Visit to TPCC 2

Haha, today we went for the regular visit to TPCC - we missed the senior citizens there and I'm sure they missed us too! Yup, it’s been a happy experience, as usual :) Today we were more focused that we only visited senior citizens from two one-room flats, all of whom were our old “patrons”.

Haha, the first one we visited was Mdm Ng Soo Gek, the 93-year-old women that I talked about in my previous entry. It seemed that she felt more comfortable to share with us about her personal life experiences in her own home. She started off by talking about her past, something that spurred up sadness and disappointment, and even disillusionment. She used to be a smart kid who loved studying very much and who always topped her class in all subjects, back in her hometown in China. However, she was forced to quit school at age 15. The reason? Stupid as it might sound, it’s due to her parents’ firmly established conviction that women who have no knowledge are those who have good virtue (女子无才便是德)…

And then she was selected by a matchmaker and went into the parents-arranged marriage at 17. Unlike so many other girls who were so ecstatic about their marriage, she had cried for a long long time before that because she loved freedom and she loved studying (wah, that’s amazing). Worse still, she had to leave her motherland to accompany her husband to Singapore.

Maybe her life is one that is destined to be full of tragedy and sadness. 3 out of her 5 sons died of diseases when young and 1 out of her 2 daughters was killed by the Japanese during World War II – that’s why she hates Japanese so much until now and that’s why she was so disappointed when she heard that one of her granddaughters was going to marry a Japanese guy (Victoria seemed to be so excited about this, “Oh, Japanese, cool!”). Totally speechless. Sigh… Her husband died at the age of 55 while she lived until now, 93! Just imagine living nearly 40 years alone without a life partner – that makes me damn sad.
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PS: On the way back, Guan Xin told me, “I feel that Auntie Li Ling and her husband are so much happier and more blessed in life cos they at least have each other, whereas Mdm Ng has to live alone for 40 years bearing the great agony of loss of husband and children and other relatives, though materially they are equally poor. So, you must try to live as long as possible so that someone won’t be lonely when old!” LoL! That’s somewhat true :)

A big Thank-You for the following people – about my Promo

To be frank, my promo result is not a matter of talent, hard-work or luck, but a matter of you – all the dear friends who have directly, or indirectly, made me different from who I was some time ago. Truly~

Shuohan, the Master, my idol in real life and big brother – you have done such a good job in trying to drag me to the maths phys and chem lecture (because of you, my attendance has skyrocketed from a supposedly 20% to 50%)! I feel so grateful for the fact that at least you bother to do so J And not to forget the deadly-needed support that you gave me after my disastrous maths paper in Promo (otherwise my history would have died as well). Most of all, thanks for coaching me maths, lending me tutorials and assignments, and being such a wonderful partner in tennis!

Dear Victoria – the bless of life, my source of faith, conviction and inspiration – thanks for giving me the sincere trust that I badly needed during the first few months in RJ; thanks for healing my heart in end-March and then in early-Sep; and most of all, thanks for giving me the forever-lasting reason to love RJ despite all the adversity, prejudice and pressure! I’m seriously damn proud of you! But the 10-As miracle is just too much for me – how am I going to sustain your ever-increasing expectation, given that you demand equally much from me as a friend and as a cca-mate? Sometimes you render me quite hopeless by instinctively and unconsciously comparing me with Charles and Valencia in every single aspect of life… the fear of falling behind…

6I people! The greatest class I have ever encountered! You guys never fail to make me relaxed, happy and excited! From the forever-high Kenneth to the brotherly Desmond to the bossy Arathi and all the interesting and welcoming cute guys and gals like Yingying, Jun Wen, Yashan, Pingfang, Dashini, McBin, Bong, Cheryl, Chermaine, Kevin, Ying Jie, Eng Wee, Eleanor… You all are just so amazing!

And so many others! I really thank you for being such supportive friends!

Visit to TPCC 1

Haha, I'm going to write about today's visit to Toa Payoh Care Corner – it’s interesting and to a noticeable extent, fruitful, I assure you!

Well, we encountered quite a series of funny and unnecessary problems getting to the CORRECT place (poor Tze Heng spent two and a half hours travelling and took 7 buses in total to get there). Yah, true, we wasted some time, but we kind of enjoy ourselves during the process and I think we arrived at the place at the perfect timing – with the SMU people cleaned up the flats already and the elderly being happy about that.

