night cycling and lessons learnt: something about chinese, dialects, and speaking English

Here, I'm not going to add the photoes that materialised from the night cycling. I hope the photographer would upload the photoes on facebook!

Rather, what I'm going to do here is to mention the issues I've discovered from night cycling.

I've realised there is a much more serious chasm between generations, one that is worse than I expected. The kids born after the 1985s can barely understand our parent's generation born in the midst of the post-war boom. How did I know this? You know something is wrong when kids can't communicate with the chinese/dialect-speaking auntie who is taking your order at the restaurant or kopitiam. Something is seriously dead wrong.

I discovered this revelation while I was night-cycling, and we entered a dim sum restaurant that I presumed was quite traditional. When your friend has to look at the English translation of the dishes...

I think this goes beyond any talk about class warfare. It is simply this: one generation cannot understand the other, and because of this, Singapore is on the verge of losing something very precious: our past. Perhaps the govt is trying to stamp out all visages of the past in order to preserve its image of modernity - which is another figment of imagination dreamt up by a certain founding father.

There is a lack of a missing savviness, some kind of street sense, that ability to mix around with other people of different socio-economic status. From the nightcycling, I observed that Singapore is really divided not between the haves and have-nots, but rather, between the English speakers and non-English speakers. The talk about income inequality I think, is really about those who can speak English well enough to compete in the global market, and the rest of Singaporeans who have done not-so-well in English. It really just boils down to the language divide.

There is however, a silver lining in all of these. The fact that everyone has a chance to learn English and to potentially participate in the global market despite the background - that in itself is a miracle. I look at my sec 4 class again, and easily more than half have made it either to a local university or elsewhere. Yet, Geylang Methodist Secondary when we came in was just like a neighbourhood school, not unlike other secondary school, with its fair share of troubled kids in a rough neighbourhood (it was geylang, after all). Yet in that secondary school, there is a class where more than half - in fact, almost all of the kids are studying in a university, despite the middle-class background, and having parents who might not have even spoken a proper word of English ever in their whole lives (my own parents were primary school dropout). My class is a testament of how neighbourhood kids can eventually grow up to take on the world, and it is a demonstration of nothing less than the success of meritocracy in ensuring social mobility - that our birth does not decide our destiny, that it is our own choice that decide where we end up, whether we choose to persevere in our own learning...

So between the understanding of our past - of our parent's generation, and the ability to hold our futures in our own hands - how do we choose? I would like to say that these choices are not at all mutually exclusive, that a person who eats potato can also learn to appreciate the diversity of cultures out there. I write English essays, but I also can converse with childhood friends in Chinese, and army friends in Hokkien if I choose to. My culture is part of my DNA - but it doesn't determine fully who I am. I can flow between these different places, and to think of it now, these kinds of cultural legacies that are only transmitted through families - these are gifts. That my neighbourhood friends have gone so far off on the other side and chosen to live predominantly in their English-speaking universe - well I'll just be agnostic about that.

But it just seems very weird that my neighbourhood friends can't exactly hang out speaking hokkien or chinese, despite their backgrounds in middle-class families, and most of them would also be chinese speaking at home... On a lighter side, it is something quite awkward when you go to a chinese restaurant and the auntie speaks chinese and hokkien....

something to mull about...

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Singapore the Nonexistent Nation

Dec 28 was the last youth service.

Anyway, the more I think about it, it didn't make any real sense to have a third youth service. It would only make sense if there was a different message, or repackaged for the youth. And the definition of youth is well, kinda irrelevant too. And its about the demographics too. There are simply less young people than before.

Anyway, I attended the service on december 28th, and I was glad I did, because Pastor Khong talked about something that struck me. He said something like, 'its a miracle that Singapore exists!' And he went on saying that Singapore has no reason to exist politically, economically, demographically, because of the limited size and population of Singapore. And he went on saying that it is God's miracle that Singapore exists and prospers.

That thought really struck me. And since I'm on this theme of the Singapore and the future, and thinking of writing something long about it, I thought that that words, Singapore, non-existent, miracle should somehow be together. So I thought something along the lines of, Singapore: Continuing the Miracle of the Non-Existent Nation.

I wonder if it might work. Still haven't even jot down a single word about all the futures that I want to write about it. But yeah. I guess all these conceptualisations are just a start. Its difficult to predict anything, especially for the future - goes that wise saying.

Hmm..

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Steven Chu is Obama's secretary of energy!

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i'm a... NOKIA... fan

This might be surprising, given that I have an iPod Touch and I have a MacBook...

The reason why I'm a slight fan of Nokia is because of its vision of mobile computing that it has, in reimagining how mobile devices might be like in the future. That said, I am also interested in how Apple might be having implementing its future designs. I am also, looking forward to the MacTouch or MacBook Touch sometime in the future.

I'm not really a brand fan - I'm just interested in how these companies are pushing the frontiers of consumer technology and the evolution of user interface, and of course, how technology will integrate with everyday life and reimagining the possibilities of computing.

I'm really wondering, if we already have the capabilities of supercomputers of a few decades back... oh yeah. i live in the information age... what that means...? we are still figuring out the consequences of all of these, i suppose. it took a almost a century to realise that the industrial revolution had consequences for the environment. How long will it take for us to realise the consequences of living in an information age? hmm...

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