classy in the east east

Little Dragon Tales, Chinese Children Songs:

Can’t say I remember the translations for all these songs. Adults can learn Chinese this way too (or in my case, pretend to learn)…

I always ask people (in the library and outside) if they’ve seen Asians Sleeping in the Library…Everyone gives me blank stares. I’m left thinking AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO WASTES TIME ON THE INTERNET ON AMAZING BLOGS?! So I’m sharing the awesomeness that I now experience every time I step into the library. Singaporeans may be sleeping in the library, but they’re probably still studying harder than I am….I’ve been tempted to take pictures to submit but it seems kinda silly when most everyone in the library is Asian…Also, all the cool kids go to the library to take naps.

But I could start a website titled Exchange Students NOT in the Library. But I guess it would be more novel it is was Westerners Sleeping in the Library (assuming they make it past the bubble tea table)…

This headline made me crack up, the actual story…not so funny.

China wonders if, in the rush of life, it has lost its soul, from Firstpost.

When my friends complain about working with a group of Singaporeans (side note: 70% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese and most local students are Chinese), they usually say their group members hand in subpar work or they pass of responsibility. I usually chalk this up to cultural differences – which, I know, can become a lazy explanation  - between individualistic and communal societies. It does seem that fewer students here are willing to take the lead and there’s usually quite a bit of hmmmming to get any group action going.

With that said…can you really explain a man running over a child TWICE with THAT cultural difference? I’m dubious. This seems like the worst cost-benefit analysis ever:

The minivan driver who knocked Wang down, and then ran over her deliberately, has since surrendered to the police, but offered a curious explanation for his action. He said he had been talking on his mobile phone when he hit the girl, but decided to run her over because it would have cost him less to pay off a dead girl’s parents than to pay for her hospital expenses.

“If she had died, I would have been required to pay only about 20,000 yuan (about Rs 1.5 lakh) in compensation, but if she were injured, it would cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan in hospital expenses,” he said.

There’s just too many possible cultural differences to explain there. Whereas I primarily describe a car as red or my dream Audi, in Malaysia it was $80,000 or 100,000. I saw a house as mansion-like, 5 stories, but my Malaysian cousins described it as 2 million. So my quick and dirty take: In a culture which relies on price tags as the qualifier, any action can simply be boiled down to dollars and cents or kuai and jiao…

Halloween is not a thing in Singapore…I saw a sign at BluJaz (great bar for live music) that said Halloween is for Gringos. And is that true.

All the exchange students are doing an “UNDERGROUND RAVE PARTY” – getting bussed to an undisclosed haunted mansion. Doesn’t seem very underground, or very rave to me – but who cares, it’s halloween! All the local students just raise their eyebrows at the idea of Halloween. Only the expats do trick-or-treating, guess where I’ll be on the 31st!

Viva gringos celebrating Halloween!

So Occupy Singapore was a bust. Surprise! I saw the facebook event and mentioned it to my friend. She asked me if I wanted to go and watch some good ol Singaporean dissent – pretty sure that’s not allowed by Lee Kuan Yew and the soft authoritarian government. I told her I didn’t want to waste my time and figured there wouldn’t be too much to observe. Her pictures were of other picture-takers and the media. A handful of people came out to watch…nothing.

Singaporeans are pretty apathetic about their own government – it’s control over the media, it’s very direct links to the biggest Singaporean companies and it’s control over free speech and many many other things. It’s going to take a lot more than an American-based movement of ?????? to move Singaporeans to join in communal rage – this is a much different ‘communal’ compared to wearing a face mask when you’re sick. #Asians

Spotted at train station in Jakarta.

So I won’t launch into a commentary about this, but a sidenote…An Indonesian girl we met at the black sand beach Parangtritis gave me a crash course in Islam in Indonesia. She told me that she doesn’t wear a head scarf and neither does her mother. She said she’ll only wear one when she can look inside herself and feel ready. When her mother was growing up, headscarves weren’t common. It was only because of the influence of stricter Muslim practices from the Middle East that Indonesian Muslims started following more “traditional” practices.

A distant family member (so distant were not blood-related family) was in town for a few nights so I showed him a bit of Singapore. I think my tour guide skills were better than my comedic ones…

him: the only thing i had planned was salsa
me: the dance, not the food? haha, well lemme know
him: the dance. it’s not a real food, it’s a condiment. like bacon.

For my Modern China Economy class, my midterm had 20 marks and here’s the grade breakdown:

Max 16
Min 2
Mean 8.4
Stand dev. 2.9
Median 8

Ranges
“0 – 5″: 25
“6 – 8″: 61
“9 – 11″: 46
“12 – 14″: 19
“14 – 16″: 5
Total 156

Let me breakdown the breakdown…the highest grade was an 80% and lowest was 10%. Three percent of the class got above a 70% – which at my home college is considered decent, people freak out when they get anything in the 60 range. Both the mean and media were 40% – FORTY PERCENT. This multiple choice test was insane – questions would have four choices and then combinations of those choices (A and B, all of the above, etc). I don’t have much of an econ background, but pretty sure this doesn’t resemble a normal bell curve…

When I talked to my friends in the class, they seemed unbothered. I was freaking out – and I’m pass/fail for exchange abroad. At my home uni, a good amount of the class would have bombarded the prof w alarmed emails while most of us would reassure ourselves – by blasting the professor and the unfairness of it all. We would all pray for a generous curve. Some of us would be at the counseling center. But in Singapore, big classes always have some kind of a forced curve. No one has been able to clearly explain it to me, but the result is that students don’t seem worried about how their grade is calculated or WHAT their grade is – it’s everyone else’s that matters. The attitude is “so long as I did better than the bottom half of the class.” Doesn’t really matter if you failed the test. I started going on and on about how the test was probably too difficult or the prof wasn’t doing his job. And got some blank stares – guess that’s not the Asian way. Accept your grade destiny and pray that everyone did worst than you.

Can’t decide if I love or hate this…

Backpacks are usually boring and global flair is kitchsy cool. But $149 for a backpack from the new brand Ethnotek? I paid less than that for a serious backpack from one of the best brands.

Switching the colorful panels is pretty unique, but I noticed that the batik designs were noticeably missing Indonesian (the most well-known or traditional batiks) or Malaysian batiks. I wonder how much of the backpack price is funding the founder’s backalley pursuit of artisanal designs?