A drink that didn't work

I found a drink stall on my campus selling this beverage: 珍珠豆奶 bandung. It seemed like a good idea: combine parts from 3 nice drinks to make a new one, a nice SE Asian fusion. Good idea, terrible taste.

Bilingual ballot envelope

A while back I received a ballot for the mid-term elections in the US. The envelope is written in both English and Chinese. I guess this has been the practice in the Seattle area for some time. I thought it was rather interesting.

Election campaigns in Taiwan

We were recently in Taiwan for a conference. Our visit overlapped with the campaign period for local elections. It was interesting to see how politicians campaign. 

Posters for candidates were of course common. Campaign vans drove around. Helpers jumped out and stood on street corners with placards. Outside a temple we received a packet of tissues with a candidate’s face on it. Later we saw her advertisement on an ice truck.

Most campaign material focused on some slogan for the candidate. Party affiliation was not obvious. Parties were not written prominently and materials were not color coded by party (as far as this color-blind person can tell). 

We saw many ads for female candidates. It was interesting to see how these politicians portrayed themselves. Many of them did not shy away from liberal use of pink. One candidate in Taipei had pink posters of herself wearing pink clothes and a pink bow. Several young women contesting the elections used heart designs.  

The best campaign material we received was for a female candidate, Ms. Yan Shengguan (aka, "Taiwan's daughter," in Tainan. Her campaign made a page of stickers for attaching to transportation cards. The stickers depict cartoon versions of the candidate, stylized with different themes. In one she is shown as a warrior, signifying her “courage.” In another, "efficient," she holds bow and arrow. She is also apparently "caring" (is that a princess outfit?) and "innovative" (wizard?). 

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Preview of the National Art Gallery (SG)

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend an event at the old City Hall and Supreme Court buildings. The site is to be converted into The National Art Gallery of Singapore, due to open in some five years time. Before massive renovation begins, the new tenants will be giving an open house on 9-10 October to share the plans for the gallery. And before the open house, the premises were opened for a preview tour for some Singapore bloggers. 

We watched a presentation on the renovation plans. The conversion of the City Hall and Supreme Court buildings is the next (and last major?) step in turning the historic buildings of the colonial administrative centre into an arts hub. This approach to heritage preservation makes some sense, as the public can still enjoy the buildings. The graphics of the future National Art Gallery reminded me very much of the National Museum, also hosted by a heritage building after renovation a few years back.

Representatives from the National Art Gallery (which exists now only as an administrative unit) fielded questions on a variety of topics. There were good questions about the difference between the Gallery and the Singapore Art Museum, as well as on how the Gallery would help the Singapore arts community. The Gallery will focus on Southeast Asia art, including Singaporean. 

The knowledgeable site curator led us on a tour. Significant events, including the Japanese surrender, have taken place there. We were allowed up into the dome of the City Hall building. Bats swirled through the rafters. Stepping out onto a ledge afforded spectacular nights views of the city. 

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Chusok

Today is chusok (추석) or Moon Festival. I'm in Korea for research and my trip overlaps with the holiday. Pretty much everything is shut down for the day. Yesterday massive rainfall came to Seoul and the streets flooded badly. 

Families gather with paternal relatives at the home of the senior male. For most families the main event today is ancestor worship or jesa (제사). Today we had jesa at 9am. The women prepared most of the food the day before, or earlier. This time we set out food for six deceased people: the patriarch's parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (all paternal only, of course). These slips of paper are written for them, and are burned after the ceremony.

The food is arranged so that when the ancestors visit, they start their meal from the back of the table with the main courses. Here they are offered pork and rice cakes -- at new year, they get rice cake soup instead of rice cake. Toward the front are the desserts, including apples, jujubes, and other snacks. There is also alcohol. 

The men lead the ceremony, which consists mostly of bowing in series of twos and threes. Alcohol is offered to the ancestors. As a son-in-law I have no official place in this ceremony but I am invited to offer my greetings to the ancestors. The whole ceremony is done in five minutes. The meal that follows is much longer.

