FIrst blog: please introduce yourself

Hi everyone, and welcome to the first actual blog post.  This one is a bit of a freebie as you don't have to respond to anyone's post (although you can if you want).

Please introduce yourself to the group.  Say where you are from, and/or where you are connected to, and give us an example of something you care passionately about.  I'll go first.  Mine is a bit long (because I've been around for a bit longer than most of you), so don't feel like you have to go into as much detail as I do.  But something along similar lines would be good.

Soooo.  Here goes:

My name is Chris Fung and I am a fifth generation Chinese New Zealander. When I was young, my family moved to England where I lived for 8 years so this has influenced the way I think about myself quite a lot. In some ways I am culturally more English than anything else. I studied in Beijing for 2 years right after college but I don't really feel all that connected to Beijing, especially since it's changed so much since I was there.

I have also lived in the US for a long time now, I came to Boston to go to grad school and mostly lived across the river in Somerville. I now live in Dorchester which I actually like a lot better than Somerville (sorry Somerville). For ten years I lived on O'ahu in Hawai`i. I lived in the ahupua`a of Makiki for most of that time and for a short while I lived in Kapahulu/Waikiki.

My mother's family come from Jung Sing and my father's family come from Siu Hing. These are counties in Guangdong Province in southern China. My mother's father owned a fruit shop in a place called Fielding, in the lower North Island of New Zealand. His father (my great grandfather) was a terrible gambler and actually lost the shop several times through gambling debts.

My mum's dad was not a very nice man apparently. While he begrudgingly allowed my mother to attend college (she was one of the first Chinese New Zealand women to do so), he would only allow her to major in Home Economics instead of Literature or Physics which were the majors she wanted to do.

My dad's family were early converts to Christianity in Guangdong. According to family lore, my great grandfather on my dad's side was actually thrown out of the village for converting. During the 1930s my grandfather and my great uncle in particular were pretty high up in the Chinese Baptist Church. My dad remembers when Guangzhou fell to the Japanese and they had to flee into the hills and live on grass and leaves boiled up into mush because there was no other food. After the Wars ended, my dad's family initially stayed in China but then left in the early 1950s after my great uncle died (family lore says he was poisoned by the Communists, but my dad thinks this is probably incorrect).

My dad's family went to Hong Kong and then my grandfather was sent to New Zealand to be the pastor of a Chinese Baptist church in Gisborne on the East Coast of New Zealand. He was then sent down to Wellington, the capital, to be the pastor there where he remained until he retired. My grandfather loved to talk (this is probably where I get my own over-verbal lecture style from). He died from hypertension (too much salt in his diet) in his late 70s.

I have two children now. The oldest, my son Isaac (14), lives in Kenya with his mother. She's a marine biologist with the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute. We met while I was teaching anthropology back in New Zealand, and she was getting her masters in marine bio.
I go to see them every summer but it's hard since I can only see him once a year and he's now a pre-teen. Luckily Kenya is in some ways, a little less challenging as a place to be an adolescent than the US is.

My daughter Leomana is almost 11 months old. She has her mother's eyes, a beautiful smile and is just about to start walking. She is very interested in people for the most part and is a wonderfully good-natured baby. Being a parent is wonderful but pretty tiring as well. I'm sure it's going to be just as wonderful and just as tiring for the next 20 years or so. My wife and I were counting up all the places Leomana is connected to by heritage and potential citizenship and we came up with eight different countries!! Figuring out which other languages she should learn is a pretty algebraic proposition, so we'll probably start with Spanish (which is not native or heritage for either of us).

The last thing I would say about my connections is that I have been a musician specializing in traditional West African, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Haitian rhythms for close to 35 years now. I started out playing in the engine room of a Trinidadian steel band based at Weslyan University in Connecticut and have studied drumming with a number of teachers over the years. The most important are Nurudfafini Pili Abena and Jah Amen Mobley (who were students of Babatunde Olatunji at the Elma Lewis Center in Roxbury), Fode Oulare, Reggae MacGowan and Moussa "Pico" Bangoura. I have been a semi-professional musician but I really love playing for dance classes. I have worked with a number of amazing and generous dance teachers in Boston, Cambridge, Chicago and St. Louis and strive to be worthy of all my teachers as a human being and as a member of several different musical lineages.

I am very proud to be a teacher at UMass Boston. I have worked at four other universities, private, public, elite and overseas, and I am 100% certain that UMB is the place I have been happiest at. It's partly my colleagues, the students and the location, but its also the urban mission and the sense that education is a real gift that has value to people in the UMB community. It's not seen as an entitlement or a mere transaction here.