Category / Books

by Eileen 配仪

Reading: South Of Clouds (Bill Porter)

LOL!!

Unfortunately, all three pools were in the open, and bathers were required to wear swimsuits. Since I didn’t have a swimsuit, I had to buy one. And the only kind for sale was of the one-size-fits-all variety. No problem, I thought, and went to change. Apparently I had put on some weight, and the seams strained to contain my bulk. As I emerged, a pair of Chinese bathers took one look and said to each other, “Wow, look at that guy. He’s so fat.” I was in shock. I had always considered myself a modest-sized individual, and now I was having trouble wearing the one-size-fits-all swimsuit. I remembered weighing myself a week earlier in Hong Kong. The little card that had fallen out of the slot above the scale had said 190 pounds. Now I was being confronted by the hard truth of what 190 pounds meant for someone five feet seven inches tall. I slipped into the pool, hid beneath the steaming water, and considered my options. Obviously, I was living too large. As a feeble gesture, I decided that for the rest of this trip I was going to limit myself to one beer every other day. I had to do something.

by Eileen 配仪

Read: The Mountains are High by Alec Ash

The high refers to those who are like him, coming from elsewhere in China for an extended break and are high from either drug or some other form of escapism. He took drugs too (weed at first, then acid). After tripping on acid he decided that he found his faith.

I don’t like the book for the suggestion that taking drugs as a short cut to finding faith – he suddenly found his faith after an acid trip. For that it is a thumbs down and after the book, I don’t like the guy enough to read another of his book. In the 1 year he spent in beautiful Dali, with all that nature and history and  all he could think of naming is a pun on drug taking?

by Eileen 配仪

Places of Happiness

Reading: The Mountains Are High by Alex Ash

2020, Dali became the new Italian or French country-side. It became romantic to leave the cities for agriculture, small B&B or just doing nothing more than surviving, rejecting the general markers of being successful.

Alex Ash moved out of Beijing to Dali after a heartbreak. By this time, he said that there was a huge movement in China to move back to the countryside. 30-40 years ago, the move to the cities for better jobs meant they could be richer than their parents. In those days, said my tour driver, he just had to show up in the city and there were people who didn’t care much about education and he was hired to operate something.  

The cities are now places of bad air, high prices, small apartments and  unfamiliar people who move in and out all the time. Most of all, the competition now made it hard to make money. 

The complains I am reading is the same that I see of Singapore on reddit. The complains about PSLE (“children should be children, why high stakes exam”), that boomers made heaps of money buying cheap landed houses (*eye-roll*), wanting early inheritance or for parents to be independently wealthy, the intense desire to stop working by 30 or 40 yet be richer than their peers at the same time, still doing frequent travelling, buying watches and bags to signal moving up the social and economic ladder. The only difference is, we have no countryside. Instead, the young started to fantasize about FIRE.

I find it honestly shocking for me to read about those who have worked to age 30 years announce retirement. It’s not the money. They just started adulting. The noise of ego rushing through their veins are still roaring in their ears. Have they realised that RE is probably the last flex they can shout about?  What will they flex for the next 20 or 30 years?

Maybe it’s an Asian thing. We can’t stop wanting to brag. When in their twilight years, when there is nothing more to brag, Asian parents bring up children’s achievements. It’s not competition ie the desire to one up. It’s to replace a feeling of emptiness – what am I without that thing I was proud of doing? 

I remarked (again)to my friend C that she is way happier after pivoting to her new work. I think this new work place is better than her old workplace even with the longer hours. We were chatting at lunch yesterday. I felt that I have moved into another phase of life where I am no longer fixated in certain things, I said.  She said it was the same for her too. Recently she realised she managed to achieved  lifestyle aims that she wanted when she was younger. It’s not material achievements but stuff such as just being happy and contented with life. More money is always well appreciated but life was ok. She was travelling as often as she could. Her job was fun and interesting. In her private life it was just family and boyfriend.

It made me wonder if I am in the same space she is inhabiting. I should be – writing, reading and painting and I finally got to sit down and watch TV. (We moved the TV to the living room for my husband to watch the football matches.) My friends said that I should exercise more and I have been doing it. I also managed to bring down my sugar level to normal. However, I am still feel a sense of anxiety. Maybe that’s normal. It takes time for the muscle to remember pleasant things.   

by Eileen 配仪

Withdrawal Syndrom: Books on Yunnan

This format isn’t meant to compare these books – just listing what I’ve read in a more condensed way.

There is so much love that Peter Goullart has for Lijiang. I feel disappointed to discover I can’t buy his other writings – they are out of print. When I was in Yunnan, I love the touristy version of it. Yet, when we were there on holiday, there is this undercurrent of too good to be true. Peter Goullart does open with the touristy version of Yunnan in the 40s – enchanting, humourous, peaceful and mostly locked away. He also shared the real lived version of it. Opium, petty thievery, crazy aggressive tribes, and the Naxi community around him. He was sympathetic to the people in the area, generous and willing to humble himself to make friends in the community. He could not be a better official for Yunnan branch of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives for one main reason – he was willing to hike up inaccessible places, learn so many languages and was honest and transparent. He is literally the kind of just, fair and open magistrate that C-Dramas portray. Even with the not so great experiences (from the minor annoyances to outright close to death) he has with the tribes, he remained open and magnanimous.

