Musings

Here’s a quick heads up for a dear friend….
Remember last year I blogged about Heritage Heboh? Fortunately, I managed to catch the sneak preview of that. I did not manage to attend the real thing as I had a terrible flu due to too much fun in the sun in Langkawi.
This year, the same bunch of Malaysians (young and old alike) are coming back, bigger and stronger with a showcase called Ronggeng Merdeka. Yes, 50 years of independence, remember?
This time around too there are more venues where you can catch the highly creative children/tweens in action.

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Friendships are different in this millennium.
In those days, I used to buy Galaxie and scour the penpal column and pick up a pen to write a letter off to someone. I had 2 good penpals then – Phyllis who used to live in PJ and send me posters of Madonna and Diana of Kuching who used to write in lovely longhand and share with me tales of her awful Chemistry teacher.
Dear old Phyllis is now a medical doctor, somewhere. Last I heard she was specialising in eye care and surgery. Diana? Haven’t heard from that woman in decades eversince I left school.
These days, friendships are different. I read someone’s blog, get to know all the juicy details of their lives, their peeves, their passions, their dogs and cats, and then I get to meet them.
And that’s so odd!
I met a fellow blogger on Monday and had a good two hours of nonstop conversation over a Nyonya dinner. In fact, I had read and heard so much about her that it was hard to believe I was actually going out to meet someone I’ve never met – and I was going to have dinner with her!

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Welcome to a new look for Mayakirana’s blog….actually I’m totally so not techie. This is the work of Nic, of course.
I’ve been bugging him to change the theme for my blog for the absolutest longest time but you see, work and business get in the way.
And this past few weeks have been totally busy. So much so I think my friends are sick and tired of me saying, yes, yes, I can chat but for a while only. Got piles of stuff to do. And some of them can’t even sniff me out online because I’ve been out and about!
So when things get truly zombie-crazy busy, it’s nice to fiddle with themes for a bit. And have you noticed that this theme is rather cool? You can move the elements around if you like. Ajax and web 2.0 combination – and a resemblance to Mac. Apple Mac, that is.
The creative director (my husband lah) decided it was time for Maya’s blog to be moving with the millennium. Toss out the old theme and be as geeky as I can be. I’m not sure if I am geeky enough to qualify for geekdom but sometimes I do get pretty excited over widgets and what-nots I find online.
I’ve got a bunch of stuff to share too, and all these ideas are fermenting in my cranium.
Went for a Buddhist talk for the past two nights at Caring Society Complex, and enjoyed myself thoroughly listening to Phakchok Rinpoche who’s a terribly good storyteller.
Never mind that he stopped at times to ask his secretary how a certain word was said in English, never mind that the translator got mixed up when she was speaking in Mandarin.
His Dhamma talks were hilarious. But the best part has got to be the Q&A session at the end of the talks…. these are the times when people try to ask intellectual questions and stump many a listener. But the young Rinpoche answered them affably, with a twinkle in his eye and a cheeky smile. I will post up his photo once I re-size it properly. (He’s young too… he’s only 26.)
Actually I never knew much at Vajrana Buddhism until a friend told me about Rinpoche coming to Penang (I consider myself much more Theravadin than anything but then again, these are just labels….I’m learning about Pureland from Nic and reading up on it too but I grew up with Theravadin ways ie suttas, Dhamma camps/retreats etc).
Anyway, Rinpochoe visits Malaysia every 6 months I believe and gives talks and does puja with the laypeople. You can find out more about him and his monastery in Nepal from http://www.gomde.org.il/eng/pr.htm
Anyway, I’ll write more later. Now I’ve got to dash out for a while and run some errands.
Cheers!

