I've gone identity mad!

ENFIN/FINALLY, the papers are done and the semester is passé! My feelings right now can be totally described in this song:

Grace Kelly-Mika (French Version)


I could be brown
I could be blue
I could be violet sky
I could be hurtful
I could be purple
I could be anything you like

Original version here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mtazsM8J4s&feature=related

Yes I like Mika, because he is such a genuinely-crazy but good singer. It's time to let my hair down, though I probably should cut it since everyone has been telling me that my hair is getting long (it's just their nice way of saying that it's becoming a lion's mane due to lack of taming...).

Peace out.

What's your excuse?

By now most of you already know that I will be heading to Nepal to do my internship for the next semester. But I still have people asking me why go to such a place for internship instead of staying here or taking well-beaten paths such as China, Australia, US or UK. So I figured here are my reasons:

Top 10 reasons why I choose to go to Nepal:

1. Why not?
2. I am sick and bitter about SPH's bully tactics.
3. The awe-inspiring Himalayas
4. To get out of this cold and unfeeling hell-hole
5. To alleviate the desire in me to see the world
6. To learn about different cultures
7. I want to do bunjee jumping (it's one of the things I have to do before I die or else I will die dissatisfied)
8. To have a more diverse journalism portfolio
9. To lose weight and toughen up for more extreme places in the future (i.e Africa, Kashmir, South America, Siberia, etc)
10. To search for the elusive happiness

I realised that most of them are push factors rather than pull factors. That is, I'm going to Nepal not really because I really want to, but because I'm running away from this miserable society. But that's alright, I went to Mizzou with almost the same reasons, and I think I left a piece of my already-holey heart there in the end. I'm almost sure I'll learn to love Nepal and it's friendly people eventually.

4 down, 2 more to go. Just let me get it over and done with exams already.

For crying out loud

Our sunny island hasn’t been that sunny recently. The heavens here have been crying their hearts out, sometimes bawling out suddenly and other times, I wake up to the grey mornings that remind me of tears streaming silently down someone’s face .

And today while going back to my dorm room from dinner, I saw, or rather heard at first, a small kid (about 1 or 2) positively crying her hearts out. There she was bawling her eyes out, and beside stood whom I assumed to be her dad, just staring at her. I kind of wanted to smile at her easy tears, but that seemed rather mean of me. Since when have I become so “grown-up” to be laughing at whatever thing which warranted a kid to be so heartbroken about? And big and grown-up dad standing there did not help much either. If I were the kid I’d complain to mum when I get home for dad being so mean to me.

I realized we all need a good cry once in a while. And being “grown-ups”, we often are embarrassed about crying. When was the last time you had a good, heartbreaking bawl? Few people have seen me actually cry, and the last time I did I’m afraid I left a dear friend rather confused. Crying just isn’t “wise and practical Yi Wen’s” style. But it did me a world of good, and the benefits greatly outweighed the potential embarrassment.

So hey, whatever it is that’s bothering you, crying may not solve the problem. But it may just clear your head and make you think of better solutions. And if not, surely crying is capable of making one feel much better. Otherwise, I don’t know why God gave people the ability to cry then.

If the heavens can pour so much and a kid can cry so easily, why not us?

On Beauty

No, this is not about Zadie's Smith Booker prize-winning book, but a much older one. More than 150 years after it was written, alot of the insights in the book still hold true, well at least in my opinion. That's why classics are called classics.

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
Chapter XVII Confessions

“It is foolish to wish for beauty, Sensible people never either desire it for themselves or care about it in others. If the mind be but well cultivated, and the heart well disposed, no one ever cares for the exterior.

So said the teachers of our childhood; and so say we to the children of the present day. All very judicious and proper no doubt; but are such assertions supported by actual experience?

We are naturally disposed to love what gives us pleasure, and what more pleasing than a beautiful face...when we know no harm of the possessor at least? A little girl loves her bird....Why?...Because it lives and feels, because it is helpless and harmless. A toad, likewise, lives and feels, and is equally helpless and harmless; but though she would not hurt a toad, she cannot love it like the bird, with its graceful form, soft feathers, and bright, speaking eyes. If a woman is fair and amiable, she is praised for both qualities, but especially the former, by the bulk of mankind: if, on the other hand, she is disagreeable in person and character, her plainness is commonly inveighed against as her greatest crime, because to common observers, it gives the greatest offence; while, if she is plain and good, provided she is a person of retired manners and secluded life, no one ever knows of her goodness, except her immediate connections; others, on the contrary, are disposed to form unfavourable opinions of her mind and disposition, if it be but to excuse themselves for their instinctive dislike of one so unfavoured by nature; and vice versa with her whose angel form conceals a vicious heart, or sheds a false, deceitful charm over defects and foibles that would not be tolerated in another.

