Tunnel museum
On Friday, the students from 2A took me to the Tunnel museum. We had to take the tram to the end of the tram line in Illija and walked to the Sarajevo suburb of Butmir, where the international aiport located.
Then I understood why people told me to take the taxi to the Tunnel when I asked for buses to get there. We walk on the earthen road passing small houses and fields under the summer heat and the relentles sun rays.
After walking for half an hour, we arrived in front of a shattered house, the Tunnel Museum of the Kolar family.
The tunnel 800 meter long, 1 meter wide, and 1.60 meter high (I circle the tunnel on the picture) was dug in 1993, a year after the war began, providing the only safe land route for humanitarian aids and escape in and out of the city. Two of the students on this trip walked through this tunnel during the siege. One had to go to her doctor, and one had to come live with her uncle on the other side. For 3 1/2 year, the city was sieged by the Bosnian Serb forces. A mixed Bosniak-Croat friend of mine told me that the reason for choosing the location of the tunnel was that people kept trying to escape through the airport runnaway and killed by snipers.
The part of the tunnel open for visitors was only 20 meter. It was a short walk underground, but I think that it was enough.
How ‘daddy’ affects your job?
According to Stephen Poulter, the author of "The Father Factor", there are five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters. Children of the "time-bomb" father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes. But these children may have trouble feeling safe and developing trust, said Poulter, a clinical psychologist who also works with adolescents in Los Angeles area schools.
I've always told my friends that the causes of a matter run deep, much deeper than they think. I often use a similar technique:
1. Think about what happened during the day
2. Think about what happened yesterday
3. Think about last week, last month, last year.
5. Think about the time when you were young.
….
x. Remember when you were a little kid.
"Often we understand and re-discover the root of the problem if we trace far enough," I said, but only few people believed it. I took a Scientology course which had a section emphasizing Question/Answer called Dianetics. The questioner has a list of questions to ask the questionee e.g.
Questioner: Can you recall the first time you X certain Y?
Questionee: [Answer] Questioner:
Can you describe the Z?
Questionee: [Answer]
(X: action, Y: event, Z: one of the five senses)
I believe that this line of questioning is to lead the questionees to a point of comfortness where then they will feel comfortable enough to say whatever on their minds. "The first time" phrase forces them to remember thing happened long ago in the past.
Something in my heart
I first heard this song during my teenage years. Then I did not understand a single French word—I fare no better now—nor heed the Vietnamese lyrics much; nonetheless, “something” from the song attracted my short-pan attention. Perhaps, it was the nostalgic melody, typical of French chansons, the background sound, the young singer’s whispering narrative of a youthful, forgotten past and of a glorious yet uncertain future, or a little bit of all. Many years later, whenever I listened to this song, I paused for a few minutes constructing unclear images of my bittersweet years when I was ten.
Like the young girl in the song, I hurried through the growing-up process and longed for a glorious future; as uncertain as it might be, I would care less. Uncertainty I found indeed, but the splendor I discovered little if not any. I started wondering why. It took me more or less seven years to finally figure out the first piece of my “growing-up” dilemma: I was functioning or lack thereof in a framed and uncreative society, swamped itself with the deep-rooted, obsolete, inflexible, and foreign Confucius ideology adapted from the ancient Chinese. In most places I looked and most people I met, I saw another kind of problems in me, whether they are self-spawned from within or planted from without. Struggling to find my “place” in the world, I officially accepted my unchangeable traits which, by definition, contradicted in every sense with the aforesaid environment in which I operated. The only way, I saw, to protect my sense of identity and to survive whole was that I had to walk out of the nice-looking framed picture, albeit only on the surface, and carved for me a brand-new one.
It is not to say that I never “lived” before. The awareness of living began its shape during my college years at UC Berkeley, a school world-famous not only for its academic excellence but also for its liberal education, acceptance and honoring independence and uniqueness. One night, after finishing our class’ project, my project-partner and I walked out of the underground, air-conditioned room to sit outside on the pavement. I suddenly said, “You know, this is really life.”
As much contented by the new awareness, I was frightened at the same time realizing that until that moment, I barely “lived” or acknowledged that I was “living.”
“To live”, thus, has become one of the central life-messages I’ve strived to achieve for the past few years.
I don’t analyze my life and myself too much anymore. Why? Because I’m too busy living, I suppose.
Don’t worry about me since at the moment I am living grandly in a rented room on the second floor of a house at the feet of a mountain, looking down to the city full of star-light.
Among those starlight-watching nights, I caught a glimpse of myself; who knows? I might be the glimpse of myself in this world.
The following is the English translation of the song “Quelque chose dans mon coeur” base on the Vietnamese version translated by DH. To listen to the song, go to thanhda.com
Something in my heart
French
Vietnamese
Chut Vuong Van Trong Tim (Quelque Chose Dans Mon Coeur) – Kieu Nga
My parents still think of me as a little one,
but with friends, I grew up quickly.
Though we still hold each other’ hands,
something pulls me toward the future,
as I wander along with mellow melancholy,
in torn shoes and dirty jeans.
I crave for the clock-hands going very fast,
and wish I can let go many times.
Something in my heart,
foretells me of my destiny,
between the beginning minute of a mysterious sky
and the ending moment of a bygone innocence.
Something in my heart,
collapses an entire life.
of strange desires, of eager feelings,
and of panics I’ll soon forget myself.
I’d like to walk around the earth,
becoming another Ava Gardner,
carving my thoughts on the walls about hidden passions,
about the minutes and hours I only saw on movies.
I’d like to travel back to the past,
so in my mother’s lap, I’d cry.
Something in my heart.
When I sleep alone at nights,
alone in a city lies dormant,
there appear vanishing whispers,
telling a story of my life.
Something in my heart.
