at irene's request, i am doing another post...*grin*
talked with grandma this morning..... had my dose of Shanghainese anecdotes.
one story concerns a boy mathematician in primary school who wins lots of maths olympiad prizes... one day he was absent from school and the rest of the class asked the teacher: why is he absent 2day?
the teacher told them that the boy's grandpa passed away and he had to attend the funeral.
Then the whole class started clapping in joy
one of the boys said: finally his grandpa(who was a university maths professor) died! now no one can teach him maths anymore and he will become all crap!
Very disturbed kids...
disturbed.....
Posted by
YN
Friday, May 20, 2005
5 comments:
Oh goodness... that's terrible...
I knew sally would leave a comment...
err.. i hope this is not a true story...
yes, YINING! keep posting~~~
Hmm yes it is disturbing but I can understand that kind of mentality, and sometimes that's my train of thought. It's very distracting, disturbing yet very gripping thought. Very tempting path - to blame.
It comes from prolonged acclimatisation to forced achievement and the desperation/frustration of not being able to reach unrealistic goals.
Having exhausted your own ability and resources in optimising your own performance and failed miserably according to all "legitimately recognised standardisation" (i.e. marks, tests, competitions, which assess where you are not how far you have come and thus reward you for base capital rather than profit gained through effort), you turn with bitterness to everything and everyone who landed you in this impossible situation of having wasted your time and energy and potential and unable to move on (dead alley).
If you cling on to the belief and possibility of still achieving those unrealistic goals, you don't turn against those who put them on you in the first place, instead you turn bitterly on those who are working to achieve the same goals except who aren't interfering with your path to achievement, yet the bitterness comes from the need for someone to suffer in compensation for the suffering you've endured, and so the competitor must take the fall just for filling the place that might have came to you by default had he not existed.
On the other hand, you turn on those who pushed you in the direction of those unrealistic goals each year with the age-equivalent of a rifle to the back of the head (i.e no toys when you're 2, no playing with friends when you're 5, threaten to smack you at 7, beat you up at 10, threaten to kick you out of the house at 12, pushing you out of the house for all the neighbours to see at 15, makes sure your bf/gf never sees you again at 17 etc.) - yeah and I am talking about parents, only those who are blinded by their own fault-driven ambitions though - if in the event that the kid turns on the parents then you get the 11 O'clock new that a double homicide has occurred in a house in some Asian-centric suburb (cough Box Hill) and the prime suspect is their teenage son, who turn himself in without a struggle.
What to do about it? Don't deny this exists, don't look at it like some ridiculous bizarre behaviour that's monstrous....it's human nature before the frame of morality makes it monstrous. The frame of morality is not to be dismissed in a rejectionist toss. No. But to dismiss human nature as something of a rare aberrance justifiable with a throw-away comment such as "oh goodness...that's terrible" is to give it too little credit. It exists and it was here first, respect that and then work with it. If you don't and treat it with the attitude of "it's rare, it'll pass" or "it's monstrous, I want to gloss over it as quickly as possible and be on my merry safe way", you're never going to make an impact on these people, and what good will your mismay be if it has no impact on the world.
Understand human suffering, even the evil suffer and, since evil makes people sin, and sinners suffer, it is the evil who suffer the most. Sometimes to alleviate suffering you need to see what evil sees and yet resist its grip on you.
No points for guessing who wrote this one. :)
John 21:22 Jesus answered,"If I want him to remain alive until i return, what is that to you? You must follow me."
Please explain.
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