Personal Life: Languages, Career, Education, etc.
10 March 2016 [link youtube]
The inevitable "personal update" video.
Youtube Automatic Transcription
yo what's up some of you might be
wondering why I haven't been talking much about my personal life lately on this channel it is not that I've been censoring myself for that I've decided to separate that aspect of what's going on with me from what I talked about on YouTube quite the contrary my apprehension has been that I didn't want to make statements that would be contradicted by the facts just a few weeks later although in some ways my life has been numb stagnant shall we say sitting at this desk working through a stack of books writing a series of essays the University grind in other ways my circumstances have been changing my outlook my expectations for the future have been changing rapidly a week to week and sometimes day to day actually today my expectations for what's going to happen in the next 12 months are dramatically different what they were just one week ago I had a lot of new information coming in from different sources related to jobs education and also related to my divorce in this phase of my life everything I'm doing directly and indirectly is influenced by my daughter even though my daughter is largely absent from my life for those who don't know you can click back to earlier videos and you can see a couple minutes of video footage from the time I spent with my daughter during the Christmas vacation I don't celebrate Christmas however it's conventional to refer to it as the Christmas holiday if you will um this came up in a discussion recently when I point there to someone someone who knows me well that you know the reason why I was learning Chinese I don't know just one year ago was because of the expectation that Chinese as a language was going to be a huge part of my daughter's life my ex-wife and I we decided that we would raise my daughter with her two languages being English and Chinese now the different reasons for that including my ex-wife's academic specialization she's not ethnically Chinese you can probably tell from the video of my kid my kid isn't half chinese but my ex-wife she studied china and her work her intellectual life is wrapped up in china and um it was not I mean look some yuppies in the suburbs somewhere might decide on a whim to try to teach their kid Chinese but this is a very serious decision that we made and we backed it up with real action we actually packed up and moved to Taiwan with a newborn baby okay so we're not messing around we got an airplane we moved to Taiwan needless to say I did all the heavy lifting and you know my wife was still breastfeeding and you know i bought the furniture and physically carried the furniture from the furniture store to the house we rented it was actually a small house it was a house the size of an apartment intel on this was a whole process and we were really committed to for several years living in a chinese-speaking environment so this was not a kind of minor or trivial thing in deciding to raise my daughter speaking Chinese and so I had an emotional as well as an intellectual commitment to learning Chinese that really comes out of my family circumstances if you want to put it that way that's one of the reasons why it was so devastating to me when my university situation proved to be so terrible here in Canada that I could not continue studying Chinese and the complaints concerning that went to the Ombudsman went to the head of the department went to the Dean and ultimately went to Parliament it's quite a story to tell and the positive side of it is although several the professor's sort of hated me in the short term and reacted very negatively the fact that was pointing out what was wrong with this department which ultimately I was just doing to try to save myself I mean you know I really was not trying to cause problems for anyone I wasn't trying to win an argument ideologically or philosophically but it was like look I'm in a crisis because of what's wrong with this department and I need you guys to help me that's the bottom line but when I could not continue with that and sorry what I was I just interrupted myself the positive thing that came out of those complaints was that in the end one by one those professors recognized that what I was complaining about was substantive that my complaint was well-intentioned and that I was pointing out things that were seriously wrong demonstrably wrong and I had demonstrated them just yesterday I had a professor talk to me about that verbally again several times and at different points in time professors have come forward and said yeah you know what I realize now of what you presented at that meeting with the Dean yeah this is worth thinking about you know what you wrote those emails about it wasn't for nothing and what I say back is well it's nice to imagine that that'll improve things for students here are five years in the future but doesn't help me because I came here to learn Chinese and that proved to be impossible so the short term decision that was that was there was a lot of anguish and making it was to switch from Chinese the Japanese and it more recent videos in the channel I've been talking about learning Japanese moving to Japan as of this moment in making this video it is really uncertain will I continue to work on Japanese and I mean in the next six months I mean the immediate future will I continue to work on Japanese will I go back to studying Chinese or will I have to give up on Asian languages entirely and if I did that the most likely language I would switch to studying would be French French may not be terribly exotic or interesting and the reason for that again is my daughter when I met my daughter she was speaking as her primary Nate language not English and not Chinese she was speaking French now that wasn't the plan I remember one of the questions that was put to me especially by my ex lawyer I have an ex-wife but also have an ex-lawyer I hired a new lawyer afterwards but my former lawyer I remember asked me why when I found out the situation was what it was why didn't I pack up and move to France right away to be with my daughter and so this is right back when the divorce first happened and one things I said to her which it's obvious to me but wasn't obvious to the people I said you know my ex-wife she only