They that have beauty, let them be thankful for it, and make a good use of it, like any other talent: they that have it not, let them console themselves, and do the best they can without it – certainly, though liable to be over-estimated, it is a gift of God, and not to be despised. Many will feel this, who have felt that they could love, and whose hearts tell them they are worthy to be loved again, while yet they are debarred, by the lack of this, or some such seeming trifle from giving and receiving that happiness they seem almost made to feel and to impart. As well as the humble glow-worm despise that power of giving light, without which the roving fly might pass her and repass her a thousand times, and never light beside her; she might hear her winged darling buzzing over and around her; he vainly seeking her, she longing to be found, but with no power to make her presence known, no voice to call him, no wings to follow his flight;...the fly must seek another mate, the worm must live and die alone.”


A pretty decent effort by Anne Brontë on the whole, with none of the great tragedies that so highlighted her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights, and yet not such a feministic work as her other sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre or Charlotte’s good friend Gaskell’s powerful works. If you want to read classics without the weird/cheem/funny English characteristic of non-contemporary English novels, Anne Brontë may just be your girl.

Still not convinced why classics are actually very good reads?

Go back to your mugging then.

Season of Muggertoads

Buddha has no more legs for you to hug

It’s this time of the year
When oddly enough
You find yourself suddenly
Free from projects
Assignments and deadlines

You look at the others panicking
And you panic slightly too
But when you walk around on campus
Only to feel an almost celebratory mood
And you start to wonder

When you look at your papers
You sigh not in relief
But in wonder of why
The need to panic
When all you need

Is just good ol’ consistency.

It's the time of the semester again

Yes, exams are my miniature disasters that often turn out to be minor catastrophes eventually. And KT Tunstall sings is oh-so-well with just her "Wee Bastard" (the loop pedals she has to do this one-woman show).

Miniature Disasters - KT Tunstall

I don't have to raise my voice
Don't have to be underhand
Just got to understand
That it's gonna be up and down
It's gonna be lost and found
And I can't take to the sky
Before I like it on the ground

And I need to be patient
And I need to be brave
Need to discover
How I need to behave
And I'll find out the answers
When I know what to ask
But I speak a different language
And everybody's talking too fast

I'm still pissed that I missed KT Tunstall when she came to Singapore when I was at Mizzou. :(

A tribute to the nostalgic past

Even before Mizzou, I had already caught the adventure bug back in JC 1 when I went to Trinity College in the University of Melbourne in Australia for three weeks of Science Summer School back in 2004. As I lay in my bed trying to sleep last night, it dawned on me that SSS 2004 was one of the first experiences that opened my eyes to the different cultures and people in this world. There, I learn how a simple bottle of water at a ranch could result in such different views by the Aussies, Indians, Malaysians and Singaporeans. Ask me if you've not heard of that anecdote, since I think I've told quite a few.

The Elephants (my group name) clockwise from bottom left: Bay Gie from Malaysia, Arjun, Ankit and Karan from India, Julian, Douglas and Kathryn from Australia, Vivien our wonderful group leader who is also Australian, Sze Jia, Me and Choo Jie from the Lil' Red Dot. This may be the only time that you'll see me in a skirt. ;>

Suzie, one of the group leaders, helps Roger the madcap prof with some weird science demostration. Suzie has got to be the smartest and funniest redhead that I've ever met, not that I've met alot of redheads...

Half of Eugene and Julian , who looked like they really enjoyed dissecting the cow's eye.

Karan & Karan: The two Krazy Karans and moi. I looked like I totally dunno how to react to their crazy antics.

Every once in a while, I kind of miss those days of hanging around the Junior Common Room of the college, watching tv in the Behan basement, sitting around a real Aussie bush campfire and listening to Roger forget the lyrics of "Tie me Kangaroo down sport" and attending crazy science lectures that included dissecting a cow's eye. One of the best memories of SSS 2004 was a bunch of us sitting down on a patch of grass on Lygon Street and eating our gelatos and finally getting a sugar rush when a few of us started marching back to campus while chanting something that one of the Indian girls invented.

Group of us at the Ace-Hi Ranch, where we had a fantastic time riding horses and doing all kinds of outdoorsy stuff.

Sze Jia and Me with the Darwin girls, whom Maddie, Em and Jasmine were collectively known as, since Darwin to the rest of the Aussies sounded like the land of never-never.

This has got to be the most poignant photo of SSS 2004 that I've ever taken. It was the end of the whole "awe-inspiring" (quote from Bridget) experience and the ball that we kicked almost eveyday at the college never lookes so forlorn with Shikha and Ankita ignoring it.

