Tell or not tell?

 

I’ve always kept things from my family, especially after moving abroad, and certainly if they are problems.  After all, what can they do, being so far away?  Telling them will only add to their worries — we have enough stress already in modern life as it is.  A number of friends I've spoken to about this subject in the past say they feel the same way.

    An 82-year-old student’s daughter has moved to another part of the world and is trying to get her dogs out there to join her.  The papers are all in place but she’s having trouble getting the approval of the authorities at the other end.  

    My student mentioned this yesterday, more than once, so it’s obviously playing on her mind.  

    It is true that a lot of old people tend to repeat things, often because they forget that they’ve said it, but probably also because old people usually have a smaller input of external experience: no work-related matters because they’re now retired; they don’t go out that much; a lot of their friends are no longer around; so they end up dwelling on a narrower (and usually more immediate, time-wise) range of matters.

    Dog-lovers (/ owners of cats, parrots, any pet animals) might protest at this, as pets are mostly seen as family, but I personally don’t think that having trouble re-locating one’s pets is important enough to add to an old person’s stress levels.  

    Old people have unavoidable health issues that are related to growing old to plague them:  diabetes, thus restricting their range of food; high blood pressure, ditto; cholesterol, ditto; arthritis; poor eyesight; etc.  Why add to their list of woes?

    This is only an idle personal opinion expressing how I see things on the scale of levels of importance.  I’m not downplaying the importance and value of animals as living beings.  It’s definitely not a criticism at all of my student’s daughter to tell her mother about the hassle with the dogs.  I know that families and friends do often share the most trivial of details about their lives, because they need to talk.

    My father started to pass out blood in his urine or stool (can’t remember which) back in 1978, aged 61.  

    He thought it might’ve been because of an internal injury from a fall while pruning the fig tree a while back, for which he’d taken some Chinese herbal concoction, so he wasn't terribly concerned, but went to get it checked out all the same.  

    It turned out to be cancer of the liver, which the family decided not to tell him about.

    On the last day of his time at the hospital, he went round the ward, cheering up everyone else, feeling sorry for them that they were stuck there while he was going home.

    So, my father died not having the worry and stress of knowing he had cancer of the liver.  

    My last landlord in Highbury died of a heart attack just three months after being diagnosed with cancer of the liver.  I was/am glad for him that he died a quick death and didn’t have to continue to suffer the horrible side effects of his chemo and radio therapy — or, worse, the more stressful mental anguish of worrying about his cancer.  

    I personally think that, being the hypochondriac his wife had said he was, he’d scared himself to death, worrying about his cancer.  

    Stress is a much bigger killer than actual physical ailments, I feel.

Hindsight often comes a bit late

From MBP [MacBook Pro] dictionary:

Hindsight:  Quote understanding of a situation or event only after it has happened or developed: with hindsight, I should never have gone. Unquote

Eureka: Quote a cry of joy or satisfaction when one finds or discovers something Unquote

Entering my 70s, I find myself constantly having an eureka moment as I go about my daily life, except it’s not of joy or satisfaction, just “oh, I see now what they mean!”.

    I, and the people in my generation that I speak to about such things, remember being told as children by the elders: “You will know what I mean when you get to my age.”  

    It was said so often that one, especially as a child, just treated it as 耳邊風 / 耳边风 ěr biān fēng / “ear side wind” / a puff of wind passing the ear:  unheeded advice, things that these old people kept repeating.

    Before I reached the age of 50, I got up one day to offer my seat to an old lady (in her 60s??) who’d just boarded the bus.  She said, “Thank you kindly, dear, but no, once I sit down, it’s hard to get up again.”  

    My legs haven’t got to that point yet, but I’m surrounded by people whose legs have, and I can see the struggle involved in the simple act of standing up from a seated position, something most people below 60 or 70 take for granted.

    With this in mind, I’m now trying to make up for lost time with regard to doing massage and relieving pain before my hands and fingers lose the strength.  The massage equivalent of 及時行樂 / 及时行乐 / jí shí xíng lè / “reach time carry-out happiness” / enjoying oneself while there’s still time / carpe diem.  

    I’d only started four years back to do massages in earnest, when I was teaching Mandarin and English at a Chinese community centre and found some grateful takers among the ping pong players there, most of whom were retirees (the common generation at community centres and the ones who don’t have to be at work 9–5).  

