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.