Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

  • 09 Dec

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    Getting ready for Christmas

    4

    I have PLENTY of time. Not.

    It never fails. One minute, I’m regarding the calendar and snorting because I have so much free time it’s laughable. The next, it’s the day before Christmas Eve and I haven’t done A Thing.

    Gads, I’m a bad parent sometimes. You know those parents who have a ritual around putting up a tree and decorations? Who have stories about special ornaments handmade by their great-great-aunt with arthritis from ration coupons they saved during the war? Who have lovingly preserved each and every recipe so as to reproduce faithfully a banquet from the nineteenth century? Yeah, nope, not me. After giving our last two artificial trees the thumbs down, we haven’t even bought a new one yet, and Christmas is just a couple of weeks away. Yikes!

    (Then again, we don’t even have curtains for more than half the house, so what’s a tree between friends, right?)

    One thing we have decided to follow is the Christmas Eve dinner thing. Because it’s so hot here in the tropics, you’d have to be a lunatic (are you listening, Australia?) to have a major food-fest at lunchtime. Interestingly enough, it’s also the same on the Continent. So, Malaysia and Poland are in agreement and a Christmas Eve dinner it is.

    J abhors carp, the traditional Polish main dish. He tells me he’d rather eat wet tissue which, interestingly, resembles the texture of carp … or so he says. I wouldn’t know, having never eaten giant koi-type fish (hey, we keep them as pets!), but I’ll take his word for it.

    On my side of the fence, it’s Portuguese Eurasian roast chicken. This is a family favourite, and is something I can make in my sleep, so it’s definitely on the menu. Vindaloo and devil curries are also traditional, but the kids still aren’t that much into the chilli-hot food (yet!), so I have to make a choice.

    I like vindaloo because of the adventure. I say that because it’s not like the Indian curry of the same name at all. It’s fresher, a lighter red and quite vinegary (no surprise, as it’s based on a Portuguese dish cooked in vinegar sauce). The thing is, it’s also a finicky dish. Just add one spoon of vinegar too much and you’ll ruin the entire curry you’ve been slaving over for more than an hour. This is a curry that demands you taste CONSTANTLY! Eurasians have normally cooked this with chicken, but I like the texture of pork more, so that’s what I use. (And then I discovered that — hey! — pork was the traditional meat for the founding Portuguese dish too. Fantastic!)

    The traditional salad I remember from my childhood days was An Abomination Of Nature. No other words for it. It put me off salads for decades. The basic ingredients were okay — lettuce, hard-boiled eggs, onions — but the dressing was, not to put too fine a point on it, the spawn of Satan. My mother used to make up some concoction that combined condensed milk with powdered mustard and enough water and milk (almost a cup) to form something with the consistency of swampy water. This would then get poured over the basic ingredients and let to soak for hours before serving. Believe me, it’s worse than it sounds.

    Nowadays, we do a green salad with a freshly-made vinaigrette although, as we’re having a party this year, I might also add a pasta and asparagus salad.

    In deference to the cold of the Polish winter, we’ll have some mulled red wine in addition to other, non-alcoholic refreshments. It goes down to about 25-27 degrees Celsius in these here parts around this time of year (in the evenings), so I think our fake fireplace (we lugged it all the way from Australia) will look very nice in the corner. We’ve had it on before (just the flames, not the heat) and visitors have loved it! And I’m trying to talk J into cooking his most excellent chicken briyani.

    Dessert is where we all fall down. From watching Jacques Pepin, I know how to do a bulk order of Crepes Suzette in one go. And thanks to the Juniors’ cookbook (that’s Juniors of New York), I can whip up a mean NY-style baked cheesecake. Both are good do-ahead dishes. Some bought, good-quality ice-cream for those who want it and I think we’re done!

    So, our menu is shaping up as follows:

    • Chicken liver pate and one other dip to start (pesto? pimento? pumpkin? p-sour cream?) plus other cheap nibblies, like crisps and mixed nuts, and so on
    • Roast chicken
    • Pork vindaloo curry
    • Something from J: chicken briyani or roast leg of lamb
    • Potato dish, maybe a gratinée
    • Two salads
    • Rice
    • NY baked cheesecake
    • Sorta kinda Crepes Suzette

    What about your Christmas do, for those having one? Care to share what you’re having? Are you going traditional, iconoclast, hybrid?

  • 07 Dec

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    Don’t assume: a tiresome tale of gold coins

    2

    Use it or lose it

    People are full of parables and, really, they don’t get more annoying or tedious than those from east and south-east Asia. We were at a school event recently. It was a 6-hour festival of utter futility that happened to occur on our wedding anniversary. Six hours of non-celebration that I will never recover. And it included this little gem from the principal.

    Once, there was a father with a son. He thought his son was rather spoilt and wanted to teach him the value of hard work. So, one morning, he said to his son, “You will not get any dinner tonight, unless you go to work and come back with one day’s wages.” His son cried, but the father remained firm and sent the son out of the house to find work.

    Once the father’s back was turned, the mother called to her son and gave him a gold coin. “Go away for the rest of the day,” she told him, “and come back in the evening with the coin.” The son did as his mother told him and, at the end of the day, he came back with his coin. But his father knew that it had been given to him, so he threatened to throw the coin into the well. When the son didn’t object, the father did exactly that and sent the boy to bed hungry that night.

