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)

Swan’s feet (Singapore)

During my undergraduate days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), an English chap in the Japanese Section introduced me to the expression “swan’s feet”: to the observer, the swan is gliding smoothly and calmly on the water but under the surface the feet are paddling madly.  (I can’t find it under google, so he must’ve invented it.*)

I remember going to a job interview for the post of legal secretary at a lawyers’ firm (Boey, Ng and Wan, in Asia Insurance Building) in 1974. 

It was my first secretarial post after graduating from secretarial school, my previous job being as a telex operator at Conoco Western Pacific in Singapore (an American oil company, now ConocoPhillips).

I’d driven there after my morning telex shift, got stuck in the traffic, arrived late, sweaty and stressed out and anxious and nervous and flustered. 

Sat there opposite the three partners, wringing my hands under the table as they fired questions at me.  

There was also a test, of course:  dictation, shorthand, and typing out the dictated document in triplicate.

Anyway, I got the job. 

All three partners told me later how impressed they’d been with me — sitting there so calm and confident during the interview!! 

Classic swan’s feet, though I didn’t know the term at the time.

(Singapore, 1974)

*Thanks to Valerio for unearthing this:  

https://www.horebinternational.com/the-swan-metaphor/#:~:text=We%20don't%20see%20the,They%20are%20like%20white%20swans 

Mishearing things (UK)

A while ago, one of BBC Radio 4’s programmes talked about people mishearing song lyrics, with hilarious results.  Some of them even made more sense than the original.

This reminds me of two cases of people I knew who were involved in mishearing messages.

The first one happened at British Monomarks where I’d worked as a part-time telex operator throughout my first degree.  

Subscribers would ring in and dictate their telexes to us.  

One of them was a shoe company:  they had contracted a factory in Taiwan to make the shoes, which they would sell in the UK.  

On this particular occasion, the sender of the telex was placing an order for a batch of shoes, ending the message with a reminder to the factory to “make sure the shoes sit properly” (which was what my colleague heard down the phone line, and duly typed up and sent out).  

The people at the Taiwan end must’ve wondered about the way the British cultural perspective works:  getting their shoes to “sit properly”, whatever that means.  

Manager John Haste couldn’t get over it.  He went round saying and chuckling, for a number of days after that, “Make sure the shoes SIT properly!  Make sure the shoes SIT properly!”

The second story neatly confirms how easy it is indeed to get “s” and “f” wrong when heard down the phone line.

It had happened to an English chap doing Japanese during my first degree days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).

He’d originally got into Oxford University to do zoology.  He’d done his end-of-first-year exams.  That was the practice in those days:  if you can’t even pass the first year exams, you’re deemed to be unable to get through the rest of the next few years of the course.  

The telegram from his mother arrived in Greece where he was having his summer holiday.  It said: SAILED ALL SUBJECTS.  He happily carried on with his holiday.  

He got home and found out that it was meant to be:  FAILED ALL SUBJECTS.

(UK, late 1970s)

* For those who might need help: to sail through = to succeed easily

See also: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2020/12/thinking-outside-box-london.html