A Chinese pun

Eating gow choy, better than one gow choy

A joke my mother used to chuckle over came back to me. In the story a young lady is asked to prove her cooking skills by making ten dishes. So she took some Chinese chives and fried them with an egg satisfying the condition. Chinese chives are called gow choy 韭菜 which is a homophone for 九菜 nine vegetables.

You are most likely to find 韭菜 at yum cha as gow choy go, fried cake with small shrimp and radish.

Dead man's head

Today I was reminded of a swear phrase in Cantonese. The most literal usage I heard of it was when Malaysia first printed its own paper currency, bearing the image of a late Agong, instead of one of QEII, as Malaya used to be a British colony. A person seeing this paper money for the first time complained: say yan tau (dead man's head) money! I think he didn't like the design or something, but I forget.

As a swear phrase it's only moderate, used to express disfavour or unhappiness with some thing or situation. It's mentioned in this collection.

Chance to win 2000 DMHs

thambi

I was reminded of this word when I read a kiasu joke. In my childhood it was a generic term for a young Tamil man, as in:

The kopitiam thambi will bring over your coffee

It occurred to me to look it up today, and it means little brother. I suspect it's no longer correct to use. However I think bang, short for the Malay abang, brother, is ok. Sort of like bro in English.

No thambis here, serve yourself

Word of the day: etiolated

I remember well what this word means. It describes plants that grow in insufficient light so look blanched and have elongated stems. It was introduced in my high school Agricultural Science class. As soon as I heard it I joked: Like David!

Everybody else in the class understood what I meant and laughed. The unfortunate target of my joke was a classmate who was somewhat pale and spindly. He transferred to another school later, nothing to do with my joke, nor was he bullied. I wonder what became of him and if he remembers this moniker. I'm sure he's bulked out like all the rest of us. 🙁

Etiolated boy

Two words for we in Malay

Malay is a relatively easy language to learn. For example there is no conjugation or indication of number for verbs. However Malay has a feature that English doesn't. Malay has two pronouns for we, kami and kita. Simply put kami does not include the listener, whereas kita does. So where English would use the same pronoun we for these sentences:

Thanks, we had a great bushwalk.

We must take better care of our environment.

Malay would use kami for the first and kita for the second.

I feel that this is a lacuna in English. If there were two forms of we, pollies would have to openly prevaricate in sentences like this:

We will all benefit substantially from this tax cut.

😉

If I may briefly mention a few things…

First Day Covers

Remember these? I was reminded by one in my collection of paper mail that was sent to me 48 years ago. In those days FDCs commemorated special days and were collector's items. Some aficionados went to the trouble of getting them at the post office on the first day of issue to gift to friends.

It was sent to me by a friend who was the younger brother of a boss I worked for after school. He may have been a colleague, I can't remember. Obviously he was keen on FDCs and was kind enough to send me one. I wonder what's become of him. I hope he had a good life.

Sugar people

He liked word jokes

A joke a friend of mine made came back to me today. A couple of university friends, one on a break from studying in NZ, and I, were discussing what to do over the Chinese New Year break. We were considering taking a ferry to Pangkor Island, off the coast of Perak, to stay in a beach chalet. Talking about the holidays, the NZ friend invented the phrase sugar people.

We knew exactly what he was joking about. Chinese sometimes call themselves Tang people, 唐人, because that period of Chinese civilisation was a glorious era. However the character for Tang, with the radical for rice added to the left, becomes the character for sugar, 糖. The characters are homophones and context disambiguates. You'll usually hear the Cantonese phrase tong yan, and it doesn't mean sugar people.

The other incident I remember is on the return trip on the ferry, we observed one of the passengers conspicuously taking great pleasure smoking a cheroot. Annual Chinese New Year cigar, quipped my friend, the implication being that it was a once-per-year treat.

My friend's somewhere around, possibly in Singapore. I miss his quirky sense of humour.

While writing this I discovered that sugar people are in fact a thing. They are figurines made from melted sugar. I never saw them in Malaysia though. Sugar was for tea or coffee, and sugar objects would have attracted ants.

