A Malaysian Chinese Remembers the Nanjing Massacre

(Disclaimer: This blog entry deals in a very sensitive and gory account of history. Reader discretion is advised. Anyone of acute racist sensitivities should be forewarned – Simon)

The China-Japanese relationship has hit the rocks again in the recent textbook revision fiasco. This time both sides are accusing each other of ‘un-neighbourliness’, with South Korea joining in for some mud-slinging. Meanwhile the street protests, flag burning, embassy-pelting, and product boycott continues in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and all over Japan.

I’m a Malaysian ethnic Chinese, born long after the war. My grandmother disliked Japan and Japanese products. She didn’t hate them, just disliked them, just like how some narrow-minded Malaysian Chinese dislike Indians (yeah, I know quite a few like that). But of course, she also didn’t like me, so she didn’t talk to me much (she already had 4 grandsons before me, so I was a little inconsequential).

My dad lived through the war and Japanese Occupation, but he never discussed it with us. All he said life was hard then, they had to live on sweet potato and sometimes hid in jungle. But my dad was an exemplary Christian, so I suppose he would not speak ill of anyone.

All my life I’ve been a little apprehensive about the Japanese. I only know about the war from what I read in the media, our history books, and personal accounts of survivors. But the recent political furor has spurred me to find some facts of my ancestral past.

I did not find much on the Malayan Occupation that I didn’t already know. But I did find out about the Nanjing Massacre from many sources (this is a good one). Summarized here are some of them:

During the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese committed a litany of atrocities against innocent civilians, including mass execution, raping, looting, and burning. It is impossible to keep a detailed account of all of these crimes. However, from the scale and the nature of these crimes as documented by survivors and the diaries of the Japanese militarists, the chilling evidence of this historical tragedy is indisputable.

The Tragedy at Yangtze River - On 13/12/37, a large number of refugees tried to escape from the Japanese by trying to cross the Yangtze River, but were trapped by the Japanese Army and killed. A Japanese officer estimated that more than 50,000 people were killed.

Annihilation in the City - Japanese troops fired at more than 100,000 refugees or injured Chinese soldiers in the streets. Dead bodies covered the two major streets of the city. The streets became “streets of blood” as a result of the two-day annihilation.

Mass Execution of Captives – TheJapanese arrested anybody who was suspected to be a Chinese soldier. Many were arrested and sent outside of the city to be massacred, from several thousand to tens of thousand at a time. The captives were shot by machine guns, bayoneted, burnt alive or gassed.

Scattered Atrocities With Extreme Cruelty - Japanese soldiers invented and exercised inhumane and barbaric methods of killing including shooting, stabbing, cutting open the abdomen, excavating the heart, decapitation (beheading), drowning, burning, punching the body and the eyes with an awl, and even castration or punching through the vagina.

Raping - An estimated 20,000 women were raped by the Japanese soldiers during the six weeks of the Nanjing Massacre, most were brutally killed afterwards.

(Some of the descriptions for that last item were so brutal I won’t reproduce them here. Read the article for yourself for the details.)

Somehow I can imagine what happened to the Malayan Chinese were not so different than in Nanjing. It is no wonder it is often called the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’. Novella once sad ‘War is hate, anger is king’.

My conclusion? I don’t know what to say. But I am reminded of Romans 12:19:

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.

I can understand why my grandmother dislikes them.

(For further reading, you may want to try Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking)

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REALLY FUN Earth Day Green Tips!

Today is Earth Day. I didn’t know about it until I heard it on morning radio. Not to be confused with Secretaries’ Day, or Very Good Public Holiday (yesterday). Nope this is Earth Day. When for one day, everybody (ok, not EVERYbody… some people) get all politically correct and ‘environmentally conscious’ and try to do something ‘eco-friendly’ and to impress their friends and ease their guilty conscience for the next 364 days.

Don’t get me wrong. I think far more than anyone else I know, my family recycles / saves / reuses / repairs / salvage / scavenges for the environment (or rather more for austerity purposes…). But being green is a daily, life-long effort and consciousness, not just one day in a year.

