FUNNYACCENT

A Gem in NorthEnd

My usual running route.

When I step outside I know today is going to be one of those warm day, a day I want to be under the sun all day. The blue sky is clear. Not even a patch of cloud is visible. After long winter and an unpredictable hide-and seek cold weather, my body is ready to soak up all the heat from the sun.

I improve my running on the beach by five minutes with the wind slapping my face. I want to run near the water edge, but some parts have soft spot, the damp sand collapse as soon as I land my feet.
This morning a torn vinyl car seat is thrown on the beach. Good gracious, somebody must have made an extra effort to drag a broken car seat and throw it on the beach?

On my way home I decide to walk on the boardwalk. The morning is too beautiful to be observed in 15 minutes/miles run, or is it another way my legs are telling me........"Dang.........slow down sisteryo, don't you see I'm dying here?"
I wonder why I don't taste a salty air this morning. Are we getting short of salt?
When I was a kid I thought the Creator poured out the salt into the ocean. A lot of salts.

Moving On

Today is the last day Ce and her kids at the house. She is accepted to another program. This time she gets her own apartment . No more communal living. Everybody is happy for her she and her kids. And......everybody is happy she is leaving.
First, we are happy she gets her own place.
Second, we are happy she gets her own place.

For months we've been watching helplessly she's losing her grip over her children. They scream, they shout and they curse at her, and she respons exactly the way they want it. Evermorning, we watch an on going battle between her and her children: To get them dress to school, to get them eat their breakfast and to get them out of the front door. They do everything possible to make her life more difficult than it is.

One Can Wonder

I am disgusting at myself. Yes, I am right now. I'm disgusting at myself not because I have a body odor, no sir, I don't. I take a shower everyday, and I scrub my body with home-made body scrub made of rice, dried rose petal and nipple-lemon juice. And after I rinse, I lather myself from neck to toes with glycerin sandalwood scented soap twice. Pamper myself in a shower is a luxury I can afford......for now.

I am disgusting at myself not because I live in a filthy apartment. I wash and rinse all my dishes after I eat my meal. I wipe and clean the stove after I cook. I mop the kitchen floor everyweek. I water my plants every other day. I scrub my bathtub every week. And I organize everincreasing library in my living room, even though I leave my book thoughout my apartment. Under the sofa, under the bed, in the bathroom, on the refrigerator, under my sewing table, behind the tv, I leave my book everywhere I land my behind.

I am disgusting at myself because I couldn't make myself sit at least two hours a day to write at least a thousand words day. I find all the excuses I can think off not to write. In the middle of the sentence. Earlier this evening, in the middle of the sentence, I put on my running shoes and went out running on the beach. While I was running, I had this 'masterpeice' idea what to write when I get home.
I sprinted to the end of the beach so I could go home and put my thought on the paper.

When I got home, the Simpsons was on. So, I sat and watched Homer and his son wrecking up something as usual. Simpsons was over and I grabbed Vertigo and read the last three chapters. Vertigo. Vertigo has been hypnotized me since I started it 36 hours ago. Eventhough I was not sexually active or partying like the author, but I was angry like hell in my teen, just like her. I was a loner and I found comfort and solitude in books like she did.

Long after I finished the book, I couldn't help wondering about my angry teen years. I wondered why didn't any of the teachers during my elementary school years ever made an effort to tell me how good I was at writing. They never failed to scribble in red ink an A+ in all my compositions and essays, but none of them ever told me, ever motivated me to keep writing. None of them ever asked me what was I reading when I sat quietly at my desk reading my latest book, when everybody else in the class was doing something elset whenever we had a "freesubject'.

Why oh..why You put the idea in my head that I can wrie. And now when I don't write I feel like I am floating in a pool. I could feel my feet touching the bottom of the lake but I don't want to stop and put my feet down. I want to keep swimming toward the water fall. The water from the rocks above spray on my face, the gentle sound of the water spread the wings on the face of the lake. And I keep swimming toward the water jumping in slomo into a pool below.

