Thank yous for 2014

I have adopted this habit from my younger sister to count blessings at the end of every year. I did it on FB only to realize some of the people I want to thank are not there, hence here.

I think it is a very good habit. We always read inspirational quotes that tell us to count our blessings but literally listing it out on cyberspace, is far more practical than just thinking about it after reading the inspirational quotes. That way, we can always revisit the post and bring in the silver linings whenever we face the daily challenges, stresses and annoyances throughout our lives as we always do as human beings. A little dose of gratitude, goes a long loooong way. 

1. I thank God for healing me of dengue after a horrible episode of prolonged decline in platelets, endless vomiting, high fever and chills. I thought that I would never pull out of it because I could not nourish myself to fight it. As those who know me would know, I am always over-confident of my strong immunity. Never in my life have I ever been admitted to a hospital for anything! Yet this time, I felt so helpless and weak. I thank all the people who cared for me while I was at my worst; my parents, my husband Alvin, my sister Yee Wean, my bestfriend Hazel, my cell-leader Elizabeth, my pastor Pr Lee Choo, my MTAS gang Mei Wei, Cindee, Vinsky, etc, my cellgroup Ee Vonn, Wendy & Patrick, my new colleague Christine, ... for being there for me in person. Every little bit of care and concern means the world to me! And thank you to those who couldn't be there but sent forth your wishes and prayers too! Nothing in modern medicine or technology could've healed me more than the cares of the people close to me. There is afterall no cure for dengue. I have never been more thankful to be alive, or to be able to sleep in my own bed, or to be able to eat without vomiting after.
2. I thank God for the Short + Sweet journey this year with my hubby Alvin. It seems that whenever we collaborate, amazing things happen. We are better together than apart as S+S proves it. ;) I thank Ross for taking our "baby" to great heights and putting our vision into action!! Thanks to Shen for making the music sound superb!! Love it!! I thank the entire team from 300 Million: A Reconceptualization of Conception and A Woman At War for a memorable journey and for the endless commitment put in.
3. I thank God for saving my dad's life after the horrifying heart-attack in April while both my sister and myself were abroad. It was a shock to us seeing how healthy and fit he is for his age. He's fitter than some 30year-olds I know! It really taught us how temporary our lives are in this world and nobody is immune to sickness or death and not take health for granted. It taught us to appreciate what truly matters in life and not just the passing distractions. I am just super glad and thankful I still have time to spend with both my parents and my entire family is still whole.
4. I thank God for my husband Alvin, who stands by me through thick and thin... and walks all my crazy journeys with me; be it in the arts, in ministry, in life, this year... in sickness and in health. Thank you for making me laugh even when I can't manage a smile. Thank you for walking all our journeys together that deepens our understanding of each other's lives; we can talk about the stuff we go through to each other and really really relate!!
5. I thank God for the privilege to produce More Than A Show for SIBKL. Thanks for your faith in my Pr Lee Choo and Ronny. Although, I kinda failed you guys at the very last lap when I got dengue, you guys took over the baton so readily and willingly. I could never have done it without you. Thanks to Mei Wei, Zara, Alvin, Janet, Charmine, Cindee, and the entire cast and crew of MTAS for your endless commitment to make the show work. You guys are so awesome!!! I love you and miss you all... post-production syndrome. :( :( I am so ready and looking forward to 2015's Christmas Production!!
6. I thank God for opening up an opportunity for me in my career to venture out of my comfort zone in the world of the sick, into the big wide world of healthy people. It opened up my mind and my perspective of the way business or marketing is done. It gave me the opportunity to learn the true art of influencing people through mass-communications, touching emotions from afar and a lot of room for creativity exploration. I can clearly see how this wider experience in creativity will add so much value back to the emotionally compelling world of niche chronic diseases, which is ultimately still my first love and I miss it!
7. I thank God for my sister, Yee Wean who shares my love for travelling... not-in-style. Whilst there are many people who crave luxuries while travelling, we share the same objective in travelling, just experiencing regular life in that place, eat their food, watch their people, see things and walk, a lot. Don't over-plan, and go with the flow... tripadvisor and googlemaps have not failed us. We don't need a tourguide. Our Italy trip was perfect that way!
8. I thank God for my best friend in the whole wide world, Hazel who is always there for me through everything and supports me in everything I do. And makes the time to spend with me even with her crazy travelling schedule. This year, we managed to make a trip together to Krabi and it was the most relaxing, agenda-less trip ever. It was super wonderful!! In the world of so much busy-ness, it is a luxury to be agenda-less. I hope to take more trips with you!
9. I thank God for the opportunity to serve in the SIBKL Creative Ministry as a Video Editor. I want to thank Wai Yan, Shu-Ling, Desmond and Mei Lee for being such patient and wonderful teachers that have unlocked a new skill in me as a video editor which gives me new perspectives to add on to my passion in the performing arts. Videos gives me a whole new basket of toys to play with in the performing arts and storytelling! Joining CM-Production team was initally just a trial as I had always been in the worship ministry all my life. But I am definitely here to stay. I love it here!!
10. For the new colleagues I meet in my new job in this new industry; I have never met someone so remarkable as you, Christine; super objective minded, responsible and genuine. I am thankful and honoured to be your peer. You have my utmost respect as a person and I hope to see you go way further in your career. I am thankful to have a well-united team; Jocelyn and Jeslyn; both whom I can always rely on and have a high sense of team-unity even in challenging times. I really appreciate the sisterhood feeling that you girls give me and make me look forward to come to work. I am also thankful for my boss, David whom has a wealth of experience and is never selfish to share and mentor. On of being a nice empathetic person, he still holds high standards, principles and work ethics in his leadership... usually a very difficult balance to strike. I also appreciate his immense respect for our work-life balance.

