equivocality — Jeff Ngan's collection of thoughts, experiences, and projects, inspired by pretty much everything
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15 Mar 09
4

Typical Of My Dad

(This hap­pened in Chinese.)

Around the din­ner table, my aunt men­tioned that it was her daughter’s birth­day, and that it hap­pened to be Friday the 13th. My dad said to me, “Isn’t your birth­day on the 13th too?”

“I don’t know”, I said rather loud and sarcastically.

My dad was in trou­ble. All the fam­ily around us real­ized that he doesn’t know my birth­day. So he said a date (and year, as if recit­ing a his­tor­i­cal event) with a hint of uncer­tainty in his voice.

I don’t think he was ever more relieved than when I told him he was right. Not because he got the right date, but because he didn’t seem like such a bad father to every­one else.

tagged with #father / filed under Random
14 Mar 09
2

This City Lets Me Live

Boundary Street Balcony — Sunset

I think it was some point between hail­ing a taxi to meet my Uncle Joe, and the com­fort­ing famil­iar­ity of find­ing myself in one of the same malls I was in five years ago, that it really sunk in.

I’m in HONG-FUCKING-KONG.

The con­stant din of traf­fic and peo­ple reminds me of the way New York never sleeps. It pul­sates and breathes, as if it was a body. I won­der how there can be so much life in such a tiny city1. None of my words, pic­tures, or videos could ever do it jus­tice, because it’s the expe­ri­ence that makes it real. The things that can’t be said. Like the way peo­ple treat the elderly. The every day sig­nif­i­cance of food and eat­ing well. The mil­lion sub­tleties of the Chinese culture.

The temp­ta­tion to move here is com­ing on me again, with every street, every sign, every per­son I pass, every day gone by. Maybe the tim­ing is right, where I find myself not only root­less in Ottawa, but with a sense of for­lorn­ness attached to the city as well. I’m begin­ning to won­der; what can I leave behind? What do I want to leave behind?

  1. Half the area of Ottawa, with over seven times the pop­u­la­tion. [↩]
tagged with #experiences #Hong Kong / filed under Photos Random
14 Mar 09
5

Having It Maid

It’s the maid’s day off.

To be hon­est, her brief absence has shown that I already got used to hav­ing her around.

But then again, it’s not hard to get used to such a lux­ury. You wake up and feel like eat­ing some­thing, and she’ll have it ready by the time you’re dressed and fin­ished brush­ing your teeth. She draws your bath water. She irons your clothes while you wait. She picks up the gro­ceries for din­ner when you decide what to eat. Some of the dishes are so com­pli­cated that she begins cook­ing the night before, and has her niece (my aunt and uncle’s maid) come over to help.

Nothing needs to be said when it comes to chores around the house. When a meal is fin­ished, every­one gets up and heads to the liv­ing room. The next time you come back, the dishes are gone and the table wiped clean1. I fold my sheets before leav­ing the house, and when I get back they’re refolded, only neater.

My grand­mother has a his­tory of live-in ser­vants, although there haven’t been any wet nurses, gar­den­ers, or chauf­feurs for a while. Ever since her chil­dren grew up and left the house (or coun­try), she’s only needed one maid at a time. It seems to be a great rela­tion­ship, as there’s a respect that goes both ways; the maid is extremely good at her job, and we treat her like fam­ily. When the last maid died after 30 years of ser­vice, all her funeral arrange­ments were taken care of. In the last years of her life she had gone blind from dia­betes, and was then served her­self. That’s how we found the cur­rent maid, who’s been with my grandma ever since.

One of my favourite rit­u­als2 is the way the maid is given din­ner. After all the food is cooked, the maid lays the dishes out on the din­ner table, but doesn’t take any for her­self. So my grandma will take a plate, pile food onto it, and bring it to her.

