Presumptuous behaviour (China)

 

Presumptuous:  (dictionary definition) (of a person or their behaviour) failing to observe the limits of what is permitted or appropriate.

The series I’m watching at the moment has a scene where the two boys (late teens) arrive in Guangzhou (old rendition Canton).  As they disembark from the train, some of their bags are grabbed by two men who are freelance porters looking to earn a bit of money carrying people’s bags for the short distance from the platform to the front entrance.  When the boys challenged them, they reduced the original fee of 5 yuan to 3 yuan, then called the boys penny pinchers when the boys said no.  This is set in the late 80s.

    It reminds me of something that had happened on my second trip to China in 1997, with my brother and a then-student (a Westerner — let’s call her Mary).

    It was a two-destination trip:  first to 厦门 Xiamen (old rendition Amoy, famous for the soya sauce brand name) in 福建省 Fujian province, then to my father’s birthplace in the 潮州 Cháozhōu / Teochew dialect area of 广东省 Guangdong province, both in S.E. China.

    My brother had been to my father’s village a number of times, and had asked me more than once if I’d like to go.  He’d caught me in a nostalgic mood when he asked yet again in 1997, so I thought I’d give it a go, although I’d sworn in 1988 after my 37-day film shoot that I wouldn’t go back there ever again, nor have anything to do with the people or the culture.

    After a few days in Xiamen, we took a long distance coach bound for 汕头 Shantou (old rendition Swatow), the nearest town in 广东省 Guangdong province for my father’s village.  The coach driver had forgotten about our request to be dropped off at an earlier spot in the outskirts (where we were to be picked up by my brother’s contact), so Mary and I were left standing somewhere beyond the meeting point while my brother walked back to see if he could find his contact.

    There we were, two women (one of whom was a Westerner) standing by a main road leading to Shantou, with luggage and other bags sitting at our feet.  We could’ve been wanting a minibus into town, it’s true.  All the minibuses heading that way would slow down and ask if we’d like to get on board, to which we shook our heads and said no.

    One of them, however, actually came to a halt, in spite of our having declined.  The conductor got off, grabbed two of our bags and started to get back on the bus.

    Incidentally, he had picked out the two most expensive-looking bags:  one was my brother’s leather attache case, the other was an airport duty free goods bag with a couple of bottles of whisky in it.

    I grabbed his shirt from behind, shouting, “Hey, put those bags down!”

    He held on to them, saying, “Oh, Miss, I’m only helping you to put them on the bus.”

    I said, “But we’d said no, we didn’t want to go into town.  Put those bags down, or else…” and at this point, I’d picked up a huge plastic bag with a big tin in it, swinging it, à la cowboy with a lasso, in the air above my head.

    What he didn’t know was that the tin was filled with pastry called Kueh Kapit*, each shaped like a hollow cigar, therefore very light.  The hollow cigar-shape pastries take up a lot of room, hence the size of the tin.  It was this big tin in the huge plastic bag I was swinging in the air above my head, threatening to whack his head with it, that the bag-grabbing minibus conductor saw.  He immediately put the two bags down, and they scooted off.

    This story with the dramatic last bit had my family laughing for days after that.

(China, 1997)

PS:  I’m normally a flight, rather than fight, person.  Having been brought up to think that it’s unfeminine behaviour to fight in public, my brain freezes up when there’s any friction or potential confrontation.  Even if I was in the right or being wrongly accused of something, I’m unable to react.  I might come up with the right defence some five days, if not weeks, later, so I don’t know where I got the courage from on that particular day, or how I managed to react so quickly.

* (AI overview) In Singapore, a hollow, cigar-shaped pastry resembling a love letter is called Kuih Kapit. It's a thin, crispy crepe-like biscuit, often enjoyed during Chinese New Year. The name "love letter" comes from its historical use in conveying affectionate messages between lovers. The pastry is made by pouring batter onto a hot, patterned mold and then rolled into a cylinder while still warm.

