Politics vs Friendship (Taiwan)

 

Lee Kuan Yew, then Prime Minister of Singapore, went on an official visit to Beijing in May 1976.  When I read about it in The China Post, Taiwan’s English language newspaper, I was green with envy, because it said his daughter, who was my year at RI (Raffles Institution), had gone along.

I went off to tell Mary, my colleague at Conoco Taiwan.  We were the youngest (aged 21) members of staff, with our birthdays three weeks apart, so we had a sort of special bond between us.

I said, “Look, Wei Ling gets to go to mainland China, when the rest of us can’t.”  

Singapore had no official diplomatic ties with mainland China at the time, so it was not easy, if well nigh impossible, for Singaporeans to go there.  I’d been intrigued, especially since I love travelling, by films and documentaries made by and about mainland China: the ones where they speed-skated on frozen rivers, where smiling young women picked apples the same colour as their rosy cheeks — all quite different from my tropical childhood.

“And,” I continued, “she got to go to New Zealand last year when her father went on an official visit.  She’s so lucky!”

Mary Fu’s face was like thunder, “I thought we were chums, yet here you are, envying her for being able to go over to the other side.  Don’t you know they are our arch-enemy? How could you!!??”

I was taken aback, “But what’s that got to do with our friendship?  I’m only envious that as the prime minister’s daughter, she gets to go to places the rest of us mere mortals can’t.  Didn’t I also say I was jealous of her for going to New Zealand as well?”

Mary refused to speak to me for three weeks.

Then, she rang my extension one day, “I’ve thought about it, and I can see that I shouldn’t have put our friendship and politics in the same category.  Can we be friends again?”

My reply, “So you’re ready to be friends again, are you?  Well, I’m not.”  And I left it for another three weeks.

Years later, she’d recount this incident as one of the biggest eye-openers for her.

(Taiwan, 1976)

Cockeyed (Singapore)

I was sitting with some people at one of the tables in the old RI main tuck shop (not the small one in the annexe next to Science E) when this chap came up and spoke to us.  

I looked up, and he seemed to be talking to me as one of his eyes was looking at me, but I didn’t know him. I looked at the other eye and it was looking at the other people at the table.  Yes, he was cockeyed!  

I ended up listening and nodding to the end out of politeness, even though I couldn’t understand anything of what he was saying, because I never found out who he was addressing.

*old RI = the old Raffles Institution site at Bras Basah Road before its move to Grange Road in 1972

(Singapore, 1971)

Students' witticism: 04 (London)

I texted a few people with this:

Quote

Haha, just heard on Radio 4.  There’s a town called Whynot in Mississippi.  A letter got returned, with the note:  “Not Whynot, try Why.”  

I’ve googled: there’s no Why in Mississippi.

Unquote

Ex-student Kevin texted back:  Yeah lots of ‘i’s no ‘y’ 🙂

Took me a while to work it out...

(London, 2021)

Simple folk remedies: 09 (hay fever) (London / Vermont)

 

I used to suffer very seriously from hay fever.  

Not only did my season start earlier and end later than most people’s, my symptoms were also quite severe.  

Apart from the usual sneezing, runny nose and itchy eyes (but constant in my case for all three), my scalp would itch (even right after a hair wash, so no, not dirty hair); my ear tunnels and the back of my throat would itch way inside, making me want to stick my hand right inside/down to scratch.

One November day, I discovered a greengrocer’s that sold bags of fruit cheaply — sort of bulk discount at £1 for a bag of 10 or 12, a new thing in the mid-80s.  I’d buy a bag of lemons every Saturday, and spend Sunday squeezing them for my week’s supply of lemon juice.  To sweeten it, I added honey.  Every morning, I’d pour out about 2 inches of this lemon-and-honey concoction into a litre bottle and add water.  (In the summer, ice cubes instead, for a cold drink as the ice melted through the day.)  

Come March, when my hay fever didn’t happen, I thought it was because the pollen count had been low, but a student said it’d actually been quite high.  

It then occurred to me that it must’ve been the lemon-and-honey concoction I’d been drinking the last few months.  (Hay fever jabs are meant to be done in November or December, way before the season starts, or it’ll be too late to be effective.)

Then I came across a little book written by a doctor in Vermont in the 1950s.  He said he noticed the farmhands didn’t suffer from hay fever, then observed that they chewed a piece of honeycomb throughout the day.  

He went on to make a concoction that’s marketed as honegar.  (It’s just honey and cider vinegar, so it’d be much cheaper to buy the separate ingredients and make your own.)  My own concoction is honey and lemon, so it must be the honey that’s the active ingredient.  

I came up with this theory: if bees spend all their time sticking their noses into pollen and yet don’t sneeze themselves to death, they must’ve built up some resistance, which then gets transferred to the honey they produce.

(London, 1980s; Vermont, 1950s)

Almost-simultaneous teaching (London)

 

It was my suggestion to assign two teachers to each grade, so that the students would benefit during their two-hour lesson from two different teaching styles, accents, etc., that they wouldn’t have got if they had only one teacher for the whole lesson.  So, the time-tabling of two adjacent grades on the same evening meant that the teachers would switch over after the break.

One evening, ten minutes into my teaching Grade 2, one of the Grade 1 students came to my classroom, saying that their teacher still hadn’t turned up.

Those were the pre-mobile phone days, so I couldn’t try to get in touch with the teacher and find out.  The only thing to do was to keep the Grade 1 students occupied until their teacher arrived — if he did at all, which was an unknown.

Luckily, the two grades were on the same floor, but at opposite ends.

I set a few sentences for the Grade 2 students to translate, testing grammar and vocabulary.  

