"Intellectual and well-informed hobbit"
25 July 2007, 7:40 pm. 23 Comments. Filed under Literature, School.
I am absolutely hopeless. As a follow-up from the major trip I had before which gave me two serious bruises, I had another bad trip and now I have four huge bruises on my legs. It's reasonably funny now from retrospective view. But it hurt like mad right after I fell and my right leg was wobbly-wobbly all day.
Anyhow, at the start of my Economics lecture today in school, we were given a feedback form to ask about what we think of the lecture and the lecturer. This lecturer is great. He made boring economics lectures fun and engaging with his sense of humour and most, if not all, students love his classes. But the funniest of today's lecture was not something he said, but a particular feedback comment my friend's friend had written:
Which parts about the teacher's lecturing are good?
He reminds me of a very intellectual and well-informed Hobbit. I happen to like Hobbits. They are playful creatures. Mr G. J. is a playful Hobbit, but he seems like he may be a bit [far] away from the Shire. I think we should put him in a cage and send him back to the Shire after this Economics 111 semester. But other than being a Hobbit, he's super awesome!What suggestions do you have for improvement?
Bring Gandalf to class.
So it was a bit of fun for the first 15 minutes or so laughing over the feedback comment in economics. I "remembered" the comment word-by-word because I flipped out my cellphone camera and took a few shots, claiming to throw this into my blog. My friend said I have no life. Maybe I really don't. If I was the lecturer I would hold on to this feedback sheet and match its handwriting to an exam paper I would receive a few more weeks down the track.
That gave us a good crack-up but um... "Racist" against hobbits? Personally, I think any book that manages to rouse major international attention is successful writing, whether it be actual great writing or not. J.R.R. Tolkien is a genius for being able to construct such a complete and persuasive fictional world. I think he also wrote 12 books just on the history of Middle Earth. My sister and I have discussed about the high possibility of him being an alien from another world which he based Middle Earth on.
Another top fiction? I'm thinking of Harry Potter. I heard that USA managed to sold 5000 of the newest Harry Potter book in the first minute they were officially released in bookstores. Apparently, that's the best book-selling record so far in the US. From this point of view, it's a successful book. Over-obsession may be a bit too over-the-top for my liking, but there's no reason to hate it so much either just because there's a large number of fans all over the world. My dad calls the book childish, but everywhere I walk on campus, someone would be holding the last Harry Potter book. I wonder what J. K. Rowling might be up to now. Counting cash or writing another magical series?
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
10 July 2007, 1:05 am. 13 Comments. Filed under Literature, Rants.
I feel like I'm hosting a book blog at the moment, continuously blogging about books I just finished reading. Well, it's just in the holidays and during this holiday I decided to get back into reading English novels because it gives me more thought into different issues rather than the "lovey-dovey" Chinese online romance novels I was obsessed with over the past five years or so.
Anyhow, I finished reading Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See last night at 2 am. It was a great book. I cried at certain points and throughout the entire final chapter. Call me a water-tap if you wish but it was that touching. However, the details of foot-binding made me cringe as I placed myself as the character in the story.
This past tradition of foot-binding disgusts me. According to the novel and what I heard before, girls of families of reasonable social status bound their feet when they were around six or seven. The aim was to have a set size of no longer than the length of a thumb (7 cm) and this was how feminine beauty was judged by in the past China. Toes were bound to the heel and they balanced and walked on just their two big toes. All the bones were meant to be broken eventually and through this process one in ten girls died. Since the flesh was bound together for the rest of their lives, it stank. To overcome that, they used artificial scents, of course.
Now to me, that's something seriously wrong with the men. They got turned on by terribly mutated 7 cm feet because well... Women swayed "beautifully" on their "lily feet" and with such feet it was impossible for them to run fast or run away from their husbands' homes.
In terms of gender inequalities, I know it exists throughout the world and to a greater extent in the past times. But to look at it from a more modern point of view, this masculine superiority idea that most Chinese men (being a "zodiacist", I say Sagittarius in particular) still holds is crazy. Foot-binding is an example, but that's outdated. There's this thing about how the guys may or may not have sex before marriage but, they would expect their future wife to be a virgin. 
Along with that, how pale white skin normally connotates physical weakness and obviously, that's one part to the definition of Asian feminine beauty. I don't think I'm ugly, but I get annoyed when the Asian guys back in high school used to refer to me (mockingly) as "black girl" just because I'm darker than most other Chinese girls. (It didn't kill my self-esteem so much though because they weren't the best looking males either. 
) But seriously, they need to grow up. Move along with the global trend towards gender equality and with that... Tanned girls are not ugly! 
Saving Fish From Drowning
4 July 2007, 8:14 pm. 11 Comments. Filed under Internet, Literature.
There we go. I just finished one of the most boring novels ever—Saving Fish From Drowning by Amy Tan. It was really not exciting. I don't recommend it unless you have a lot of time to spare but one should make his/her own decisions. For me, the best bit to the book must be this quote right at the start:
A pious man explained to his followers: "It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. "Don't be scared," I tell those fishes. "I am saving you from drowning." Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes.
- Anonymous
I find that incredibly amusing. 
Sadly, I did not see that tie in with the rest of the story. Perhaps because I was bored and didn't bother to analyse like I would have for an English exam but all in all, I wasn't too engaged in the story until I was about four-fifths of the way through.
I am proud I managed to finish it though. For I also found a bookmark left in the first one-fifth of the book by the person who borrowed it from the library before me.
Off on another topic, would anyone meet up with Internet friends? I mean, you see the news reporting stories of people getting kidnapped and raped by "friends" they met over the Internet. Doesn't that intimidate anyone? But then I also learnt from school that the media gives off wrong impressions of crime rates to the general public, especially about "street crimes" like homicides and rape because that's what viewers are interested in. So, what do you say? Better safe than sorry? What about the numerous other cases of good Internet friends meeting up to become "real life" friends?
