CNY-less, 3rd anniversary

Chinese New Year is coming.
And this is going to be my 3rd year of CNY-less. My first and second CNY-less year were kinda pathetic; I remember I had to study for exams, attended classes like not-CNY, not surrounded by any CNY-related things, and listened CNY songs from YouTube. One word: Pathetic.

My American friends once asked me, do people in Malaysia celebrate CNY? I was like "duh?". Well, I do not blame them for asking this "duh" question, I mean after all it is Chinese New Year, which make them think that it is only for Chinese aka China people. Another friend of mine was suprised with my sadness for CNY-less. Do you know how I answered his suprise-ness?

"Imagine you are far away from family during Christmas, and you are also not surrounded with Christmas Tree, Christmas Presents, and Christmas food." -this is what I answered.

Well, I guess this yr's CNY-less might be slightly better than the previous years. Reason? I just received a CNY card and an angpau, bought "nian gao", going to a CNY Food Fair, and most importantly, I dont have to study for exam or go to class :)

p/s: For those who think that studying/working overseas is COOL, think again.

おかあさんとエリースさん、ありがとう。わたしはとてもhappy!

Multilingual

One obvious advantage to be multilingual...
You can talk BAD on people on their face w/o "worrying" that they understand you.
The RISK?
That person might actually understand what you are saying!

I had a short trip to New York, and apparently, as a chinese, I spent alot of time venturing Chinatown. And obviously, I can't use cantonese or mandarin to talk "bad" about people (folks, its a "tradition" here to use canto/mandarin to talk bad about Mat Salleh) since most of the people in Chinatown is Chinese, so naturally my friend and I digged out our "buried" BAHASA MELAYU and utilized it! Well, our BM were so KARAT! yet still understandable la. Who cares? as long as we faham each other, boleh la.

Here is the interesting part,
We ( 4 of us) were having lunch in this typical-chinese-only-restaurant. For some unknown reason, we kept on chit-chatting with our karat-punya BM. So a friend of mine who is not really fluent in Cantonese spoke to the waiter in Cantonese to order food. After that we continue our chit-chats, suddenly my friend told us, "Eh, u dengar tadi apa meja sebelah cakap pasal kita tak? Mereka cakap kat dunia ini banyak orang multilingual. Tapi ada sesetengah orang suka menunjuk-nunjuk dan pura-pura faham bahasa lain." And obviously that group of people made a stupid assumption on all of us based on my friend's not-so-fluent cantonese.

Since that group menyemarakkan our api,
All 4 of us with a volumized tone, continue our chit-chatting in fluent CANTONESE, this time. and we "won". That group of people dengan perasaan yang sangat malu, terkejut and whispered "they really can speak and understand Cantonese!!!" -PADAN MUKA-

so, the moral of the story is: Be careful on Multilingual People, especially in city like NY

P.S: BM is not a safe language to use in NY, too. Because we met alot of dont-look-like Malaysian Malaysian and also Indonesian.

Berhati-hati semasa mengunakan Bahasa Melayu~