When I Was Young

'Senile delinquents' roam HK's streets, all sharp elbows and killer shopping carts

Tabitha Wang

voices@mediacorp.com.sg

IT ONLY took a few seconds. I had chosen my stuff at a Salvation Army charity shop and placed it on the counter to pay.

In the time it took to open my purse and take out the money, someone had swiped a choice buy, a branded sweater selling at HK$20 ($3.65). I chased after the "thief".

It turned out to be an old woman, looking as fluffy as a kitten but with claws like a tiger. She refused to relinquish her ill-gotten gain even after I asked the shop assistant for help. "How dare you young people gang up on a helpless old lady," was the gist of her lament.

Except this was no helpless old lady. She was a member of the Hong Kong Ah Pak and Ah Por club. You know, the kind who leap tall buildings in a single bound and chew sheet metal for breakfast.

The Hong Kong elderly are a deadly species. They may look like the next typhoon would blow them away but don't be fooled.

That one-foot-in-the-grave image is all an act. These are no shrinking violets. They make their own rules - because they believe they are above the law of the land.

There's no stopping these "senile delinquents". Jaywalking, queue jumping, a bit of petty "thieving" ... when they're caught, they just invoke the Confucian "respect thy elderly" tenet and confidently wait to be let off.

When buses come, they insinuate themselves into a queue of people who have been waiting for hours and expect entry. Woe betide you if you get in their way - they have elbows of steel.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been jabbed in the stomach trying to board a bus with Ah Paks who look like they were about to collapse from lung cancer.

It's not just bus or train queues - they expect people to give them way everywhere. My friend went to a recent consumer fair hoping to get some bargains.

She came home empty-handed but with bruised toes. The old folk were bulldozing their way to all the good buys by running their heavily-laden shopping-bags-on-wheels over everyone's feet.

Another friend had a run-in with an Ah Por at a supermarket. He had selected some tomatoes and put them in his trolley, which he left at the end of the aisle to pick up something else.

He returned to find an old woman happily putting his tomatoes into her trolley. He tried to stop her by pointing out the pile that was on sale behind them.

Instead of apologising, she glared and said: "But these are so much nicer than the ones over there." And left with his tomatoes.

A Singapore friend says there are just as many senile delinquents back home. "It's the whole Confucian thing. They think they can get away with murder because they're old and we must respect their age."

Tsk, tsk, old people these days. Whatever happened to the nice old ladies that I had known when I was younger? They were always so patient and lovable ... and never stole branded sweaters from under your nose.

English poet Jenny Joseph's Warning, When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple probably best sums up their attitude.

Voted the United Kingdom's most popular post-war poem in a 1996 poll conducted by the BBC, it spoke of how the poet planned to misbehave when she grows old and included the lines:

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit.

Well, hopefully what goes around comes around. Maybe I should start working on those elbows of steel now.

Tabitha Wang is going to booby trap her tomatoes the next time she goes shopping, so senile delinquents beware.

From TODAY, Voices – Thursday, 24-Sep-2009

ISLAM IN FRANCE

Burqa furore hints at internally-conflicted political discourse

Muslims in France wear the niqab (left) while the burqa (centre, right) is seldom seen in the country. AFP

PARIS - It is a measure of France's confusion about Islam and its Muslim citizens that in the political furore here over "banning the burqa", as the argument goes, the garment at issue is not really the burqa, but the niqab.

A burqa is the all-enveloping cloak, often blue, with a woven grill over the eyes, that many Afghan women wear, and it is almost never seen in France. The niqab, often black, leaves the eyes uncovered.

Still, a movement against it has gotten traction within France's ruling centre-right party, which claims to be defending French values, and among many on the left, who say they are defending women's rights. A parliamentary commission will soon meet to investigate whether to ban the burqa.

The debate is indicative of the deep ambivalence about social customs of a small minority of France's Muslims, and of the fear that France's principles of citizens' rights, equality and secularism are being undermined. French discomfort with organised religion is aggravated by these foreign customs, which are associated with repression of women.

Mr Andre Gerin, Mayor of Venissieux, a Lyon suburb with many Muslims from North Africa, began the affair in June by initiating a motion, signed by 57 other legislators, calling for the parliamentary commission.

"The burqa is the tip of the iceberg," Mr Gerin said. "Islamism really threatens us." In a letter to the government, he wrote: "It is time to take a stand on this issue that concerns thousands of citizens who are worried to see imprisoned, totally veiled women."

A few days later, President Nicolas Sarkozy said that "the burqa is not welcome on the territory of the French Republic".

