Short Creative Nonfiction
Compilation from UCLA Creative Nonfiction I and II (2021 and 2022)
The Moment I Knew I was in Trouble:The Lily Pond
There’s something fantastic, almost romantic, about the lily ponds. While my family was tending to my younger sisters, I snuck behind a tangle of lazy branches and weeds to explore a lily pond I’d discovered at the Washington-Canada border. The pond resembled the pictures I’d seen in the fairytales. This was the pond where the princess must’ve met the frog! The clouds parted to reveal the sunset. Magic filled the air. The pond was beautiful, not in the same way as a manicured rose garden, but instead like a fecund, abandoned garden, where life grew freely. The five o’clock sunlight seeped into every crevice of the pond, bathing everything in a translucent glow. Thickets of verdant algae swayed with the gentle current, and clusters of moss crept up the rocks near the pond’s periphery. Marbled turtles ambled along the rocks while iridescent dragonflies glimmered in the summer dusk. Pink lilies danced on the water, and the damp air smelled of musty maple syrup with a hint of Hydrogen Sulfide. My dress clung my sweaty skin as I inched closer to the pond’s edge. Precariously balanced on a mossy rock, I decided to walk on the lily pads across the pond. I took one step and was swamped by viscous algae. I tried to open my eyes, but crumbs of sand stung my eyes. I screamed, only to swallow the foul water. Two minutes later, my feet found the floor. I dragged myself through the marsh to dry land. I looked at this new world through drenched hair. Everything looked grayer, but maybe it was because the sun had set. I felt a little colder, but maybe it was just the evening breeze. I wrung my dress until my knuckles turned white. What just happened? The lily pad was supposed to support me. I spotted the outline of my family three hundred feet away. I don’t think they noticed I had gone missing. What felt like hours was a matter of minutes. I dragged myself over to them. Seven heads turned towards me. Weeds dangled from my hair. A layer of algae had dried on my face. My mom instinctively searched for bruises and cuts. “Hi.” “What on earth…?” Teeth chattered in the silence. “I just sort of slipped on a slippery rock.” My grandma wrapped me in her luck-red poncho. Once a magical place of imagination, the pond was now a prosaic swamp where tourists dumped their trash and old pennies, a place where dreams die.
CONDOMINIUM BLUES
Condominium Blues The beds, tables, and chairs were all gone; they had already found new families. We had given away our decent furniture to aunts, grandparents, and co-workers. But the weathered, burnt sienna couch still sat somberly in the heart of our living room. As I gently traced the grainy edge of the couch with two fingertips, I suddenly realized that it had aged quite a bit. Crumbs of crusty leather upholstery had begun to flake from the lumpy cushions, revealing a raw, frayed interior. My little sisters and I never wanted to leave our condominium, a space much too small to house six people: my mom, dad, grandmother, and three growing girls. Nonetheless, we made it work. We begged our parents to take the tired couch with us to the new intimidating, Italian-style house, but my mom refused. The couch neither aligned with the new living room’s color scheme, a drab collection of mature greens and sandy tones, nor did it match the sophistication of the other furniture pieces. At seven years old, I had no regard for the principles and formality of home design implemented by the interior designer, a stern, middle-aged lady we'd secretly hated. As I solemnly sat on the tear-stained couch for the last time, I thought it strange that a couch, nothing more than a simple frame encased by soft leather filled with feathers, knew me better than my friends at school. It had tolerated my muffled sobs when I buried my snot-covered face in the cushions when our fifth goldfish died. It had watched me climb to the top of the fridge late at night to fill my pockets with the pink Starburst candies from the bucket of Halloween candy. It provided the perfect hiding spot in a game of hide-and-seek, a nook in the right angle between the backrest and a seating cushion, made just for me. Soon, the couch would be flung into a dumpster, finding itself in the company of other unwanted appliances and furniture. After a teary farewell, I stepped out the door, keeping my voice and face devoid of sorrow because, well, it’s silly to cry over a couch. Eight years prior, my mom bought a house, a REAL house. She gathered my sisters and I onto the couch to announce that we would be moving out of the condo. “Girls,” she started, “Daddy and I just bought a new house! Each of you will get your own rooms!” Whatever reaction she was expecting, we certainly did not supply. I gazed at the condominium’s scuffed walls, the crusty carpet, the dusty lampshades. I didn’t understand. Home was here, at the condo. Why did we need a new one? My parents bought the unit in the condominium complex just before I was born. After my mom left the hospital, she took me to my grandparents’ house while my dad set up the condo for our new life as a family. He arranged the small home office, the kitchen, the living room, my parents’ bedroom, and the crib. He taped over the electrical outlets, softened the sharp edges of the furniture with packaging tape and diapers, and covered every square inch of the concrete floor with multi-colored foam mats. The condo was perfect for a family of three, but it was never meant to become our forever home. But everything changed in