You said we could lie: 02 (names for fictitious children) (London)

For the Beginners class on the evening programme, the oral test was three minutes per student, which is a long time to be speaking in Mandarin for that level.

    This was the strategy I taught the generations of students during my 23 years of teaching on the evening programme, presenting the plan graphically on the board.

    The student is in a bubble in the middle, marked Self, with details such as surname, name, age, nationality.  (That might be 30 seconds of the test time covered.)

    Radiating from that central bubble, like a satellite network, are four different identity bubbles:

    1. Family (the one they were born into), with details such as parents and siblings, plus their names and ages.

    2. Family (the one they've created), with details of their spouse and children.  (I told them all to be married and to have lots of children, to fill up the speaking time.)

    3. Their studies:  I told them all to be full time students, because they knew how to say they were learning Mandarin, and describe their teacher and fellow students.

    4. Their work:  This was the part of their life I told them not to venture into, as their Mandarin wasn't anywhere near good enough to talk about their work in real life, e.g., Hilary was an IP (Intellectual Property) Rights specialist lawyer; Chris Welch was a professor of aeronautics and space engineering at Kingston University.

    Student Dennis, unattached at the time, in answer to my questions in Mandarin, "Are you married?  Do you have any children?  How many? Boy or girl?  What are their names?", would giggle after each of his made-up answers.

    Student Tom didn't even bother to spend time and energy on this.  He simply gave the names of his two fictitious children as Gubo and Palanka, the two characters in the mainland Chinese-designed textbook we were using at the time.

    Palanka could be the Chinese rendition for Blanca, a common enough European name, but I was at a loss (this was pre-googling days) to put a finger on a provenance for Gubo.  Plumping for Albania (since it was, like China, one of the few communist countries left in the world at the time) was exotic and always produced a smile, so I stuck to it.

    Tom coming up with Gubo and Palanka for the names of his two fictitious children took me by surprise.  My eyebrows went up, as I checked in Mandarin, "Your children are called Gubo and Palanka?!?"

    He gave me a look of frustration (and something else -- maybe a touch of derision?) as he switched to English, "It was you who told us to play this silly game."

    Yes, he passed the oral test.  Couldn't fault him on lack of imagination.  Nor even for telling the examiner off....  I did say that they could lie -- as long as they lied grammatically.

(London, early 1990s)

You said we could lie: 01 (age) (London)

Old friend Valerio and I have been talking about using AI for our queries.

    We've both had some wrong answers.  Sometimes, it's due to the question not being worded in a way that lets AI know exactly what the questioner is looking for, as I discovered when the answer was off course, and re-wording the question a bit got me what I was expecting.

Valerio said:

Quote

The interesting thing with AI is that you can prevent bad responses if you explicitly tell it not to do it. If you don't say " don't lie" it has no reason to tell the truth.

Unquote

My response to the above was:

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Hahahaha, how devious of it! “You didn’t tell me not to lie.”

Unquote

    This reminds me of my teaching evening class students.  To encourage them to speak, I said to them, "You don't have to tell the truth.  You can lie, as long as you lie grammatically."

    One day, a student said in Mandarin during an exercise in class that he was 16.  The evening course didn't admit students below 18, and this student was in his 30s at least (and looked it), so instinctively, I said in surprise, in Mandarin, "You are 16 years old?!!?"

    He came back with, in English, "You told us we could lie."

(London, mid–late 1980s)

Going round and round in circles: 02 (London)

The first blog about Going round and round in circles (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2020/04/going-round-and-round-in-circles-london.html) reminds me of a phone conversation I once had with the secretary of one of our film directors on The Heart of the Dragon.

    The Heart of the Dragon was a 12-part Channel Four TV documentary series about China in the early 80s, made by a company specially set up for it, with each producer/director having their own company working on all sorts of other projects.

    Nigel’s company, Hawkshead Communications Limited, was a corporate training filmmaking company, specialising in communications.

    One day, a call came in from the Hawkshead secretary for Nigel.  He wasn’t in, so she said she’d like to leave a message for him.

Secretary:  Tell Nigel I can do it and you know what I mean…

Me:  Do what?  I don’t know what you mean.

Secretary:  No, those are the names of the training films:  “I can do it” and “You know what I mean”.

(London, 1983)

The nature vs nurture of food: 14 (They say it's very hot but...)

