  pictures finally , i'm timely about something . i developed a roll of black & white film and the urlLink results are kind of twilight-zoney. there is one picture so far from urlLink snowball , pictures i was referring to in urlLink this post , and a vintage pic from last summer!
some people like a spa.... but for me to relax and feel centered, i sit down with a chinese dictionary and chinese text and start reading / translating. because, of course, for me english is my better language and so written chinese (my first language) has to go through a translation process. i read an article titled "a study of the one thousand most frequently used chinese characters and their simplification" (jclta - journal of the chinese language teachers association). once someone has learned these one thousand characters, they have learned the "bulk of the chracters of the working chinese language".
i remember reading once about how illiterate citizens during the cultural revolution were rigourously educated for three months during which they learned ~1,000 designated characters the knowledge of which enabled them to then read newspapers and communicate. ok, so i'm not so hard-core and i've always considered reading/writing to be the easier part of my chinese education because i got a really good start (mummy taught me while i was a toddler and really strict chinese tutors in hk) in that.
learning to speak mandarin - as i am learning that i don't have a tongue for languages - is another matter and that is a stressful endeavour that is not progressing at any rate at all. there is always this small nagging voice at me asking, "how do you ensure that your child(ren) is not total twinkie urlLink * ? " my mum is an immigrant so she taught me the real thing. as second generation chinese who has gone back home , it's my duty to pass on everything i can... don't really want to think about the plight of the third generation when mine is so hard.... i'm concerned that the best i can do is pass on some kind of bastardized version of what i was taught. though i cannot speak for the efforts of my significant other to be, this is one thing i can do that i know is certainly in the right direction.
that is why it brings me a sense of peace and balance. * twinkie - is a (questionably) derogative metaphor for canadian-/american-/british-born chinese (japanese, korean, etc. ) characterizing the fact they have a foreign exterior but westernized values. synonyms: banana, jook sing . jook sing means "hollow bamboo. " i once heard it had a white mooshy inside but i might be mistaken. it does symbolize an imbalance in the jook sing . urlLink read more.... 
