Cultural Convolution

With the increasingly diversified environment at work, in training, in school and volunteering events, I was exposed to people from all over the world visiting the US for the first time and communicating with them through the one common language that we have, English, have reminded me of my own experience learning the language and speaking it for the first time to native speakers in the States. I completely understand what they were going through as I am learning languages myself at the moment. Learning a foreign language so that we are not only fluent but confident in using it is a tough journey that one has to overcome on their own by lots and lots of practice. And being misunderstood can often led to social withdrawal behaviors that I have witnessed only a couple days ago on a lady from Mexico in a company training. As the listeners, being “tolerant” is not enough. We need to actively engage these ESL speakers by asking them relevant questions without putting them on the spot and be patient and open-minded about what they have to say. But the universally understood rule about asking question is be careful what you ask for — ‘cause if you are not prepared to have your opinion be challenged, then don’t bother asking.

It is also imperative that we “see what we are not seeing” and do not make assumptions about other people — we certainly cannot “see” what we are “not seeing”; but it is the awareness that there’s blind spots in our cognition that’s what drive better understanding. I had this enlightenment during my Product Research training recently but that’s another story.

Recently in my German class, we had a discussion on racism during the culture section where we talked about the demographics of the German populations and read two poems speaking against discrimination. Then Frau Hampton turned to us and asked if any one in the class has any experience before. The question is obviously directed to me, because I’m the only immigrant (first generation or what have you) in the room. I thought about my life here for a second and I was relieved to say that I couldn’t come up with stories. I have seen other people being treated “differently” but that’s mostly because of their own, well, stupidity, in provoking their American counterparts. What I’m trying to say is, relationship could only be established if there are two or more people involved. Hence courteousness and respects are expected of both sides, not just one. While one person open their arms, the other person needs to step forward to finish the hug. If we do not accept, adapt to or at least be tolerant of the culture we are stepping into, expecting to be treated like every one else is unrealistic.

Now, I must add, that being “different” is not necessarily a bad thing. Some times it could be an advantage. And I’m not just talking about races or sexes but also your ability to roll your tongue, your distaste for chocolate, your obsession with purple and orange ensembles. It’s all about playing your stereotypical “weakness” to your strength. In Product Research world, for example, not having been married and without a baby nor any diapering experience doesn’t mean you cannot talk to Baby Care consumers and do good research work; as my coach has taught me, tell the mom “You are the expert in the area.” will put her into a teacher’s role and there no better way to get a mom talking than that. Being Chinese in the Midwest might mean I will get ridiculous questions/propositions/acc

“Try to remember the kind of September, when life was slow, and oh so mellow…”

A few days ago I had a little personal triumph at Half-Price book store in Montgomery. — I found a 20 years old Patti Page’s “Hush Hush, Sweet Charlotte” CD that was imported from Tokyo. Apart from the front cover, everything else including the insert that promots all the CDs from CBS/SONY released in the year ‘88 were all writen in cheery little Japanese characters! Patti Page is one of my dad’s favorite artists. He can barely read English but he knows Patti Page and I remember he had a hard time getting hold of her LDs/CDs in Hong Kong when I was young. Things might be different nowadays, given how easy it is to get imported goods but I know he would love it so I decided to buy him this CD as a gift. I visit Half-Price Books a lot and from my experience, a rare find, say the original Joshua Tree by U2 will cost like nine or ten bucks in Half-Price Books and stuff that pricey (relatively speaking) would already be pretty hard to come across. Usually everything there is under five dollars. Not that I did not already know the value of the disc itself but when I saw that it was tagged as $14.98 I knew that I’ve made a (small scale) Guinness‘s world record type of discovery.

I like getting my CDs from second hand stores. It is almost impossible to find a real second hand store nowadays that would match our expectations for one of those mysterious places owned by an old couple whom have no longer the will or the power to arrange their array of goods accumulated over the years where amongst the inferior or commonplace contemporary stuff stacked in hapless, untidy piles are the hidden treasures from time immemorial like those talked about in old books and movies. Most of the second hand places now are big chains with painstakingly clean aisles, neat shelves and bright florescence lights that are operated by punks, emos or out-of-work white males that carry serious stoned expressions regardless of the time of the day you go in. Despite the sterile environment, the joy of treasure hunting, I supposed, is still pretty much the same as in older times. It is always exhilarating when you uncover something rare, whether it’s a CDs or an old gramophone record that carries a song that one has heard in one‘s youth that makes one nostalgic, or signifies an era that inspires even if it was before one’s time.

Since Patti Page, a singer in the 60’s as most other famous artists that we remembered from that era are big on re-doing old songs from years or even decades before, most of us should have, in one way or another, heard of the songs that made her famous, like “Moon River”,  “Try to remember” (we‘ve probably all heard of the version by The Brother Four), “Can’t help falling in love” (as in “I can‘t help falling in love with you“ by Elvis Presley), “Jamaica Farewell” (originally by Harry Bellafonte) and the song that definitely every American has heard of (Well, of course I can‘t speak for them, but Nate can and that‘s what he told me), the “Danny Boy”, the unofficial Irish anthem that got its way into many important occasions like soldiers sent-offs and funerals.

