I am going to the Women's Commission

Before I have time to tell you my life at the Gender Research Centre, Chinese University of Hong Kong, I am heading to the Women's Commission next Tuesday.

Many of you knew that I'd been involved in the Legislative Council Election of the Article 45 Concern Group and Cyd Ho during the summer last year. But not many people know where I am after that.

Well, it's reasonable. I am going to different places every month after the election.

I took a long vacation in October. I pratically did nothing over the month. I spent most of the time during the first two weeks to sleep, compensating those time I lost during the election. I tried to clean up my room, but it's a never ending story and it's still in chaotic situation right now.

The most constructive things I did in October was knitting two sweaters for Angelica's and Alice's baby boy and baby girl respectively. I will post some pictures here, if I ever figure how to do it.

In November, I landed on a part-time research position at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong.

Yes, you are very right. I don't have any legal background and I barely passed my Engineering Law in my undergraduate study. But it's a qualitative research, exactly what I had done for my MSW dissertation. I think this is the very reason they hired me without much thinking.

The research project is on litigants in person, i.e. people going to court without a lawyer. There's an increasing trend of litigants in person showing up before the judge, and a lots have been done overseas. Needless to say, we are seriously lagging behind. Research overseas shows that many litigants in person are in fact highly educated. The reason they don't have a lawyer is because they believe they can handle it all by themselves so they choose not to hire a lawyer. I am interested to know if this is also the case in HK.

So Decemeber came. I arrived at the secretariat of the People's Panel on West Kowloon. It broke the record to "burn me out in the shortest time". Just after one week, I was exhausted and couldn't take it any more. I guess I changed after the election. In the past, I believe a job should be something I like and occupy every second of my life. But now, I prefer to have some spare time to do some personal things too. The "personal things" can be reading a good book, watching a drama, chatting to friends, or even going to bed early. The PPWK simply came too late and couldn't fit in my current "agenda of life".

And then it's year 2005. I begin working as a Project Coordinator at the Gender Research Centre, CUHK. I thought I am here to stay. It fits my "agenda" somewhat: quiet, so you can concentrate, and people are nice and simple.

This year is the 10th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action and the WTO. Women's groups worldwide are working on something around "Beijing+10 meets WTO+10", hoping to mainstream gender perspective into the WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong in December this year. Therefore, I am at the GRC to organize a local workshop to review the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action in HK, and a regional conference on "Mainstreaming Gender: Intergrating Beijing + 10 into the WTO process".

Life is full of surprise.

This week I received a call from the Women's Commission to offer me a post as Publicity Officer there. (To be more precise, it should be the Women's Division of the Health, Welfare and Food Bureau of the HKSAR Government.)

I haven't even had a split second of hestitation and accepted their offer. First of all, it pays 1/2 more than at CUHK. Second of all, it provides me a stepping stone to switch back to the promotion field. I set a goal to land on a publicity position in the public sector at the beginning of the recent job hunt. What better opportunity can there be?

The Women's Commission is lousy, but I am there to stay.

May God bless me.