  1. Admittedly, this was the hard­est thing for me to get used to. Something in me would keep scream­ing, “PUT THE DISHES IN THE SINK”. [↩]
  2. And as a Taoist, I’m gen­er­ally deri­sive of rit­u­als. [↩]
tagged with #Chinese culture #grandma / filed under Random
13 Mar 09
9

Hong Kong: Markets

tagged with #Chinese culture #Hong Kong / filed under Random Video
12 Mar 09
7

Protected: Questioning Effort

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tagged with #friendship / filed under Random
12 Mar 09
2

Hong Kong Humidity

Difference in Hong Kong and Ottawa weather

One of the notable dif­fer­ences here is the humid­ity. The pages of my book are begin­ning to wrin­kle. Towels don’t dry when they’re hung on a line. Even though it’s 20°C out­side, it feels more like 15°C because it’s so damp. Humidity is some­thing that Hong Kong is known for, as it’s sur­rounded by water and filled with tall build­ings. It makes me won­der how peo­ple deal with mold in their houses.

Ironically, it “rained” two days in a row, but the rain was so weak that I had to ask oth­ers if they felt the droplets. Very dif­fer­ent from Ottawa, where rain­fall goes beyond obvi­ous, and can last for days on end.

tagged with #Hong Kong #weather / filed under Random
11 Mar 09
11

Being Strong For My Grandmother

The can­cer has spread to her bones and sev­eral major organs now. We asked the doc­tor not to tell her, but we can’t do any­thing against his moral oblig­a­tion to inform the patient. Either way, she doesn’t know how seri­ous it is, whether it’s from shock and denial, or mem­ory loss.

But she’s awake, and aware, and feel­ing no pain, which is good enough for me. The most we can do now is to try to make the rest of her life as enjoy­able as possible.

She thinks she’s going to be fine. Keeps telling me that she’ll take me to a nearby park when she’s bet­ter. As much as it hurts me to know this won’t be pos­si­ble any­more, it’s reliev­ing to know she’s so obliv­i­ous. We don’t let our­selves cry around her, for fear that she may real­ize how bad it is.

Her face is more sal­low, her fin­gers and legs ema­ci­ated, but she still has her thick, black hair1. Aside from a dis­tended stom­ach, it’s hard to tell that she has such a grim prognosis.

But by far the hard­est part is hav­ing to cod­dle her like a child to take her med­ica­tion. Telling her she’s a good girl if she swal­lows her pills and reward­ing her with ice-cream. That we’re only strict because we care about her. It tears me in half when she gives such a painful look of dis­taste with every pill we hand her, 18 a day.

She used to be so strong. Now we have to be strong for her.

  1. “I used to have even more”, she tells me. [↩]
tagged with #family #grandma #health #sickness / filed under Random
11 Mar 09
13

Relationship Advice From Chinese People

My fam­ily always ask me if I’m dat­ing any­one right now. They assume I pre­fer Caucasian girls. I tell them I don’t mind either way (the other side of “either” being Chinese girls). That’s when they warn me about main­land girls. Chinese main­lan­ders are com­monly viewed by Hong Kong peo­ple as being low-class, crude, and provin­cial. It’s said that even if a girl from there is pretty, they lose all attrac­tive­ness as soon as she opens her mouth. On top of that, they’re gold-diggers, just look­ing for a way to get money or a green card.

They tell me I’ll be fine as long as I don’t marry a main­land girl.

My grandma used to tell me to find a Chinese girl, because Chinese girls treat their men bet­ter, or to find some­one who loves me more than I love them. She’s filled with all sorts of funny apho­risms, like “Women are to be loved, not hit.”

tagged with #attractiveness #Chinese culture #dating #love #relationships / filed under Random
09 Mar 09
4

This City Lets Me Feel

I’ve been stand­ing on the bal­cony of the fourth floor apart­ment, watch­ing peo­ple walk around in the mid­dle of the night. If there’s one thing that’s always defined Hong Kong to me, it’s the con­stant traf­fic you hear when you’re sleep­ing, mostly light buses run­ning on diesel, and taxis. Across the street, the rooms of the St. Theresa’s Hospital are light­ing up one by one. The sun hasn’t crested yet, but the streets are becom­ing busier by the minute as the sky bright­ens in notice­able degrees.

Boundary street balcony — sunrise

Practicing Tai Chi usu­ally helps me sleep and cen­ter myself, but today it’s only a reminder of how painfully sore my hip sock­ets are from run­ning around air­ports with all my lug­gage. You never truly appre­ci­ate the short form until you try prac­tice in a Hong Kong apartment.