Nic had gone to the office for a bit and when he came home, he dug into his bag and handed me a Poslaju envelope.
“For you,” he said.
Was I surprised! A present? For me? But from whom?
One look at the address on the top left corner of the envelope and my heart did cartwheels.
Of course! I knew who the sender was.
And immediately felt guilty as hell.
Dotty, you shouldn’t have but you did. Dotty is one of my earliest friends from the early days of my blogging life. She loves stalking around my blog but she won’t start her own blog.
But Dotty has ALWAYS remembered my birthday and that’s both sweet and thoughtful. Yet it makes me feel so damn guilty all the time because I always forget hers! Oh dear. What an awful, awful friend I am.
And here she was, as timely as she always is – with her Poslaju packages. Each year. Without fail. Gosh, that woman must have a memory like an elephant. While mine is like a snail’s probably!
We both share a maddening interest in books and tea. All types of tea.
So this sweet woman had gone to Tokyo on a holiday with her husband and bought me Fukujuen green tea in gorgeous little packs!

I’ve got 4 types of green tea – Sencha, Hoji-cha, Gyokuro and Genmai-cha. I was prancing around like a little girl with my gift! It must have cost quite a bit, what with the yen rates these days.

But what I love most are Dotty’s beautifully handwritten notes and birthday card. She always outdoes herself, each year.

Each card is crazier than the one before, in true Dotty style. Her cards always make me laugh out loud.
And her notes. Telling me stories of her life in the past year. Those snippets of her life will remain a true secret between me and Dotty. Because you see, that’s what friends are for – they keep you in their thoughts despite the long silence. They tell you about big things and little things and yes, many things, despite the curve balls Life sometimes throw our way.
Dotty, thank you for remembering this silly friend of yours. I hope you will enjoy your surprise, just as you have surprised me countless times. And beyond that, stay strong and stay confident that life will always turn out right. And you’ve got friends – yes, even a highly forgetful friend like yours truly.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the friendship we share.
Arigato gozaimas! Even without drinking the Fukujuen tea, I already know it’s going to be good coz it’s full of love!
Here are more Dotty memories!
The year when Austen ruled and when velvet became me.

I got this in my inbox just now and I know I won’t be able to physically support this charitable cause (as I am not in KL or Selangor) but I know I can rely on the goodwill of those of you who regularly read my blog to help spread the word. Plus, many of you are in KL and Selangor and if you are around the Mines Shopping Mall area, do drop by and check it out.
It came from this 31-year old guy called Tan Chuan Yen who suffers from cerebral palsy. He’s a student at the Mines ICT Able Training Institute and his institute is having a charity sale of branded t-shirts to raise funds.
Here’s what his email read:
Our institute is having MINES ICT Charity Sale Campaign at 1st Floor, Mines Shopping Fair (beside of the McDonald’s Restaurant) everyday from 11:00am to 10:00pm starting from 18th April 2007. We are selling branded clothing there at RM10 each.
The fund will be donated to our institute. Hope you can kindly support our institute and/or forward this news to your family, relatives & friends. Hope they can kindly support our institute too.
For further requires, please kindly contact Alison Wong at: 03-8948 8981.
Knowing me, I am rather skeptical these days (what with bogus Buddhist monks and fake non-profits and fake charity tickets!) so I decided to poke around their website at http://www.minesict.com
Datuk Fong Chan Onn is their president and you can find out more about the committee and team members.
What resonates with me is that this institute is helping the disabled using ICT, which is basically my field and industry! Their website says that their aim is to “equip the disabled with the skills and alternative options to pursue a fuller and more meaningful life.”
ICT is a fantastic way to equip the disabled because they can work from home and they can do something truly empowering for themselves and their community. All they need is an Internet-enabled PC and they can do wonders, without having to contend with unfriendly public transport such as buses (which is a big issue in Penang right now because the new batch of buses will not cater for the disabled first… reason being, the bus system needs to be tested before they can buy the more expensive, disabled-friendly type of bus.)
Anyway, Nic and I always believe that it’s often good to not only give fish but to teach those in need how to fish. That’s why one of our favourite charities is The Montfort Boys Town in Shah Alam. Teaching skills to those in need will last them a lifetime; the boys and girls (yes, Montfort now accepts girls) will have skill sets and knowledge which nothing can take away.
So if you are in KL or live near Mines, or just want to buy some t-shirts as gifts, do go and check it out.
And please help spread the word too!