OK, before it descends into a rant, let me highlight a few REALLY FUN things everyone can do today for Earth Day (for a start) to celebrate… even if you don’t give a damn about the environment…:

• Don’t come in to work today. Tell your boss you don’t want to pollute the air with your car exhaust fumes. Especially if you have an old junk car like mine that looks like a chain-smoker impatient to get cancer…
  
• If you’re already at work, don’t fret. Turn off the air-conditioning to cut down on gas emissions that burn a hole in the ozone. Then get all your colleagues to sit outside in the park/canteen/video arcade/Borders/mamak and sleep the day off or whistle at passing girls.
• Recycle water. Pee into the potted plants in your office’s waiting room/foyer. Try to resist the urge to mix some into your boss’ chrysanthemum tea (especially if you’re yeet hei or ‘heaty’).
• If you’re a lady (and can’t pee into potted plants), get all the girls to coordinate their toilet trips, and flush once only after everyone has used the toilet. And use paper from the office shredder instead of expensive tissue paper.
• Make a compost heap next to the water cooler or fridge or microwave oven. Dump all shredded paper, used coffee bags, tea leaves, fingernail clippings, dead cockroaches, cat droppings and other biodegradable stuff into a plastic container and continuously keep it wet or moist. After a few days you’ll see the worms and maggots will appear and voila! You’ve got a mini compost heap! You can then put this natural (and wonderfully fragrant) fertilizer into those retarded mini-cactus plants on your colleagues’ desks.
• Recycle paper. Many types of paper can be recycled for the office use, especially the fax machine. Cut up used mahjong paper into A4 size (with all the financial calculations). Or use junk mail or flyers you get in your mail box. Just make sure your boss read the CORRECT side of your report, not the side advertising for escort services/slimming centres/feng shui masters/plumber/4D predictions.
• Companies spend thousands every month on eco-unfriendly toner cartridge replacements. Collect used engine oil and use it as liquid photocopy toner. It works just fine…just don’t be around when the technician comes around to service the machine. If your machine uses dry powder toner, mix a bit of dark coffee powder or stubble from your electric shaver. Your faxes won’t look so great, but you’re saving the environment, remember…?

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What I’ve Been Doing All Day

This is what I’ve been doing all day…

Well, it’s a public holiday, I’ve also been watching EPL a bit…eating goreng pisang (fried banana fritters)…but mostly doing that thing in the picture…

Simon Finally Tries KFC’s Curry Crunch

I wanted to try it 2 Saturdays ago, but after reading this blog on PPS saying it was crap (can’t remember which blog), I decided to have my lunch in good ‘ol McDs. But the craving was getting the better of me, so yesterday I had a go…

But before that, I must say here and now that I don’t go to KFC much at all, since all my few visits there in the last 10 years have pretty much been disappointing. When I was kid, going to KFC was like a treat, since it was all we had in my hometown. But coming to the city to work, I was more of a McDs/BK guy…. KFC’s chicken started getting smaller and smaller…and the idea of cheap, foreign workers preparing my food was quite a turn off.

So I kind of stopped going there, anyway their Original Recipe seem to get worse everytime I tasted it. They started introducing wave after wave of novelty gimmicks, all of them pretty crap – Colonel’s burger, Zinger burger, Original Recipe fillet burger (what a rip-off), cheesy wedges (just looking at it makes me feel like regurgitating), popcorn chicken (one pack is not even enough to feed a hamster) and Chocolate Chips ‘N Nuts Cookies (what, were they baked by the domesticated chickens?).

And they never had cool toys to collect. And like for like, McDs always seemed cheaper than KFC.

But enough about that. So I bought the Curry Crunch chicken for me and my wife. No, actually I bought ONE set of the Curry Crunch and ONE set of original recipe – just in case the curry chicken tasted like crap.

