| Brain Injury and Being a minority by Greg Zeng, Australia |
| ... The grand-mummy of all disabilities? Most disabled people you see only have one part of their body affected. Maybe you have poor eyesight. Or poor hearing. Or poor movement. You there! Are you stupid? Or are you crazy? No � you are just lazy! But you are so lucky! If you are like most disabled people. Blind, deaf, crippled, stupid or crazy, or lazy � you might have just the one thing wrong with you. Now imagine if you have all of these, together � at the same time. You are blind, deaf, crippled, stupid and crazy. And lazy. That is brain rot. That is brain injury. With my brain injury, I died 16 years ago, aged 35, in the middle of my career. My brain was in a coma for two weeks. �They� told my family and myself � that I will never walk, never remember anything, never talk. I would just be a vegetable in a nursing home. But now I am the creation of modern medicine. Modern medicine kept me alive. My many visitors helped me to out of my coma. The nurses taught me to remember things. �Turn over! Open your mouth! Good boy.� ... |
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| Personal introduction The grand-mother of all disabilities Unfortunately I have the grand-mummy of all disabilities. No � I don�t have AIDS, which is like mad-cow disease, but AIDS takes a hundred times longer. If you have AIDS or mad cow disease, you have brain rot. I have brain rot � which is like AIDS & mad cow disease. But my brain rot will probably never get worse than it is now. My brain injury affects my sensory behaviour � sensations that I receive through my eyes, ears and other sensors. It affects my muscle movements, like you see in the Paralympic people. It affects my intellect. It affects my emotions � like you see in the crazy people in prison or rolling around homeless in the streets of the city. The grand-mummy of all disabilities? Most disabled people you see only have one part of their body affected. Maybe you have poor eyesight. Or poor hearing. Or poor movement. You there! Are you stupid? Or are you crazy? No � you are just lazy! But you are so lucky! If you are like most disabled people. Blind, deaf, crippled, stupid or crazy, or lazy � you might have just the one thing wrong with you. Now imagine if you have all of these, together � at the same time. You are blind, deaf, crippled, stupid and crazy. And lazy. That is brain rot. That is brain injury. With my brain injury, I died 16 years ago, aged 35, in the middle of my career. My brain was in a coma for two weeks. �They� told my family and myself � that I will never walk, never remember anything, never talk. I would just be a vegetable in a nursing home. But now I am the creation of modern medicine. Modern medicine kept me alive. My many visitors helped me to out of my coma. The nurses taught me to remember things. �Turn over! Open your mouth! Good boy.� The physiotherapists taught me to get out of bed. The speech therapists taught me to talk to you . The vocational therapists taught me to get dressed. I still have brain injury. I still am a little blind, a little deaf, a little crippled, a little stupid and very much crazy. And very much lazy. That is brain injury. Chinese families want to forget that I ever existed Most Chinese families, including mine, wanted to forget that I ever existed. I was dead & buried, in the good Chinese tradition. But thanks to organizations like the MDAA, here I am now. I have risen from the dead, from my grave in the nursing home, and I will tell you about the three things: Disability, Chinese and my life being affected by both diseases. Disease one: Disability. Any disability. Or the grand mother of all disabilities: brain injury. Disease Two: a primitive, pre-modern culture, like being Chinese, that knows nothing about bringing dead people to life again, unless they are good examples of a human adult. Main definitions Consumer�s view A consumer�s view of being Chinese, and being crippled. Now that I personally have brain injury, I am forced every second of every day for the rest of my life to deal with disability. My disability consumer might complain, and ask for help. But then I�m a Chinese adult. As a Chinese adult, I must appear to be strong, resilient and self-sufficient ... even if I am the opposite. I do not need help. No! Not in any way. I repeat: I do not need help. No! Especially not modern help. I am adult. I am self sufficient. ... I do not cry. I have no emotion. My life here and now is not important. What is important is my family. Am I good for my family? My name is TSANG HING MING. TSANG � family name first. That is the most important part of me. You can call me TSANG. I am the official representative of my family. My life, for myself, has no meaning. As long as my family name is intact & respectable. John Howard. That white man, boss of Australia, talks about family values, family first. He doesn�t know about families. We are Chinese. We KNOW what families are. In the family, there are no human rights, no individuality. Family first. Family only. That characteristic of Chinese people � no individuality, no human rights - is a big frightening puzzle to most non-Chinese people. The non-Chinese cannot understand it. And they fear it. Chinese - Am I? I look Chinese. I dream and think in my baby language, especially when I�m in a coma, or I�m wanting to go to sleep, or I�ve just woken up from my sleep. My baby language is that which I received from my mother, my father, and my very large Hakka family. My Hakka village was surrounded by strange, hostile white people. Most Hakka villages are surrounded, in China or Singapore, by other strange, hostile people � like the Cantonese in southern China, or the strange people in Singapore. So even though, like most Hakka people in Timor, Indonesia or Malayasia, I do not speak Hakka language, my thoughts and feelings are Hakka. My spoken, written and formal language is that which the military people outside our Hakka village � said that we had to learn. So because I was born in white Australia, the one official language here is a version of English, called �Australian English�. For those of you who do not know what Hakka is � in the official Chinese language (Mandarin), it is pronounced �keck�. Hakka or keck is one of the more than 100 languages spoken by those people who are called �Chinese�. On the Internet, you will discover that the Hakka language version is the biggest in any of the Chinese languages. The military and official languages, Mandarin in Singapore, Taiwan & China, or Tagalog in the Philippines, or Indonesian in Indonesia, or English in Australia � are not so enthusiastically discussed on the Internet. It reminds me of the advertising motto: �If you are second best, you try harder.