The title, stolen from a recent blog entry by a friend and former colleague. Shin’s website has garnered quite a loyal following. Small wonder. She writes so very eloquently and movingly about her experiences as a mother and cancer patient. She talks about death and god, love and what it means to be a good person, often posing tough questions, fearlessly taking on issues no one else would dare to touch. And she never ever wallows.
In her latest post Shin talks about the people she admires, and why she thinks of them as superheroes. She also mentions Homeless FC. She’s not seen the film, but after reading about it, she thinks some of the people we feature are heroes too. We’ve never thought of Wai Tung or Ah Lung and Ah Hung as heroic. But she is right. You don’t have to perform major feats in order to qualify. Heroism is about trying to be a better person and trying to use what you have to make the world around you a better place.
It’s amazing how Shin doesn’t draw the connection between her own experience with cancer and the idea of heroism. She’s been waging a painful fight against a horrible illness. Yet she still finds time to nag her friends to take care of their health, raise funds for cancer-related causes, bring up two kids, keep a blog and engage in hugely thought-provoking online discourses about god and the afterlife. Over the past few months, she’s somehow managed to bring together a disparate bunch of people from all over the world. She’s given us a reason to get online each morning – we log on simply to read what she has to say. To learn. To be inspired. Superhero? You bet.