See, you don't even need to look very hard, there is just too many things to be thankful for. Cheers to 2015, and bring on more of life to be thankful for!!!

I am my mother's daughter

An awfully outdated post... but Mother's Day this year was finally different. Not just the usual dinner and ang pau... but real precious mother-daughter time away from everything. Being a mother is a full-time job... like 24hr, 7days/week, 53weeks/year. No break... no time off. So, being away from the family and the home is sort of a break... I said sort of because, even then, all the way in Taipei... she is still my mother. I am glad to finally spend that quality time with her; exploring foreign places, walking helluva a lot, explore new food, shopping and pillow talk every night for a week. It was nice... sometimes you don't realize that you don't take the time to get to know a person better just because that person is there, everyday. 

I sure hope mom enjoyed her Mother's Day this year with me... I certainly enjoyed it with her. :-)

Parental Choices

When we were young, we used to hang on to our parents with our dear life. Nope, there are no other human beings we could trust except these 2 adults who gave life to us and spend every single day with us. But, as we grow older, we start to have our own lives... we develop wider social circles and we get married.

Our parents' place in our lives become smaller and smaller without us noticing it. Time spent with them gets less by the year... time spent on work gets more by the year. In this day and age of the busyness era, everyone has to learn to prioritize. Work puts food on the table and a roof over our head... yes, that become priority numero uno! It doesn't help when most of us have only 15 days of annual leave per year. 15 measly days. And so it becomes very easy to prioritize everything else over them...

1 week vacation (minus weekends is 5 days leave) with your hot stud hubby or 1 week home with nagging parents??

1 week off for a performance tour (or whatever your hobbies/passion may be) or 1 week of balik kampung with your mom to see more relatives who will ask you "when are you having a baby?"???

Another 1 week off for a girly beach vacation with you BFF or to visit a faraway BFF that you only get to see once in a blue moon or 1 week off to bring your mom for an unadventurous elderly-friendly holiday???

And there goes your 15 days of leave!! Haven't even counted emergency leaves, church missions, extension of business trips in exotic places, etc etc.

The answers are very easy. Wayyy too easy to choose... that we often forget that, they made the choice to have you. They prioritize having to spend their time, effort, money to bring you and raise you into this world... sacrifice their youth. A much much much more difficult choice than to choose the latter in ANY of the above. A choice so difficult that I myself have decided not to go down that path. But they went down that path already.

So this year, while I am on sabbatical... incomeless as I may be, I will finally have the luxury of time. The luxury of time to go home more, time to go for my very first (yes, first. shame on me) vacation with my mom. And I am looking forward to it. While selecting photos for this post, I realize I do not have a single photo of me and my mom alone. With dad, plenty but not a single one with mom alone. Tomorrow, will be my very first trip with my mom alone... and it will be the first of many photos of me and her alone. It is never too late to make the other choice to be with them. =)


Happy Mother's Day!!!

Sisterly Reminiscence: Part 2

I don't usually do sequel posts but my last post really unleashed so many old memories that were weird but truly truly awesome beyond words. I just realize how wild our imagination was as kids. I don't have as good a memory as my sister so she remembered all this crazy stuff I imagined up!

1. After watching an episode of Bionic Woman about female robots called Fembots replacing humans, I imagined up our own Fembot lab where we too kidnap people & replace them with Fembots. We could monitor what the Fembots were doing through the monitors. So, detailed, siap dengan mini fire extinguisher in d lab. kakakaka

2. Another imaginary place I dreamt up. We were witches living in a scary castle surrounded by a bloody moat. It even rained blood! Indoors & outdoors also I drew!!

