A new idea, and omg snow

Winter is coming

So yep, it’s snowing. I’m not sure if that small picture can show the slurry white stuff that’s floating around all over the place, but snow is a bitch to try and capture on camera especially in mid air. Doesn’t help that everything is all grey too. At any rate, looks like it’s time to bust out the really warm clothing, start drinking more alcohol to stay warm and go buy footwear that isn’t going to get soaked and eat your toes.

In other, happier news, I have finally sat down and finished something that I’ve kept promising myself. I’m just calling it a voice log at this point, but the genesis of the idea was with good friends in school for a radio program. Of course this isn’t quite there yet, but I’m hoping it is a good start, at very least. Took me about a night to come up with the text and a couple of tries to record everything. Because I am hopeless with audio editing, I had to do everything in one take. Then there was the challenge of finding an audio hosting service that you could embed onto wordpress, and I don’t think i was very successful in that. I’ve done the next best thing, and all you need to do is click on the link below.

Voice Log 1 - <—- yes, this link

Leave Einstien Alone

is most amused

Quite recently, I’ve been getting quite a bit of chain “evangelical” emails that use a certain scene of Einstein’s youth to suggest firstly that a) the most eminent scientist of the modern world was religious and that b) God exists. The scene (and now there is even a video on it) involves a young Einstein challenging his professor’s assertions that in order to create evil (which as a matter of fact exists) God himself has to be evil. Young Einstein then goes on challenge the need for a good/evil dichotomy stating that God and evil can be explained as energy is, where cold is the lack of heat rather than something onto itself.

This is more than mildly annoying not merely I’m not even sure if these events even happened (I welcome to be corrected on this), but more so because it is the religious lobby hijacking a man whose religious beliefs aren’t even clear as “one of their own.” Einstein was almost certainly not religious in the conventional sense of going to church and praying. While he has famously made many quotes that use the word “God,” this hardly indicates anything since numerous people use God’s name in vain when they stub their toes on the pavement and doing so does not make these toe stubbers any more religiously inclined. Einstein has however rejected the idea of a personal god, made many less than flattering comments about the church, and called religion “childish and primitive.”

Einstein can be described as religious only in the sense that he admired the fundemental structure and workings of the universe as only a person of his genius could.

So really, stop circulating that nonsense. If anything it points to a weakness of faith that almost requires pandering to a dead scientist that never supported the cause of most modern monotheistic religions anyway! What has Einstein got to say that the Bible and your faith doesn’t already tell you? Is your belief so pathetically limp that it requires the words of someone famous to support?

And of course, as I did argue with someone who sent me the email, some people are going to claim that “it isn’t about einstein, it is about the message.” Which is really as intellectually dishonest as they come. The same conversation could be happening in a class room right now and yet it does not matter, because it does not have the name of one of the most intelligent men to ever lived. In fact all the incarnations of the story make sure you know who the child speaking is, telling your that it is Einstein right at the end, in bold letters and clear wording. So at the end of the day, it is completely about Einstein, and not the message.

In many ways that is highly pitiable, mostly because the message itself is some interesting food for thought and would have been far more accessible if it could stand on its own merits.

Being Eurasian

Writing this comes as a bit of a rude shock, since the idea of writing about mixed ethnicity has always been something I found to be immensely boring and predictable (Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston being some of the chief culprits). There is always a person of a minority ethnicity stuck in an environment that is otherwise homogenous. Then there is always The Mother with whom our character has the most bizarre love/hate relationship. Expand this idea for enough pages and suddenly you have “immigrant literature.”

Of course as fate has conspired, I now have to level all that same critique at myself. I level some blame at my uniquely Singaporean upbringing, which while publicly trying to cast race as a non-issue is almost ludicrously obsessed with the idea of race, from having it as a mandatory field in most forms as well as the ever racially correct representation on television shows and posters. If anything, growing up on our little island has made me all the more racially conscious, each time I fill up “others” on those blasted forms a small pinch on my racial consciousness to ensure that it was wide awake.

On top of state fumbling of racial issues, there is the general bizarreness of growing up in a Eurasian family. My late grandmother was the consummate anglophile, who claimed that Queen Victoria had given her a spoon. My mother, being hundred percent Chinese, was the suffering daughter-in-law, ever at odds (in that discreet passive aggressive way families always employ) with my grandmother who would at times gleefully proclaimed the inadequacies of being Chinese. Add on to this bizarre duet the fact that my grandmother was Chinese herself having married my Eurasian grandfather, and one might get a gist of the sort of family politics I grew up in.

And so, childhood was a muddled series of tales about “my friend Elizabeth” and the ever present reminder that YOU ARE MORE CHINESE THAN ANYTHING ELSE! People in Singapore like to think that Eurasians have some sort of definitive culture, down to those tacky “ethnic costumes” that get paraded around during National Day. That isn’t true, and those ethnic costumes are linked to only a particular group of Eurasians of a certain European descent.

More accurately, I grew up as a hyper-westernised Asian, who along the way tried his best to reject Chinese tradition (seeing as we only celebrated it 2-3 days a year during lunar new year) but eventually came to realise that it was not worth the effort (especially considering the resulting nagging the mother would deliver). Eventually you came to realise that you weren’t really Chinese, and you should be proud of that fact. I learned to be proud of being Eurasian, although what that meant no one was ever really clear. And in the same way, it annoyed me to no end when a person’s first reaction to me saying that I was Eurasian was “really?! But you totally look Chinese/Malay!” which I cannot help but take as a minor insult. I know there’s no small amount of racial vanity going on, but who isn’t to some extent vain about their ethnicity? Telling a Chinese person they look Filipino right after they said they are Chinese certainly isn’t going to be the most polite comment to make.

