hello hello some more

to add on to what i wrote before dinner called, i've been troubled by what Chaim Potok calls "core-to-core cultural confrontation" and writes about. it's what makes fauziah and me not as malay/chinese as we'd like to be i think. but i shouldn't make excuses for how i've let chinese slip out of my life and come up with funny theories on why i'm so darned comfortable with speaking thinking breathing english and not chinese as well. there's something dead wrong when my american roommate says that she's more asian than i am and by asian she means chinese really. i recently started really listening to how i speak. i can sound polished but the truth is i'll never sound as smooth as the americans do. don't know if i've a speech impediment or if it's just not my natural language. after all i grew up speaking chinese, up till sec sch when i discovered eng lit, and they've spoken english mostly all their lives. if we'd done chinese lit, i think i wouldn't be having this trouble. i'm always reminded by my roommate that i shouldn't be so comfortable with english when i help her with a sentence or a word that she's struggling to find, and she goes "i can't believe a foreigner can think of an english word and i can't" (on this i'm also quite irked by how sometimes they think anyone who's not american or western should be less liberated/modern/advanced in anything).

yeah that's why i'm listening to 九三三 fm now (inspired by my friend yonghe) hehe maybe i'll come back speaking better chinese than even you shup and surfing around for chinese lit courses to take. i think it'll be a great challenge to do chinese lit hehehe.

this is it for my weekly update on chimchiminychim. want to nurse my aching ankle now stupid cold and rain that just started is killing my foot. save me!