Father and son

Never had I thought that my son, Chi-an, will become a musician or a guitarist one day. But he is now, and is very busy teaching people of various age groups in schools in the daytime, in the Music Education Centre after the school hours, some other students come to our home to learn from him in his studio. This picture shows the place he sets up as his guitar tuition classroom.

Chi-an's involvement in learning guitar had a dramatic story behind it. When he had just turned to eight years old, an age local schoolboy student are entitled to join in a government-funded weekend music education, I enrolled him on that program. All of the new students of that program started learning music with an easy to play instrument called recorder.

Two terms had passed and I found Chi-an was not as passionate in his daily practice at home as he was when he just joined in the program. I asked him why and he showed a boring gesture, not even looked at me, but said "I'm bored with that". "How come?", "you played quite well, don't you?". "Yes, but I have learned all of the musics of that book." He replied. 

How could that be possible? The first book meant to run for four terms. But I was curious to know if his words was true, so I asked him to play every piece of music for me. And as if he really wanted to get out of that program, he confidently and promptly picked up his recorder and played on and on till the last piece of the book. I was amazed, and I thought that I might have to consult Mrs. Rimer, chief executive officer of the music education program.

During the class break, I asked Mrs. Rimer how should I deal with this problem? Mrs. Rimer was concerned of problem that her student lost their interest in learning music. But Chi-an's cause sounded different to her. She told me that if Chi-an really could play the whole book of music, she would allow him to jump to the upper level straightaway.

So, Chi-an was summoned to present before Mrs. Rimer. He confidently played one after another without much mistakes. Mrs. Rimer could not allow him to play every single one because she was very busy, so after Chi-an had played four or five pieces, Mrs. Rimer turned to the last page of the book, and again Chi-an confidently played it to Mrs. Rimer's satisfaction. "Very good! I will inform the teacher of the second year recorder class about my decision to place Chi-an in her class right now."

That was how Chi-an jumped to a higher level of recorder class and finished the recorder class in one year. 

After that basic recorder learning, each of the music education program students was supposed to select their favorite instrument to carry on their learning according to the program. As most of other Asian parents, I tried to persuade him to learn violin or cello. But he did not like either one of these two instruments, and finally agreed to learn clarinet.

In the year that followed, he learned Clarinet quite confidently and easily. But I could not see any of his passion in the learning of this instrument. Then, before the first year of learning clarinet was to finish, he argued to quit from the music education program. His reason was simple -- he was bored of it.
In order not to let him drop out of the music education, I suggested that he could change to learn some other instrument of his favorite. And this time, he chose cello. The reason was that cello was big, and to him "big" meant cool.

So he was placed in the cello class; was given a cello by the music school and was happily carrying that big object around in the school. There were only two students in his class, Chi-an and another student, a lovely Russian girl of Chi-an's age.

Every Saturday afternoon, I drove the cello, Chi-an and grandma to the school for the one-hour lesson. And to make him happy in the learning of the cello, three of us went to KFC for lunch after the class as a reward. Even I had so many encouragement and reward to motivate his learning, yet. I could not see a sign of his passion over that instrument.

Finally, the one year cello lesson was coming to an end. He told me what really interested him was guitar, electric guitar, the guitar that plays rock and roll. Oh, dear me! His real favorite was exactly what I was fear of.

One day, while I was waiting for his class to finish in the school yard, I came across Mrs. Rimer. She smiled and asked me "how is Chenny?" I think I must have a worrying facial expression at that time, instead of greeting back to Mrs. Rimer properly, I murmured "he played cello quite well, but he told me he was really interested in guitar." Then, Mrs. Reamer replied to me in quite a stern voice "guitar is also music, what's wrong with it?". With Mrs. Rimer's challenging remark, I was sort of suddenly enlightened. My mind was more opened to the instrument that Chi-an really liked.

Not even before Chi-an's cello class was finished, he and I were found in Mainline Music buying a guitar and an amplifier. This time, I really saw his passion of the guitar music.

In the long journey in supporting his pursuit of learning his favorite instrument, I had never thought that one day he would make guitar tuition his career. About eight years from the day he got his first guitar, he was employed by the Music Education Centre as a guitar teacher during his second year in the University on a part-time basis.

