motherland

I am sorry again for being busy. The school terms starts in six weeks' time and already they have started work. I am terrified by this Ost-Asian industry. They have shown me work prepared for 2007. It is a kind of benign madness.

Anyways, my new friend claims he is English. He has a broad Hokkien nose (he claims he is 25% Hokkien) and those unnerving single-lidded Chinese eyes. I raised my own bushy pale yellow eyebrows at this. He said, "Barney, you're from Denmark. But what makes you different from a Swede or a Norwegian? Is it that you speak Danish?"

Haha. This is an old argument. But I will not fight this guy with words. He is a madman who has better English than I have. Although he cannot properly pronounce 'Bjaerni'.

The odd thing is that the Mother Tongue department teaches only Mandarin, Tamil and Malay. But in the staff room, they speak Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hindi. It is a mystery to me. Then I find out from my other friend the big friendly Math teacher more about the language problem here. It seems the government decided all Chinese speak Mandarin, all Indians speak Tamil. And all East Asians speak English. My response is, "??!!??!!"

Then I realise that everyone else thinks that Swedish, Norwegian and Dansk are all the same thing. Except my friend the science teacher. Sigh.