The last two days, I attended a “City Stories” workshop organised as part of the “City of Stories” series by The British Council. Idiot that I am, I did not read the workshop description too carefully but submitted an application. I was one of the fortunate ones to get a place in the workshop. Fortunate because the workshop – in fact, all the workshops in the series – was over-subscribed. So, yes, I was one of the fortunate ones, not just to get a place in the workshop, but it was my first choice of workshop.
When I told a writing friend I got a place, she said something along the lines of “how exciting, especially the walking tour.”
Walking tour?
A couple of other friends, including one who also got a place in the workshop, confirmed the walking tour.
Walking tour?
I went back to read the workshop description. (Yes, this is a little like getting a new gadget and trying to get it to work before finally taking out the user’s manual to read it. But I digress … )
Yes, there was a walking tour in the workshop, but it would be on the second day, not first.
The first day was spent in the cool confines of the British Council examination room. The 12 of us – 13, including the workshop leader; 14, including the course facilitator who sometimes sat in – took up a section of the huge room, and all day, other people would walk in to go into one of the other rooms connected to this huge room.
The first day, we wrote a lot, and we read some – not just read, but would take turns to read aloud, passages from selected extracts about cities, and writings about cities, for discussion.
There was some talk about the the walking tour the next day, particularly if we were all going out in a group, in pairs, or alone.
Came the second day, and I was pretty nervous. Maybe I should beg to be exempted from it. I have a valid health reason.
The first writing exercise was just to loosen us up, with various questions that included “What can I see in front of me?”, “What can I hear?”, “What can I taste?”, “What can I feel?”
This is what I wrote for the last question …
“I can feel anticipation – of the walk ahead … anxiety – where will I be sent, and can I handle it, will I do a good job of the walk?”
As it turned out, we were given various guidelines for the walk, and a map of KL, but they were just guidelines. We didn’t have to follow the guidelines. Something went off inside me when I heard of the places we could visit for the walk.
Something awoke in me. Something I’d not remembered for more than 30 years. Something I plan to be writing about from now on, writing much more about. Perhaps to make up for the 30 over years of neglect.
My anxiety was unfounded. I enjoyed the walk. Although the morning had been very hot, by the time of the walk, it was cooler, or maybe it felt that way because I was enjoying myself so much. But I did look up at the sky and thinking it wasn’t blazing searing hot.
By the end of the day, I had to rush off to meet my cousin in Petaling Jaya. I could feel the beginning of what I’d been worrying about. I offered up a prayer that I would not feel sick during the train ride, which was a possibility as I would be in a small space with other, possibly sweaty, bodies. But I arrived at the destination station without wanting to throw up, offered up a word of thanks as soon as I stepped out of the train, and picked up my car to go and meet my cousin.
He’d brought his mother to visit my mother. It was a lovely visit, two old friends touching hands, and my aunt, who has sight problems, commenting “she doesn’t feel thin.”
I was feeling well enough to go on to the next part of my evening’s plans – dinner at 1 Utama. I ate at Old Asia, and had the Vietnamese (something) shoulder of lamb. I told myself to enjoy it (which I did), even though I might throw it up later.
Later, at home, the thing of the back of my head was pushing itself forward. But I was home, a safe place to feel ill in.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I woke and got up for a little while, and knew I had to take a couple of Ponstans and take a cold pack back to bed with me.
This morning, I didn’t feel too good, but I was at home, and decided to take it easy for the day. It’s one of the many perks of working from home, not having to go into an office, and being able to re-arrange my schedule to accommodate my body.
I was out in the sun yesterday, it was part of a workshop. I’m not supposed to be out in the sun, especially not towards the middle of the day with the sun at its damnest hottest. I was laid low the day after (today), but it was worth it. I’m glad I didn’t beg to be exempted from the walking tour; otherwise, I would not have been reminded of a very important part of my childhood that I somehow have put aside and never tapped into for my writing.
I am not supposed to be out in the sun because of migraine tendencies and also because of my lupus. Today was the price paid for yesterday’s walking tour, but heck, it was worth it!
My friend Judy visited the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden yesterday. She wrote to say she had a great time but she didn’t bring her camera. “I wasn’t sure if they were allowed and didn’t remember from the past….didn’t want to take the chance since they check your bags before you enter MSG and confiscate stuff. Anyway, I was probably the only person there without one.”
I replied to say that she needed to get a cameraphone. “Then, at least, you will have some sort of camera with you all the time.”
I know my photographer friends are rolling their eyes right now. A cameraphone?
