Nabueh's space

I learned this English song called "Sukiyaki" on my trip to West Malaysia with other NPCC cadets in 1979.  We had lots of sing along and was given a song book to help us do just that.  I remembered the two songs I liked best (几呼唱得都快滚瓜烂熟) were "A Time for Us" and "Sukiyaki" (click on link to hear song on YouTube).

I thought the melody for Sukiyaki was very soft and slow and I thought maybe one day, I'll have a chance to listen and understand the Japanese version.  But thoughout my school years from 1979 to the time I graduated from NUS, I never had a chance to even learn the "gana" or "kana" in Japanese (try your kana knowledge by clicking here).  Besides, every time I mentioned that, my family (especially my grandmother) would remind me how cruel the Japanese were during World War II.  For a moment I thought I'd never have a chance to learn this popular foreign language.  That was in the 80s. 

In mid 1990s,during my doctoral thesis writing, my thesis advisor (He's English) decided to move to Japan.  I had to do my thesis entirely via long distance discussion because over 80% of the time, he was in Tokyo.  That's when I took one semester of Japanese intermediate class.  I hunt for the song sukiyaki and to my horror, the lyrics was very difficult and there was no mention of the word "sukiyaki".

The word "suki" (好き) in Japanese means "like".  So "Dai suki" menas "I love you".  And the word "yaki"(焼き) menas "fried" as in "nabeyaki udon"," dorayaki"(the fried thing eaten by Doraemon, see Jason's blog page), "yaki soba" (fried buckwheat noodles), "tori yaki", etc.  But sukiyaki (in the Western world) turns out to be food cooked in water and nothing is fried.  It looks like Shabu-shabu and it's so famous (mainly because of the song), Thailand simply shorten it to "suki".  So for example, MK Suki and Coca Suki filled up Bangkok with hundreds of its "suki" restaurants.  See picture of a pot of sukiyaki below:


Back to the song.  The Japanse version is called "Ue o muite Aruko" literally translated to "up, look, walk".  And "yaki" & "suki" are not mentioned in this 1963 song by Kyu Sakamoto.  The lyrics was incomprehensible (and I mean the translated English version by A Taste of Honey), but by a clever twist, the title  "Sukiyaki" made it possible for Westerners to remember and it topped the US chart that year.  And because of the success of the original version, another version by Blue Diamond is easier to remember and is full of "sukiyaki"s. This lyrics was not the ones I memorized.  The one I sang in Sec 3 with a bunch of other Sec 3 kids from other schools has lots of "sukiyaki"'s in it.  I was disappointed for a short while but I've decided to study Sakamoto's lyrics in Japanese and learn its meaning.  In doing so, I also discovered that Kyu was also the original singer to the song "Shina no Yoru" (China Nights) which was also sung by 李香蘭 (山口淑子--Yoshiko Yamaguchi 1940). That was the version I had in my car audio CD!  I was able to associate to it right away!  (李香蘭was also mention in my previous blog -- click here --when I probed deeply into the origin of the song 夜来香).

Here is probably a part of an ad in the 1920s:



I cropped it, resized it, and changed its colour saturation and contrast to make the Chinese characters stand out.  It's so old, the Chinese characters are read from right to left.  It goes something like:
      "The two of them say: 'suck here, suck there and he's still the best' "

It may sound "dirty" but in Chinese the words “he” (他) and “it” (它) sound the same and often are indistinguishable.  And the word Chinese use suck (吸)  to mean smoke.  So this is really a cigarette advertisement and was found in a blog by Lisa Boly reviewing Lisa See's latest book "Shanghai Girls".  See Lisa Boly Wordpress review of Lisa See's latest book Shanghai Girls.  There you can see the cover of the book and another full (uncropped) picture of the above picture advertising for "Hademan Cigarette"  哈德门 (or is it Marlboro).

On my second year of NUS, I was diagnosed with high blood pressure.  I was measured numerous times on numerous occasion in NUS medical clinic.  I was completely distraught to learn that I have to take hypertension medication everyday for the rest of my life.  A few years later, I landed in Canada and went to the clinic for more medication and was told I do not have high blood pressure.  I was puzzled.  I asked again and again and was retested weeks later and told to go home because I was normal.  How could this be?  I thought it over and over again and concluded maybe because the line for "hypertension" was different in different countries.  But how can it be?  For the remaining years in America, my systolic blood pressure was monitored and is always around 130 to 140.  However, yesterday, it was 108!