Sugar people dining out

My dad read Japanese

Datsun stand at industrial fair in Penang

Well, actually just katakana, not the full Japanese syllabary, which includes kanji, hiragana and some rōmaji. It came back to me today that my dad was able to translate electronics terms from repair manuals that I had and electronics trade magazines that my brother was subscribed to after returning from studies in Japan. I particularly remember トランジスタ (toranjisuta, transistor) and ラジオ (rajio, radio). Then there were components like コンデンサ (kondensa, condenser, an old synonym for capacitor). However they have contracted television to テレビ (terebi) something they have also done to animation.

Where did he learn katakana? It wasn't for work. In the late 60s Japanese companies had only begun to export their cars to Malaysia, and they had set up some manufacturing in Malaysia, but my dad had no dealings with those enterprises. Rather, it was because as a young man he had lived through the Japanese occupation of Malaya during WWII. Katakana is phonetic and used for foreign and loan words so relatively easy to learn. I suppose it was a survival skill, but he was also good at picking up knowledge. He even showed me the katakana scheme but I have let that knowledge lapse. He didn't tell me any war stories. Our family suffered the privations of wartime occupation, but emerged relatively unscathed, compared to far more unfortunate civilians.

The first telephone exchange

 

You can have my phone but not my cat

At university one of the lectures in final year engineering was on telecommunications, which was not formally covered by a course. It was presented by an engineer from Telecom Malaysia, the national phone company. He explained that the first automatic telephone exchange switch was invented by Strowger, an undertaker, allegedly because he suspected that the town switchboard operator was diverting calls to her husband, his business rival.

One of my classmates was very susceptible to jokes. If you told him a joke, he would start laughing and keep laughing for a minute or two. After that even a reminder of the joke would set him off again.

Anyway when I heard the phrase first telephone exchange, my mischievous mind caused me to say to him: First telephone exchange; you give me your phone, I'll give you mine. That set him off.

We got told off by the lecturer for the disruption.

Formal Chinese numbers

Something my dad explained to me when I was a kid that I still remember. I first saw the "complicated" Chinese character for one on currency: 壹. I asked my dad why didn't they just write: 一? He said, it's to forestall forgery or alteration, just as one spells out an amount in words on cheques in English. Being an accountant, he knew all that.

Here are the formal numbers from 0 to 10 in Chinese:  零壹贰叁肆伍陆柒捌玖拾. Pronunciation is identical. Here's the blog post I found which gives more details.

Right, that's 壹萬 bucks you owe me

 

Teaching English

I think he was ok, just very tired

In Malaysia one of my university friends took an B.Ed degree. After graduating, she was posted to a rural school for a year to fulfill the requirements of her scholarship. On one of her trips back to the city, she regaled us with stories of mistakes students made in English sentences. I thought those mildly amusing, but of late I have come to think that those mistakes just illustrate irregularities in English.

My mother is a good cooker.

My mother is a good baker is a perfectly good sentence so why not cooker? Which reminds me I once texted a friend that Aldi was selling rice coolers, thanks to autocorrect. Friend texted back that coolers wouldn't be approved by his wife as she preferred her meals hot.

I am in the well, I hope you are in the well too.

I am healthy, I hope you are healthy too is fine, but of course the student didn't recall that well is a physical object too. I'm often tempted to ask people if they are in the well.

 Maybe more examples will come back to me.

The George Town / Butterworth ferry

I noticed that I had a handful of photos of the Penang ferry, which connected the island to peninsular Malaysia until a bridge was built. George Town is the urban area of Penang island, and Butterworth, the opposite urban area on the mainland, so it was a very convenient service. They are separated by 3 km of the Penang Strait. Crossings took about 20 minutes. Here's a picture taken by my dad in the 60s.

The ferries are operated now by the Fast Ferry service. The ferries were named after islands of Malaysia and this one, Pulau Tioman, is named after a resort island to the east of the state of Johor in peninsular Malaysia.

Which way is the ferry headed? From the building near the right edge of the photo, I think it's headed for George Town. Which means that the photo was taken as we left Penang.

