he struts around in pajamas and a cane. how else would you describe this walking absurdity. why don't you find out yourself.
with chalk >>
Ajay. BenDIBLE. Carmen. Chan Tong. cQ. Delicia. Eilene. Elaine. Emily. Geral. Gideon. Jane. Jean. Jeremy. Jian Hui. Kar Mun. Katrina. Kenny. Matthew. Mich. Michelle. Nadia. Phanit. Rachel. Sarah. Sheng Ling. Wei Shen. Xinyi. Yung.
or crayons >>
no utensils >>
nuff >>
Chinglish just isn't good enough / Monday, December 21, 2009 @ 6:16 AM
I always dreaded ten o'clock on Saturday mornings
Ten o'clock meant the end of Saturday morning cartoons
Ten o'clock was when my uncle went out to the nearby kopitiam.
Ten o'clock meant Chinese lessons.
At the stroke of ten on the old grandfather clock hanging on the wall in my aunt's house, my aunt would round us all up, my brother, my sister, and two cousins, along with me. We'd troop half-heartedly to the cheap pine shelf in the study room that held the battered chinese readers, with their colorful images of happy children playing games. I've always wondered why life wasn't so easy. After collecting pencils, notebooks and erasers, we would sit on the circular table from the eldest to the youngest.
My aunt would come around giving each of us a new worksheet and marking our papers. As we struggled with each character, sounding out slowly the pinyin next to it, prompted and corrected by my aunt, we'd finally reach the bottom of a sentence. Then we would repeate the laborious experience on the next phrase. Each reader was divided into sixteen or so passages covering various subjects from grocery shopping to family trips. For each passage there was a comprehension excercise in which my aunt would get me to not only read out my answer but to write it down. Aunty would move around checking our progress, and marking our exercises, and listening to us read out the passages in which I now recognise as sloppy Banana, English accented Chinese.
There'd be a break in the middle of the lesson where all of us ran to the kitchen to get 'kakak', my aunts maid to make us Rebina. "Five minutes only" my aunt would say although it sometimes stretched to ten. My cousin and I would run into the sun-drenched backyard, walking around, kicking dry tufts of grass around while holding the plastic mugs in our little hands.
Those breaks were always too short. We were soon back in the house in the dreaded study room, bent over Chinese books, messily copying out new characters. All the while my aunt would tell us to sit straight. I remember thinking about what I would do for the rest of the day or what was for lunch during these periods.
For me, the lessons started when I was seven beggining at Standard One chinese and progressing along. Unfortunately, I didn't quite grasp the significance of these lessons as a bratty kid who just wanted to muck around on weekends. While I was supposed to be committing to memory the intricate characters and sounds for each word such as 'snow' and 'blood', I'd be staring out the study window, looking at the gun trees swaying around the tiled rooftops, wishing I was a little white kid and doing Little Athletics or watching TV, anything other that Chinese lessons on a lazy Saturday morning. Many lessons I spent sulking, glaring at my aunt, the readers, the faded blue grid-lines on the exercise books.
As a student progressed, we could change to different numbered books, in which the squares would correspondingly shrink, until we could write small and neat characters.i never graduated beyond the huge boxes, which barely contained my scratchy, stubbornly clumsy characters but more of doodles of stickmen and giant bug-eyes monsters. I couldn't understand why I had to learn chinese while everyone else at school spoke, thinked, dreamt, do English. Why, I wondered as I grew older did I have to waste my time? And why I wondered did Aunty waste her time on us?
I've always envied my two older siblings and was always trailing after them. I couldn't wait to grow up and be just like them, taking the bus to high school, going out with friends and sometimes a 'special' friend. This burning desire to be just like them extended to Chinese lessons. I'd seem glimpses of their readers. They always seemed to get exciting and impressive passages, the story of the frog in the well, the little white rabbit (xiao pai tu), or the old man and the mountain, while I had to read about children going to school, to parks, to the sea. But slowly I reached those hallowed passages. And they weren't as great as I expected them to be. The frog in the well was a stupid, tiny amphibian with a gargantuan superiority complex. The old man turned out to be an equally stupid peasant who thought he could make the journey across the mountain my digging literally through the mountain.
As I moved on through lessons, I slowly moved through readers. But I never fully absorbed the characters, the phrases, the essence. By the time I was ten and Standard Five in Chinese, the only characters I knew (as in could write and read) were elementary ones such as 'I', 'you', 'them'. I learnt the character 'male' from a glossy Giorgio Armani perfume ad in Marie Claire. The only sentences I could write entirely were 'My name is Huang Shen Han' and 'I love you'. I could speak more but even then I stumbled and stopped, trying to fill the gaps in my sentences from my near-empty cache of words.
As time passed, I learnt a few more characters and a bit about Chinese culture, I came to undertand its consistency or inflexibility, the passive strength that is the key to its longevity. I became familiar with chinese Emperors and Poets. I came to appreciate how a four-character phrase, and even a single character itself embodies thoussands of years of development and knowledge.
However later as time moved on, I lacked the willpower to continue in these lessons. I come up with excuses 'I have a lot of homework la today Aunty, maybe next week'. But now I realie, I regret not paying closer attention to those chinese lessons, Regret that fills my heart everytime we go over to my Aunts and watch an English movie on the flatscreen. There are also more selfish reasons to be regretful. I could if I'd been more diligent in my lessons, write in my resume 'speaks fluent that lined the boulevard of Chinatown in Perth, and order in Chinese, eavesdropping on Chinese conversations between Chinese people among the Aussies who can't understand Chinese while I slurp up soft, squidgy noodles, slick from a hot, salty broth... Maybe I'd feel more authentic in some way.