While they were doing that, I ran down the corridor to the Grade 1 class, and set some Q&A sentences for them to do: What’s your surname, What’s your personal name, Where are you from, Where do you live, Are you married, How old are you?

While the Grade 1 students were doing that, I ran back to the Grade 2 class, went over the translation sentences with them (analysing why / why not use a particular structure or word), set them more sentences, and ran back to the Grade 1 students.

In this fashion, I ran back and forth down the corridor for another 20 minutes until the Grade 1 teacher arrived.

I swore my students to secrecy over this.  Mustn’t let the university know I could teach two classes (almost) simultaneously, or they’d try to save money by getting me to do it.

(London, 1994) 

The unconscious state (UK, Kuwait)

Just heard a BBC World Service programme about some serious Covid patients (and their doctors, nurses, and chaplain) up in Leeds, Yorkshire, northern England.

The doctor interviewed said they still spoke to the comatose patients as if they could hear them.  One of the family members would even read out recipes for want of something to say, just so that the patient could hear their voice.

I have heard quite a few stories about people who are in an unconscious state being able to hear.

A football-mad boy started to respond when the family played him some football match commentary.

When Michael Rosen* caught Covid and was in a 40-day induced coma, one of the nurses one day mentioned to him (as part of the treatment) the name of the football team that was the main local rival of the team Rosen supports.  The nurse reported Rosen rolling over in his bed and keeping his back to her (presumably in disgust or protest).

When I was interpreting in Kuwait in May 1986, the six of us interpreters came back to our hotel from a half-day tour of Kuwait City, and were walking up the main staircase when one of the team twisted her ankle on the stairs, and fainted from the pain.

She was carried up the rest of the stairs and placed on a sofa in the foyer.  I knelt down beside her, held her hand, stroked it and said soothingly, “It’s all right, Mary [not her real name], it’s all right, everything’s all right, everything’s all right, don’t worry, don’t worry.”  She opened her eyes at that point.

Later, when she got back from the hospital, she told me that when she was in the unconscious state, she felt she was falling down a very long and dark shaft.  She said she felt quite frightened as she was falling down, down, down.  Then she heard a voice saying, “It’s all right, Mary, it’s all right, everything’s all right, everything’s all right, don’t worry, don’t worry.”  She suddenly thought, “I know that voice!  It’s xx!!” and immediately calmed down.  That was when she then woke up, to find me holding her hand, stroking it, and soothing her with those words.

*Michael Wayne Rosen (born 7 May 1946) is a British children's author and poet who has written 140 books. He served as Children's Laureate from 2007 to 2009, and has also been a TV presenter and political columnist.

Kafkaesque logic (China, London/New Orleans)

 

Old friend Valerio says he’d not received an email I’d copied him into on 31 October.  Searched in his spam, did a global search — no joy.  Said he’s now worried there might be other messages that’ve just got lost out there in cyberspace.

My reply to him: yes, it’s worrying indeed.  You can’t fix what you don’t know is a problem.

This calls to mind something that happened on the 1988 film shoot in China.

The film director had gone out prior to the shoot itself, to do some recce’ing (reconnaissance).

It was a travelogue, following this multi-millionaire motorcyclist throughout his ride from Shanghai to Pakistan.  

As anyone who’s worked in documentary film projects would know, especially in the earlier days, there was really no such thing as spontaneity.  You didn’t just turn up and follow the subject with your camera crew throughout his journey.  

Especially if it was China, where you’d need all sorts of things like permission — that is, after you’ve found the right people and places for him to “run into” on his long ride across China on the Silk Route.  It would’ve been a waste of time and money unless everything was already in place for the camera to roll.

The motorcyclist was originally going to just get up in the morning, have breakfast, get on his bike, stop for lunch, get on his bike, stop for the night, eat dinner, go to bed.  Repeat the next day, and the next, and the next — for 37 days all the way from Shanghai to the border with Pakistan.

With a film to be made out of it, an idea suggested by one of his PBS (America’s Public Broadcasting Service) friends, it’d have made sleep-inducing viewing in this format.  So, the film company commissioned for the travelogue decided to weave a trail of “chance encounters” into his 37-day journey across China.  All for a bird’s-eye-view of China in that era (the late 80s):  a private entrepreneur parvenu in officially-socialist China; a divorced woman — just to name two examples.

On her recce, the film director had been assigned a guide/interpreter woman, to whom the director entrusted with the task of unearthing these interesting encounters and obtaining the relevant permission.

After the first day of filming around Shanghai, the director sat down with the guide/interpreter to go through the list of people the latter should’ve rooted out for the motorcyclist to “run into” and chat with.

The guide/interpreter had displayed blatant dereliction of duty right from Day One of the recce — which was why I was taken on last minute, as her English and work ethics were so appalling.

On the drive out of Shanghai, the director decided to have a meeting on the mini-bus with the guide, asking her, “Have you tracked down the people on my list that I’d asked you to sound out? Have you found me other likely subjects of interest?”

The guide said, “No.”  (Surprise, surprise.)

The director: “Why not? The recce was a few weeks ago, you’ve had all this time to do it!  We can’t afford to lose time, having come all the way from the other side of the world!  You’re the local, you know where to find these people and how to get permission.  That’s why we’ve employed you.”  (Well, we had no choice actually, as she was assigned by the government body.)

The guide’s self-defence: “I couldn’t do it, because I don’t know how much you know about China.  You have to tell me what you know about China, and you have to tell me what you don’t know about China.”

(China, 1988; London/New Orleans, 2021)

See also blog At the Lost Property Office: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2011/10/at-lost-and-found-office.html 

(Merriam-Webster)  Quote Kafkaesque:  of, relating to, or suggestive of Franz Kafka or his writings; especially : having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality. Unquote