Here's a photo of the vicinity of the ferry terminal on Penang, taken in the 70s. My photos have not withstood the ravages of time as well as my dad's.

And here is another ferry, the Pulau Lumut. Wikipedia tells me that it's been renamed Pulau Indah.

Neither ferry is in service any more, so those names have passed into history. The oldest ferry in the recently retired fleet entered service in 1971. Only one ferry of this class, the Pulau Angsa, is still serving motorcycles and bicycles. It turned out that the car service ended very recently, at the end of 2020, because the ferries were too decrepit. Now cars have to use the bridges and three water buses carry foot traffic. So passes the era of a historic ferry service. Sic transit.

Poor DJ (or poor station)!

Mount Faber, Singapore

Some time in the early 70s, Malaysia began to issue licenses for private stations. Hitherto all stations were state-owned. I recall expectantly tuning in to a new station looking forward to more pop music.

Unfortunately this station's pop half-hour must have been poorly funded because it seemed like the DJ had only 2 records, or maybe 2 copyright clearances. I still marvel to this day how the DJ managed to get through 30 minutes with the same set of songs on high rotation. One of them might have been a Barry Manilow album or maybe that's an unjustified association. 😀

I don't remember what station that was, or what happened to it. But I still remember that brave DJ soldiering on with his upbeat chatter for a half-hour for several weeks. I wonder if these days he recounts this story of the worst job he ever had.

Kuala Lumpur Subang Airport

I noticed that I have many old photos taken in the 60s at Subang Airport, whenever people arrived or departed. Here's one occasion. From photos taken around the same time, I believe the year is 1966.

Arrivals and departures board

Most of the origins and destinations are local, like Singapore, Penang, Kota Bahru (in the north-east of Peninsular Malaysia) but you also see more distant cities like Phnon Penh and Amsterdam. This incidentally confirms the photos as from the 60s because the civil war in Cambodia started in 1970. The KLM Amsterdam flight would have been multi-stop, at least a couple of if not a few days long, and possible staging airports include Bangkok, and New Delhi. Nearer to Europe I don't know. I would have to do a thorough search of KLM history to discover those airports.

The reason my parents and I were at the airport was to farewell the daughter of a church member, who had been wooed by, and married an Australian, and was emigrating to Australia. That's her and her brother at the top of the staircase in the previous photo.

Last minute checks

My mum is at the far left. The amah who helped raise the daughter is on the ground, then the husband, and his mother-in-law, who was obviously sad to part with her daughter.

MSA plane

This could be the plane they boarded. If so then they would have changed planes in Singapore, perhaps to board a Qantas flight. On the other hand I may have taken a photo of an unrelated plane and they took the KLM flight to Singapore and thence to Australia.

I looked up the family in question. It seems that the couple are living near Grafton, in a rural area. I seem to recall the husband was from a farming family. The mother later migrated to join her daughter and son-in-law in her old age, and died about 15 years ago.

I had forgotten that there was an airline called MSA (Malaysia-Singapore Airlines). It lasted from 1965 to 1972. Even though Singapore split from Malaysia in 1965, joint operations continued for 6 years.

Subang airport was superseded by KLIA in 1998. Today only a few budget carriers use what's left of Subang.

PS: You can view full sized versions of the photos by clicking on them.

Nangka

I've just been extracting the fruits from a quarter of a nangka, also known as jackfruit to Westerners, that I got from remainders at a market. It was perfectly good because it had not fully ripened when I bought it, but when the aromatic smell in my kitchen got overpowering, I had to extract the fruits before they started to ferment.

Nangka tree in Vietnam

As the reference article states, the fruits are surrounded by inedible fibres, and the stalk exudes sticky sap when cut. You can see the orange coloured flesh in one of the pictures. This reminded me that when we dismantled a nangka in Malaysia we used cooking oil to help dissolve the sap on the hands afterwards. Tonight I used that, some dish detergent, a scouring pad, and some isopropyl alcohol to finish off.

Very messy, but totally worth it. I have enough fruits to last me a couple of days.