Beijing

I can't remember why I wanted to start blogging, so I spent this holiday keeping away from it. I mean, there are only 2 times a year where I can enjoy a protracted separation from the kids without having to troop back to school for Wushu or something equally pointless, so why spend it on something so impossibly simian as blogging?

Alternatively, it could have been because I was back in Beijing!

Beijing was more out of an obligation than anything. I can't say I've been missing home terribly, especially since the family swept down for a visit in May, or it may be because I've been in Singapore for too long. I swear, there is something terribly infectious about this country's 'stayer' and 'quitter' thingamajig, though it apparently seems to affect the wrong people. But back to Beijng.

So it wasn't as cold as it could've been, and I would've loved to be back in winter, seeing as to how it's always steaming here in Singapore. Did the usual, reunion dinner with the dynasties, shopping, bitching with Ling about Singapore women, because Chinese women are so very afraid of being loose. The worst thing about going back is not so much having to familiarise myself with my family again (which, in itself, is rather tragic), as it is seeing how everyone's grown since the last visit. It makes me feel guilty, almost alien, if you get what I'm saying. Ling, for instance, has become so much prettier and 'ang mo' as Singaporeans would put it. She's wearing make-up, dammit. I would be proud of her, if she could do a better job out of it. Ling's my sister, by the way, 18 this year. She's got big dreams, many of which revolve around Singapore, and I fear I may have been a rather big part of that. We can only wonder, I suppose. I was still stuck in Beijing at 18.

It's also sad that I went back to tour Beijing. It felt more like a holiday than a homecoming, it suddenly didn't feel stupid to take pictures at Sun Dong'an and heck, you know something's wrong when you visit museums.

I just realised I don't particularly enjoy talking about Beijing, because it makes me feel more like an outsider than anything. And Cindy was extracting it out of me like I had come back from a Star Tour, I almost slapped her when she asked for souvenirs. Maybe I'm getting touchy.

If I can figure out how to stick photos here, I'll stick up some random shots, though I don't see the point. China makes me melancholic. The people there are different. You sure as hell won't meet women like Cindy there, at least not to my knowledge. They're so desperate to break out of there, I wonder if young people here in S'pore realise how lucky they are. To that effect, I have never been wholly supportive of the Speak Mandarin Campaign. Perhaps because it seems to force roots onto people who should be breaking free of them. And it corrupts the language, I feel. I never tell my students: "as a Chinese, you must speak Mandarin!" The kids here aren't Chinese, nor should they be. Theirs is a country without a heritage to bog them down, and deservedly so. Mandarin is more like a tool than a collective ethos here, at least in my students' generation, and ethnic argumets won't win them over.

I've observed... if you're good in Chinese, you're 'Cheena'. It's adopting someone else's culture rather than yours, no matter how long-buried. I think there is a Singaporean ethos here, multi-cultural as is supposed, but not so ethnocentric. That's what I think anyway. I prefer telling my students that Mandarin is just one of the many languages they can learn, and it's up to them whether they want to give a shit. Just because some Western big shot speaks Mandarin, it's nothing to lose sleep over if you suck at it. I think that's called being 'kiasu', in vernacular tongue anyway. If there's something Singaporeans should be ashamed of not being able to speak, it's singlish. The language policies in this country are befuddling.

For the record, I do speak it, more often than I do English. This of course to satisfy my critics, for what they're worth. Which reminds me of why I started blogging... I like writing in English, because then I don't get marginalised. Plus, I need to tell someone about Cindy, with whom James is still getting on with frightening regularity, but I'm in too frigid a disposition to go on about that tonight.