As of the time I'm writing this blog about his career, he has been teaching guitar full time just over one whole year. From the stories of his interactivity with the students and his steady growth of popularity reflected from his the enrollment and retention figures, I know he is on the right path of his career.

I'm now really relieved in seeing both my children are being active and passionate on their jobs. All I need to do now is to be their spiritual support and to concentrate more In the Amituofo chanting.

Will the world be better off by 2020?

One of the papers that Chenny chooses to study this year is business ethics. Not long after the term commenced in March, we had a spontaneous chat during the dinner time. Very seldom had we had long, formal and academic talks, but this one was. The chat gradually drifted to his further study on Business Management, then he raised a big question "Will the world be better off by 2020?" and invited my input of thoughts about this topic.

I read quite a lot of news reports relating to this topic in recent couple of years. Most of them predict a worse one, and so does mine. I had a compulsion of writing an essay type document on this subject at the moment when Chenny raised that question. The next day I worked out a 750 word report to at least prove the logical part of my brain is still functional although it lacked supporting statistical figures..

Below is my writing.

The world will be worse generally by 2020. So I believe.

My conclusion that the world will be generally worse by 2020 is based on the following arguments. 1) dysfunctional consumerism, 2) worldwide moral backward 3) technology over dependence.

Consumerism has a bad image nowadays. People seem to have realized consumerism is the cause of destruction in many ways, such as the threat to ecological balance; overuse of natural resources; encourage unnecessary consumption. These are a few examples of the nature of consumerism.

Almost no exception, when any country experiences an economical downturn, its government always turn to the remedy of consumption stimulation. During the worldwide financial crisis in 2008, in order to slow down the recession, Taiwan government issued agreed amount of consumer voucher. Taiwan Pres. appeared in the TV, using the voucher to buy food and goods to stimulate consumption in an attempt to alleviate the impact on small businesses. Other countries in the world also adopted similar ways, though differently, to seek for a solution from consumerism.

Apparently most of the free countries in the world adopt consumerism as an instant remedy of economy stimulation. As a result, this approach to economy stimulation causes a lot of waste on their national resources, and perhaps still see the recession worsening.

Because so far in the world all the capitalised countries have no other solutions than the consumerism approach, and we know what it will lead to. That's why I believe it will not be better off by 2020.

The second point that supports me to believe the world will not be better off by 2020 is the fact that the worldwide moral standard is going backward.

Overall moral standard has a great impact on the country in terms of social cost. If corruption is commonly found in the government, this country will see no future. A nation's social security will be fragile if the moral standard among the people is too low. Read in the news you will see what the overall moral standards is like in a country. Police was attacked; infants were killed; shops were robbed, and etc.

Although it is impossible to erase all crime or corruption from a society, what we are looking at is the tendency of its increase and its severity. And the statistic reveals the worry is not wrong.

And the consumerism will make the issue of moral standard a lot worse. We all can tell this by common sense.

The third point that makes me believe 2020 will not be better off is our over dependence on technology, especially the IT technology. We know that today everything we do is depending on computer and Internet connection. When there is any accident occurred, chaos follows immediately. We all experience traffic jam due to the failure of traffic signals; the long queue in supermarkets check out point; top secrete information hacked, all these result in social cost rocketing.

My arguments sound pessimistic, but I'm only reflecting the truth and facts. The solutions I can think of are on the following.

Setup a ministry of moral education. Teach people to live simple lifestyle.

Largely increase the spending on fine cultural promotion and cultural related tourism development.

A Cross-generation Friendship

This young fella is known as Robbie. He has been my colleague, English teacher, playmate, or in the modern term, my buddy since that day when he introduced himself to me in 2003. As his age is the same of my own kid, I take this friendship with him as a cross-generation one.

The stories started from 21st October 2003, the first day of the three day training program which our company, Ora Limited, sent us to for our learning of moderation skills. Ora is a private training establishment providing a distant learning programme titled Kiwi Ora to deliver knowledge about the basics of New Zealand to new immigrants who enrolled.