the next four years. Our small household gained three new members: two little sisters and my grandmother. Halmi, my grandmother, lived with us during the week to help take care of us. I started kindergarten, and my sisters enrolled in a nearby preschool. My mom treated patients from eight o’clock to three o’clock, and my dad did not come home until dinnertime. My parents decided that we needed a larger house. And that was that. Shortly after my parents bought the house, my mom brought my sisters and I to the new house to give us a tour of the new house, an Italian-style home built in the 1920s. It had a butler’s pantry (who even has a butler?), a second staircase (which does not pass the city’s safety requirements), and a basement (also known as the “dungeon”). My mom rhapsodized over the house’s charming, sophisticated architecture, making sure to point out every little detail, from the flower-like ironwork on the stair railings to the pattern of marble countertops. She bounded up the classy staircase, like a little girl, and waltzed through the different rooms. “Don’t you just love our new home? And your new room?” “Yes, Mommy.” “Good.” She smiled down at me and squeezed my hand. To her, the new house was more a state of mind than it was a house. She continued to dream out loud and I followed behind her. I did not tell her how much I hated the house. The truth was, I hated the way the walls that echoed when I spoke; I hated the way the dim yellow lights flickered with each step; I hated just how small I felt in that big house. There was simply too much space left unfilled by the symphonies of busy cars on the street, sounds of doors opening and closing, and hushed voices of the neighbors. My room at the new house nearly tripled the size of my room at home. Dusty footprints littered the floor of my room, and I felt as though I was trespassing on an area where I did not belong. The condo only had three bedrooms: one for my parents, one downstairs for my grandmother, who stayed with us during the week, and one upstairs for me. My younger sisters jumped from room to room at night. Sometimes they slept with my parents at the foot of the bed, and sometimes they slept downstairs next to my grandmother in what we lovingly named “the third room.” We did not move in right away, as my sisters and I had initially thought. The house needed renovations, a project that required no more than two years of construction. But one thing led to another, and soon enough, half of the walls were stripped down to their cotton-candy pink drywall and wooden framework. At home, thick blankets of blueprints and bills and interior design books draped over the dinner table. Bedtime stories turned into long phone calls with the architect and the contractor. Saturday mornings were spent at tile stores, appliance stores, and lighting stores. A combination of my mom’s foibles, her idiosyncratic indecisiveness and notions of the perfect American home, elongated the renovation by two, four, six years. And in the meanwhile, my sisters and I grew up in the condo. Our favorite place to play was on the burnt sienna couch. It provided more than a place to sit to exchange perfunctory pleasantries with fair-weather friends, to watch Sunday afternoon cartoons, or to gather for the weekly family game night. My sisters and I would gleefully transform the well-worn couch into a whimsical pirate ship complete with a sail (made of bedsheets) and mast (made of wrapping paper tubes). We’d rip the cushions from their velcro strips to play, three pairs of feet prancing and leaping from cushion to cushion because, of course, the floor was lava. The couch was also a paradise of items lost, forgotten, neglected. Stale Honey Nut Cheerios, minivan keys, candy wrappers, quarters, puzzle pieces, Lego pieces. I loved to dig my sticky finger into the crevices of the juice-stained cushions, vain attempts to retrieve treasures. After my fruitless treasure hunt, I would plop onto the couch in a fit of exhaustion, only to hear the couch jingle, crunch, and squeak, as if to playfully mock my lousy efforts. We never wanted to leave. Eight years after purchasing the house, we finally moved into the place where my mom had envisioned us growing up. At fourteen years old, I slept in my new bedroom for the first time. Two years later, the walls of my room remain blank, poster-less, crayon-less, photo-less. Just plain, eggshell white. At the new house, we never spend time on the couch in the living room. The new tan suede couch was too hard to sit comfortably on. We don’t play family games together anymore either. My grandmother went to live at her own home. Everyone is stressed out, but at least my mom is happy. She tells me that she has finally achieved everything she has ever wanted. On the weekends, she happily scuttles around the house, cleaning everything in sight. She polishes the wooden cabinets weekly. She dries the sinks and shower glass with microfiber cloths every night to avoid the water stains. She wipes down the stovetop every night to scrub away the oil splatters. She says that she is never going to leave this place. As for me, I would be leaving for college in the next two years. The condo was my home, the only home I have ever known, and no house would ever take its place. Home is the smell of my grandmother’s Korean food on a cold Thursday night. Home is the melodic chime of the rice cooker and gentle whir of the laundry machine. Home is the crayon self-portraits on the wall. Home is the purple, polka-dotted, kitty-cat bedsheets that lay unmade on my full-size bed. Home is the old, juice-stained couch.
