Posts tagged "chinese"
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April 9, 2025
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 a pot, making his signature chilli paste that we all won’t eat our food without. My grandma is fussing over the roast duck, soy sauce chicken and whole fish and prawns.
I walk into the kitchen, in search of a snack. No matter how busy they are, they always have time to feed me.
Have some hae jor, beancurd rolls stuffed with pork, shrimp and chestnuts. Have a bit of everything.
My grandma calls me her ‘little baby mouse’, because I eat so slowly and carefully.
I watch TV until my cousins arrive. I put on my good clothes (but I have to be forced to do it). I greet everyone: first in Teochew, then Mandarin, then English.
Happy new year! Happy new year! Happy new year!
Eat, rub my tummy, smell everything, laugh and poke my grandpa’s tummy. I do that every day, but especially on lunar new year, he is especially jovial and happy. I tell him he looks like a fat Buddha, and he laughs.
If you hold your chopsticks that way, ah girl, you are going to move very far away from home. Very far away from me.
How right he was.
August 4, 2023
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 am starting from scratch.
Thankfully, technology helps. I no longer have to peruse a large Chinese dictionary by looking up total number of key strokes (even though I'm glad I learned that skill). With a few things in place, I can quickly level up.
I use Calibre for ebooks. It's pretty customizable.
- Get your Chinese ebooks wherever you get them, and add them to Calibre
- Click to open and read the Chinese ebook inside Calibre's ebook viewer
- Highlight some text and mouse over the symbol that looks like a little library
- A library / lookup window should show up on the right
- Click Add Source
- Add the following source: name, MDBG
- Add the following permalink:
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb={word}
Now, whenever you highlight a word or phrase, it should popup the Chinese dictionary result.
Some example photos:
Highlight text in the ebook to pop out the lookup / dictionary view on the right.
Click add source, then paste the url https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb={word} into the box.
If all goes well, you should now see the definitions from the Chinese dictionary.
Happy reading!
February 8, 2023
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 think it's for everyone, but I like Chinese and Japanese bakeries. I like soft, pillowy breads that straddle the line between savory and sweet. I like hot dogs in my buns. I like ham in my bread. I like scallions in them, too. Barbecue pork. Eggs. All of it. My palate leans heavily on the savory side of things, and I also prefer my breads that way. Salty. Savory. I opine on that, and more, in this video.
As part of my increasing frustration at the perennial sour-ness of bread in the city I now live in, I seek out Chinese bakeries. Here are a few of my favorites.
Mee Mee bakery in Chinatown (pictured), is known for its 'cow ear cookies' or 'pig ear cookies', a savory spiral biscuit that's really more salty than sweet. I love that shit.
I also like Yummy Bakery for Hong Kong style 'paper cup cakes', which are fluffier and softer than American cupcakes; almost like a souffle, but like paper. If that makes sense. Also try their egg white tarts and wife cakes.
In the Outer Mission, Princess Bakery is an old school favorite. Try the coconut buns and the hot dog scallion buns. In the same neighborhood, Hong Kong Bakery is a classic. Don't sleep on the Excelsior: I think it has the highest density of my favorite Chinese food in the city, more than Chinatown and more than the Sunset or Richmond.
Lastly, Pineapple King Bakery, like I recommend in the YouTube show. Try literally anything there, and definitely don't skip the milk tea. I wish there were more Japanese bakeries in the city, but there are not. I'm glad people enjoy the sourdough of San Francisco, but I'm overjoyed that I have these alternatives here. I'm trying to take the perspective of "it's okay to not like things", but it is so goddamn hard when it's so hard to find good bread in this city that isn't surprisingly sour. (Recently, I bought a bag of bagels, and it was made of sourdough. Without warning. Sour simply isn't a flavor I enjoy: I also feel that way about American hot sauce.)
January 6, 2023
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 them and learn about them whenever I could.