Wild Rice

My original plan to go to Central Square was to buy a pound of organic wild rice at Harverst Supermarket. I discovered wild rice eight years ago when I was experimenting organic food. It was a disaster the first time I cooked the wild rice. It turned out mushy more like soggy cereal. The second time, it was undercooked. Then, it hit me, why didn't I mix with jasmine rice. I learned thru my twice mistake, wild rice take a longer time to cook.
So, I soak it in the morning. When the water is boiled, I add a handful of wild rice to one cup of jasmine rice. It turned out well. The rice was fluffy and a little chewey, the way I like it.

When I came out of the store, I was debating whether to cross the street to get a subway home, or walk to next block and cross the street to Rodney Bookstore. As usual, I chose the latter. oh.......well.........

Fried Banana On a Rainy Day

It has been a wet week. Everytime I open my closet door, I look at my half dozen of batik wrap skirts hanging in my closet and wondering when will I be able to wear these damn beautiful thangs??
I look out the window to see if it is still raining........Yep, it is.

When I was a kid, walking in a pouring rain never bothered me. I was nine years old when my parents moved again for hundredth time. This time we lived in an army base in Sungai Besi, Selangor. Our house was number four on the tenth row. Along the rows of these families quarters there was a large green field. Two soccer fields were put together and there was more space left. That was how big it was. At the end of the field a row of swings, cement slide and two sets of see-saws. Sometimes, during a rainy season, if there was no lightning, my mother would let me and my two little brothers to play in the rain with other kids from our block.

We ran, slid and threw ourselves on the wet grass. We kicked the puddles at each other. We didn't paly any particular game. Our mission was to get wet as much as possible. After an hour my mother would come out and stood at the edge of the field to call us in. We groaned and begged her to let us stay outside for a little longer. No, she said. "I don't want you to a catch cold".
We trodded back into the house, straight into the bathroom. She let me took a bath and then came my little brothers turn.

We changed into dry clean clothes, usually a pajama because we were not allowed to go out again for the rest of the evening. Playing for the children is like working for grown-ups. All those kicking, running and screaming left us hungry. The best part was, when we came out of the bathroom, we were going to sit down at the kitchen table, all five of us.
At the kitchen table, my father was sitting there sipping his 'teh tarik'. Three cups of hot steamy tea with milk and a big platter of 'goreng pisang' - still warm, waiting for us. My mother prepared the bananas earlier while we were out getting wet. The bananas were cut lenghtwise, dipped into rice flour batter. and deepfried in corn oil. They were golden and crispy on the outside and tender inside.

Boy...........I miss that.

State of Mind

A couple of days ago I received another e-mail from my sister KN. Besides updating me with my niece's school acitivity, her three newborn kitten and her little garden, she told me about our neighbor Mr. I. Mr. I and his family live two houses away from my mother's house. I know Mr. I as a quiet man. He didn't talk to anybody unless it was a matter of life and death. When he came home from work, we wouldn't see him again until the next morning when he left his house on his Raleigh bicycle at 6:30 a.m to go to work. That was the only time I saw him in a dim light. His face uliminating by the front porch light of our house.

When my parents bought a piece of land thirty seven years ago and built a house on it, Mr. I and JM's house was one of a dozen or so houses on our Street #15. Unlike Mr. I, his wife is an opposite character from her husband. People say, they are like night and day, or like earth and sky.

I wasn't surprised reading three lines about Mr. I my sister wrote me. He tried to commit suicide by slashing his throat in his bathroom. There are many things have been going on back home that leave me unfazed and undazed anymore. News about little girls being raped and killled, news about an illegal immigrant Indonesian maid was gang raped by four local cops, news about a 65 years old grandfather repeatedly raped his nine years old granddaughter, news about a fourteen years old boy raped his 16 years old sister. Rape, incest and commited suicide are news I hardly read or heard of twenty or thirty years ago.

I couldn't say those things didn't exist twenty or thrity years ago, but to read about this horrible things as I read a daily weather forecast make me wonder: What happen to Malay people now?

Is it the way they show a resistence to Islamic law enforcer? When I was a young girl, nobody (Malay men and Malay women) batted an eye to uncovered head Malay women. As long as she dressed modestly, nobody would give her a sarcastic remark. Nobody would've had asked her in arrogant tone, "Islam ka?" (Are you Muslim?).