MUSICALITY
Somewhere in Vienna, Austria, Mozart’s ghost was laughing at me from the grave. I begrudgingly sat at the dusty keyboard for hours, shoulders and elbows slumped forward on the buttery keys in exasperation, and gazed at a flurry of eighth-notes, sixteenth-notes, dynamics, and accents as they scurried across the wrinkled pages of “Rondo Alla Turca”, like a kaleidoscope of butterflies under the zephyr of the ceiling fan. Earlier that day, my piano teacher had emphatically waved her newly-sharpened pencil in the air and hummed along to my lackluster performance. When she had decided that her ears had heard enough, she lightly tapped me on the shoulder with the pencil, gesturing for me to stop. “Have fun! This is a FUN piece!” she exclaimed as she smacked the sharp end of the pencil a little too hard on the shiny piano top, leaving a tiny scratch resembling a quarter note. I bit down hard on the strawberry-flavored candy I had been storing in my right cheek. How could she expect me to have fun when I couldn’t even play the right notes? “Close your eyes and use your imagination. When you hear this piece, what do you see? What do you feel?” I hesitated. “Maybe a fair or carnival or something”, I mumbled unenthusiastically. Her eyes lit up under the golden glow of the lily-shaped lamp. “Exactly!” She leaned back in her chair and gently tapped the tip of the eraser pencil to her temple. “Yes, let’s imagine we’re at a fair,” she muttered. But now it was getting late. I finally lifted my elbows from the piano and noticed that the smooth edge of the keys had left deep imprints on my forearms. Before giving “Rondo Alla Turca” a final go, I thought to myself, “A fair, think of a fair”. And just like that, I found myself in New York, at the fair I loved to attend every summer. As I looked out from the top of the ferris wheel, I let the muggy air dance through my hair. I breathed in the sonorous hum of the rides and rhythmic screams of the riders while the cicadas clicked in the background, like a metronome. I tasted the sugary-sweet melody of the August evening and let it wrap around me like a warm blanket, and I felt the corners of my mouth twitch into a smile. I took a deep breath and played the first note...
DENALI IS ALL I NEED
My uncle insisted on a midnight bike ride, as if we weren’t tuckered out from the six-hour-long bus ride to Denali National Park, a spruce-green carpet of the Alaskan wilderness. The trip to the Last Frontier had long been on Halbi’s bucket list; “Dad, don’t you want travel to Korea instead?” my aunt would repeatedly ask him. He had only visited Korea twice since he had slung his suitcase over his shoulder and left for the Land of Opportunity. He shook his head and continued to pop macadamia nuts into his mouth in between bites of his daily bran muffin. And that was that. So there we were, smack dab in the middle of the 49th state, cursing at the swarms of mosquitos. After renting bikes, we pedaled down a well-trodden path blazed out by previous tourists. Back at home, I was accustomed to the incessant white noise of sirens, garbage trucks, clattering dishes, television static, and my muddled thoughts. But when the world was quiet, I found myself searching for syllables and vowels, only to discover an oasis of serenity in place of the hum of my fast-paced life. It was serendipitous, the bus driver had noted earlier as he drove us down the narrow path that snaked through the hills, that we visited Denali on the only clear weekend of summer. There’s something magnetic about the way the crest of Denali peeked out of her curtain of clouds that night, the way she begged us to come a little closer and gaze a little longer, the way the birch and wildflowers all seemed to lean into her, as if to listen for her secrets to immortality. It was hard to tell whether the sun had already set. Mother Nature had splashed watercolors all over the sky and poured the honey-like sunlight over the pleats in the earth until it trickled into each crevice of the vast stretch of the untouched plains, bathing the picturesque landscape in an everlasting twilight. Someone once said that time is priceless; what do you do when you’re given extra? I traced the seams of the dawn (or dusk) with my eyes and savored each shadow, each crevice, each whisper. Those twenty-four hours of light were a gift, given to me so that I could behold the beauty of the pristine scenery for just a little longer. Somewhere in between today and tomorrow and yesterday, I held onto the moment like a promise.
