more so that's that's no joke it's a beautiful apartment it's in a beautiful place it's in a location where I'd be proud to have my daughter here there's a fabulous swimming pool down the road I remember when I first moved in here for first visit here actually I took photographs of this swimming pool and sent them to my ex-wife there are palm trees there there's a beautiful mountain you can walk up the side of there are a lot of activities here for a three and four year old that'd be fabulous and also fundamentally I just have the floorspace of a great kitchen at great floor space where I can have a three-year-old or four-year-old sitting and playing with Lego on the floor this is a home where be happy to host my daughter so right away in terms of the offer to come here for like five years this is a huge incentive for me and now with the information I have now I totally regret that decision because I now know it was basically impossible for me to be in the situation I was fearing and preparing for practically right because the reality is what the French court system did to me and I think a good lawyer could have advised me this would happen or anyone with a lot of experience in French divorce court could have advised me the reality the situation I was in was that ah my daughter wouldn't come here to join me instead I would go there I would have to rent an apartment in France going hang out there now another thing that really motivated me which again is now hard to remember it in retrospect is that prior to learning Chinese I had years of experience working on the related Southeast Asian languages of Palli lao tai cambodian even burmese i had worked on these Southeast Asian languages that are very closely related to the local language here which is called Daiyu de Hong died the de Hong Tai language so the idea of moving here and living here for several years was not just to learn Chinese as a language but would have opened the door to my being engaged with a language that incredibly few Westerners have studied and that I was incredibly well prepared for having worked on Lao having worked on northern Lao aka tightener and having worked on poly as a written language as a dead language moving to Hong presented me with the opportunity not only to sort of complete my Chinese language education but to also to move forward and move backward in my career at the same time to move forward to a new area of language study because I'd never worked on de Hong died specifically but in a sense it was also moving backward it was capitalizing on it was me he's something useful out of more than ten years of research in my life more than ten years of research that I did while living in Canada also a living in Laos Thailand Cambodia and while living in Jing Hong Jing Hong Yun and while living in kunming yunnan back in 2002 seven two thousand two thousand seven two thousand eight you know here was an opportunity for me not just to progress further with my knowledge of the Chinese language but in a sense to regress to go back to a group of languages that I really worked very hard on in the past and that I could now develop specialized expertise in and I knew just one white man who had a PhD in that area one white man who was a PhD into home dye and I think he's the only english-speaking man to have a PhD in that language in don't I so I say white man to be brief obviously you know totally happy to work with a you know a black person or you know anyone who speaks English ooh who's that language but I'm using that as a shorthand to mean he's someone who's a scholar in that field who doesn't speak you know Chinese as his first language or doesn't speak Southeast Asian languages first language he's he's a white Australian who comes out of that academic background so there seem to be unique opportunities long term opportunities linked to moving here and I now know that absolutely all of them are Hollow all of them are unreal based on the information I have today I completely regret my decision to move here in reality after six or seven months and could mang learning Chinese I had already accomplished the purpose of this trip and the smart thing for me to have done would have been to move back to Canada as soon as possible get back into a master's degree in Canada as soon as possible finish my second BA University of Victoria I have one BA from University of Toronto finished my second ba University of Victoria go on to get an MA at University Victoria and then go on to get a PhD ASAP what really made sense with all the information I had now would have been to go back to Canada and get on the PhD track absolutely as soon as possible but there was another motivation a kind of short-term motivation that has long-term implications my father was dying my father was dying a long slow death and he's now deceased and I did feel the pressure to get a job here in China simply because that was what I promised to do in the first place when I came over now there's a really funny story there that I'm not gonna tell it's a really funny story that's hard to summarize and make brief but when I first moved to come in it wasn't just to become a student I was supposed to be a student temporarily for just a couple of months and then I was supposed to start this job as a university professor a university instructor teaching English in a small university in Kunming so could make as a much bigger city that's coming into Hong or two different places the bus trip between could Ming and de Hong is about 12 hours they're far apart and there are a lot of mountains in between all right but just for that reason I did feel as though as soon as I came to Kunming as soon as I came here to China I had to kind of pound the pavement and find a job here because my father who paid for my airplane ticket over here my father who paid for me to be in Chinese language lessons in conveying and who to some extent I think really did understand the situation he assumed that I was not just coming here to study but it was also coming here to work and you know again it's really easy to get these things mixed up in your own mind in your own heart at the time and in retrospect the truth is the only reason why that job was worth taking was the short term opportunity to learn and practice speaking Chinese so after six months in China there was no point in accepting a job that kind anyway there was no point in pursuing or applying for job at that kind anyway my reasons for doing that were already defunct they were already obsolete I should have gone back to Canada right away got back into a master's program in the back into a PhD track as soon as possible that would have been a smart thing to do but again there was this looming pressure on me to have a home a real home and a real job for my daughter to be a host to my daughter there was this looming pressure on me which again is partly just in my own imagination but partly was something explicitly discussed with