In Pittsburgh, I was given a skin test for tuberculosis.  Anything for than 5mm after the skin test is positive for infection (not the disease).  My test came out "5mm"!  Yes, exactly 5mm!  I was on the borderline.  He decided I should take the drugs for 6 months.  These things are so arbitrary.

So who decide what number it is and how come the numbers are so nice?  Body Mass Index (BMI), Systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, wasit line, cholesterol level, LDL, Triglycerides, numbers to  determine Hypercholesterolemia, blood sugar level and the list could go on.  If through numerous experiment and data, physicians has determine when and BMI level is considered obese and when you're overweight, why are the numbers so nice?  You would think the 95th percentile or seventy-fifth percentile for BMI will be more like 26.762 or 32.543.  But no, anything above 25 is overweight and anything above 30 is obese.  Who round these numbers up?  After all, this is nothing more that a person's weight divided by the square of his height (thanks to a Belgium statistician, Adolphe Quelet 1796-1874).  And to make things worse, Singapore (Surgeon General) has arbitrarily adjusted the overweight BMI as 23.5 instead of 25 for Singaporeans.



Thanks to all these "arbitration", my total cholesterol level has decided to jump up and down the 200 level  during the last decade.  So everytime I go beyond that level, I will watch my diet carefully and my doctor will ask me to be tested again and most of the time, I would fall below that arbitrary 200 again without cholesterol lowering drugs. 

ASIDE---Yesterday, I was given the purple pill.  I looked this up on the web with my daughter and learned that it was given generally for people with Esophagitis or any form of GERD.  She has just learned the word "esophagus" from her books and I knew that word since primary school.  So I prnounced "Esophagitis" the same way as "esophagus" but with with the end removed and appended with "itis".  She corrected me and said it differently.  I gave it a thought, then secretly check it was the internet and found that she was right.  It took me a while to learn that "photography" is pronounced differently from "photograph" but she doesn't have to learn that.  Sigh!

I don’t usually like to buy new things.  As children, we were frequently reminded how children of Africa and other poor countries (especially right after the second world war and during the time my grandparents were in China) have to starve.   It was a privilege even just to have meat to eat.

   

The picture above is a picture of my grandfather’s village in Fujian China TODAY.  (I’m using present tense) There is only one school on that island and this particular relative is so poor, they don’t even have money to patch leaks and sell what they could “harvest” on a newspaper on the street.  In fact, I was told by my aunt who took this picture that very little has changed since my grandfather was a kid!

But recent events of recession, depression, big losses due to cancellation of expensive trips made us re-focus, re-organize (re-ORG!)  and rethink what money is and how we should spend it.  We did not become more frugal.  In fact we kind of went the opposite direction.

Here is what we gathered:

• that spending make us feel guilty is WRONG.
• Saving a lot of money to the point of obsession is BAD. 
• Not spending and waiting for the price to go down is SILLY.
• Working harder/longer so you don’t have a life (or have time to smell the roses or hug your children) to make more money is downright STUPID.

So it seems like we do not embrace saving money anymore.  We do, but not to an obsession.  We switched to whole grain bread and brown rice which are 2 to 3 times more expensive.  We bought a lot of new thing which we postponed buying for a long time.  We made a list of what we want (making sure it’s not just unnecessary greed and instant gratifications) and go and buy them.  For example, my futon frame bought in 2001 was broken since 2003.

Since the entire futon cost us $500, I fixed, repaired  and re-repaired and we made do with a “dangerous” futon seat for up to 7 years.  So last week, I ordered another frame on the internet and fixed the problem immediately.  Here’s what the new futon frame looks like:

Altogether, we came up with a long list of things to buy and fix and get them all done!  Here’s the partial list:

• new kitchen faucet
• new bathroom door knob
• new BBQ grille, an expensive one, not those cheap $100 or less Char-broil brand
• new 2-shelf cabinet
• new cell phone (albeit ordered from eBay and shipped from China)
• new kid bicycle
• new baseball mitten and softball for kids
• new hoe
• new pair of gloves for kid

All these can be found in my “Bought New” photo album if you CLICK HERE !  And we spent thousand over more dollars ordering a new set of mattress with bed cover and bed sheet from MACY’s which will be delivered new Tuesday! And we got new chicken fence and pickets and new vegetable plants, tilled the soil in the garden and started a new veggie garden!