You'll find signs of faith everywhere you go. Outside local 'coffee shops' (kopitiams), inside wet markets and hawker centres, under trees, in a street corner somewhere. At various Taoist festivals. At 'void decks' (the ground floor of a public housing building), especially during funerals.
From my archives, some photos of how faith is professed in black and white. First photo is a film photograph, the rest are digital (some kind of Sony Nex camera from 2012).
The ground floor of a public housing building is used for weddings and funerals. Here, a scan of a film photograph taken with a Leica M3. The Chinese characters are a call to prosperity.
Even in downtown Duxton Hill, hipster central in the middle of the Central Business District, you can see altars everywhere if you look. They tend to be hidden away.
There are different hierarchies of Taoist gods. The ones on the street tend to be lower ranking, and serve different functions from the 'higher class' gods.
At big Taoist festivals, like the Hungry Ghost Festival, we have traditional singers on stage. Many traditional Chinese arts are deeply entrenched in Taoist practices; or is it that Taoist practitioners tend to be the keeprs of many traditional Chinese rituals and arts.
A close up of a Taoist altar with various deities.
Here's a link to an interesting story about how some of these deities are made by craftsmen.
August 3, 2015
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 rejects of the imperial court, cast out into the Nanyang sun where we sweat with the sons of the land.
My grandfather was an upright man,
So upright and uptight his wooden backscratcher formed the curve between his back and the rosewood chair.
My grandmother would only ever wear a two piece Chinese suit
Made of silk and cotton. I can still see her, smelling like mothballs
Speaking, summoning, reaching out to me
in Teochew.
What is your native place,
They ask me from Kanyakumari to Rameswaram.
In Tiruvanamalai, I finally cave. I say,
It is not China.
We could have been anywhere.
Semarang, Sri Lanka, Calcutta.
These sea routes go unmapped and undiscovered
From Swatow to the rest of the world.
I want Swatow to remain a shorthand
For the mythical land where I can chase demons,
Exorcise my grandmother,
Write poetry and wrap myself up in a giant band-aid of ignorance.
The less I know about Swatow
The more the idea of China lands with a heavy plod
This is a language I speak perfectly
Without my soul.
August 3, 2015
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 languages' were never foreign to me. They just seemed like perfectly formed words in very different chords. When I started travelling, my language brain and place brain also got inextricably tied up with each other.
For example,
When I am home in Singapore, I code-switch. Every ten minutes. English-English. American-English. International-English. Singlish-English. Then I go from that largely English existence to, broken-English-if-I-have-to. Then to Mandarin. China-Mandarin. Taiwanese Mandarin. Singaporean-broken-ass-Mandarin. Then to what I actually consider my mother tongue, which is early 1900s Chaoshan area Teochew language.
In my 'international English', learned from a decade in a privileged upper-middle class English speaking school setting, I fit in anywhere. My politics are liberal. My passport takes me to any country in the world. I am both privileged and not, in this language. I can become American, Australian, Singaporean. Or I can become this weird hybrid, which is closer to the truth: that I speak in a certain way because I have been everywhere and nowhere.
But the me that speaks in an affected Singlish accent, that is also all me. It does not come naturally to me, but I have learned its inflections and quirkiness. I have learned how to express anger, despair, annoyance and joy-using the same words-but I have learned to separate my emotions with the ascent or descent of a single tone. With the addition or subtraction of a single suffix. Lah. Lor. Leh.
Why you so like that leh, means resignation and acceptance that your friend is an asshole.
Why you you so like that one, means you are still surprised your friend is an asshole, because he isn't often one.
Why you so like that lor, means you have been an asshole for a while and I know that, but I am still annoyed that you are.
Why you so like that lah, means I am in equilibrium with your general assholery.
It's that Singlish that gets stuff done. I pick up the phone and yell at someone in it. No matter the colour of their skin, the understanding is universal. "Eh why you like that can you help me or not bro"
My Mandarin brain is complicated.
I literally cannot go to China without having an existential crisis about it. When I was 4, my Chinese teacher in kindergarten yelled at me, saying "why don't you understand Mandarin? What kind of stupid Chinese person are you?" At that point, I decided: not a very good one. I don't want to be a Chinese person, then.