Apparently, the rituals have become simplified over the years. In the past, people spent some time talking about each of the ancestors, but we skipped that. Still, it requires knowledge about what foods to prepare (and energy to prepare them!), how to arrange them, and what procedures to follow. How much of this tradition will the next generation maintain?

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Supermarket sociology

I've been missing the Sheng Siong supermarket across the street from where we used to stay. It is always so lively there. That got me thinking about how different the clientele is at the various supermarkets in Singapore. If I taught sociology I would encourage a student to do a sociological study of customers and behavior at various stores. Here are some generalizations based on my experiences in a few neighborhoods.

There are many dimensions you could examine: language, accent, attire, purchases, queuing style, the list goes on. At our old Sheng Siong, for example, one rarely hears English. That branch, because of its location, attracts many mainland Chinese workers staying at dormitories in Geylang, as well as some Vietnamese women from Joo Chiat. You can hear plenty of PRC-accented Mandarin. Some of the clerks speak almost no English. The store is often so packed that moving around is difficult, and during holiday times the shop expands into the carpack. It's casual. The fruit stands are often pungent with the smell of jackfruit. And live frogs look up at you from inside their bucket.

One rung up in terms of price is the Fairprice chain. At the branch closest to our place, it felt like a luxury after Sheng Siong to walk down the wide, empty aisles. There the language changes to locally-accented English and locally-accented Chinese, as well as some dialects. Elderly Singaporean women staff the counters. The fruit stalls are odorless. But people don't buy fruit or vegetables here. Fairprice complements the system of wet markets. Fairprice is the supermarket of the heartlanders.

Then there is Cold Storage, home to arctic airconditioning and S$17 bags of potatoes (really!). The incidence of foreign-accented English (including among Singaporeans) rises sharply, to at least 30%. Staff tolerate white people being unnecessarily friendly. Customers push carts through the aisles, which they load up to take down to their vehicles, which they will drive back to their private homes. Some 20% of women wear sunglasses on their heads (okay, I haven't really counted). No buckets of frogs. 

And there we have it. Just by looking at supermarkets we have identified three classes of Singapore residents who differ in their cultural, linguistic, residential, and economic characteristics. All of this could be better established by sociology students going out and actually recording these things and putting real numbers on them. Visible traits could be correlated with housing types, status in Singapore, and income. But anyone who's stayed in Singapore already knows it's true. 

First impressions of Bangalore

Over the weekend Katong Couple attended a friend's wedding in Bangalore. The only other place we've been in India is Delhi (and Agra). One of first impressions of Bangalore was how familiar it was coming from southeast Asia. For many reasons, south India felt much more familiar than north India. And I suppose it's not surprising given the different climates, and the north's closer connections to Persia and the Islamic cultures of the middle east and central Asia versus the south's long historical links eastward. Many things stood out:

• Vegetation: The tropical trees of Karnataka make the place look at least superficially similar to SE Asia. Bangalore's boulevards and neighborhoods are surprisingly green.
• Birdlife: Many of the common birds are the same or similar species as we see in SE Asia. These include two types of crow, mynas, koels, kingfishers, etc. (The Lalbagh Botanic Garden teems with birdlife.)
• Coffee culture: Unlike the north where tea is the beverage of choice, south India drinks coffee. And it's sweet and milky like coffee in Malaya, Thailand, or Vietnam.
• Cuisine: The rice-based diet, rather than the breads in the north, is also familiar.
• Multilingual environment. As a city of migrants, Bangalore is a place where people communicate in many languages. Bangaloreans switch easily from Kannada to English or Hindi or another language to communicate with people from elsewhere. In Singapore or Malaysia we also see that sort of linguistic flexibility.
• Then there is the Tamilian connection in Singapore & Malaysian: in Bangalore we could easily find familiar foods like dosai, colorful south Indian Hindu temples, and a Dravidian language.