Chinese New Year

I am happy. Firstly, Danny is back from his week-long business trip to Singapore. Secondly, his mom is here, meaning I can go run my errands with dragging Sara through the crowded streets of Causeway Bay, and more importantly, get that long overdue haircut. Thirdly, we had an enjoyable reunion dinner with friends despite being away from home for the first time in a very long time over this festive period.

Yesterday, I spent the morning grating carrots. Year after year, I find myself grating carrots at Chinese New Year. We enjoy eating yu sang (a raw fish salad eaten at Chinese New Year) and since we get to go home most years, we lug back the fixings that can be easily bought at NTUC (local supermarket in Singapore) and invite a bunch of people over to enjoy the fun of tossing grated carrots, radish and raw fish (with a bunch of other things like plum sauce, crushed peanuts and sliced preserved ginger). Clever me didn’t take a photo of our handiwork last night. We ordered in most of our other food, so it wasn’t a particularly delicate sight to see boxes and plastic utensils, but hey, my excuse was that this isn’t our apartment and our ability to entertain is somewhat stunted with the limited crockery available.

Yu sang is, curiously enough, a Singapore concoction. I don’t remember much about why we eat it, but I think it has to do with the sound of the word which means prosperity in Cantonese. I know there are a whole lot of prosperous phrases that one is supposed to say as we pour on the different dressings and fixings, but as to be expected, we don’t know them. The fun part of it all is that after everything’s been poured on, everyone digs in their chopsticks and starts tossing the salad together. Some say tossing it higher brings better luck. All I can say is that it creates a bigger mess because the salad then doesn’t always land back on the plate, but on the table instead. I remember the one time we did it for Danny’s colleagues in Tokyo and his Hong Konger boss was somewhat appalled at the idea of eating something that had been so man-handled, but after trying it, agreed that it tasted pretty good.

After the few months in Chicago in near isolation, it was good to be back among friends yesterday, some whom we had not seen for three years now. It was mostly a party of people left behind (having to stay in Hong Kong over the holiday for one reason or another), but we found our fun riding out the family-centric holiday together. Anyway, as we’ve now found out, it is quite a busy time here in Hong Kong over Chinese New Year. There’s a parade of floats this evening and we get fireworks tomorrow. The good thing about being in a serviced apartment in town is that we get to watch much of it from the room, so it’ll be a relaxing way to enjoy the festivities.

Perhaps going home for Chinese New Year isn’t always the best way to enjoy the holiday.

Feeling ugly

There I was, looking dumpy, hobbling ever so obviously, waddling like a duck, dragging a reluctant Sara and a folded stroller (in case you are wondering, it is possible to hobble and waddle at the same time). I ran smack into a girlfriend whom I hadn't been able to track down simply because of the rush of the move out of Tokyo, I had forgotten to keep email addresses and phone numbers out of the packers' way and hence, wasn't able to call anyone since all our stuff is in storage.

She looked fabulous. Chic, beautifully coiffed, manicured. Sophisticated. She didn't even recognize me. Groan. How dumpy have I become? Sure, a good part of it is my current pregnant state, but I'm also in sore need of a good haircut (blame it on a disaster in Chicago) and since Sara, I've become too lazy to put on some amount of make-up before stepping out of the house. Coupled with that the hobble I recently acquired having thrown some part of my back out lifting Sara, I look pretty, well, sad.

Two months after having Sara, I had gone to a party all decked out. I met some ladies who had only met me a few months earlier prior to delivery and they couldn't recognize me at all. I swore I wouldn't allow myself to sink to dumpiness again, but obviously I have. Sigh.

I know appearances aren't everything, but if only I could look half as good as Heidi Klum did when she was pregnant, I'd be so grateful.

Osama

Sometime between 2 am and 4 am yesterday, we were all up, jetlagged and watching BBC. A report on Osama bin Laden came on and Sara, who was busy watching the few spots of light crossing the Victoria Harbour, suddenly turned round to look at the TV.