    The next morning, the father repeated his edict. “You will not get any dinner tonight, unless you go to work and come back with one day’s wages.” This time it was the boy’s aunt who gave him a gold coin and the scene repeats itself with the father throwing the coin into the well.

    On the third morning, after yet another repetition of the edict, the son actually did go out and do some back-breaking, incredibly tiring work. When he came back to the house at the end of the day, his father again threatened to throw the coin into the well but, this time, the son dropped to his knees and begged his father not to do it, telling him how hot, thirsty and exhausted he was, and what heavy work he had to do just to get that coin. And the father handed it back to his son and gave him his blessings, or something like that.

    Assumed moral: Hard work makes you appreciate what you have more. Or, you only appreciate what you earn with hard work. Or something like that.

    Alternative moral to J and I: If you can’t even pretend to have done some work, you deserve to lose your money.

  • 30 Nov

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    Don’t assume: Our car mechanic

    2

    The tale of the fifty cents

    So this week, I thought I’d start a 3-part series on the tales that people tell. And how you shouldn’t jump to conclusions because the conclusion you jump to may not be the conclusion other people jump to. It’s also an observation on what rosy-coloured glasses we use in life, during really inappropriate moments.

    Like the story told by our car mechanic when we still lived in Melbourne. He was a young, hard-working man who had an immense amount of respect for his father. So much so that he told us the following anecdote while we were waiting for our bill to be totalled:

    When I was young, about ten years old, my father told me he’d pay me fifty cents if I mowed the yard. Wow, fifty cents! So I dragged the lawnmower out of the garage and I mowed the front yard and then I ran up to my father asking for my money. “But you haven’t mowed the back,” he told me. So I took the mower to the back yard and, after a couple of hours, finished the back yard. I ran to my father again, asking for my fifty cents. “Not until you clean the mower and put it back in the garage,” he said. So I cleaned the mower, put it back in the garage and went to the front verandah where my father was sitting, reading the paper. After I told him that I had finished, he looked at me, folded his newspaper and walked into the house. I never got my fifty cents.

    We both stared at our mechanic. “So what’s the moral of the story?” J asked.

    “It’s strange,” our young friend replied. “I asked my father that recently and he said he couldn’t remember what he wanted to teach me, but it was probably along the lines of not always getting what you want.”

    We remained quiet — both of us horrified but conversing only with speaking glances — until we were in our car, driving away.

    “Well,” J said to me, “I think the moral of the story is that you can be missing a few marbles and still have kids.”

    “Really?” I replied. “To me, the moral of the story is that parents can be utter c*nts.”

  • 18 Nov

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    Once more, an automaton

    2

    Oh good grief, will the world not stop sending incendiary missiles of bogus thinking my way? To whit, an article in the Brisbane Times, entitled “Money can buy you love, economist says“. Dr Paul Fritjers has figured out what different events mean to men and women, translated into cold, hard cash. Herewith:

    WHAT’S a marriage worth? To an Aussie male, about $32,000. That’s the lump sum … the man would need to receive out of the blue to make him as happy as his marriage will over his lifetime. An Aussie woman would need much less, about $16,000.

    Hmm, I thought. So, according to him, marriage makes men twice as happy as women. Interesting. Moving on:

    [W]hen it comes to divorce, the Aussie male will be so devastated it would be as if he had lost $110,000. An Aussie woman would be less traumatised, feeling as if she had lost only $9000.

    Men are twelve times unhappier during a divorce? O-kay. I keep reading and decide to tabulate everything to make it easier (but feel free to go check the original article, to make sure I transcribed everything correctly):

    Event Women Men x difference
    Marriage +$16,000 +$32,000 x 2
    Divorce -$9,000 -$110,000 x 12.2
    Birth of a child +$8,700 +$32,700 x3.8
    Death of spouse/child -$130,900 -$627,300 x 4.8
    Moving house +$2,600 -$16,000 x 7.7

    Asked why his calculations show men much more affected by life’s events than women, Professor Frijters says he doesn’t know. ”But it does tend to give me confidence in the calculations. We know, for instance, that marriage improves the lives of men much more than women.”

    Yes, let’s jump from one independent conclusion and use that as the premise for validating an entire, completely different data set. Oh. My. Frickin’. Gods. I thought we had moved beyond this utter bullshit since Sigmund “Scientific method? What’s scientific method?” Freud.

    Remember women, only men can feel with full emotional charge. It doesn’t matter that you’ve carried life within your body, losing it still doesn’t match a man’s pain. Not by 4.8 times.

    I’m starting to get just a teensy sick of all this tripe that posits women as Other, as alien. Remember the “women have no emotional feelings during orgasm” “finding” in May of last year? The one that was couched with so many “maybe”s, “perhaps”s and “probably”s that the actual result ceased to have any objective meaning? Now we have this complete and utter claptrap. All of Frijtes’ research depends on a 10-point scale questionnaire (not renowned as the feedback mechanism of profundity) given to 10,000 Australians since 2001. And he’s managed to translate that shallow scale into actual money amounts.

    Let’s count the ways where he could be barking up the wrong tree.

    One, people always feel the need to please the authority figure and, culturally, this is drummed into women more than it is into men. So, given a questionnaire, the chances are that the women are going to answer in a way that’s less independent than the men, who have always been culturally conditioned to be mavericks.

    Two, we don’t know what was said to the participants before they took the questionnaire. Were there verbal and non-verbal changes in the way the spiel was delivered to men and women?