In my second year in London, I was invited by an Indonesian Chinese woman to visit her in Guildford.

    Her Caucasian husband (Belgian??) worked for Conoco, the American oil company I'd worked for in Singapore, Taiwan and London.  He was away on an offshore rig in the North Sea, so she thought I could go and stay with her for the weekend.

    I arrived on Saturday to find her having lunch:  roast lamb the Western way, but with a bowl of fresh, whole green chilli by the plate.  Like the Mauritian woman (in the blog https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-nature-vs-nurture-of-food-12-chilli.html) eating her afternoon tea biscuit with regular nibbles at her fresh, whole red chilli, this Indonesian woman worked her way through the bowl of fresh, whole green chilli with each forkful of roast lamb.

    For dinner that evening, she suggested having a takeaway curry.

    Going through the menu at the takeaway counter, she said to me, "This curry called vindaloo, they say is very hot, but it isn't, actually."

    After her derisive remark about the label of "very hot" for a vindaloo curry, she decided to go for the next one up, which is a phall (another one I'd not heard of, and which I've since discovered is not offered on the menus of a lot of high street curry houses, maybe because there isn't a huge demand for it).

    Back at her house, she opened her carton of phall curry to find it a vibrant orange red colour.  Her face lit up, "Now, this looks more like it!"

    She put a spoonful of it into her mouth, then shot up from the table, dashed over to the sink, spat it out, rushed over to the fridge, yanked the door open, pulled out the largest bottle of Coca Cola, and glugged it in huge gulps.

    When she turned round, her eyes were bloodshot and tears were streaming down her cheeks, as she squeaked, "My goodness, that was hot!"

    It was a bit later that the thought sneaked into my head:  maybe the man in the curry takeaway kitchen heard her scoffing at the categorisation of vindaloo, and decided to teach her a lesson by doctoring the phall to beyond how they'd normally serve it.

(Guildford, 1978)

The nature vs nurture of food: 13 (How to know how hot a curry is?)

In Singapore and Malaysia (presumably Indonesia as well), we didn't (still don't?) have labels, like they do here in Britain, to indicate the level of spiciness, e.g., a Korma curry (least hot), a Madras or a Vindaloo curry (at the top end).

    The spectrum might've been invented as a guide for the white foreigners in the old days as they would need some help identifying how hot a curry was.

    I don't remember now how we Singaporeans plump for curries (and their spiciness) when choosing a dish.

    All I remember is: the names of the dishes give a clue to the ingredients, but not the level of heat, e.g., beef curry (how hot though??), lamb curry (ditto), fish curry (ditto), etc.

    Maybe through painful trial and error.  If your taste buds get burned after a particular dish at a particular curry house/stall, you stay away from it next time.

    Once burned, twice shy.

(Singapore, 1960s and 1970s)

Meeting dead friends

I lost a very dear Taiwanese soulmate of a (platonic) friend to a road accident in 1979, which of course was unexpected.

    It was a particularly great shock as I'd just spent a month with him in the summer in Taiwan, walking the Cross Island Highway through the central mountain range (with four other friends, camping on the way), among other things.

    I was plunged into a deep depression and grieved my loss for a long time, until I decided to look at it from the other angle: that I was being selfish, that I was grieving for myself because I had lost a friend, not for him as he'd died and, therefore, wouldn't be suffering (from his accident injuries, and from the horrible things people do to each other in this world).

    Since then, I've talked to him down the decades, telling him how much I miss him, asking him to wait for me to join him.

    A fortnight ago, it suddenly struck me that if one believes in reincarnation, he would've / might've already been back on earth, maybe in more than one life since 1979.

    This would mean that when it's my time to leave this earth and go up to where he'd gone to in 1979, to spend time with him, he won't / mightn't be there!

The nature vs nurture of food: 12 (Chilli with everything)

I've come to know quite a few Mauritians in the last five years or so.

    One of the things I've noticed about them is that they share Singaporean people's love of chilli / spicy food.

    An extreme example is from a visit to the home of two of them, a married couple. At afternoon tea time, which is supposed the English style with tea, cake and/or biscuits, the wife sat down to her biscuit with a fresh, whole red chilli between her fingers -- to be eaten with every nibble of her biscuit.

(Crawley, near Gatwick Airport, 2024)