It was a clear spring morning. The training was undergoing in Wesley Community Centre in Auckland. Peter, the trainer, had just finished his first class of the day and announced a 20 minute tea break. So we walked out of the classroom for a good breath of air and mingling with colleagues we had not seen before.

As I was leaning on the veranda rail outside of the classroom, gazing afar, recollecting what had been taught in the first class, a young man with a backpack walked briskly up the flight of stairs, sort of in haste, toward me.

"Hi!" he said to me, panted a bit. "Hi!" I greeted back, "my name is Morris. Are you coming for the training?". "Yes," he said, "My name is Robbie. I am a newly recruited advisor. The second head in the office just informed me of the training this morning. It is my commencing day today, so I came from office to join in the class. I must have missed the first period..."

The conversation went on. I knew he was from Taiwan at age 6 with his parents. He had just graduated from Auckland University, was major in Education, worked for Federal Express in the last six months, and bits and pieces of other topics till the trainer swinged the bell to call us in.

The second class was game related to the training. The trainees were divided into 3 groups to be in the game. Robbie was naturally invited to join our group. His English proficiency, nimble movement required by the game made the elder and ESL (English second language) members of our group less stressful.

Robbie and I became close friend during the three days. Soon the three day training was over and we went back to work routine from own home office relying on telephone and internet to contact the Kiwi Ora students and the outside world.

Computer skills is an important part of our everyday job as a Kiwi Ora advisor. We were supposed to be able to use the Office softwares and general office equipments well. We had to deal with trouble-shooting in case of paper jam on printer or fax machine, computer system crash, internet disruption, virus issues and etc. Under this circumstance, someone like Robbie who was recognised as computer expert among advisors became very important, and often called out to the rescue of other advisors'.

I was quite good at keeping the office equipments run smoothly, however, from time to time the Windows system, virus or internet could go wrong inevitably and these problems were beyond my computer knowledge.

Once, my internet connection was lost. Robbie came to check all the possible problems but found none. The last option would be running a system restoration which was very time consuming. Without a frown, Robbie moved my notebook to his home and spent one whole night to get it up and running.

Another time of Robbie's big help given to my computer was when I shifted to another place in October 2004. The internet connection was lost again. He just worked on it for me with enthusiasm.

His regular contact with me via e-mail and text message through mobile phone means I have a private tutor teaching me English. At the begining stage of my involvement in Kiwi Ora, it took me at least 15 minutes to finish writing a short e-mail. Through constant practice in writing messages to him, I am now able to write a lengthy article like this post in English with ease of mind. Thanks to him.

With so much assistances he had given me, what had I repaid him? I could not think of any, however, he insisted he had learned a lot through talking with me. What a profound compliment he has made!

Being young, that meant his reactions toward unfair or offensive remarks from his students or other colleagues tended to be following the impulse instead of the brain. Fortunately he managed to hold the hurtful feelings and turned to seek for counselling from me.

I usually gave him my caring ears, showed my empathy to him, reflected what he was feeling, and lastly asked him what would he do toward the problem. I followed the counselling principles which I had learned from my 10 year engagement in the voluntary role as Auckland Lifeline telephone counsellor. Although I was not sure how much help my caring ears and the fundamental counselling skills may have brought in defusing his anger, I did act to him like a patient and caring parent to his own kids. Well, he usually commented at the end of our counselling-like conversation, "ah! sensei (sir in Japanese), you are wise man. Thank you very much.", leaving me dumbfounded.

In June 2005, I was diagnosed having Parkinson Disease. Quite depressed I was from hearing doctor's announcement. This time, Robbie played his role as my counsellor. His prescription was: inviting me to join his letter-drop cruise* whenever he scheduled one; and proposal of taking my annual leave for a holiday in Australia. I accepted his suggestion and he also arranged his holiday to be in the same time window. So on 15th August 2005 we flew together to Sydney. I stayed at my 4th sister's place and he stayed at the Holiday Inn enjoying a real holiday.
As my disease deteriorated due to its progressive nature, I was gradually losing ability of driving for duration over 10 minutes. He was always pleased to give me a ride to places such as company functions, conference, student meeting venues, or anywhere over the other side of the harbour bridge.