I know there's more to a person than their cultural background, how they look on the outside, more to me than being Malaysian-Chinese-Australian. Do I even need those hyphenated cut-and-paste identities? There are other parts of me... but...
Maybe, I'd feel more authentic?
with love, Samuel
I always dreaded ten o'clock on Saturday mornings
Ten o'clock meant the end of Saturday morning cartoons
Ten o'clock was when my uncle went out to the nearby kopitiam.
Ten o'clock meant Chinese lessons.
At the stroke of ten on the old grandfather clock hanging on the wall in my aunt's house, my aunt would round us all up, my brother, my sister, and two cousins, along with me. We'd troop half-heartedly to the cheap pine shelf in the study room that held the battered chinese readers, with their colorful images of happy children playing games. I've always wondered why life wasn't so easy. After collecting pencils, notebooks and erasers, we would sit on the circular table from the eldest to the youngest.
My aunt would come around giving each of us a new worksheet and marking our papers. As we struggled with each character, sounding out slowly the pinyin next to it, prompted and corrected by my aunt, we'd finally reach the bottom of a sentence. Then we would repeate the laborious experience on the next phrase. Each reader was divided into sixteen or so passages covering various subjects from grocery shopping to family trips. For each passage there was a comprehension excercise in which my aunt would get me to not only read out my answer but to write it down. Aunty would move around checking our progress, and marking our exercises, and listening to us read out the passages in which I now recognise as sloppy Banana, English accented Chinese.
There'd be a break in the middle of the lesson where all of us ran to the kitchen to get 'kakak', my aunts maid to make us Rebina. "Five minutes only" my aunt would say although it sometimes stretched to ten. My cousin and I would run into the sun-drenched backyard, walking around, kicking dry tufts of grass around while holding the plastic mugs in our little hands.
Those breaks were always too short. We were soon back in the house in the dreaded study room, bent over Chinese books, messily copying out new characters. All the while my aunt would tell us to sit straight. I remember thinking about what I would do for the rest of the day or what was for lunch during these periods.
For me, the lessons started when I was seven beggining at Standard One chinese and progressing along. Unfortunately, I didn't quite grasp the significance of these lessons as a bratty kid who just wanted to muck around on weekends. While I was supposed to be committing to memory the intricate characters and sounds for each word such as 'snow' and 'blood', I'd be staring out the study window, looking at the gun trees swaying around the tiled rooftops, wishing I was a little white kid and doing Little Athletics or watching TV, anything other that Chinese lessons on a lazy Saturday morning. Many lessons I spent sulking, glaring at my aunt, the readers, the faded blue grid-lines on the exercise books.
As a student progressed, we could change to different numbered books, in which the squares would correspondingly shrink, until we could write small and neat characters.i never graduated beyond the huge boxes, which barely contained my scratchy, stubbornly clumsy characters but more of doodles of stickmen and giant bug-eyes monsters. I couldn't understand why I had to learn chinese while everyone else at school spoke, thinked, dreamt, do English. Why, I wondered as I grew older did I have to waste my time? And why I wondered did Aunty waste her time on us?
I've always envied my two older siblings and was always trailing after them. I couldn't wait to grow up and be just like them, taking the bus to high school, going out with friends and sometimes a 'special' friend. This burning desire to be just like them extended to Chinese lessons. I'd seem glimpses of their readers. They always seemed to get exciting and impressive passages, the story of the frog in the well, the little white rabbit (xiao pai tu), or the old man and the mountain, while I had to read about children going to school, to parks, to the sea. But slowly I reached those hallowed passages. And they weren't as great as I expected them to be. The frog in the well was a stupid, tiny amphibian with a gargantuan superiority complex. The old man turned out to be an equally stupid peasant who thought he could make the journey across the mountain my digging literally through the mountain.
As I moved on through lessons, I slowly moved through readers. But I never fully absorbed the characters, the phrases, the essence. By the time I was ten and Standard Five in Chinese, the only characters I knew (as in could write and read) were elementary ones such as 'I', 'you', 'them'. I learnt the character 'male' from a glossy Giorgio Armani perfume ad in Marie Claire. The only sentences I could write entirely were 'My name is Huang Shen Han' and 'I love you'. I could speak more but even then I stumbled and stopped, trying to fill the gaps in my sentences from my near-empty cache of words.
As time passed, I learnt a few more characters and a bit about Chinese culture, I came to undertand its consistency or inflexibility, the passive strength that is the key to its longevity. I became familiar with chinese Emperors and Poets. I came to appreciate how a four-character phrase, and even a single character itself embodies thoussands of years of development and knowledge.
However later as time moved on, I lacked the willpower to continue in these lessons. I come up with excuses 'I have a lot of homework la today Aunty, maybe next week'. But now I realie, I regret not paying closer attention to those chinese lessons, Regret that fills my heart everytime we go over to my Aunts and watch an English movie on the flatscreen. There are also more selfish reasons to be regretful. I could if I'd been more diligent in my lessons, write in my resume 'speaks fluent that lined the boulevard of Chinatown in Perth, and order in Chinese, eavesdropping on Chinese conversations between Chinese people among the Aussies who can't understand Chinese while I slurp up soft, squidgy noodles, slick from a hot, salty broth... Maybe I'd feel more authentic in some way.
I know there's more to a person than their cultural background, how they look on the outside, more to me than being Malaysian-Chinese-Australian. Do I even need those hyphenated cut-and-paste identities? There are other parts of me... but...
Maybe, I'd feel more authentic?
with love, Samuel