My memory of “Try to remember” came from a date in my high school years. One of those movie dates that actually meant the world to me at that point in time. The movie was a Hong Kong production with Leon Lai and Shu Qi in which their love affair was discovered when they died together in a car wreck in London on a Christmas night by their grown-up daughter and son they have respectively in their own families. And the story really took flight when then the two youngsters, initially hated each other’s gut after the shocking discovery about the other sibling, slowly put together the wonderful, heart-wrenching love story of their parents who had met a long time ago in their college times and eventually made peace with each other for the sake of their parents. It was a very romantic story and “Try to remember” was played, as a you tube video clip someone has put online has reminded me, during a slow-motion play-back of their memories from their college orientation battle-of-the-sexes game where Leon met Shu Qi for the first time and made a lasting impression on each other‘s heart. I remember for a short period of time I was obsessed with the idea of playing that song on piano. I don’t think I can do it anymore but I will probably never forget that song as the lyrics says we all have moments when we “try to remember the kind of September, when life was slow and oh so mellow.”

It’s kinda funny, but I like songs that Patti Page and Patsy Cline redid in the 60s that were from like the 30s . I wonder what kind of songs from our times will touch our future generations like those that has touched me. Would it be Rhiana’s “Umbrella” or Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida”? I certainly do hope that it would be the latter if the choices come down to those in the year 2074. At least it has some kind of educational historical refrence in it.

Because of misplaced creativity on the translator’s part, the movie Pulp Fiction was renamed “The Dangerous” in Chinese in Hong Kong, which was in a way befitting when one skimps the surface of the story. But it was, as I later discovered, more than what was spelt out. The movie was released in 1994 and I was at the time no more than eleven years old. As the movie was a category 3 movie (which was equivalent to NC-17, the most restricted level in the US movie rating scale), the poster on which Uma Thurman in her iconic hairstyle laid seductively on a bed, holding her head up in a supercilious tilt while smoking a cigarette was stamped with a red warning symbol with the Roman character of the number 3 enclosed inside a solid-colored equilateral triangle that by the weird force of association reminded me of the somewhat triangular (inverted) Caduceus one sees on ambulance. One could only think of the movie as extremely vulgar and violent which were the very characteristics of most gang movies that enticed millions of audience which, me, the child of a righteous man no less protected than the sons and daughters of any southern Presbyterian preacher. Because of these, the Oscar-winning movie has eluded me for a great many years.

Some ten, fifteen years have gone by and I finally got to watch this movie made famous in my social circle more because of the taboos that Chinese film-makers at the time of my teens would not venture touching upon in their movies than the movie itself. Despite the hype that was built up around the movie that I knew, if it wasn’t in the least bit brilliant, would sure to disappoint, I was duly impressed. Scenes in the movie lingered in my mind way after I have finished the movie. I honestly said to Nate, who complained that I was hard to impress when it comes movies (and pretty much everything else as he will soon find out), “Wow, it was really good.”

If you have forgotten about the movie or have never watched it and plan on watching it soon, I must say, please be warned: the movie was far from perfect in its execution. But like the hackneyed saying, the imperfection was what made the movie so impressive, so perfect in its own way. The way how different short stories were shuffled in a seemingly random order and the way how those considerably long but clever and absolutely necessary conversations were dully documented, although they were stretching the audience’s patience a little bit, they made perfect sense when the movie wrapped. There were many prolonged scenes that was intriguing in a way but with the huge production dollars associated with every extra second of the film and the easily lost concentrations of modern days movie-goers, they seemed to some rather daring directing efforts in the movies. For example, why did the camera followed Travolta around in the restaurant for a whole minute? Why did they showed almost the entire dance between Thurman and Travolta in the twisting contest? Those were parts that would be easily skipped in movies nowadays since they didn’t necessarily assist the flow of the story but yet, in that odd minute or two when you see the two danced, their genuine, somewhat awkward interaction made you feel good and really get you into their states of mind. And when the unexpected happened, you get a bigger pang out of it. Your heart beat with that of Travolta not the half-dead Thurman laying in a horrid state on the floor after overdosing on heroine.

My favorite part of the movie was no doubt near the end when Samuel L Jackson made that long speech about his revelation about the purpose of his life. I liked that he tried to redefine the Bible passage from Ezekiel he recited every time before he killed a person over and over again to let us follow the logic of how he finally saw that he was the sinned and he was to repent his life’s wrongdoings by saving another man’s life. It was just rare that any action movie, regardless of whether the story was good or not, would take time to deliver a moral message that was so critical to the movie yet could also be skimped over as easily under another director/writer’s hand.

