Marital bliss: 3 (London)

One of my evening class students, whom I shall call John Smith, used to come to the pub with the class after the lesson, and to the annual meal outings at Christmas and Chinese New Year.

He’d been corresponding with a woman in China, as a pen friend, for years until his wife died, after which he married this pen pal.  She soon got her son over.  Within no time at all, he stopped turning up for these gatherings.  Each time he was invited, he said his new wife didn’t approve.  Perhaps his work pension didn’t stretch to feeding him, her and her family as well as allowing him little treats outside.

(London, 1980s/1990s)

Marital bliss: 2 (London)

The pub customer with the Japanese wife reminds me of an engineer who came to repair the photocopying machine at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) in the 80s when I was working there.  I was in the equipment room at the time, using the only Mac computer around at the time.  He started asking me where I was from, then proceeded to tell me his wife was from Thailand, adding that as soon as they got married, he was not allowed to go out with his mates to the pub or the restaurants.

(London, late 1980s)

Marital bliss: 1 (London)

On my pub shift last Saturday, a white British customer in his 70s asked me where I was from.  (I get asked that a lot, with some amazing/outlandish guesses, like some country in Africa.)  

He said he had a Japanese wife, and had lived in Japan for a while.  I asked him if he spoke any Japanese.  He said, “Shut up.  Stupid.  Go away.  They’re the only Japanese I know, from what my wife said to me over the years.”

(London, 2018)

Update 050318:  Just gave this blog to an English student (who has a Chinese wife) to translate into Chinese, and he came up with the Chinese versions for "shut up", "stupid" and "go away" without any hesitation.  Wonder how he knows the Chinese for these terms so well...

Universality

There's a Chinese phrase:  (archaic usage) 置喙 zhìhuì / "to-place beak" / "to stick one's beak into something" = to interfere / interrupt

Interestingly, the Italian phrase is exactly the same:  non metterci becco / "not put beak"!

Update, 311217:  My Italian friend Valerio says his Peruvian friend Ari says the Spanish have the same phrase:  meter el pico / "put the beak".

Maybe the link between the Italian and Spanish is the fact that they're both Romance languages.

Update 170218:
Spanish: no meter la nariz (also: el pico)  (Thanks to Ben Vickers)  
Catalan:  no ficar el nas  (Thanks to Ben Vickers)

Both "nariz" and "nas" mean "nose" (which is closer to the English version "to stick one's nose into something"), so the Romance language rule doesn't work here.

Romance | rə(ʊ)ˈmans, ˈrəʊmans | adjective: relating to or denoting the group of Indo-European languages descended from Latin, principally French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Occitan, and Romanian: the Romance languages. 

[mass noun] the Romance languages considered as a group. 

ORIGIN: Middle English (originally denoting the vernacular language of France as opposed to Latin): from Old French romanz, based on Latin Romanicus ‘Roman’.

Update 250619: 

Polish: nie wtykaj nosa w nie swoje sprawy / don’t put your nose into what’s not your business

Babies (Singapore)

An ex-student, Petra, gave birth a few months back, and has been posting updates on Facebook, one of which said she gets peed on and is covered in vomit.

This reminds me of what happened on one of the post-natal trips I made with my mother, who was a private midwife.

The term “private” needs to be clarified here:  in those days (1950s and 1960s), women who were illiterate did not want to go to hospital to have their babies delivered because they couldn’t speak English (the official working language of the time in British colonial Singapore).  They also preferred to be at home, so that they could be cared for by family members, usually the older children.  These women mostly lived on coconut and rubber plantations, and some would have 12 to 16 children.

My mother’s post-natal visit routine:  bathe the baby, clean the area around the tied-up umbilical cord, bundle the baby up in clean swaddling cloth, check the baby over (take body temperature, etc.), then leave it lying on the bed and go and attend to the mother who’d be sitting in a chair (a change from lying in bed).  

It was after my mother left the all-clean, all-nice-smelling baby on the bed and went over to the mother that I, aged six, would sneak up to the bed, open the swaddling cloth at the bottom, pull out the baby’s feet and kiss them.

If I was spotted by the mother, she’d ask, “Would you like to take it home with you?”  I’d look at my mother eagerly, as if to say, “Can I?  Can I?”

On one of these occasions, however, I opened the swaddling cloth to find the baby had just defecated.  Not realising what had happened, the baby’s mother asked the usual question, “Would you like to take it home with you?”  I reeled back in horror, “No!”  She asked, “Why not?”  The six-year-old me said, “I only want one that doesn’t poo.”

(Singapore, late-1950s)

A most unusual Chinese ingredient (London)

Went to a small reunion dinner the other night at a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown.  Going through the menu, I came across a dish that had, for one of its ingredients, “dry winds meat”.

Some 15 years ago, I’d gone for a Chinese meal with Pam and Jackie.  Pam was totally baffled by one of the ingredients and asked, “What is ‘minced wind’?!?”.  My eyes moved on to the next line:  ah, if she’d read on, she would’ve seen that it was “minced wind dried meat”.

Note:  Wind-dried meat (风干肉 / 風乾肉 fēng gān ròu / “wind dry meat”), in Chinese cooking, is meat that’s marinaded, then left to dry in the wind, suspended from a hook, just like cured meat such as sausages in the West.

(London)

A very special old lady (Johor Bahru, Malaysia)

A Malaysian ex-student has just shared on her Facebook wall The Straits Times’s video on Robert Kuok, whose recent Robert Kuok: A Memoir has already sold out only one day after publication.

I remember Robert Kuok's mother very well — she was my (maternal) aunt's Buddhist master who lived in Johor Bahru.

She'd always bring a huge bag of oats from their flour mill in Kuala Lumpur when she came to visit us.  Nobody else in the family particularly liked Western-diet ingredients like oats and milk, so I'd have all the oats to myself!

She also brought me a table lamp and a book about the tulips in Keukenhof Gardens from Holland after she went to visit her eldest son, Philip Kuok, when he was ambassador there. It was all very exotic for a teenager!

The old lady (whom we called Ah Por ["grandma"]) had :

* a maid (an unmarried woman with no relatives to whom she'd offered shelter);

* a driver called Ahmad (who'd make one trip a day to the market, and now and then to the temple the old lady had built somewhere outside Johor Bahru in the countryside, spending the rest of the time cleaning and polishing the car, a Morris Minor).  The Kuok brothers bought the old lady an Audi (I think) for her birthday one year, but she went on using her Morris Minor;

* a parrot called Benjamin with a vicious beak -- he'd only allow the old lady to touch him; she'd call him Benji as she scratched his neck and he'd bend his head;

* a pair of dogs (Morning and Evening, one born in the morning and one in the evening); 

and

* a cat called 珠小姐 zhū xiǎojiě / Miss Pearl, who lived in a bird-house contraption at the bottom of the garden, atop a pole, high above the ground, so that Miss Pearl had to walk this long, long, long wooden ramp to get to it at night.

(Johor Bahru, Malaysia, 1960s)