This won’t be morbid and I won’t make it depressing.
I was home in Banting early this month – it was an early morning phone call which woke me up and I knew it wasn’t good news. No one calls at 7am on a Saturday.
It was my Sis.
She couldn’t reach me via my mobile (I switch it off each night because there are crackpots who think nothing of dialling a wrong number at 3am and I do so value my beauty sleep) and called my landline.
“Mom wants us back home. Grandma’s is the hospital. Mom thinks she may go any moment….”
I never think of death and dying much although as a Buddhist, I am constantly reminded of it. Dying is inevitable.
Yet, we always think Dying (with a capital D) happens to other people. And like most Chinese, talking about Death warrants a loud, unbemused “choi”! Particularly if I am speaking to my aunts who get highly superstitious at any mention of unmentionables.
Yet, Grandma was 88 years old. She had lived a long life. Was it a good life? I hoped so. I hoped she enjoyed the last few decades – despite the hardships and difficulties early in her life.
What I remember most about her was her constant struggle with pain and aches though. Mom used to repeat the story of why Grandma had such a pronounced limp.
Grandma was a working woman back in the 1960s. She used to wash and clean huge ships which moored off the port in Penang. She took on this job as my Grandfather who was a goldsmith, had been laid off from work.
One day, as she was getting ready to go home after a particularly tiring night of cleaning and mopping, she mistook a step while she was getting into the boat. The boat ferried these working women from the port to the ship in the middle of the straits. The next thing she knew, she slipped and fell and fractured her hip!
She never quite recovered despite the hospitalisation and subsequent check-ups and she often walked with a limp. In her later years, she used a walking stick because her legs were not strong enough to hold her body weight.
As such, she lived on medicine. She was at her happiest when she had her store of Panadol and rheumatism pills. Her other vice was buying numbers from the “kedai nombor empat ekor”. And like a true blue Cantonese, she enjoyed mahjong too. She would usually be more alert if she is sitting and watching a boisterous mahjong game.
As sickly as Grandma was, ironically it was Grandfather who passed away first. I will forever remember that time as it was during the finals of the 2002 World Cup. Not that I am a football fan. Sometimes things like that stick in one’s mind.
Grandfather, the hale and healthy one, the one who never had a single white hair on his head, even though he was in his 90s, just passed away suddenly without any sickness or long-suffering pain.
But it’s not easy to watch your loved one go before you do.
At that time, Grandma was quite composed when she pressed the button and stared unflinchingly as the coffin with her husband’s body disappeared into the cremator. Grandfather had firm instructions that he wanted to be cremated and his ashes strewn into the sea.
And this time, in similar fashion, Mom would press the button.
We saw the coffin moving into the inner hall, where two crematorium staff then loaded the entire coffin into the cremator which had its door open and ready. The cremator is a large furnace which burns the body to ashes. Grandma’s ashes would be collected a day later and strewn into the sea. Just like her husband’s.
It was very poignant – those few solemn moments when the cremator door shut and the sounds of the furnace being started were heard – that signalled the last time we would ever see Grandma again.
Mental note to self: Let us appreciate what we have right here, right now so that when we go (yes, we all go some day) we go with a peaceful heart and no regrets or fears. And of course, appreciate and treat well those around us so that we know we’ve been the best we could be, to them.

I just came home from Langkawi yesterday but I will be going away for two days. I just got news from my sister that my maternal grandmother had passed away this afternoon. She was 87.
I will be going home to Selangor tonight. Her funeral and cremation is tomorrow.
I am OK, no worries.
I am thankful that my Porpor had a long life. She lived with us for as long as I could remember.
She is at peace now and that’s all that matters.
Over and out.