So it's been 4 years since SSS 2004, and while a few of them have visited me in Singapore (A.J., Em, Maddie and Jasmine), I sometimes wished I could go back to my room in Cowan and wake up to the sounds of the other Summer Schoolers playing football in the square below. I wished I could still have meaningful chats with Maddie, with whom I would say was one of the closest friendships I developed there. I do wonder how they all turned out sometimes. FB allowed me to keep in touch with some, but it's not the same as actually talking to them face to face.

As I start to get ready for another experience in Nepal, I have no doubt that I'm going to keep exploring this world that I live in, because there's always something to learn from people, and whatever it is that you learn from them, it usually stays with one forever.

And the saga continues

Since last week's report by The ST on the ex Japanese air force chief's "unofficial" remarks on Japan's war time aggression, there have been more developing reports in the ST almost everyday this week. And in today's papers, the ST published a scathing editorial on it, coupled with another commentary written at the ST European bureau in London.

Excerpts:

Another denial tempest in Japan
The Straits Times Editorial, Saturday, 8 November 2008, Page A24

"No doubt, there will always be some Japanese people who harbour views such as those of the disgraced general. It should not be forgotten that history testbooks written by revisionist writers are allowed in Japanese classrooms, though fortunately in only a very small minority of schools. But such people, if they are in the public service, have no business articulating their revisionist ideas openly. The fact they they feel compelled from time to time to do so, would make Asian governments wonder if the official line of contrition should be taken only at face value."

Germans show how not to forget the past
by Jonathan Eyal
The Straits Times, Saturday, 8 Novemeber 2008, Page C24

"But it is still a fact that while for the Germans the act of atonement was always seen as an ongoing lengthy process, a route with no particular end or timeline, the Japanese tend to view reconciliation initiatives as one-off acts, which require no permanent change in either habits or behaviour. That's why the German efforts succeeded, while the Japanese ones remained largely unconvincing."


I don't know about you, but I always thought that the main reason why the Germans are able to accept their past terrible mistakes and move on was that as Europeans living in a region which witnessed the rise and fall of many great empires they had a better sense of history and understood that while they should remember and glorify their past achievements, they should never cling onto it, not matter how good it was (eg the Renaissance period).

But this is not the case for the Japanese, who being Asians, were taught to glorify their past (think how many times our Chinese textbooks taught us that China with its 5000 years of history, blah blah blah...), and never to forget what our ancestors did, and that we should always "trace our roots back to their sources" (aka yin2 shui3 si1 yuan2). So you see, the fact that Japan was once a great imperial power, coupled with years of closed-door policies during the Edo/Tokugawa period where warriors such as the Shinobis/Samurais (in which death was much more dignified than defeat) were worshipped, made it much harder for the Japanese to stop clinging on to their nostalgic past.

So I think it's a cultural thing, that Japan is unable to move on and look ahead. To move ahead is to accept that Japan was not such a great empire as it taught itself to believe, and as Asians we all know how that would result in the Japanese having a massive loss of "face".

This is also part of the reason why China took such a long time to admit the extent of the SARs crisis, the melamine and all the other food controversies it had to deal with.

As Asians, we sometimes have to question ourselves if the concept of "face" is worth clinging on to. Pride is a double-edge sword. It can elavate you to the loftiest of mountains, but it can also bring about your greatest downfall.

A day without MRT?

While Americans woke up to a new hope of a better President yesterday the French are not so lucky. Mademoiselle Cécile just told me that the trains are on strike in France again, forcing her ride to visit a friend in Toulouse (which is at the south of France and she's in the North at Normandie...) to be cancelled. You'd think that in this day and age of recession the French train union will be more sensible and just be glad that they still have their jobs. But no, they have to stage a strike to "complain about an increase in working flexibility for drivers". Here's the story if you are interested:
http://www.forbes.com/afxnewslimited/feeds/afx/2008/11/05/afx5652079.html

And if you can read French:
http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2008/11/05/des-perturbations-sur-le-reseau-sncf-prevues-des-mercredi-soir_1115364_3224.html

Can you imagine our MRTs stopping just because the workers shuang shuang decided to go on strike? I think Singapore will come to a standstill. No more school maybe, which might not exactly be a bad thing afterall...

And yayness to finally the end of this blasted sem. I bid good riddance to you!

Change is the new buzzword

Obama might have won the US presidential election, but he lost out on Missouri to McCain by a mere 0.2%. And Missouri has been the best bellwether state in the US, but maybe no longer. Here's what the Columbia Missourian has to say. http://www.columbiamissourian.com/stories/2008/11/05/mccain-obama-race-tests-missouris-bellwether-status/

And I thought the NY Times gave a pretty comprehensive map to show how each candidate fared in each state. Notice how close it was for Missouri and North Carolina.
http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/results/president/map.html

Well, at least the people at Boone County, where Columbia is located, voted for Obama. BoCoMo has spoken right!

Ok, now what, Obama?