    Three, women have a tendency to be labelled “emotional” or “hysterical”. Were the results an indication of women actively trying not to appear emotional?

    Four, what kind of language was used on the questionnaire? Was it gender-neutral?

    Five, could this even be a reflection on reflection? Men tend to take things personally and feel they have to “resolve” the issue (the dominant’s usual role in society) whereas women feel they have to cope and move on (the submissive’s usual role in society)?

    And that’s without even looking into the dubious proposition that the complexities of a life-changing event can be adequately captured in a 10-point frickin’ questionnaire!

    When I mentioned this to J over the breakfast table, he looked at me and asked: “What’s the guy’s bias? I bet he’s divorced.”

    He’s right on the first part. Every scientist approaches her/his pet hypothesis with an agenda. What’s Fritjers’ agenda? Is he divorced? Was it amicable? Has any traumatic event occurred in his life that has led to an even unconscious resentment towards women? There must be something, because anybody looking at the figures in the table, even men, would find it mighty strange that a man would feel the loss of a child more keenly than the woman who bore it. By almost four times. And Fritjers’ blithe explanation-that-isn’t for the large discrepancy is just more grist for that hidden agenda wheel.

    There’s a very sour taste in my mouth right now left by Fritjers’ irresponsibility, and I hope it doesn’t take any methodical peer much time to completely demolish his theory. In the meantime, however, we have:

    Insurance companies and lawyers … [taking] … a keen interest in the research, he says, because of the need for dollar compensation.

    And I’m off again! So, if a man loses his spouse, there’s the potential for him to be compensated almost five times more than if it’s a woman who’s lost hers? In what universe, except our own, does this make any kind of sense?

    Even worse than the blatant statement that men are worthy of more concern — the inference being that they feel more “deeply”, that they’re more “human”, whereas we’re somehow “lesser” — is the economic consequence of such lies. Any insurance company that aligns itself even faintly with Fritjers’ disturbing views, will find more than enough justification to cheat women (already the disadvantaged majority) out of bona fide compensation for serious life calamities. What’s next? Are we going to regress to the time when we thought women couldn’t feel pain like men?

    Actually, that’s already happening, isn’t it? I gave birth to The Wast in California, and could not believe the “natural birth” bullshit that surrounded the process. I even had one friend go for counselling after birth because she had to have a forceps birth and felt that, as a result, she had “failed” to be a “real mother”. I had two emergency Caesarians for both of mine, and neither were pleasant experiences, but did that make me feel any less a woman? Absolutely not! My children were born healthy and alive and that was all I asked for. The real job of being a mother only began after that, not during an entirely biological process that has its own inherent risks that modern medicine can now mitigate against.

    When a woman insists on sucking on ice chips (I mean to say!) rather than getting pain relief, there’s only one sector that wins, and that’s the HMO. Through a lengthy process of indoctrination, medical insurance companies in the United States have convinced women that *any* kind of intervention during the birth process is a reflection on their worth as women and mothers, and they’ve done this for the sole reason of increasing their profits. If I had any spare time, I’d really like to see the figures of female mortality during birth in an HMO environment, versus corresponding mortality in a country that has an affordable, public option. I’d also like to see the figures in the above two scenarios when comparing avoidable complications on the babies that have been delivered vaginally.

    And now Fritjers strolls along with his loaded study. Where do I start?

    Or, more to the point, where does it end?

  • 11 Nov

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    Sausage: A day in the life

    2

    I know I should be posting photos but that requires an investment of time that I really don’t have right now. Srsly. So I’m afraid you’ll just have to satisfy yourself with the following until Kaz has some few nanoseconds spare. Sorry.

    Midnight to 5:20am :: Sleep, but also wake up and whine if (a) I need to go potty, (b) I need a hug, (c) I need a hug while I go potty. Go back to sleep while tata swears and curses and wipes down pyjama pants and/or floor. Dream of chewing doggy bones.

    5:20am :: Mama‘s awake! She’s letting me out! Jump on mama! Jump on mama! Jump on mama! Let’s go into your office. Ooo, the fish are still asleep. Jump on mama! Jump on mama! Tata takes me out for my first potty trip of the day. Get back to mama. Jump on mama! Jump on mama!

    6:00am :: What’s that I hear? Tata is downstairs, making breakfast? Mayhap he may drop a juicy crust of bread if I look pathetic enough. Time to go down, sit on his feet and get breakfast snacks.

    6:20am :: I would’ve preferred a piece of bread with jam on it, but bread’s bread. Back to mama‘s office. Let mama know I’m back by jumping on her.

    6:30am :: Follow mama downstairs. I show my love by stepping on her toes and nipping at them while she’s walking down the stairs.

    6:30am to 7:00am :: Try to scavenge food from the other two pups at the table. Why are they sitting at the table but I’m not? Jump on mama! Jump on mama!

    7:00am :: Step outside with tata. It’s still dark. I have to go potty again. Pups disappear into a big yellow box on wheels filled with other sleepy pups.

    7:15am :: Back into the house. Up I shoot to mama‘s office. She’s still there! Jump on mama! Jump on mama!

