good teachers

You know you've had a good conversation with a good teacher when you come away from that conversation, with a new clarity about ideas you've been mulling over for a long time. Somehow, good teachers have the ability to draw these ideas out of you in a way that helps you see them anew, or perhaps, in a way that crystallises them somehow, so that rather than an amorphous mass of stuff, you can look at what you've been thinking about and see its structures, how it all relates. Everything suddenly seems so obvious. And not because the teacher-figure has actually taught you anything new. It's all about eliciting something that's already there, latent, perhaps unformed. It's about formation.
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i've been so lucky with my teachers and bosses. Definitely something to be deeply grateful for as this eventful-ish year draws to a close.
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saving face

So apparently this inability to admit a mistake is a Chinese cultural thing. It's about "saving face". i guess, for whatever reason, i must have missed out on that part of the Chinese Culture 101 Introductory Programme. From what i'm reading online, my attitude about making, owning up to, and apologising for mistakes is the standard Western perspective. Which, honestly, just makes more sense to me in this case. i mean, if you've made a mistake and everyone knows the mistake has been made, if you've done something wrong, if you've wronged someone, then refusing to admit it just makes you look weak and afraid. And owning up shows courage. In my view. Which apparently is the usual Western view. Apparently, Chinese people would rather lie than lose face. They would even lie when it's obvious to everyone that they're lying.
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Apparently this thing about saving face also explains why Chinese people so often refuse to just tell you directly what they think, why they avoid criticism, and instead put things in such a roundabout way that they're almost certain to be misinterpreted. They probably think that they're trying to help you "save face". So opportunities to learn and improve are never taken up simply because everyone is so focussed on "saving face".
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This explains so much.
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i think that every culture has practices and beliefs that are just plain unhealthy and need to be corrected. This obsession with saving face is definitely one of the most frustrating aspects of Chinese culture, for me.
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pet peeves

i like and respect:

• people who listen
• people who are humble (and confident) enough to acknowledge their mistakes without trying to make excuses, and apologise for them, and then try to make up for the wrongdoing if possible. 
• people who are humble (and confident) enough to acknowledge their weaknesses, and then hardworking enough and committed enough to self-improvement to figure out ways to compensate for or overcome these weaknesses.

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So yes, go figure the pet peeves.

PS:
Newly-articulated insight (which i've intuitively felt for a long time, but have only put into words, like, 10 seconds ago) -- arrogant people are often deeply insecure. Whereas people with a healthy sense of self are often also the humblest.

PPS:
Newly-articulated question: Just because someone is loud and aggressive doesn't mean they're right. The question is, what does a quiet, un-aggressive person do with an aggressive person who is wrong. Or rather, what does the quiet, un-aggressive person do with the aggressive person's wrong views / ideas / perspectives when they need to be corrected.

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lightsaber physics

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ... 

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post-christmas post

i suppose the fact that i've started getting invited to Christmas parties where i don't know a substantial majority of the other guests, says something.
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In other post-Christmas-party news. There's always so much food leftover at these things. Why??? It happens at all parties -- the ones where the hosts provide the food, and also the potluck ones. Why are we so bad at estimating how much we can finish? Someone should come up with a creative way of re-distributing this excess to the people who need it more, while still ensuring food safety and hygiene. Not me, cos i really don't think this is my dai ji at the moment. But it's just something that i'm surprised has not yet been done. i mean, talk about obvious applications of Christmas charity ...
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Ok, obviously the solution is just to cook less, or use the excess food for sandwiches etc. i guess my point is that we in the first world live such lives of excess, use up so much more than we need. And not just "we in the first world", but "we who are comfortably off in the first world". It's so easy to condemn the mega-rich for their lifestyles -- how seldom do we look at our own and ask ourselves if we're even following our own principles / values in our consumption habits ...
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when a child is born (2)

