Two contrasting pictures of the human landscape hit me between the eyes.
There is first the disaster that is threatening to seize China by throttling the peoples and the land to death.
Next, there is the horror of money politics crippling the Japanese political scene, by the technocrats' large-scale swindling of the retired through pension funds fraud.
Yet at the same time, there are those packets of large sums of cash put neatly in men's public toilets, in cities throughout Japan, with a note indicating that these packets are given with a blessing from an unknown person whose only desire is that the money may enable the finder to find a release from his financial hardships.
We are seeing in Asia today, concurrently, a soul-searching contrast of 2 neighbours which can hardly let their eyes stray for even a second, watching each other.
Today's China is a China which is so money-crazed as to lose all sense of responsibility for fellow human beings. Foods are contaminated, fruits are doctored to look great, grains and vegetables are cultivated with no thought of consumers' health, meats are doctored to entice the eyes but are hazardous to health, and foodstuffs are not food but made only to appear to be food.
What monsters Mr Deng had turned his nation and his people into, so that today, Chinese have lost their dignity in their souls and have lost respect for themselves. Many sing the praises of the present-day China, but I have grave forebodings.
China's highest level of technocrats ruling the land have passed the death penalty on the head of their food and drug agency. But, that's not going to make things any better. The "bug", that is Money and Selfishness, has been let loose all over China, and the infection has become a pandemic. Chinese people today do not have any feeling of guilt or even any sense of horror in even thinking the thought of getting rich by any means.
In Japan, in the midst of horrendous cases of fraud and the appallingly high costs of living, those who saw the neat packets of money nearby the wash-basins at men's public toilets and, read the well-crafted handwritten notes asking them to take the cash and use it to break free from the poverty chaining them... many of them took the money and handed them over to the authorities to be returned to the giver.
What a contrast: two capitlistic nations; one in the grip of threatening decay and decline due to ageing of the population, and the other burgeoning with new-found energies and market-driven zeal to grow richer still. Yet, how instructive, I thought, they are to our private and personal lives.
The apparently youthful China of this day though rapidly becoming the world's richest nation within a breath-takingly short time yet scares me to the core by their greed.
The apparently ageing and aged Japan of this day, rapidly declining and its countrysides being depleted of its people in such rapid speed as to leave one struck with foreboding of ill upon the land and the people. Yet, the mettle of the Japanese's soul leaves one with hope.
The Chinese of today run the risk of not having the grace and the good sense of knowing how to grow old...
The Japanese today may have a certain sense of the deja vu with regards to huge accummulation of wealth and the breath-taking strides they took to become innovators and researchers of modern technologies, only to be brought low by long period of stagnation and high unemployment.
To my mind though the Japanese may yet hold forth the promise of demonstrating, in our dealings with one's fellow men, the dignity of honesty and faithfulness in one's soul.
The wise tell us that Money answers everything... but recently in Singapore, Money has caused untold sorrow and pain in families. How has it happened?
When the nation's economy started to heat up as a result of the decision to invite Las Vegas tycoons and other gaming bigshots to plonk their funds here to set up a casinos with the very disarming description, Integrated Resorts, it set off a financial bonanza. Properties became hot.
Also, thanks to the wealth of newly-minted tycoons in India, Russia, China, Middle East, and anyone who is in the know, huge sums of money have been flowing into Singapore, to be entrusted to bankers called Personal Wealth Bankers. With so much money from Properties and Inflows of Funds, very conspicuous indulgences are rearing their ugly heads. The most horrendous is binge drinking.
In this recent display of wealth, social drinking has become de rigeur. Those who drink unfortunatley drive, and they drive dangerously. Limbs and lives have as a result been smashed up.
Someone has recommended taking a goof look at how Japan has been handling drunk driving.
If we were to take our cues from the Japanese law enforcement officers, we may in fact end up having to close down all those freshly minted bars and Irish pubs and whatever else... Why? Because, if we take into consideration the inability of Singapore Chinese to hold down their drinks, we will have to suspend all alchoholic beverage servering joints on the island. It would be most offensive if the pubs were to ban Singapore Chinese from having one bottle too many, while having no such limits for foreigners. Since there is this unsavoury uncertainty, publicans give up trying to double guess whether to ban a customer or not. The enforcement officers will then step in and end up closing down most of the pubs.