    7:15am to 2:30pm :: Follow mama everywhere. When she’s in her office, go to sleep on the mat under the desk. When she’s in tata‘s office, chase out the cats. Have food. Go potty. Sleep. Try to steal some fish food from the big fish in the pond outside. Wonder what they taste like? Go potty. Try to get the cats to play with me, but they only hiss and swat me with their claws. Spoilsports. I’ll keep trying though; I know I’d love playing chase with the cats. Bark at sounds heard by nobody else, just to show that I’m a good doggie. Get snacks. Sleep.

    2:30pm to 7:00pm :: Other pups are home! Time to play! Time to bite bigger pup’s trousers. He likes that! Time to lick smaller pup’s hand. She likes that. Although she strangles me sometimes with how she holds me, I know she loves me. Run under their bed! Run around their bedroom! Run under their bed! Run around their bedroom! Repeat until I hear sounds from the kitchen below. Food! Jump on mama! Jump on mama! If cats are around, chase them through the house. Get fed. Potty and a long walk or play time in the garden. Jump on mama! Jump on pups!

    7:00pm :: Still full of energy. Jump on pups! Jump on mama! Bite pups’ clothing! Try to lick mama! Jump on mama! Jump on pups! Get time-out. It happens every evening, wish I knew why. Lie outside TV room door.

    8:00pm to 9:00pm :: Let inside the TV room! Hurray! Quiet now. Sneak up to mama, lie in her lap. Fidget. Snuffle. Lick. Nap.

    9:00pm :: Go outside for last potty of the evening. Lie on grass instead and look pathetic. Try to do slalom around the palm trees. Lie on grass. Try to eat snails. Jump on mama! Jump on mama! Oh yeah, and potty, I suppose.

    9:30pm to midnight :: Tata positions my kennel so I can see into mama‘s bedroom. Puts me in kennel and locks the door. I sigh and settle in for a sleep. Dream of chasing cats, putting tata in the kennel and snuffling up to mama myself on that large, comfy bed. * sigh * Sleep.

    And that’s roughly what you get when you own a bull terrier pup.

  • 06 Nov

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    Let’s talk about … millions of Kims & Parks

    0

    Following on from Wednesday’s post on a recent party incident, I would hate for anyone to think I’m deliberately targetting old white guys for my ire. Let’s go … hmmmmm, how about … South Korea! Via the New York Times.

    Ah, South Korea. They of the full-contact democracy, stratospheric education ratings, unimaginable broadband penetration, one of the largest concentrations of land mines in the world (the meat from animals that go grazing in the DMZ along the North/South border, and are blown to shrapnel as a result, are then sold to Indian Muslim restaurants in Malaysia for turning into mutton curry … just fyi), and wonderful wonderful barbeque and kimchi. My favourite movie of the year (The Good, The Bad, The Weird) comes from Korea. As a result of all this, I’ve often wanted to visit Korea. But then I read something like this:

    On the evening of July 10, Bonogit Hussain, a 29-year-old Indian man, and Hahn Ji-seon, a female Korean friend, were riding a bus near Seoul when a man in the back began hurling racial and sexist slurs at them. The situation would be a familiar one to many Korean women who have dated or even — as in Ms. Hahn’s case — simply traveled in the company of a foreign man.

    South Korea is a case (yes, another one) of wanting to have its cake and eat it too. It likes the part of globalisation that means people enter the country to do work that nobody else wants to do, or pay the government to study there, but it doesn’t like the bit about having to actually deal with those people as fellow human beings. But, as with most things, some are more equal than others:

    Ms. Hahn said that after the incident in the bus last July, her family was “turned upside down.” Her father and other relatives grilled her as to whether she was dating Mr. Hussain. But when a cousin recently married a German, “all my relatives envied her, as if her marriage was a boon to our family,” she said.

    I think it goes without saying that we’re talking about a white German here rather than, say, a naturalised German of Turkish origin, nyuk nyuk. ‘Cos if you’re brown, here’s what you can expect from fellow Asians:

    For Mr. Hussain, subtle discrimination has been part of daily life for the two and half years he has lived here as a student and then research professor at Sungkonghoe University in Seoul. He says that, even in crowded subways, people tend not sit next to him. In June, he said, he fell asleep on a bus and when it reached the terminal, the driver woke him up by poking him in the thigh with his foot, an extremely offensive gesture in South Korea.

    I have to admit, the idea of always having a train seat to myself is tempting, but I wonder if it’s worth the surrounding angst? Let’s be blunt. The East Asians are obsessed with skin colour — Chinese, Korean, Japanese. Even the most bigoted Westerner envies a nice tan, but not so for millions of Pacific Rim residents … and Chinese Singaporeans. And it doesn’t stop there. The Koreans hate the Japanese. The Japanese hate the Chinese. The Chinese hate the Koreans. Good Gods, most people from the rest of the world can hardly tell the groups apart and, with the way the winds of history — and population drift — have been going for the past few millennia, I doubt there are many utterly pure-blood Chinese, Koreans or Japanese around anyway!

    In 2007, the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination … urged public education to overcome the notion that South Korea was “ethnically homogenous,” which, it said, “no longer corresponds to the actual situation.”

    If it ever did.

    My current hypothesis is this. The discrimination of skin colour in Asia can, I believe, be traced back to manual labour. That is, if you were a peasant then, by definition, you spent more time out in the sun, working your skinny arse off. Spend more time out in the sun and your skin becomes darker. Ergo, darker skin == cultureless, brainless peasant. On the other hand, don’t spend any time out in the sun, concern yourself with scholarly duties — or nothing at all — under a roof all day, and your skin remains lily-white. That, of course, has to mean that you don’t have to slog outside, either because of your education or wealth. Ergo, whiter skin == educated, rich, aristo type.