I was in Kuching last week but now I’m back, though I haven’t really gotten into the work mode. Not yet anyway. Still a bit lethargic. Maybe it was all the CNY festivities and going about visiting my in-laws’ friends and Nic’s relatives!
Visiting and reciprocal visits is a big must in Kuching. Kuching is still a very community-minded place whereby everyone seems to know everyone and someone is always related to someone one knows! It’s even “smaller” than Penang. I thought Penang was bad enough – often I know someone who is someone’s cousin, uncle, friend, sister or what-not. Soon enough, I can trace their family tree back to one or two generations who may be some far off relatives of mine.
But Kuching… it can be a good and a bad thing. Like we were introduced to a guy who worked for a Kuching business magazine last week by a client of ours. Next thing we knew, Nic starts looking at the namecard and tells me, “Eh, the address looks familiar. I think I know who the boss of this outfit is.”
Sure enough, the “boss” of this magazine turns out to be Nic’s relative! In Kuching, there are many people with the surname Sim and this particular Sim is of the same clan as Nic.
Apparently these Sim people go way back – they can trace their roots to some kampung in China, a district or province (don’t know which) called Chao An! So these Chao An folks came by ship to Sarawak years and years ago (Nic is the 2nd generation Sim in Kuching – his paternal grandpa really came on a slow boat from China! In terms of lineage, he proudly proclaims that he is generation number 29 if he counts the starting generation from China).
I am ashamed to say I don’t know which generation I am although I do know my paternal grandmother came to Malaya at the age of 9. I do know that I am Toi Shan Cantonese and this dialect is only now spoken by geriatrics. Not many young people know this dialect anymore (damn, I am proud to be part of the ‘dinosaurs’).
Even in my family, only my dad, my younger sis and I speak this; it’s a convenient secret language between my sis and I whenever we want to bitch about people in public! My youngest sis has never picked up the dialect though she understands it well. She plain refuses to speak to me in that dialect, turning instead to regular Cantonese. My cousins don’t speak it either. But the funny thing is, it is such a beautiful familiar dialect but it’s dying out because no one bothers to teach their children. My uncles are guilty of this crime. They speak to their kids in English and Mandarin with smattering of Hokkien but no Toi Shan! A bigger shame!
My late maternal grandpa came from China too – I used to gawk at his red IC when I was a child and wondered why he never had blue ICs like us. Like most Cantonese, my maternal grandpa was a goldsmith in Penang for a number of years before he stopped working. My paternal grandpa (also deceased) is also Cantonese and was a tailor of fine suits at Leith Street. But that is all I know.
Which brings me to another issue: family roots. I’ve recently begun to ask more questions of my 88-year-old paternal grandma, or at least trying to ask her when she is in her more lucid moments. She floats in and out of senility but she is one happy senile woman. So most times I am left putting pieces of stories together, culled from recollections of my aunts and uncles, like a badly made jigsaw puzzle.
My aunts and uncles are all in their 50s and beyond so I had better ask them more before they start turning senile too. Many stories are stories of childhood years, in those days before TVs, handphones and the Internet. Many are stories of the early post-war Malaya, when people did not worry about locking their doors at night. I remembered one story where my 4th uncle as a child often sleptwalked! He’d walk right out of the double-storey house, but not before opening the grille door. He’ll sit himself down at the metal swing in the garden! Amazing.
But is it me or that the older I grow, the more I need to find out where I came from? It seems that way. Especially when I see 4 generations under one roof in my grandma’s home, and I think to myself, hey, I don’t REALLY know all their stories. I must start documenting them. I must.
So, do you know which village you are from?