I’ve been up for hours now, and I’m exhausted but wide awake. It’s the jet lag, the med­ica­tion, a rest­less mind, or all three.

Those who know me know that I’ve always felt that Hong Kong is my home­land, even though I wasn’t born here. But for some rea­son, it hasn’t sunk in that I’m here yet.

I guess I’ve been going through some hard times. I never really thought about it until some­one brought it to my atten­tion. The heart­break, the col­i­tis, the grand­mother, the dis­il­lu­sion­ment. Somewhat major things, I sup­pose, that weren’t in the front of my mind. Maybe I haven’t been let­ting myself think about them. Or maybe they’ve been affect­ing me with­out real­iz­ing it.

The writ­ten word appears to be the only reli­able thing I have left. My friends are all away. Everyone’s asleep, and I’ve been cry­ing. I’ve been cry­ing in the heart of this beau­ti­ful city.

This city brings my guard down. This city lets me feel.

tagged with / filed under Photos Random
09 Mar 09
0

Death And Turbulence

For some rea­son, I’m always seated by the wings of planes. It suits me fine, as I like to watch the dance of flaps as the pilots check their instru­ments and con­trols. It makes me think of how beau­ti­ful flight is, of what an accom­plish­ment of human­ity it is to get this giant con­trap­tion off the ground.

The cap­tain issues a word of cau­tion over the loud­speaker in his generic voice about cinch­ing up our seat belts because it’s going to be bumpy until we reach 20000 feet. Leaving at 1pm and arriv­ing at five in the after­noon, it remains day­light for the entire flight, as we’re chas­ing the sun around the hemisphere.

Flight infor­ma­tion flashes in pairs on the TV screens:

Ground speed: 857k/h. Time to des­ti­na­tion: 14h 12m.
Altitude: 8000km. Distance to des­ti­na­tion: 15289km.

The man next to me reads People mag­a­zine to take his mind off the sud­den drops in alti­tude. He clutches his ster­num every time the plane dips sud­denly, and fum­bles around for the vomit bag. Eventually, he set­tles his head on the upright tray.

Every shake and sud­den move­ment is a reminder of your mortality.

I used to be scared of tur­bu­lence. Now I can’t tell if I’m used to it, or the fact that I’m going to die some day.

tagged with #death / filed under Random
05 Mar 09
17

Sensitive To Sensitivity

I almost walked out of Tai Chi class the other night.

Someone asked me if I was going to “pass out again”, because I got light-headed the class before and had to leave early, most likely due to a side-effect of the new med­ica­tion I’m on, though I was far from pass­ing out.

I was flat-out offended, and began expe­ri­enc­ing what my ther­a­pist explained are “auto­matic thoughts” — irra­tional thoughts that affect mood neg­a­tively. I had to step back from the sit­u­a­tion, put the words out of my head, and calm myself down. If not, I would have over­re­acted, and prob­a­bly regret­ted it. But I couldn’t fig­ure out why I was so upset. After all, I’m far from one who gets offended easily.

Was I being pub­licly emas­cu­lated? Was I being judged with­out con­sid­er­a­tion of all the facts? Was my com­mit­ment to attend prac­tice after not eat­ing for two days being belit­tled? Was it the tone? Was it because I couldn’t speak back and defend myself, for fear of pol­lut­ing the sanc­tity of the class1 with my per­sonal pol­i­tics? Probably a bit of each.

I tend to have sim­i­larly bad reac­tions to peo­ple being sur­prised that I don’t know some­thing. It feels like I’m being judged, as if they pre­sume to know who I am. Even though it’s sup­posed to be a com­pli­ment, it’s a back-handed one, like say­ing “I thought you were smarter than that”. John used to be espe­cially guilty of this2, but he suc­cess­fully cor­rected the behav­iour years ago. It took a psy­chol­o­gist to point it out to him, and adverse reac­tions from sev­eral peo­ple, includ­ing me.