    It sounds too moronic, too simplistic, to be true, but nothing I’ve come across in decades of pondering this question leads to any other conclusion robust enough to encompass almost an entire continent. I’m open to alternate suggestions, if anyone has one, honest.

    I’d segue into other racial groups here, but I wanted to concentrate on the Koreans in this post. So, holiday there? I don’t think so. I know what you’ll say: “But, Kaz, you can’t just refuse to visit a country because of some incidents of stupidity!” And I’d just tell you how utterly sick and tired I am of having to pay to put up with even the probability of this kind of behaviour, year in and year out, and having to subject my children to it, and how about a frickin’ break, OKAY??!!

    (Oh, am I out of valerian already? That bottle went quick.)

    You’re after a happy ending, aren’t you? How about this?

    What was different this time, however, was that, once … [the incident with Hahn and Hussain] … was reported in the South Korean media, prosecutors sprang into action, charging the man they have identified only as a 31-year-old Mr. Park with contempt, the first time such charges had been applied to an alleged racist offense. Spurred by the case, which is pending in court, rival political parties in Parliament have begun drafting legislation that for the first time would provide a detailed definition of discrimination by race and ethnicity and impose criminal penalties.

    Will it work? I say no. There is too much embedded racism already at play in Asian society. Literally millennia of it. So, you see, it’s not just a Western problem. It’s a problem for all of us.

    ADDITIONAL: And, when I say it’s a problem for all of us, I include myself as well. My taking offence at the assumption that I was the servant of the house, for example (ref. last post). Upon reflection, one reason I felt such anger was because I consider myself superior to the average servant. There, I said it. So, being lumped in the same category with a domestic worker was deeply insulting to me. This is despite the fact that I know that many, for example, Filipino women who are tertiary qualified are driven to domestic servitude overseas due solely to their country’s woeful economic, short-sighted and rapacious policies. And, in any case, there but for an accident of birth, goes I. This is a demon I’m going to have to wrestle with myself. I just hope I win.

    ADDITIONAL THE SECOND: How about I lighten things up next week? I actually have * shock * horror * writing news and I’ll see about putting up an update on mini bull terrier and general vandal, Sausage.

  • 04 Nov

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    Locked out of my own home

    4

    This topic starts in so many places, and leads to so many places, that I’m not sure where it will end. So bear with me.

    A few weeks ago, J and I were at an afternoon get-together. It was actually a nice mix of people, an equal assortment of Asians and Westerners, and maybe that’s what relaxed me. To be honest, I don’t like being alone in a crowd of Westerners. It makes me feel uncomfortable and, to be honest, quite vulnerable. That’s because there haven’t been many events where I haven’t been — even unconsciously — insulted. The put-downs are varied — because I speak English well or because I have a Western accent when somehow an Eastern one is expected. Because I’m smaller than I sound, browner than I sound. Because I’m too “intense”, too “heavy”, too “depressing” to be around. Whatever it is, there seems to be absolutely no hesitation with a stranger telling me exactly what’s wrong with me to my face on very little contact. Is it because I’m female? Or brown-skinned? Or both? And, therefore, does that make it easier to use some kind of superior tone towards me? (This opens up a whole ‘nother grocery store of canned worms, so I’ll just leave it there, for the time being.)

    In any case, we were at this event and, because I usually get on very well with older people, I stopped to talk to the father of the hostess. I mentioned where we lived and he commented that he’d seen me walking around the house a few times (they live quite close), “but I thought you were the servant.”

    You’d think I’d be used to all this by now but, weeks later, I have to admit that that one throwaway line still bothers me. That person was English, and he made his comment with such blithe unconcern, that it stopped me in my tracks. I’m still trying to figure out what emotion is ascendant in me — anger, confusion, indignation. Shame. Shame that whites can look at people like me and the first thing that springs to mind is “servant”. Shame that, in the country where I was born, a foreigner can look at me and, with one word, reduce me to the level of a slave. Realisation that, in the eyes of a white, I have no status except what they deign to give me.

    This unsettling vulnerability strikes at the oddest times. I’ll be watching TV, looking at someone cute and then wondering whether he’d give me the time of day if we met, purely because of the colour of my skin. It was a question that dogged me from teenagehood. When I met J, I went through the same angst. Would his parents approve of me? Not because I was a professional, tertiary-educated woman with successful businesses of her own, but because I was brown-skinned? Everything in my life — all my skills, experiences and accomplishments; my past, my present, my future — reduced to one, genetically-determined, completely irrelevant, factor. Ah SLC24A5, thy sting is sharp.

    The mothers of two ex-boyfriends heartily disapproved of our liaisons. The first mother was Indian, her son was her first-born and she was worried about him liaising with an Eurasian girl because, “everyone knows Eurasian girls are sluts”. We’re of mixed blood, you see, and so can’t really be trusted. The Japanese thought the same, which was why they tried to exterminate my race during WWII. Srinivas went on to marry an Indian girl. The second mother used the old “think of the children and what they’ll have to suffer” argument to dissuade us. Peter the Pom eventually married an Australian Italian. All this is water under a several-decades’ old bridge and yet, all it took at a party, to bring it all crashing back, was one thoughtless comment from an old man.

