Posts tagged "chinese"
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Belated New Year
In January this year, I wrote this about how I felt being away from 'home' for the Lunar New Year again: This lunar new year eve, I am usually home in Singapore. I am seven years old, and I wake up to the smell of roasted chilli, poached chicken, and cabbage soup. There’s a bustle in the kitchen. My grandpa is stirring…
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How to add a Chinese dictionary to Calibre
I am trying to read more Chinese books. My Mandarin school teachers are probably having the last laugh, but I am genuinely interested in some of the fiction in the Sinosphere these days. Unfortunately my school-time Mandarin class experience was so poor (old school, traditional, not fun or engaging) that I feel like I…
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Chinese Bakeries of San Francisco
Photo taken on Leica M3, 50mm Summilux, Ektar 100. Developed and scanned by The Darkroom. When you think of bakeries in San Francisco, perhaps you think of sourdough. Certainly, there are some well known bakeries in the city known for their sourdough, but that's not a style or type of bread I enjoy at all. I don't…
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Five Frames: Chinese Gods
Singapore is technically a secular country. A large number of its ethnic Chinese population practices traditional Taoist rituals, though evangelical Christianity is encroaching quickly. As an ethnic Chinese person raised in Christian traditions, I felt surgically removed from these practices and I wanted to document…
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Split Language Disorders
It is a well-documented fact: multi-lingual people have multiple personalities. I am no different, though I was only recently cognizant of that. Of how my languages affect the way I perceive myself, present myself to the world. How I trade, make contracts; how I fall in love. For as long as I can remember, 'foreign…
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Swatow
When my people speak of who we are and where we come from We do not say, China. When my relatives reclaim our collective past, Those words—China—dance on our lips, foreign. We do not say China. We do not say China at all. Instead, we are the people of the coast. We are the subjects of the Tang Dynasty. We are the…
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Don't Lugi Be Happy
In peninsular Southeast Asia there is a word of Malay origin, bastardized by Chinese pronunciation that perhaps best describes the prevalent mindset of the middle class in everything from career to politics: lugi. More than the losing of face and the losing of status, our collective great fear is the fear of losing…
7 posts tagged "chinese"