The French press has been full of heated opinion pieces. Women wearing the niqab, many of them French converts to Islam, have said that they have freely chosen to cover themselves after marriage.

Passions have run so high that when domestic intelligence issued a report saying that only 367 women in France wore a full veil, it seemed to make no difference. For many French Muslims, the entire discussion is an incitement to racial and religious hatred.

Mr Mohammed Henniche, secretary for the private Union of Muslim Associations of Seine-Saint-Denis, said: "I think choosing to use burqa instead (of niqab) is not an accident. They chose a word that is associated with Afghanistan, and that spreads a negative, scary image."

Even existing laws are misunderstood, he said, with a woman refused entry to a bank because employees thought a head scarf was illegal.

"French political discourse is internally conflicted," said Mr John R Bowen, professor at Washington University in St Louis. There is confusion about different kinds of public space, he said - the street and places that belong to the state but are not freely open to the public, like schools.

However, Mr Bowen does not think there will be a law banning the niqab. THE NEW YORK TIMES

From TODAY, World – Wednesday, 02-Sep-2009

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

While this gets a go in India, it does not in Singapore. Read the news here.

Bilingual, that is; it's so hard getting the simplest things done in a foreign land

Tabitha Wang in Hong Kong

voices@mediacorp.com.sg

AS A non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese living in Hong Kong, I get lots of snide remarks from the locals. The occasional "banana" (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) insult gets flung at me but my peel is so thick now it hardly registers any more.

But what is irritating about not speaking the language is that the simplest task becomes almost as complicated as flying a space probe to the moon.

I don't take mini-buses because I can't tell the driver where to stop.

It's worse over the phone. When my Internet broadband service is down, it takes three calls before I can get someone to understand what the problem is.

I had to fill in my health insurance form four times because the agent could not explain what she wanted. All she could say was: "Account number wrong. You check with bank, okay?"

It's become so bad that I refuse to do phone banking or indeed conduct anything over the phone, preferring to do everything face-to-face. This becomes tedious because it means dragging myself from one customer service centre to another.

But so far, I have been spared the harrowing experience of one Singaporean woman here. Last week, Sinead Yeo was stuck in a lift so she asked her friend to call the hotline for the lift maintenance company - in English. The operator, unable to understand, hung up on her friend 17 times in half an hour. Eventually, he had to call 999 before Miss Yeo could be rescued.

Imagine if all non-Cantonese speakers had to call emergency services for something as simple as a lift problem. Already, the police in Hong Kong are claiming they are overworked and underpaid - how much more overworked they would be if they had to come to the rescue of every expat stuck in a lift.

Ah, silly woman, you say. If you move to another country, should you expect them to speak your language? If you go to Mongolia, you wouldn't expect everyone there to speak English, would you?

True. In my defence, I am learning Cantonese so I can at least buy vegetables at Graham Street Market and order iced lemon tea at a coffeeshop. And I know enough now to be able to exchange simple pleasantries with my neighbours.

But it isn't as if I am expecting Hong Kong residents to speak Malay or even Hokkien. I am talking about English, the international lingua franca of business, diplomacy, air traffic control, rock '*' roll ...

And I'm not looking at some tiny country with hardly any contact with foreigners, am I? I am talking about Hong Kong, which bills itself as Asia's top financial centre and has an estimated expat population of about 100,000. Why should they not speak English?

"We do," said my Hong Kong friend. "But most don't speak it well so they are embarrassed to try."

I find that the younger generation, brought up under the Cantonese-only medium of instruction in schools, are the worst. Most people over 40 that I've met are bilingual, switching from Cantonese to English with ease.

My English-speaking Malaysian colleague, who married a local, complains that his sons' English is the pits. He speaks English to them but they answer in Cantonese. "I worry that they're limiting their choices to only local universities when the time comes," he laments.

Even scarier is the fact that many of the young ones can't even speak Mandarin. They can read but not speak it. So they have effectively imprisoned themselves in a monolingual world.

This is where I believe Singapore has an edge over Hong Kong in attracting big multi-national companies.

I was speaking to a British expat who is moving to Singapore. After five years in Hong Kong, he is looking forward to going somewhere where "it's so easy to be understood". He wouldn't need to mime (or "chicken dance" as he calls it) every time he wants to do anything from business negotiations to getting from Point A to Point B in a taxi.

As I heard him wax lyrical about the many things he can do, I began to realise how something as basic as being understood can make a difference between feeling isolated and fitting right in.

