drieddeadfish's frivolities...

surprising enough, a lot of frivolous stuff i watch or talk about about trigger off something in my mind and often make me think about some stuff. but, why is this useless blabber in this mayday site? because they make me think a lot, some to do with them, some that has totally nothing to do with them.

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national pride. whether i like it or not, they seem to have clear political inclinations. they are not necessarily pro any party, cos that wouldn't really be wise, but they are definitely pro-taiwan. at the end of their concerts, gong lang is always accompanied by the blue taiwan flag and ashin's earnest salute. gong lang is not only talking about a person's dreams and aspirations, it encapsulates the dreams and aspirations of all young taiwanese, even of taiwan itself.

what hits me is that i am not part of this. no, not that i want to be a taiwanese. it is the fact that as singaporeans, we don't belong. the lack of national pride. if you have actually been friends with me for some time, or that you have been following the old drieddeadfish, you will realise this is not the first time i am bringing this topic up, endangering my own pride by allowing myself to be vulnerable to public ridicule. laugh at me if you want, but i am seriously bothered by this. why is it that we don't feel tears welling up when we see the red-white-crescent-stars flag? why is it that we don't revel in our own culture and uniqueness as a nation? will we hang around to help, or will we leave at the very first opportunity?

i have no idea where it all went wrong. was it history? is it the government? is it what they teach in schools? or is it how they teach in schools? i really have no idea and i honestly have no solution to offer. i am not sure if i am the only that thinks that this is a problem, but to me, it is indeed. to have a generation of citizens who feel no sense of belonging to a country is not only sad but dangerous. sometimes i forget about it, but occasionally, something as frivolous as a wyt concert can kick start this whole chain of questions in my mind.

why is it that taiwanese can be so proud of being taiwanese and we can't? ashin salutes the flag, machi talks about being the taiwan son. what exactly makes the difference? there is no simple solution, but mr goh, i think making speeches targeted at singaporeans' conscience is obviously not the way to do it. conscience seem to be a rather exotic thing in our sunny island set in the sea.

alright, maybe that's a little harsh, but you know what i mean.

before i came over to london, i knew i had to go back home. i mean, i had to, i just had to. everything i have is there. my life, my family, my history is there. how can i bear to leave it behind? i still thought so last year. but now, i'm not so sure. i still can't bear to leave everything behind and never return, but i am not sure if i can be contented with staying put anymore. i wonder if i can stay in singapore for 3 or even 2 years without thinking of escaping to somewhere else, be it for a short break or to work. why? because singapore is too dead.

what a country or even just a city needs is its own heartbeat, and that is what we lack in singapore. singapore is a city with no heartbeat and without a pumping heart, it is dead. go ask around. everytime i go back, i hear exactly the same thing from everyone i know: sian ah, don't know what to do, there's nothing to do, sian of doing the same things over and over again. and as you probably realised, even these 'comments/observations/exclamations' are repeating themselves. and after returning from taiwan this summer, i can really feel the difference. even though taiwan is dirty, messy, ugly, old, and all the other stuff, but it feels alive. i really don't know how to describe it, but it's alive. a friend who recently came back from japan made the exact same comment and recently, another friend, while discussing how i disliked hk, made exactly the same comment too. and as much as i dislike that place, even hk has a heartbeat. this heartbeat is something i cannot really explain, but if you have felt it before, you will know what i am talking about. it's like when you stand really still, you can feel the city pounding away, with life, activity, ideas, yells, hawker smells.... if you know what i am talking about, then you too, will understand it when i say singapore doesn't have one.

maybe when we find out own heart and heartbeat, everything else will follow.

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my frivolity also brings me to another topic. i was watching "shi zi lu kou" the other day and the hosts and guests visited this school and the little children were sitting under a tree learning to speak hakka. it skips to the next scene in a restaurant that prepares authentic hakka food, certified by the local government as "authentic", then it skips to another scene of primary school children learning how to make hakka salted vegetables. right from picking the vegetables from the vegetable fields, to washing it, to rubbing salt onto it, stepping and preserving them in tanks. it struck me then that i couldn't speak a word of hakka, didn't even know some of the very typical hakka food, not to mention making salted vegetables. i come to this final conclusion: our education system is  flawed.

the singapore government had been seriously short sighted in their policies. maybe it isn't really their fault, afterall, i do understand the need for economic growth in the sixties. it was a tradeoff and the government then had chosen the path of speedy economic growth. however, what they have forgone in the process is cultural growth. now that we have achieved a breathtaking list of accomplishment economically, what we find is that we have stagnated culturally for 30 years, and we have lost our history along the way. and now, no matter how hard we try, it is already too late to try to find again what we have already lost.