Indeed, the matter is so troublous now is not because of not knowing one's limit of tolerance of alchohol, but rather the new-found wealth and along with it the "with-it" culture. Nonetheless... the government just cannot shut that ('with-it' culture and pubs) down. How then, can Singapore be reckoned to be a Global City, a fun place to come to work and play and raise a family? No, the very thought of it is just too distasteful to entertain.
There is thus a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" scenario playing out in this boom-town that is almost on the equator. However, in the midst of all the fuss and the pain and the money... so much is in store for us who wish, above all things else, merely to call this "Global City of the 21st Century"... our home.
There has been litres of printers' ink that must have been used to print the pages of all the newspapers throughout the world... concerning the horrible shooting on the campus of Viginia Tech.
In Asia, we waited with bated breath when the first indications surfaced that the killer was an Asian. What would it portend for the many Asian young people studying, teaching, working in university campuses across the length and breadth of the U.S.?
Then the media released the apology that Korea made through the media, aimed at Americans in America. This was followed up with a remorseful open public letter from the shooter's family, penned by his academically outstanding sister.
Intimations began trickling through to us in Singapore, that there is a backlash comprising of hints and innuendos as well as more open remarks of anger and bitterness with regards to the killings. NBC raised the noise level by several decibels when it decided to air the videos that the autistic killer had made in between his bouts of killings.
Bottom line is: apart from Americans in America, we do not understand how in spite of the numerous incidents of gun abuse (involving powerful handguns as well as rifles) that had resulted in chillingly horrendous outbursts of killings on school grounds and buildings as well as college and university campuses, America cannot yet bring itself to ban guns for being weapons of mass destruction.
And yet... Americans send their soldiers armed to the teeth with all kinds of weapons of destruction half way round the world, in the cause of putting to an end the amassing of weapons of mass destruction.
America has yet to bring closure to its anger since the days of its Civil War and after that its expansion westwards resulting in genocides and extermination of native Indian tribes.
When Americans faced stiff oppostion from the Japanese soldiers defending their homeland, the American president used as excuse to use horrendous weapons of mass destruction on the Japanese civilians, that the war could then be ended sooner than later. But, the move smacked more of an anger towards the Japanese for defending Iwo Jima so stoutly that America lost more men capturing that forlorn island than at the landing of Normandy.
Korea then came to taste the intensity of American blood-letting ways, followed by Vietnam. Both wars were fought on fabricated premises of the threat of communism and, America, being the hero that it was had to get the job done... a la Blacskburg.
So it is that many Asians ask ourselves, Would Cho, autistic as he was, go on such a wild rampage of unmitigated anger if he were still in Korea? How would he be able to own such powerful handguns to kill so many lives in a span of a few hours, on an otherwise lovely Spring day? Even if he were to join one of the notorious gangs of Seoul, he would still be unable to go on such a blood-bath. The gang chiefs would have had him silenced in order to preserve the dignity of the gang.
But guns, and powerful ones at that, can be easily used to vent one's anger and hatred... on innocent folks; only in America. So, perhaps, Americans should be doing deep searching of the soul instead of flailing at Asians, to avert such disasters recurring.
It is time for America to remove their "sacred" Second Amendment, and live as civilised persons in this rapidly deteriorating world of angry young men. Until then, America has no right to claim to be the chief power of the World to ensure freedom and democracy. For, all that America has done thus far is make young people more dangerous enemies of freedom and democracy and life itself.
This was where a small group of us went to last Sunday morning. It is the Japanese Cemetery Park (Nihon-jin Bochi-koen), reputed to be the largest memorial park for Japanese, high and low, famous or ordinary, in Southeast Asia. This region was known to those who were buried here as Nanyo. The photo shows many crudely hewn granite stone slabs stuck into the ground. They marked the graves of simple peasant women from Amakusa-Shimo islands in Kumamoto prefecture in Kyuushu and the Shimabara peninsula in Nagasaki prefecture.
