Hi Simon,

I am pleased to inform you that I found a neat method to publish your article in nantahfriends at least for the time being until I acquire the skill to handle Chinese character input.

It is advantageous to know how people look upon Nantah alumni. I am delighted that your comments are largely fair and positive. I especially welcome non-Nantah graduates write to the website and hope that you will write regularly.

nantahfriends as an independent invoice publishes any article as long as it is of good taste (eg no pornography) and not defamatory. Many articles published in nantahfriends may not find their way to nantah.com. In a few occasions, I communicated with nantah.com but was given a simple one sentence answer in email: "It is the decision of the committee".

nantahfriends plans to add a special edition to pay tribute to late Dr Lin Yutang and I hope to be able to contact his daughter Ms Lin Tai Yi. Leaving alone the ideology and what he did to Nantah, Dr Lin as a man and an author is still admirable. Very close to my heart also is a section devoted to the comparative studies of Christianity and Chinese philosophy although I myself is not a Christian, neither I know that much of Chinese philosophy. nantahfriends owes its existence to its Editorial independence as well as its scope of interests.

In many ways, nantah.com appears to be a subset of ZaoBao as far as Nantah issues are concerned. It is not an independent voice. I hope they will be more debates on this but it is not my priority. Alumni associations are not able to enforce any of their decisions on nantahfriends because nantahfriends does not report to any alumni association. Nantah.com is right not to report the existence of nantahfriends.

I like to see Nantah alumni speak with one voice in order to participate in international alumni conferences to make our existence felt. If we want a sister alumni association, then Beida alumni association would be a nice one for various reasons.

I admire the Malay people and their leaderships in Malaysia. They safeguards and works for their own ethnic education and culture. Within a short span of 40 years, their achievements have been remarkable. They have Malay language as the official language practically at all levels and yet achieve racial harmony. I am afraid Singapore has not done that well. In Switzerland, it is trilingual, in Canada, bilingual, in Singapore, monolingual (which is English).

Hope to have more discussions with you.

Kind regards,

Ven Yee Foo
Editor
http://friends.nantah.org (http://www.nantahfriends.com)

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