3. This is a drawing of our home's living room. Even the cushion cover patterns are exactly like this. The 2 heads sticking out from the couch are my sis & me. Sis said that I wrote a whole essay for this photo but I can't remember what I wrote.

4. This is one of the many "Be Bo Ba Bo" pages in my book. I invented that term for free-scribbles pages. Hahahah

5. And kiddy essays I wrote, the Malay one is about a Magic Coffin that can bring dead things back to life. (I think I must have been very fascinated with all things sci-fi, fantasy and the paranormal since little). The English one was about a boy my mom used to babysit whom I really hated. hahahah.

One conclusion is, I was one crazily imaginative child!!! But that was what made our childhood so interesting. We didn't have the luxury of travelling, having computers or other canggih stuff and had never even flown on a plane. How else can we have our adventures but in our minds?? In the end, I think our adventures were way more interesting, wouldn't you say??

Sisterly Reminiscence

Just had dinner at parent's place again tonight. And we kinda brought up this old memory of me & sis cycling to the nearby kedai runcit to get my mom some onions when I was 12. We got chased by a couple of dogs (actually I remember they were only few months old puppies heheh) and I cycled soooo fast with my sis behind me that I lost control and cycled into a tree. Of course all the onions terpelanting all over the grass & the bicycle front wheel was bent. It was one of those old-school bicycles with a basket in front. How cool was that?

In this day & age, children no longer have the entire neighbourhood as their playground. Most are confined to their homes with their Macbooks, Ipads and Wii. Parents too, welcome this confinement due to rising crimes of kidnapping or human trafficking. They too have the opportunity to travel the world and see what other parts of the world is like.

Although we had never had a computer or traveled anywhere as children, I am so thankful for my awesome childhood... because entertainment & adventure was not provided to us, we used our imagination to dream up these sources of entertainment & adventure. I could never have had such an awesome one had I not have a little sister to share it with. It wouldn't be at all fun to do any of these things alone. Some things we did:

1. Before we slept, we'd have our imaginary adventures we called "kongabout". We'd set the premise of the adventure, then go along the adventure together through a conversation + narrative. Sometimes it is a different premise every night but at times it is a continuation of the story the day before. We'd continue until 1 of us gets too sleepy to talk or fall asleep.

2. We'd record ourselves singing, in harmony... sometimes to the piano, sometimes a-capella.

3. We even recorded ourselves acting in short stories where the characters in the story are ourselves & our cousins. (I know its weird but I'd give the world to find those cassettes again)

4. We'd go back to Penang during the year end school holidays. Occasionally we would also buy cute animal shaped Eden cakes and lepak at Youth Park or at the Botanical Gardens where we get to see the monkeys.

5. We'd go to our uncle's bungalow where we could swim, and can play hide & seek for hours coz the house was so huge, you can hardly find anyone. We'd even climb up his tall fences to go curi-curi play with his neighbour's fluffy white dog.

6. We'd make glutinous rice balls together with mom during Winter Solstice & see who can make the tiniest balls.

7. I remembered we even built "tents" with our blankets in our bedroom to have our pretend camp-out sessions.

8. We played batu seremban & getah at school, we were both excellent at it!!

9. We'd play with stray kittens together and get scolded for dirtying our hands with their germs.

10. Even as we got older, we performed in the school choir together. We were in the same schools in both primary & secondary school.

11. We have a singing group together called Karla Ryka, then changed to Dejavu, then changed to Citadel. The 2 of us and our friend Kim. We'd walk to school on Saturday mornings while we sing in harmony the whole half-hour walk there. We performed in our school's talentshow, other school's talentshows & even got through 1st round of Asia Bagus.

12. We'd stay back after school together just to lepak with friends, & even played in the mud in our school field.

Good times... Awesome kan? =)

Blood is thicker than water

During this festivity where reunions are customary in this part of the universe, all the generations gather together and this is where this inter-generational conflict is most prominent. Your family; you love them... but you don't necessary like them all the time. They have their own ideals in life; financially, culturally and everything else. And the worst part is, the "I have eaten more salt than you've eaten rice" line. I am sure that they have good intentions behind all those expectations... but what is ideal for them may not be ideal for me. I have never neglected my daughterly duties to them, be it excelling through my studies, financial support, regular visits, running small errands eg. computer related stuff, or even bring them to the hospital if they do not feel well. I live 25 mins away, and am there for them. My sister even more so, as she lives with them. She even spares the time to go on vacations with them. But none of that is ever enough for them & they will not hesitate to voice their dissatisfactions. I really do not understand.

