Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Luscious Lips........


We have them, coming in different shapes, sizes, angles and colours. We use them for kissing, for speech, and for the ‘natural completion’ of our facial features. Like skin colour, the variety of visual differences, and also the sounds coming out from them, proves to be a criteria for our first-impression judging.

In this corner of the world, where millions of lives survive upon the shared air, water and land, English could be said to be widely spoken. And when English is spoken in any of the eleven nations in this region, it carries its own unique localized flavour with it. Welcome to South East Asia, a combination of colours, smells, flavours and sounds, ranging from jungles and plains to archipelagos and volcanoes. With each locality, comes the differences that could be heard a few kilometers away, sometimes beyond a fenced-border, other times beyond a bridge or two.

This difference requires embracing and understanding, nurturing and commitment, yet many of us chose to ignore the wider picture, by living in our self absorbing and ignorant little circle. In all eleven nations of South East Asia, English could be heard, and in all eleven nations, the accent differs between borders. This difference serves within the framework for our first-impression judging of the other person, and usually serves as one’s best way to determine if the other person would be one that could fit snuggly and comfortably within one’s little circle, or not. Appreciate each other’s accents, and one may have the chance to slowly but eventually better understand the reasons and unchangeable realities that mold each and everyone of us into who and what we are. We are not merely born guilty, we are also born innocent, while there is no balance of the two at birth, there is the choice for better balancing ourselves with age and maturity.

Words are not powerful enough to move a person, it is the person’s own inner-personality and desire that could usefully change his or her decisions in regard to the choice of paths, and how to travel these self-selected paths.

Ambiguity allows imagination, these words of mine are not dictated in a manner for my personal views to be understood, they are for the reader to assume and imagine what my words could mean to them.

Saturday, July 7, 2007

who and what are you?



I am born British, Hong Kongese, and Singaporean (by passport at birth, by paternal blood, and by locality of birth, respectively). I am educated by the British style both in Singapore and Canada. I speak Cantonese with family, Mandarin and English with friends. My skin is yellow, my eyes are brown, and my hair is black. I am who I am, you are who you are, but we are who we choose to be.

You would never be able to persuade everyone to believe who you are, nor would you be able to change everyone to follow your preferred ways. What you could do, would be to make the difference within the permitted framework, and if that fails, no one would restrict you from leaving where you ‘used’ to call home, for that new faraway ‘freer’ place you may eventually call home, simply because we know that you would never be able to change your original home to suit yourself, and you choose to leave because you are not able to ‘live with it’, then it only becomes obvious that your ability to adapt is nonexistent, and if it IS indeed nonexistent, then how the hell would you expect yourself to adapt in your ‘future chosen home’?

Ten years on, the two wars that helped create the world’s greatest colonial empire lost her second last colony back to one of our contemporary world’s fastest growing nation, only to lose her last colony to the same nation two years later.

We love freedom, many of us fight for freedom, when it is taken from us, we request for it back, when we feel like we lack it, we demand it. Heroin’s banned, but yet the colonial rule was justified upon that, freedom striped from ancestors based upon the fact that they were weaker, and once the ‘ink dried’, indoctrination of democracy based upon an unjust war was instilled. Over a hundred years has passed, the belief in democracy reeking like any other medium created by man for the sole purpose of power and control over others, while some die for it, others die against it, which ever side it be, the difference is this: nothing.

Don’t fight for what you believe to be right, nor fight those who you believe to be wrong, don’t be “anti-something”, because someone else would be “anti-you”, you look very different from me, but I am very much the same person as you.

The oblivious breeds naivety, for if we reject what and who we are, then our beliefs would be worth ash, but if we could learn to embrace and be proud, then our short mortal life would be worth more than any after-death-promises.

Stand tall, be proud, breath my air while I drink your water, we aren’t many, we are one.

Taiwan, Taiwan, where are you?