Dystopia and Utopia

The above are theme topics for a class in American Lit and Cultural Studies at CityU. I'm the tutor for 3 sections. This week they did group projects. For the idea of utopia, two different groups played the HK World City Youtube and said it was not true at all. One student shot a short video of herself in Sham Shui Po and said it was noisy, polluted, dirty, and this was the reality of HK life.

Then, one group showed pix of Foxconn/Apple workers and re-enacted working at the factory and collapsing and dying (this was clearly dystopia--they had enacted moving from a rural village in hopes of a utopian existence as a factory worker). The buzzing factory line noises were hilarious.

When I see some group projects like this I feel a little encouraged that the students are aware of what is going on and that they could possibly work for some kind of change. Hard to say, but it does give one hope. I feel like this young population should mobilize around issues of air quality, but most probably think it's normal to breathe this terrible air. As one person told me--when I was a kid, everyone had asthma! I heard one story last week about a young woman who really suffered from asthma. She went to Australia and did nothing, but after a month, her asthma stopped. She had suffered from it her whole life. She desperately tried to get a job there. No luck. So she is back here working, having problems breathing.

Good clean air needs to be thought of as a basic human right.