    The other thing that I’ve come to realise is that you can’t change the mind of such people. What he said as a 70+ year old was only a public utterance of his own attitudes that were formed years earlier. And those attitudes are nothing that I can demolish with one witty comment at a social event. Not that I had any in reserve, even if I wanted to. All I can do is hope he dies soon so he infects as few additional people as possible with his views though, considering how long he’s been alive, it’s probably a forlorn hope.

    But do you want to know the kicker? He married a Chinese woman. I spoke to her as well and she’s a very charming, quick-witted, erudite lady. They had two daughters. But he only had to look at me and see “servant”. The mental convolutions in that mind are too complex for me to even begin to unravel, as they are in most bigots, so I didn’t even try. (But I do, don’t I? Was it because I’m shorter? Darker than his wife? Was it my bearing? My features? Some other non-verbal characteristic?)

    It’s too much to think that I’ll manage to keep my own children away from people like that old man. And it’s not a question of age, really it isn’t. I’ve found that, in general, you can only expect bald bigotted honesty from two groups – youngsters and oldsters. The rest are (usually) a little too smart to come out with things like that in company, and certainly not when they’re without their allies. But it doesn’t bother those who are young, and those who are old. And while you may be able to do something about the youngsters, it’s way too late by the time they’re pensioners. All you can do is smile, excuse yourself, and move on.

  • 19 Oct

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    I’m so proud of you, darling

    2

    As you know, I rarely talk about my private life. That’s mostly because I think such anecdotes are pretty boring to innocent bystanders. But I really did want to make an exception in this particular case, because I’m inordinately proud of our son, The Wast.

    He’s a good boy, a 9yo A-/B+ student who’s class monitor. He has a wicked sense of humour and takes his responsibilities seriously. He is of a mind that there are problems he can handle himself, much to my occasional chagrin, and takes everything in life — finances in particular — very seriously.

    Recently, we’ve had A Situation with one of his language teachers. (Both The Wast and Little Dinosaur currently learn English, Malay and Chinese. At home, they also get the occasional bout of haphazard Polish.) This language teacher — let’s call her Teach — is obviously inexperienced. Or it could be that she couldn’t score one of the many scholarships in other career areas and so decided to join the teacher’s training college. This career path is a common one, one that is eased for a particular race due to the prevailing policies of the country, making it a shoo-in for them to graduate and be assigned to schools, regardless of their actual level of expertise.

    The Situation involves verbal abuse. It appears that Teach is not very good at controlling the class. As a result, the boys in particular tend to play up. This is exacerbated by the fact that, after perusing The Wast’s worksheets and exams, it’s obvious to me that she isn’t even a very good teacher. (And I say this as an ex-teacher, ex-lecturer, and ex-corporate trainer.)

    The inexperience and counter-productive attitude of Teach manifests itself by reducing herself to the level of her charges and verbally abusing the children, literally making them cry, and then taunting them afterwards.

    After almost a year of such behaviour that was related to me by The Wast, and which skirted the boundaries of proper behaviour (I’ll admit it, I thought she had only herself to blame for reducing the classroom to an absolute battlefield, and that she deserved every bit of backtalk she got), it finally went too far when it was related to me that she told one of her misbehaving students in class (after making him cry) to, “Go to hell!”.

    The Wast and I had this conversation over the dinner table.

    Me: And what do you think about that? I know that Wong was misbehaving, but do you think the teacher had the right to say that to him?
    The Wast: No.
    Me: Do you think something should be done about it? Bearing in mind that she is the teacher?
    TW: Yes, I think something should be done about it.
    Me: Right now, I’m thinking that I’d like to write a letter to the Principal and Vice-Principal, pointing out that this is unacceptable behaviour.
    TW: Okay.
    Me: The problem is, I’d have to put down in the letter exactly who it was who told me about it.
    TW: (silence)
    Me: And, if the letters go the Principal and Vice-Principal, you could be called up by them and asked to repeat what you’ve just told me.
    TW: To the Principal?
    Me: (nodding) Could be. Now, bearing in mind that the teacher has never had to correct you, and that you personally have never had any problem with her, are you prepared for that? After all, Wong isn’t my child. Because it doesn’t affect us as a family, I could just ignore it.
    TW: (after a pause) No, do it. If the Principal calls me into his office, I’m prepared to tell them what she said.
    Me: Are you sure? You want me to write the letter?
    TW: Yes I’m sure.

    After dinner, I had The Wast stand behind me while I typed out what I wanted to say so he could see exactly what kind of trouble he’d be getting into! The next morning, as I handed him the two envelopes, I asked him one more time if he wanted to see this through.

    Me: Wong may not even thank you for this. He might not even know we’ve said or done anything. Do you understand?
    TW: Yes.
    Me: And are you still happy to take this to the office?
    TW: Yes.

    As he was waiting for the school bus to arrive, I told The Wast that there comes a time when we have to stand up for what is right, even if it’s on behalf of someone else, and even if we don’t get thanked for it. He nodded and said he understood, although I really doubt that he’ll thank me for the pithy sermon when he gets older.

    (UPDATE: Two days later, the school called in all the teachers to explain proper classroom behaviour and to remind them that the words they use in the classroom can be used outside the classroom and will give the school a bad reputation. That’s not quite the spin I would’ve put on it, but this is Asia, where the #1 activity is always saving face. We’ll see if it works.)