HISTORY RESEARCH PAPERS
Grades 10 and 11, respectively
Opium to Extradition:
A Turbulent Era in Post-handover Hong Kong
In the summer of 2019, protests erupted in the streets of Hong Kong after the government proposed the implementation of an extradition bill, an act that appeared as an attempt to exceed China’s supposedly limited control over the area. Until midnight, July 1, 1997, Hong Kong remained the last notable British colony, an unusual circumstance that, without a doubt, has contributed to the clashes with the current government body. Described as a mix of “British political dominance” and “Chinese economic importance,” this global trading hub and commercial center is a fusion of both cultures; for over a century, the British influence in Hong Kong has played a key role in the cultivation of the unique Hong Kong identity and culture. Both official documents and street signs are written in both Chinese and English, and children are often given two names at birth, a reflection of the different historical, social, and cultural influences. Additionally, the years under British government allowed the residents of Hong Kong to explore and adapt to values including freedom of speech, personal liberty, and, most importantly, democracy. This paper will explore the Opium Wars, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the handover of Hong Kong, the Umbrella Revolution, protests in 2019, and, most recently, the controversial national security law in June of 2020. The dominant British influence after the Opium Wars fueled current unrest with China in a post-handover Hong Kong through cultural and political separation, ultimately resulting in the enactment of a national security law. This unusual combination of both China and Britain is rooted in two military conflicts in the 19th century. Up until the early 1800s, China exclusively accepted silver as a means of payment through exports of tea and silk, highly sought-after goods. As a result, the trade grew lopsided in favor of China because enormous quantities of British silver allowed for the manufacture of coins. In the meantime, British merchants had discovered a market for opium prior to the unbalanced trade, but the illicit opium trade drastically accelerated during this time in attempts to level the playing field. Merchants sparked a new demand behind the backs of Chinese authorities, for non-medicinal use of opium was banned, only adding to the appeal of the drug as a narcotic. However British merchants also demanded silver as the only acceptable form of payment in order to purchase more Chinese goods. While the British trade certainly benefited from the chaos that ensued, rampant opium addiction and the subsequent economic disorder plagued China, and, at the pinnacle of the drug trafficking, 20,000 chests of opium were intercepted by authorities in Guangzhou. From 1839 to 1842, British and Chinese forces fought until the British seized Nanjing, effectively ending the conflict. Twelve days later, the two parties convened to negotiate the terms of peace; under the Treaty of Nanjing, China was to pay reparations to Britain, grant the country access to key trading ports, and, lastly, cede Hong Kong in perpetuity. Interestingly, the matter of opium remained untouched. The First Opium War marked the beginning of increased British influence in the region, exposing the residents to new ways of life. However, Britain began to materialize their desire for more assets beyond the terms in the Treaty of Nanjing, and, in 1856, skirmishes broke out along the Pearl River. France joined the British forces later that year. After two years, Britain and France forced China into the Treaties of Tianjin, a series of treaties allowing for increased presence of the two countries in China, merely putting the Second Opium War on hold. When Chinese diplomats refused to ratify the treaties, fighting continued until November in 1860. Finally, at the Beijing Convention, China reluctantly agreed to open more ports with other Western powers, allow foreign travel throughout the interior of the country, and to legalize the opium trade. Decades later, under the rule of Queen Victoria in 1898, the New Territories were ceded to Britain in a legally binding agreement for ninety-nine years for reasons relating to the security of the region. In 1982, fifteen years before the official handover of Hong Kong, British and Chinese leaders began to negotiate the terms for the transition of Hong Kong from a British colony to a Special Administrative Region of China. The British government was willing to return both Hong Kong and the New Territories, a collective group of islands, despite the separate treaties in which each region was negotiated, for the country had lost interest in maintaining both territories. The Chinese government had long awaited the transfer of Hong Kong in hopes of ending their “century of shame,” the interim in between 1842 and 1997. However, the negotiations took place behind closed doors and did not directly take into account the people of Hong Kong, and the lack of transparency regarding the Sino-British Joint Declaration foreshadowed the major protests in 2014 and 2019. On December 19, 1984 at the Great Hall of the People, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain and Premier Zhao Ziyang of China signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration to formally establish the terms for handover. The document outlined the “one country, two systems” model under which Hong Kong would be run, and it set the date of return for July 1, 1997 at midnight. The original intent of the “one country, two systems” proposal was to retain Hong Kong’s political and legal system whilst slowly rebuilding the connections to China through policies, laws, and culture. Mainland China would only be responsible for handling foreign affairs and defense. From 1985 to 1990, a fifty-nine member committee, primarily comprised of Chinese appointees, drafted the Basic Law, the Hong Kong equivalent of a mini-constitution, to lay out the structure of the Hong Kong government and further stipulate the specific components of the seemingly simple “one country, two systems” model articulated in the Sino-British Joint Declaration. The central aim of the Basic Law is said to have been universal suffrage in all Hong Kong elections. However, because Hong Kong is a presidential limited democracy, universal suffrage was never fully guaranteed under its status as a Special Administrative Region of China despite being the overarching demand of protestors in 2019. Instead, the Chief Executive is elected on a five year basis by the Election Committee, a group composed of 1,200 members representing four different areas of interest including financial, commercial, industrial, and other sectors. The