Yes, I am in Kuching now. The weather has been cool and rainy at night making sleep much more enjoyable! Other than that, did you celebrate Valentine’s day yesterday?
Nic and I detest anything that’s crass and smacks of commercialism. Valentine’s Day is one of them. Not because LOVE is trite or should not be celebrated. I think you should celebrate love everyday and not just romantic love. Love among siblings, love for your pets (yes, I can think of a whole list of my past pets which I positively adored!), love for your friends, parents, and yes, love for your partner, husband, wife, etc.
How about love for your environment too? That’s one of our fave loves anyway – we try to minimise use of plastic products, we carry our own shopping bag whenever we go out and we recycle paper, glass and aluminum as much as we can.
So really there are dozens of ways you can love. I find it utterly distasteful that most people have this narrow concept of love. Like some friends of mine who will pay and be happily ‘slaughtered’ by restaurants, florists, gift shops come St V Day. They MUST go all out – they must have roses, they must have a romantic dinner for two, they must have gifts. Despite the fact they could just do these things and more on any other day!
Anyway, whatever floats their boat. And heck, it’s their money.
I don’t want run-of-the-mill roses. Nor a fancy dinner. I am just as happy with a homecooked meal (the both of us are quite adept in the kitchen with our wok!) and a nice cosy down at home. I’d rather have a good massage than be battling crowds and traffic to reach a restaurant only to tuck in to substandard food cooked by some poor third-rate cook.
Nic and I had a different sort of Valentine’s Day last night – we took his parents out for a ‘chu char’ dinner nearby. It was memorable because the food was quite delicious (surprisingly as I thought the cook didn’t look too much of an expert). We opted for ‘chu char’ because his parents are more of the rice-type of people; they wouldn’t be happy in a western restaurant anyway. After dinner, we strolled over to the local supermarket because his parents had yet to buy all they needed for Chinese New Year.
So what’s this thing about declaring your love on Feb 14 and not any other day? You should celebrate your love every day and be grateful for each day you get to see your favourite people, friends, family and pets.
I chanced upon this article today and felt it appropriate to share with everyone about what happy couples and real relationships are really about. Not about gifts or trips or diamonds.
10 Habits of Happy Couples by Dr. Mark Goulston
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Happy couples know that the real relationship begins when the honeymoon is over. Unless you maintain a garden of love, it will grow weeds and its beauty will wither and die. So let’s explore 10 habits of highly happy couples:
1. Go to bed at the same time. Remember the beginning of your relationship, when you couldn’t wait to go to bed with each other to make love? Happy couples resist the temptation to go to bed at different times. They go to bed at the same time, even if one partner wakes up later to do things while their partner sleeps.
2. Cultivate common interests. After the passion settles down, it’s common to realize that you have few interests in common. But don’t minimize the importance of activities you can do together that you both enjoy. If common interests are not present, happy couples develop them. At the same time, be sure to cultivate interests of your own; this will make you more interesting to your mate and prevent you from appearing too dependent.
3. Walk hand in hand or side by side. Rather than one partner lagging or dragging behind the other, happy couples walk comfortably hand in hand or side by side. They know it’s more important to be with their partner than to see the sights along the way.
4. Make trust and forgiveness your default mode. If and when they have a disagreement or argument, and if they can’t resolve it, happy couples default to trusting and forgiving rather than distrusting and begrudging.
5. Focus more on what your partner does right than what he or she does wrong. If you look for things your partner does wrong, you can always find something. If you look for what he or she does right, you can always find something, too. It all depends on what you want to look for. Happy couples accentuate the positive.
6. Hug each other as soon as you see each other after work. Our skin has a memory of “good touch” (loved), “bad touch” (abused), and “no touch” (neglected). Couples who say hello with a hug keep their skin bathed in the “good touch,” which can inoculate your spirit against anonymity in the world.
7. Say “I love you” and “Have a good day” every morning. This is a great way to buy some patience and tolerance as each partner sets out each day to battle traffic jams, long lines and other annoyances.