    I now give massages for free at least three times a week, sometimes more.  The sense of achievement one gets in having people hobble up to you in pain, some nearly half bent over in pain, then standing up straight and stretching out their bodies/arms after 20 minutes of your massage and saying, “Oh, I feel like a new person!” is indescribable and has to be witnessed or experienced in person.

    I wish I’d embarked on it much earlier.  Don’t let it be 耳邊風 to you.  Go out and do whatever it is that gives you a sense of leading a useful life before you lose the opportunity.

Good thing or bad?

 

I forwarded photos of Turkish places sent by a Turkish friend who’s home on a visit.  Italian friend’s brother who’s been to Turkey in his UNHCR capacity made a comment about the negative impact of tourism, especially mass tourism, on a place.

    This brings to mind something my Japanese friend, illustrator for children's books, now quite famous in his field, told me in the late 70s about a Japanese man (couple?) who'd joined a distance adoption scheme to sponsor a child in a third-world country.  

    He / they sent the child things that were common in Japan but not found / affordable in that country at the time (e.g., toys and stationery).  It resulted in the child being ostracised by the other children because he was different.  They also envied him and didn't like him because he had things they couldn’t have.  It might also have been that he was showing off as well — don't know.  

    The result of "wealth" in the “wrong” place, at the “wrong” time.

Hantu (Singapore)

 

The word “hantu” strikes fear into the hearts of most S.E.Asian children in my childhood days.  

    It means “ghost / spirit” in Malay / Indonesian.  There were lots of hantu films in my younger days, which we children couldn’t watch without at least one adult present for us to clutch.

    Adults, especially male ones for some reason, loved to scare us with hantu stories at night — no point telling them in the glare of daylight, not effective enough, not so much fun.

    The big house where I grew up had a red skin banana tree (not common) at the bottom of the back garden.  The loo was also at that end of the house.  

    One night, the womenfolk (two aunts, three older sisters, two maids) sat in the covered patio after dinner, and one of them started to say that hantu-hantu* reside in these red skin banana trees.  

    A bit later, I had to go to the loo.  I dug my sister out of bed and made her go with me, insisting that she stand outside by the door AND keep on talking loudly so that I could hear she was there.

(Singapore, 1960s)

* In Malay / Indonesian, one just doubles up a noun to make it plural, e.g., kawan / friend is kawan-kawan in the plural.

Chinese sayings: 27 (紛至沓來 / 纷至沓来)

紛至沓來 / 纷至沓来

fēn zhì tà lái

“numerous arrive numerous come”

to come thick and fast

The university college I was working at had appointed a new director.  (It shall remain unidentified for obvious reasons.)

He was a banker in his previous job, so the first thing on his new-broom-sweeps-clean list of chores was to try and save money, starting with proposing to shut down the Linguistics Department.

Huge waves of protests from within the school:  how can a school of languages be without a Linguistics Department??

I arrived one morning for work to find one of the porters, Ian, emerging from the telex room (which was on the other side of the corridor from the reception desk), hands full of reels of telex, shaking his head.  Asked what the matter was, he said, “The machine hasn’t stopped spewing out incoming telexes from universities all over since the director’s decision to close down the Linguistics Department.”

I asked, “What do they all say?”

He said, “Only what a prat he was.”

Another day, I arrived to find that I had to go round the building and get in through the side door (which I never knew existed before), as the driveway in front of the main entrance was being dug up.  I asked Ian what was happening there.  He said, “Oh, the director dropped a penny, and they’re looking for it.”  (It turned out that the chancellor of the college was visiting, so they were sprucing up the place a bit.)

(London, 1980s)]

Compassionate London train drivers (London)

 

London is such a big city with a population of just under 10 million that one would expect people with a timetable to keep, such as train drivers, to be just jobsworths interested in fulfilling their work duties.  

    I heard a couple of decades back that bus drivers got penalised not just for being late (happens easily with the horrendous traffic jams, exacerbated by road works), but for being early as well (so they have to hang back and idle away the minutes at a bus stop if that happens).  I know being too early also messes things up for others, with people arriving on time to find their bus has gone, so it’s a fair enough system, penalising both ways.  

    Well, train drivers don’t have traffic jam problems (although they do have problems with signals, I know from experience), and they can perhaps catch up on lost seconds or minutes by speeding up a bit in between stations.  They mightn't be able to just go faster to make up for lost time, though, as there might be a speed cap built into the trains for safety in case a driver goes a bit speed-crazy.  