The guardian angels in one’s life: 14 (The young man I met in the mountains)

 

The details of how I came to meet this young man, three years my junior, a final year high school schoolboy at the time (July 1975), will have to go into my A Collection of Spooky Stories, because it’s too long a story for this blog.

    I’d given him the nickname of 胡老大 Hú lǎodà / “Hu old big” because he was the oldest of the group of three boys I’d met in passing.  (老大 = “leader / the oldest / the boss”.)

    We hit it off (platonically) right from the start up in 梨山 Líshān / “pear mountain” where we met, and kept in touch for the rest of my time in Taiwan (1.5 years until November 1976) — me in Taipei in the north, him in 嘉義 (Chiayi / 嘉义 /Jiāyì) in the south.

    We kept up correspondence after I returned to Singapore and after I came over to London, by which time we’d known each other for only about three years.

    Yet, knowing I didn’t want to take money from my mother, he offered financial help.  I got a letter from him (snail mail days) saying that should I need any help financially, his father had a sugar cane field that they could sell in order to send me the money to live on in London.

    His family wasn’t stinking rich — it was only a sugar cane field they owned.  Still, a sugar cane field at that time could go a long way towards the cost of living in Taiwan, yet he offered to turn that field into cash for me.

    I found a part-time job in the end, as a telex operator with British Monomarks which saw me through my university course, so I didn’t need to take him up on his generous offer after all.

    It’s incredibly touching, though, that a friend of only three years’ standing should offer to sell off a piece of family land to see me through my studies.  It’s not like I was in hospital, or in serious trouble that I needed to be bailed out of.

    Thank you, 胡老大 (d.1979), for the thought behind that kind and supportive, not to mention generous, gesture.  It was enough to see me through spiritually, knowing that there were friends out there who would step forward to help me out should I end up needing it.

    I’m eternally grateful, and feel honoured to have met you.

(London, 1977–79)

The guardian angels in one’s life: 13 (The ex-schoolmate)

 

I’d saved up over my two years of working in Taiwan in order to support myself for my first year in London, studying for my ‘A’ levels to get into university.

    The advice I’d been given was not to work at all during my ‘A’ levels but to focus completely on my studies and get good grades for getting into a good university, because once in, I’d be fine until the end of the course, barring failing my Year 1 end-of-year exams.  That was the practice at the time:  once you passed that Year 1 end-of-year exam to confirm that you’d be able to last the course, there were no more exams until the final year.

    Knowing how strongly I felt about taking money from my mother, ex-RI (Raffles Institution) schoolmate Wilson wrote from Australia and said that he’d send me money if I was ever in need.

    This was only a schoolmate, not even a distant relative, yet he offered to help me financially for living in London which wasn’t cheap even in the 1970s.

    As far as I know, he wasn’t that well off himself either in Australia, so if I’d appealed to him, it might’ve meant a bit of deprivation in his own life, all alone in Australia, just to help me out.

    I didn’t have to turn to him after all, because I found a part-time job as a telex operator with British Monomarks, which saw me through my university years, but it was a godsend to have that offer on tap should I ever need it, settling any panic that might surface.

    Thank you, Wilson, for being such a supportive friend.  I’m very grateful and feel very blessed to have a friend like you.  God bless you.

(London, 1977–81)

Language labs (London)

We used to have language lab sessions for Japanese at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).

    The version they used was a Yale University recording, which was fast.

    The arrangement for our Yale University tapes was:  the tapes would play a sentence, leaving a gap for the student to repeat and to be recorded onto the tape — this bit was for the teacher/student to listen to if needed, for feedback.  It’d then play the next sentence, and so on.

    The tapes would then get wiped for the next batch of students.

    The tape I had during my session didn’t get wiped properly somehow, so I ended up hearing the previous student’s recording.

    As the Yale recording was fast, the poor chap was struggling to keep up:  before he could finish repeating Sentence 1, Sentence 2 would come on, and so on.  