By April 2006, my disease became more unbearable. I considered quit from this job. It was a tough decision to make as although my daughter had gained her bachelor degree and a permanent job, my son was just in his first year in the university then. It was Robbie who came to my home office on 3rd May 2006 to help me make up my mind.

I had drafted my resignation e-mail the previous day but was finding no enough courage to send it to the head office. Robbie said to me, "Chenny is in university now and is able to support himself, why do you have to struggle with work now that the disease is troubling you?" That's right, how can I hide the fact of being sick forever? So at that moment I hit the SEND button of the Outlook to get that resignation letter e-mailed to the manager with Robbie standing beside me watching.

About two month after my resignation, Robbie followed me. He got an even better job at an education institute. His new employer sent him to Boston, USA to attend the world annual e-learning conference.

Though our colleagueship had come to an end in 2006, however, this cross-generation friendship carries on till no end.
Things are in constant flux. I was informed by Robbie the other day of his very tough decision in life: shift to Adelaide, Australia where he was just offered a job as e-learning advisor. Considering New Zealand is where he spent his days of childhood and youthhood; is where all his friends live; is where his parents reside. It is a difficult decision to make, yet the quest for the deeper taste of life can only be attained if one is resolved to transcend the boundary of comfort zone. No matter what is to be his final choice, by the moment prior to his very likely departure, I post this article as my best wish to his new life in Australia.

* letter-drop cruise: Some of Kiwi Ora learners are slow in doing their assessments. When their due-date is up, then the advisor has to use all sorts of method to motivate them. Dropping a notice of late assessment by hand-delivery in the student's letter box make them feel the advisor is close to them and thus they give more effort on the assessment.

Guide To A Happy Life – Di Zi Gui (弟子規)

This pamphlet caught my eyes one day in a Buddhist group cultivation session which I attend regularly. It was displayed among many other Buddhism publications on the table for free circulation. It drew my attention not because of its delicate cover design but the subtitle “GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE”. I said to myself silently “Gee, hope this guide does bring happiness to me.”

I turned to the introduction page of this pamphlet and read “Confucius believed that moral principles, virtues and discipline should be the very first lesson taught to a child, and that children should practice them daily.” That means a happy life can only be achieved if the foundation of being a good child is carefully laid at a young age. So this is a book teaching children to become a good people when they grow up. But the subtitle “GUIDE TO A HAPPY LIFE” sounds that it is a set of guides applies to people of all age.

Indeed this set of guides should be followed fully in order to guarantee a happy life. Why? Because the learning outcome found in a child can only be excellent if the parents and people surrounding this child are leading good examples. Therefore, this book is not just created to teach the children but also the adults. It is understandable to me that the happiest parents are those whose children are behaving and performing nicely. A child with good behaviour learns other subjects more efficiently. A student with good learning efficiency achieves life goals more easily. Thus, each step of their life is getting good influence from this set of guides set out by the ancient sages, and this brings about long lasting happiness to all the parents, children and people concerned. Isn’t this logical?

It is not just logical, it really works. Recently Master Chin Kung made an experiment in teaching this book to the children and interested adults in a small town called Tangchi in Anhui Province. He anticipated a notable result to be achieved from this experiment in 3 years; however, a good result emerged in half a year instead. He said this result proved that people are educable. This town has a lot of moving stories now. The crime rate obviously drops. Children are polite. Their learning records improve. And adults are leading good example. The leaders of other cities are seeking for this kind of education to be delivered to their residents.

A happy life is what everyone looking for throughout their life. Recently I heard a lot of news from Radio Live about tragedies caused by gambling, party pill and alcohol. Nowadays we tend to choose any method that brings instant effect. It is fair to do so. But the result tells us there is no bargain in getting happiness. The deluded happy feeling only lasts a few hours and perhaps ends up with a lot of trouble. For the sake of creating a happy society, why don’t we get this educational pamphlet a try? If it is promoted and carried out properly, it should generate a good outcome in one year.

This pamphlet is accessible following the link below. It is published in bilingual format, and is welcomed to download for free circulation. Amitofohttp://www.amtb.org.tw/pdf/hz32-05.pdf