If you think based on what I said Pulp Fiction was a snob movie, you were absolutely wrong. The story and the characters were extremely colorful. Nate and I were laughing our asses off when Bruce Willis stood in the counter of the black market store trying to pick his weapon. His first picked a rifle, then he saw a baseball bat. Just when he was swinging the bat to prepare himself for battle, he saw a chainsaw. At that point we were already falling off our chairs. Then he laid his gaze upon the Japanese knife set upon the shelf. He unsheathed the knife and went into the backdoor to kill his enemies. It totally foretold the obsessions with Japanese knives Quentin Tarantino has and reminded us of Kill Bill. I was basically in awe looking at Bruce Willis. In his exchange with his fictitious goofy French girlfriend he showed himself as incredibly attractive, funny and more importantly an excellent actor that a simple love scene was no challenge for a man I have thought only capable of demolitions, flying across buildings and driving a truck to a helicopter filled with Russian manslayers that almost never die. Of course, the stabbing people in the heart with needle part and the homosexual cop ass-raping the black guy part (as with the appearance of the Gimp) were more graphic than I hoped. But it’s an American movie after all. These kinds of things were the essential ingredients of most gangster movies. And without some dramatizations, the world probably wouldn’t talk about the movie as much as it did.

One thing I realized after watching Pulp Fiction was that there was absolutely no sex scene in the movie and the promotional photo on all the posters and DVD covers of Uma Thurman lying on the bed was rather misleading. (Not that I would like to watch her. Both Nate and I were befuddled at her popularity for how genuinely ugly she looked.) She wasn’t even in the movie that much.

There was no real, tangible gain one can get from watching movies like that apart from the mental stimulus. Pulp fiction is, after all, pulp fiction. But if I were to say something I learnt, I guess it was not to judge a book by its cover, or more precisely not to based our judgments of things entirely on the advices of a conservative governmental agency.

One of the biggest mystery of classic Hollywood movie was Sammy Davis Jr’s “EEE-O-ELEVEN” in the original Ocean’s 11 movie filmed in 1960 featuring his fellow singers from the Rat Pack, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin etc. For those of us who loved or at least enjoyed the remake of Ocean’s 11 as well as the 12th and the 13th, it was a great movie that a fan couldn‘t miss, though with all the respect to the bygone generations of dashing movie stars with captivating voices, the movie was a tad too long and the filming technique a bit clumsy. As with watching any classics, it certainly does make you realize how much both the movie-making and (burglarious) technology have improved tremendously over the years. But for all it’s worth, the acting was satisfactory and the ending was fulfilling. There was one thing, however, that left the youth of the twenty-first century who re-visited this movie that made Las Vegas famous baffled. — What does “EO11“ , the title and lyrics of a song by Sammy Davis Jr. that was played over and over during the movie and eventually wrapped it up, actually means?

The internet community took a wild guess on “askearth.com”. For a forum that was populated by herds of pop-culture and gaming geeks, plenty educated guesses that were nonetheless wrong were proposed.

Someone said that “E means eleven, O means Ocean, 11 is of course eleven”. Now, this guy completely underestimated the linguistic abilities of the script/song writers. What kind of people would be paid millions of dollars to blatantly commit the error of verbal redundancy? If so, who’s were those who paid them? Illiterates or dimwits? One brave member said he couldn’t convinced himself of that explanation. If calling out the band that was led by Danny Ocean was the intention of the title, then it should be called “OE11” instead of “EO11”, he said. Gotta agree with him.

A couple other people suggested that “EO-11“ was the name of the troop that they all belonged to in the military. This explanation was even offered in the movie synopsis in one of the popular movie review websites. It sounds pretty sensible until you recall that at multiple places of the movie, Danny and Jimmy were specifically being called as the Lieutenant and the Sergeant of the “Troops 82“.

Here, I venture as far as offering my own explanation of what it means and I know y’all just can’t wait to hear it —- United States called their space expedition program EO s. In the movie, Danny Ocean (Frank Sinatra) and Jimmy Foster (Peter Lawford) were trying to convince Vince Massler to join in their operation and Vince was reluctant. He said, “If it’s so fool-proof, why hasn’t somebody done it yet?” and Danny replied him with this legendary exchange: “Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon yet - no equipment.”

So there he said it. “Same reason nobody’s gone to the moon.” Danny viewed this meticulously planned operation as grand and as breakthrough a feat as man landing on the moon. It then made perfect sense to refer to their operation the same way NASA refer to their spatial expedition. The movie was filmed before 1960, NASA started at 1958, man’s landing on the moon is on 1969. My explanation fits perfectly with the timing. It’s seamless, right?

Though it would have been pretty clever on the writers’ part if this is true, this isn’t the right answer.