So the verdict? It was actually quite OK. But nothing spectacular or fantastic. Just some flavouring on the fried skin. Of course it doesn’t justify all those OTT ads we hear on the radio and on TV. Just OK, another take on the traditional way to fry the dead bird.

But I think by taking the Hot & Spicy off the menu to promote it is annoying what few loyal customers they have.

I’m wondering, what other gimmicks are they going to come up with? Satay chicken? Rendang chicken with rice? Friend chicken porridge? I’m not holding my breath…

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The Most Famous Malaysians on the Internet

As always, I’m looking to increase the journalistic value and integrity of my blog (AHAHAHahaha…!). So yesterday I decided to do a survey to find out who are the Most Famous Malaysians on the Internet. What I found out was quite interesting (albeit a little subjective…).

But before that, some qualifications on the ‘research‘:

• Using Google, I search the names with inverted commas (“…”) to get exact names.
• I used the most common base names (e.g. “Mahathir Mohamad”), to aggregate the different permutations due to titles and different spellings.
• I recognise that many people may have the same names, thereby some searches may yield more sites than it should, but i reckon most of it should refer to the person I’m looking for, and the margin of error is negligible.
• Due to Google’s search constraints and nature of their names, I couldn’t search some Malaysians such as Datuk Lat (too common a word), Jeffrey Ong (too many people with the same name), etc.
• For some strange reasons only known to Google, an identical search returns different results from different IP addresses, and at different times of the day. So to make all things equal, I made the searches at one particular time and place.

And so without much further ado, here it goes:

The Most Famous Malaysians on the Internet (by Google search results)

791,000 for “Michelle Yeoh” (international actress)
139,000 for “Mahathir Mohamad” (former PM)
112,000 for “Siti Nurhaliza” (singer)
73,400 for “Anwar Ibrahim” (former DPM)
59,000 for “Ziana Zain” (singer)
38,000 for “Tunku Abdul Rahman” (16,600 for “Tuanku Abdul Rahman”) (first PM)
31,400 for “Abdullah Badawi” (current PM)
31,500 for “Alex Yoong” (former F1 driver)
24,100 for “P. Ramlee” (actor/singer/entertainer)
12,700 for “M. Nasir” (actor/singer/songwriter)
12,700 for “Jeff Ooi” (blogger)
12,500 for “Hussein Onn” (former PM)
7,210 for “Lim Kit Siang” (politician)
6,620 for “Najib Razak” (current DPM)
8,640 for “Samy Vellu” (politician)
6,860 for “Wan Azizah” (politician)
6,250 for “Chandra Muzaffar” (politician/activist)
5,830 for “Nicol David” (national squash player)
4,800 for “Karim Raslan” (writer)
4,570 for “Yasmin Ahmad” (director)
4,270 for “Ong Ka Ting” (politician)
3,750 for “Ning Baizura” (singer)
3,740 for “Hadi Awang” (politician)
2,210 for “Halim Saad” (businessman)
1,780 for “Reshmonu” (singer)
1,400 for “Lim Goh Tong” (businessman)
1,400 for “Shalin Zulkifli” (national bowler)
1,370 for “Ramli Ibrahim” (choreographer)
1,060 for “Hans Isaac” (actor)

Below 1000, there are too many that to be found, such as Imuda (822), Karpal Singh (804), Wong Choon Hann (780), M. Jegathesan(587), Ananda Krishnan (523) and Sharifah Aini (512).

Did I miss out anyone?


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Giant Weird Sculptures At Malaysian Roundabouts

The other day on the way to Cherating, we were at Malaysia’s one and only “Persimpangan Bunga Cengkih”. Yes, you read that right, there IS such a thing. How did I know? There were signs in all directions telling us about it. And sign from 5km away preparing us for this ‘special’ landmark, as if it’s the world’s biggest durian.

For those of you wondering, “Persimpangan Bunga Cengkih” is a direct translation of a ‘cloverleaf junction’. It’s an American traffic engineering term (I learnt this is college). Malaysia boleh, man. Why stop there? Why not have signs for every “Persimpangan Batu Intan” (diamond interchange) or Persimpangan Separa Terompet at Permukaan Datar (at-grade partial trumpet interchange)?