"JESUS!"

Eh? Say what? She's been studying those crucifixes at church, but obviously one bearded face to the next is hard to tell apart.

"Uncle Freddy?" A little more tentative this time, since she figured she obviously got the first guess wrong.

Uncle Freddy is Danny's bearded German brother-in-law and her favourite uncle because he likes to dangle her upside-down. I don't think he'd be flattered by the comparison.

Final destination

Survived the flight. Now to survive the jetlag.

Funny how one becomes indifferent as one moves through city to city. You just dig in your heels and decide that you're going to make this work, come hell or high water. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against Hong Kong. I'm just not impressed any longer with the notion of living in a new city, as much as it is a privilege that we've been blessed with time and again. That said, Hong Kong isn't new to us. In fact, it's been a little like coming home. We can't say we know Hong Kong very well, but we did live here before for three years, and everyone speaks enough Mandarin and a smattering of English for us to get around smoothly. There have been new buildings that have gone up since we've left, but otherwise, it's the same old place. Not the huge sprawling cosmopolitan that Tokyo is, but enough of a city to keep things reasonably exciting. The best thing about the city – friends. We have some old faces to call upon and some new ones too. It'll be a good time here, I hope.

Anyway, it's been a long tiring day spent trying to recover and getting Sara to coordinate her jetlagged sleep with my jetlagged sleep. It's Monday tomorrow, so work for me starts proper – the whole business of getting us set up with a home and a life. Chinese New Year comes as a pleasant interruption, so we get a little more time with Danny before he goes into high gear at work. All in all, we're all glad to be at final destination at last.

Death and destruction

It's just about noon and already I've had fortune (or misfortune) to think about the above.

The movers were here today and given this is America and everyone loves to chit chat, I got to talking to one of the packers about Chicago weather. Of course, that rapidly sunk into a discussion about extreme weather and then, how to avoid extreme weather. That is, to move to warmer climes which, in some cases, usually means natural disaster zone. Think Florida, Hawaii, California, even Japan (not talking about Hokkaido which has the misfortune of big earthquakes and being very cold). I learnt that people will move to Florida despite hurricanes year after year. The warm weather is really worth that much. I also discovered that in south Illinois, there is a huge fault line that is even larger than the one in California. Really? I didn't know that. You hardly hear about devastating quakes here in the States, other than the tremors from time to time on the West Coast. I also learnt that tornadoes don't typically hit cities, but that Chicago has been hit by a tornado before. It's also reassuring to learn that if a tornado came through here, the buildings would all stand, but everything would get blown out of the buildings though. Hm, maybe not so reassuring, but then, what do I care? Hopefully it'll be something I'd never have to consider.

Japan rests on three tectonic plates, which is why it gets more tremors than elsewhere in the world. I suppose having survived three years there, I've become something of an earthquake snob. Anything less than 7 on the Richter scale doesn't sound major. Plus, we had all learnt during our time there not to think much about a big jolt in the middle of the night. All said and done, though, we are glad to be out of there. Everyone talks of the BIG ONE waiting to hit Tokyo, now that it's not had a big quake in 70-odd years.

Anyway, now the movers are gone and I'm waiting for my child and my husband to wake up (don't ask – it's too tedious to explain), I was surfing some Singapore blogs and got to reading a post about an unexpected death of an acquaintance. In fact, this is the second post I've seen in the last couple of weeks about the same thing. So I got to thinking about unexpected deaths of acquaintances. I've been through two and it's always more nerve-wrecking than the anticipated death of someone near and dear. You get the feeling that it could happen to anyone. Even you.

The first was an acquaintance in university. He was a senior who mixed more with the locals than with the home crowd. He could've been said to be a touch arrogant, but mostly he was still quite helpful to struggling juniors, Singaporean or not. It came as a rude shock when in his final year, a term before the finals, he was diagnosed with advanced stages of cancer. Now the wierdest thing was that we'd seen him around the faculty for most of the year and he'd always say he was just under the weather. Apparently, the National Health Service is pretty dire – they were never able to detect what was wrong with him. He was only properly diagnosed on a trip home. That was the last we saw of him. He never came back and the school awarded him a degree with honours as though he never sat for his finals. A few months later, he passed away.