Legislative branch, founded in 1843 by the British government, was also altered in response to the handover. Often referred to as “LegCo,” the council consists of seventy members who typically identify with either the pro-democracy or pro-Beijing coalitions. Fifty percent are elected through means of universal suffrage based on geographical constituencies, roughly forty-three percent are elected through functional constituencies, and the remaining seven percent are elected through a list of “district council constituencies.” However, many argue that the makeup of Legislative Branch does not paint an accurate reflection of the people and general sentiment of the region; in fact, in the 2016 LegCo election, forty of the seventy elected members aligned with the pro-Beijing coalition, and the remaining thirty seats were filled by pro-democracy representatives, reflecting the steady hand of the Beijing government in Hong Kong despite the “high degree of autonomy” agreement. Fundamentally, Hong Kong’s political, economic, and judicial systems were to remain untouched by the Beijing government until the year 2047, and freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion were to be preserved under the Basic Law as well. Rather than provide a clear source of reference for leaders, the Basic Law often creates clashes between the people of Hong Kong and the Beijing government today. The ambiguity of the document allowed both parties to act based on each country’s interpretation of the Basic Law and the “one country, two systems.” Anthony Dapiran, Australian author and lawyer, noted that, through the lens of the Beijing government, “the One Country is the precondition to the Two Systems.” On the other hand, the people of Hong Kong “insist upon having the Two Systems as the precondition for them accepting the One Country.” This lack of a mutual sense of understanding would haunt Hong Kong in the twenty-first century. Some scholars even stated that the proposed system itself would pose issues regarding the preservation of the promise of a “high degree of autonomy.” Albert H.Y. Chen, a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Hong Kong, stated that the “paradox of ‘one country, two systems’” is that it encourages aspiration for ‘Western-style’ liberal democracy while placing limits on achieving those hopes.” Essentially, the fusion of British and Chinese values, after the Communist Revolution of 1949, would not be able to permanently coexist peacefully as the two directly contradict each other. As pointed out by Anthony Dapiran, author of City of Protest: ‘Hong Kong… finds itself in a state of disequilibrium: the city’s precarious balancing of a high level of freedom against a low level of representative democracy is not a natural state.” The reactions to the establishment of the Sino-British Joint Declaration were those of relief, anxiety, frustration, especially among the younger demographic. Those who felt relieved were glad to know that the period of uncertainty had ended, but those who had grown up in the British colony with more liberal points of view and found it hard to imagine a life where they are not fully able to exercise their right to freely express themselves. The rise in numbers of student-led political groups clearly captures the apprehension of the people of Hong Kong as the deadline for handover approached. As pointed out in a series of studies conducted in 1985: “[L]ess than 32 percent of respondents said that they trusted the PRC government, while more than 73 percent said that they trusted the Hong Kong government.” Additionally, after the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, much of the minimal feelings of relief dissipated, for many grew afraid of sharing a similar fate to the protesters in China. Over the past two decades, Hong Kong has been hit with ripples of protests, each slightly varying in demand and magnitude. This paper will touch on three major movements: the 2012, 2014, and 2019 protests. In 2012, the government promoted curriculum changes in the classroom, resulting in resistance from educators, parents, and students. The authorities, in accordance with the “moral and national education” model, had hoped to implement a more mainland Chinese-centric approach in order to increase the amount of support for the Chinese identity. However, critics of the government viewed the attempted alterations of the educational system as “brainwashing of Hong Kong’s youth.” After protesters, largely led by members of the student body, took to the streets, the schools were granted the choice on whether to conform to the new curriculum. Although the protests in 2012 pales in comparison to the more recent movements, this event marked the increase in awareness of the boundaries of the “one country, two systems” policy. In 2014, the people of Hong Kong demanded changes to the electoral system because, under Hong Kong’s system, voters were limited to a few choices for the position of chief executive, most of the candidates leaning toward the pro-Beijing coalition. Widely recognized as the “Umbrella Revolution,” the people of Hong Kong once again took to the streets to demand an authentic form of universal suffrage in all elections. As pointed out by Jonathan Kaiman, correspondent for the Los Angeles Times: “Above all, Beijing fears that the city… would choose a pro-democratic candidate, potentially planting the seeds for a movement to break away from mainland control.” Ever since the handover, China has struggled to retain a large influence in Hong Kong beyond the government, for the people of Hong Kong refuse to be labelled as Chinese. Unlike the protests in 2012, the Umbrella Revolution did not result in material amendments to the electoral system; the suppressed unrest only propelled further, intensified protests in 2019. The government’s response, or rather the lack of a productive response, only added fuel to the raging fire. In 2019, an extradition bill introduced by the Hong Kong government drew out massive crowds due to the concern of increased Beijing presence and a violation of the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. Essentially, the extradition bill “would allow the transfer of criminal suspects to jurisdictions with which the city does not have fugitive agreements, including mainland China.” Additionally, China’s more secretive judicial system has sparked the fear that China could extradite people according to their political motives as well. Initially, the protests were largely peaceful marches but have escalated throughout the summer. Both protesters and police forces have implemented more extreme tactics including the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, batons, pepper spray, and water cannons from the police while the protesters used