30-Day Mandarin Challenge

It was one of those lazy afternoon in the office where I was yearning for 5:30pm to come quicker. As any wise, young team of paralegals would do to kill the time, my colleagues and I started browsing the staff directory to work out who was who in and around the office. "Maggie, you speak mandarin?" asked one of my colleagues. "How did you figure that out?" I asked. It turns out the staff directory at work also tells everyone in the office what languages you spoke. I had no idea that what I placed on my CV as 'Intermediate Chinese (Mandarin)" was taken seriously. I think the thing that made me quite ashamed was if during that lazy afternoon, a Chinese Mandarin-speaking client came in and there was no one else to attend to this non-English speaker, I honestly would not be able to hold a conversation at all. It would be in broken Chinese, interlaced with English. So much for ten years of Saturday Chinese school.

It was around this time I decided to embark on a 30-Day Mandarin Challenge, where I would try to re-learn the Mandarin that I had abandoned. Tim Ferris' TED talk really inspired me to take up this Challenge. He spoke of his experience learning Japanese at a tertiary level,  how it failed him when he landed in Japan for his exchange and that the most effective way he picked up Japanese was simply by learning the most frequently used words/characters in the Japanese language. This made a lot of sense, because it was these frequently used words that would be utilised in conversation. This method was not only more practical, but also made the task of re-learning Mandarin a tonne easier. So for the 30-Day Mandarin Challenge, I decided to learn ten Mandarin characters a day, totalling three-hundred new words by the end of March. 

A chart of the 1000 most used Mandarin characters, courtesy of the Internet

And this worked. I felt as if my Mandarin had improved significantly, and I felt more comfortable using the language. A friend tested me during the 30-Day to see how well the method was working: he asked me what the word for 'fast' was, and what the opposite of that word would be. I intuitively said 'kuai' (fast) and 'man' (slow). I actually could not believe that I was able to do it with such ease. Because I learn/memorise by writing things down, my Chinese Mandarin writing also improved, with my script getting better - even Dad was impressed because he thought I had forgotten everything from the good old days of Saturday school.

Day 27 and Day 28 of the Challenge.

Although the Challenge has come to an end, I am glad that I am still able to use it here whilst living in Phnom Penh. As a city quickly expanding and developing thanks to foreign investment from the rest of Asia (read China), a lot of the locals here speak both Khmer and Mandarin, especially at the various markets in and around town. Knowing and being able to use the language has been great leverage for bargaining with the shop owners, and also asking for exactly what you want. I want to be able to continue to build on what I re-learnt in the Challenge, which essentially kickstarted all that buried knowledge. I am so keen on visiting China after my internship is over, not only to climb the Great Wall but to also use my Mandarin and see how it fares among mainland speakers. And obviously to consume all the soup dumplings I can stomach.

30-Day Meditation Challenge

I picked up yoga late last year in a quest to try something I have always wanted to do. And after hearing about a place that taught hot yoga at a relatively cheap rate I jumped on bandwagon, all ready to embrace all the therapeutic benefits I had heard so much about. I think to wholly embrace yoga practice, one needs to also wholeheartedly embrace the philosophical underpinnings of the practice. Yoga, to my knowledge, is a practice which evolved from buddhist teachings and philosophy. It embraces mindfulness and self-love. It is highly conducive to entering zen: a place of calmness, inner-peace and love. I remember these feelings so clearing because I would often get comments of my calm aura by peers, especially during exam period. I loved being in this mental space I had stumbled upon and yearned to practice it more.

Another delightful Yumi Sakugawa illustration

I first read about meditation with this forty-eight page guide, given to me by one of my closest friends, who had also started meditation practice on his own accord. The practice and philosophy of meditation really resonated with me, so I decided to challenge myself in February 2014 to meditate everyday. In preparation of the Challenge, I read the linked guide and familiarised myself with mindfulness practice. I told my friends about this Challenge and was blessed with response I got - unwavering support coupled with a bunch of meditation resources sent through from the meditatively astute friends. Some resources worked, others did not.