    I could hear him stumbling and stumbling, and his verbal frustrations (some four-letter words) uttered at being overtaken before he could finish repeating the sentence.

    At one point, I heard him bawl at the tape, “Oh, slow down, you stupid woman!”

(London, 1978)

Double standards: 06 (The Chinese written script)

 

Chinese is a language that is known for being difficult to learn, let alone master.

    The written element is the most difficult for students, in my experience of teaching over the decades.  It bears no resemblance to other languages, except for written Japanese which uses Chinese characters to a certain extent, but even then, not all Japanese kanji [Chinese characters] are written the same way.  Native speakers of lots of European languages have the alphabet already taken care of when they learn another European language.  (There are also lots of similarities in the vocabulary.)

    To make it even harder for the learner of Chinese, post-1949 China reformed the written script, from traditional to simplified, so now there are two versions.

    As the label suggests, the simplification of the written character is supposed to help reduce the illiteracy problem, but it also means that a lot of mainland Chinese people cannot read material published in Hong Kong and Taiwan.  At most, they can only guess at the gist — an equivalent I can think of is perhaps a Portuguese person reading a Spanish text or an Italian text, but a lower percentage of comprehension for a mainland Chinese person when it comes to traditional script.

    I was brought up on the traditional script at primary and secondary school in Singapore.  (Singapore officially adopted the simplified script in 1976.)  Personally, I prefer the traditional script:  it is more graphic, with a lot of the characters immediately giving a visual clue to what it represents.

    Some examples:

• 龍 lóng for “dragon” looks like the animal as it is represented in paintings, but the simplified version 龙 is a poor cousin really, in my opinion.
• Ditto 車 chē for “vehicle”.  The original meaning of 車 is a horse cart:  the two horizontal lines are the wheels (as seen from above / the air); the vertical line is the axle connecting the two wheels; the square box in the middle is the body of the cart; the line in the middle of the square box is the man sitting on the body of the cart.  The simplified version 车 just doesn’t do the trick, somehow.

    Having said the above, however, I must confess to applying double standards when it comes to my personally having to handwrite the Chinese script.  It takes ages to compose a page, even if one were to go for the cursive version (called 草書 / 草书 / cǎo shū / the “grass script” in Chinese, 草 cǎo meaning “grass” but also “rough draft”, sort of a running style).

    Luckily these days, one has technology to do all the hard work — but only if one has all the right tools (the computer / mobile phone, the software, etc.).

The guardian angels in one’s life: 12 (The evening course classmate and the telex agency)

 

I had no idea what I could do for part-time work, which had to be regular for the flow of income, yet not disrupt my studies, but I’d cross that bridge when I got to it, I decided.

    Enter the evening course classmate for that:  Steve Hunt.  He was one of the two classmates (the other being Hugh Lansdowne) on the evening course who’d nagged me into applying for SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) through the clearing system, resulting in three very happy and productive (knowledge-acquisition-wise) years.

    Steve worked part-time at British Monomarks, a telex agency not far from his flat near Russell Square.

    He mentioned me to the manager.  I not only got in, I got to choose my hours, which were: 5pm–9pm on Mondays and Fridays.  The reasons were: 

• my lectures at SOAS finished at 4.30pm, so I could walk across Russell Square over to Queen Square and clock in comfortably by 5pm.

• I’d have done my lesson prepping over the weekend for the whole week ahead, leaving me free to work on Monday 5–9pm without worrying about the rest of the week.  I could work 5–9pm on Friday as I had the weekend ahead to prep my lessons for the following week.

    British Monomarks was not just a flexible employer, allowing me to work the hours that were convenient for me, it was also very compassionate.  When a very dear Taiwanese friend died at age 23 in a road accident after we’d spent a lot of time together during my month in Taiwan the summer of 1979, they gave me all the extra hours I asked for to distract me from sitting around at home grieving.  They saved my sanity that autumn.  