I know I’ve already come a long way. I’m not so sen­si­tive about my weight (for a guy) any more. I stopped car­ing what peo­ple think when I know the truth. But this inci­dent made me real­ize that I still har­bor a sen­si­tiv­ity to cer­tain things. I still have some grow­ing up to do. Still have to real­ize that peo­ple say things with­out think­ing, or don’t mean what they say, or that I may even take innocu­ous things the wrong way. Even though I feel that I had a right to be offended, I still don’t want to be.

And the fact that I was offended just makes me more upset.

  1. I approach my work with the same kind of reser­va­tion and detach­ment to remain pro­fes­sional. After all, these are sit­u­a­tions in which we can’t choose the peo­ple we work with, so there’s noth­ing to do but accept and any unpleas­ant­ness. [↩]
  2. And quite self-aware of it. As a per­son obliv­i­ous to pop-culture, he loved to hold it over peo­ple when he knew some­thing they didn’t. [↩]
tagged with #growth #human interaction #social commentary / filed under Random
01 Mar 09
4

Name My First Painting: Winner

Before I announce the win­ner, I wanted give a HUGE thank-you to every­one who par­tic­i­pated in my paint­ing nam­ing con­test. It’s sim­ply amaz­ing, the num­ber of ways dif­fer­ent peo­ple can see the same thing, even from dif­fer­ent angles. I par­tic­u­larly liked the lit­tle bird in the left-hand cor­ner that Julie noticed.

Even though there were a few con­sis­tent themes, like flow­ers, and dancers, the types of titles sub­mit­ted were widely rang­ing, from:

…the abstract

…to the straightforward

…to the creative

…to the sci-fi

The Winner: "stroke of pluck" by Pearl.

I chose this as the win­ner because of how well it describes the paint­ing to me in such few words, while being wrapped in a clever pun. Congratulations to Pearl on win­ning the paint­ing! I’ll fig­ure out a way to get it to you this week.

To show my appre­ci­a­tion for all the par­tic­i­pa­tion, any­one who sub­mit­ted a title is eli­gi­ble to receive a 5″×6″ print of the paint­ing. If you’d like a copy, just e-mail me and include your con­tact name and postal address. Since I’ll be num­ber­ing and sign­ing each lim­ited edi­tion copy, I’ll need to know if you want one by the end of the month so I can fig­ure out how many to make in total.

tagged with #art / filed under Random
27 Feb 09
4

Best Table Tennis Celebration

This is so awe­some.

Adam Bobrow (the player in blue) times his loop per­fectly in the mid­dle of a series of defen­sive lobs against the smash of his oppo­nent, throw­ing off his oppo­nents offen­sive rhythm, and caus­ing him to drive the ball into the net.

I gen­er­ally don’t post stuff like this (i.e. con­tent that isn’t mine, as I don’t want to have a tum­blelog), but I couldn’t resist. As an avid lover of table ten­nis (who has since given up prac­tices for a love for Tai Chi because they’re on con­flict­ing nights), and as a player who fre­quently gets destroyed by oppo­nents in the league, I under­stand exactly how good it feels to get a sin­gle point when it’s match point for the other guy. After all, it’s not a com­plete thrash­ing if you don’t have zero points. You can tell the ref isn’t impressed, but he doesn’t hand out a yel­low card for misconduct.

I want to see some­one do this after win­ning in push hands. :D

Edit: I showed the video to Norm, my old league team­mate and coach, and also a cer­ti­fied level 5 umpire (the high­est level you can get, which means you can pre­side over inter­na­tional and Olympic level matches; I’m a lowly cer­ti­fied level 1 umpire). He had this to say:

I watched the game, when the point was over and the guy did his dance I wouldn’t give him a yel­low card for the first 5 sec­onds. But he kept on doing this and it def­i­nitely deserves a yel­low card. But then when I saw the score board, I changed my mine again. Seems like the game was lop­sided and he was just crown­ing around for his point.

I have to agree. If he was cel­e­brat­ing a lop­sided game on his end, it would be con­sid­ered cocky. But the fact that he’s los­ing and danc­ing to such a hol­low vic­tory means that he acknowl­edges how badly he’s los­ing. Well played.

tagged with #table tennis / filed under Random
20 Feb 09
33

Name My First Painting

The dead­line for name sub­mis­sions is over, and the con­test is closed. I’ll announce the win­ner over the week­end. A big thank you to every­one who participated!