Miss Uber Bored

People facebook or msn in class when they are bored. This is what I did instead. I was so uber bored in class today that I wrote a series of poems in a shot. Not my best, but they are done in less than an hour. Two more days left to the end of this stupid sem.

Just plain bored

In the air-conditioned nation,
Staring at the powerpoint
Yet seeing 7000 miles away
Wondering, imagining
Of barren winter trees and squirrels
Of the painted world map in Laws


Tenses of the confounded past

Le passé composé (ler-pah-seh com-po-seh)
Sounds like an exotic French dish
But is actually as confounded
And idiosyncratic
As grammaire en Anglais


In limbo

I am comfortable and fat,
I am dissatisfied with life.
I am sympathetic, a hypocrite.
I am moving along, never thinking.
I am stuck in the nostalgic past,
I am hoping for a better future.
I am blessed, I am praying.
For the mundane to end,
For life to finally begin.


On my mark

The countdown begins.
For school, exams, and Nepal.
Torture of waiting.


The irony of happiness

I leave the familiar behind,
In search for greener pastures.
I leave the family, safety and comfort,
In hope of finding myself.
In the land of temples, mountains,
Poverty and strife,
I search for happiness.



Just let me get it over and done with already.

Living in their own floating world

Japan sacks general over WWII stance
The Straits Times
Saturday, Novermber 1 2008 Page C9

Excerpts from the article:

Tokyo-Japan’s air force chief was sacked yesterday for writing an essay in which he denied the country was an aggressor in Word War II, a stance likely to anger its Asian neighbours.

General Toshio Tamogami, chief of staff of Japan’s Air Self-Defence Force, had made comments in an essay which won the top award in an inaugural contest aimed at describing “true views of modern history”.

“Even now, there are many people who think that our country’s ‘aggression’ caused unbearable suffering to the countries of Asia during the Greater East Asia War,” said the English-language version of the essay.

“But we need to realise that many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater East Asia War,” it said. “In Thailand, Burma, India, Singapore and Indonesia, the Japan that fought the Greater East Asia War is held in high esteem.”

“It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor nation.”

The Greater East Asia War was a term used by Japan to describe the conflict in the Asia-Pacific theatre, emphasizing that it involved Asian nations seeking independence from the Western powers.


The further I read this article, the more incredulous I felt. I’m sorry Toshio-san, but contrary to what you believed, most people in Asia do not take a positive view of the “Greater East Asia War”. Just ask my grandmother, if she even grants you an audience that is, without her thinking that you are a evil barbarian who mercilessly killed her friends and relatives during what we called the Japanese Occupation here.

Seriously, it is because of such older generation Japanese people who refuse to admit and accept to the terrible things they did in WWII that result in Japan being unable to move on. People make mistakes all the time, but as long as you are willing to accept what you did was wrong then people will be willing to forgive you. It may take years and generations to forget the mistakes of the past, but eventually you will get there. Living in denial will just aggravate things and make others condemn you for trying to live in your own floating world.

True, what Japan did caused us to realize that we cannot depend on the ‘Western Powers’ to protect us from invasion forever. But that does not justify the atrocities committed by the Japanese military at that time in Singapore, China, and many other parts of South-East Asia.

When I was at Missouri living in an international dorm, I got the chance to interact with quite a few Japanese and Chinese students. Talking to them, I concluded that most young Japanese people simply do not care about what Japan did in WWII and what the Chinese thinks of them. Simply put, they are just tired of the whole issue altogether. And I do not blame them, because how can you expect to engage the young when the ‘history’ they learnt in their school textbooks contradicts with what the rest of the world says?

Now the Chinese students I talked to presented a much more interesting variety of opinions on this issue. I have Chinese friends who totally embrace the Japanese culture without so much as a thought of Japan’s involvement in WWII to those who still refuse to eat sushi precisely because of this issue. And I think in a way, the Chinese people have it the easier way simply because they were the victims of the past atrocities and can therefore choose to react the way they want without public censure and outrage over what is the ‘right’ way to respond to this issue.

I do not think that every Japanese I meet is an evil barbarian ghost like what my grandmother thinks. Contrary to that, one of the best friendships I had at Mizzou was forged with a Japanese girl. But sadly, I think that when I see the young Japanese people choosing to walk away and ignore their past makes them unaware of how deeply their ancestors had hurt the rest of Asia and those at Pearl Harbour. And what is history good for if we do not learn from our past mistakes? The day that Japan gets rid of the older generation of Japanese politicians who are the unremorseful descendents of many of the Japanese WWII war criminals will be the day that Japan finally takes the first step towards reconciling with their past mistakes.

Germany has moved on. And so should you, Toshio-san. If you have difficulty accepting the facts, just pay a visit to Sentosa here or read Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking. And if you still don’t geddit, then please at least stop perpetuating your fallacies and retire to Mount Fuji. And make sure you have Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World to keep you company.