23 November 2007
Categorised as Literature & tagged with books.
Like many others, my sister and I got this famous book on the day it was released in bookstores. But while my sister finished it on the day, I only recently did (after leaving it in my bottom drawer cabinet for three months). Considering myself as a dedicated Harry-Potter-series lover, I am indeed a social failure. Though, better late than never!
I found it really exciting throughout. It’s impressive how J.K. Rowling managed to link such a long story together from the first to the seventh book and resolve all the mysteries by the end of everything.
Contrary to popular distaste for the epilogue, I liked it. Well, I’ve always liked the “happily after scene” after a good story.
I have yet to make my Reading Log entry for this, and I’ll write more thoughts for it when I do. Hopefully by the end of my summer holidays (until 3 March) I will have completed the entire Harry Potter series again.
For those who are not into Harry Potter: If a book series could be so popular that readers of all genders/sexual orientations/ages/sizes/blah across the globe are into it, it means it’s definitely worth your time to have a try.
(… Did I just spend all that time manually upgrading WordPress and then remember I had the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin? Ahhh *swears*)
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! >.<
4 July 2007
Categorised as Internet, Literature & tagged with books.
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?