bricks, fire, vandalism, and other forms of property destruction. While the protesters originally demanded only for the removal of the extradition bill, the demands of the protesters have expanded to include four others since. In addition to the withdrawal of the bill, protesters have also demanded an independent investigation on the police tactics in protests, the removal of the “riot” label from the protests, dropped charges against arrested protesters, and universal suffrage, the seemingly underlying theme of the unrest in Hong Kong over the past twenty years. Of the five major demands, only one has resulted in a material consequence. On September 4, 2019, Chief Executive Carrie Lam agreed to halt the extradition bill for the time being. As for the remaining demands, the Hong Kong government has not responded in the way that the protesters would have liked. Today, the streets are eerily quiet due to the novel coronavirus and a new security law. On June 30, 2020, an hour before the twenty-third anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong, the Beijing government passed a national security law to regain a firm grasp over the territory after disruptive waves of protest in the prior year. The growing calls for democracy posed a danger to China, and authorities quickly mobilized to draft a law that would quell various forms of rebellion. Under the national security law, any act that can be interpreted by the government as a form of secession, subversion of the central government, terrorism, or collusion with external powers, and any actions construed as a threat can warrant a lifetime sentence in prison. Additionally, the Beijing government imposed a new Chinese-led National Security Agency to oversee Hong Kong, led by a member vetted by mainland China. Many fear that the broad tone of the law will allow the government to interpret the law however they would like; Under the law, the Hong Kong government, backed by Beijing authorities, would also be able to impose a more stringent form of the infamous 2019 extradition bill as well. Carrie Lam, the current Chief Executive of Hong Kong, has said that "stability has been restored to society while national security has been safeguarded, and our people can continue to enjoy their basic rights and freedoms." However, the people feel as though they have been robbed of their rights under the now irrelevant “one country, two systems” model, referring to the national security law as “the end of Hong Kong.” Furthermore, many activists have surrendered their social media accounts and demobilized their respective political groups due to the fear of arrest. What does this mean for Hong Kong? Life in the region progressively has begun to closely resemble China, and the people of Hong Kong are limited in terms of their right to protest their government. Ever since the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989 and handover in 1997, the people of Hong Kong have become increasingly aware of their loss of freedoms and have worried about the future of Hong Kong and the loss of its rather special cultural identity. The fight for democracy has been suppressed by the national security law despite the promises made in the Sino-Joint Declaration and Basic Law, for the Hong Kong judicial system has become more intertwined with Beijing than ever before. Still, the muffled calls for democracy linger in the air of the eerily quiet streets of Hong Kong. For some, peace and order have been restored in the region, but for others, the empty promise of “one country, two systems” has yet to be fulfilled.
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The Complicated Legacy of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin
“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war,” President Abraham Lincoln allegedly remarked during Harriet Beecher Stowe’s visit to the White House in 1862, at the height of the American Civil War. Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is generally regarded as a major catalyst of the war. Stowe’s novel, published in 1852, stirred Northern consciences and triggered Southern outrage, contributing to the rapid divergence of the Union during the 1850s. However, the contentious debate over slavery had been mounting since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. In 1848 the quandary about the fate of the Mexican cession exacerbated the volatile conflict over slavery. By the end of 1860, tensions between the North and South over slavery had reached a breaking point, and the South seceded. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, known as America’s “first bestseller,” cemented Stowe’s place in history as one of the most influential writers in America. While Harriet Beecher Stowe certainly helped to fuel the moral sentiment that precipitated the Civil War, her personal values and prejudices informed her thoughts, resulting in the mixed legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Harriet Beecher Stowe was born on June 14, 1811, two decades prior to the peak of the Second Great Awakening, in Litchfield, Connecticut. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a prominent Presbyterian preacher, and her mother passed away when Stowe was just a toddler. Both education and religion played integral roles in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s upbringing and career, shaping the morals and beliefs she emphasized in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe was raised alongside twelve siblings, many of whom also engaged in various social reform movements. Her older sister, Catherine Beecher, was a proponent of the movement for women’s education, and she established the Hartford Female Seminary, the place where Harriet Beecher Stowe’s burgeoning literary talent would flourish. Religion significantly influenced Stowe’s work as well; as a child, she was brought up observing traditional Puritan customs, but she later embraced the more emotional and personal principles preached during the Second Great Awakening. In addition to her contemporary belief in “ a benevolent God, the value of good works, a communal religion, and even spiritualist visions of angels and saints,” Stowe also gained a newfound interest in the more “democratic appeal to the marginalized” after witnessing impassioned sermons of preachers in the Second Great Awakening. In 1832, Stowe moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to teach at the Western Female Institute, where she began her prolific career as an author. Ohio’s proximity to slavery in Kentucky kindled Stowe’s abolitionist sentiment, as she heard horrific accounts of slavery from slaves who had run away or had been separated from their children. Although Stowe’s family employed two indentured African American women in her home, Stowe