The easy thing would be to say, "i don't know why this song has been so resonant for me this Christmas" -- but we all know that good writing is never easy. The truth is that i just encountered a wonderful instance of kismet two days ago that convinced me that nothing is beyond God's grace, that even the ugliest, darkest, most apparently hopeless situation can eventually resolve itself into something that can be light, can be hope.
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Things can always change -- and not only for the worse, but also for the better. It's not just Star Wars that can lay claim to "a new hope". And so the lyrics of this song have been circling in my head ever since midnight mass last evening.
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i love this particular performance. i even love the mistake they make in the last verse -- it's the flaw that makes for perfection. i've never heard this song sung so poignantly before. So much grief and hope and yearning aching in their voices, shining in their eyes. i guess you have to have seen hell before you can know what it means to thirst for the grace of God.
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And i love that audience singalong. There's such a quiet joy about it. i like to think this is what Christmas should be about.
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when a child is born

This has always been one of my favourite Christmas songs, and Sinead O'Connor, one of my favourite singers, although i can't say i admire her (quite screwed-up) personal life as much as i admire and love her voice and singing ...
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May the love of Christ find all of us this Christmas. God knows this world needs it.
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A ray of hope flickers in the sky,
A tiny star lights up way up high.
All across the land dawns a brand new morn --
This comes to pass when a Child is born.
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A silent wish sails the seven seas,
The winds of change whisper in the trees.
And the walls of doubt, crumbled, tossed, and torn --
This comes to pass when a Child is born.
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A rosy hue settles all around.
You've got to feel you're on solid ground.
For a spell or two, no one seems forlorn --
This comes to pass when a Child is born.
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It's all a dream, an illusion now.
It must come true, sometime, soon, somehow.
All across the land dawns a brand new morn --
This comes to pass when a Child is born.
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catching the zeitgeist

The best innovations / works of art / New Stuff In General -- or rather, not 'best' but the ones that become popular -- are the ones that manage to articulate something about the "spirit of the age" that people are already feeling but have not yet articulated for themselves. Eg. Steve Jobs. The thing that made Apple great was that Steve Jobs somehow had the ability to intuitively grasp what it was that people wanted in their tech products, before they even knew they wanted it. And then he'd make it, and make it good, and sell it to them for loads and loads of money.
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This is what gives that "AHA" moment when, for example, people read about a new idea that immediately resonates.
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There's value -- definite value, possibly more value, in the long run -- in the kind of innovation that's so far ahead of its time that people and society need to catch up with it first before it can start being useful to them. But people who want something to be an immediate hit, who have no time to wait -- that's what they should be aiming at. To articulate or somehow ride on the crest of something already begun, but before it reaches the public's general consciousness.
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light

Some people are light. Wherever they go, they carry this quiet radiance that attracts others to them, regardless of politics, worldview, culture, ideology. Once your life has been touched by one of them, the world begins to look like a different place. It's such a pity that these people are so few, and that it's so easy to forget the light once it has gone out of your life for a while. i do believe that this is the light of God -- a light that we cannot manufacture for ourselves, and that has to be given as a gift. Is it too much to ask that this light will shine in me as well?
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perfect solution

It's funny how life works out. So apparently, there is at least one young-ish writer out there who looks at the way my writing life has turned out, and who thinks that i've found "the perfect solution" (in her own words) to the issue of how to make time for writing amidst the demands of life here in Sg. To be honest, the very thought of someone out there envying my life is completely hilarious. So of course, i had to disabuse her of that notion. No. There is no "perfect solution"; and even though i did have to make choices to get to this place (that is by no means a perfect solution, not by a long shot), the options available to me were given to me not because of any plotting and scheming i had done, but rather by chance, or to put it another way, by grace and God's generosity.
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Everything has a trade-off, comes at a price. And some things are truly given, and come not by our own effort alone. i guess, at the end of the day, it's just about knowing how to see what you've been given as a gift, and then making choices. It's about how much you value different things. Priorities, and learning to be OK with paying the price for whatever it is that you value the most.
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nature red in tooth and claw

