Just had a chat with wena, my elder daughter and she told me that others are eagerly waiting to read my next posting. Yikes! I am not sure that I like to know that others want to read my postings. One of my constant thoughts relates to how young Chinese girls educated in English and brought up in Malaysia often have questions about how they fit in the societies in which they find themselves. I myself question my own identity all the time. My thoughts are in English, and in my virtual world, it does not matter what color I am. But every morning when I get up, I have to look in the mirror and, to my surprise, I look like an old Asian lady. Wow! Something must have happened overnight and I metamorphosed into what I saw in the mirror! At the same time, I like the traditions associated with the Malaysian and nonya cultures. I especially love the food and the kuih; e.g., the pineapple tarts. When I was pregnant with Jasmine, I had a craving for pineapple tarts. So, my mother and I made almost five hundred pieces of them although they were all small ones. My mother is a good cook but she does not want to make all those small nonya cookies any more.

I now work in a small town in the U.S. and there are very few asian, african-american, hispanic or native american people around. There are more native americans than the other ethnicity because there is a casino, just three miles east of the town. The university has almost 20,000 students and the town has about 30,000 (I could be wrong here but I have no time to check this right now). You can check on the data at http://www.usg.edu/galileo/internet/census/demograp.html. I live close to an even small town, population about 500! My farm is in the middle of fields that grow corn, alfafa, soy beans, etc for the black and white dairy cows. Sometimes you can smell the manure that the farmers use to fertilise the fields. Well, enough of this rambling as wena says.