Which makes me wonder, why do Malaysians put weird, weird things at road junctions and roundabouts? Giant durians, giant mangosteens, giant groundnuts, giant congkak-boards, flowerpots big enough to bathe a cow, giant flowers with accompanying giant insects and giant butterflies (but no giant bird droppings), strange ‘artistic’ carvings that look like crap when its faded and rusted, etc…

I hear somewhere in East Malaysia there’s a giant white cat. But that’s acceptable, since it really blends with the name of the city. (On a side note, the council staff must spend a lot of time every morning clearing the area for giant buried cat droppings. And giant fish bones littered all over.)

But it isn’t all bad. Sometimes these ‘landmarks’ serve a good purpose – as a ‘landmark’! “Yeah, OK, you go straight, aa? Until you see the giant Siti Nurhaliza billboard, aa? Then you turn left, you know, until the roundabout with the giant orang-utan, aa? Then go 3 o’clock…”

But one word of caution. Make sure all these works of art are adequate protected by railings and kerbs. Over the years I’ve seen dozens of ‘mat racers’ smash into the center of the roundabouts or junction islands during their midnight drag races.

We wouldn’t want the beautiful giant durian wantonly damaged, do we? How will we ever find our way without them?

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Scenes That You WILL NOT SEE in Star Wars Episode III

I can feel the force of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith starting right now. First the media is going to play it up on all fronts, followed by endless teasers and montage clips on TV and the Internet, then the merchandising and Happy Meal toys, etc.

I just watched the trailer on Astro. It doesn’t show much, but most of us already know the main story since 1983 – Anakin seduced by the Emperor to join the Dark Side, Anakin fights it out with Obi-Wan, all the Jedi exterminated by the Sith, leaving only Yoda and Obi-wan, Amidala dies and twins separated, clone army become the Stormtroopers. Then there is the top-notch CGI, battle on land and space, lightsabre duel, anti-hero fighting his inner demons, yadda yadda yadda.

But the details and side stories are still pretty much unknown. But I can tell this much, I definitely WILL NOT SEE these scenes in the movie:

• Any serious acting or Academy Award winning script-writing.

• Amidala and Anakin doing a Bollywood love song-and-dance routine in the forests of Dantooine.

• Any appearance by Vulcans, Romulans, Klingons, the Borg or the Dominion. (No wait, on second thoughts…)
• Comic relief scene featuring Jar Jar Binks and a bunch of drunken Ewoks.
• Han Solo making an appearance. (Darn. He’s the coolest Star Wars character ever)
• Ditto for Jabba the Hutt. And his lesser known cousin, Pizza the Hutt.
• Any technical explanation by starship engineers on how they managed to induce artificial gravity inside the space crafts.
• How Anakin finally designed that poofter / ghey Darth Vader outfit.
• Male bonding scene between Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader with the former WWE wrestler Vader.
• Anakin finally gets an inspiration for his Dark Side name when he visits a Malaysian banana leaf rice restaurant. (“Dey, macha, can give 3 pieces of dat vadir, aah?”)
  

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The Most Beautiful Waterfall in Malaysia

IMHO, anyway. It’s the Sg. Pandan waterfall near Sg. Lembing, was there yesterday. It’s much higher, couldn’t get it all in one shot… Thanks, Mike for taking the shot and sending to me…

Survival Guide to Malaysian Rural Towns

I just came back from a holiday trip to Cherating, and will explain to my readers why my blog was not updated for a few days. It was a fun trip; 10 of us living it up in the sun, sea, sand, turtles, seafood, sandflies, waterfalls, etc. There will be probably be 2 weeks’ worth of blog entries from that trip, but I’ll start with this one.

