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Exciting Life Updates

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I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable. I digress. Many exciting life updates! I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending...
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The Pestilence of Spring

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  • April is the cruellest month, breeding
    Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
    Memory and desire, stirring
    Dull roots with spring rain.
    Winter kept us warm, covering
    Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
    A little life with dried tubers.
April has come, with pestilence. T. S. Eliot’s iconic lines speak so powerfully now. The continuous tense hangs on the edge of each line, unresolved, imploring you to read on dreadfully. The contradictions confuse. You ask yourself, bewildered: When will this end?

This week has been a whirlwind of activity. I finally delivered my jurisprudence presentation on Monday. It brought me much pride and joy because I had burnt my weekend working on it. I also completed my final IPPT on Tuesday morning. Then on Tuesday night, we were told to pack up and stay at home for the rest of the week. Whoosh.

Staying at home feels like the OBS Solo again. It also makes me remember my Junior College days when I spent 12 hours every day revising for the A Levels, sat on the exact same desk I am sitting at now. The rain beat down hard on my window yesterday, adding to the cosy atmosphere, reminding me of the student I once was and what I had stood for. There is some remarkable continuity after all, haha.

Last week, I wanted to write a detailed response to my former schoolmate Ted Ang’s forum piece in Lianhe Zaobao, but I never resolved to do so. This short paragraph shall be my condensed reply. Ang draws a distinction between “free speech” and “speaking freely”, and associates the former with “Western liberalism”. To Ang, “free speech” focuses on “free[dom]” and refers to unbridled expression, whereas “speaking freely” focuses on “speaking” and refers to responsible speech and its concomitant epistemic, alethic and civic norms. He advocates the suppression of the former and the flourishing of the latter. You know me: I think that regardless of liberalism’s merits and demerits, its supposed “Westernness” is a red herring. I don’t believe in ideological essentialism and dichotomous caricatures of East versus West. Ideas should be judged based on their merit — not where they came from — and we can (and should) pick and choose. Liberalism as Ang has construed is not characteristically “Western” anyway; and even it it is, it must be located precisely along the meandering river of Western thought, for it means different things in different places and epochs. Moreover, Ang does not give any policy recommendations, which calls into question the extent to which “free speech” and “speaking freely” can be separately addressed. Fundamentally, I contend that “free speech” and “speaking freely” may be conceptually distinct but practically inseparable, and thus Ang’s distinction is merely a syntactical sleight of hand confined to the realm of relations of ideas.

On Wednesday afternoon, I messaged the HP WhatsApp group and asked if anyone was free for a video chat. Cui Zizai called me on Skype last night. Zizai maintains The Pursuit of Truth and Beauty, a quirky blog that is unmistakably his. He is now a rising sophomore at Duke taking graduate-level mathematics, psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and political science courses. We talked about how COVID-19 is playing out in the United States and how college life has changed as a result. He has been trying new recipes with his electric rice cooker. Stories of his exciting academic life make me squeal inside yet again: I really, really cannot wait to go to university.

May my pen too never falter. ∎

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