    Thank you, Steve Hunt (deceased).  Thank you, British Monomarks.  The two of you saw me through my first degree without financial worries.  I’m very grateful.

(London, 1978–1980)

See also: 

https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-guardian-angels-in-ones-life-05.html 

https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-guardian-angels-in-ones-life-06.html 

The guardian angels in one’s life: 11 (The then-boyfriend)

 

I’d saved up for two years in Taiwan to cover my first year in London, not wanting to rely on my mother (with all the repercussions that would go with it should I not do well in my studies:  “You have wasted my money!” blah blah).

    The excellent advice I’d been given by my then-boyfriend was:  “Focus on getting good grades for your ‘A’ levels.  Once you get in to university, you are safe for the rest of your course, so you can work part-time then.”

    (In those days, there was only the end-of-year exam for Year 1, to confirm that you can indeed last the course — four years in my case.  The next exam was at the end of Year 4, so one could work part-time in Year 2 and Year 3 — or enjoy student life, which included [for some] being at the school bar after lectures, before sobering up in the final year.)

    So, I had a study plan for my ‘A’ levels.  I’d get back from classes around 5pm, eat an early dinner, then go to bed, with the alarm set for midnight.  The two TV stations shut down at 11pm in those days, one couldn’t really cook in the middle of the night, so there was nothing else to do but study.  I’d go back to bed at 4am, having put in four hours of work (which was worth eight hours, as it was all quiet and I was totally focused), then get up at 8am to get ready to go to class.  On some days, I’d study all the way through to 8am, which meant that I’d put in 16 hours of work for the night.

    Yes, I got good grades, and yes, I got into a good college (SOAS / School of Oriental and African Studies / University of London) where I had the most enjoyable and productive time, learning lots.

    Thank you, Peter, for teaching me such a good strategy.  I’m very grateful.

(London, 1977–78)

Being a carer: 02 (The ex-teacher) (Greece)

 

The same ex-teacher (from my Year 2 at SOAS [School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London] in 1978-9) whom I’d taken to Paris for two Buddhist art exhibitions said a few months later that she’d like to go to Greece.

    She’d last been in Greece in the 1940s en route to England when she sailed over from Hong Kong, and wanted to see classical Greece again, she said.

    So, once again, I started to organise a trip (no internet in those days, remember?):  air tickets, hotel, etc., this time booking two single rooms to avoid the heart-stopping apnoea episodes that I’d undergone in Paris.

    I went out to her house the night before, to stay over, as we were catching a morning flight, and I wanted to travel out to Heathrow with her, rather than meet her there.

    The next morning, on the taxi ride out to Heathrow, she asked if I’d slept well.  I said yes, but if she wanted me to stay over on a regular basis (she had approached me on this before), could I have a bedside lamp, as I always read at bedtime.

    We arrived in Athens around noon.  Once our rooms were sorted out, I got us booked on a city tour for the afternoon.

    A city tour means leaving the bus whenever we arrived at a particular scenic spot, to follow the guide around, then getting back onto the bus, to be driven to the next spot.

    After a few of these spots, back on the bus to move on to the next one, she suddenly said to me, “When we get back tonight, I’ll get you the bedside lamp.”

Me:  Get back tonight??  What do you mean “get back tonight”?

She:  When we get back to the house tonight.

Me:  But we’re not going back to the house tonight.

She:  Oh.  Are we not?

Me:  No.  We’ve only just arrived in Athens this morning.

She:  Oh, have we?

Me:  Yes, and we’re staying in a hotel for a week.

She:  Oh, are we?

    Oh my goodness, what had I taken on, I thought.

    I’d only been her student for one subject for one academic year (which is only nine months), so it wasn’t like she’d been my teacher all the way through the university course.

    I wasn’t even a distant relative, so what was I to do if something were to happen to her during our time in Greece.  (She had a daughter but she lived in America.)

    The enormity of my taking on the role of volunteer carer started to dawn on me.

(Greece, 1996)