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Pavements, benches, and lamp posts scatter all over this beautiful harbour. Located in the heart of Vancouver, this place is a perfect spot for tourists. The surrounding mix of nature, city, and body of water gives a sense of refreshment to anyone (and everyone!) who visits.

….

Pause. Something catches my eye. A big memorial, a photograph filled with people from the far East. A Komagata Maru Memorial.

….

Komagata Maru was a steamship from Japan which carried 376 passengers from (then) Punjab, British India. With hopes of escaping British rule and starting a new life, they sailed all the way from Asia, only to be denied to dock in Vancouver. This resulted in anger amongst the passengers but in the end, 20 passengers were admitted to step foot in Canada, while the remaining were forced to turn back to India. I can't fully imagine the horrors that happened once they were sent back, especially after learning that a British gunboat was waiting for their arrival.

As a settler, a 21st century immigrant, I still couldn’t quite imagine the horrors people from the past faced when immigrating to Canada. Now, different types of ships and boats dock and pass by this park almost everyday. Today, this place welcomes me, an Asian who now has rights to be in this place.

But I wonder, by whose authority am I given a right to enjoy and start a new life here in Vancouver? Was it the trees? The harbour? If it were not for humans, would my ancestors be able to come to such a place?

It was hard to remove humans from the storybook of this place. Humans forced themselves to exist in the story by having such discriminating, immigration laws. The harbour and beautiful landscape that surrounds this place would have welcomed different immigrants and settlers.

This place once told a story of the selfishness and small-mindedness of human beings. But I am glad to see that over the years it has been adding on new chapters, with each chapter not erasing the horrors and mistakes of humans in the past, but acknowledging them and going back to make sure history doesn’t repeat itself. This place shares how we still have a long way to go when it comes to immigration laws and welcoming diversity, but it also shares how far we’ve gone, and will keep going.

I am thankful for the story shared today, of how my reality now was once a dream for people all over the world who wished to have been given a chance to step in such an inviting place.

If I were to bring in the renderings of living inquiry into the classroom, it will create a space for collaborations, tensions, and open possibilities. The combination of visuals and text in a space open up moments of reflection, questioning, realisation, observation, and collaboration between co-educators, parents, and even children. Living inquiry emphasizes the visual and textual understandings and experiences rather than merely what is seen on the surface.

Where I work at, the process of sharing visuals and text is of high importance when it comes to being shared in a studio space. The studio is where art becomes alive, and conversations (with either persons, space, or materials) take place. To bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art is to showcase what goes on inside or outside the studio space and letting the classroom then speak for itself. This results in deep engagement with what is present and with what used to be present. We are also engaging ourselves with different roles in one body: a(artist), r(researcher), and t(teacher), which affect us in different aspects of our lives as we take with us and bring home our own questions, thoughts and wonderings.

Crawling, hugging

weeds tightly fastening themselves into the rusty train tracks

Thick, black smoke emerges

from the railroad train that stomps its angry feet on the soil

wired fences Silently standing

as they become vines for the greens running out of room to spread

Shooting up, up, up

a boundary as well, separating the cement pavement from the fields

Stairs giggling as you walk down

There’s a secret down there- you’ll know it from the way they smiled in excitement

Finally they stop, as they reveal a glistening lake

that was too shy to show itself to the entire world

Slowly, the blue skies back away as the main event starts

The Creator painting in red, yellow, black watercolors

A child stares in amazement as the twinkling points of light then make themselves known

and like a superstar, they wave back to the starstruck child

I used to see

An endless competition between nature, and rising effects of greed and capitalism

A switch in sight, in perspective

I wonder what happens when we choose to see the beauty in harmonious co-existence

As I look back at my previous post, I feel like I did not give the space any justice. As I peeked through the photos from last week’s exercise, I see that there was actually a lot of beauty in the place that I have missed because I focused on a particular subject- nature vs capitalism.

For this week, I move forward in search of a different space. I arrived in Granville Island, the perfect place to reflect and notice. Surrounded by the water and an overwhelming number of tourists, I found a spot that helped me reflect back on the previous post I had.

This spot had a lot of symmetry too. But although it was filled with stores, shops, and visitors from all over, capitalism was not in the picture.

I think that there was a very important subject that I have missed when looking at space like this, and that is people.

How people interact with a space, admire it, question it, interpret it.

Did anyone else wonder why the walls had to be blue? Was there an intention for that? Why was this done in this particular way/order? What could be changed? Can it change? Who was involved in the creative process of creating this space?

Last May 2018, I volunteered at an orphanage in Baja California, Mexico. Robin was a fellow volunteer, who insisted she didn’t know how to play. We were there to help renovate a medical clinic, but to our surprise, volunteering for the orphanage also meant spending time with the orphans. I was ecstatic, but Robin was hesitant.

Joy and excitement continued to fill the air as the children ran around with the other volunteers. The almost deafening sounds of screams and laughter reach the nearby middle school as students and teachers constantly poke their heads out the window. Maribel reached out her hand towards Robin. As Robin smiled back at her, puzzlement and curiosity was evident in Maribel’s face. If time did pause, it felt like it paused for a while during that moment. Maribel tilted her face and slowly came closer, with her eyes fixed on Robin. The words play came out of her mouth. Robin, frantically shaking her hands, insisted she didn’t know how to play.

“Play”…

Maribel repeated over and over. I wondered how will this young girl teach my friend how to play? It looked silly, but in that moment, what did it mean for us to engage in play?

Maribel picked up a ball nearby and gave it to Robin. The two mainly communicated through smiles and nods. These orphans were used to visitors coming over the past years, but I wonder if she ever came across someone like Robin before…

With a weak toss, Robin stepped back a little and shrugged. Facial displays of dissatisfaction showed. A small sigh was let out, and I could feel my heart starting to pound a little louder. Maribel took the ball and looked at it in her hand. She weighed it with an up and down motion, before dropping it to the ground. She ran somewhere else and came back with a frisbee. But before tossing the frisbee, Maribel made sure to explain how to throw it. With one leg put back, smiles and nods were again exchanged between the two instead of words. Robin caught the frisbee on the first throw, and she made sure to follow Maribel’s instructions during her turn. Oh how wonderful it was to see them play!

The homestay parents from Casas uno a diez began to call the children. I look up to see the orange and golden skies being quickly engulfed by darkness and twinkling lights. A soft wind blew a chilly breeze as stillness replaced the once so busy environment. After saying our goodbyes, on the way back home we wondered: How was it that this child taught her how to play? Robin always shared how she grew up with books and equations her whole life. She was never surrounded by so many children before, too.

Now back in Vancouver, I think about the children I take care of, and the rules and expectations during “play” that I sometimes come up with. Maribel’s puzzlement with Robin’s “lack of play” in the beginning continues to resonate with me. This lived experience (an encounter between a child who wanted to play and someone who did not know how to) was not just for Robin. When I think about it, their play consisted of nods, smiles, tosses, and more smiles. It made me look back at the simplicity of play, the sense of fulfilment after play and engaging in play, especially with “experts in the field of play” (children).

After looking back and reflecting, I too would like to be taught how to play. Initially, I thought it was silly, but now I dream of myself being in Robin’s shoes that day… to get to experience how wonderful it would be to be taught by a child how to play…