It shook all of us. To have someone that young that you know (barely or otherwise) die before his life even began. Here we all were, at the cusp of adulthood, and it can all disappear without any warning.

The second unexpected death I've encountered was that of a colleague. He was this nice bloke at the office, a really nice guy. We'd been out socially before, but we didn't know each other well. He was about my age and had only left school a couple of years before deciding to do a masters degree in business. During the routine health checkup, they discovered advanced stages of cancer. His story was made even worse – his premature death was the result of a poor response to chemotherapy.

Stories like these occur all the time and yet, each time I hear one, it makes me stop. Even when everything is going your way, it doesn't take all that much to knock it off track. I think we are never grateful enough for each day we get because we forget that many things are out of our control.

Phew, this ended up being a heavier post than I had intended. A little morbid going into a big flight tomorrow, I suppose, but I think some reflection and gratefulness for all the blessings we've had thus far is in order.

Wiley

Sara likes to pretend she's changing Bear-bear's diaper even though Pooh has no pants. We've been doing this for months. She'll even ask me for a wipe so that she can wipe down the bear (as well as clean the table and the floor with same said wipe – urgh).

This morning, she was working on Bear-bear with a stolen clean diaper again. At some point, she crumples it all up and announces she is going to throw it. Now this is new. I stop her and take it away. It feels mostly dry, but something doesn't seem right. I sniff it (a thing only mothers would do) and yep, it's a fresh diaper. So I hand it back and say she could play with it, but to keep it because it's not been used. She nods.

I go back to what I was doing and can see out of the corner of my eye that she is back to trying to wrap the thing around Bear-bear. The next time I peer at her, though, I see her gently leaning forward into the diaper, almost kissing the inside, in fact, with her water bottle in her right hand. Uh-oh. Suddenly everything slows to a crawl as I lunge forward to yank the diaper away from her.

Sara knows a couple of things:

1. How to spit water down her front because she thinks it's fun (and then gets all upset when she gets a yelling for that, and if my nerves are frayed, a smack too)
2. A diaper is thrown when it is wet. That's what I always say when it's time for a diaper change.

Put one and one together and our daughter had decided that to make the game more fun, she'd spit water into the diaper to make it wet enough to throw.

The monkey.

And here we go again…

So our time here is up. Or just about. In a week's time, we will be off again for the second half of our long journey from Tokyo to Hong Kong, via Chicago.

It's been shorter than expected – I had thought we had at least another few more weeks here, but hey, I'm not one to gripe. Hanging around here is like floating in limbo. There's so much to do and yet, I can do virtually nothing at all because we are not at final destination. Shopping, the one thing everyone assured me would be key to making this whole stay in the US worth it, hasn't been good. Unfortunately for me, my pregnant state has meant I can buy nothing. Plus it's winter. Sale or no sale, why on earth would I be buying clothes that I would never (hopefully!) need to wear ever again?

Anyway, moving on is welcome. We'd like to have somewhere we can once again call home. And become legal residents somewhere. May sound strange, but honestly, being given a dirty stare each time I say I have no social security number makes me feel like a real alien. Even more alien than I felt in Japan where foreigners have IDs called the Alien Registration Card. Also, I struggle with forms which ask where we are domiciled or where our address of permanent residence is. All that is hopefully about to come to an end, and I can only feel relief.

That's not to say I haven't enjoyed our stay here. Chicago is really quite a lovely city. If only it weren't winter though. I always like the States because no matter what anyone says, getting around is relatively easy, food is never really that bad, everyone speaks English and depending where you are, there is usually some level of culture to enjoy. This time, though, I think my biggest lesson has been in the American healthcare system and while I have only but scratched the surface, I can see this is an institution that is bleeding society dry. What I can't figure out is where all the money is going and after a conversation I had with an acquiantance, we have concluded it's either the drug companies or the insurances companies creaming it off. Doctors don't make all that much and hospitals hardly run at a profit. So where is the money going?