One of my friends suggested a sensory deprivation tank/floating session as part of my meditation challenge. The float session was not as useful for a couple of reasons: first because it was an obscurely new environment for me, and second because of my mild claustrophobia. Added on top of this, I had some scabs on my elbows (from the planks I was doing on my bedroom carpet), which stung like a wasp when I submerged my body into the saturated Epson salt float tubs - very distracting and prevented me from reaching zen until the last ten minutes or so in my floating session. I found that I meditated best when guided by the humble voice of Alan Watts in a natural surrounding or on the daily commute into town. The guidance led me to feel in complete utter harmony and peace with myself and the universe - all the good and the bad stuff.

Gili Layer, Indonesia 2014: One on my meditation spaces during the Challenge

Meditation has made me a lot more calm as a person. I have learnt to breathe deeply, and with every breathe I have become more responsive to my environment. I have learnt not be so damn defensive and as a result, am a lot better at navigating different relationships, albeit sometimes frustrating. My thoughts are not so concrete, but rather suspended, which allows me to become more reflective of who I am so I can better be.  And I guess that is the point of life, right?

30-Day Blogging Challenge

Blogging is the art of sharing oneself. It allows an individual to voice themselves via the amazing means of the World Wide Web. I think blogging expresses individuality but also forges solidarity and connectedness. It is about expression and sharing.

I first started blogging back in my teenage years, on Myspace (ha!). Actually, it may have been before this. I was part of a clique at my local girls' high school, and as part of the pact to "keep in touch" when a couple of members of the said group was moving to different schools, myself included. It was a naive and fruitless endeavour because we all simply just grew apart. I then started the myspace blog, before moving Wordpress.

My Wordpress blog was pretty well maintained, given that for my HSC year, I decided to blog everyday of 2008 as a means to build my vocabulary and self-expression. I kept it interesting by naming each daily post with a new word, courtesy of my daily "a new word a day" desk calendar, and used the new word in the post itself. Sometimes the word was cleverly used, but most of the time, I used the word incorrectly.

I stopped blogging on Wordpress during my first year of uni because I was completely disillusioned and quite possibly undergoing some early-life existential crisis. University was exposing me to all sorts of ideas, which led me to feel unoriginal and rather isolated. This completely threw me off blogging because I felt like I no longer had an authentic voice or view, and ergo any attempt at blogging was mere regurgitation of other people's view. Simply, there was no point to it. Also, I noticed that I tailored my blog to a specific audience, writing to appease others, and not really expressing myself. It was a weird dynamic that was not particularly conducive to an enjoyable, flowing blogging experience. So I stopped, set up a new domain and blogged (very) infrequently.

I left the blogosphere for about two years, and returned to it after my exchange year abroad. With a renewed sense of self and armoured with touch of confidence, I decided to challenge myself to write for myself, on a public forum once more. Feel free to have a read here if you wish.

It was fun to be blogging again. The spike in self-identity definitely made it a space where I could reaffirm my own values, but also embrace the self-doubt I was going through as a twenty-something year old (something that I still struggle through, and am now okay with). It allowed me to assert myself but also wallow in the complexities of life. It was a great place to dump all my thoughts and desires.

But the 30-Day Challenge proved challenging, especially towards the end. I found that I spent a lot of my day actively keeping tabs on what experiences/events/emotions to blog about. This made me feel like a wallflower, not really participating in life (in Chobsky's words). I became way too mentally stimulated to appreciate the little pleasures of life. I was also tired of looking for "exciting" things to blog about; the desire for more is tiring.

I realise now that there is so much value to keeping thoughts and experiences to yourself. Not in a non-sharing sort of sense, but in a way that allows our minds to simply observe things without doing anything else. Sort of like a sponge that absorbs water, there is something rather lovely about allowing our minds to take in what is before us, to hold it and simply let be without expressing anything else. I think there is a deep appreciation of life from us allowing our minds to do this from time to time. And this was something that was hard to do during the 30-Day Blogging Challenge. 

This is why I choose to blog at least one at week on this domain, as oppose to making it a daily blog. I have chosen to value my own thoughts and mind, and allow things to foster and brew. I also carry around a notebook to jot down any thoughts that are ready to be elaborated.