Head covered has become a number one issue as there is no other important issues to be addressed.

More.................

A Planet Earth Story

It's pretty annoying to see some people to leave candy or gum wrappers, an empty coffee/soda cups behind them when a trash cans are within their reach. Take a train at night, and you'll see newspapers, burger wrappers and all kind of shit all over the train. New and old stain on the seats and sodas spilled on the train floor, empty soda bottles rolled back and forth on the moving train. It makes me wonder, do people leave their shit around like they do outside their house when they are at home? Or they just shit where they eat, or eat where they shit?

Stuck On My Mind

And though I act cocky, and have a big mouth, and my father always tells me I have all the answers, I know I don't have any of the answers about love, about being grown up. I feel small and scared and defenseless and damaged as the small sparrow I'd pried out of the mouth of a neighborhood cat and bandaged up and fed, for days, with an eyedropper, before taking it down to the park and releasing it, after my father convinced me that it waas wrong to keep it, and that eventually it would have to make it on its own or die.

Vertigo by Louise DeSalvo (memoir)

Mistaken I-Den-TIty

While waiting for the women and their kids to get ready for family night, a co-worker asked me what do I do to keep fit.
"I run."
"You do? Do you run everyday?"
"No, three or four times a week, depends on the weather."
"How long you been running?"
"Long time, since I was in high school."
"No wonder you're so fit and small, I never met an overweight Chinese women."
"What is Chinese women got to do with me"?
"I thought you were Chinese?"
"I told you the first time we were introduced, I am a Malay woman from Malaysia."
"Oh........I'm sorry, yes, you must've told me."

This is not the first time I am mistaken for a Chinese. With my brown complexion, I hardly pass as a Chinese. But people are repeatedly mistaken me as a Chinese.

"Uh....uh.... you don't look Chinese at all." My Singaporean-Indonesian friend Trisca told me one day when our sweat........errr...perspire dripping on the floo in spinning class a few years back.
"You have double eye lids and mine is only single." She pointed her shapely finger to her eye-lids.

Once, when I was still at Bunker Hill College, I was in Sociology class. We were watching a documentary film, The Human Odyssey. The film was shot at different parts of the world. At one scene, it was about an ethnic group of Tujia farmers in Hunan Province, located near YangTze River.

A Haitian girl sitting in front of me, turned around and asked me, "Do you understand what they are talking about?"
"No, I don't"
"But they are Chinese."
"Which I am not."
She returned her attention back to the screen.

The next scene was about a famous Masai warrior tribe in Kenya. I did something very immatured. Something I shoul've not done as a grown woman.
I tapped her shoulder. She turned around and I asked her. "Please tell me what they are saying?"
Her expression changed in an instant. Faster than a lightning.
"Those are nomad people from Africa."She snapped at me. Her voice had double edge razors, sharp enough to slice anything near her.

One In a Million

I just opened and e-mail from my sister KN. Reading an e-mail from KN is something I look forward to. She writes as we are chatting face to face. With her busy daily schedule as a single mother of 13 year young, active and intelligent girl, taking care of our mother, cooking, cleaning the house inside and outside, part-time dressmaker and drives her daughter and other two girls back and fro to the school. She is an amazing woman.

She is one of thousands of Malay women who sacrifice their youth and their personal needs for their familes.

She is one of thousands of Malay women who put aside their heart desires long time ago in order to support their families, to help their little brothers to pursue the education.

She is one of thousands of Malay women who carefully plan their financial income so they can buy this and that to her ever increasing nieces and nephews.

She is one of thousands of Malay women who gets up in the morning to prepare the food while the sister-in-laws are everywhere except in the kitchen with her.

She is one of thousands of Malay women, whose brothers always turn to her to bail them out when they are in deep shit, whose brothers telephone her in the middle of the night to borrow some money. but they have a selective amnesia when the time to pay back the money they borrowed , and forget about her when they see the light at the end of the tunnels.

She is one of our big sisters who is not appreciated and forgotten.

She is one of our big sisters who ask nothing in return, and yet she is one of the thousands has been badmouthed and back stabbed because she is always right and they hate for her gut.

She is one in the million. Thank you KN.