The most amusing part of the day came right at the start when the facilitator ran through a few real life examples of food-related organisations who had been caught blatantly breaching basic food safety regulations:

1. A bakery with a cockroach baked into a sandwich loaf
2. A dead rat found in the storage area of a restaurant
3. A restaurant keeping live crabs in the restroom

All the above transgressions occurred in Asian-run establishments. It makes sense – when you’re an immigrant running a restaurant in Australia, what do you know of food safety when you speak little English and when there would have been no such regulations your home country? To reduce the likelihood of such incidents occurring, it makes sense to me for local governments to provide training workshops on food safety conducted in languages other than English. At the very least, it would make sense for literature on the topic to be made available in multiple languages – that way, even if people don’t get the benefit of hands-on training, they still have access to the basic principles in a language they can understand fluently.

However, when it comes to free meals, I don’t know when to stop. Functions I attend/organise generally have buffet-style meals set up for morning and afternoon tea and lunch. Help yourself. Eat as much as you want. Go back for third and fourth helpings. Let us bribe you with food to encourage you to give us your business.

On a normal day, I don’t even eat morning or afternoon tea. But if it’s there, and it’s free, why yes, I will have two slices of cake for morning tea and three scones for afternoon tea. On a normal day, I’ll generally have fruit and crackers or a muesli bar for lunch. But if it’s there and it’s free, why yes, I will have two serves of three different types of salads, hot dishes, and gourmet wraps. If I’m staying overnight on a business trip and there’s a free hot breakfast, I’ll have bacon, sausages, eggs, tomatoes and hash browns instead of my usual cereal or toast.

The reasoning behind this inability to say no to free meals is simple – when you’re a first generation migrant, you grow up with family stories of how they never had enough to eat, how food was always scarce and how it was always a struggle to get by day by day. So even while I might have spent the majority of my life growing up in the relative prosperity of Australia, there’s always that theme of food scarcity in the back of my mind. You eat what you can now, because you never know where your next meal is coming from.

On this note, I’m heading to Auckland for the next four days for a conference. A conference with free meals. Expect me to gain five kilos and have immense eater’s remorse by the time I return to Melbourne.

Narrow-sighted marketing aside (what’s to say that someone who looks white doesn’t have relatives or friends overseas they’d like to call?), I find their sales pitch to me amusing. Communicating with my extended family isn’t something I’d do on a whim. It’s the type of thing that needs lengthy preparation time – e.g. I need to plan ahead and only see them briefly when I’m on holiday in Hong Kong, but never be surprised by a phone call. After all, when all they have to say to me is:

1. Why didn’t you study accounting or medicine at university, instead of humanities?
2. Why aren’t you already doing a PhD?
3. Why are you working at a not-for-profit, instead of having a stable job at a big bank?
4. Why aren’t you earning six figures a year already?
5. Why have you moved out of the family home even though you’re not married?
6. Why aren’t you married?
7. Why are you dating a white boy instead of our own people?
8. Why can’t you lose three dress sizes and fit into a size six?

Why would I willingly speak to them without prior preparation and boosting of my self-esteem? I get enough criticism from my parents. I don’t need it from all my other relatives too!

I managed to inadvertently aggravate my parents by forgetting that it was Chinese New Year’s Eve tonight – it’s more important to our family than the actual day itself. Having lived away from home for the past few months though, I forgot entirely about the New Year, and arranged early on to meet a friend from Sydney for dinner tonight as she’s only down for a few days. Bad move on my part. At least I’m back in the family home in the afternoon, to at least do my part in the worshipping of our family ancestors – the burning of paper money, etc. I try my best to do what’s expected of a good Chinese daughter.

And – tomorrow’s not only the start of the Year of the Tiger, but also Valentine’s Day! I haven’t planned or organised much as I was quite extravagant in planning an elaborate birthday for Dylan last week, so I’ve just done something quite small (which I can’t write about here yet, because apparently he’s starting to read this blog again).

I have told him though, that however commercial or cheesy he might find the holiday, I fully expect him to make an effort tomorrow. We might be used to just chilling at home with a few DVDs, but tomorrow needs to be something more. It needn’t be as cheesy as roses and chocolate – I just need him to show that he understands that while the holiday might not mean anything to him, it means something to me, so he should just suck it up and treat me like a princess. So there. =P

Now, this film has been in the works for months now – it was first announced that Stephen Chow (this man is a genius in the Hong Kong movie industry, my childhood was spent ROFLing to his films, and I still delight in them now) would both star as Kato, and direct the film too. I was absolutely ecstatic when I heard the news – Stephen Chow crossing over to Hollywood, and working with Seth Rogen who I adore equally? Fantastic! Now with Stephen entirely unattached to the project, this announcement of Jay as Kato is equally as exciting, especially considering how disappointed I was to miss his Sydney concert early last month. It means that since Jay is crossing to Hollywood, there’s every chance that in his promotion obligations for The Green Hornet’s release next year, he’ll return to Australia, and I can see him there. There’s a silver lining!

Plus, considering that the role of Kato in the remake is rumoured to be written as more of a equal crime-fighting partner, as the real brains behind the operation rather than a silent partner to the comic Green Hornet, Jay’s role is bound to be as prominent and prestigious as Seth Rogen’s. It could do a lot in improving the depiction of Asians in mainstream Western media and removing the Asian geek, bad accented Asian, Asian mail order bride, etc. stereotypes.

Heck, the release of the movie next year might even encourage me to change the layout on the Jay Chou fanlisting.