“EEE-O-ELEVEN” was basically a way of calling out 11 points in a craps game. The shooters have fancy ways of calling out all the possible numbers that could be rolled by the combination of the two dices and it was habitual that they called 11 as “Yo-leven” which later got reduced into “YO” and eventually got turned into “YEE-OOO-ELEVEN”, a number that could make the shooters win (It was more complicated than that but I‘m obviously not the best person to explain casino games). Ever seen men murmur under their breaths in casino the number that they have just betted on with the concentration of a pious catholic praying with his/her rosary beads? That’s exactly what Sammy Davis Jr. was doing in his song. For a movie about a group of men coming together to win their money from the banks of casinos with high hopes of being the richest men on the US soil, the reference to the number that even the dumbest gambler would pray to get in a craps game was just extremely fitting.

It is crystal clear. The rival for the most gold medals in this year’s Olympics is simply a battle between two nations, US and China.

The Olympics would have been a reasonable trigger for identity struggle for someone who’s trapped in the middle like me. Luckily, being a thoroughbred Hong Kongese who only some years ago got my nationality changed from British National Oversea to Hong Kong SAR of China now here living out in the Midwest, I have assumed the attitude of indifference, like many other expats in America, in light of the Olympic spirit and ethos of sports in which there is no country in sports (hypothetically speaking), only the gifted and the trained, the surrender and the endurer. And the world game is a facilitator of reaching the goal through series of intimate cultural exchange experience.

Hence, as I’ve said, in the face of this year’s Olympics Slogan ”One world, one dream.”, I have chosen to take the high road and remain impartial to avoid making unfair judgement of one team against the other. Certainly, my childhood in the small island of Hong Kong that was devoided of any type of patriotic education and my adolescence after the handed-over of Hong Kong which managed to maintain its own fairly independent government and a highly liberal press, made my enthusiasm for National sports only so-so and ”making it to the world stage” has not been my sole personal goal like many other Chinese youth. I barely know any of the famous sportsmen from China that appeared in the opening ceremony except Li Ning and Yao Ming and I supposed that’s how most other fellow Hong Kongeses are too.

My personal background has made me an impartial reader to Olympics news and being aptly equipped with a rather new HP computer that automatically loads up Yahoo! as my homepage on which I would always get immediately carried away by the intriguing news headlines before I have a chance to type in Yahoo! HK to read about the same competition in Chinese, I am under the advantage of being able to learn about the Olympics in both the perspectives of the American and the Chinese presses. And what I’ve found from the juxtaposition of the two was that the American press coverage always, with a humorous (at times sarcastic) undertone, highlights the brighter (actually, not so bright) side of things occurring in or behind the scene of the Beijing Olympics while their Chinese counterparts tried hard to maintain their perfectly amiable image by keeping all their news painfully sterile and to-the-point. The difference is grossly interesting. 

Let me give you an example. The Chinese gymnastics team — they are a widely popular topic over the lunch table here. The fact that they are amazingly good athletes is only a small part of the reason for their world acclaim in comparison to the controversy around them about their real ages. My personal opinion is that there is no dispute about the fact that some of the gymnasts are underage, but the press acitivity revolving the issue was just too much of a monkey business. Reports from self-proclaimed experts trying to decode the game videos and photos, and the plethora of reports about evidence American journalists have dug up from ancient Chinese history concerning the real age of those poor Chinese gymnasts, trying their best to deface the Chinese team are ungracefully abundant. When I went on to the Chinese news website, however, there are nothing but straightforward reports about their brilliant performance. I missed the show, but apparently NBC has a program a couple of nights ago where they’ve brought in anthropologists to analyze the facial features and bone structures of the Chinese gymnasts to determine their real ages, and came up with the conclusion that they were no more than 14 years old. Of course, the anthropologists came from the States. What magnificent way to contest the validity of the gymnasts’ ages that were testified by the Chinese government itself. Hmm… it seems like neither country is very good at this.

Another example is the controversy around the girl who lip-synced in the opening ceremony to Ode to the Motherland. The switch has caused many hostile opinions over China’s obsession with maintaining the perfect image. But who could blame them? You don’t get to do the Olympics everyday. The only pitfall of the Chinese government over this matter would be not to have realized that Westerners think all the Chinese people looks the same and that the girl with the crooked teeth, much like how we see Caucasian kids with freckles, are just as cute as any six-year-old kid is. The little girl herself whose voice was used was also reported to have said that it was an honor already to have her voice being used in the opening ceremony and it didn’t matter that she got replaced. That was very graceful in her part.

After you finished reading as many of these reports as I’ve, you would certainly realized that American presses are definitely much more liberal and at times highly infilterated with personal opinions. Because of the pervasiveness of mixed media broadcasting that the boundaries of journalism ethics and standards that keep television and newspaper reports in its impartial and honest state have become much more vague when it comes to broadcasting on the web and on a blog, even though those sites are still connected to the news agencies. And this prompts us to question the unbiased, unprejudiced nature of the journalism on this side of the earth.