They were given the noble sounding name, Karayuki-san; 唐行 (karayu-ki) meant "travellers to the Tang Land" that is, China. It was a very cruel joke on the women, for they were brought to China by the agents who contacted them back in their home villages. Once in China, they were passed from city to city or were shipped of to the Nanyo, sold to the brothel owners there. There was therefore a pecking-order of sorts. Top of the pick stayed on in Shanghai, followed by those shipped off to Singapore, and at the bottom of the pile, the various outlying towns of Southeast Asia. The best known of these lesser places was Sandakan, made famous by an inquisitive and sensitive home-maker, Yamasaki Tomoko.
She put all her interview notes she made in her conversations with the women of Amakusa into a book, called Sandakan hachiban shokan: teihen joseishi josh (Sandakan Brothel No. 8: An Episode in the History of Lower-Class Japanese Women). The book was a publishing sensation when it was placed on sale in 1972. It hit a wide cross-section of Japan's nationalists really hard, when they took offence with the authoress in the way she had made nonsense of the meaning of Yamato Nadeishiko.
But, ironically these women were indeed the heroines of Japanese courage. The Karayuki-san sold abroad were dedicated patriots, sending money home to support both their poverty-stricken families and to the cause of Japan's wars against China (mid-1890's) and Russia (in 1905). The agents and brothel owners used the idea of national good to enslave the poor women who were told that their bodies belonged to the state and that they were a sort of female army. A number were certainly sold into prostitution by the horrendous famine their families were facing.
Ms Yamazaki paid a number of visits to both Sandakan's and Singapore's Japanese cemetery. Sadly, for many of the women, they remained nameless, both in life and when they are dead... nameless and unknown. But, for the efforts of Ms Yamazuki and her transcriptions of her conversations with the Karayukis still living then in the 1960s.
Alas, as Japan got richer and immensely wealthier, it was still the same, old Japan that, as the novelist Osaragi bemoaned repeatedly in his novel, Homecoming (Kikyo), the land is very narrow and its people are very poor. When you are the poor of Japan, you are indeed poor in every way... like those women from the under-class of Amakusa and the Shimabara peninsuls of Nagasaki.
When they returned from the Nanyo (after the end of the First World War when Japan had gained recognition as being the equal of the European powers), they went home only to be faced with scorn and disdain. The Karayuki-san were discriminated against in post-1920 Japan, no different from those cruel days when they were in Singapore and Sandakan. The Japanese media had painted these 2 towns as the hotbeds of Chinese boorishness and uncouth conduct; the standard impression of the Chinese among Japanese till this day. However, their once familiar friends and well-known neighbours shunned them, and made jest of their sufferings as workers of the sex trade. They faced family members (for whom they endured hardships to send hard-earned money to support them) who turned their faces away from them in shame. Their society and government turned their noses up at them and their backs towards them. However, one thing precious remained for them: their pride to remain Japanese. As it was when they were abroad, so too when they came home. Even though Japan was too ashamed of them.
The most ironical observation of Ms Yamazaki of those stout-hearted women was their Catholic faith. Indeed, her first introduction to the Karayuki-san of Amakusa was her sight of a bent old lady sitting alone, silent like a statue on a pew in a rough and simple chapel in Oe, a village near to Amakusa. She was in prayers.
When my years' work is done and our well-earned days of unfettered leisure come by, When our dreams of this day arrives, to spend it together, just you and I... Then, all in a rush our worlds collide, to the flaming horror of splinter'd atoms.
When our time for days of leisure and pleasant relaxation are handed to us, When the routine of daily goings and comings grinds to a halt, giving us unhinder'd converse... Then, in a burst of pent-up fury, we unleash legions to shred our nerves.
Then how I long for those untrammelled days when work kept me whirring, Days that now like bleached swathes of cloths, in the winds twisting and twirling. Then does my heart ache with pains that cannot be relieved, a heart frayed bare.
All my days spent in hopeful labouring in anguish of soul to withstand till... I shall find vindication in cherishing the hope for this well-deserved day's fill. Then... in an unbridled venting of bottled rage we shattered our familial ties.
Desolate, yet trying to keep up an appearance of normalcy, I walk my beat through the Park with my camera slung around my nape, a briefcase in hand filled with works of a cameraman's feat. Oh, the emptiness of my days lived in solitude I ne'er knew till that day my rest was waylaid.
...gone every one, home to Stateside; 'cos the gobermin would take their shirts off their backs as well as their socks off their feet, if they go on working abroad.
