East meets West

This:



to this:



OR THIS:



Just like the way people say 'chivalry is dead', we can also say that 'decency is dead'. Take two of the video clips i have attached above as examples of that saying in the entertainment world that most people portray as 'glamorous'. Hello Scandalous, bye bye Classiness. Lets face is: Sex sells. Advertising and sex have been tied together since advertising became a big business. The use of sexually suggestive images to sell just about everything really emphasizes the point that sex is a merchandiser's best friend. However, in traditional Chinese Culture, it was less often thought about this way. Think about the Black and White TV era. How often would you see a young teenager prancing around on the stage dancing suggestively while singing in a bikini? These days it seems like the right thing to do if you want to survive as an artiste. The search for real talent doesn't really exist anymore. I bring this up because I only came across Sun Ho's 'China Wine' video a couple of days ago and I was deeply shocked. This is how i remember her:



What happened? As i watched her provocative video, I wonder if she was really a pastor, a councilor and a mother? What does her Church think? A little hypocritical isn't it? I don't know, I guess everybody is entitled to their own opinions, and you might not oppose as strongly to her change of image as I do, but to me, her being a 'devout Christian' who gets full support from her Church is rather hypocritical. Also, this proves how much the West has influenced our Culture. Selling sex probably was epitomized by the late Marilyn Monroe, and since then countless TV shows and Ads have used sexual images in order to boost sales. In traditional chinese culture women are more conservative. Obviously, our homegrown Sun Ho has fallen out of that category. Why then does the authorities in Singapore take such pre-cautious measurements in allowing import products such as TV shows and music? Even our dear local talent has proven that she prefers otherwise. I recall a local TV show called 'Girl-on-Girl' where in each episode some scantily clad girls have to battle out with each other in physical activities. It was quite a bad production, and it proves my point. It is obvious to the naked eye that we are showing signs that we are moving further and further away from our traditions and root cultures. It is just like saying you have decided to cut your friend out of your social circle because she only talks about herself, when all you do when you socialize is brag about yourself. It is contradicting just as it is hypocritical.

The world and its differences

This funny video clip which I am sure most of the world has seen, is one such example of cultural difference. I asked my boyfriend, who is Canadian, if he used to get beatings from his parents as a child. He said never. I, on the other hand, treated caning as a habit of my parents'. My brother and I used to get light beatings from my mother everytime we talked to much over dinner and not finished our food. It didn't hurt, and we brushed always brushed it off with laughs. Nevertheless, the mere sight of the cane made us quiver with fear.
This is only one tiny aspect of a difference in culture. When I moved to Taipei three years ago, i suffered great culture shock. We were all Chinese and we all spoke mandarin, but their rationale and mentality was something that I had to get used to. Even their slang is different. They use Mandarin words that, prior to my move, I have never heard in my life. If you watch a typical Taiwanese variety show such as :



you will find that there are many words that we do not normally hear on the streets here in Singapore. It really took me a while to get used to it. I did however manage to pick it up and it was really fun trying to adapt to the culture and use their language and learn their mannerisms. I think it is quite important for everyone and anyone to be able to adapt to new surroundings. You also get to learn so much more about different cultures and it is always a fun experience trying to fit in.
When my boyfriend first moved to Singapore, he couldn't really understand why it was so hard to look for a place to stay. Most landlords he called said they 'only wanted Chinese people'. He immediately took this as racist. In the landlord's defense, the government has imposed this rule in HDB areas that a certain quota must be met. And because Singapore encourages, a multi racial environment, certain areas are only allowed to accommodate that many indians, malays, Eurasians and Chinese. I had to explain that to him over and over again but he still insisted that it was clearly racism.
For Christmas last year, I went over to Canada to meet his family for the first time. Because I have eliminated red meat from my diet for over a year now, there were many things that I could not eat over the dinner table. I also tend to be really picky with my food and I try to avoid high calorie foods. As we all know, Christmas is the time lots of desserts and sweet things. As chinese, we do not have the habit of refusing things. Naturally, when a chocolate sticky pudding was given to me, I accepted it politely, only to secretly give it to my boyfriend when we are away from the dining table. He questioned why i had taken it if i didn't want it. I told him i felt it was rude to refuse. He thought i was being silly and reassured me that it was perfectly alright to just say 'no'; no one would have gotten offended. I could go on and on about all the cultural differences I have experience. i spent the last couple of years travelling a lot and I have gotten to experience so many different cultures and places. There are, however, certain cultures that I know even if I tried I would never get used to. Like the openness of plastic surgery in South Korea. I hear that parents there save up so that when their daughters turn 16 they can buy them new eyes, or a new nose or a new chest. It baffles me.