Because of the Don Quixote spirits of American press, every other news article now reads like a crusade waged against the integrity of the Chinese sportsmen and their government. Regardless of whether the Chinese are lying or not, they will get badgered by the rest of the world until the end of time and that’s the truth whether you accept it or not. US and China relation is no more cleaner than that between Israel and Pakistan. It’s God’s will (whoever their Gods might be) to put the two Nations in constantly conflict and I’m afraid that cannot be helped. But we should rejoice that they have shifted the battlefields from lands to papers and computer screens. Perhaps one can think of the western world as the mother who just can’t help nitpicking everything her son does and there’s nothing he can do about it until he grows up and become independent of her, then her good-natured advices wouldn’t matter anymore.

There are much deeper political implications of the Olympics than a person like me can fathom and I acknowledge that my light-hearted analogies about US-China relations are definitely inadequate and very inaccurate. One thing I know for sure, however, is that the news on this side of the river (when I say river I mean ocean) are definitely funnier.

Can an adult enjoy Disney World? That was the question that occupied my mind while I was walking through their various attractions with my parents on their first visit to the famed theme park. It seems to me an incredible embarrassment for anyone over the age of sixteen to say that they love Disney World, especially when they are being glaringly ripped off not only financially, but creatively.

 In this day and age, it is unbelievable that Disney could operate in such rundown condition and continue offering the same rides and exhibition that employs cheap mechanical gadgets and visual tricks as they have been since the 90s. Regardless it was the Animal Kingdom or the Hollywood Studio, the Magical Kingdom or the experimental village Epcot, the technology behind most of their games are crude, outdated and monotonous. Since the last time I was there four years ago, only one extra attraction has been added to the Hollywood Studio, and it was basically a walk-in movie theater that, as in the typical theme park fashion, cramps a whole bunch of unknowing tourists like me into a dark room with loud music and forces us to watch a trailer of a new movie that they’ve recently made (this particular one is Narnia and Prince Caspian) on four white projector screens. The financial investment in this new attraction compared to what Disney was charging us was nothing.

Not even the grand finale of the day — the Fantasmic laser show at night time was at all inspiring. It was almost an insult to its audience’s intellect. The show was basically a re-showing of the almost century-old Fantasia cartoon (remember Mickey as the Sorcerer‘s Apprentice?) on a continuous waterfall screen at the amphitheater. The technology involved could easily be replicated in a small home water fountain one could get from pet stores for twenty dollars, except the one in Disney was much bigger in size. Although my parents were enjoying their Disney World visit greatly along with thousands of other cheerful visitors, I could not help but being the skeptic. What about “A million years of dream”? What about “Being ahead of its time”? What about the “Engineering” in the “Imagineering”? What about sustainability and continuous improvement? Did they stop hiring engineers in the last decade? What a shame it is for them to keep charging people sixty, seventy dollars for a ride in “Honey, I Shrunk the Kid.” The movie was so old I think even Blockbuster has moved its DVDs into the classics aisle next to Sunset Boulevard.

Despite the huge disappointment in their lack of innovations, I still enjoyed my time with my parents over there, thanks to the humorous hosts that entertained us on our way in various shows and rides, and the witty word-play that were on all the directories, menus, signs and displays. Since I liked to read, I have a suspicion that I enjoyed them more than any regular tourist and I’m loving it. Why, humor is timeless and nothing can beat the feeling of a hearty laugh that came from the depths of our hearts because of something that was downright funny. Hmm…there seemed to be a lesson to be learnt here — If you’re not smart enough, at least you can be funny. Here the Disney company has once again showed itself as the daring educators of the American youth, apart from nurturing such great role models like Linsay Lohan and our beloved Britney Spears.

Of course, some of the jokes were pretty corny, but they were made even funnier when the hosts that were supposed to say their much rehearsed speech with real Disney enthusiasm said them with an absolute irritation when they started to lose their patience with the roaring audience under the sweltering weather. I suppose the minimum wages didn’t help much.

Being quite on the verge of being an Engineer Disease patient myself, I could not help but noticed the pattern of how most rides and shows were conducted in Disney World. Apparently, the designers of the attractions decided that the best way their customers could enjoy their creations was when something unexpected happened during the course of the show, and they decided that stuff malfunctioning and breaking down were on the top of their list. Hence no matter where one goes, stuff are always going haywire in Disney World. — A mother elephant escaped in the midst of our Safari ride; The engine of the train broke down and has to stopped dead on its track right next to the plastic foam, wired frame Catastrophe Mountain (very aptly named, I must say) where everyone sitting on the left hand side was duely warned ahead of time to beware of the splashing water that would come “unexpectedly” during the course of the ride; The rabbit in the Muppet Show quitted during an act; Our host was abducted by Western Cowboys during the ride through classic movie scenes and reappeared two sets afterwards, killing the bandit that kidnapped our tour bus (who had continued to guide us through the various exhibits in between like any normal bandit would after kidnapping their subjects); The robot pilot in the Star War ride only told us seconds before takeoff that it was its first time flying a spaceship before crashing into a meteor in outer space…and the list goes on.

I just love how predictable everything is in Disney World. It’s like those fairytales that Disney has been trying to perpetuate all these years. It’s always “happily ever after” in one’s cocoon. Now if only life is that simple.