So much fighting all over the world right now. Well, maybe not just right now. Human beings have been fighting since time immemorial. It's just that the noise right now seems particularly loud and dissonant. Everyone scrambling to be heard, to get their will -- their vision of how things should be -- enacted in the world of actions and decisions. Sometimes it seems like human life is nothing more than a bunch of egos fighting against each other. Everyone trying to get their way.
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Maybe that was part of the attraction of FY for me. There in the middle of some obscure mountainous region in Taiwan that most Taiwanese people had never even heard of, it felt as if all the noise and conflict was just far, far away. Escapist? Perhaps. Probably. But perhaps also necessary, once in a while? It's so easy to lose yourself in the noise, in the contest of wills. It's nice sometimes to just be away from other people's noise.
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afterword

Here's the absolutely gorgeous 'Afterword' from the 2015 Picador Classic edition of William Fiennes's The Snow Geese. (How many times have i raved about this book already in just the last 6 months???)
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It's so inspiring -- and not just a writerly kind of inspiration either. It's an utterly human kind of inspiration -- inspiring in the way that makes you think, i want to be the kind of person who can say something like that, who can think in that way, see the world with those eyes, live life with that kind of spirit.
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‘Illness is an imaginative as well as a physical constriction, and I wanted to spread my wings. I thought about home, and about the different ways in which that sense of belonging might be conceived. I thought about how our longing for the familiar, the known, exists alongside our appetite for the new, the undiscovered, and how we all have to negotiate a path through these contrary impulses. I watched the swifts on their exhilarating vespers flights. I dreamed of a return to vitality and independence. I imagined an adventure, a quest. And so a book was born out of the confluence of many streams of thought and experience -- home, illness, recovery, poems, nature, science, love of language, and a great longing to drink down the world in gulps after such a period of deprivation.
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No elaborate plans. It was only by writing and rewriting that I found myself at home in a form -- a sort of poetic form, in which the images would do most of the talking. Similarly, a structure emerged -- eight movements, which I thought of as an octave, a scale that begins and ends with the same note: home. The third movement set entirely on a bus, the sixth entirely on a train. The rhymes of birds and words ghosting between the lines, and echoes sounding throughout, a pattern of images, so that a book about nostalgia would always be remembering itself ... I ddin’t worry about what kind of book I was writing. I didn’t understand the post-publication pressure to locate The Snow Geese in a particular category or genre. It’s not as if we inherit six or seven templates into which we have to shoehorn our way of seeing the world. I’ve loved seeing the book appear in different provinces of bookshops, and still relish the fact that a friend in New York found it in the Pet Care section.
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I remember the kindness so many people showed me along the way. And how that generosity included stories: Jean’s forehand winner, Rollin’s joyful flight under the Golden Gate, the Viking’s skirmishing with widows, Marshall’s wild garlic, Sam’s rivermouth swim with beluga whales. I remember writing in the small back room of a friend’s house, the table shuddering beneath my forearms whenever the washing machine entered the spin cycle. Or in the flat in Gospel Oak, hearing the playground clamour of a nearby primary school dissolve into the sound of geese roosting on a private lake. For days, a symphony orchestra and full chorus rehearsed Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in All Hallows Church across the road, the cases of double basses standing outside the door like sentries, or smokers. I was often anxious, even afraid. Sometimes writing seemed little more than an arena for self-criticism. But even then I felt a strange rightness about The Snow Geese, as if there’d been a hole in the universe the exact size of that book, waiting to be filled.’
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joy

Permission to speak in a way that may possibly backfire on me and force me to eat humble pie at some point in the future, Sir!
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Some writers don't like talking about their work-in-progress because they're afraid that doing so will somehow jinx it. i have always avoided saying too much about my writing online, and i will never put up anything here that i actually intend to publish -- because plagiarism, because intellectual property, because human nature.
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But can i just say right now, that working on this book project is turning out to be possibly the most exhilarating thing i've ever done -- scary, yes, frustrating too, especially since i have still not found the 'voice' nor the 'narrative structure' that i need to say what i want to say. Yet for some reason the journey so far has been absolutely joy-filled in a deep and fundamental way. It makes me want to get up in the morning and go to "work". i hope all this works out into something that will actually be readable and that i won't have to take back these words at the end of the next half-year.
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the trouble with goodness