But how are we going to balance the budget?  Well, it’s really just a simple act of balancing.    Here are a few:

• Strike on opportunity to make easy money (for instant, the summer job pays a thousand a week for six weeks working only four days s week, two hours a day),
• reduce unnecessary long trips to Cleveland and Buffalo (these trips cost a lot and the driving is tiring),
• drink only water not pops or soda,
• make my own gourmet coffee (instead of constantly buying from expensive over-roasted, bitter STARBUCK)
• don’t buy lottery ticket or gamble (only poor people gamble and have high/false hopes of winning) -- that will be the same as waiting under the Zhu tree for a rabbit ,守珠待兔.
• spend more time exercising instead of shopping in the mall

In short, have a positive attitude that one only feel rich when one enjoy the cents they make, not by saving or having a big savings account.  (my blog on Rich Dad, Poor Dad.)  Our previous attitude that frugality is a virtue is flaw and very wrong.  Firstly we pay more with delayed buying because of inflation.  Just think of my futon for example, if I bought it five years earlier, we would have bought it cheaper and we would have enjoy it earlier and lived with five years of broken, dangerous furniture!  And what’s the point of a fat savings?  As the saying goes “A Fool And His Money Will Soon Part”.  A fatter saving is like preparing for that to happen!

It’s one of those Sunday where we have been invited to a potluck party at 4PM.  Now 4PM is too early for dinner as we usually have dinner after the gym at 8PM or later and 4PM is too too late for lunch.

“Better have something light before we go.”

That’s a sentence that starts with “better” (see Grammar) and it’s true I had better cook something light for my daughter and myself.

I remember “ZA-RU  Soba” ( ざるそば )some buck wheat Japanese noodles I bought not-so long ago.

I mistaken the price –tag on this packet of noodles as $1.59 and I remember those “yummy” soba on a block of ice I tasted in Sushi Tei  (すし亭 ) in China Square Central.

Turning over, I realize the instructions were all in nihon-go.

It took me quite a while to read and understand those and to save time, I boiled it, quenched it in cold water, did not bother to quench in colder water and did not bother to place them on a block of ice.  The result came out in a small plate looking like this:

with scrambled eggs and Japanese Rice Seasoning (Furi-kake 振り掛け)

On my big plate with Tao-You ( 福建黑豆油) and Sesame Oil (and Vietnamese chilli sauce) it looked like this:

I gobbled up my whole plate like a hungry ghost.  My daughter didn’t like it.  She chose all the furi-kake and eggs.  Too bad, she has wait till 4PM to taste real food which I found on the stove freshly cooked from the oven and managed to take one picture:

And I realize that the price-tag is really $7.59 for 3 bunches.  So that plate cost me about $2.50 and I still had to cook it!

Me:  "Name all the planets in the solar system."

Daughter:  "Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter Satrun, Uranus Neptune."

Me:  "What about Pluto?"

Daughter: "Pluto got kicked out!"

Me:  "What?  Who said that?"

Daughter:  "Yeah, it's no more a planet, it's called a Dwarf Planet!"

I am sure Pluto is still happily revolving round and round the Sun despite what we call it.  But upon consultation with astronomer Dr. Darren Williams, I learned that what my daughter said was true.  Pluto was not massy enough to be a planet.  It doesn't have enough gravity to pull things around it so that it appears "isolated".

"But Mercury is light as small too, why wasn't he get kicked out?"

"He will be if a magic hand moves him around the location of Pluto or Eris near the ends of the solar system."

"So lucky for Mercury, there is not enough "debrises" around him to test his strong pull of gravity and so he naturally is isolated?"

"Yes, you can say that."