By sheer accident, I stumbled into a place where one could catch a glimpse of heaven if it should exist, a place of collective reminiscence for love that we have once experienced in our lives, requited or not.

When the old band of four, all in matching Hawaiian shirts and unflattering receding hairline that performs at Sunset Waterfront Grille and Bar in Cocoa Beach, Florida every Tuesday, played the famous tune of “Tennessee Waltz“, even the shyer Chinese couple started to move their bodies to the melodious rhythm of the heart-wrenching song that sustained its popularity from when it was first written in the 30s, through the wonderful interpretations of 50s’ Patti Page, Patsy Cline and Elvis Presley, 60s’ Tom Jones, Otis Redding and 90s’ Norah Jones and touched our hearts again and again in the decades passed. In this little air-conditioned room that was the main part of the Sunset G and B restaurant, the furnishing was rearranged for the Tuesday occasion. Chairs and tables were put together to allow for group sitting around the platform where the band was playing. On that particular day I happened to be there, all seats were occupied. Men and women in their sixties and more — all dressed to the nines — in this weekly social occasion to reconnect with old friends and make new ones while enjoying the music provided by the local band, danced to their hearts’ content to their favorite tunes. 

Even for someone like me that was born in the 80s, the effect of the Tennessee Waltz was immense. The talk of lost romance was delicately delivered within a few words that fully represented the more discreet and reserved cultures of men and women during courtship in the older times. A couple stood up and danced in the space between the potted trees and the entrance. Despite their ages, their bodies agile, their steps accurate, and their movements expressive. They could hardly be called beautiful yet two two of them together were nonetheless a beautiful sight to witness — two silhouettes weaving around each other like lovebirds twirling around tree branches chirping to a tune in their hearts which its historical meaning only known to them— it made one feel at ease about growing old.

Before I left the band played one of my favorite songs, “It Happened in Monterey” featured in the film in 1930 The King of Jazz and made popular than ever by the much loved Frank Sinatra. I have always loved the line when he sings “Broke somebody’s heart and I’m afraid it was mine.” It highlighted the irony of love — one doesn’t control one’s own heart. In the face of love, emotions are in charge. So when the line came up, in this rather sterile tourist city with nothing but feet sorching sands and blazing sun, on one of those days when I was in a desperate need to fall in love, the little song consoled me and left a pleasantly melancholic feeling in my lonely heart.

Link to listen Frank Sinatra’s “It Happened in Monterey”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhcuMVgROHU

Link to listen Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ek3eCbfqp0&feature=related 

The Europeans are grateful —  Hop on any European airline, chances are you will be moved by the clapping and cheering of the fellow passengers around you when the flight has successfully landed and you will find yourself having a renewed appreciation for the wonderful job that the pilot did for bringing a full flight of passengers safely from one city to another across the endless ocean, the violent turbulence, the roaring weather, and slipping out of the deadly chances of mechanical failures and human errors by the meticulous preparation by the crew even before the journey begins.

Clapping is just a way for the passengers to say thank you to the crew. It is a tradition that begun a long time ago when flying is still a luxury instead of just another option to driving. While the novelty of flying has worn off a great deal in America and most part of Asia due to the light-speed advancement in flight technology and airline and route expansions, the tradition persisted in Europe, Africa and some Asian countries. Patrick Smith from Ask the Pilot column of Salon.com suggested that the phenonmenon is more pervasive in economy class. His said that ”There’s a certain communal spirit, especially after a long-haul flight, when you’ve spent several hours in a relatively intimate space with hundreds of people. In a way, the applause acts like big collective handshake.” He has his points.

I say we oughtta keep this tradition alive on American airlines and celebrate our living moments while we can because one doesn’t know when one would by the twist of faith board a flight of no return, given how manifestly bad American pilots are being trained on plane landing. And I am speaking from experience — for the past eight months I have travelled nationally through various American Airlines (US Airways, United Airline, Northwest, Continental and Delta) no less than ten times. As far as I can remember, more than twice my planes have landed at inappropriately acute angles like missiles aiming for the unknown enemies hidden underground and barely missed snapping into two halves after the thunderous thugs when the planes finally hit the asphalt and rushed forward at neck breaking speed. While my typically reticent fellow Americans squeaked in terror around me in the cabin, which turned into a collective laughter that was second-nature to any human to cover their embarrassments for their over-reactions, I released my grip on the arm rests, rolled my eyes and gave the direction of the cockpit a disgusted look.

Erraneous decision in the cockpit, however minute, has incalculable implication. Although humans are born to make mistakes, the airlines that are responsible to the training and re-education of the flight crews are being paid exorbitant amount of money by their trusting customers to ensure the chances of them making incorrigible mistakes are kept to the minimum. As nearly 50% of all airplane accidents occurred during the last phase of the flight, which is preparation landing (dropping altitude, circling at low altitudes before the air traffic authority of that particular city gives out permission to land) and landing on runway itself, these types of near-misses showed how much more importance we should be putting into training pilots on this portion of the flight and into reconstruction of any physical infrastructure and system to allow the appropriate landing procedures to be carried out in the most conducive environment. Seriously, one crash landing is just one too many.

