My graduate school topic has evolved quite a bit. I’ve gone from wanting to look at the Chinese Ghost cities as a way to relieve population pressures on mega-cities to urban health issues. My initial pull was to look at some of the most polluted cities in China, to talk to people working in the coal mines and to end up with quantitative data expressing the problem… however… it’s China, so nothing is that easy.
While looking for some information on Linfen (China’s most polluted city) I came across a VBS documentary called Toxic where the documentary makers go to Linfen to document the coal mines and people living there. Basically no one will talk to them, in fear of the government finding out that they’ve spoken poorly of the coal factories (that are all government owned/run). The documentarians are essentially kicked out of the city after a week for prying.
That didn’t give me very high hopes for what to expect being an academic wanting to go in and pull out data about what exactly the coal mines and factories are doing to the citizens of the city.
So I’ve had to change… again. My new proposal has me going to China for 6 weeks next month to do some unstructured interviews with people living in China. I will be using storytelling as a method for data collection where I will simply be asking citizens to tell me about their life. I want to know how their urban experience has changed in the past 30 years and their own personal stories about the economic development happening around them. I don’t plan on asking any pointed questions about the environment, I just want a plethora of case studies to look at which can then be turned into rich pictures and analyzed using soft systems methodologies. My hope is that I will gain some insights from listening to their stories and also do some work on post-normal science and the value of atypical or non-scientific knowledge. But I will write more about the analysis once I’m back. For now I’m just focusing on who I’m going to talk to and how I want to approach it. It’s difficult to be an academic who wants to look into China because the government doesn’t want anything done that will have them lose face… so I need to work around that culturally sensitivity and try not to step on any toes along the way.
Besides these issues I’m running into, grad school has been great. The hardest part has been learning Chinese… In regards to speaking I am picking it up very well. Also writing/reading in pinyin has been relatively easy. Memorizing the characters has been the tricky part. We’re supposed to know around 500 by the end of the course…and right now I’m learning the first batch of about 65 – 70 for my first written test. I can write simple sentences about introductory stuff to a person (hello my name is kai-lin…my phone number is…i have 5 people in my family..they are… etc) but I am a LONG ways off from writing my first Chinese academic paper (however, my school plan has me writing one at the end of next summer…ha). The nice thing about typing on the computer is that you just type in the pinyin and then it automatically comes up with some characters so then you just need to recognize it. I can write on the computer pretty quickly.
I also got my Chinese name: 凯麟 which is Kᾰi-Lín…and means triumphant female unicorn. 
yeah… pretty pleased with myself for that one.
иконографияПравославни икониI am taking …um 1 class. …Which is super lame. 
But it means I have time for volunteering. So next week I’m checking out 3 or 4 different opportunities to see what I want to spend my time doing. There is really less than a month left of school, so I can’t do something that needs to be long term.
For the summer I think I’m going to be back at Accu-Link. I contacted them – they didn’t really say yes, but they didn’t say no. They asked how long I’d want to stay this time, but then didn’t respond… but I’m sure it will be fine.
My summer goals are pretty solidified in my head:
- lose weight
- find a thesis topic
Losing weight should be pretty easy at my mom’s during the summer. There is an elliptical trainer that I really like going on, I can cut the grass, I’ll be walking around and they don’t have a lot of crappy food in their house. I mean – they eat really rich food… like cheese and real butter, but they don’t have a lot of things with sugar or salt. …Also, I’ll get yelled at if I buy chips or junk food.
About the thesis – …turns out my whole idea of studying these “ghost cities” of China may not pan out as planned. I don’t really think it’s as big a mystery as people make it out to be. …China needed to increase their GDP by 8% in a year… so each regional government was given the instruction to do so. The easiest way to do it was to build infrastructure. Not only would this falsely inflate the GDP by making it seem like more money was being spent but it would also employ more workers. As for why they stayed empty – investors bought out most of the housing and now are just holding onto it, waiting to sell. So what houses are left are actually really expensive. Also – no one wants to move there because there is currently no economy there. Is this all a problem? I dunno, it’s weird – but I think it’s going to play itself out in a few years. I’d rather work on something that really will help people when I get involved. …So I’ve been doing a shit ton of reading about coal mining in China and the effects on people’s health, the lack of environmental health education, the effects on live stock, farms and water… There are lots of issues with coal, it’s just not a horribly original topic. The ghost cities were original… oh well, such is life.
I still need to talk to my advisor about all this – but I haven’t gotten into York yet, so I’m not going to bother him until I do.
This is the personal statement that I wrote for York. I wrote a slightly different one for U of T but I like it a lot less… I’m probably going to get into both schools but I will definitely choose York over U of T in a heartbeat. The person who would be my advisor is amazing, the faculty is much kinder and smaller so it will be easier to make close connections and the way the program is designed gives me much more freedom to structure my graduate degree into something really good for what I’m doing. …Here’s the statement:
While in China this past summer I saw vast, empty, but beautiful and expensive cities that were being built close to very impoverished and poor areas. It is apparent that the management of planning and investment in China is off track. I want to examine how and why. My intention for graduate work is to apply systems methodology to the kinds of urban planning problems faced by rapidly developing economies like China’s. I would like my work to have a practical effect on the lives of people living today as well as provide an informed contribution to academic research. York University, with its excellent interdisciplinary option, would be an ideal choice to allow me to work towards this goal. The opportunity to work with noted systems thinkers, such as Dr. Martin Bunch, would enable me to explore these issues while applying my strong research and writing skills, demonstrated in my undergraduate work. Dr. Bunch has agreed to supervise me in addition to an agreed upon thesis committee comprised of Dr. Peter Mulvihil as well as Dr. Xueqing Xu from the Chinese Language and Literature department.
My academic career has been varied and full of interesting challenges. My wide range of professional and academic experiences gives me a unique perspective on my areas of interest. Professionally I have mainly been in management and executive positions strengthening my abilities for self-directed organization and understanding of group dynamics including people’s needs when learning to live and work together. Academically, my original focus was on environmental science and ecosystem behaviour, but at the University of Victoria I was exposed to the pressing and serious social problems in environmental studies, and decided to further study these social aspects of my field. During the second half of my degree I thus focused mainly on urban planning and economics in East Asia.
During my years at York, I was introduced to systems theory and soft systems methodology. These were integral elements in piecing together the varied academic themes I explored throughout my undergraduate studies. My diverse background had given me a solid foundation in the biophysical workings of ecosystems, the political background for understanding the need for participatory and informed action, and the economic insights to understand the motivations of stakeholders. I believe these three areas are vital for an informed approach to urban development problems and when accompanied with systems theory allows for a more holistic understanding and approach to global environmental issues in general.
Due to my strong academic past and varied professional life activities I feel prepared to explore the questions that my Chinese experience posed. As I stood staring at the empty Chinese city before me, I wondered: Who planned this city? Are there more like it? What went wrong? All the environmental planning theory I had studied stood concrete in front of me. In that moment I had an emotional as well as an intellectual experience of the material I had written, read and talked about for so many years. The York Masters of Environmental Studies, which I hope to partner with the York Graduate Diploma in Asian studies, is the right program for me because of its interdisciplinary approach, in which I will thrive as a self-directed individual with a strong work ethic and desire for knowledge.
Comments (0) 
Themocracy