Thus with his jaundiced eye President Bush has turned the U.S. and the notable Yankee traders away from a globalised world, when he enacted through the upper and lower houses the Bill that taxed Americans working abroad, even in US corporations, both as income earned at Stateside as well as in the country overseas where they are located.
All this came into law late last year. But, when 2006 drew nigh to its departure, it became more glaringly obvious to me that the local street and shopping and dining scenes were emptied of Yankees.
In their places we now have increasing numbers of Europeans (besides the Brits, the French, the German, the Dutch, the Swiss, the Italians, the Scandinavians, the Spaniards, even the Russians and other Eastern European nationalities), Indians, northeastern Asian nations like South Korea (the second largest contingent of study-mothers or in Chinese, pei-du mama with their children who have come here to study in Singapore schools) and Japan, besides Thais, Indonesians, and Malaysians. There are also scores of Australian children and teens who are studying here, in the Australian schools in Singapore following the syllabus in Australia. There are even Mongolians who have sent their children to study here in Singapore government schools!
But, the Singapore American School is going through a crisis. Their enrollments of students from America are dwindling.
This trend reverses a process that has taken over 160 years to bloom and grow.
As early as 12-15 years or so after modern Singapore's founder left these shores to return to England, a Philadelphian Yankee arrived at these shores. He came as a trader dealing with all the produces that were brought here for trade, from spices to tea to fine chinaware and silk as well as to sell armaments.
Balestier, the Yankee trader, married into a well-known American patriotic family, the Paul Revere family. To commemorate Balestier's appointment as the US Consul in Singapore, his father in law's foundery cast a bell in the likeness of the Liberty Bell.
The Revere Bell had always been treated like a mother-in-law. The Brits did not want it to be given prominence, but neither could they melt it down and forget about it. Thus it laid, like an old sofa put away in the attic. No one had the audacity to even put it outside for the rag and bone man to cart it away.
Until the 1970s when Singapore suddenly woke up to the opportunity of making friends with the Yew-nited Staytes of Hamerica. Kissinger returned the favour, and the Bell was taken out of oblivion, dusted of its accretions of benign neglect and put in an acceptably honorouble place... in the entrance foyer of the national museum.
The appearance of the Texas oil-men who came to prospect for undersea oil and to install and man the oil rigs off Malaysia and Thailand and Cambodia/Vietnam brought back once again the scenes after the Second World War when a smattering of US servicemen made their presence felt. But, the Brits then made sure it was not for long. The oilmen however were here for spreading their wealth around, and so Singapore boomed as the mighty dollar swirled all around the bars and restaurants and nightclubs.
Then came the corporate executives, followed a little later by the likes of Citigroup market marauders. Along with them were the electronics and semiconductor engineers and accounting folks. They brought Singapore's culture several notches higher towards an Americanised newly-emerging US proxy for Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.
But now... it is like a blowin' in the wind. They have almost all gone... gone without a trace almost.
If this trend of President Bush's policy were to continue then I am doubtful if Americans can honestly support their claims to be a global superpower. How can they be when they are not global in outlook or experience or expectations. For the while, there is an illusion of sorts that American leaders are playing on their fellow Americans. But, in truth, Americans no longer understand the world nor wish to.
If so be, then America ceases to be global. How then can it truly play any role as a responsible power in the globalised world?
Would that sanity returns to America's leadership, especially the Texan corporate honchos the likes of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush. They have ill-served Americans.
Hi folks, So... momable informed me she had tagged me, and asked me, "Will you, won't you, will you, won't you... won't you join the game?"
Like those young, intrepid (but dumb) oysters, I have thought, "Why not?" So here are the 5 things about myself:
1. always do it tomorrow what you should have done yesterday;
2. crows may caw and snatch things from before your very nose even while you're looking, but they fed Elijah in the desert... that's the maxim I've lived by;
3. until I got married, young women would send my mind racing off in several directions till I would get completely clueless and say the darn'dest things;
4. I grew up never thinking well of myself but of others; that was the ethos my elders imparted to me... till I graduated and went to grad school, then I thought I should think otherwise till marriage knocked some sense into my heart;
5. I wanted to be an architect, but family finances and limited opportunities available for such training shunted me into the yards of accounting and finance and then to teaching, the very thing I dreaded most doing.