Yes, a cameraphone. At least you’ll have something to capture the moment. The picture may not be award-winning, but when you look at it weeks, months or years later, you will be reminded of that particular moment. More than just the image within the frame, the picture taken by a cameraphone will bring back the sounds and the smells from that particular day when you’d snapped that picture. When you look at that cameraphone image, you will not think how wonderful the lighting was, or how striking the angle; instead, you will be reminded of how your handphone1 has a camera so that you managed to capture a picture of the Best in Show winner lifting his leg to pee on the cup.
Or maybe like me, the pictures remind you of how the battery in your regular camera died at the wrong moment but the camera in your handphone saved the day.
Yes, it happened to me. I was visiting the giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo in November 2006. While riding the Skyfari, I aimed my camera at the giant panda exhibit below, all ready to take an aerial shot when I saw the low battery warning on the display screen. Next thing I knew, the shutter button froze and the camera went blank on me.
That was it, I thought to myself. No pictures of mama Bai Yun and her cub Su Lin, which I hadn’t taken as they weren’t together when I visited earlier that day. I wandered around the other exhibits. At the polar bear exhibit, I saw someone hold up a phone, and I almost exclaimed out loud.
My handphone, my handphone has a camera! I thought as I took it2 out, turned it on its side, slid open the lens cover and and aimed at one of the polar bears.
And so that was how I managed to capture some mother-and-daughter moments that late November afternoon at the San Diego Zoo. I know the quality’s not great, but they are precious reminders that I was there and saw my giant panda family.
1handphone – that’s what we call it in Malaysia; elsewhere in the world, I think it’s also called a mobile or a cellphone 2it – my handphone is the Sony Ericsson K750i, not the latest, but it works for me
Malaysian holidays are pretty well spread out throughout the year, with a day for almost every month, except towards the end of the year when there’s a concentration of holidays. In fact, today, the 15th day of Chinese New Year (also called Lunar New Year) marks the end of the festive holiday “season” in Malaysia that began with the Muslim Hari Raya Puasa at the beginning of October 2008, and included Deepavali (Hindu “Festival of Lights”), Christmas, (Western) New Year and Chinese (Lunar) New Year.
By “season”, I don’t mean a long stretch of vacation time uninterrupted by work. Malaysian holidays (either “national” enjoyed by everyone in the country, or “state” enjoyed only by people in a particular state that celebrates that holiday) are usually just one day or at most two. The one-day holidays would be Christmas, (Western) New Year, a Sultan’s (head of State) birthday, etc. But Hari Raya Puasa is a 2-day holiday; so, too, is Chinese New Year. That’s when offices and schools close for a “break”.
These holidays are given by the Government and are usually called “public” holidays, even though there are some that are only for people of specific states (in which case they are called “state” holidays), but generally, all Government given holidays are known as public holidays.
As noted earlier, before I interrupted myself, the longest stretch is towards the latter part of the year, from around October through to January or February the following year. It feels like a long stretch because often, we’re just back at work before it’s time for another public holiday.
Such holidays are often turned into long weekends, altho this is not collectively enjoyed by everyone, but only by those who decide to create the long weekends by taking time off between a holiday and a weekend (but only if they feel their workload is light enough and they have enough vacation days to do so). So, if there’s a holiday on a Tuesday, they might take time off on the Monday in-between and thus have a 4-day break (Saturday – Tuesday) instead of just one day (Tuesday). This can also happen if a holiday falls on a Thursday; it can even happen if a holiday falls on a Wednesday, and people apply for either Monday and Tuesday, to extend the previous weekend, or Thursday and Friday, to go into the coming weekend.
All this may sound confusing to a non-Malaysian, but it’s pretty much second nature to Malaysians. It’s all part of time management.
It gets more interesting if holidays are close enough to create even longer holidays. There’s a recent example. The Chinese New Year holidays this year fell on 26 and 27 January. There was a smaller public holiday on 1 February – Federal Territory Day, enjoyed by people living in various FTs, including Kuala Lumpur, the capital. Most people returned to work on the 28th, but some living in one of the FTs took time off on the 28th, 29th and 30th, and ended up having an 8-day break, enough to go away for an overseas tour or something.
There’s more. When a holiday falls on a Sunday, the next day is a replacement holiday. 1 February was a Sunday, which made 2 February a holiday, too, which meant those who carved out the 8-day break from the two holidays returned to work only on 3 February. Actually, it was a 10-day break, because 24 and 25 January, the two days before Chinese New Year, fell on a weekend.