    It’s obvious to me, especially in the world as it’s currently morphing, that standing up for what is right is the equivalent of painting a giant red bullseye on your chest. I keep telling myself that I won’t ever do it again. Never speak up for a situation I feel is grossly unfair, especially when there’s no chance the victim/s will even know who I am or what I’ve done. “It just isn’t worth it,” I keep telling J. “And don’t we have enough problems to cope with, without giving ourselves more? Why should I put myself in a position where I could be persecuted, just for telling the bloody truth?”

    In all honesty, I still don’t know if I’ve done the right thing with The Wast. The reality is that a strong ethical streak is enough to land you in jail in most countries of the world, democracies or otherwise. In the extreme balance of contraries (shifty-but-survives versus stalwart-but-suffering), I’m still not sure that I’d want my children to grow up fearless and strongly principled. That way, literally, lies death, as the corpses of humanitarians, principled journalists, activists, and others of their ilk, assassinated by righteous, bleating governments of every stripe, readily attest.

    I suppose, in order to balance his streak of morality, the next lesson The Wast needs to learn is how to keep his mouth shut, and I’m the worst person to teach him that one. But, in the meantime, I’m so proud of him I could burst.

  • 09 Oct

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    Category

    I can’t be racist! I’m Asian!

    2

    So, I was reading about the Hey Hey debacle this morning. It appears that the reboot of a popular Saturday night Australian show, Hey Hey It’s Saturday, has got the world buzzing because of a blackface routine. That’s not what I want to write about. Two-thirds into The Age article, we have the following:

    The Sydney plastic surgeon who played Michael Jackson in the skit — in white face — yesterday professed surprise at the response. “It’s quite ironic that I’m an Indian and five of the six of us are from multicultural backgrounds. So to be called a racist, this is a first certainly for me,” said Anand Deva [thus also proving that -- although he may be a plastic surgeon (he's made of plastic perhaps?) -- he has little grasp of the English language -- ksa].

    Oh puh-lease! As much of a post-colonialist, grumpy, waaaaay too intense, anti-imperalist leftist pinko commie scumbag that I am, PLEASE do not make the argument that — just because you don’t have white skin — you can’t be a racist. You can be in a crowd of Asians from all kinds of countries, without a single orang putih in the mix, and you can still see, hear and experience racism. Or, to put it more properly, bigotry.

    (TANGENT: You may say I’m being unfair targetting the language abilities of a person, but look at his profession. He’s a plastic surgeon! Wouldn’t you expect someone who is cutting and rearranging various of your bits (notwithstanding your own ethical stand towards plastic surgery) to, at least, be able to communicate in a clear and unambiguous fashion? Doubly so if it’s a medical doctor? And, if they come from India, where English is the prized language among the middle class, then there’s really no excuse. So, no. If anyone is in a position where they have to slap down many thousands of dollars for procedures that may lead to their death — no matter how low the very real risk — then I expect the recipient of that money and that life responsibility to be utterly precise in what they say. And, to be honest, the last thing I’d want is a surgeon masquerading as a music-hall artist with sloppy language skills. But, onwards ….)

    In Australia, my white-skinned husband was discriminated against because he spoke with an accent. Fluent English, but with an accent. He’s from Europe you see. In Asia, it can get much worse. Like my Malaysian Chinese aunt getting insulted by Hong Kong Chinese on a shopping trip because her skin was “too dark”. From her indignant retelling, she said that they even commented, in earshot, that she must not be a “proper Chinese”. And, mind you, Aunt Jen is pretty fair-skinned to my eyes.

    You can almost understand the Australian reaction. After all, we’re talking about a different race. But to have one subset of your own ethnic group diss you because of the colour of your skin? That’s harsh.

    Closer to home, let’s tackle Anand Deva’s group. Everybody knows that an Indian family always hopes for a fair-skinned daughter … if they’re cursed to have one at all. This is because a fair-skinned daughter is easier to marry off because she’s seen as more desirable. It’s a lesser consideration, but still there, with prospective son-in-laws. Do you really want your daughter to marry a dark-skinned man? Think of the children! What colour will their skins be? If it’s too dark, opportunities slam shut like a bank vault door. Even marriage must be thought through like a multi-generational battle strategy because of the innate and manifold bigotries of Indian society.

    And, in a brilliant two-fer, I offer a recent article from Sexis contributor, Mandy Van Deven that talks about the prevailing attitude in India towards white women. It starts off with a bang (pun intended):

    “Memsahib, we can go have sex?”

    It takes me a moment to process that the skinny teenage boy selling dupattas on the streets of Kolkata (Calcutta) whom I met only thirty seconds ago just asked me to fuck him.

    “Ki aschorjo! Amake eta jigesh korcho keno? I am not a whore!” I yell at him in mixed Bengali and English …. This is not the first time this has happened to me, and I doubt it will be the last.

    Van Deven continues:

    If a product being sold is sexual in nature—for example, condoms or panties—then the woman advertising it is white. In Mumbai talent scouts roam the tourist areas in search of Western women to pose for such pictures …. The sexual exploits of Western women are so suspect that many hotels refuse to provide accommodation to them and some restaurants refuse them entry if accompanying an Indian man for fear that their reputation will be tarnished as being a place that allows prostitution.