My first painting

This is the first paint­ing I’ve ever made. I’ll suf­fix that with “in my adult life”, because I prob­a­bly did some­thing with my hands when I was a kid.

Julie, who’s very famil­iar with the medium, got me to sit down and paint with her. I was able to play around with dif­fer­ent tech­niques of strokes and the like. It was inter­est­ing to dis­cover the way the colours bleed, the con­sis­tency of the paint, and the tex­ture of the canvas.

It’s def­i­nitely abstract. I agree with Dan’s astrol­ogy read­ing, in which he said that I see colours dif­fer­ently, but that doesn’t mean I can cre­ate them. Frédéric once told me that it’s eas­ier for him to paint than pho­to­graph, because if he needs a cer­tain colour, he can just add it to the paint­ing by hand, whereas you can’t do this with a scene in pho­tog­ra­phy. My forté seems to be in cap­tur­ing instead.

Painting doesn’t come nat­u­rally to me. In ele­men­tary and high school, I went direc­tion of music (gui­tar, voice, flute, and piano) instead of visual art. In uni­ver­sity, when I wasn’t play­ing in bands any­more, I stuck with the writ­ten word, and even­tu­ally moved to pho­tog­ra­phy and video when that wasn’t enough.

So the paint­ing cur­rently remains unti­tled. Partially because I can’t put a name to it, and par­tially because I haven’t decided what it is. Which seems a lit­tle silly to me, as my need to cre­ate has always come from the need to express. Even though Jackson Pollock once said, “When I am in my paint­ing, I’m not aware of what I’m doing”, his paint­ings still had a direc­tion, a life of their own, much like an impro­vised jazz solo.

What do you see, and what would you name it?

Leave your sug­ges­tions in the com­ments, and I’ll choose a win­ner next Friday. The win­ner will win the paint­ing! Yes, I’ll even ship it to you. The dimen­sions are roughly 8.5″×11″ (or 21.6cm×28cm).

tagged with #art #Julie / filed under Random
16 Feb 09
4

Father-Son Bonding

I called my dad on his birth­day this week. After the divorce I would never call him, spe­cial occa­sion or not, sim­ply because I needed to dis­tance myself from the sit­u­a­tion. He did call me on mine last year though, which reestab­lishes a sort of prece­dence and rit­ual, and he actu­ally thanked me for the call.

We made the usual small talk, about work and home.

Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG 2006

He told me he bought a car: a 2006 Mercedes Benz SLK 55 AMG hard-top con­vert­ible with 18″ rims and 7-speed-automatic trans­mis­sion. He’s going to keep the Beemer for win­ter dri­ving. It filled my heart with quiet joy when he said I could drive it the next time I vis­ited him. Not so much because he was let­ting me (for I was always allowed to drive the Sportline 300CE while liv­ing at home), but because I could tell in his voice that he wanted me to try it.

I asked him if there’s any his­tory of col­orec­tal can­cer in the fam­ily, which the doc­tor wanted to know at my last appoint­ment, to which my dad answered, thank­fully, no. He shared with me his own health con­cerns, the med­ical terms of which he only knows in Chinese. These are things I avoid ask­ing about when I visit him, as he pops some pills from a bot­tle kept with the dishes in the kitchen, and I real­ize that I’m learn­ing more about my dad than ever. It’s not so much out of a need for pri­vacy or avoid­ance of embar­rass­ment, but sim­ply out of con­ve­nience, as these top­ics would never get brought up.

It’s strange to bond with him in this way, only after so many years of leav­ing home.

I remem­ber him try­ing to teach me pho­tog­ra­phy when I was younger, but he soon lost inter­est, in both pho­tog­ra­phy and me1. Maybe it’s the dis­tance that makes us appre­ci­ate each other more, and it wouldn’t be the same if we lived in the same city.

In a way, I’m glad to have the rela­tion­ship now, and I’m able to for­get that I’ve never had it for most of my life.

  1. As such, all my pho­tog­ra­phy is self-taught, aside from one trick used to zoom a lens towards the sub­ject so that the edges are blurred that he showed me at the Statue of Liberty. [↩]
tagged with #family #father #health #parents / filed under Random
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