Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

Another impressive panel of “experts” was formed to help boost the economy. More enlightening advice to increase productivity. More “new” policies in the pipeline to control the flow of foreign workers. They decided that wine is good. Too much wine is bad. So what’s the plan? Increase foreign worker’s levy and keep the workers; the longer the better. Now why didn’t I think of that?

Strange world. Strange people. When billions are lost, people keep quiet. When there’s not going to be any football (don’t ask me which league, which match. I don’t watch football at all), you get angry protests from the public. This is my Singapore. The big and serious issues are discussed in hushed tones at the local coffeeshops. The petty ones get good and loud airing everywhere. Why? Because politically sensitive issues are downplayed by the media? Because football is a “safe topic” to complain about? But seriously, recreation is important.

You must either be very weird or very lucky to love your work. Even if you enjoy your work, you don’t want to be struggling to make ends meet when you’re in your 50s or 60s. But that is what’s happening in our society. Apart from a certain group of highly privileged people, we are all stressed out and struggling with all the hungry foreigners ready to take our jobs (even dentists are not safe).

At a dinner, a colleague of mine (Chinese man) joked that he wanted to send his children to India to study dentistry and then let them come back as “Indian dentists” since the chances of them getting into NUS are virtually NIL. We were put through a difficult and expensive course of study only to have foreigners coming in the “easy way”. We might as well raise our kids cheaply in a foreign country and then bring them back through the wide open doors on our shores if graduates who had gone through a much easier path (more holidays, less homework, lower school fees) are acccepted here.

Pass me another glass of wine. We might as well talk about football. Something’s got to give and drinking won’t always work. For me, it’s travel. It’s as important to me as football is to some guys. My Australian friend Lindsey who was beer-starved on an oil rig in Brunei once said that he needs beer more than he needs his wife.

Of course I wouldn’t risk the integrity of my skull by saying that, but people like my father simply cannot do without his daily yam cha sessions with his pals. Approaching 80 and after winning a battle against lymphoma 5 years ago, he is no longer worried about the big and small issues in life. He still does a bit of accounting every now and then, but sitting down with friends over a cup of tea and some tim sum is probably the most enjoyable thing for him. He doesn’t worry about whether his tim sum sessions earn him anything. He has a life and is living it as fully as he knows how.

In contrast, there are many young and stingy workholics who panic at the loss of $2 and they want to make every gathering with friends count. How many insurance policies can I sell? How many MLM downlines can I get from this outing? Which is why some people ask me what I stand to gain from my travels. How irritating. Of course I gain tremendously from these trips, but not in monetary terms. How do I explain that? Even Confucius can’t explain the four seasons to a grasshopper. Very often, I have to find excuses or highlight possibilities of finding treasures to justify a trip.

For many educated Singaporeans, a holiday means more than shopping, sleeping, watching trees grow, paint dry and catching up with the in-laws. For me, a trip without challenges and discoveries is a wasted trip. Not a real holiday.

I’m not a lazy person by any definition. In fact, I think I’m certifiably overworked and deserving of some reward. People who think I’m not working hard enough are just self-centered, inconsiderate and ignorant bozos. With so many tight and sometimes humanly impossible schedules, something’s got to give. I need to pick up my backpack and hit the dusty trails, write a story, take some nice pictures as much as football fans need to watch the World Cup, Father needs his tim sum and Lindsey needs his beer.

Ah! I just found my favourite redundant news headline for the year 2009.

“Teaching of Chinese language must match students’ ability”, says Education Minister

And my award to the most intelligence-insulting one goes to:

“THE property tax of HDB flats is being raised next year partly to avoid having to introduce a bigger increase later should home prices continue to rise, said Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts Lui Tuck Yew.”

Yes. 2009 is coming to an end and boy am I glad that the end of 2009 looks nothing like the beginning. I should have seen a bad year coming when my climbing boots broke at Island Peak base camp, ruining my attempt to scale the 6189m Himalayan peak in record time. Bad omen? I’m not superstitious, but I certainly want 2010 to start off well. Maybe I should set another goal on my Chinese New Year trip to Vietnam and Guangxi.

Business wise, 2009 has been one of the worst years in recent history. Thankfully, it’s coming to an end and business over the last couple of weeks has been exceptionally good. I don’t think I can survive another 2009. An old friend of mine gave me a timely reminder.

She said: “If you are in a valley, it just means there must a peak somewhere, right? That’s my limited mountain-climbing theory for you. Climb on, Adventurer..”

Yes, I’ll climb on.

Many years ago, when I was new to the internet, I pissed a certain bureaucrat off in an online forum by describing Singapore’s closure of Singapore’s Chinese medium schools as a stupid mistake and the Singapore’s so-called bilingual scheme as dong bu cheng, xi bu jiu. Not surprisingly, Mr Bureaucrat expressed shock at my audacity in challenging the unquestionable wisdom from the top.

I’m sure that if it was a letter I had written to the press, I would have been villified by representatives from every department of the civil service and the editor would have closed the topic just as I started to pen my first reply. Thanks to the internet, I had more supporters than enemies, all coming from the general public.

Fast forward 15 years and it’s now my turn to be shocked when I read the following article:

SINGAPORE - As a child, he was much more comfortable speaking to his friends in English than in Mandarin. Not surprisingly, Mr Vincent Ng, who comes from an English-speaking family, found Mandarin language lessons in school to be quite a chore.

