Translator: Thuy Nguyen Reviewer: Seong Hun Lee
Whenever I would start crying Reading rate shouldn't exceed 21 characters / sec; lengthen duration, reduce text or split the subtitle.
when i was a kid.
My parents would say:
stop crying or else kharaab uncle is gonna
come to get you
Kharaab uncle is coming to get you.
Kharaab means bad in Kachhi which
is an Indian dialect.
Kharaab uncle means bad guy.
Looking back on this,
I always laugh because
i just think about how funny it is that
even though it was a bad guy
my parents called him an uncle because
disclaimer to brown parents
every single adult
is either an uncle or an aunt to you.
So i should't really have them supprised.
Anyways, I have a very distinct memory
from my childhood of when i was sitting
on the old carpet in our town home
in Burnaby
and i was sitting on top
of the warm, heater vent and
peering outside looking onto the street
and my teary eyes were futher blurred
by the raindrop on the window
And i remember quite vividly
seeing a car pull up into our driveway
it was a white car and i remember my heart
started to race and i thought: Oh no,
Kharaab uncle is really coming to get me.
I really did, i really did think that.
It turned out that car just turned around
and went the other way, i guess
it had been going on somewhere else
but it is a small thing
but when i think about it
this mark is the beginning of the
trajectory of fear in my narrative
and it started to get me to think about
the other as something to be afraid of
is something that i needed to fear.
As i grew older
and faced the prospect of independence
my parents weren't so comfortable
with me taking the bus by myself.
My dad would insist on driving me
to my meetings in my events.
Because he found that
i would be safer that way and
of course,
this would get me to think
well, i guess there's something on the bus
that i need to be afraid of
maybe i should, you know, stay away
maybe I should keep my distance
I have an older brother and
that's a picture of us there
he's here today, actually, and
so i noticed a pattern early in my life
I noticed that my parents
would trear my brother very differently
than how they would treat me
they would not be so concerned
when he would take the bus alone
and they weren't as protective of him
as they were of me,
not nearly protective
and it didn't feel good
it felt really unfair actually daring two
X chromosomes from the lottery
left me far from winning.
I felt like i had to be afraid
i felt like i had to keep my guard up
at all times and i wasn't fair.
At a young age,
i was exposed to gender inequality
and i didn't like the weight of envidence
so i would try to theorize ways for,
you know why maybe that was the case, and
i didn't it hadn't occurred to me yet that
life is unfair and so i would think maybe
just maybe in a Cyndi Lauper escalade
maybe girls just have more fun
at the end of it all
and so maybe it'll just end of adding up
and so it'll end up being pretty equal.
But i don't know if it's true
that girls have more fun
and even if it is,
it doesn't quite reconcile the fact that
so many of us have to live in fear.
And so, I wonder is this fear that we
experienced is it valid? Well let's see.
Absolutely, it is absolutely valid
and i cannot blame my parents for being
so protective over me.
But I am not sure that
living in fear is the best way that we can
respond to this
and so I'm going to talk to you today
about a story that story of a
project that i started called 101 days,
101 strangers, 101 stories
where for 101 consecutive days.
I set out to meet a new stranger
each day to learn about their story
about what drives them
and the thing is that
when i started this project it was
never about making my community more safe
and about making myself feel more safe.
I actually came out it from kind of
backwards way and so this is project.
And what actually inspired it was
a few years ago,
i had heard about a boy who spent his
entire summer working a different job
every single week
and I thought that was so cool
Image how much he learned about himself
about what he likes,
about what he doesn't like, about
what the lives of other people are like
So this summer I had a bit of free time,
i was working a couple of contract jobs
but i had some free time to kill
and i wanted to start a project of my own.
So i reflected on what the kind of things
were that energize me in my life
And i came to the conclusion
that it was the one on one
conversations that i would have with people.
So often we asked each other, you know
"what do you do?", "where do you work?"
and we never really asked
those big questions about, you know,
"what do you love?", "what drives you?"
and I wanted to start asking
more meaningful questions like this.
And so I grew up kind of a perfectionist
and this is my last disclaimer
but I grew up as kind of a perfectionist
where i'd like to plan
these project out
and I realized over time that
you're planning out
projects meticulously, sometimes
it prevents you from
starting them at all.
So, I decided on a date
I said july first
I'm just gonna start this project
i don't know what it is going to look like
but I'm just going to do it
and so I did.
So it turned out that on july first
I had just moved into a new building
and I had boxes everywhere.