Seriously, I’m quite proud of my first interview with the elderly! It was with Mdm Ng, a 93-year-old lady who can only speak Teochew, my “grandmother”-tongue (since my mother tongue is Chinese)! Being the only one among our group who was able to understand and communicate in Teochew, I interviewed her with great passion and compassion – you know, a sense of belonging or whatever the thingy is called, in a place that is far far away from my hometown~ Being able to speak 3 languages and understand 1 more may have benefited me, but being capable of communicating only in Teochew has surely impeded Mdm Ng from gaining the full pleasure of chit-chatting with friends. And the sad thing is, she radically refuses to interact with people who speak other languages (I remember her frowning when I discussed, quite quietly with Yawen in English at a time). In aspects other than language, she is quite upright in her life – she does regular exercise and cites her health as the major source of satisfaction; she practices Chinese calligraphy and she even gave me a signature in Chinese characters! She watches TV and reads newspapers; she listens to music and she sings Teochew opera (she boasted that she can sing quite well)! However, I could still detect a sense of loneliness in her eyes despite the disguise of her happy outlook – that spurred from lack of care from children and spouse, and from relatives in general. And I really felt exhilarated when I found that our accompanying had added some spices to her life, which was shown in her shining smile :)

The second interview was quite exciting too! Mdm Lim is a 100-year-old (!!!) lady who can only speak Hokkien. And then the amazing thing happened – I talked to her in Hokkienish Teochew and she talked to me in Teochewish Hokkien and we managed to understand each other! Hooray! The second amazing thing is that her maid is hired by the CARING Singapore government instead of by her sons and daughters! (since when the Sg gov becomes so rich huh?) And the third, also the most, amazing thing is that her maid uses iPhone! Omg! Now the world has changed a lot, I think, hahaha! But seriously, living till 100 years old is not easy and she faces some difficulties in daily life, such as weakening vision and hearing, deteriorating respiratory systems and increasing inconvenience of moving around…

We are all in this together (2)

The last line in yesterday’s piece seemed to cause quite a moment’s turbulence – “due to time constraint” – but I meant what I said (though I didn’t finish the compulsory work anyway). And the fact that I didn’t write about Little Peijun in the first piece also seemed to bother her quite a lot. So, as promised, I’m gotta start from Peijun today.

The best thing about Peijun is that she is too kind-hearted to hurt anyone’s feeling. She is the kind of girl who is well-mannered, respectful and polished, and who will never be late for any appointment with anyone, the rare species in our batch of TMS girls. All these impressed my Mum so much that she said that Little Peijun is so “Ho-Sie” (Teochew, meaning “loved by everyone”). My Mum has never said the same thing about me though (Jealous, urh!). And congrats! Everyone says that you have grown prettier and prettier during the past three years (btw, do you know how childish you looked and how petulantly you behaved when you first came here, haha)! When are you going to catch up with Hanzhe and when are you going to have your dreamed Prince? Don’t worry, at least you are smarter!

Now comes to Yu Yuan, our Gossip King and the ChairMan of the Federation of Temasekian Women – I assure you this is not an easy job at all as the five of them are so untameable and so unpleaseable (sometimes it could be fun though). Yu Yuan has a very High and Special reputation among Temasekians, both Singaporeans and PRC. Every time I talked about Yu Yuan, someone around me would say, “Woo, Yu Yuan” or “Wah, Yu Yuan”. And as the Chinese Lit Rep, he always had to mediate between people who fervently wanted to cancel the lesson, like the girls, and people who wanted to go for lesson, like himself; to mediate between people who never did their homework, like me, and people who finished everything on time, again, like himself. But to be frank, Yu Yuan is very very talented (I’ve discovered this truth since six years ago). Talking about his glorious days in Hwa Chong made me feel deep shame. I just so sorry that in the end you didn’t stay in Hwa Chong, a place you loved and a place where your dream had already soured high up into the sky… OK, don’t talk about this anymore or else I will break down into tears. Good luck with your double Olympiads and double science research projects during the Nov-Dec holiday~ Have fun!