We still love them though... not just because the Bible tells us to but honestly, we still do. In my sister's words, "I just syiok sendiri treat them nice coz they don't seem to think that is nice anyway." and "You just angry sendiri coz mom bukan main proud lagi that she told you off about some CNY customs.". I guess we'll each continue to syiok sendiri then. Do things that we think, other'd appreciate. Whether they do or not... doesn't matter coz everyone has their own good intentions behind it.

Putting myself in their shoes, I am sure as a parent I too, would have expectations for my kids. No human is capable of real unconditional love, only God is capable of that. Would I behave like them if my kids don't meet my expectations?? Well, I guess I will never know... Because I have long decided not to have kids. I do not think I can handle more than 1 inter-generational conflict. I have come to accept the reality that parents and kids grow up in very different times and will always have different mindsets no matter what.

In this festive season, let us learn to accept each other's differences and come to the Reunion Table with sincere happiness that will manifest itself in smiles. After all, blood is thicker than water. =)

Gong Xi Fa Chai!! Happy Reunion!!

Family feud

I'm sure most of you who are married has gone through this phase: planning the wedding! You would think that something as wonderful as this would be such a happy occasion and everyone is just soooooo happy for you. *BZZZZZTTT* Wrong!

Somehow parents seem to object to every single thing their children wants: their choice of house, their banquet venue, their dress, how many guests to invite...etc... and even to the extent of their choice of partner!!!

Argh!!! It is as if this is their wedding. Er, hello... who's the one getting married here????

I realize that I may think that my parents are annoying, never agree with my opinions and never see my point of view!
But if I were in their shoes, it's the same: my kid is annoying, never agrees with my opinions and never sees my point of view!

There!! One more reason why I never want to have kids. Just like parents, you too, can't choose who your kids'll be. YOu've got to love them no matter what they are.

The only person you do get to choose, is your partner for life! And that, I've made my choice! :)

Health is wealth

My dad has been suffering shoulder and arm pain for the past one month. Like most Chinese people over 50, no matter how I persuaded him to go see a doctor, he did not listen.

He went to see a Chinese Tabib instead for Urut. He said he had some muscular/nerve pain so he just urut with all his might! The result was severe decapacitating pain!! On Sunday, he could no longer stand the acute pain I had to admit him to the Emergency Department in Hospital Serdang.

After doing an x-ray, this was what they found.


Cervical Spondylosis/Osteophytes

The Emergency MO said it was not dangerous, only painful. Many old people suffer this as their bones degenerate. She gave him a referral letter to see the Orthopaedic Specialist and Physiotherapist, also some analgesia drugs/painkillers.

Yesterday, his pain acted up again, so severe that his painkillers don't work. He was again admitted to the Emergengy Department, this time given IV analgesia. The ER staff told us there were no Orthos around to see him, asked us to go home. I know that cannot be true as at least 1 Ortho has to be on call. I insisted to see the on-call Ortho. They finally called the on-call Ortho MO. She came down to see my dad and gave the same diagnosis then gave him an appointment to see the specialist today and more painkillers.

Today, he finally saw the Consultant Ortho. Not only was the osteophytes on the spine, it was also on the shoulder blades. But it was not severe, continuous physiotherapy should do the trick. Surgery is only the last resort, 75% of the sufferers get healed using physiotherapy.

Phew!! You cannot imagine how relieved my dad and my entire family was that it was not serious, that surgery was not needed. We can finally breathe normally back today...

Isn't it scary how your health deteriorates for no reason but your age? My dad is a healthy man, no history of any disease, eats well, does regular light exercises and drinks plenty of water. Take care of your health, you'll realize how much you miss it when you lose it.

Goodbye Poh Poh

My grandmother just passed away this morning... peacefully, in her sleep. She had not been well for many years, after an episode of stroke.


Farewell Poh Poh

It was a very heartbreaking news for my mom. My sister and I were not very close to Poh Poh because we live in KL and she lived in Penang... but still we have fond memories of her. We will be leaving for Penang tomorrow.

The most heartbreaking part for me is that she was not saved. All you Christians out there with non-believer families will understand exactly how I feel. There is no feeling of consolation that your loved one has returned to the Lord. How you wish you had shared the Lord with her earlier, how you wish you had prayed for her more often. It is times like these that the urgency hits you, the urgency of bringing all your loved ones to Christ.

Life is fragile... do not procrastinate.

Tuen lin fan

Translated it means reunion dinner. Well, my cousins and I had a reunion dinner during Chinese New Year at Sunway Pyramid. The last reunion we had was in 2005!! It's such a pity that we only meet so rarely because I remember when we were much younger, we were much closer. I guess that's what growing up and getting your own life does to family ties eh??

Well, we've planned to have it more often from now on. Let's hope we really do stick to it!! :)

Couzies reunited!