PlingTalk

I think everyone had tons of fun and after the parade you could see people were still in a high mood…groups of obviously straight people were wandering around with a ‘pink flag of the UK’ and a British guy who was with his girlfriend and another straight couple even fooled around saying which guy he fancied…haha…it was truly a fantastic night!!

I hid my suspicions, which was probably wise. Bob March and Wu Su-hua, authors of The Chinese Negotiator, argue that Chinese people believe karma (”yuan fen” in anglicized Chinese) binds themselves to anyone from anywhere who might share a fate. Fate, the Chinese figure, means any common path into the future. In business, the authors say, it means a contract or a joint venture by which both sides get something they want. Outside business, from what I can glean after seven years of relations with friends, students, co-workers and news sources, karma means that both sides — who in history might be enemies or at least take mutually unknown paths — have invested something valuable such as time or money in a common future.
For the clergywoman, karma probably just meant that she happened to be on site when a foreign journalist showed up wanting a bit of information that she had. For other people who invoked the karma clause on me, it just meant we had voluntarily decided to cooperate, despite racial differences. As a teacher, I committed four-month time blocks to make sure people learned something they could use, and as students they agreed to learn it. I could have walked off the job. They could have cut all my classes (and a few did). As news sources, they risked their reputations to speak with me on sensitive topics. As a reporter, I scrapped the worst quotes and used statements that gave them dignity but made their point. They could have fled. I could have called them dangerous subversives in an article.

“Sarawak Body Butter”…was passing a Body Shop store and saw the ad promoting theri newest collection ‘Sarawak’ on display, and of course lah being the patriotic Malaysian that i am, i went into the shop to see what it was (i seldom go into body shop btw) and the staff said the name indeed came from the rainforest of Sarawak…so i bought it….its body cream…i’m getting lazy nowadays to use it…i can never maintain these beauty products…remember the handcream and nail polisher i bought last yr? Well it didn’t even last one month before i stopped using them cos i was too lazy…BUT i am going to endeavour to use this given how expensive it is!!