Travel to Paris
I went to Paris on 22nd Sep to take part in a KPOP random play dance event, and that was my first time to travel abroad to do what I like. I went there with 3 course mates. After the YouTuber uploaded the video, I posted some comment which related to my project and got some feedback to my comment.
From the comments you can see that, some people around the world know me from what I did when I was in China. They know that, “oh, this girl is from Chinese random play dance organisation, now she is study in the UK.”
The Korean comment was saying “She is famous in Shanghai’s KPOP RPD, now she is studying in the UK and then travel to France to take part in this RPD. To some extent, this is the biggest achievement for KPOP, right?”
To some extent, this related to my project. The YouTuber “created a community” which is for KPOP fans, dancers and some YouTube viewers. The community is under his channel, or let’s say it is his channel. He held these events to gather people who have connection to the community, such as me. Then, me, as a representative from a Chinese community, jumped into the international one, with some people knew and some people didn’t know me before, (I think) I am like the uncertainty, to break some existing circle, to connect the Chinese community with the international one.
I said “connect”, just because I think, nowadays, it is very difficult for Chinese people to come out and participate in such events. And because of the Covid pandemic, the famous Chinese isolation policy, some non-Chinese people will build higher cultural barrier inside their heart. Furthermore, because Chinese government build the wall to ban Chinese people from using YouTube, sometimes we cannot see directly what other people think about us, which will also build their stereotype.
So I think, what I did is like a break and connection between the two community.
1st Negotiation with the “gate keeper”
On 14th Oct I reached out to one of the manager of the dance club of the Chinese students association in UAL face to face. I had a small talk with her about the plan of gathering the KPOP team in dance club and our dance club. However, she refused my advice, with the reason of “if I use the club to do my project, people will copy me and do what as I do” and “there is no slot for me to do this in campus’s activity room”.
To some extent, I think her reasons are reasonable, but not that much. However, just because I got Covid last week, I was not that smart to negotiate with her about this.
David mentioned about the word “gate keeper”, and encouraged me to negotiate with her once more, to see if there is difference with the result of the intervention.
Travel to Barcelona
Last weekend I travelled to Barcelona alone to take part in another random play dance event, alone, wow. I have no knowledge of Spanish (maybe hola), no friends there, and I never travelled to Spain, and my parents don’t know I was so crazy.
What I did was, I searched for some Chinese students in Barcelona who is going to the dance event through the Chinese social media, and luckily I found a girl and her friend (well, they are 6 and 7 years younger than me….). I asked them to be my guide, and I said I would teach them how to dance for return.
On the day of the event, we had a small workshop in the gym of my hotel in Barcelona, then we went to the place.
Then for the video and the comments.
The comments were as usual, and I was really impressed by the one who said “You’re an inspiration for the K-POP community!”
But this time I found a comment that might related to the project.
The Korean comment was saying “You are not Chinese… You are Korean, I hate China.”
Actually I am a person who does not like to reply these kind of comment, because I think that will make me be in a storm, but this time I think I need to reply to him/her, because I think it is what I want to do to clean the stereotype, to lower the cultural barrier, even though I have no idea of why this viewer commented like that. The difficulty was I think I cannot only say “Don’t say that” or “No”, I think I need to say those mildly. And I am so happy to see that there is a like when I made this screenshot.
Funny supplement to this:
I talked about this with David, David encouraged me like, “he said he hate China, not Chinese, not you, right? Is this the same as maybe you like K-Pop but you do not like Korea?”
Yes…..