Before I tag anyone, I should perhaps ask for their permission so, for now, there is none whom I have tagged.
Hi folks, Here it is again: the year end, meaning the season of Christmas and the festivity of welcoming the New Year.
Seeing as how the large number of us are living in cities of no mean repute, meaning places where things of faraway places are up close, it is not surprising that Bollywood should feature in, the by-now ubiquitous presence of, YouTube. It isn't at all an out-sourcing, it is nothing but a fresh injection of Bollywood humour and flair into an otherwise standardised and getting rather pallid rendition of Christmas's staple carol, The 12 Days of Christmas.
However, apart from that intrusion, there is the surprising appearance of an exchange of mood at this time of the year. For the first time, in my mind, I see Christmas season as having receded into the shadows of a disgraced person who was once a popular personage. I mean Christmas in the west, especially America.
Both the economy and law have weighed in for America a gloom that renders Christmas into a gaunt spectre, the ghoul of Christmas. Once, it haunted Scrooge in Dickens' tale. Today, that ghoul has returned and is haunting America instead, at this season of good cheer. Christmas is not Christmas... anymore; it is Happy Holidays.
At the other corner of the ring is a city like Singapore. Christmas is not what it used to be for Asian cities. Just a time for westerners.
Then the majority of them would take this time of the year to make it their bounden duty to show they were Christmas. They went to church after which, they boozed and they had their fling till the wee hours of Boxing Day (apppropriate name, for by that day, most of them would be flat on the floor, KO'd).
No, today, Christmas in Singapore is for all races. It is... an evening spent on the wing of a song (and more), after a sumptuous dinner of superlative dining experience, thence to the disco... and as the diarist, Pepys, used to end his daily entries, "...and thence to bed."
But, of course, today's meaning is quite different from that of Jacobean England's.
It's been about a week and a little more since I returned from Los Angeles; time for me to regain my sanity, clear some cobwebs in my mind, and settle down to the humdrum of my usual routine.
What then is the gist of my feelings and my recollections of the past 3 weeks then?
I return to my home country to see signs everywhere of a vigorous display of much wealth, whether in cash for spending or buying expensive new condominium units or assets of high worth (like Sony's latest PS3 bought at a huge premium, or Samsung Plasma wide-screen TV, or the latest SUV or cars like Ferraris or Lamborghinis,...)
All these signs of boom-time Charleys are just surreal, seeing as I have just left an America that is so deflated of hopefulness and bulging wallets that everywhere there are only indications of a Christmas that will be without much trimmings or the killing of the "fatted" turkey for gorgeous meals. The mood is definitely indigo for the pocket-book is bare. One thing however is for sure; Christmas is quite likely to be the giving and receiving of Mrs See's chocolates and candies rather than Lindt or Godiva.
Will we be spared of the effects of America's hollowing-out coughs? But for now, who cares?
'Tis the season to be jolly... bring out the fine blended old malt Scottish whiskey, the Brute, and the Stella Artois. Roast the fatted turkey, carve up the leg of ham and the roast beef... we're going to have a grand finale to see off the departing year.
After last night's wet and cold weather, today broke fair and brought in its train a beautiful summer weather; warm and sunny. It was a bonus issue from heaven above, so I chose to venture forth to a nearby shopping precinct where there is a Peet's cafe. It is quite a relaxing neighbourhood, made up of retirees and university students (U. OF Cal, San Diego). The Americans do make rather pretentious labels for themselves; they call the apartments for such oldies, "Assisted Living" or "Luxurious Retirement Condominium". Here is an example (in La Jolla). It is called La Man(y)ana, a posh upmarket retirement development reputed to be the home to Mafia capos of bygone years.
Sunday was fantastic, the warm relaxing mood lasted the entire day. Even the birds were out in force to bathe in the sunshine. Here are some gulls enjoying themselves in the refreshing sea breezes... The flowers put on their lovely bright colours:
The sky was never bluer, with a luminence that takes one's breath away. But America just has to have a faux facade to their buildings, like these:
I had a quiet and entertaining afternoon readin Sei Shounagon's Pillow Book for she never stirs up one's senses with her way with putting words in poetry that are so devilishly clever.
WIDGETIZE