I was surprised to find out he wrote it in Singapore and found publishers in Singapore. That’s amazing. It’s so sad though I can’t find his books in print.

It was strange to me that this was sold so widely and won lots of accolades. I felt the author replaced research with fiction and that was about it.

I finished the book and felt it was totally alien as if a far away westerner writing about a tribe in China. The more believable aspects of the portions was when all the characters moved to America. All of a sudden, they felt at home. Not lost, trying to explain and understand a culture they didn’t belong. I had a hard time trying to figure it out what made this book strange for me. It was extremely well researched but something was not tight about the story.

Superstitions and cultural norms and taboos are the first ways that humans collectively reduce their risk of death, of man made or natural disasters as they go about their day to day life. Their village has a ruma (spirit priest) and a nima (shaman) – this indicates that their beliefs are extremey tight as a norm. Their norm is also intense pattern identification from dreams as an indicator of potential or emerging risks. Even if one person in that village is educated, that one person will live life very close to the cultural norms even though education explained those beliefs as superstition. 山高皇帝远 -being “very far away from the emperor”, being in the hills, change and the Cultural Revolution didn’t make a huge difference. Change was slow as is expected in this place where the teacher was exiled.

In this context, every tribe person would adhere closely to these norms. There will not be accidents such as San Pa hitting the spirit gate. In these cultures, baby care will be more extreme because not only you will need to care for the child physically but also protect it spiritually. Li Yan’s mom will not leave the baby alive because bad things will happen to her family and the child as well. As a culture and a midwife who has no qualms getting the man of the family to kill two newborns (rejects), to leave a reject newborn is to subject it to something worse than death. As a mom who had given birth to a fatherless child, regardless of her maternal instincts she would also follow those practices. It would be worse for her not to. The logical story would be the sheer imagined terror of unleashing a defenseless child against spirits who will attack it and cast bad omens and actually do bad things through the baby, like a poltergeist. (See this detail explanation by Ruijing Wang that I found – “Ritual Care: How the Akha Take Care of Their Small Kids?”)

It is also unexpected that an educated person will abandon their norms immediately after moving to a different country. My observation is that the norms are best preserved by migrants. They live as though frozen in time. They carry on their normal tasks while internally, they are still there with their grandparents and parents in the countryside or in their home country. Habits, norms in their home country has changed significantly but these are not transmitted to the migrants. So they freeze what they know and carry them out in their new home. So when moved to America, when the American white people’s prudish habits of stating that they don’t go out and just eat and have intercourse, it was jarring. Talking about a one bedroom bungalow and describing it as cozy and perfect for 2 persons is crazy. A 4 bedroom house (“Spanish styled”) is grand and extremely luxurious. Knowing that it is styled in Spanish ways and she has a room that sounds like a writer’s room, is off the charts nuts in terms of luxury. 不上头才怪！

So when she suddenly behaves in America as if familiar with the comfort, taking on strange habits of stating intercourse (almost like those Nanyang artist besotted with topless Bali ladies) it sounds correct. Like she is an American – never was Ahka at all. The odd device of doctors writing long letters to new parents of the baby, I could actually accept it. Very rich people do have doctors who are on call and has wonderful bedside manners. Not having one is usual means not wealthy enough. It is odd though to be so descriptive. Ha ha.

by Eileen 配仪

Rothschild scale of wealth

I am reading the House of Rothshchild since December – picking it up and putting it down. It’s a boring dull record of all the monies they make and the varied deals and negotiations they had.

Two things struck me. One, it appears impossible to have a well run anyway without some conflict in the running of it. While the father and brothers had this super tight agreement not to split up the business – instead they created their own branches and cross held  shares, there is still conflict in the day to day deal making.

Their willingness to take on risk for the deal. Risk like smuggling, running capital flows during wars. They did not hunker down and avoided risk. They aggressively continued business, taking on larger and larger risk until they were, combined, bigger than any other banking houses. They were never shut down because countries at war were begging for the shipment of gold to fund wars and they were the only merchant banking house willing to do so.

This appears to be the same sort of basis why certain illegal busineses such as drugs growing, manufacturing and  trafficking remain hard to kill off.  (I’ve read elsewhere). Generals with huge resources were able to fund and provide armies for wars in their country. As a thanks, they were undisturbed in their businesses.

Rothschild “assisted” many countries. In addition to having  insider news from politicians, they were largely undisturbed in their deals. They had cultivated many political relationships with bribes. 

Look at their growth

1797: 9,900 GBP 

1807 : 50,600 GBP (10 years)

1810: 72,700 GBP (3 years)

1815: 336,000 GBP (5 years)

1818: 1,772,00 GBP (3 years)

By 1825, they hit GBP4.08m and 1844 it was GBP7.78m.

