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South China Morning Post
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
I look Chinese but don't speak the language. Is that so bad?
Published: 9:30am, 22 Feb 2025 Tôi không phải là người Việt Nam, tôi là người Mỹ gốc Malaysia. ('I'm not Vietnamese; I'm an American originally from Malaysia.') This was the first phrase I asked my Vietnamese language instructor to teach me as I took up the bureau chief position for Reuters in Hanoi. I found it necessary to recite this often to establish my background at the outset, because to many Vietnamese, I looked Vietnamese. It occurred to me as I moved back to Hong Kong in 2019 that I might need to memorise something similar in Cantonese. I am ethnically Chinese , and I think I look Chinese (or at least Asian; I've been mistaken for a Thai in Bangkok, and a Filipina in Manila). I did eventually settle on a phrase, sik teng mm sik gong , which covers a multitude of my linguistic sins – 'I understand, but can't speak.' My Chinese vocabulary has been frozen in time since primary school, when conversations were simple in our hometown, Petaling Jaya, a satellite city of Kuala Lumpur. My siblings and I spoke Chinese to our live-in amah, our paternal grandmother, taxi drivers, market vendors and in restaurants. My parents are to blame. While neither had higher education, both became native-level English speakers, reading voraciously and passing down the reading bug to their five children. We devoured all manner of English-language material, written, spoken and on celluloid. Working for an American oil company, my father brought home Time and Newsweek magazines, and the Western influence was further transmitted via music: Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, Mozart and Bach, Fiddler on the Roof and My Fair Lady, and later, Police and Earth, Wind and Fire. (And, OK, don't hate me, but even Abba.) The exception was when our parents took us to every Bruce Lee film screened in Kuala Lumpur, as well as any 'historical' Chinese movie, like one about the Boxer Rebellion . I guess it was their way of giving us a touchstone for being Chinese, or in the case of Lee, letting us connect with a rare global Chinese icon.
Yahoo
08-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
As-New 1978 Ford Granada Is Today's Bring a Trailer Find
Here's a museum-quality everyday Ford from the late 1970s. It's essentially a time capsule, with only 47 miles on the odometer. It's not fancy or fast, but it does have the rarely seen four-speed manual transmission. In 1978, the fortunate few might have bought a new Porsche 928 or BMW 635CSi. The most enterprising purveyors of imported party stuffs might have picked up a newly bewinged Lamborghini Countach. Most Americans, though, had more mundane jobs and more mundane cars—their automotive excitement was maybe watching Starsky & Hutch drive through a fruit stand once a week. Over the years, while the Porsches and Bimmers got polished and pampered, the regular cars got used up and thrown away. But not all of them. Today's blast from the past at Bring a Trailer (which, like Car and Driver, is part of Hearst Autos) is a 1978 Ford Granada two-door, and it only has 47 miles on the odometer. It was reportedly driven home from the dealer then stored by its original owner for decades, a highly unusual garage-queen life for a deeply ordinary machine. But by surviving in shockingly original condition, it has aged, unexpectedly, into something quite special. Ford launched the Granada in 1975 as a slight step up from the Maverick compact sedan, a car for the someone who dreamed of an LTD but didn't relish the thought of putting gas in that two-foot-longer mastodon. With its humble Maverick underpinings, the Granada was not the choice for disco-listening groovy cats, but a sort of dadmobile for people who just wanted to listen to Perry Como while they drove to work at the Acme stapler factory. If you wanted big-car luxury, you could get a laundry list of options on the Granada. Or you could not. This example is slightly unusual for having the four-on-the-floor manual transmission, but it doesn't have many extras besides an AM/FM stereo with an eight-track player. It's finished in black with red vinyl upholstery and sports 14-inch steel wheels with wheel covers. The engine is the 4.1-liter Thriftpower inline-six, which, with 88 horsepower on tap, is clearly far more thrift than power. The tires were replaced three years ago. Ford's advertising made an attempt to burnish the Granada's image by challenging consumers to compare it to a similarly sized Mercedes. "Can you tell its looks from a $20,000 Mercedes-Benz?" Uh, yes. Obviously. Ford's plant was cranking these things out as fast as it could, and the late 1970s were not what you'd call a time of peak quality control. Still, the Granada offered some luxuries at less than a quarter the cost of the Merc. With only 47 miles on the odometer, this Ford is a time capsule of regular everyday life toward the end of the 1970s. It'd be ideal for anyone filming a period movie or TV series, or perhaps as part of a museum display on the Carter administration. Or you could roll right up to your local Cars & Coffee event and show up all the gathered vintage BMWs and Porsches with a car of a type no one has seen in decades. A perfect, low-mileage Granada with a four-speed manual transmission? Just throw a coupla Perry Como eight-tracks in the glovebox, and it'll be like you're right back in the late '70s. The auction ends on February 11. You Might Also Like Car and Driver's 10 Best Cars through the Decades How to Buy or Lease a New Car Lightning Lap Legends: Chevrolet Camaro vs. Ford Mustang!