� Disability Brain injury is the grand mummy daddy of all disabilities. I�ll ask you: Who are you? Your legs � then I�ll get a wheelchair for you. Your eyes � then I�ll get an eye-replacement for you. Or your ears � then I�ll get an ear replacement for you. With all these replacements, you can win a gold medal in the next Paralympic games. But if you have a injured brain, can I get a brain replacement for you? My brain injury affects not just my intellect. I am not just intellectually retarded � otherwise I�d get six gold medals for Australia in the Paralympic games. Not just one stupid gold medal. But six. How�s that? My brain injury also affects my mental health and my emotions � that is why I will be under psychiatric treatment for the rest of my life. Brain injury also affects muscles, so I am � not a paraplegic � but a hemiplegic. My left side of my whole body is almost useless, and it has a mind of its own, being very lazy or spastically overactive. Finally the brain affects sensation: vision, hearing, taste, temperature and so on. And I am disabled and handicapped in all these areas as well. Most of the people in this room will have brain injury if they ever get to old age. Sometimes the brain injury is very slight and unnoticeable. Sometimes it is noticeable enough to be called a �stroke�. But my kind of brain injury � traumatic brain injury � is most dangerous when it occurs in mid career, or the peak of your life, which it did for me. So it is especially difficult. Personal view So � I�m Chinese, and disabled, in a hostile, non-Chinese culture. I�ve suggested that the non-Chinese throughout the world are very puzzled: Do we Chinese have psychology? Do we have feelings? Are we mindless cogs in a machine? My Hakka village was Chinese. Then I lived alone, outside my Chinese village in a world that was hostile to Chinese people, for thirty years. Five years ago, I returned to living in a Chinese village. In good Hakka style, I am living with my wife and her family. My Hakka village � they used to go to the temple and its activities, then eat and discuss family politics. But after my marriage to a Hongkong woman, my Chinese village is not Hakka Chinese, but Cantonese Chinese, still living in a world which is hostile to Chinese people. They just eat, dream about eating and money for more eating and very loudly play mahjong. Confidentiality, my pre-modern villages, both Hakka and Cantonese, cannot and will not understand modern medicine. Both Chinese cultures think that my disability is something caused by someone who did something bad � in my past, or in the past history of our families. Only by everyone in the family being �good�, can the badness go away. My Chinese cultures outwardly put forward their modern education � to show that they are no longer primitive, pre-modern cultures. Good reputable schools, high distinctions at university, fashionable behaviors and obvious signs of financial wealth � all good proof that we are modern. Like many western people however, we Chinese secretly are still hostile to modern and post-modern times. So perhaps we might wear contact lens instead of spectacles. My father, Order of Australia medal twice over, and now 89 years old � still tries to pretend that he never needs spectacles. Weak eyes, weak legs and weak arms, weak intellect, weak personality or weak glucose tolerance are all easy to fix in these modern times, but our Chinese family cultures are still denying these common disabilities. Very well known to upper class pretensions are the facts that you are never weak. Chinese people, like the Royal family that Lady Diana married into, are never weak, in any way. Keeping up appearances, or keeping face, is more important than the truth. That is why you rarely see Asian or Chinese people involved in the outside community or in politics. We are so family obsessed that nothing else is important . What to do? Ask Lady Diana To be famous, you must be dead first. Lady Di proved that. So as Lady Di says, get Elton John to raise millions of dollars and then nothing changes. More research The intelligent people � the ones who have university degrees � tell us to help the academics in the universities to write books. Then ten years after the books are published, their might be a change in the world � maybe, perhaps, in the wind is blowing the right way. Support advocacy organizations The Brain Injury Association is saying: do you want things to change, long after you are dead and buried, or dead and cremated - maybe, perhaps, in the wind is blowing the right way? Ohh! Perhaps you are Chinese? Or perhaps you are Queen Elizabeth? I think that if you definitely want think to change now, to help correct the bad and sick things of our past, then you must make it happen. Now. Don�t leave it up to a gamble on some educated monkey. Get in there now, and make it happen. The ABOVE was a script for verbal delivery, face-to-face, to a live audience. PLEASE COMMENTS. : [email protected] by Greg Zeng, Australia |
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