It made me wonder if the Boglehead theory of 2 or 3 fund for the simple minded investor was really a marketing tool. It was easy to sell and it meant Vanguard could set these funds up easily, earning a small mark up for their troubles (the smallest all the proponents will tell you).  Now with this huge fund invested in the market, globally with big amounts, now wouldn’t that make a guy feel a bit swell? He could influence the companies without owning anything at all. He has an army at his bidding and calling ready for world domination. What would the next step be?

by Eileen 配仪

History

Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?

I never thought I would stop loving Grahame Greene, honestly. He was my first real love. I had an earlier “boyfriend” John Irving. Irving was a middle school romance. I was attracted to how funny he was. I was smitten by his jokes and how absurd he makes everything seem. I hung around Irving’s friends like Kurt Vonnegut and Gunter Grass and pretended to laugh at their jokes and filled their beers when they cried. I never really did clicked with the three of them. Vonnegut I could never get – his jokes were not funny. Grass was sooooooo super cool. Always bringing his pets or toys around – a dog, cat, fish, drum. I loved being part of the cool crowd. At the height of my coolness, Grass introduced me to Thomas Mann. I felt so fancy when I met Mann. He was suave, cool, handsome, funny but never overly cerebrel as if one of those Oxbridge people who have the mythical combination of bright, smart, kind and funny. It was disappointing I wasn’t invited back after a few times. I suppose I wasn’t cool enough.

I was totally obsessed with Graham Greene. I have forgotten how we met. There was no big moment. No meet cute. Just a book store and random really there are so many others, you know. Definitely nothing in romance novels or “that it was fate that drew us together”. I didn’t think it would be a lengthy love affair and such an obsession. I even flirted Dostoevsky when we drifted apart. (So worldly wise and so trustworthy. Over the years, Dostoevsky and I became good friends. I cannot always understand what he says when he rambles on but when I need some sorting out, Dostoevsky answers my telephone calls. ) I also remember another in between guy Thomas Hardy. (So many Thomases!) I stuck to Hardy for quite a long while. But throughout this time, it was only Greene who filled my soul. I was drawn to his melancholy, his inner drama. Greene drove to the hilt my intellect and emotions. There was no drama, no shouting, no declarations of love. Just a quiet intensity of emotions. When he dropped me, I was devastated.

Margaret Atwood rallied around. We drank tea and talked about men. Later, I must have been introduced to Peter Carey by someone. He was brilliant – too brilliant. I called Dostoevsky and this time, it was a voice message. Over time, peace and calmness returned. I no longer think about Greene at all. I wonder at myself why the intensity then.

Lately I’ve met a mentor Hilary Mantel. She is so experienced being in the corridors of power. She terrifies me actually. Once you get into the boardroom, she knows your P/L and Balance Sheet, not only your secrets but the secrets of others and she knows how to use them. She is at the same time empathetic yet cunning. 100% scary. I can never have long sessions with her. I don’t tell her about Greene when I talk to her. She has already known and dismissed him.

(I gave away a full collection of Greene’s books a few years ago.)

by Eileen 配仪

Dwelling on status

A status non winner – by that I mean average persons who wins some and lose others – may deal with the whole thing in a sour grape manner: “Not playing that particular game because it not my kind of game.”

A status winner will strive for greater grandiosity to elevate his or her position from the other winners. Their requirements of others and themselves get more and more specific bordering on ridiculousness. He also includes religion as a status game which makes sense from his perspective since his belief appear to be just status games.

I don’t know. His view he paints is strangely depressing.

The players of status game also never ever feels satiated by the amount of status earned which sounds a lot to me like plain ol’ suffering. The kind of suffering that is depicted in Haw Par Villa, of neverending hunger.

by Eileen 配仪

The Status Game by Will Storr

The full title of the book is “The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It: On Social Position and How We Use it”. This is a fabulous read. Highly exciting and intensely argued by the author. I was very much persuaded by his theory that status games are a basic need. If denied of status in a sudden manner, we implode.

I have been wrestling with humiliation and envy these few weeks. Wrestling is a big word that brings up imagery of two giants hugging each other. My wrestling is more like a parrot shouting long paragraphs of curse words at inappropriate moments. Like when I am in the middle of a flux of instructions coming at me left and right. Or trying to learn my presentation. (“Stop it! Concentrate!”, I would admonish myself.) Humiliation and envy are also big words. My feeling is more like rage against my circumstance and wishing I was lying down somewhere else.

Reading this book it worked for me to figure out why I was having these feelings. Humiliation is just a louder volume of the kowtowing that we engage in at home, school or at work. It is a means of socialising to ensure alignment. Envy came from wanting to receive a high enough status to avoid having to kowtow. What totally blew away these feelings was my recognition that I didn’t actually want to be a high status person. All I wanted was to drift away and disengage.

The book was very well argued, thick with terrifying examples of how the lack of status creates killers and the role status plays in the world stage. As I read the book, it felt that the world he writes about are only filled with extroverts who desire to engage in the world they are in and have people know and react to their actions and decisions. As an introvert who drifts in and out of conversations, my world is quite small. I don’t aim to influence my friends and when I want to influence them, my influence is quite weak. I lack the desire to make someone do something. I know that after a while, I prefer to be by myself, doing my own thing.

挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