Of course, never-failingly the pilots would speak to us after those near-misses in his deep, sexy nasal voice to welcome us to the city XYZ, as if absolutely nothing abnormal has ever happened. Sometimes I wonder if pilots are recruited based on the level of theatrics they displayed in making takeoff and arrival announcements rather than their leadership skills, their expertise in flying a plane, and most importantly landing one.

Let’s clap and cheer for the flight crew next time your plane lands safely on the runway of your destination like the Europeans. You just cheated death again. It’s never too late to realize the need to celebrate being alive.

People from different countries have different ways of symbolizing the answers to any yes-no, right-wrong or true-false question. While the English uses the checkmark and the cross mark as symbols of opposite meaning, American often uses the cross mark to replace the use of the checkmark to symbolize the presence or the positive state of something as if the two are interexchangeable. In Japan, they use a slightly different system which is the “maru and batsu” —-the hollow circle dot and the cross mark. Maru, which means “circular” in Japanese becomes the representation of merit and excellency while batsu, which actually came from the word “bad” in English becomes the representation of all things negative. Because of all these subtle cultural differences in the usage of signs and symbols, confusion can sometimes be created.

Western cultures are very keen on the uses of the cross mark, which is the same as an “X”, or the 24th alphabet, to indicate new technology or breakthroughs in general. For example, Microsoft uses the name “Xbox” to represent their newest gaming system. While the Americans and the rest of the world love their innovation, the Japanese were skeptical simply because of its misleading name — the “Bad Box”. There are many other interesting uses of the “X” mark in America such as “X’mas” as the short-hand for Christmas, which my grade school art teacher who was deeply pious regarded as a sacrilege of the Christian religion, and the simple use “x” to replace “ex” to promote the power of many commercialize products like the “Xtreme” energy drinks or “Xterminator” anti-spam software.

Many linguists will say that English is the first true international language, a common language that promotes cultural and commercial exchanges. Today, 89% of the EU claimed that they are English speakers. Around the world, there are 375 million people who are English speakers. Although not every single one of them is of English descent and possess very distinctive local cultures of their own, many cities and countries who have used English as their official language, or rather the “unofficial” people’s language for a substantial amount of time such as Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, India, United States of Emirates and many more African countries such as Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria had adopted the British signs and symbols system together with the English languages over the years and continued their usage long after the British colonial rule. It is interesting to see, however, that the Americans have broken out of the pack and developed their own sets of rules, as for everything else. Of course, as one of the biggest, most powerful nations in the world, they can decide that the rest of the world should go through the trouble of following them while they make up rules that make their lives easy. This attitude can be exemplified even by the usage of something as trivial as the checkmark and the cross mark.

Sometime I cannot believe how arrogant Americans are with regard to filling out forms. Because of my work, I have administered many consumer research studies in which people were asked to answer a few very simple questions on the questionnaires regarding their impressions of the quality of the products of inquiry. They treated the instructions as if they were optional: When asked to fill in the circle next to one of the descriptions that fitted their situations best, there would always be people who put checkmarks, cross marks or even circle the descriptions themselves completely disregarding the space we provided for them. With respect to all these defiant behaviors, I could only attribute them to the traumatic SAT/ACT experience many Americans have to go through as teenagers, which forever disabled them from ever “filling in the box” again.

This is all just very fun to read about until the way how you express yes or no becomes life-threatening. For example when one travels across the borders to different countries, one is often given custom declaration forms to fill out. What if the question is “Are you in possession of firearms?” and with his/her unyielding Americanism, this stubborn American tourist puts an “X” in the “No” column. So what does that even mean? Does it mean he/she “is not in possession of firearms” ? Or he/she is saying that “I negate the fact that I am not in possession of firearms?” I’m certainly very impressed by the Americans for their linguistics dexterity.

“If you’re going to America, bring your own food.”
- Fran Lebowitz

Pertinent to the foundation of this country based upon colonizations and mass immigrations, it is perhaps not wrong to say that there is no real American cuisine. If one search deep into the history book, almost all of the popular dishes in the States can be traced back to its European, Native Indian or South American roots. It should not be denied that America gave the world their best effort: sourdough, cornbread, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cups, cereals, canned soup and frozen food are some of the important gastronomic innovations from this country. The flourish of frozen food industry in America might be distasteful to the gourmets among us, but it doesn’t mean that one cannot eat well in here. There are a lot more to American food that the undistinguished eyes can easily miss, and that is the clever adaptations of ethnic cuisine that has made American food rich in flavors and colors that is beyond what could be find in the almost ubiquitous fast food chains all around the world that is constantly mistook as the “American food”. It took me 5 years to realize that the “Junk food nation” has more to offer than hot dogs, burgers and pizzas…