I wonder what's Cantonese for "I'm stuck in a lift"...

Tabitha Wang finds that though useful phrases still come slowly to her in Cantonese, she has already picked up a lot of swear words.

From TODAY, Comment – Friday, 03-Jul-2009

Image via Wikipedia

4th in a series of train mishaps:

1. DC train crash
2. China train crash (which never made it to most newspapers)
3. Italy train accident (with fuel explosions)
4. French train accident

By 938 LIVE | Posted: 08 June 2009 1740 hrs

Cartons of contraband cigarettes

SINGAPORE: Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) officers have arrested a Malaysian man for trying to smuggle contraband cigarettes into Singapore at midnight last Wednesday.

Close to 1,000 cartons of cigarettes were found under the floorboard of a broken down Malaysia-registered bus. It was being towed by a Singapore-registered tow truck via the Woodlands Checkpoint.

ICA said potential customs duty and GST payable for the cigarettes amounted to more than S$76,000.

When questioned, the 31-year-old Malaysian claimed that he was a relief driver. He said another Malaysian by the name of "Louis" had instructed him to take some passengers from Jalan Skudai to Singapore.

After clearance at Woodlands Checkpoint, he was supposed to leave the bus at the mosque near the checkpoint and await further instructions.

The case was referred to Singapore Customs for further investigations.

Upon conviction by the court, first-time offenders can be fined up to 20 times the amount of duty evaded and are liable to a jail term of up to three years.

- CNA/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

By Tan Yew Guan, Channel NewsAsia | Posted: 21 May 2009 2219 hrs

AWARE President Dana Lam

SINGAPORE: AWARE said it is regrettable that the Education Ministry has decided to drop it as a sexuality education provider.

While it understands the ministry's decision as it has been under considerable pressure from some parents on the matter, AWARE said it still believes that its comprehensive sexuality education programme is a much needed resource for youth.

Dana Lam, president, AWARE, said: "I think it is grossly unfair that the programme has been so misrepresented to the public by a few people who have picked up isolated phrases and then brandied it around. So parents out there may now have a skewed understanding of what the programme is about."

AWARE said it will continue to review its programme in consultation with parents, teachers, counsellors and other relevant parties. It will offer the programme to MOE again "at the appropriate time".

But AWARE is not the only vendor affected by the saga. Other vendors, whose programmes have been suspended for the time being, hope this saga will blow over soon.

Edware Ong, president, Singapore Planned Parenthood Association, said: "For us, this is our core programme and service. We are very concerned that this continues to be ongoing. As it is, our current programmes have already been affected."

On the streets, many welcome MOE's move to tighten its oversight of sexuality programmes. But there were mixed views on whether AWARE's programme has lost the public's trust with its neutral stance towards homosexuality.

"Whether AWARE should be teaching in schools, there should be a neutral stance to it. Given that they are a secular organisation, I think that's fair," said one Singaporean.

"We have to get the right message to our children and that's very important. Like AWARE getting involved and all that, they may send the wrong message to the kids, which is not acceptable by Asians generally," said another.

"I think you have to take into consideration that we import a lot of culture. You want to appear that you are upholding the traditional cultures that we as Singaporeans hold very dear to us, but also you do not want seem like you are backwards," said one man in the street.

But most agree that educating the young about sex is a must. - CNA/vm

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

You can’t please everyone… and certainly when it is about being “free”, free to express and think for yourself, and to decide on your own…

-----

AWARE SAGA

Letter from Gavin Lee

I WAS very disappointed with Today’s decision to feature a four-page answer to the Aware saga from Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng.

I believe civil society has shown unprecedented maturity over the past few weeks. First, the media caught wind of the unsavoury takeover of a women’s advocacy group and reported on it. Second, Singaporeans were alarmed by the religious slant in a civil rights group. Then, Singaporean women voted out the new Exco who had orchestrated a coup to oust several longtime, well-respected figures.

All this has shown that civil society is capable of regulating itself. It is clear that the majority of both Christian and non-Christian Singaporeans wish for a clear separation between civil and religious space. And they took action to ensure that this separation is preserved.

Why is it that in this scenario, Today felt the need for an official conclusion, and Mr Wong still felt the need to step in?

Undoubtedly, the issue of homosexuality did a lot to obfuscate the bigger issues at hand. But if Singaporeans have already shown that they are mature enough to handle the prickly topic of religious versus civil space, why can’t we be trusted to handle issues like sexuality?

I bet many students are memorising Mr Wong’s responses for use in their General Paper works. Bear in mind that these are Singapore’s future leaders.