    Go read the whole thing. It’s an eye-opener for Westerners. So, oh no, Anand Deva, Indians can’t be bigoted, ignorant scum at all, can they? We’ll reserve that privilege for the whites.

    Getting back to race in general, how do you think Asians regard, say, Kenyans (or vice versa)? Think they could be racist? Of course! How do Arabs, as one bunch of Asians, regard Koreans (or vice versa)? Think they could be racist? Of course! So believe me when I tell you that this whole only-whites-are-racist schtick gets pretty damned tired pretty damned quickly.

    What I am NOT saying is that whites can’t be bigoted. You only have to read my past posts on my life in Australia to know that. What I AM saying is that I am sick to death of one group hiding behind a shield of racial righteousness just because they happen to have a skin colour that’s not white. The more I travel the world, the more I’m convinced that there are more things we all have in common than in difference. And, in bigotry, that unfortunately holds true as well.

  • 07 Oct

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    Category

    Sausage!

    2

    Yes, not content with the couple of dozen koi, two ponds, three aquaria, two cats, and two kids, we have now added a dog to the mix! Say hi to Sausage.

    Sausage is a miniature bull terrier. The bull terrier, in a true case of a country victimising the animal, has been criminalised in Malaysia so, if I wanted a bully, I had to go for a miniature. And I did so want a bully.

    They are great dogs, undeserving of the terrible reputation they have. They are intensely affectionate, loyal, protective and a load of fun. The full-sized dog weighs in at 20-36 kg and tops out at about 60cm in height. The miniature is less than half that (usually up to 15kg and about 30cm in height). Other than that, the personalities are identical, along with that cute-ugly mug, broad chest and angled eyes.

    That’s not to say they are an easy dog to own, just because you can pop one under your arm and go hiking with it. Unless you’re unrelentingly firm, a bully can easily dominate a meeker family. And you have to be careful of them using charm to get their own way. It’s adorable when they’re puppies, but you don’t want to create a rod for your own back. As I’m writing this, Sausage is lying on a mat at my feet, which appears to be her favourite position during the day.

    We got Sausage for a number of reasons. For one, J comes from a more dog-oriented family and his mum has always regarded a dog as an integral part of the household, especially if that house has a decent yard, as ours does. Another reason is that J got sick of me sitting in front of a computer screen 12+ hours a day. Sausage is his sneaky way of getting me to exercise more. (The cats, it seemed, just weren’t up to the task.) So far, it’s worked. I think I’ve seen more of the outside in one week than in all the previous year combined.

    Sausage’s diet is BARF, as is the cats. It’s more expensive, but there’s no substitute. The cats have thrived on a raw food diet (Fluff for 6 years and Squeak for 4), with only a bit of tartar to show for it. Fluff is ultimately lazy and hates eating anything that resembles work, so it’s off the vet he goes in the next month for some descaling and we’ll see how he feels about that, the lazy sod. Squeak, on the other hand, loves bones and doesn’t have any health problems whatsoever.

    Sausage has her own diet that differs from the carnivore cats’. More vegetables, whole eggs ground up. She loves prawn heads, which the cats really couldn’t get into, no matter how many times I tried to entice them with it. Chicken carcasses, chopped up. Raw beef and mutton scraps. I’ll be trying her on fish soon. I don’t tell the vet. Vets are still pretty anti-BARF, and I don’t want to court trouble. Of course, all the animals are up-to-date on their various vaccinations and medications (and the cats are completely indoor animals), so I don’t feel I’m being stupid about this but if I watch what food goes into our stomachs, I think I would be less than responsible if I didn’t do the same for our animals.

    The other thing I can also recommend thoroughly is clicker training. It’s a great way to very quickly shape behaviour. I believe we (the kids and I) taught Sausage the command to ‘Sit’ in about 5 minutes, tops. I wouldn’t have believed it if we hadn’t done it ourselves. Of course, she doesn’t always do it. She’s already figured out, for example, that I’ll tell her to sit when I want to enter a room where she’s not usually allowed. In such cases, she’ll stare at me blankly then, when I open the door, step inside THEN sit.

    I did ‘Stay’ at mealtimes and that one has taken as well, although I now have to vary the situations I use it in. Bullies are clever enough to quickly know what it is you want them to do…they’re just not sure that you absolutely mean it 100% of the time. The result is that they interpret commands according to their own reading of the situation which, about half the time, is not your reading of the situation. Just mentioning it.

    And don’t forget the bully runs. This is the bull terrier equivalent of a cat’s manic half-hour, and they will rush everywhere at speed, bumping their heads against a host of hard surfaces, but with surprisingly little (if any) damage to furnishings to show at the end of it. You’ll look around, everything will still be in place, and you’ll say, “What just happened?”. Best just to stay in one spot and relax until it’s all over. Having cats has been good practice for this particular behaviour.

    Having a dog is not easy. They’re not self-cleaning the way cats are. They will also eat anything and everything, so they’re stupid that way too, compared to their feline counterparts. However, I have to say that, in the area of problem-solving, Sausage is proving to have it all over the two cats. So it’s obviously a different type of intelligence. For the moment, I’m looking forward to the end of toilet-training (Sausage turned 3 months old this week), but then Maria tells me I have to watch out for the teenage period. I’m already groaning.

    POSTSCRIPT: Of course, being Malaysia, just because an animal is illegal to own, doesn’t mean you can’t buy one, but what’s the use of breaking the law in that case? Only the animal suffers in the end.

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