And now, I find myself walking around in Europe, the ancestral continent that isn’t. And it is readily apparent that just like Singapore, I was not ethnically at home. To Europeans I looked Asian (there has been some creative guesses at me being Japanese, Korean and even Vietnamese). It seems that here too, a Eurasian would be doomed to walk a cultureless in-between or neither here nor there (now thankfully without forms asking about my race).

To my Chinese friends, this will undeniably sound like a long and unwieldy rant that makes no sense, at best. At worst, it will sound like some anglophile raving about how I wished my eyes were blue and my hair was blonde. It is difficult to deny that there might be some of that in here. But it goes far beyond that, pertaining on a far deeper level to the idea of racial identity. Chinese people can (and do) often wish they were another race. My grandmother had convinced herself that she was partially white. But the main thing is that even while wishing they were another race, they would always be able to remain as Chinese people. When Chinese culture comes back in the vogue (if that ever happens), then they would have something to be proud about. You have your festivals, customs and traditions to call your own.

Contrast that to the nothing of not truly belonging anywhere. Yes, it can be a happy independence, to not be bound by the shackles of tradition. But no man can be an island, and in the quiet hours, I do long for the supportive arm of tradition, even if it may turn out to be bondage. I now realise why Amy Tan and Kingston were so (horrifyingly) rambling all over the place about ethnicity. It is a extremely uncoorporative idea, filling at once multiple themes and streams of thought, defying any effort at being presented as a cohesive whole. Even now my brain quietly argues about whether tradition is necessarily tied to race in the first place. Yet, even with all these inconsitencies, the duplicity of feelings, you cannot help but want to write about this ever present spectre of race that looms over you, a dark cloud that is impossible to avoid.

The Joke that is Citizen Journalism

Or rather, citizen reporting, since as of late everything since to involves citizens reporting on each other. Just yesterday I was taking the train home, when a young Malay man opposite me decided to squat down and sit on the floor. To my quite abject horror, my first reaction was to whip out my camera and send the picture of this unfortunate person to the Straits Times for people to “tut tut” over under the accusing headline of “WHERE ARE OUR COURTEOUS COMMUTERS.”

I am horrified, because I have become victim to an especially damning sort of social conditioning. Stand there in the moving train, I could have done several things. First, the option was always there to ignore him. Second, I could tell him to stand up. And third, of course, I could send his picture to STOMP, providing our news-starved newspapers with a tidbit to publish. The choices beget the question: if I could not bother to tell him to stop, was he really bothering me in the first place?

With all the spin peeled back, citizen journalism as heralded by the likes of STOMP is nothing more that a perpetuation of a school yard mentality to “tell the teacher.” Think of all the major stories “broke” by citizen blogs. A large amount of them involve people telling on other people. The current H1N1 pendamic is no different. Internet users hide behind their sactuaries of anominity and freely criticise potential carriers as being irresponsible. The lable of irresponsibility carries as much irony as does the term citizen journalism.

The Smoking Democracy

Today, the United States of America House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to give the government unprecedented control over the smoking industry. Officials can now limited the amount of nicotine in cigarettes, prohibit sale, and of course, mandate compulsory warning signs on each packet.

To any Singaporean, this kind of stuff is old hat. Possibly in the near future, the establishment will gratingly remind us of this, trumpeting our island as yet again being a world leader that even the decadent liberals of the Western world eventually follow. Considering briefly that in Singapore, smokers are subjected to being taxed out of their nose, bombarded with ceaseless campaigns of blacked brains and lungs and most iconic, being confined to a small yellow box with others of their ilk. We easily bring all this to mind, and yet seldom give pause to brood a while perhaps, on the question of “Why?”

The short answer is that in a democratic society, the majority has spoken (as has the house of representatives in the USA), and so sets down the law. If you are satisfied with this answer, then democracy for you is as simple and as crude as mob rule. Over the course of its development, countless politicians have warned against the degeneration of democracy into the tyranny of the majority. So the answer that “because it’s the popular opinion” is woefully insufficient.

Of course, the majority element cannot be downplayed, but the development of the modern democracy has led to a multitude of institutions that specifically guard against simple pure majority rule. A great deal has been said about Human Rights and Constitutionality of the acts of the government generally, but in Singapore there seems to be too little being said on the subject of smoking. For while the people affected are smokers, the principle goes beyond the mere pack a day.

Without a doubt, smoking is a dangerous hobby to indulge it. It creates numerous, documented health problems to both the person and the people around him. But then again, smoking isn’t unique in this regard. A large portion of the way we live involves danger and risk. Drinking, gambling, just driving on the roads, or even eating a particular kind of food, can all be little nails into the coffin of our lives. So, if we are indeed going to herd smokers like animals into yellow boxes, depict them as decaying zombies on TV and so on, we better be asking the right questions along the way. Are these actions giving due regard to the rights of smokers? How much government intervention do we want into dictating what is the “good life”? Is this good life even possible, or do we just chose which way we are going to die?

For the crucial issue is: what happens to smoking can happing to anything and everything else. Setting the precedent for the easy incrusion by the government into our private lives simple paves the way for future meddelling as the governement sees fit. Even if the government retains popular support, democracy by then would have truly gone up in smoke.