030602, 2023hr, singapore time.

ah, i spent the whole day continuing to clean the house up. it's almost like spring cleaning, the way my mom said it - "make sure it's very clean leh, have to wait till you come back next year to clean it again!" so funny. but anyway, because i was so tired, i was actually a little glad, that my friend couldn't make it to our dinner appointment after all. would rather take the rest of the day off, bumming around doing nothing, than go out there to brave the weather and the great singapore sale crowd. i would be too lazy to even try to dress a little nicer, if i were to go out. haha.

continue my ramblings about china...the three people i remember from this trip.

the first is the tour guide we had in shanghai. we had different tour guides for different cities that we went to, and frankly, the one in shanghai is the best and the most professional. we call her xiao yao - her surname is yao. she dresses fashionably, looks so much more like an arty farty architect than a tour guide, definitely. yet, from little nuggets of information she let out about her background, one also gets a sense of how she's perhaps not a simple tour guide either. she speaks arabic, first of all, having stayed in egypt for two years. [the whole two years, she proudly claimed, she wore only chinese folk attire, which fascinated and awed all who saw her. i can imagine - she's a beautiful woman, probably look very stunning in a qipao.] she's travelled the world extensively, and loves her country very much. her husband is very much older than she is, and they have no children, though she's already in her thirties. she's quite well to do, and enjoys political discussions, whether seriously or in a joking manner.

to me, she stands for who i want to be - confident, intelligent, charismatic, and beautiful. she also stands for the educated professionals in china - somehow, when one mentioned china, what comes to mind? mindless farmers? communists? red guards? boorish engineers? there're so many stereotypes, but i'm not sure the intelligent stylish professional woman is a common idea. gosh. she's such an inspiration.

the second person who left a deep impression in me, is the driver for my tour coach - li shifu. he's another inspiration...i was the first to see him, when we first arrived in hangzhou, he was at the airport to pick us up. i was way ahead of everyone else, because i was pushing the heaviest cart of baggages and it had a lot of momentum, so i was the first to spot him. but i wasn't the tour leader, so i really wasn't sure if he was the guy who was supposed to pick us up - for one, he wrote the name for our tour agency wrongly, though he got it right that we were from malaysia. i was a little afraid of him, i just smiled shyly and stood there like an idiot waiting for the tour leader to catch up with me and see if i got the right guy. haha. after that, li shifu teased me about how silly i was, not saying anything, just standing there, he also didn't know whether he was supposed to talk to me. haha.

li shifu scared me a little at first, he spoke very loudly and apparently rudely whenever he spoke to other chinese people, during the tour. yet, he was a little soft spoken and very polite towards us. he's really a very gentle man. i can't think of any specific incident, but he took very good care of us the whole time. maybe some would say that that's his job anyway, but actually it isn't. his job was to drive the coach, the taking care was just extra, because he saw that it was all women in this group and we didn't have a proper tour guide to take care of us. so he did everything, beyond his acual obligations. and we really trusted him - even when we were apparently running late for our flight, i personally knew that he would get us there in time, somehow. he inspires such confidence... perhaps he's not properly educated, but he's actually also very wise. he does his job with a sense of dignity, profesional responsibility and kindness. before we finally left, said goodbyes to him, i shook his hand, still didn't say all that much. could only say "thank you."

okay, last person i remember, is this terrible lewd fruit hawker. the night before our flight home, we went out to buy some fruits. as it turns out, my mom and i didn't really buy much - we didn't want to bring them home, and there's only that much i can eat in a night, before we leave the next day. haha. i guess that hawker was very disappointed that we bought only 2 peaches, so he was terribly rude towards my mom. i think he's in his twenties, and far too sharp tongued for his own good. after my mom and i bought the fruits, he rambled off something in dialect to his fellow hawker - though i didn't understand the dialect, i knew that he was complaining about us, just from the looks they were giving us. my mom was quite mad, so she walked away, i stayed behind to wait for the change for our payment. as the guy gave me back the change - all in coins too, deliberately, i'm sure grrr - he touched me on my shoulder and my arm, he smiled a crooked-teeth-smile and said in manadarin, "xiaojie, you're not cold ah?" i was wearing a spaghetti strapped top, i just said no and i walked away. only later, did i realize i've just been molested. so blardy damn gross!! grrrr....after that though, i spoke briefly to another fruit hawker who tried to guess my age and was surprised to know i was his age. he's equally sharp tongued like the other guy, he criticized another woman customer to me, did not even bother to try to hide his sarcasm and disdain, when he's being in fact equally "couth and uncultured", in his words. at least he didn't try to molest me. after that, looking back at what happened, i get the images of these young hawkers all blurred together, and i wonder. are they so sharp tongued because of their trade, or are they in this trade because they are so? very rude. sigh.

so many other people i can mention - like the humorous and pleasant looking tour guide in nanjing who had freckles on her face, the handsome but slightly cold/shy tour guide in hangzhou who had a girlish voice, and the hypocritical and money faced tour guide in suzhou who tried to cheat us by overcharging by 100% for arranging for foot massages. my contact with other non-tour-guide chinese people was quite limited, i must say, the bulk of them were irritating sales people at the touristy shops, and waitresses at restaurants who leave no impression at all. within my limited contact with the people, however, at least i try to see individual people as individual people, and i think there's really no point in trying to form an overall impression about the chinese people, is there? it's freaking more than one billion people to think about.

i like to remember my travels by the people i meet though. i think besides pictures, these people say a lot about the place. in fact, i think people reveal a lot more about the place, than the pictures. that's why i'm not really a camera person when i travel, especially since i'm so bad at taking pictures. they say pictures say a thousand words - well, mine barely splutter out like 2 words maybe. hahahhaa...

in all, like i've said before, my trip has been interesting. the people made an impact in me.