The Wire

One of my favorite TV shows have got to be the HBO series 'The Wire'. It is unlike any other typical 'cop-drama' on air. It is set in Baltimore city, and it really chooses to reflect on reality, rather than just 'for the sake of creating another cop drama'. What happens in this series is what happens in real life. Most of the time we do not see or realize these things are actually going as we walk, talk, eat or sleep. This is because of how the media tries to cover up unpleasant reality. That is why I have given up on watching unrealistic 'good-cop-always-wins' type shows. Endings in those type of movies are often the same. The creator of 'The Wire' has done a good job on exploring 5 different facets of Baltimore City in 5 seasons. There is the Drug-ring, the port, the city bureaucracy and the print news media. Despite its presentation as a crime drama, it is really about the American city. Its about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how, regardless of what job you're in,  you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you are committed to. 

I think it is important to portray reality in the media . Unfortunately, a lot we see on TV these days are just a fragments of a fantasy world. Media has shaped culture. We think or hope that everything in the world we live in is like what we see on TV and the movies. We forget that as we worship a celebrity walking down the red carpet, say, at the golden globe, another person is dying from starvation. Take Sex and the City for instance (just because that was the latest movie that i watched ).  Yes, it defines the importance of female friendship and brings out the underlying moral that as a girl, nothing is more important than your girlfriends. But is life really that simple? If that had been reality, like at the beginning of a movie, would a penthouse right in downtown Manhattan be purchased without a mere consideration? Or would everything end up the way it did in the movie? It is like a beautiful painting. It is attractive to your senses but but it is not real.If you haven't seen it, you can read the synopsis for the movie here. 

I guess in most of the things we see on TV, its main purpose is solely to entertain. Nothing much else. We all need forms of entertainment, I do not deny that, but if entertainment is always about good looking people, happy endings and unrealistic goals, then the media would shape our culture in that way and it makes us not look beyond that. It makes us not look deeper into sociological problems that we might or already face.

Hence, I am hoping to see more of 'The Wire' type shows on TV. I am still in search of them.

SIA slapping incident

I was browsing through archives or newspaper articles recently and came across that article involving the SIA 'slapping incident'. Just for re-cap, you can view the article here.

Last I heard was that they settled outside of court and it had been treated by SIA as a private matter.

Many people have their different viewpoints on this matter. Some might view it as unjust. They might ask if treating this as a 'private matter' is actually fair? We all know that this incident is considered a case of battery and assault, and that it has cause the SIA stewardess humiliation. If someone was caught in public assaulting another person, will that person be let go of without being pressed for charges? As i see it, its highly unlikely. So why was Mdm Tan ( the rich man's wife who assaulted the air stewardess) allowed to settle this matter out of court? Is it because of status? In an article it states that her husband, Mr Wong, sits in one of the subsidiaries of Singapore Airlines and is one of Singapore's richest man. Is inequality happening because of high status and class? If Mr Wong had not been of such high status, would his wife have been let off this easily? What about the stewardess's distress after the incident? It is a highly embarrassing situation to get slapped by another woman for 'talking' to her husband. What is the big deal with 'talking' anyway? Mdm Tan had to have been a very insecure person in that case.

Of course, we do not know in details what had been going on that that particular moment. We can only read about it, but we cannot judge and give our reasons why Mdm Tan had behaved this way. Maybe there was a little more to just 'talking' that we don't know of. Many times couples fight because they do not realize what kind of signals and gestures they are giving out. The male might just been helping another girl out of a car out of common courtesy and kindness, but his girlfriend might interpret it the wrong way and get jealous and angry. A girl might be staring at a handsome guy because he looks familiar and thinks she might know him, but her boyfriend might interpret it the wrong way and accuse her of staring at other boys when he is right beside her. Many little misunderstandings like these happen with two people, and in this case, the air stewardess might have been giving out wrong signals by using misleading gestures.  I am not in anyway trying to defend Mdm Tan. She had no right to get physical with a stranger and is definitely in the wrong. All I am saying is that maybe there is a little more to why she got so angry than we know of. Perhaps beyond the stewardess's conversation were things that she had been unaware of. Perhaps it is in her nature to be touchy when talking to people and Mdm Tan had not appreciated that. Perhaps she had used a flirtatious tone to speak to Mr Wong which had irked Mdm Tan. Sometimes we do things without realizing that we provoke others. Be it in our hand gestures, our tone, our eyes... they have tendencies to send out mixed signals if we are unaware of the situation. 

 

Treating this as a private matter will disallow the public eye to get further insights on this situation. We will never know what really went on, as we know, the Singapore media is heavily controlled by those with the power to do so. So is treating this as a private matter just? I still cannot decide for myself.