I came across an old e-mail from my dad in October 2003, referring to a series of blogs I posted about our family reunion the previous month.
“Your updated Sept journals,” he wrote, “describe our reunion after 17 yrs quite vividly. Though they are not sentimental, they are so warm and full of feelings. I hope your sister and brother will read them.”
As we approach the third supermoon this year, I am reminded of how I witnessed the two previous ones in July and August.
One of my many goals is to become a better writer. To do so requires reading good writing, reading about how to write, being in contact with good writers, practising the craft of writing to get better at it, and taking writing workshops.
Like any task, it’s not always easy or natural to get started. You have to get started to get going. There’s a certain momentum you need to keep going. After you’ve written your first draft, you need to rewrite and get feedback.
I remember the day my father came home from his office in Yomitan-Son, Okinawa complaining that he and his colleagues had to learn how to use a word processor. It sounded like a major obstacle. Until then he seemed happy with a typewriter.
Little did we know that the word processor marked the beginning of a revolution in communication. The personal computer, Internet, and e-mail not only enabled him to correspond with his kids, who at one time lived on three different continents, but also left an audit trail, or rather, a rich anthology of correspondence.
Last photo of Dad and me, Taichung, Taiwan, March 2014
A full moon makes me think of and long for reunions. Why? Because the moon when full, symbolizes a complete circle — a reunion.
When my colleague in Humanities sent an e-mail with nothing but a link to the Civil Beat article to a mailing list subscribed by some 641 employees and students at UH Maui College this past Monday April 21st, my immediate reaction was “don’t they teach family planning to avoid unplanned pregnancies?” My second reaction was “maybe that’s a taboo subject.”
Others who read the article more thoroughly had more substantive things to say. Two days later, my colleague Stephen Fox who teaches “Experiences of Music” rebutted in Huffington Post.
For me, these two articles and the long e-mail trail of first-person testimonies to their own experiences in appreciating the community college system caused me to ponder if I had too tunnel a vision in my initial attempt to “fix” it.
I arrived in Maui with no experience of attending community colleges and only a brief teaching spell at a university that was a former polytechnic in London — the closest equivalent to a community college. It ranked last place out of 122 institutions of higher education in the UK at the time. My probability and statistics students were struggling in class and juggling work and family commitments. I often excused myself from class to scream silently into the empty hallway, to regain my strength and composure.
I did not understand what it meant to be struggling and juggling until it was my turn to be a mature student. Going back to school to pursue a full-time degree in music after years in non-music industries was an eye-opener. Among talented kids half my age, I felt inadequate and old. Every day I’d spend half an hour grooming myself to look young and fit in. It might have been easier if there were other students my age. But life-long learning at a conservatory was unheard of.
Now I teach and study part-time at a community college in Hawaii, and I am grateful for the opportunity to do both. Not everyone is here to get a degree. I’m taking a class to improve my writing and conflict management skills. I would love to take art history and all these other courses I never could afford the time to take during my undergraduate years because I was so set on getting my degree in engineering.
I am sure there are others in the community that would take courses for personal enrichment and self-interest. Unfortunately, accreditation agencies don’t assess on that basis. They measure how long it takes to graduate, how many graduate, how many transfer, how many complete their courses, how many part-time students become full-time degree-seeking students.
On those bases, I would be a poor statistic, for I am not taking classes to pursue a degree. I have students and classmates who are former combat soldiers, retired financial analysts, former prisoners, grandparents, working adults, and full-time students that fit the traditional profile.
Not everyone is here to get a degree.
Every conservatory student is faced with the daunting task of putting together a concert in which he or she performs or composes. When I had to prepare for my “final exam concert” in 2008, I had no idea what was involved, only that I had to do it.
There was no such thing as crowd funding back in those days. Or at least I had never heard of such a thing. The only cost I was worried about was the dinner after the concert. How was I to treat 40 musicians to an authentic Chinese banquet? I should also pay for drinks and snacks after the concert and before the “verdict” — a half-hour period of rejoice and uncertainty before the jury announces my grade. I should also buy gifts for the conductors and soloists and flowers for the orchestral musicians.
I decided I would ask for sponsorship — whatever that meant.
Invitation to Anne Ku’s Culture Shock! Final Exam in Composition, June 2, 2008
I asked the university where I had been teaching as an adjunct lecturer. They helped me reduce the cost of printing the posters and programme notes. I asked the bicycle shop next door. The owner was surprisingly supportive. I asked the wine shop opposite. I asked the dental practice opposite the wine shop. That covered three of the four corners of my street.
The dentist said his practice was new. He didn’t have any cash to give. I negotiated free dental cleaning for the soloists and choir singers in my chamber opera. The wine shop gave me a big discount on expensive wines for the two conductors and a case of wine for the Chinese banquet.
How do I make sure the 200-seat concert hall gets filled? I could call and e-mail all my friends. I could put a poster up and hope people would notice. Someone introduced me to Facebook as a means to grow an audience.
These costs were least of my worries.
My real worry was finishing my opera in time, early enough to find musicians to play it. I had a mental block to finishing it. I had a row with one of my teachers. The other lived in Belgium. Fortunately, my first composition teacher, who had retired a few years before, came to my rescue. The late Henk Alkema lived on a house boat within a short cycle distance from my house. He not only offered to help me with my opera but insisted that I needed a conductor. And that he wanted to conduct it.
The story of how Henk helped me deserves a blog post in itself. I wish I had asked him how to recruit musicians for my opera. He told me the more violinists the better. I deliberately avoided writing a viola part because I knew there was a shortage of viola players at the conservatory. I went to the teachers and asked for names of their best students.
Would I have to pay them to play my music? I hadn’t budgeted for that. We were all students, after all. But why would my classmates want to volunteer their time to study, rehearse, and perform my music? Unless, they did it out of the goodness of their hearts, they got credit for doing so, they would feel left out if they didn’t, or I’d do the same for them. I simply didn’t know what motivated musicians to play music, and in this case, unknown music by an unknown composer.
As the project wore on, I got more ideas and more help. People volunteered. I recruited a stage manager. I recruited a front office manager – someone who graduated with a Masters in arts management – to handle the audience and programs. I invited my next door neighbor, an amazingly good amateur photographer, to take profile photos of the musicians before the concert. I even got interviewed in the university newspaper.
In hindsight, I daresay that it was the most empowering experience I have ever had. If you can produce your own concert from scratch, you can do anything.
The audience at Anne Ku’s Final Exam Concert, June 2008. Photo credit: Fokke v.d. Meer
