. . .

i should have updated my blog, replied to people's msgs and put on links to the online community of 'diasporic chinese women', but i just keep on coming back here for expressing myself (since chialin's gone) without doing all the above things. for the time being this seems a blissful, pressure-free haven to me. well, not that my blog is in any way a pressure, but it is after all more public and cannot be as relaxing, whimsical and not making sense as this one. and i have to admit, language choice does make a difference to me. (though i get paranoid and wonder if all the things i said about her will be found out in the end- in whcih case, i really should have made the complains in traditional chinese characters)

have to hand things in on the 23rd and then 26th will be the day. argh, if i continue to feel so tired and sleepy around this time of the day, i cannot possibly pull it thru. not to mention all the other niggling. . . (ex. i got the wrong light bulb for my ikea lamp *sigh* how would i know there are two different kinds?

which reminds me, i met adrian in costcutter when getting a light bulb. my hello to him was somehow in mandarin, despite his coming from hong kong, and never before (well, only once) had we chatted in mandarin- he doesn't speak mandarin but cantonese and i can only sing cantonese songs without knowing at all how to speak it. we've only talked in english to each other.

but for some reason i reacted in mandarin the moment he greeted me and it brought in a strange atmosphere. later i found out that in hong kong, speaking mandarin is considered 'of a lower class' becasue you get loads of chinese workers pouring into hong kong, taking away the labourers' jobs, and they seem 'naive and backward'. so tensions between cantonese and mandarin get entangled with the job market as well as ideas of modernity. although my mandarin is of 'taiwanese accent', adrian's hearing of mandarin is probably too poor to tell the difference. i thought the moment of my speaking mandarin as a response to his greeting was so fascinatingly charged with challenges to him and me. i don't know much about hong kong and yet my little knowledge of the language politics in hk simply revealed a lot of intricate relationships among the chinese, hk and tw people.