Over the years while participating in dozens of motorized treasure hunts, I’ve seen my fair share of villages and small rural towns: Ayer Tawar, Kemaman, Damar Laut, Parit Jawa, etc. Don’t get me wrong; I love the rustic peace and slow-paced life there, and when I was growing up, my hometown was semi-rural. And most of my classmates came from outlying villages. However, a lot of people are city-bred, so you may not get a little culture-shock. So here’s a helpful guide to all those urban-sesat folks:

SURVIVAL GUIDE TO MALAYSIAN RURAL TOWNS:

• Keep within the speed limit. Knocking down some old makcik on a bicycle or running over someone’s stray chicken will get you in big, big trouble. A flash mob will congregate in seconds, baying for your blood. This rule applies especially if near the morning market, bus station or 4D shops.
• Most petrol station attendants will pump the fuel for you. This isn’t like the city, where you have to do it yourself.
• Don’t honk the car in front of you if he doesn’t immediately start moving when the traffic light turns green.
• Every town has at least one coffeeshop with lots of old people drinking slowly. Go in and try it. They probably have best coffee and toasted bread you’ve ever tasted.
• Don’t provoke the local boys on their illegally modified motorbikes. They don’t fall under the Malaysian traffic code.
• Forget about firing up your notebook for some WiFi at the coffeeshop. Your best bet is for some internet connection is at the local cybercafé. And try not to let the Indonesians using Wartel or counterstrike deathmatches disrupt your surfing.
• The Store or Bintang supermarket is the biggest place there is to buy something. Don’t bother looking for a 7-11 or Guardian.
• When communicating with the locals, speak clearly and listen carefully. Their version of BM may differ very much from yours.

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7 Movies that Truly Defined the 80’s For Me

Seven movies that truly defined the 80’s for me:

E.T. (1982)– It’s was more than a year after it was released in the US that I finally got to watch Spielberg’s superb film about a docile finger-pointing alien in our local wooden cinema. This was back then, when films where good family fun, without any swearing, mindless violence and gratuitous sex. Sure, Predator and the Borg could kick E.T.’s ass, but the final bicycle chase scene sure stuck in our minds… And Drew Barrymore was such a cute kid back then.

Top Gun (1986) – Ah, yes. Tom Cruise in the ultimate cool movie of the decade. Propelled by one of the greatest soundtrack of all time, this movie shot Mr. Cruise to superstardom. Suddenly everyone was wearing gold-rimmed Ray-ban sunglasses and green Navy jackets (even in bloody hot Malaysia). Yeah, and everyone wanted cool nicknames like Iceman, Goose, etc. And what was the real storyline? Who cares?!

The Original Star Wars (1977-83)– Yeah, I understand the first movie was actually released in the 70’s, but by the time it came to Malaysia and the craze finally kick in, it was already the 80’s. Like most purist, I feel the original series has its place in history – it was so mind-blowing, there was nothing like it in the whole decade, and it really changed the way our generation looked at movies, science fiction, story-telling and how the good guy finally wins.

Mannequin (1987)– It wasn’t very big here, I caught it on video. But it was so cool and funny. I just found out the girl is actually Kim Cattrall of ‘Sex and the City’, she looked different then. As with all good movies, then it had a great soundtrack. What a great love story to give hope to all those with broken hearts and broken dreams to find the one you love…

Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – It was swashbuckling adventure, it was funny, it had the expendable bad guys, it had a heroine and it had a good looking hero we all cheered for. For me, it was the first Western movie that followed the HK-Jackie Chan style – action and humor from start to the end. Most English movies I watch before that were booo-ring ‘talking’ movies.

Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile (1984, 85) – yeah, sure, they couldn’t be taken seriously, but it was fun. That’s the whole point of movies, isn’t it?

Back to Future (1985) – For obvious reasons. The premise of it all was so exciting (back then), and the whole Oedipus complex was thing was irresistible. An 80’s kid caught in the 50’s. Spawned too many copycat movies after that. The sequels should never have been made.


Notable mentions: Empire of the Sun (’87), Gremlins (’84), Ghostbusters (’84), Spaceballs (’87), Top Secret! (’84) and Ferris Bueller (’86).

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