All said and done, it wasn't too bad a stay. Next stop will be Hong Kong and we hope it will be a L-O-N-G stop. I'd like to stop moving every year and we'd like to stop switching countries every few years. We hope this will be the second to last stop before we finally go home, but we know that it's a hard call. Anything can, and does, happen.

Tag! You’re it!

Uh-oh. Been tagged by Kwai Yoke of Little Foot Steps and Sesame of Casserole of My Life. Seeing how my hand-leg (shou3 jiao3) too slow, I just know I'll have problems coming up with five bloggers to tag after this. Neh mine, just play first and den see how.

Okay, so this is how to play this meme:

Remove the blog in the no.1 spot from the following list and push everyone up one place. Then add your own blog to the bottom spot.
1. Simply Hantam
2. Princess Diary
3. Baby Talk
4. Little Foot Steps
5. Life in a petri dish

Sorry, Sesame, but I saw KY's tag first, so she gets priority here….

And then, victimize another 5 people with the following questions:

1. What were you doing 10 years ago?
In university, just coming out of Christmas break. Spent a couple of weeks backpacking across Spain with six other girls. It was a hilarious time when I was mysteriously christened grand-mere crapaud (grandmother toad), no thanks to the Mauritians I was travelling with.

2. What were you doing 1 year ago?
Sitting around thinking it would be a year of non-events and that my life would finally take on some semblance of normalcy once again. How wrong I was.

3. 5 snacks you enjoy
(1) Any nonya kueh that is either rolled in desiccated coconut or has gula melaka or copious amounts of coconut milk. Wait a minute, I think that's ALL nonya kueh…
(2) Fried chicken ala KFC
(3) Chwee kueh (yep, I'm still going on about that)
(4) Cheeseballs
(5) Most fried things you'll find on a dim sum trolley

4. 5 songs to which you know all the lyrics off your head right now
(1) The ABC song. We sing this several times a day. SEVERAL.
(2) One, Two, Buckle My Shoe. Courtesy of countless viewings of Barney's videos.
(3) Itsy Bitsy Spider, hand movements and all.
(4) Let There be Peace on Earth. The only hymn I can sing out loud in full confidence that I haven't gotten a word wrong.
(5) The entire Miss Saigon musical. Okay, okay, so I may miss a word here or there, but seriously, I kid you not – I know more than 95% of the words.

5. 5 things you would do if you were a millionaire
(1) Get out of debt
(2) Buy a real branded bag and a pair of branded shoes, from a real branded shop. Just for the hell of it.
(3) Put away some for the children's education fund.
(4) Get a sensational hair cut from David Gan or someone like that. Again, just for the hell of it.
(5) Give to charity, but first, figure out which charity actually has the money going into the cause, and not getting siphoned off through some bureaucratic bullshit.

6. 5 bad habits
(1) Nagging.
(2) Web surfing.
(3) Harry Potter fanaticism (is there such a word?). Reading too much HP theories and other junk.
(4) Bordering obsessive-complusive behiavour. My best example is how I always, ALWAYS, have to go back and check if I've locked the car.
(5) Anal retentive behaviour. Very annoying, according to Danny.

7. 5 things you like doing
(1) Web surfing.
(2) Pretending I can write.
(3) Dancing.
(4) Getting a massage.
(5) Reading mindless junk like trashy romance novels and HP fanfiction.

