Entry 3: Dawn of the Date

It's been raining again for these past few days, maybe in preparation for fall or maybe the skies are not really happy about the way things are happening around the world, but I guess to a Singaporean it isn't much of a surprise. Wet socks, wet jeans, wet shoes, but at least it doesn't stink up the rooms like it would in Singapore because of the much drier climate.

Lesson start in 2 hours' time for me, the very first Math lesson in my college life. I'm not exactly excited about lugging a huge calculus book around for a 20 minute walk to class, but that's the way they roll around here. Who else do I have to blame but Newton, who invented calculus and discovered gravity, but never realised that centuries later these two would come hand-in-hand as an evil dynamic duo in the form of a textbook.

The other time I was hanging out with Alex (Bridges, from the previous entry if you've read it) around the Levee Plaza, which is a really small shopping place with barely enough places for you to see for an hour. I had my hair done, all ash-blonde and pseudo-Japanese, and we had some beef hor fun. Yes, you read it correctly, beef HOR FUN. It was more like zup-less white fried kway teow with beef slices on them. But awful as it was, it was a heart-warming to have a Chinese lunch with an angmoh who also uses chopsticks.

So I was asking Alex, Do we all look and sound the same to you guys?

We, in this sense, meaning all Asians that supposedly have yellow skin, which includes Koreans, Japanese, China Chinese, Hong Kongers (Hongkies is like a derogatory term just like what Chink is to us) and of course, Singaporeans. Because I've known it to be quite a problem when it comes to such things, and they tend to generalise. Just go watch MADTv's Bobby Lee in the Average Asian series and you know what I mean*.

So he said that he could slightly tell the difference between the languages but finds it hard to tell us apart.

Upon retrospect, I guess it's all the same everywhere. Just like how we can't exactly differentiate Latin and Greek but we know that they do sound different. Or how Indians and Bangladeshi or Pakistanis don't look different to us at all. Or how French and Italians and Swedish and all other Europeans probably all look the same: all angmohs. So what we can't tell apart and single out, we generalise.

This morning I met Ingrid again at the Health Centre, where I had to go to get my tuberculosis shot (which eventually due to administrative matters I went back to my room in the pouring rain with an empty Medical History Form in hand). She smiled at me and I smiled back, but it makes me wonder if she remembers me from the ISS picnic. Afterall, in all probability I'm the only ash-blonde Asian with copper-toned skin and a single ear-stud running around campus.

Then again, we most likely all look the same to her.

*Trivial fact: Bobby Lee wanted to have the skit, in a way Sacha Baron Cohen wanted to film Borat, so as to show the "uglier" side of stereotyping, so to speak.