The “ice-cream van” (Taiwan)

A friend’s friend Eric was over in Taipei on some training,  so I was asked to look after him, as he couldn’t speak any Mandarin (a common phenomenon amongst Singapore Chinese in those days):  take him sightseeing and shopping, dine with him.  My colleague Lǚ Jìpíng said she’d come along, so one evening after work, we took Eric to Zhōnghuá Road, which is the shopping, eating and cinema area in central Taipei.  

At one point, I saw a jacket in a boutique window, so we went in to try it on, as I’d been wanting one for ages.  Being one degree north of the equator, Singapore is too hot for anything other than short-sleeved, or even sleeveless, tops, so jackets were a sartorial novelty, a “must-have” for me at the time.  

By the time we emerged from the boutique, Eric was nowhere to be seen.  We waited for a few minutes, then another few more minutes went by, and still no Eric.  

Just as we were starting to worry about the boy getting lost, as he couldn't speak Mandarin, he appeared from round the corner.  “Where did you get to?”  

He explained that he’d got bored waiting for these two women to finish their clothes shopping, so when he heard the jingling tune of an ice-cream van, he rushed off in pursuit of an ice-cream.  To his horrified incomprehension, he saw workmen tossing the contents of rubbish bins into the back of the “ice-cream van”.

In Singapore, ice-cream vans play a tune to let people know they're in the area.

In Taiwan, rubbish had to be brought out when the collection trucks were in the area, hence the tune.

(Taipei 1975)

How to tell which stalls sell the cheapest food (London)

In the West, people often say that the way to tell which Chinese restaurant serves authentic Chinese food is to look in and see who are dining in them.  If a particular restaurant is full of Chinese people, then the food will definitely be authentic.

A mainland Chinese chap had moved into the flat above me, so I took him on a little tour of Nag’s Head, an area beyond our district, because there are more stalls and shops there, and their fruit, vegetables and meat are cheaper.  

I said to him, “There isn’t one single stall that’s cheaper than the others for all items.  Some of them are cheaper for one vegetable, and some are cheaper for another.  What you can do is go up to the stalls, and have a look at the price tags put up against the respective items, so that you can get an idea of which stall is cheaper for which item, and make a comparison.”  

He said, “No, there’s no need to look at the price tags.  Just look at the people in the queues at the respective stalls.”  

I asked, “What do you mean?”  

He said, “Well, look at that stall: the queue is full of black people and old age pensioners, so their things must be cheaper!” 

(London 1987)

Consideration for other people (Singapore)

On one of my visits home, I went with my brother Dave and sister-in-law to the market on a Sunday for their weekly shop.  As I was staying with them, they had to buy enough to feed me as well as the three of them.  

As the bus was taking a little while arriving and Dave’s hands were fully laden with bags of shopping (a chunk of cod a foot long, king prawns, various types of meat, vegetables), I suggested he put the bags down on the stone seats provided for people at bus stops.  His response was, “No, some of the bags are a bit wet because of the fish and the prawns, so I don’t want to mess up the seats for other people.”  I felt SO proud of this considerate brother of mine.

(Singapore 2005)

My “writing abilities” (London)

An old friend and the most avid reader of my blogs, Valerio, emailed to compliment me on my “writing abilities”, which brings to mind my undergraduate days.

A newly-arrived American teacher in my third year at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Dr. Sarah Allan (see also Chinese etiquette: modesty, https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2013/04/chinese-etiquette-modesty.html), taught us Mencius, a Chinese philosopher whose discourses with the king featured the concept of kingship a lot.  At the end of the term, she set an essay on this topic.

Sarah Allan (now Professor) had told us she was shocked to find us, university students in Britain, still hand-writing essays, because American students had long been handing in typewritten essays.  (This was 1980.)

As I was by then a trained, qualified and experienced secretary — having done a secretarial course at age 18 and passed with a distinction in a PSC (Private Secretary’s Certificate) from the LCC (London Chamber of Commerce), then worked for a law firm in Singapore and an American oil company in Taiwan — that was the least of my problems.  Also, I had shipped over from Singapore my manual typewriter, an Olivetti.

