Habits are hard to undo: 01 (Driving in Taiwan)

 

When I was working for Conoco Taiwan in 1975–6, each big boss had his own driver (President, Chief Geologist, Chief Engineer, Administrative Manager).

    The drivers were needed for the morning journey in to the office and the evening ride home, then perhaps during the day for various activities like meetings outside the office, squash and lunch at the American Club, or dinners/parties in the evenings.  The rest of the time was spent sitting in the kitchen on standby (a lot of it discussing the situation with mainland China — I heard some interesting views; most of the Conoco Taiwan male staff were retired soldiers who’d gone over to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek, so they had family back there).

    The Conoco Taiwan President straddled the Singapore and the Taipei offices, spending more of his time in the former than in the latter, so his driver Jimmy was at a loose end most of the time.

    One day, he was so bored he suggested taking me to the Motor Vehicles Office on the outskirts of Taipei to get my Singapore driving licence converted to a Taiwanese one.

    The process was very simple:  eyesight test, colour blindness test, weight and height measurements.  That was it.  I got my Taiwanese driving licence within minutes of my arrival.

    Jimmy then said, “Would you like to drive back into central Taipei?”  

    What a treat!

    As soon as we left the Motor Vehicles Office, I was being careful to stay within my lane (of a six-lane motorway, three lanes each direction).  So, I kept the dotted white line (that delineated the lanes) immediately to my right hand side, as a guidance for the space for my car, which is the best way if you’re not sure how wide your car is.

    Unfortunately, the system in Taiwan is American, i.e., the steering wheel is on the left hand side of the car, and one drives in the right hand lane of the road.  (I was brought up in Singapore, which uses the British system.)

    By keeping the dotted white line immediately on my right, I ended up straddling two lanes, with the dotted white line running down the middle of the car.  Jimmy had to reach out and steer the car into the middle of the lane on more than one occasion as I kept trying to keep the dotted white line on my right hand side, purely out of habit.

    When I had to change gears, my left hand would go WHAM into the side of the door.  The gear stick was on my right hand side now.

    When I had to use the indicator while switching from one lane to another, I’d end up activating the windscreen wipers:  SWIPE SWIPE SWIPE SWIPE across the front screen.

    Everything was in the “wrong” place!

    Luckily, this was late morning and Taipei of 1975, so there wasn’t that much traffic around.

    Recalling this episode now, half a century later, I’m thinking not so much of the hazard I might’ve posed to the other drivers on the road.  Rather, of how it might’ve confirmed the then-commonly-voiced opinion of “these women drivers”!

(Taipei, Taiwan, 1975)

Habits are hard to undo: 02 (Driving in Iraq)

 

What started off the blog about driving in Taiwan was my computer repair man, Ali from Iraq who’s also a very kind man, giving me a separate keyboard for my newly bought replacement laptop, saying it’d save the keys of the keyboard on the laptop itself from wear and tear.

    He asked for feedback the next time I went to see him.  I said my hand kept trying to move the cursor from the trackpad, except that the standalone keyboard does not have a trackpad.

    He said he does the same thing with a device that does not give the option of blowing up the screen display (text or picture) using one’s fingertips (sliding them together or apart to decrease or increase the size).

    He then went on to tell me what had happened to someone he knew in the days just after Saddam Hussein’s downfall.

    This is how I remember he told the story, which Ali said still has the man’s circle of friends laughing years later.

    Foreign cars started to get imported into Iraq, whereas up to Saddam Hussein’s exit, the Iraqi people were driving old bangers from a few decades previously.

    Some of the imports were from Japan, which drives the British way, i.e., in the left hand lane of the road, with the steering wheel on the right side of the car.  As the Iraqi system is American, those who bought Japanese cars had to adapt to it — until workshops started to sprout up later on, completely overhauling them for the Iraqi roads, moving the steering wheel to the other side of the car, etc.