moved to France very temporarily at that time what she told me and it would think it was sincere was that she was going to France for only a couple of months and then was going to pack up and move to the United States almost immediately and again within the United States it was very likely she would move to seattle now where i live in canada is a five minute trip from seattle i exaggerated slightly but i'm right next to seattle that was one of my reasons for moving here and at that time i wrote to my ex-wife and said well look you said you were maybe going to move to seattle now I'm living here and again for a divorced couple that's a good situation like okay you know we're not next door neighbors but you know we're a quick trip were in two cities that are right next to each other you can travel back and forth any time trying to get this kind of positive situation set up now needless to say that did not happen but you can see that given the information I had at the time and all the circumstances in divorce that not only did I have no reason to move to France I thought at that time my wife was either going to be living in New York or Seattle immediately and again our connections to China are so strong she could indeed pack up and move to China or Taiwan or somewhere else in Asia I continue to live with that uncertainty there really continues to be no way for me to plan my short-term or long-term future in connection to my daughter or to plan to have a career than the meaningful sense connects to my daughter it's just not the case that I can commit to French as a language or say a plan to become a I know a schoolteacher in Quebec or something let alone a schoolteacher in France and think that this will solve my problems that way and on the other hand in terms of what my resume shows I was a scholar of Buddhism for about 10 years but I was not a scholar of Buddhism only I've always cared about poverty politics slavery struggle real history real material history and economics economics never stop being a passion for me economics as the philosophy of poverty and all these things show up in my CV when I'm presenting my resume to people some people are tremendously positively impressed and some people are not because they don't want to hang out with somebody but you know my resume does in many ways reflect the kind of person I wasn't the kind of person I am I went to Asia looking for a combination of humanitarian work and research research that was partly ancient partly contemporary etc but today standing at the crossroads I'm at right now at this university and in this university department that's been so problematic we're really this department can't offer me any kind of opportunities neither short-term opportunities for learning languages nor career opportunities the problem is for me to plot the next step in my path in a way that builds on my cv and resume positively and doesn't abandon everything I've accomplished in my cv and resume to move off in a totally different direction um yeah that's all I had to say in this update video oh I could say more but the problem is just lately the reason why I haven't been talking about personal life is that everything is subject to change and in the next two weeks everything I know now really could change again
wondering why I haven't been talking much about my personal life lately on this channel it is not that I've been censoring myself for that I've decided to separate that aspect of what's going on with me from what I talked about on YouTube quite the contrary my apprehension has been that I didn't want to make statements that would be contradicted by the facts just a few weeks later although in some ways my life has been numb stagnant shall we say sitting at this desk working through a stack of books writing a series of essays the University grind in other ways my circumstances have been changing my outlook my expectations for the future have been changing rapidly a week to week and sometimes day to day actually today my expectations for what's going to happen in the next 12 months are dramatically different what they were just one week ago I had a lot of new information coming in from different sources related to jobs education and also related to my divorce in this phase of my life everything I'm doing directly and indirectly is influenced by my daughter even though my daughter is largely absent from my life for those who don't know you can click back to earlier videos and you can see a couple minutes of video footage from the time I spent with my daughter during the Christmas vacation I don't celebrate Christmas however it's conventional to refer to it as the Christmas holiday if you will um this came up in a discussion recently when I point there to someone someone who knows me well that you know the reason why I was learning Chinese I don't know just one year ago was because of the expectation that Chinese as a language was going to be a huge part of my daughter's life my ex-wife and I we decided that we would raise my daughter with her two languages being English and Chinese now the different reasons for that including my ex-wife's academic specialization she's not ethnically Chinese you can probably tell from the video of my kid my kid isn't half chinese but my ex-wife she studied china and her work her intellectual life is wrapped up in china and um it was not I mean look some yuppies in the suburbs somewhere might decide on a whim to try to teach their kid Chinese but this is a very serious decision that we made and we backed it up with real action we actually packed up and moved to Taiwan with a newborn baby okay so we're not messing around we got an airplane we moved to Taiwan needless to say I did all the heavy lifting and you know my wife was still breastfeeding and you know i bought the furniture and physically carried the furniture from the furniture store to the house we rented it was actually a small house it was a house the size of an apartment intel on this was a whole process and we were really committed to for several years living in a chinese-speaking environment so this was not a kind of minor or trivial thing in deciding to raise my daughter speaking Chinese and so I had an emotional as well as an intellectual commitment to learning Chinese that really comes out of my family circumstances if you want to put it that way that's one of the reasons