I, for one, don’t see any point in blaming the youth on being apathetic if society is bent on spoon-feeding them. Let society find its own outlets for handling these tricky issues.

From TODAY, Voices – Monday, 18-May-2009

Their stand is clear: “Aware has never promoted homosexuality”.

In a statement yesterday evening, the 24-year-old Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) stressed that its stand has always “been identical to that of the Government”.

“We agree that the heterosexual family is the norm for our society,” the women’s advocacy group stated. “But homosexuals are also part of our society and they should be able to live freely and happily, free of any discrimination.”

Their comments come in response to Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng’s comment that homosexuality was “clearly a major issue to both sides” in the Aware saga.

While welcoming Mr Wong’s reminder of the need for restraint, respect and tolerance, Aware said it was “most regrettable” that some people now think it has a “gay agenda”, and that “wrongful allegations” continue to be perpetuated online and through other channels.

“This is totally unfounded,” it stressed. The allegations by Dr Thio Su Mien and those she “handpicked” to take over Aware’s leadership were based “on the strength of bits of information taken out of context and strung together to create an imaginary and inaccurate picture of Aware’s activities”, said Aware.

But, the current executive committee is moving on, they said. With an expanded membership, they are now putting together programmes for the year. ALICIA WONG

From TODAY-Weekend, News – 16/17-May-2009

By Alicia Wong, TODAY | Posted: 16 May 2009 0741 hrs

AWARE's new exco - elected at EGM on May 2, 2009

SINGAPORE: Their stand is clear: "AWARE has never promoted homosexuality".

In a statement on Friday evening, the 24-year-old Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE) stressed that its stand has always "been identical to that of the government".

"We agree that the heterosexual family is the norm for our society," the women's advocacy group stated. "But homosexuals are also part of our society and they should be able to live freely and happily, free of any discrimination."

Their comments come in response to Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng's comment that homosexuality was "clearly a major issue to both sides" in the AWARE saga.

While welcoming Mr Wong's reminder of the need for restraint, respect and tolerance, AWARE said it was "most regrettable" that some people now think it has a "gay agenda" and that "wrongful allegations" continue to be perpetuated online and through other channels.

"This is totally unfounded," it stressed. The allegations by Dr Thio Su Mien and those she "handpicked" to take over AWARE's leadership were based "on the strength of bits of information taken out of context and strung together to create an imaginary and inaccurate picture of AWARE's activities", said AWARE.

But, the current executive committee is moving on, they said. With an expanded membership, they are now putting together programmes for the year.
- TODAY/so

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

Channel NewsAsia - Saturday, May 16

Homosexual groups, pro—family groups call for tolerance on gay issue

SINGAPORE : Homosexual groups and pro—family groups may not see eye—to—eye on sexuality, but many in both camps agree with Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng’s call for tolerance and accommodation on the subject.

The AWARE saga brought many divisive issues to the forefront, and sociologists doubt these will be resolved despite their airing.

Associate Professor Paulin Straughan, a sociologist, said: "In a conflict, where values are involved, there is never a win—win situation. If you push on one side, the other side would have to retreat. So then you force the polarity, I don’t think that is very healthy.

"When you have these kinds of heated exchanges, especially when it goes into cyberspace under the cover of anonymity, strong words are heard, and there is always the danger that you push somebody who is normally apathetic to take a stand. And at the end of the day, it does polarise."

This is one reason why analysts said the government decided to give a response.

DPM Wong said that while Singapore is a conservative society, homosexuals are entitled to their private lives. He stressed the importance for different groups to live and let live — a view welcomed by many, including homosexuals.

Said Stuart Koe, CEO of gay portal Fridae.com: "The gay community is pro—family. We have families. We love our families and our families love us. But as a result of what’s been happening in the press and the public media, a lot of abuse and offensive words have been hurled with impunity and I think the people around us are quite hurt about that.

"I’m really concerned that the pendulum in Singapore seems to have swung so far to the right. What he (DPM Wong) said to the press is very important because it is what brings Singapore to the centre. That is very heartening for the gay community to hear because we feel like we are being cornered.

Dr Carol Balhetchet, director of Youth Services at the Singapore Children’s Society said: "I agree with the government that the two critical values we need to have is respect and tolerance. Just as much as the small conservative group’s views should not be forced on the mainstream, similarly, the liberal’s views should not be forced on the rest of us."

And all said it’s important to agree to disagree. — CNA /ls

From Yahoo! News; see the source article here.