The trouble with goodness is that it is so hard to write well about it. So many try -- especially people who have experienced it, who want to share it with the world -- but so often, the result is inadequate, prone to annoy rather than to attract. At least, that's how i feel about a lot of writing that tries to be transcendent. Simply put, it fails.
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The few writers i've come across who do it well: Marilynne Robinson, Christian Wiman, Marie Howe, William Fiennes, Arthur Yap (in that gorgeous gorgeous poem, 'your goodness')...
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Can't quite put my finger on what makes the difference between the successes and the failures. i do think that the failures have this annoying tone that ... i dunno. Just sounds (to me) so flaccid and flabby and washed-out. Too easy, i think. There's no tension in it. And i don't mean an unhappy tension. i mean the taut tensile strength of a violin string that enables it to sing. It's what happens when the technical skill of the writer doesn't match up to the ambition of the writing. And if that sounds mean, i wonder if perhaps it's kinder than saying that it's what happens when the writer's life experience has not been searing enough to ready him/her for the difficult task of writing about goodness.
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peer pressure

One thing i've never been able to empathise with, is the way people feel they have to follow what other people around them are doing. Basically, this idea that "I have to do it, cos everybody else is doing it". Or even worse, "I do it because everyone else does it" -- at least, "I have to do it" signals the beginning of some personal preference in the matter, one that has been suppressed, of course, but the point is that there is some inkling of an individual in there somewhere. Much worse, i think, to be so unaware of one's self as to not even think there can be any (better) reason for choosing to do or not do something.
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i've always found it really hard to understand. Why the heck would anyone subject themselves to doing something they didn't really like, just because it happens to be popular, or because it happens to be what everybody else approves of and thinks is cool?
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i realised several years back that most people don't think this way (even if they'd rather not admit it), and that the reason i do, is probaby .... drumroll .... due to my parents. Yes, blame the parents. Like blaming the government. Easy, convenient. But in this case, it's not blame, but thanks. It's because of the way they brought me up (they were strict and thrifty -- they provided for me well and comfortably, but didn't give me the trendy toys and clothes that my schoolmates were given) that i learnt to stand on my own and not feel like i had to be the same as my peers. Well, that, and probably also a personality that is innately introverted. i've never actually been very much affected by peer pressure at all -- meaning, i don't even feel it most of the time, because i was never even in the race to look cool and fit in to begin with.
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This has been incredibly useful for me, i feel. It's what has helped me maintain a certain degree of objectivity in the way i look at the things that so many Singaporeans value so much -- sometimes, over-value. It's helped me to hear, quite clearly i think, the inner voice that tells me who i am, and what i stand for. This is not always a comfortable thing. But in the long run, it's always a good thing -- because the truth will set you free. i've felt free to make choices that are right for me, rather than feeling as if i had to live up to external expectations that did not fit who i am. So many people, it seems, have midlife crises in which they realise that who they are, is not who they want to be; or in which it dawns on them that what they've been doing all their lives, is not the thing that they really want to do. i don't think i'll be exempted from this necessary rite of passage -- but i do think that my midlife crisis will probably be about other issues, rather than the problem of discovering that you've been living someone else's life all along.
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i like to think it's also helped with my writing. It's good for an artist to be able to resist trends -- or rather, to be absolutely aware of what the trends are, and to make sure that you don't just follow them mindlessly. i think that trend-following has to be done with deliberation, if at all. Especially in a place as small as Singapore ...
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Of course some might think this could have its more problematic side as well. Being un-trendy means that, erm, you'll probably never really fit in with the in crowd. But i confess rather an indifference to the in crowd anyway. i mean, they're nice as individuals, and i usually like hanging out with them one-on-one and having real conversations with them, but crowds have never really been my thing. Let me just stick to tea and a good book, thank you very much.
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So yes. i'm so grateful for my childhood of no Barbie dolls, no Nike shoes, no Levis jeans. For a childhood in which i was free to become the person i am today. My parents did get some things right, after all.
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