Amongst the mindless “feedback” pages that make up half the paper, is a section entitled “My Platform” where randoms on the street answer a general question. Below is one from earlier this week:

So really, it’s not just me who finds the whole idea of confessing a relationship to my hardass Asian parents terrifying. It probably doesn’t help that the night I’d planned to confide in my mother (and thus, ask her help to break the news to my father), she effectively told me that she thinks I should only date Asians, because Caucasians “just aren’t like us”, despite the fact that we’ve been in Australia for two decades. Mr. M isn’t Asian, so needless to say, there’s no way I can tell them yet.

In any case, it’s now been five years since I got my tattoo, and my parents are yet to know anything about it. Granted, I’m not the kind of person who will walk around the house semi-naked (I’d love to, but I wouldn’t with anyone else around…), and am always appropriately clothed in the presence of my parents (and never go swimming with them), so there’s never been any opportunity for them to find out about the tattoo. It’s not something I’d ever tell them either while I’m still living under their roof, largely because there’s no point in involving myself in a row which can only end in tears and disinheritance.

Their protests against body decoration are antiquated at best:

1. Girls must keep their bodies pure and untainted with any modification beyond single piercings in each ear. This includes bans on body piercing and tattoos, as well as vowing to remain a virgin until one’s wedding night where one will submit meekly to one’s husbands desires, never finding pleasure of one’s own.
2. Traditionally in China, only criminals and those with shady pasts have tattoos.

So…yeah. They can’t know about my tattoo, nor my sexual proclivities, nor my decision to move to the other side of the world, nor basically anything that means anything to me as it goes against their ideas of what proper Chinese girls should do. That’s why I found this article particularly interesting about the breaking down of taboos in China surrounding tattoos. Many younger Chinese people are opting to get tattoos, and like myself, are hiding them (and doubtless, other lifestyle choices) from their more traditional parents. The extent to which I have to hide my true self from my family isn’t a phenomenon restricted to second-generation immigrants like myself – it’s something that’s happening with all modern children who are finding it hard to reconcile their modern learnings and lifestyles with the traditionalism of their parents.

It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. How much is a woman worth? By their discussion, paying about 70,000RMB to the bride’s family is de rigeur in their rural village – so the monetary worth of a woman in rural China is approximately $14,000AUD, 7,600€, or $10,000USD. How many rural Chinese brides could you buy? I can almost afford two!

They argued that this was tradition, and that it was easier for the villagers to go along with it than to turn away from it. Yes, and? It would have been easier to continue binding feet. It would have been easier for well-to-do men to continue having five or more concubines. It would have been easier to remain under imperial rule rather than overthrow the emperor. Just because it’s easier to stay with a certain tradition doesn’t mean that it’s right.

As people with more enlightened and egalitarian views who have ties to the village, my family should be doing our best to educate our extended family about matters like this. Women shouldn’t still be considered possessions to be bought and sold. It sickens me that someone related to me could still think in these terms.

My cousins and I would dread any family get-together, as our parents were bound to set up a mahjong table, and we would be pulled away from whatever game we were playing in order to massage shoulders, refill cups of tea, and fetch snacks. We hated it then, but there are obvious benefits now: nimble and strong fingers, and arms trained to withstand hours of constant activity for example. There are also some negatives: for example, I’m unable to give erotic massages because my fingers are conditioned for strong therapeutic massages.

My talent is well known by friends, and I trade hour-long massages for other benefits (e.g. friends treating me to lunch). Today, I was generous enough to give an awesome massage for free to a mate for well over an hour when we were at the beach, as he’d been feeling tense from all his Thai boxing training. Strangely enough, this was a mate I’d not seen for twelve years. We’d gone to primary school together, then lost touch over high school and university. He then found me on Facebook, and we’d spent hours chatting on MSN before meeting up again…and it was like no time had passed at all.

Maybe that’s the best indication of a good friendship: timelessness.

Asian father to eight-year-old son in Mandarin: If you keep swimming like that, you’ll always be a failure.

That’s hardass Asian parenting for you. The dangerous thing is that he was saying it in the low and reasonable voice that Asian parents adopt in public when they know that there are strangers nearby. It’s a voice that second generation immigrant kids will recognise as a sign that once they get home and the door closes on the rest of the world, all hell is going to break loose.

As a child, whenever I heard that tone of voice from my parents, I knew that I was due a date with the chicken feather duster (or really, whatever was close at hand), and the customary dozen smacks that it would rain upon my body. It would always be accompanied with claims like: “If you try to run away, it’ll only hurt more!”, “I only do this because I love you”. I’d have to finish off the beating by standing in the corner facing the wall for anywhere up to three hours, not saying a word, and occasionally when my father was feeling particularly sadistic, having to balance on one leg.

One of my friend’s mother actually managed to break a wooden clothes hanger on his body. As bizarre as it seems, he tells people this proudly – it’s almost as though we second generation immigrant children see childhood beating stories as a badge of honour. The more brutal, the more cache you have amongst those with similar family backgrounds. The more you’ve endured, the more awesome you become.

I look back now, and I laugh and find the whole thing amusing. It didn’t scar me in any way, and rather, I turned out pretty much as “normal” as anyone can these days. In fact, I’m immodest enough to say that I turned out better and more normal than the average person, all because I was kept in a straight line by my hardass Asian parents.

I personally believe in corporal punishment, and I won’t hesitate to smack and punish my own future children when they misbehave (though not to the extent where I break wooden hangers on their bodies). Stopping their allowance, banning them from watching TV, all these new-fangled weak excuses for punishment don’t actually achieve anything. Just think back to your own childhoods: as if getting your allowance cut off stopped you from doing whatever it was you were doing. If you’d gotten beaten with a feather duster, it would have at least made you stop and think twice about doing it again.