And Lin Bo, my roommate for the past two years~ Admittedly, he’s a model roommate who can cook quite decently and who regularly clean up the room on a weekly, or even daily, basis. You know, it’s quite difficult to find this kind of guys in today’s society. He has a strong sense of belonging to the Teochew Students’ Organization, XCL, or Xin Chao Liu, and he is quite committed to it. Sometimes we had some petty conflicts because I was too lazy to attend activities organized by XCL, or by him in particular. But we managed to figure things out and everything seemed fine in the end :)

XinZi, the real CaiNv (actually the only one) in our batch, always impressed us with her beautiful Chinese language. Her language is so delicate, touching and sensitive, just like herself. I do hope that in the near future, she would find the belonging that she longs to find as pictured in her words!

Zhang Xin, the one who is most difficult to entertained… I think Peijun’s description about Zhang Xin in her blog entry is too perfect to be out-beat so I don’t want to waste my time writing about the same thing. Peijun, you have really done a good job!

Last but not least, Lizhen, Peijun’s confidante. I’m sure one day a guy would thank you for taking care of Little Peijun when she’s young and childish, haha. I rarely get to know you and the only way I do is through the words from Peijun. I think there must be a reason for Peijun to miss you so much and go back VH, or go out with you, frequently after coming to RJ. Hope you will be together again.

Finally, I finish it! Hope it’s not so bad – I mean, my English is so lousy and yet Peijun’s blog entry left me with no choice but to write in English (otherwise she would have made me feel shame about my Chinese, haha).

PS: just a response to Peijun’s description about me: don’t view me through the prime of the past history (I know it’s somewhat defamatory) anymore and I will take your advice and try to stay steadfast from now onwards. I’m really grateful for your support this year!

We are all in this together (1)

Reading Little Peijun’s new blog entry about the 9 of us made me have a strong impulse to write an article of the kind. But I came to realize that my entry would be much similar to hers only after a few lines in Chinese. So, I made the painful decision to write it in English instead. Hope you don’t mind~

Of course, the first one I want to talk about is my Dear Brother ChangYong. Wherever I go, you always seem to be the one who competes with me for attention and popularity, in a benign way. I still remember how Kela (have I spelt her name correctly?) cheered energetically and openly for whatever you do only after our very first few days in Temasek; I remember how ecstatic Sohwoon and Rachel (two of the prettiest girls in MY class) were when they knew that they were gonna sing a song with you in front of everyone in the school during Chinese New Year Celebration; and Yah, the most impressive picture about girls that you etched on my mind is the numerous times you sang songs with Hanzhe (made me jealous, huh?). Just kidding~ I love the scene when the whole school was cheering for your fabulous performance!

And ChangYong, I really thank you for your accompanying with me in Jogging, Basketball, Badminton, Table-tennis, Dinner, Shopping, Everything, on almost a daily basis during the past two years. You are really my Dear Brother and you will never know how much it hurt me when I knew you were going to leave me, alone, in RIB, and RJ. You know, I’m not a typical Mr. Kind and I sometimes mess up with other guys, and gals; but you are! You might have made the atmosphere somewhat better here~ And thanks for listening ‘attentively’ to me gossiping about others as well as myself all the time though I know you are not really interested, haha~ Next time, I’m going to gossip about you!

Haha, I can’t wait to talk about my Sis HanZhe a.k.a. ZhuZhu. Well, everyone knows that you are pretty, sexy, chubby; energetic, enthusiastic, stupid so on and so forth. But not everyone knows that you are actually the first girl in my life to get so close to me, and so far, you are still the only one. In China, I was somewhat famous, or infamous, for my ignorance of, and condescension to, Girls. But you have changed all these, showing me that girls can be as nice and as caring as you. You were always the one who was fastest and most effective to give me the consolation when I cried for the first time, and the second time, after coming to Singapore (though you might not know I was crying, you could sense that I was sad, heart-breakingly sad). During my toughest Sec 3 year, when I was weak, helpless and basically had nothing at all, you were my real source of strength and happiness (though for quite a period of time I, and probably you as well, mistakenly thought that it was YY).

Well, not everything about you is nice. For instance, you have committed a crime that could have well caused massive destruction – you are the one who actually turned me from a Good-Good boy in China to an evil and playful Bad-boy in Singapore, far far away from the supervision of my parents. And it took me more than half a year in RJ to try to be somewhat less so. Haha, just joking. I really bless you with your fairytale ‘marriage’ with Dali my Big Brother. It’s been a happy two years and may it be a happy-ever-after! Good luck Pretty Girl!

(Due to time constraint, I will stop here for now and continue writing about others tomorrow~)