why it was so devastating to me when my university situation proved to be so terrible here in Canada that I could not continue studying Chinese and the complaints concerning that went to the Ombudsman went to the head of the department went to the Dean and ultimately went to Parliament it's quite a story to tell and the positive side of it is although several the professor's sort of hated me in the short term and reacted very negatively the fact that was pointing out what was wrong with this department which ultimately I was just doing to try to save myself I mean you know I really was not trying to cause problems for anyone I wasn't trying to win an argument ideologically or philosophically but it was like look I'm in a crisis because of what's wrong with this department and I need you guys to help me that's the bottom line but when I could not continue with that and sorry what I was I just interrupted myself the positive thing that came out of those complaints was that in the end one by one those professors recognized that what I was complaining about was substantive that my complaint was well-intentioned and that I was pointing out things that were seriously wrong demonstrably wrong and I had demonstrated them just yesterday I had a professor talk to me about that verbally again several times and at different points in time professors have come forward and said yeah you know what I realize now of what you presented at that meeting with the Dean yeah this is worth thinking about you know what you wrote those emails about it wasn't for nothing and what I say back is well it's nice to imagine that that'll improve things for students here are five years in the future but doesn't help me because I came here to learn Chinese and that proved to be impossible so the short term decision that was that was there was a lot of anguish and making it was to switch from Chinese the Japanese and it more recent videos in the channel I've been talking about learning Japanese moving to Japan as of this moment in making this video it is really uncertain will I continue to work on Japanese and I mean in the next six months I mean the immediate future will I continue to work on Japanese will I go back to studying Chinese or will I have to give up on Asian languages entirely and if I did that the most likely language I would switch to studying would be French French may not be terribly exotic or interesting and the reason for that again is my daughter when I met my daughter she was speaking as her primary Nate language not English and not Chinese she was speaking French now that wasn't the plan I remember one of the questions that was put to me especially by my ex lawyer I have an ex-wife but also have an ex-lawyer I hired a new lawyer afterwards but my former lawyer I remember asked me why when I found out the situation was what it was why didn't I pack up and move to France right away to be with my daughter and so this is right back when the divorce first happened and one things I said to her which it's obvious to me but wasn't obvious to the people I said you know my ex-wife she only moved to France very temporarily at that time what she told me and it would think it was sincere was that she was going to France for only a couple of months and then was going to pack up and move to the United States almost immediately and again within the United States it was very likely she would move to seattle now where i live in canada is a five minute trip from seattle i exaggerated slightly but i'm right next to seattle that was one of my reasons for moving here and at that time i wrote to my ex-wife and said well look you said you were maybe going to move to seattle now I'm living here and again for a divorced couple that's a good situation like okay you know we're not next door neighbors but you know we're a quick trip were in two cities that are right next to each other you can travel back and forth any time trying to get this kind of positive situation set up now needless to say that did not happen but you can see that given the information I had at the time and all the circumstances in divorce that not only did I have no reason to move to France I thought at that time my wife was either going to be living in New York or Seattle immediately and again our connections to China are so strong she could indeed pack up and move to China or Taiwan or somewhere else in Asia I continue to live with that uncertainty there really continues to be no way for me to plan my short-term or long-term future in connection to my daughter or to plan to have a career than the meaningful sense connects to my daughter it's just not the case that I can commit to French as a language or say a plan to become a I know a schoolteacher in Quebec or something let alone a schoolteacher in France and think that this will solve my problems that way and on the other hand in terms of what my resume shows I was a scholar of Buddhism for about 10 years but I was not a scholar of Buddhism only I've always cared about poverty politics slavery struggle real history real material history and economics economics never stop being a passion for me economics as the philosophy of poverty and all these things show up in my CV when I'm presenting my resume to people some people are tremendously positively impressed and some people are not because they don't want to hang out with somebody but you know my resume does in many ways reflect the kind of person I wasn't the kind of person I am I went to Asia looking for a combination of humanitarian work and research research that was partly ancient partly contemporary etc but today standing at the crossroads I'm at right now at this university and in this university department that's been so problematic we're really this department can't offer me any kind of opportunities neither short-term opportunities for learning languages nor career opportunities the problem is for me to plot the next step in my path in a way that builds on my cv and resume positively and doesn't abandon everything I've accomplished in my cv and resume to move off in a totally different direction um yeah that's all I had to say in this update video oh I could say more but the problem is just lately the reason why I haven't been talking about personal life is that everything is subject to change and in the next two weeks everything I know now really could change again