had never before witnessed the heart-wrenching horrors of slavery with her own eyes. Stowe would later base the setting of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on a visit to a plantation in Kentucky. Stowe reached a breaking point in her personal life in 1849, a year before Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act—her eighteen-month-old son died after contracting cholera. As a result of enduring this tragedy, Stowe grew more cognizant and empathetic with enslaved women whose children were sold into slavery from the lens of motherhood. Stowe would later explore the theme of a mother’s grief in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1850, the national debate over slavery intensified following the Compromise of 1850, a group of five statutes intended to conciliate the North and the South following the recent acquisition of Western territory in the Mexican-American War. The compromise entailed “the admission of California as a ‘free state’, provided for a territorial government for Utah and New Mexico, established a boundary between Texas and the United States, called for the abolition of the slave trade in Washington DC, and amended the Fugitive Slave Act.” In actuality, the Compromise of 1850 was a fruitless attempt to mollify the North and South. The more stringent Fugitive Slave Act struck a chord with many Northern abolitionists in particular. The Fugitive Slave Law not only stipulated that “those who aided escapees or refused to assist slave-catchers could be fined up to $1,000 and jailed for six months,” but it additionally incentivized people to accuse African-Americans in free states under this act; financially speaking, a federal commissioner received five dollars more for ruling a “suspected fugitive” guilty than free. Stowe, emotionally charged, began researching and writing what would become Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Many have observed similarities between Uncle Tom and Josiah Henson, a former slave, abolitionist and preacher. Henson published his memoir in 1849, two years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself provided a template for Stowe’s novel. Henson was born in Port Tobacco, Maryland, in 1789. His first memories were experiences of “having his ear cut off, and sold south,” where he was later separated from his mother after being sold to a child trafficker. As he grew older, Henson found his voice as a preacher, and in 1830, Henson, his wife, and children walked more than six hundred miles north to Ontario, Canada. There, Henson used his natural leadership skills to establish the British American Institute, a settlement that would later become one of the last stops of the Underground Railroad. Historians have pointed out the unmistakable similarities between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the life of Josiah Henson; Jared Brock, author of The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story that Sparked the Civil War, noted, “It was Josiah’s faith in God in the face of hardship that fused him to Stowe’s hero.” In 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in The National Era; originally, Stowe planned on publishing her story in three to four installments in the paper. She never could have anticipated the story’s unprecedented financial success nor the vehement reactions Uncle Tom’s Cabin would receive nationwide. The Smithsonian magazine estimates that fifty thousand people read Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form, an incredible feat that prompted John P. Jewett and Company to publish Stowe’s story as a novel. In the first week, 10,000 copies of the novel were sold domestically, and 300,000 copies were sold by the end of that year. In fact, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the only book to outsell the Bible during the nineteenth century. The influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin stretched across the Atlantic as well; in Great Britain, nearly fifteen hundred thousand copies were sold. Immediately, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a national sensation. Josiah Henson himself observed Stowe’s unprecedented literary phenomenon; he wrote, “When this novel of Mrs. Stowe came out, it shook the foundations of this world… It shook the Americans out of their shoes and of their shirts.” Anti-slavery sentiment surged throughout the North, strengthening the cause of the abolitionists. William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist who established The Liberator, noted the “frequent moistening of our eyes, and the making of our heart grow liquid as water, and trembling every nerve within us, in the perusal of incidents and scenes so vividly depicted in [Stowe’s] pages.” Abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “The touching, but too truthful tale of Uncle Tom’s Cabin has rekindled the slumbering embers of antislavery zeal into active flames. Its recitals have baptized with holy fire myriads who before cared nothing for the bleeding slave.” Stowe’s conscientiously crafted characters, rhetoric, and language spoke to the hearts and minds of indifferent Northerners, especially working and middle-class citizens who had never been exposed to the horrors of slavery in their lifetimes. In contrast, Southerners were incensed by the escalation in abolitionist sentiment, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin generated considerable opprobrium in the South. Southerners aggressively repudiated the novel, as they doubted the truthfulness of the accounts of slavery that Stowe incorporated in her story. Because Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel, Southerners argued that there was no factual basis to the story, and they lambasted Stowe for her seemingly lopsided assessment of slavery. The South had been defending the institution of slavery from both a moral and political standpoint. John C. Calhoun, a prominent statesman in South Carolina, epitomized Southern sentiment; a firm believer in white supremacy, he claimed that “Never before has the black race…from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually” in an attempt to convince Americans that slavery benefitted all. On a personal level, Store endured Southern wrath against her; angry Southerners deemed her a “vile wretch in petticoats”, an insult that spoke to the fact that Stowe was one of the female authors at the time. In response to the backlash she received from the South, Stowe countered Southern retaliation with fact; in 1853, authored and published The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. She fortified the veracity of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin with an annotated bibliography and primary sources of the accounts of slavery she based her novel