There’s actually a reason for all these extended holidays at the end of the year. Most 9-to-5 office workers have to clear their vacation days by the end of the year (some are allowed to clear the days by the end of the following first quarter, or the end of January in the new year, which they do because they usually don’t get compensated if they don’t), so the various holidays at that time of year allow them to clear their vacation days, and string together a longer break between public holidays.
Today, 9 February, is also a holiday, for most of the country. Today’s holiday is for Thaipusam, a Hindu religious day that features pilgrimages and the performance of thanksgiving rites for vows fulfilled. However, not many people took time off on the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th for an even longer break. Well, maybe some did.
After today, the next public holiday is on 9 March, to celebrate the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. And after that, it’s 6 weeks to the next public holiday, which is Labour Day on 1 May.
While most people take extended holidays at the end of the year, I used to take mine at a different time. When I was working, there were years when Labour Day and the Buddhist Vesak Day holidays fell close enough (usually within a week of each other) for me to take time off between them and fly off for my annual vacation somewhere. But that was just me.
I found this article through Richard’s Notes, which I found very interesting as the topic is one that is very close to my heart.
The article is long – and at times, winding – and I have to confess to not having read every word of it. But what I got out it, helped me to know I am not alone in reading ebooks.
First off the bat, John Siracusa gives quite a bit of space to one of the pioneers of the ebook business – Peanut Press – and its evolution through various owners, including Palm Digital Media which employed him in 2002 to develop their web store. Peanut Press – which went on to become PalmReader and eReader, a name it still uses today – was the first ebook company I bought from, and which I still buy my ebooks from until today. So it was nice to read about the company’s history, so to speak.
Siracusa also discusses the “baggage” carried by ebooks as the electronic cousin of the printed book – the word “ebook” is actually meant to refer to the content, while the print version, “book”, refers to both the content and the medium. This print version definition, however, has carried over to the electronic version so that “ebook” has come to mean both content and medium.
I can understand this confusion. When I was writing an article about ebooks for Quill, a local magazine produced by MPH Publishers, I ran into a similar confusion trying to describe a physical ebook reader and ebook reading software, which would also be called ebook readers (but of the virtual variety).
It’s partly due to this confused expectation of an ebook as a medium that many book lovers have rejected ebooks – because ebooks don’t have the same touch and smell as a “real” book. To overcome this rejection, manufacturers of ebook reading hardware have tried to come out with ebook readers that look like “real” books and even allow pages to be flipped, but only in a virtual sense.
The above is just my take on the general objection against ebooks as a medium, but Siracusa discusses it in more detail in the section called “The device” in his article.
Siracusa takes on another regular objection to reading ebooks – the quality of the screen. Some of the objections he mentions include “I can’t read an entire novel off a screen!”, “I’ll stick to paper with its vastly superior contrast ratio” and “Eye strain! Eye strain!”
According to Siracusa:
With very few exceptions, all the unfavorable comparisons of bitmapped displays to print on paper are technically accurate. I’m here to tell you that they don’t matter.
The amount of time people in the industrialized world spend reading text off a screen has long since nullified this complaint. Literally billions of people have proven that they’re willing and able to read huge volumes of text off absolutely horrible screens. Think of text messaging on pagers and early cell phones, for example. Text messages are short, you say? I’m willing to bet that the average American will read substantially more text off his or her cell phone screen this year than from a book.
…
People are clearly willing to read text off screens. Plain, old, often awful screens with tiny, ugly text and large pixels. Vast amounts of text, read over extended periods of time. Up to 40 hours a week at work alone, in the case of most office workers who sit in front of a computer all day. And more at home for pleasure. Hell, you’re likely doing it right now (unless you printed the PDF version of this article or are being paid to read it).
I’ll say it again: people will read text off screens. The optical superiority of paper is still very real, but also irrelevant. The minimum quality threshold for extended reading was passed a long, long time ago.
Siracusa goes on to discuss digital rights management, and how Apple missed the opportunity to take over the ebook market. You can read all that in the actual article itself, but the other thing that was really interesting to me personally was his own reasons why he finds “reading off of this tiny PDA not just tolerable, but (apparently) satisfying enough to keep me from returning to paper books”:
Here’s what I came up with. First, I was more likely to have my Palm with me than a book. When I had an opportunity to read during the day, my Palm was there, and a paper book, had I been in the middle of one, would not have been. (Incidentally, this also lead to a vast expansion of the definition of “an opportunity to read.”) Second, I could read in the dark next to my sleeping wife without disturbing her with bright lights and page-turning noises. (The tan-on-black reader color theme was affectionally known as “wife mode” at Peanut Press.) Third, I was loathe to give up the ability to tap any word I didn’t understand and get its dictionary definition.