    One of those who’d bought a Japanese car prior to these workshops coming into existence was Ali’s friend, another Iraqi man. 

    A bit of cultural behaviour background here: Iraqi men seem to have the same habit as Chinese men — the habit of spitting.  Drivers would spit out of their car windows willy-nilly, as and when they wanted while driving.

    This friend of Ali’s forgot that he was driving a Japanese car, so he simply turned left and spat — PTUI, straight into the face of his wife sitting next to him!  More than once, throughout the journey.  (Maybe even subsequent ones, if his wife allowed him — allowed him subsequent journeys, I mean, i.e., didn’t ground him; rather than allowed him to spit into her face on subsequent occasions.)

(Iraq, post-2003)

A bit of Catch 22: 02 (Google translate)

 

Some of my students have gone to google translate for decoding Chinese text, or for translating English text (in their own heads, say) into Chinese (for them to send out as messages, e.g.).  That’s how I come to learn of the mistakes in the translations. 

    Question is:  how are the students supposed to know that there are mistakes and where (/ which ones) they are? 

    The fact that they’d gone to google translate in the first place must mean that they didn’t know what the source text (e.g., Chinese text) is saying, or that they didn’t know how to render the English message in their heads into Chinese for sending out.  

    However, they will have to be good enough in both languages to detect the level of accuracy in the resultant translation.  And if they’re good enough in both languages, why then go to google translate? 

    This is, of course, a simplistic perspective just for the purpose of the focus of this blog (which is on the Catch 22 element of the exercise).  I have used it myself to test it out, or to help me out when I’m stuck for the right word / translation for something I’m working on, especially as a translator.

    I’m not discrediting google translate at all here, just toying with the Catch 22 element in this exercise.  It is a very useful tool a lot of the time, but the user needs to be of a certain level of proficiency in both source and target languages to know if the google translate version is right / good enough.  The user will at least need a high’ish level of proficiency for this, which would therefore exclude anyone of intermediate level and below, perhaps.  

    Still better than nothing?  Or is it potentially serious to end up with bad or, worse, wrong translations?  I have in mind translations that could give offence or result in disasters.

    One example of the potentially disastrous outcome of a wrong translation:

    A German friend on the Japanese degree course at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) in the 80s was asked to take over a summer job at a car factory in Luton, translating manuals, published in Japanese, containing technical terms used in the automobile industry.

    Being meticulous and sharp-minded, also well read and knowledgeable on a wide range of subjects, he spotted the English translation of a chemical that goes into car engines, which he felt was not right, so he went to the original Japanese text.  

    Sure enough, he found that the person who’d done that translation had picked the first of two similar-looking items on the list in the dictionary, without checking out the significance in the difference.  The Japanese language has long and short vowels.  That first translator had not only picked the wrong one but, worse, one that would blow the engine up.

A bit of Catch 22: 01 (Applying for a job)

Catch 22:  (MBP dictionary says)  a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions

(from googling)

• an impossible situation where you are prevented from doing one thing until you have done another thing that you cannot do until you have done the first thing
• a contradiction or an inescapable paradox caused by the rule itself. It was adopted into general English to refer to an illogical situation, or a problem in which the solution is denied by the problem itself.

For those who might not know, the phrase Catch 22 comes from the novel of the same title, published in 1961, written by Joseph Heller, adapted into a film in 1970. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22

The example for a Catch 22 situation would be:  some or a lot of jobs require the applicant to have some experience.  So, what are first timers to do?  You can’t get the job unless you have some experience, but how do you gain experience unless you’re accepted for a job?

Do you have the Corona? (London)

 

I was waiting for a bus in Stamford Hill in north London when I was seized by a sneezing fit.

    I’m allergic to almost everything under the sun, except (thankfully) dogs and cats.  It is mid-April now, so the pollens are out (flower pollen now, later tree and grass).

   There was just one other person at the bus stop: a man in his 40s (I think), in side ringlets and a big furry hat.  He asked me, “Do you have the Corona?”  (Yes, those were his very words.)