8. 5 things you would never wear, buy or get new again
(1) Oversized sweaters. Been there, done that and I so regret it. Ugliest things you could put on. Sure, it was 10 years ago, but what possessed me to think that it was cool to wear big tents over your jeans?
(2) Exercise videos. Bought some last year and haven't touched them. Probably will never touch them.
(3) Shoes with heels higher than 3 inches. I love high heels and lived in 3-inch heels till the day I became pregnant with Sara. However, I once wore these gorgeous shoes with something like 4 inches to work one day and never touched them again. I don't think my feet have ever forgiven me for that, and yet, I can't bring myself to give the shoes away.
(4) Books on finance. I have so many and have yet to complete any.
(5) Hats. I know so many girls who look cute in hats, and I am not one of them. I have a few hats, none of which I wear because I can never find the right "look" for me in them.

9. 5 favourite toys
(1) The computer
(2) The computer
(3) The computer
(4) My notebook (as in, the spiral notebook type, not the laptop type). Wait, can that be considered a toy?
(5) The computer

10. 5 bloggers to pass on
Erh….. I don't know. I've run out of people to tag, or the bloggers I know aren't the tagging type, so…. I guess the buck stops here for me.

Horrors

The doctor was really nice about it.

“You’ve put on just a little more than you’d like to, but that’s really okay, especially with all the travelling you’ve been doing…”

I didn’t hear the rest. My mind was working fast and furiously to figure out how much exactly 129 pounds was in kilogrammes. Dammit, the dusty cobwebs in my brain make mental sums all that much more difficult.

When I came out of my check up, I asked Danny to do the math – it can’t be 60 kilos, can it? A second of silence later, he confirmed that 129 pounds is just about 60 kilos. Horrors.

I have three more months to go and I’ve already gained close to what I gained carrying Sara at full term. WHAT??!?!? Now, everyone will say, oh don’t worry, no two pregnancies are alike. But you don’t understand, I’ve already been eyeing myself in the mirror and I’ve noticed my face is rounding up. Quite a bit in fact. And my behind. Oh, my behind. With Sara people said I didn’t look a day pregnant from the back. With this one, it’s just so obvious.

The real kicker here is that I just knew, innately, that this was going to happen. With the sugar binge I’ve been having this last few weeks, could anyone be surprised? Yes, back-to-back tubs of Ben and Jerry’s, single-handedly polishing off American-sized desserts after big meals. One particularly nasty dessert had me leaving most of the whipped cream behind. To those who know me, Hsin NEVER leaves whipped cream behind. Back in my dessert-binging days, oh, some 10 odd years ago, I was known to even put the nozzle of the whipped cream can straight into my mouth to save on washing. Despite the pregnant dessert-craving state I was in, I couldn’t finish the whipped cream. What does that say about American desserts?

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. I suppose it’s no one’s fault other than my own. Getting too lax and complacent having survived through one pregnancy without much trouble. With three months left, I will have to be more disciplined, be damned the old wives’ tale that one should eat what one wants when pregnant, less your baby drools. Good thing the sugar-crave has passed, so now it’s just a matter of eating a balanced diet, not overdoing the salt intake, eating more fruits and drinking more water. Gee…. sounds like fun already.

Sigh.

Crash

From several year-end reviews I chanced upon, Crash appears to have been THE movie to watch for 2005 (even though it's dated 2004). Danny watched it on the plane (that's how he catches up with movies) and insisted it was a great, so I said okay – we borrow this from Blockbusters.

It is a good movie. The plot can't really be explained, just because there is a randomness about how the whole thing was stitched together. In a nutshell, though, for those who haven't seen the movie, it is about a random group of people whose paths cross knowingly and unknowingly through the course of 36 hours. Everyone is tied together by an ongoing theme of racial discrimination, be it victim or aggressor. The screenplay is by Paul Haggis, who largely remains unknown to me, except that his last name reminds me of a particularly nasty Scottish dish of sheep entrails. It is quite stunningly pulled together, even if it is low budget, and the screenplay was good enough to attract pretty big names. I think everyone identifies with it to some extent. Someone will say something racial and while you know you shouldn't laugh, you do – and then you feel bad about it. There are uplifting moments, but the reality of the underlying story can be somewhat depressing.

Not my type of movie for regular consumption, but definitely worth a watch.