First and foremost, no one can deny that New England Clam Chowder soup is probably one of the best gift to man from God. Do you know that there is a bill in Maine that prohibits the used of tomatoes in chowder? That is how much the Americans loved their chowder that they have to do anything to prevent its recipe from being altered. New England cuisine focused heavily on the use of seafood. From its name, it can be easily deduced that it came from its British colonial times. Due to its geographic locations, there is no shortage of fishes and shell fishes that one can find there. Apart from clam chowder, that region of the States has also offered us the Maine lobster, the Vermont Cheese and Maple syrup, the New Haven Neapolitan “Apizza”, New Hampshire’s Tourtiere meat pie and the widely popular apple cider (also comes in alcoholic form).

Understanding German influence on American food is one of the most interesting culinary adventure anyone can get, especially for someone like me who has resided in the state where the first Germantown was established in the 18th century (Pennsylvania) and one of the biggest Catholic-German settlement in the country (Cincinnati). Pennsylvania Deutsch cuisine certainly doesn’t only live within the border of that state. Some of the popular dishes are saucerbraten and sauerkraut. In “German Food, American Eats, from Life in USA”, the author explains : “German language names have not always been retained over the generations: breaded veal or pork cutlets are no longer called Wiener Schnitzel; the Roulade is now better known as a “roll ‘em up;” the Knödel is a dumpling; Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte is better known as Black Forest chocolate cake; Berliner Pfannkuchen are now just a type of doughnut; Kartoffel Salat became German potato salad (the kind served warm, made with vinegar). The German language was alive and well in the United States until an anti-German reaction set in during the First World War; menu names changed (sauerkraut was referred to as “Liberty Cabbage” for a time), but the food kept its appeal.” Oktoberfest is also celebrated each year in many cities of the States, allowing German Americans and anyone who wishes to join in the festivities that was first started as a day to commemorate King Ludwig’s marriage with his beloved, to drink lots of larger and enjoy German food.

One of the greatest culinary surprises I have in my past five years of living in the States, however, is probably the contact with Cajun food. In many past conversations, my friend from Louisiana has tried (and failed) many times to impressed on me the significance of Cajun food. It is only until one day I tried the Jambalaya over rice that I realized I have been missing out all along. A writer, Malcolm Hebert, explains that there are two types of Southern Cuisines that pervades New Orleans and Louisiana — Creoles and Cajun cuisines: “Many Creoles were rich planters and their kitchens aspired to grande cuisine. Their recipes came from France or Spain as did their chefs. By using classic French techniques with local foodstuffs, they created a whole new cuisine, Creole cooking. On the other hand, the Acadians, later contracted to Cajun, were a tough people used to living under strenuous conditions. They tended to serve strong country food prepared from locally available ingredients. It was pungent, peppery and practical since it was all cooked in a single pot. Thus Cajun cuisine was born.” Hence it is no wonder that many Southern dishes are given French name, like Cochon de Lait (Suckling Pig), Maque choux and Gumbo aux herbes (Shellfish and smoked pork).

Americans also claim ownership to some of the best desserts in the world. Brownies, banana splits, silk pie, pumpkin pie, apple pie, cup cakes, strawberry cobbler…the list goes on. However, one question lingers in my mind whenever I stand in front of coffee shop’s pastry window —-Is New York Cheesecake really made in New York?

Some historians believed that cheesecake was originated from Greece and had been made to serve athletes during the Olympics. Then they believed that the Romans spread cheesecake across Europe. In 1872, in an attempt to recreate the French Neufchâtel, a New York dairymen created cream cheese, which is 30% less in fat than its model from France. In 1912, Kraft created pastured cheese, which was the most important ingredient for cheesecake from then on. Writer Gary Allen has researched in depth into the origin of New York cheesecake and what he found, seemed to be unsatisfying: “There’s a lot of argument over who made the best New York cheesecake, whether it was Lindy’s on Manhattan’s Broadway or Junior’s out in Brooklyn. Lindy’s opened in 1921, and Junior’s in 1950. Lindy’s tends to get the credit for being first, not only because of its earlier opening date but because it had a more famous clientele and therefore received more press. Merle Evans traced the beginnings of New York cheesecake to the 1920s, and credited it to delicatessen owner Arnold Reuben, who opened his restaurant on 58th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues — and is also credited with inventing another quintessential New York dish: the Reuben Sandwich. However, there’s a good chance that Ratner’s, a kosher dairy restaurant, which opened in 1905 on the Lower East Side, may be the real source of the dish. Ratner’s version was not only classic New York cheesecake but was in the right place at the right time. While Russian paskha, an unbaked Easter cheesecake-like dish with nuts and dried fruits, and Italian pizza dolce were both precursors of our cheesecake — and would have been known in New York’s ethnic neighborhoods.” We may never know who produced the first New York-style cheesecake, but one thing is certain, what we have defined as the New York cheesecake was definitely a creation of New York.