But I still wanted to stick to the date
and so I went and knocked on
one of my neighbor's doors
and I told her about my project
and she was a little bit hesitant,
I said today's day one,
would you like to come over for tea
and she said she's a bit hesitant
but she said sure
and she came over that evening
and we talked for almost two hours
and I learnt so much from her
This is Rose. She's a janitor here at UBC
I have probably walked pass her over
a hundred times without ever saying hello
and I'm really glad that I did
that she's so much more
than just a janitor,
she me about her childhood
and how she grew up
in the Philippines
and she lived in the village
that didn't have electricity at the time
and the closest grocery store was
hours away so every couple of weeks,
she'd go with her sibling
she would carry food on top of your head
to come home.
And this was such an interesting story
that she talked about
how she was really grateful for
what she does have now.
Reflecting on that story
and I felt really inspired from this
and without having spoken to her
I would have never known this.
This is Marshall.
I met him
He's a waiter at one of the restaurants
in Vancouver
And i was eating dinner with my friend
i hadn't yet met my stranger of the day
and so i asked him
I said I am working on this project
"Will you be my stranger of the day?"
before even explaining what it was
he said: yes
that you don't even know what's that
until you sure that you want to
meet strangers, isn't it?
He said: Yes.
I apologized and said
I know you are working
but, anyways he agreed to it and
so it was pretty funny actually
every time he would walk pass her table
and immidiately he would drop
a five-second fact about himself.
And the first one was that
he hosts meditation session in his house
The second time, he came around
he said that he used to work
in the stock market
and that he used to study bussiness
and at the end of it all I asked himself
if it could go and maybe join
one of his meditation session sometime
and he said sure and I did
and it was amazing
Sometimes,just take it to
the backstory of this photo
Sometimes I would go to events
and which tell people about this project
and we would exchange contact information
and meet up at a later date
and so Karen is one of these people
who I exchange contact information with.
And an amazing women
she is a professional chef.
So lucky me.
I got to go to her yaletown apartment
and she taught me how to bake scones
So we baked scones together and ate lunch.
And I learned about her story in her life
and this is our breakfast.
These are the scones and
she sent me this text afterward
Reminder to taste the world
with your heart
So now i'm going to talk about
some more of these stories,
but i am going to relate them back
to some of the key reflections
that I've drawn from
working on this project.
So this is Rebecca.
i met with her here at UBC actually
and one of the pieces of advice
that she gave me that is
a question that I usually like to ask
Because people are so wise,
we hear quotes all the time
from people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela
And these quotes are famous
for a reason but I think there is
so much wisdom in the everyday person
so much relatable wisdom too.
And so one of these pieces of wisdom
from Rebecca was that
we should never forget what it is
that we loved to do when we were a child.
And I love that, I thought back to
my own life and my mom
she told me about how apparently
I used to like writng a lot and
I would write all of these books but
I would never finish writing them.
So this project has been interesting
because I have been documenting
all of the stories on my blog
and it is been a way to keep
myself accountable to writinging stories
and finishing them.
And I thought that was
a really neat piece of advice
and i would encourage every one here
to think back about what those things were
that you loved
before being exposed to the world
and grown up life and maybe even
asking your parents you know like
Did i have any weird habits or hobbies
when i was a kid
and I wonder if I still have it.
This is Stephon.
He is a very very wise man
He used to relate his relationship with
his wife. This's story that he told me.
He used to relate
his relationship with his wife
used to compare it to the relationships
of his friends and their partners
and he found that
in this process of comparing himself
to other people
he wasn't really getting anywhere
It wasn't very productive
didn't make him happier
and his biggest learning from it was that
he realized it was actually an exercise
in futility to compare something
so qualitative to something else
that is also quite qualitative,
is really not a productive exercise,
there is not much that you can
learn from it and
i thought about why it is that
maybe we don't approach strangers as much
in our everyday.
And i think part of it might be
because of how much we compare ourselves
to other people
and how we keep ourselves in these boxes
and even on facebook
when you see a profile picture
and how many likes it has.
It is kind of away of quantifying
this value that we have
is people in it compares it in that way
in a way that tries to quantify it,
but at the end of the day
it doesn't really mean anything.
Now this is Shamari
and this is a very interesting story.
So, I met Shamari on one of my off days.
I was, i had locked my bike to a fence
and i'd locked in a place
where probably shouldn't
And I was just coming back from work
and I was working pretty briskly.
I was afraid that it'd have been stolen
and Shamari was sitting on his bike
looking back towards me.
And he looked kind of curious and
as I walked past kind of shouted out at me
and I felt kind of uncomfortable
but we were in a park
and it was broad daylight
and i thought
what is these really to lose
if i engage in a conversation
And so, he kind of followed me on his bike
and i was talking to him,
we were just having a convsersation
and usually I would have booked it
but I decided you know what
I am going to have this conversation
and see what happens.