we may have the skill now to do a brick by brick preservation of warehouses by the river, but the feeling has long gone. we can create old streets with old rickshaws, but the hustle and bustle of life is also lost. sadly, not only do we have to face an aging population, we have to face a homogeneous future generation where people arrogantly think they are bilingual, but in actual fact, they are just not effective enough in any language. we will have a homogeneous generation where indians no longer feel indian and malays no longer feel malay, except when they are discriminated against. chinese are all the same, with no distinction between dialects, and therefore no history or background. for some, not to mention dialect, all they can say in mandarin is "auntie, zhe ge duo shao qian?", which isn't even pronounced correctly, and isn't even grammatically correct.

maybe this homogeneity is what the government tried to achieve in its early days policies of racial harmony and "speak mandarin" campaigns. but in retrospect, your guess is as good as mine as to whether it was really a good idea. the result is a 'texture-less' country. there are no layers, no rough patches, no different textures or materials, no creativity, no new ideas, no..., no texture in short.

note note! i am in no way comparing our system to the taiwanese system. i have totally no idea how their system goes and cannot talk about their merits or demerits. and frankly, i don't really have a good impression of their government and their policies and that includes their education system. taiwanese politics is a big joke and i can't really take their educationa system too seriously either. so no, i am not saying we should just switch to the confused and confusing taiwanese system. but the singaporean way definitely needs a change.

so, what can we do? the education system is a great deal to me. many of my dreams has to do with education. i believe greatly in education and i honestly find great sense of accomplishment and joy (yes, joy, you can close your mouth now) in teaching. our education system needs a makeover.

we need an education that not only focuses on academic achievement, but also on the development of a child. note! i am not saying we move away from the academics! the elitist in me still believes that academic excellence is extremely important, even as the value of a degree is constantly sliding, which is another topic altogether... back to the topic, yes, academic excellence is extremely important, but development is important as well. this does not mean that you must send your children to learn to draw, or for speech and drama lessons, or creative thinking courses. these are all of secondary importance. a child who spends a day making salted vegetables, in my opinion, would probably have picked up more that a day of classes, courses and lessons. and the reason why we don't send all our children to learn to make salted vegetables is probably because what a child picks up is not measurable while making salted veg. but lessons, yes lessons you may get little pieces of papers at the end to 'certify' that your child is now an orator and born stage talent, not that you would ever allow him or her to be an actor or a politician or anything like that. under such comparisons, spending a day in the fields, learning to our own history and culture and enjoying the 'hands-on' experience does seem ridiculous.

not too long ago, i realised my aunt's secondary school in malaysia is by the sea. those of you who know jb rather well will probably know what school that is. imagine this: secondary school, with oldish campus, maybe even slightly peeling paint from the walls. blackboards, written on with chalk, not whiteboards with whiteboard markers. long corridors linking all the classrooms, simple whites, geys, no fancy green and purples. and in front of the block of classrooms are a few basketball courts, side by side. hoops may no longer have nets hanging from them and even the red paint on the ground of the courts have faded. outside the old school gates, is an old man selling rojak on his motorbike (you know the kind with an extension by the side?) he has been everyday for the past 20 odd years. there is a small road where cars drive by regularly, though traffic isn't exactly heavy, and across the road, you have the beach. it is not exactly an eden-esque beach, but it is occasionally littered with some undergrown palm trees.

i think you get the picture i am trying to paint with the salted vegetables and school by the beach, but dun smack my head from behind and tell me to wake up, cos i know it is impossible, especially in singapore, but how wonderful it is to dream...

back to the point. my point is that we need to preserve our culture. children need to know how to speak their dialect and realise that dialects are not only for old uncouth uncles and ah-bengs. that idea is seriously childish. they also need to know and be proud of their roots. they should at least know some typical teochew food if they are teochew, or some hakka food if they are hakka.  children need to learn from nature, not video tapes, courses, seminars, classes or what have you not. children need to be given the chance to explore, to fight spiders, to run in the playground, to get bitten by ants, to play masak masak, and to do what children should be doing.

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i know i am just being too idealistic. while i am thinking of all these wonderful possiblities, images of little annoying bastards are running through my mind, and i already feel like yelling at them to just shut up. children can be so horrible sometimes they don't deserve anything more than a harsh scolding and a kick in their darn asses. hiak. damn, have i revealed my true nature? hah. well, not like you didn't know about it in the first place.

i have often dreamt of setting up a perfect 'toto chan'-like school. but i later added that i will have stringent acceptance criteria. children must be extremely intelligent so that we can do stuff out of curriculum without affecting their academic results. the children must of course also be extremely cute because uncute kids are just unbearable. they must also be active, yet obeying at the same time, blah blah..... and these are just the first few criteria. heh heh, seems like my dream will remain a dream after all since i don't think i can ever find children like that to attend my school.

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after a bloody long page of tiny words, then i realise i am the ultimate frivolous person. damn bo liao, writing some much crappy stuff about some show i watched.  but what the hell, i like doing meaningless stuff. heh.

note: the above views are mine and my own alone. don't agree without thinking through it. don't get offended too. but if you do, kiss my ass, cos i couldn't care less.

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