Eventually, I made peace with it. I learned that my grandparents spoke more Tamil and Malay than they did Mandarin. I learned that the Mandarin that had been plugged into my brain, with all of its accompanying cultural baggage-oh, you should learn Mandarin because you are the daughter of the Yellow Emperor (correct answer: who the fuck is he and why am I his daughter. And why does he speak Mandarin?)-is always going to be a part of my unstable, cultural identity. At this point, the language I keep as my second one is functional. It is sufficient. But that is what it is.
I can order food in it, and have political conversations. But I do not care about that language-in fact, I hate it. Absolutely detest it.
Because Mandarin takes a part of me away from who I think I really am, which is, a Teochew in Southeast Asia. The idea that I find no comfort or joy, instead I find downright disgust, at the language I was forced to speak for a decade or more. When the language I dream in, wake up blabbering in, feel happy and loved in, is not even a designated language at all. It is considered a dialect, not a language. Teochew is the dialect of my heart and soul. I live it, love it, breathe it, revel in it. I sound like a fairy with helium in my mouth when I speak in it.
My English and Mandarin selves are whole identities. My Teochew self is a private, semi-religious self. It is the language I use to tell my grandmother that I love her. It is the language that I use to love, and to be loved in. English feels clumsy in comparison: love in Teochew, is by far a superior experience. Partly because everyone who I have ever loved in this obscure language of mine, has loved me unconditionally.
It is then difficult to take the language of love in one plane and to try to translate it to another. Especially if it is a language you barely speak. My Indonesian brain is about 3 years old at this point. Half-formed; the other deformed. My Thai brain is a little bit better, but not by much. One time, I tried to date a Thai woman, and I spoke as good Thai as she had good English, which was not at all. It showed me that love, sex and attraction is all about language for me.
I do not think I could ever love someone who spoke Mandarin to me. Even if I understood it perfectly. It just does not work. It is not my love language; it is my functional language. English, yes. Hindi, somewhat. Indonesian, maybe.
And as I go off into the big world at large, carrying a pocket full of several languages with different lives, I am also reminded that there is no other language in the world that makes me feel the most love; only the one I speak the least. When I have dreams, more and more it is in that obscure southern Chinese dialect: my dialectical love and life, carried with me in a different passport, in a different time, in multiple other lives and languages.
February 11, 2014
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 out. What of? Anything and everything. A recent history of imperialism, colonialism, authoritarianism and other forms of oppression have perhaps conditioned our brains into a state of perpetual loss. And need for perpetual validation.
Our toddlers go for a dozen classes, academic and non-academic, before they even learn to independently put on their pants. Other people's kids may win, you see.
It is not enough to get a perfect score at the "O" Levels, scoring a total of 6 points (the fewer the better, 6 being the lowest); to qualify for the top three schools one must have enough point deductions from higher second language, sports and activities, and alumni affiliation, so you're really aiming for 0 points.
To what end, paper pushers and PowerPoint warriors?
The most successful people I know who have emerged from this Matrix ask a different set of questions.
They do not ask, "what can I lose by doing this?"
They ask, "what can I gain?" Then proceed to minimize the risks through calculated steps and methodologies.
They do not ask, "how can this help me be seen to be more successful by my peers?"
They ask, "how does this help me learn, build, make a life I want for myself, help others, and can it also afford the life that I want such that my peers can see economic success attained through healthy, self-deterministic ways?"
They do not understand the politics of lugi and perhaps it is because some of us do not understand fear; every challenge is a learning curve to be conquered.
Of course this is a privilege of a certain socio-economic class, perhaps an indulgence, but for anyone of an aspirational mindset the fear of losing out is the biggest death knell you can sound. It's not a competition, but even if it was you'd better be competing because you love it, not because you're trapped in a race whose rules you don't understand and whose finish line offers an indeterminate prize you'll figure out later. Life's too short to be afraid.