Because i really have nothing to lose
so we got to talking
and at one point in our conversation
He actually fell halfway off
of his bike and I was like: are you okay?
And he said: I got lost in your eyes,sorry
And at this point I was just feeling
really uncomfortable, but now
fast track to the end of our coversation
He had mentioned things
about do you think that
women in Vancouver stuck-up
different things like this
and at the end of our conversation
we got to talking about
how to treat people with respect
I told him that I felt uncomfortable
with the way that he was talking to me
and we talked about
the objectification of women
he said, you know, how can I approach
people with more respect.
I don't like that
i made you feel uncomfortable
and I actually just wanted to have
a conversation and so
it turned into this really really
rich learning experience and so
I thought having these conversations
maybe this is really important thing
that I'm doing.
And so now on to the topic of trust
I noticed a pattern
throughout this project which was that
I think that being a woman
made people feel like
they could trust me more and
this might seem like a weird claim
but there is someone else,
who's working on a similar project here
in Vancouver actually
called them the stranger project
which I found out about afterwards and
what's needed is that for his project,
he approaches people and
he documents them online as well
and he lists how many times it takes him
before he gets to talk to a stranger
who agrees to speak with them as well
And sometimes it is 5 or 6 or 7 people
that he has to talk to beforehand.
For me, there was only like
one and a half times where i got
kind of rejection from a stranger
but for the most part, people
were always willing to speak with me.
And so I drew connection with this
back to the story I was talking about
with my brother and how
this fear that's instilled in our culture,
it leaves women feeling afraid and
it leaves men feeling as though
they are not worthy of trust.
Now these are big claims and
this is just generally speaking,
but that is generally the case i realized
and I though okay, so
i can continue to live in fear in this way
or maybe there are ways in which
i can have conversations and maybe
slowly, we can lift ourselves out of this
in a different kind of way.
Another thing was connection.
And here in Vancouver were known
for an enormous lock of it.
There are some headlines
some actually headlines
The vancouver's known as
a pretty lonely place
A lot of people don't actually know
who their neighbours are.
And it is not often that
we get outside of our box and
connect with people.
One of my strangers mentioned that
it's kind of a weird story
but I will explain it
so we were standing and he said
only i look beside you
so I did and I was looking at the people
walking and passed each other
they weren't acknowledging one another but
their dogs would always acknowledge each other
You know when you see dogs and they
always like they sniff each other,
they do whatever they have to do and
they always ignore one another and
so i got to thinking like maybe
this is a little bit silly but
I wonder in our natural unsocialized state
Would we acknowledge each other more?
I mean how many of you
have walked pass someone on the street
or been in this personyourself
to dot your eyes down or to see that
they dot their eyes down and you don't
have that eye-contact to smile and
you don't share that
if you have experienced that
put up your hand and say yes.
Yes.
And so I wonder if this is natural,
if this is something that has just kind of
come about through the ways that
we have been socialized and so
these are just some of my hypothese
but one of these ways
in which, perhaps, we have been socialized
at least in my experience is
maybe throughout school systems.
So I've been talking courses.
I know many of the courses at UBC
do work like this
where the grades are scaled and so
if you do better than other people
in your class
then the scale works in your favor.
So you actually have an incentive to get
other students to perform worse than you.
It puts us against each other instead of
getting us us to work with one another and
so this is one of the ways in which
we've been kind of put into these boxes.
Another is our economic systems, perhaps
and how they're so individualistic.
Today we were experiencing some of the
highest levels of wealth inequality that
we've ever experienced before.
The top wealthiest 85 people have
the same amount of wealth
as the bottom fifty percent in the world.
We are living in this culture
where we want more selflessly and
we're trying to accumulate all of this
wealth for ourselves and it is not really
a collaborative process
So, on day 101, I met a woman
named Lynn, she was walking past me
in the park,
and I stopped and I asked her
if she would have a moment to talk
and she said, she took a step back to
took a look at me and she said:
I guess, I have a couple of minutes to talk.
Half an hour later
we were still talking and
she was sharing with me a story
from a time 30 years ago
when a stranger had treated her
with utmost kindness a complete stranger
and she was reflecting on this moment
in her life
and she was moved to tears of joy.
She was moved to tears thinking about
this kindness from a stranger.
She was so vulnerable and open
and completely wholeheartedly trusting me
with this story
and so at the end of it all,
they probably are some kharab uncle out there
when we were walking on the street
but I guarantee you that
not everyone is one and
if we can feel more connected
in our spaces then we will feel safer
we'll feel happier
We will feel more comfortable
and more connected, less isolated.
And I feel like if this is something that
we can achieve by even just
spreading a smile or a simple hello.
And I think it is something that we
should look into a little bit more.
Thank you.