Admitted

Name REBECCA GRACE TAN TIAN EN
	Application number 68006048
	Application statusThe general stages for the application status are Application received –> Application processing –> Outcome of application You have been offered Arts & Soc Sci in academic year 2008 – 2009. The details of the offer will be stated in the offer letter. Your letter of offer was sent on 06-May-2008.

Mind Unfettered

I watched Feet Unbound yesterday. It was a sobering documentary. Unlike many movies, I don’t think that I’ll be forgetting what I watched for a long time.

And Van, I disagree with what you said. It’s alright (I suppose) to want some form of escape from the reality of the lack of happy endings in life, but the purpose of documentaries like the aforementioned, is not to depress, it is simply to create awareness.

Now one may say that you are already aware of history and the constant depression that mankind is in (even saying that you experience it yourself), but really, how much of life do we really know? Or rather, how much do we care?

It was a powerful movie because it made you cry and laugh too. You didn’t have to escape reality to realise the tenacity of the human spirit,

These soldiers (although focussing on the women) marched 120,000 km, through the mountains, grasslands, swamps and so on. They walked for days without any sleep and food. At first they had fried flour, but that ran out. Then they ate the crops in the fields, but that ran out too. They started eating grass, but eventually that ran out too. Then they found undigested seeds of crops in yak dung, so they picked the seeds out and ate them.

the seeming futility of what we strive for.

A female soldier who had gone through the Long March, to cross the Yellow River and be taken captive by the Muslim Horsemen, tortured and raped, recounted how she was beaten by youth during the Cultural Revolution. She was beaten because she was an old person who was still alive. She was beaten and made to memorise Mao-isms, as if she hadn’t done enough for her country. (That was the saddest part of the movie, just seeing the tears well up in her eyes.)

Yet, in it all, there were still moments to laugh and smile.

A recount by a little old lady about how she dodged bullets by a “capitalist dog”. Another one who now stays in a veterans’ village, dancing along her vegetable patch while singing.

In the end, an escape from reality is simply the escape from our ignorance and indifference about others and the hardship they go through.

As I watched the documentary yesterday, part of me kept saying, “Break my heart for what breaks Yours”.