on. President Abraham Lincoln allegedly checked out The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the library from June 16 to July 29, 1862, according to the circulation records of the Library of Congress. The dates are congruent with the time in which Lincoln would have drafted the Emancipation Proclamation; while many believe this concurrence to be coincidental, Stowe’s novel could have significantly altered the course of national politics, demonstrating that Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s influenced everyone, from the indifferent citizen to the president of the United States. How did Stowe’s novel, a total of six hundred twenty-four pages, achieve what decades of political and economic discourse could not? Stowe meticulously crafted her rhetoric to appeal to the consciences and empathy of the typical American. Political or logical appeals would have been futile; while the South constantly equivocated, using Christianity to justify slavery, Stowe delineated her argument in one succinct idea: slavery, as an institution, was a moral evil, even in good intentions. By creating characters that white Americans could sympathize and even relate to, Stowe tugged at the heartstrings of Americans. In the words of author Henry James, Uncle Tom’s Cabin “had above all the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness in which they didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried.” A deeply devout woman, Stowe believed that slavery was diametrically opposed to the principles of Christianity. Stowe would later note that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin came to her ‘in visions,’ that she did not so much write it as receive it from God.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin unified the fragmented abolitionist groups in the North by pushing thousands of “waverers to an aggressive antislavery stance.” Previously the abolitionist movement varied in motivations, values, and beliefs. Before Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a significant fraction of abolitionists repudiated slavery on political and economic platforms while a minority held that the institution of slavery was unequivocally immoral. In fact, most Northerners deemed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison an extremist. The major shift in public opinion engendered by Stowe was certainly noteworthy. Following the publishing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, emotional tensions and political turmoil heightened exponentially. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in 1854, establishing the idea of popular sovereignty and nullifying the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Violent skirmishes between the pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces, known as “Bleeding Kansas” only created more friction. Emotions in the North flared in 1857 after the Dred Scott case, ruling that African Americans were not entitled to citizenship. Abolitionist John Brown’s attempt to ignite a slave uprising at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 also helped pushed the South to secession. However, Stowe’s credibility must be analyzed through a modern lens in order to acquire a more informed understanding of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s complicated legacy, especially in regard to her background as a pious, white woman living in the North. By no means was Stowe a proponent of equality and racial justice; according to several letters written to her close family and friends, Stowe suggested that emancipated slaves should not be allowed to reside in the States but should instead be sent to Africa. In her novel, she often used racist, offensive language to describe African Americans. However, this was not an uncommon attitude for abolitionists to have. Even those that opposed slavery on moral grounds did not advocate for equality, as racism and prejudice were still rampant in the North. Because Stowe’s book is a work of fiction, she may have also had other motivations in addition to informing the reader. Not only does a good novelist have to tell an interesting story, but the characters must also be relatable and familiar to the audience to keep them engaged. To create the characters in her novel, namely Uncle Tom, Stowe heavily depended on racist stereotypes, perpetuating harmful messages and casting doubt over Stowe’s credibility as an author. Many believe that Stowe’s “impressive array of facts, figures, and first-person testimonies” did not qualify her to speak for African-Americans who experienced slavery firsthand. The authentic autobiographies and firsthand accounts of slavery never received the limelight to the degree that Uncle Tom’s Cabin did; interestingly, Stowe’s fictional story emerged at the forefront of abolitionist literature, and the firsthand accounts of slavery trailed behind Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the magnitude of influence. The character of Uncle Tom has not aged gracefully in America. Today, “Uncle Tom” is a derogatory term. In the late 1850s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was transformed into stage dramatizations. In these shows, Uncle Tom, played by white actors, has been “grossly distort[ed]... into an older man than he is in the novel, a man whose English is poor, a man who will do quite the opposite, who will sell out any black man if it will curry the favor of a white employer, a white master, a white mistress,” as stated by Patricia Turner, a professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Davis. According to Turner, Stowe’s character was distorted to satisfy the commercial interests of the stage production companies. Despite the fact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a runaway bestseller, these stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin reached fifty times more Americans than the novel. Because these dramatizations have propagated such harmful stereotypes across the nation, Stowe’s original Uncle Tom has been permanently warped into a completely different character. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influence on the public’s views toward slavery is undeniable. Not only did Stowe’s novel convince white Americans to join the abolitionist cause on moral grounds, but it further enraged Southern defenders of slavery, fueling the burgeoning national division in the 1850s. While the positive impacts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were evident, it is important to examine Stowe’s credibility as a white, Christian Northerner as well. Only through considering Stowe’s biases and prejudices can one begin to dissect the complex legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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