One of the main reasons for the recent economic downturn is greed.  Oh yes, it’s also our trust that institution will regulate itself.  Who would’ve thought that CitiBANK will be a thief when left alone to regulate itself, whether it’s subprime mortgage, or credit cards, or simply approving car loans?  But this crisis has taught us a new lesson:  big institutions need to be monitored too.

With this problem, and the sky-rocketing inflation and gas prices in the US, we still do things that don’t add up.  Here’re a few examples:

Donated one TV to a friend

This is our smaller TV of the two we had.  The other bigger one is given to a friend who lived a mile away.  It’s not like they have no TV, they have more than we do.  But their bigger TV in the living room broke down and the financial squeeze is not allowing them to buy another one to replace it.  So we donated ours.  And as a consequence, we now have only the 19 inch SANYO ViZon which is approximately the size of a typical computer monitor.  Our lives did not change very much.  We continue to exercise everyday, home school our child and she gets an hour of PBS-WQLN every morning or afternoon.  And since our time on the TV is so low, we don’t even notice our bedroom has no TV.

Ask a friend to cut my hair

 

Cutting my hair costs only $7 at Marion and only takes 10 minutes or less.  Most barbers who join the Union will charge $12 or more.  So to save some money, I took the trouble to borrow a hair clipper from Dr. Su Meng so that my wife’s friend who lived in Youngsville can cut for us.  (My wife tried cutting my hair while we were living in Mankato but she took on the average one and a half hour.  And the itch I had to suffer for that hour and a half is unbearable.)  Youngsville is about an hour away by driving.  But to show our appreciation, we’ve decided to drive her to Buffalo have a good time then return to her house to cut my hair.  After reaching Youngsville, we waited and chat a while before heading to Buffalo which is about 100miles away.  At Buffalo we drove to two Asian groceries and settled in Gin-gin restaurant.  The food was pretty expensive and we ended up spending about $100 for lunch and dinner.  Normally we only spend half of that but we’ve decided to give our friend a treat.  So you see, the plan is to save $7 on haircut, but we ended up fifty dollars poorer.  And an extra 200 miles of driving.  And paid toll on NY I-90 freeway.  I probably will not cut my hair this way again because I don’t really like the traffic jam at Buffalo at 6PM and I don’t like long driving.  Plus we got lost for about 10 minutes in Jamestown NY when the GPS mislead us. But surprisingly, we (especially I) were able to take all these lightly and even thought it’s the right thing we have done.  This friend’s husband used to be my Calculus student but today he’s an army medical doctor.  He will graduate with a D.O. end of this month in Philadelphia and then move to Hawaii.  During his eight years of studies, our friend lived in a very difficult life and had never gone home to Indonesia because of that (I forgot to mention she’s Indonesian and her husband is a “Honky” -- has nothing to do with Hong Kong). 

Numbers don’t add up

So the numbers don’t seem to add up.  But we’re still very happy at what we do.  One doesn’t get happier because one has a more cash in one’s life.  And what really make sense is not really in the “cents” all the time.  It seems that the two things we did above (and dozen other more we’ve done) don’t seem to benefit us in any bit.  Our life did not change a single bit.  It’s like:

       “Why would you exercise, if you found out exercise does not improve your health or your looks?”

But our gut feelings tell us it’s the right thing to do.  It makes our friends happier.  And that’s it!  That’s all.  We try as much as we can to return what was given to us if anyone offer to help us.  Every time our friend who had our TV helped us (like mow our lawn while we were away or fix our kitchen faucet) we would go all out to buy a lot of food, take time to cook and have a party with them.  Or give them a treat at a Buffalo Wings place (the husband absolutely loves that).  In the end, the money don’t add up.  It’ll be cheaper to pay a professional!  But that’s us.  While we’re not poor, we repay everyone.  And whenever we could, we help them and expect nothing in return.  We know they’re happier.  And that’s what really matters.  Like Bhutan, we do not measure GNP (or GDP), we try to increase GNH.  Something Singapore can learn from Bhutan.

When you light a match and somewhere in Zimbabwe a house catches fire, you probably think it's mere co-incidence. But when every time you finish a whole can of peanuts in one afternoon, the very next day you got sick, then you tend to blame the peanuts for your illness.