The problem was: how to write the essay?  I read and re-read source materials, drafted and re-drafted the essay, until it became imperative I put it together.  I duly sat down and typed out whatever I’d managed to garner from my weeks of agonising over it.

A week or so later, back came my essay, with the following comment from the marker: “Good typing.  Rubbish essay.”  Even if not in those very words, still the same conclusion.

(London 1980)

Chinese etiquette: what to serve (or not serve) guests

One of the reasons the Chinese don’t invite people home for a meal is based on the modesty rule:  one’s amateur cooking is not good enough for the guest, one’s home is not grand enough to entertain guests.  So, people usually meet outside.  

However, should a guest be invited home for dinner on the odd occasion, or an unexpected guest arrive just before dinner time, one has to make sure that the ingredients are up to “guest-entertaining” scratch.  Therefore, no bean sprouts, for they are, in the East anyway, one of the cheapest foods around:  in the 1960s, one could get a pound or two (in weight) of them for 10 cents (Singapore money, which was S$8 to £1).

Chinese dried mushrooms were, and still are to this day, very expensive, so they were usually brought out only on such occasions, in addition to special occasions like Chinese New Year.  Such was the frugal practice in my house that years later, when the children were grown up and all working and contributing towards the housekeeping, if my father came home and found dried mushrooms served up for dinner, he would say, “Dried mushrooms!  Someone coming for dinner then?”

(Singapore 1960s)

The experience of (some) Westerners in China (China)

These three vignettes have come from three different lots of students.

Marian* and Renate* were doing a stint in China.  (*not their real names)  Marian has soft features — light brown hair, blue eyes and a charming smile — and of un-intimidating height.  In contrast, Renate is less feminine looking: quite tall with more angular features and buck teeth.  They’d gone to a photo studio near their dormitory to have some passport-size photos taken — for some application forms (e.g., for permission to travel to places outside Beijing).  When Marian, who wore her hair short, went back to collect her photos, one of the girls at the photo studio asked her colleague, thinking these foreigners couldn’t speak Chinese anyway, “Is that a man or a woman?”  Another day, Renate went back to collect hers, and heard the girl say to her colleague, in Chinese, “It’s the ugly one, here for her photos.”

When Mark went to a restaurant, the waiters and waitresses took fright, as they couldn’t speak English and were convinced the Westerner couldn’t speak any Chinese.  They stood huddled in one corner of the restaurant, shoving each other to go forward and tackle the barbarian, leaving Mark sitting there for half an hour with no-one to attend to him.  Finally, the one who’d picked the short straw approached him in trepidation and asked him, in very broken English, what he wanted to eat.  When Mark said, in Chinese, “I can speak some Chinese,” the waiter nearly fainted with relief.

Siberian Kristina on her Year Abroad one day needed what the Chinese call “daily use goods” (e.g., soap) and went to a local shop.  The shop assistants fled to the back half of the shop as soon as she walked in, and hovered just behind the doorway, timorously peering round the door frame now and then to see if the foreign devil was still there.  Eventually, as the barbarian had not given up and gone away, they had to emerge and come out of their hiding and deal with the onerous task of confronting the barbarian.

(China 1980s / early 1990s) 

Making fried rice lunch boxes (Singapore)

For my first secretarial job in Singapore, with a firm of three lawyers, I would get up a bit earlier and make a fried rice lunch box with the surplus rice from the night before.

My second sister could never get out of bed in time for work, never mind get up earlier to make a lunch box.  The first time she found me making the fried rice, she used the same line with me as she had with Dave over his fried rice*, peering over my shoulder, “Ooh, that smells yummy.  Can I just have a l-e-e-e-tle taste?”  Before I knew it, a “l-e-e-e-tle taste” had decimated what was to be a full lunch for me.

So I made a bigger dish next time:  one portion for me, one portion for my sister.  Being the kind of weak-willed person that she is, however, she couldn’t wait until lunch time.  By the time I had put the lid on my lunch box, she had already eaten half of her lunch.  At least she had the grace to say, with a sheepish giggle, “Who would believe it, huh?  You, with a full lunch box, yet so skinny.  Me, with only half a lunch box, yet so fat?”  

*see blog entry My brother’s late-night dinner

(Singapore 1973-74)