Ms Adele Sim, a 29-year-old media executive, pointed out that it was easier to learn a second language through pop culture and television, as was the case when she picked up Japanese a few years ago. “I learned because I liked it, not because it was compulsory,” she said.

I must say that an admission of error from our elderly statesman is something most unusual and perhaps quite welcome to many of us. Unfortunately, I believe that the real mistake is not being recognised. There is ting xie in Chinese. There is also spelling in English. What is so mad about all that?

If the teaching of Chinese the traditional way has been so “mad” and ineffective, then why are so many of our Chinese-educated friends so proficient in the language? Just look at the teaching of English in our primary schools. Is it not boring and punishing? Is it not madness? Primary 1 students already have to do comprehension and understand grammatical rules like verb agreement. And the comprehension passages are mostly about Ali visiting his grandmother and helping her with the chores. No wizards and dragons, no magical spells, no laser weapons, alien transformations and buildings blowing up. How do these kids ever learn English then?

Ask a senior of mine who is now earnestly learning the Thai language. What keeps his interest? Are his Thai language books illustrated with bikini babes? Are the books scented with aromas from his favourite food? Most of all, does he need any of these attractions (or distractions) to keep him focussed on learning the language when he is so interested and involved with Thai temple activities?

What about my TCM course? It’s a totally different philosophy from the conventional anatomy and physiology I’ve studied throughout the years. Now I must shut down a lot of my memory banks and tune in to the new frequency of TCM. Eye problems, treat the liver. Bone problems, treat the kidneys. Muscle weakness treat the spleen. Insomnia treat the heart. 324 points, 12 meridians …. not “madness”? How bad can a little ting xie be? Why why would I put up with this madness? Because I want to learn about alternative remedies to benefit myself, my family and my patients.

The whole problem with kids not being interested in Chinese lies with the issue of options and distractions. In the good old days of Chinese medium schools, all science and art subjects were taught in Chinese. The students not only learned Chinese from their Chinese language class, they also learned it in Biology and Geography. They didn’t just have to do ting xie. They had to remember what Chinese characters are used in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name.

What happens when you shut down Chinese schools. What happens when you teach all the science and arts subjects in English? Does one learn English only from English class? Of course not. We also learn English from Biology class, Math class, Physics class, Chemistry class, Geography class … then there is Chinese. Is it so difficult to see that the problem doesn’t just lie in the madness of ting xie? The students don’t need Chinese to help them understand Physics and Chemistry. The lonely subject of Chinese becomes just an optional distraction.

Yes, one cannot master 2 or more languages at the same level. But I believe that many people out there can be decently proficient in 2 languages. Check out some of the MBBS doctors who are also TCM practitioners. They couldn’t have passed their MBBS without being good at English. They also couldn’t have passed their TCM course conducted in Chinese without being good at Chinese. How did they do it? In exactly the same way we learn the English language. By studying not just “pure” Chinese language, but practical subjects in Chinese. Maybe we should just forget about teaching “pure” English and “pure” Chinese. Maybe we should just teach the “important” subjects in these languages and students pick up the languages “naturally”.

Not long after Kaelyn Ong gave a not so flattering review for the cakes and desserts at a shop at Joo Chiat called Obolo in her popular food blog, she received an email from the folks at Obolo telling her to remove the posting or run the risk of being sued.

http://myfoodsirens.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/obolo/

Sued? For what? For not liking their cakes and telling others about it? It doesn’t take an legal expert to see that Obolo may have been a bit ahead of itself. We haven’t heard Stephen Speilberg suing movie reviewers who said unflattering things about his work. Yes, J.K. Rowling has sued people for plagiarism, but I’ve never heard her sue any reviewer or hater who didn’t like Harry Potter. What about Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger? Has he sued anybody for laughing at his acting and his not so intellectual movies? Why are our local cake shops behaving like some of our local politicians then?

Maybe I’ve already answered my own question. But unlike the pitifully tenacious politicians at the receiving end of endless lawsuits, Miss Ong drew a tide of supporters on her side. Obolo was blasted for its bullying tactics. Everyone was calling for a boycott.

So why did Obolo do such a silly thing? Because they thought that as a young undergrad, Miss Ong would get frightened, give in to their threats and do as told? Well, that might have worked with me when I was Miss Ong’s age. But times have changed. Miss Ong’s defiance spoke volumes of the youngsters today. You can’t push them around anymore.

But then again, something didn’t and won’t really change. In spite of all the bad publicity, Obolo is unlikely to suffer much. That’s my prediction. Why? Because foodies are cheap. The endure rudeness, arrogance and profiteering from “good” hawkers just to get their fix. And just before I wrote this blog entry, I was at a noodle stall at Lucky Plaza. I ordered a chicken noodle and it took them ages to deliver. It’s only when i stared angrily at the other customers who got their food before me that they bothered to explain the cause for the delay - by shouting across 4 tables. When my food finally arrived, they didn’t even bother to apologise. In spite of such rudeness and arrogance (and their food is not exactly great), the stall still sees an enless stream of customers. Courtesy and good service are not criteria for success in this food business here. Every successful stall swarming with customers and long queues probably sees itself as a little kingdom and the hawkers running them act like kings.

I dare now imagine how I would be treated if their soy chicken were a bit more tender and their gravy a little more flavourful. The photo below is not taken at the stall I patronised. The last thing I want is to advertise for them.