Life has many unexplainable co-incidences that are hard to find satisfactory scientific explanations. But we don't just let it go and accept that as mere co-incidence.  Our mind/spirit yearns for an explanation.

What are the odds that when we look in retrospect that danger came so near to us (or any one in the family) and yet in the nick of time, it was just a close shave? You can sigh a sigh of relief, but one wonders if there's some other bigger force out there like an ANGEL or something. Or your luck is extremely good it must be an auspicious activator being placed in the correct place in the correct corner of your house according to your Kua Number. Or like Disney Mulan, your ancestor sent a guardian to follow you to protect you.

As human beings, it's hard not to be superstitious. Scientists even proved that our brain is wired so we are very likely to believe in a celestial being that's beyond ours.  That is, we are more prone to be superstitious than neutral.  Almost all ancient beliefs are voodoo, almost all ancient medicines are quakes.  But that's how we all began.  Hopefully, over time, we perfect ourselves to be more scientific.

Like I'm supposed to be in Asia right now.  But some heavy, emotional events happened made me change my plans.  Everything was so close, it's hard to believe why we're not in Indonesia/Singapore right now.  Even our pediatrician said there's something out there to believe why we're where we are today.  And surprisingly, despite the huge monetary loss, there was no hard feelings not even any sense of anger (except some sense of disappointment over how SIA treated us).  Normally, I would be grouchy even over ten dollars!

 

Or the Chinese would say, "这是天意!" (It's fate!)  But should one really believes in destiny?  Or are we really the captains of our own life-ship?  There is a  命(ming, life) and there is 运 (luck, yun), but is 命运 "ming-yun" fated?  Or can we use 风水(feng shui) to alter it?  No wonder the Chinese saying:

    "另可信其有，不可信其无!"

Or my aunt (and Singaporean aunties)  like to say "Choi, choi, touch wood, touch wood"!

I could not believe my eyes, two weeks ago, I woke up and the outdoor thermometer reading is higher than that of the indoor.
When you look really, really close the flowers looks like this:  (aren't they pretty?)

It should be 花より団子but 団子and 男子 sound the same in Japanese. And puns are intended here. It's of the many popular Japanese proverbs.
It means

• Dumpling over Flower
• I prefer dumpling to flowers
• flowers are not better than dumpling (boys?)
• I'd rather marry someone for money than love!
• money over romance
• Person referred to prefer practical gains to aethetics
  

So like Chinese chen－yu (成语), it means Money Over Love.  I watched the Taiwanese version of this manga and was disappointed how come they used singers to act.  But audience loved it and especially the F4 boys.  And they used the same names (e.g 道明寺 司) were used except they were pronounced in Chinese.  In the new Korean series, the names were changed.  One wonders why they followed the title so closely.  Koreans  called theirs 꽃보다 남자  or 꽃보다 男子(even if you don't know korean hangul, notice how  the last two characters look like the kanji in the title in Japanese).  But so much good things were said about the Korean series, I felt I must have missed a lot especially when I have seen both the Taiwanese version and loved the Japanese version (both series I and II).  But I'm going to hold on for a long while to to able to compare Jun Matsumoto (Japanese version), Jerry Yan (Taiwanese version) and Lee Min Ho (Korean version)  That way I can see it cheaper or even free without purchasing pirated copies of the DVD.


Talk about flower, I never knew they grew on trees.  In fact I didn't know trees come in many colours besides green.  In Primary School, I once laughed at a classmate for colouring trees orange and purple,

    "Where got purple tree one? and orange tree?  ha, ha, ha! "

Apparently this classmate travelled wide and saw orange/purple trees.  He probably told me softly but as a boy, I treated that softness as a sign of defeat than a defence.

"Flowers don't grow on trees."  said I.

But today, one of the thing I love was seeing flowers on  trees in the Spring.  They don't stay very long though.  Like this Sakura:

From far, they looked white and glamourous:


From near it looks like this:


Or this one from very, very near

When they fall, they form lots of white petals on the grass  like "disgusting dandruff on a person's green sweater".  That's when you feel like cring and the first song that comes to my mind is " 太阳下山明早依旧爬上来，花儿谢了明年还是依样的开。。。“

More photos of trees in the spring?  Click here!