me and my father who was on his deathbed to have have a job here in China to be employed here not to just study here and then go back and go back into a you know university education in Canada there was this prospect of studying these more obscure languages till Hong died and also to make use of the education area in Pali which you know Mancha seemed to present to me and thought there was there are a few more factors that are slipping my mind now and I really wanted to get this down in video I really wanted to get these reflections down in video because I know this is something my own mother doesn't understand my mother doesn't understand what what kind of went into this these decisions and I'm even afraid that I'm gonna lose sight of this I'm afraid that I'm gonna forget why it was I made these series of decisions for such peculiar short-term reasons that are now going to have such a long-term impact in my life there are some people on live streaming right now and you know [Music] now in going back to Canada I'm looking at enrolling in a course in cuisine to train to become a baker I'm looking at getting education in baking bread baking pastries so that I have a basis both for the future of the vegan movement and for my own financial future so that I could one day open my own bakery or indeed obviously work in other people's bakeries maybe run a catering service on the side it's really easy to imagine baking and catering whether it's bread or pastries or what-have-you being a vegan Baker it's really easy for me to imagine that being something positive I could do while engaged in getting an MA and PhD well engage in long years of research and education before I get my next real paying gig I can imagine it being very positive thing however it's misleading to look at that as like a well-put-together plan or a decision I made rationally and thinking thinking long-term the reality is I was forced into a short-term crisis just because of the court-ordered dates on which I have to go and visit my daughter my ex-wife could negotiate with me to change the dates I would have only wanted to change them by about two weeks or something one way or the other but max wife refused to do so and I had a really brief window of opportunity between when this job ended in China when then I would have had to leave this job in China fly back to Canada where I have no apartment I have no home find a new apartment rent a new apartment furnish a new apartment start a new life with nothing kind of thing and roll in classes at UVic get back into the school start that again and then fly to France and then fly back from France to Canada the timeline was almost impossible because of the court order dates for when I had to fly to France and see my daughter for the second time I've already visited her once I had no choice about that my ex-wife refused to let me you know just move the dates by a couple weeks to make it possible and I had no way of knowing that in advance I had no way of planning around that in terms of this job or going back to University of storia so I suddenly had this hole created in my schedule where I can't go back to Victoria and resume my education now so again if I had known this if I had known any of this I never would have moved to doe Hong I never would have taken up this job in China I would have wrapped up studying Chinese and conveying as soon as possible I would have gone back to you there and again gone on the MA and PhD track absolutely as soon as possible and it's only because of this short-term crisis which is created ultimately by my need to go and visit my daughter and my need to go and visit my daughter on a court-ordered schedule etc it's only because of that that I'm now looking at going back to Ontario different part of Canada and rolling in baking college getting a credential and possibly getting a whole new career as a in Baker before I go back to University of Victoria finish that BA get an MA in the ph.d track during which time I hope I'm gonna have credentials as a as a vegan Baker so there's there's a lot more packed into this my point is I'm making this video really trying to be honest with myself I'm really trying to be honest mental mom I'm definitely gonna send her copy of this video and you know whatever if my daughter sees this ten years now of being honest my own daughter too a lot of people make these kinds of decisions short term and whether you regret them or embrace them I mean I've got to say if somebody asked me why did I end up as a major in political science back in 1997 1998 when I was a University of Toronto when I was going through university first time the truth is there's no good answer there's a really complex story about totally surreal short-term conditions and a short-term crisis and by making that decision with none of the information I needed to make a good decision and no no source of guidance that would help me the decisions I made sincerely trying to do my best in relation to this divorce in relation to the languages I was studying in relations to my academic career and so on short term decisions where I had none of the information I needed and it's really easy with no intent to deceive and no intention with self-deception no attention to to make a myth out of my own life it's really easy for me to look back in these last two years and just get garbled up in my own mind's eye what information I had and what information I did not have when I made these decisions to move to conveying to move to de Hong concerning when I was going to return to Canada and what I was gonna do when I get there but long story short I'm not no see about this word regret and I've got to tell you I regret it all all of the decisions give the information I have now even given some of these some of the really simple information I wish my Claire had given me I regret going to University of Victoria in the first place I regret majoring in Chinese I regret switching the major to Japanese after that I regret moving to Kunming I regret moving to Mancha one of the main reasons I came out here to Kunming and then later to dil Hong well I came here to unite China was also the awareness this would be a great place for Max wife because this is exactly this is where I used to live with Max wife I live with my ex-wife in I met her in Jing Hong Yu nan and then we moved to Kunming together back in 2007-2008 we used to live together and could mean this is a great place for her and her anthropological research what she did her PhD in this is a great place for her to visit me you know if she was bringing my daughter over to spend time with me here something I now know will never happen this seemed like the right decision this seemed like a great option and a great opportunity for me and for my family in a sense of family that includes my ex-wife you know it seemed like the right decision for so many reasons but keeping it all the way real knowing what I now know it was wrong wrong wrong