8. Say “Good night” every night, regardless of how you feel. This tells your partner that, regardless of how upset you are with him or her, you still want to be in the relationship. It says that what you and your partner have is bigger than any single upsetting incident.
9. Do a “weather” check during the day. Call your partner at home or at work to see how his or her day is going. This is a great way to adjust expectations so that you’re more in sync when you connect after work. For instance, if your partner is having an awful day, it might be unreasonable to expect him or her to be enthusiastic about something good that happened to you.
10. Be proud to be seen with your partner. Happy couples are pleased to be seen together and are often in some kind of affectionate contact — hand on hand or hand on shoulder or knee or back of neck. They are not showing off but rather just saying that they belong with each other.
Even if these actions don’t come naturally, happy couples stick with them until they do become a part of their relationship. They know that it takes 30 days for a change in behavior to become a habit, and a minimum of six months for a habit to become a way of life and love.
You can subscribe to Dr. Mark Goulston’s Usable Insights at
http://www.markgoulston.com/list
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I’ll be taking off for Kuching tomorrow…yes, for the CNY hols. Yes, the bane of married people. We go back to our husband’s hometown. Well, I go back for a while but scoot home to Penang as soon as I can – that’s because in Penang, I get to do the usual Chinese-y routines of CNY – M&M that stands for mahjong and makan.
What a potent combination right? Yes, didn’t you know? I’m Cantonese and CNY is nothing but the M&Ms. Of course in my husband’s rather (ahem) proper family back in Kuching, they’ll keel over if they see me cursing my way through rounds and rounds of noisy mahjong.
So in the spirit of CNY, and while I am travessing Peninsular Malaysia on the AirAsia flights (Pg-KL, KL-Kuching – ye gawd – while carrying tubs and tubs of festive cookies!) here’s one quirky piece on Kuching otherwise known as Cat City for everyone who has never been to that town in East Malaysia. And ya, now no need passport to enter Sarawak. Yes, very sure. I used to feel like an absolute dork with my passport at the Kuching Airport (passport in intra-Malaysia travel!) but now you don’t need a passport anymore. Yes, yes, believe me.
Here are some observations about Kuching and its people which I’ve been puzzled about for the past few years that I’ve been there.
1. It’s a fashion parade at the cineplexes of Kuching. People dress up for the movies. In Penang, we just go in comfy shorts and t-shirts.
2. Kolo mee and Sarawak laksa are breakfast favourites. Every local person will have his or her favourite stall to go to. Don’t even think of roti canai. You’ll need to hunt for it if you crave it. If you find it, it probably sucks big time.
3. Three-coloured tea is another copycat fave. The regular teh comes in a glass with three different layers. It’s hot because it’s a novelty. Every kopi tiam seems to serve it.
4. Kuching people like to park haphazardly, without consideration for others. They’ll doublepark without batting an eye. Told you the place was law-less!
5. Don’t like green-haired folks and blondes who aren’t Caucasians? Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Certain young folks in Kuching like to look plain weird. Green hair. Gold hair. Maybe it’s fengshui. Maybe they’re lost, or try too hard to copy other people. Maybe they’re just plain Ah Beng and Ah Lian.
6. Sarawak people don’t have politics like we Semenanjung people. They’re rarely talking politics. I suspect they don’t really care unless the policies affect them. Does that mean they’re docile? I think they’re comfortable with what they have. Not rocking the boat is the main thing.
7. Sarawakians call us Semenanjung people ‘roaches’ as in cockroaches. Don’t believe me? Go ask your Kuching pals.
8. You cannot find a decent shopping mall in Kuching. With all that land, one would have thought that they could build the biggest shopping mall ever. Nope, they like building 4-storey shophouses which are ugly as hell. That’s why the locals themselves fly to Singapore to shop. You get supermarkets like Ngiu Kee and Everise which are hardly vogue places to shop.
9. In Kuching, the locals have a quirky habit of eating siew mai with soya bean drink. How does a savoury meat dumpling go with a sweet, milky soya bean? I don’t know but it seems it is a standard of sorts there. Go to the open air market for this odd pairing.
10. Sarawakians are damn proud to be Sarawakians. No kidding. They get manic about their roots. When one Sarawakian meets another in a place other than Sarawak, they start going on and on in their own Bahasa Sarawak, much to the annoyance of non-Sarawakians. Patriotic, maybe. Maniacal, definitely.
More Sarawak stories to come once I get all settled in!