    People tend to complain officially when things go wrong but less often write in when things go well.  

    I want to put that right a little bit with this blog about two train drivers who’d been kind enough to this absent-minded old lady, taking a few seconds of their timetable to ease her journey.

    The first one was at Upper Holloway London Overground station a few months ago.  

    I’d just tapped in my Freedom Pass (old people’s free travel pass) when I saw that my train was already sitting at the platform.  I took the first opening in the railings on my right, which turned out to be a ramp for wheelchairs and prams.  

    What I didn’t see at that point was that the ramp is very long, as it has to slope gently downwards, therefore needs to zig zag a few bends before it reaches the platform level.

    As I took my first few steps down the ramp, the driver (a black chap), who could see how long a distance (and therefore time) it was going to take me to reach the platform, which meant I’d miss his train, stepped out of his cab and waved to me, pointing at the stairs (second opening in the railings on my right).  So I backtracked up the ramp and took the stairs instead.  

    When I got to my destination, I made a point of standing in front of the driver’s cab, and waved and mouthed a “thank you!” at the driver through the tinted glass, even though I couldn’t see him.  (I’m sure he’d have seen me as drivers have to keep their eyes on the platform to make sure everything is all right before they take off.)

    The second episode was just last week at Stamford Hill London Overground station, two bus stops away from me.  

    It was only my second time catching a Cheshunt-bound train from there to Southbury further north, where I was going to do a massage.  I went and stood at where the head of the train would be, from my first experience of taking a train from there.

    It turned out to be a shorter train this time, shorter by about two carriages.  Being the daydreamer that I am, often in my own little world thinking up ideas for teaching, e.g., I didn’t notice that the train had stopped short of where I thought it would be.  The driver honked to alert me, and gave me time to run back down the platform.  So sweet.  (How many people get honked at by a train driver, except for misdemeanours, I ask you?!)

    Two episodes of personalised service rendered by two compassionate train drivers who used their humane common sense and saved an old lady missing their train and having to wait for another 20 minutes for the next one.

    They are a credit to their profession and to the human race as a whole.  Also a credit to their parents.

(London, 2024)

Why 王八 wáng bā for “tortoise / scoundrel”?

 

Over my decades of teaching Mandarin Chinese, I noticed that students (especially the male ones) had either already learned a few rude words (swear words, insults) before they started to learn Chinese, or were keen to be acquainted with them, as if that was a measure of how un-textbook their Chinese is.

    One of those rude words is 王八 wáng bā for “tortoise; cuckold; male brothel-owner”.

    The “tortoise” bit is easy enough to explain:  

• The plastron (underside part) of the tortoise looks like the character 王 wáng / king; surname Wang
• The two ends (with the legs sticking out at an angle) look like the character 八 bā / eight.  

It’s a term used by ancient northern Chinese people for referring to the tortoise.

    But why does “tortoise” in this context have a derogatory connotation?  

    According to my superficial research, 王八 was originally a scoundrel called 王建 Wáng Jiàn, nicknamed 王八 Wang No.8 by people as he was the eighth child.  So, there’s the link between 王八 and 王八蛋 “scoundrel egg” / bastard.

    Another angle on it is:  during the 明清 Ming Qing (1368–1911) times, 王八 wáng bā / “Wang No.8” became 忘八 wàng bā / “forget eight”. 

    忘八 wàng bā / “forget eight” refers to forgetting the eight moral virtues of 孝悌忠信禮義廉恥 / 孝悌忠信礼义廉耻 xiào tì zhōng xìn lǐ yì lián chǐ, or forgetting the eighth moral virtue of 耻 chǐ / [sense of] shame.  

1. 孝 xiào / filial piety (one’s duty towards one’s parents and ancestors)
2. 悌 tì / love and respect for one’s elder brother(s) (note the gender- and positioning-specific element; one doesn’t need to exercise this quality of behaviour towards one’s younger male siblings nor female ones, both older and younger)
3. 忠 zhōng / loyalty 
4. 信 xìn / trustworthiness
5. 禮/礼 lǐ / propriety, etiquette
6. 義/义 yì / [sense of] justice, moral righteousness
7. 廉 lián / honesty, integrity
8. 耻 chǐ / [sense of] shame

If one has forgotten the eight moral virtues, then one deserves to be called a scoundrel.  If one has forgotten the eighth moral virtue of 耻 chǐ / [sense of] shame, then one is shameless.