Girl's Talk, Talk Girls. 女孩有話說

On April 11^th, 2017, I attended Coldplay’s A Head Full of Dream Tour in my home country, Taiwan. I was there, not only hoping to enjoy their first ever concert in Taiwan for the in twenty years but also as a Global Citizen volunteer. On behalf of Global Citizen, we asked people to sign the petition on asking world leaders to help with the sanitation and water sources in under-developed countries and to level the law in every country in order to end discriminations on women.

I’ve become a Global Citizen since November 2015, when the world leaders were having a meeting on Sustainable Development Goals in the United Nations Headquarter, New York, and Global Citizen holding their own Global Citizen Festival in the Central Park.

Even though it seems unlikely for me to ever be part of huge events like Global Citizen Festival (it has only been held in the U.S., India, and next year in Germany), I still read their posts on social medias, sign petitions, and tweet to support the issues from time to time.

And I suppose what I did above eventually paid off, because two months before Coldplay’s Taipei concert, I received an online application link from Global Citizen, looking for volunteers joining them before every Coldplay’s Asia show. I was literally shaking while I filled in my application. It all felt so unreal, that I am actually one step forward to speak on behalf of Global Citizen! What excited me more, was that we will be advocating Gender Equality.

Now this will lead us to another story of mine. In order to explain how I became an advocate for Gender Equality and Feminism, I would like to give my credits to these two incredible young women: Malala Yousafzai and Emma Watson.

If it wasn’t because of Malala, that I accidentally ran into her autobiography in a bookstore one day when I was 15, I wouldn’t believe that a girl as young as Malala and I could ever be an “advocate” or “activist”; if it wasn’t for Emma Watson’s UN Speech when she launched the HeForShe campaign, I would still be pending, whether to get involve in the issue that I care about the most, Gender Equality, and become a Feminist.

When we talk about Gender Equality, most of us automatically think of a "modern strong women". Yet, not all women around the world have the privilege to have an insight of how modern women can be different from the past, the endless possibilities of us and how much power there actually is within us. This is why getting people's attention on Gender Equality could be so important.

Although we didn’t get much time that time to actually dig into the issue with everyone we’ve met, it still made me proud for conveying an issue that I really care and that I think everyone should care about, too. However, it also gave me a picture of how much there’s still yet for me to learn. To get done with anything great, you need to put in great efforts first.