    Apart from the fact that he ought to know it’s the pollen season, did he actually think I’d be physically well enough to be running around if I had Covid, never mind so irresponsible?

    I was so taken aback I could only say it was the chill in the air, forgetting even the hay fever bit.  (My brain is very slow when it comes to potential confrontation, unless it’s friendly repartee.)

    When he got on the bus after me, the man stayed by the driver, close to the front door, after I’d moved right inside.

    In hindsight, I should’ve replied, “Yes!”, just to see his reaction. 

(London, 2025)

Shopaholics (London)

 

An 84-year-old friend has been complaining about her 88-year-old husband (let’s call him John) buying more food than they can consume, so that most of it goes off and has to be binned.

    I’d suggested that he might like to be a professional shopper for people with more money than time or energy, so that he gets the pleasure of the buying but with other people’s money and he doesn’t have to eat it all himself.

    Two days ago, another friend was saying her father (in his 70s or 80s) is a shopaholic as well.  So, I’ve said he could team up with the 88-year-old and start a shopping service.  The friend said, “My father’s slow though.”  I said, “The customer will probably only need one delivery per week, so your father and John can take six days to do the shopping — six days of shopping heaven wandering among the supermarket aisles, eyeing up all the goods!  Bliss.”

    It’s exercise for them, too.

(London, 2025)

Mother said mustn’t eat green vegetables (Singapore)

 

When I was in my teens, some distant relative’s wife died of cancer, leaving him with two young children: a girl of about eight, and a boy of about six.

    He was away a lot, working on construction projects in Malaysia, so he couldn’t look after them.  It was decided that the siblings should be split up, maybe so as not to burden kind relatives with two children at once.  The boy was sent off to some relative on the mother’s side.  My grandma took the girl in on her coconut plantation.

    One of the things I noticed about the girl right from the start was that she’d refuse to eat green vegetables.

    A bit of cultural background here.  In all my years of growing up in Singapore, I’d never heard of children having trouble eating their greens, not in the way I’ve heard about British children doing it.

    British children, from what I’d read, never liked eating their vegetables because the traditional British way of cooking them was to “boil them to death” (according to an expression that cropped up regularly in the literature I’d come across on the subject), so we hear of British children typically hating Brussels sprouts and cabbage, for example.

 

    The Chinese way of cooking vegetables is most commonly stir-frying them, so they’re not overcooked, they stay fresh and crunchy (not boiled to almost a mush), with the flavour retained.  If children out East don’t like their veg, it generally would be them being fussy (like the younger me about coriander and spring onion, which I’d call “smelly veg”).

    With this in mind, this orphaned girl refusing to eat ALL greens was a bit puzzling.

    I tried to get to the bottom of it, as I didn’t think she should exclude greens from her diet altogether.  I went through the list of possibilities:  was it the way it was cooked, or the sauce used (soya sauce, bean paste, chilli sauce, etc.)?  She couldn’t give a satisfactory answer.

    In the end, she said, “My mother told us not to eat anything that’s green.”

    That was even more puzzling:  how could a woman tell her children not to eat green vegetables?  I couldn’t check with the mother in this case, of course.

    After a while, the penny dropped:  in my dialect (Teochew / 潮州 Cháozhōu, a S.E. Chinese dialect), the word for “green” (the colour) sounds exactly the same as the word for “raw” (uncooked).

    The Chinese are not big on raw vegetables (e.g., salads that feature much more prominently in the Western diet).  I grew up hearing grown-ups saying, "I’m not a horse or a cow!"

    It could be partly due to health concerns, rather like the Chinese not drinking water straight out of the tap, they need to boil it first to make sure it’s safe.  (Just my own theory.)

    So, I put it to the girl:  “I think your mother meant raw rather than green colour veg.”

    Once this interpretation was introduced into her head, the barriers came down, and she ate all her greens after that.

(Singapore, 1960s)