4 January 2008
Categorised as Personal, Rants & tagged with asian, parents.
There are many times I just can’t help but wonder how my parents could ever come up with such amazing “reasons” of why I can’t do this and that – as a result, I get blocked stunned and speechless.
Now for the most recent examples of epic illogical Asian logics used to say “no”:
- I want to stay at school accommodation during summer school because I have two hours of class per day and bus takes two hours per day.
They said: If you want to go, move out now or don’t think about going. We have a house. You stay at school accommodation and you’ll get laughed at.
My reaction: Uhh?
Friends’ reactions: What?
- Anson’s coming to pick me up for our Maths exam this morning.
They said: A guy‘s taking you? Oh my gawd you owe him something! No you can’t let him take you. Because if he asks you to be his girlfriend you can’t reject!
My reaction: What. The. Fuax.
Anson’s reaction: LOL LOL LOL
- Suki invited me to have a sleepover at her place.
They said: Why are you sleeping at her house when we have a house? Her mum’s going to think you have no place to return to and you’ll get laughed at. Lose face!
My reaction: Dammit. Not again.
Friends’ reactions: GG
Every time I want to ask my parents for something I’m always afraid of them saying all the random crap I can’t respond to. One of the most common: “If you don’t like it here go be someone else’s daughter.” I’m wondering why they can’t learn to argue things the “proper” way? But I guess it’s just what it’s like under authoritarian control…
How would you respond to such things?
28 September 2007
Categorised as Miscellaneous & tagged with asian, food, health.
It must be this natural thing that’s been passed down the Asian generations. While we (Asians) tend to be more conservative in most other aspects, it seems to me that we, or at least my parents, totally love weird food.
I don’t mean the oily Chinese, Thai curry or spicy Malaysian you get in restaurants. I mean taking a look at Asian food in Asian homes.
Although my parents don’t go as far as eating dogs and cats, fried worms and monkey brains that the Chinese have this weird liking for, they do have weird tastes. That is, mixing “all good things” together to form something nasty.
- Strawberry jam, meat, avocado and cheese… all in a sandwich. In minor cases, dad loves strawberry jam plus Nutella and/or peanut butter.
- Soy milk and… something. Just imagine something like… egg, or… juice. Juice? Yeah, sweetly home-made avocado or carrot or another one of those let’s-add-everything-together juice.
- Cereal. This sounds normal, right? But um… cereal in boiled water, left to cool for twenty minutes because soggy cereal tastes better. And you know parents, they love the tasteless muesli kind of cereal. So you get it, tasteless, soggy mush.
All this, in the name of “health”. When I say they taste yuck, they say I have problems because they’re healthy things. When I say I prefer to eat these things separately, they emphasise that I really have mental problems because they don’t think there’s anything wrong with them.
If you’re Asian, do you or your parents eat such things? But please put up your hand if you also agree my parents eat weird stuff (they’re not food because they’re not edible for me).
9 July 2007
Categorised as Literature, Rants & tagged with asian, books.
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! >.<