I totally identify with his “I was more likely to have my Palm with me than a book” reason. I carry my Palm TX with me whenever I’m out and about. I even have it in bed with me at night. And I don’t just use it for reading – okay, I’m digressing here a little – but also for games, music, and a notepad in place of real pen and paper.
I especially like the last two sentences in his article – an appeal to non ebook (human) readers out there:
… maybe you’ll never be satisfied by reading anything other than a paper book. All I ask is that you give it an honest try.
That would be last night, the 8th night of the 15-day Chinese New Year celebrations. I don’t remember hearing anything last night, but then I live on the 7th floor of a 16-storey apartment building, and the balcony doors were closed. Even then, it probably wasn’t as loud as what I remember from my childhood.
Traditionally, the 8th night was when firecrackers were let off – not a bang here or a bang there, but a rip of continuous crackling “pop-pop-pop” from a chain of firecrackers, followed by a momentary silence and then, the loudest heart-stopping “boom” ever.
Firecrackers are what I would call the “heart and soul” of Chinese New Year, and it was a sad day when firecrackers were banned in Malaysia in the early 1990s. Before that, there were no restrictions to where and when throughout the 15-day festivities.
I wasn’t a fan of firecrackers. As a kid, I remember going with my sister to visit our 3rd uncle on the first morning and both of us almost running through the streets with fingers in our ears, trying to dodge firecrackers being let off near us. It was meant to be fun, to light up a string of firecrackers, throw it in someone’s path and watch them jump in surprise. But it got more and more dangerous, often resulting in injuries, and I think that was what eventually led to the banning, which included its manufacture, import, sale, purchase, possession and use. Unfortunately, the ban often led to self-made firecrackers which were less safe than commercially available ones. But I’m digressing.
For me, my most vivid childhood memories of firecrackers were tied to the 8th night of Chinese New Year. This was the night when more firecrackers were set off than any of the other 15 days. At the time, I only knew that was the night we had many relatives gathered at the family medicine shop, there was an altar outside the front entrance with lots of burning joss sticks and candles, food offerings, and the centrepiece, a whole roasted suckling pig. The highlight of the night would be after the offerings were made and the pig would be carved up and portions given to every family present. And in the background, the firecrackers would be going off. The next morning, the street would be a carpet of red from the shredded firecracker paper.
There was one year my father had an unofficial competition going with the shop across the street to see who had the most chains of firecrackers to burn. Father was very organised, he had two structures built and a hoisting system to haul the firecrackers into place, which would then be set off on an alternating basis – as one chain was burning on one structure, a new chain would be hauled up the other structure and lit up as soon as the final “boom” from the first chain was heard so there would not be any pause in the noise.
Where was I when all that was going on? Upstairs in the living room, with cotton wool in both ears. I’m sure I went downstairs to have a look but was probably cautioned not to go too near in case any of the sparks flew too near. Sometime that night, I saw father rushing into the shop and later learned that one of the structures had collapsed. I don’t remember what happened after that, whether the fallen structure was hoisted back in place or the noise-making continued on just the remaining structure. There was, however, another image I remember from that night – the shop owner from across the street holding on to a lit firecracker chain and trying to twirl it around as it burned. Till today, I still think it was very brave of him to be so near holding and touching “live” firecrackers.
The 8th night of Chinese New Year actually has its own name, and it’s called “Bai Tien Gong” (meaning “praying to the heavenly god”). “Bai Tien Gong” is actually observed by the Hokkien community (Chinese people speaking the Hokkien dialect), and it marks the start of the Chinese New Year celebrations for them. What happened was that many, many years ago, during a civil upheaval in China, the Hokkiens went into hiding and when they emerged after the invaders had left, they found that it was already the 9th day of the Chinese New Year, and also the birthday of the “heavenly god”. So the 9th day – or the 8th night going into the new day at midnight – became the Hokkien Chinese New Year.
Now, my family is not Hokkien, but my father observed the Hokkien Chinese New Year, more for the food and the noise made by the firecrackers, and for the opportunity it gave for the family to get together. We haven’t observed this night for many years, not just because firecrackers were banned in the early 1990s – I think we stopped long before that – but also because first, my brother, and then I, embraced Christianity, and my parents decided to do away with the “old” ways.
These days, there are electric firecracker decorations that light up but do not really go off – after all, they are just decorations. For old times’ sake, here’s a video I found off YouTube of a 28-metre long chain of firecrackers that had to be laid flat on the ground.
