Men are from
Mars and Women are from Venus. We have heard that before. How often I hear women lament and say that their husbands have a totally different mindset
and they only think about themselves or that they do not care about the things that matter to women. I was in denial about such
characterization as I disliked any form of stereotyping or generalization . But
in recent years, I have resigned to acknowledge that men and women do somehow think and
function quite differently. I tend to be slow in seeing the obvious. I am a
late bloomer in so many areas.
Whether due to
our upbringing, education or social conditioning, a man and a woman do seem to
differ in their ways of handling issues at work or at home and in the making of
certain decisions. I am told that studies show that women like smart phones
more than men do. I wonder if it indicates that men are more results oriented and
they do not like the extra frills as they are deemed unnecessary. To some
people, a mobile phone is just a gadget that only needs to function as a phone for making phone
calls. Period.
Bali (2008) |
I also notice
that men carry loads of information with them and the way they assimilate and
accommodate new information that are given to them can be different from how a
woman process them. In a good sense, the men are goals oriented. But then when
one is too focused on the tasks at hand, his or her visions may not go beyond
peripheral. When one targets on getting to the end of the tunnel with an urgency to achieve the desired result, the need to execute these tasks with
efficiency sometimes can make one inflexible. Decades ago, I enrolled myself at
the Alliance Francaise with a view to study French. I was easily discouraged
when the question was posed to me by an ex: What is the purpose of you learning
French? What are you trying to achieve? I could not answer that so I found my
resolve weakening and quitting the course. That was very lame indeed and I
certainly lacked self possession then. I have since taken up the task of learning French again. Last week, my mechanic saw the French text books
lying in my car, he asked, “ You are learning French you want to go and live
there.” He made an observation that did not require any response from me. Learning the language can be the purpose of it all, non ?
Sexism starts at
home. We have a patriarchal social
structure. Since the women have in
the past lived with their husbands who have been brought up by their mothers who
have also lived with their husbands come what may , they stop thinking about
how they feel or what they want and
they carry on with their lives as if it is all an order of nature. The
men are like that so the mothers tell their daughters and their daughters in
laws. Boys are boys, boys behave like how boys would behave and then they grow
up and become men who behave like most of the men around them. They are all
like that so the mothers say.
I am not
advocating for gender equality or anything like that as that requires in-depth studies and more elaboration, I only think that the standards for reasonable and sensible
behaviour should be the same for both sexes. Granted that men and women have
certain attributes that may be inborn, if only each and everyone of them
respect and acknowledge that women have as much right to be their own persons
as the men do and the women who raise these men could change their own
mindset about what boys should be
like, may be one day male chauvinism may become a thing of the past .
In Aunty Lee’s Delights, Ovidia Yu, a
Singaporean writer cleverly showed the different prejudices harboured by the guests who came to a wine tasting dinner held at Aunty Lee's café
that was well known for good traditional Peranakan food. When an unidentified
woman’s body had been found washed up on Sentosa beach and one of the dinner
guests did not turn up at the restaurant, the fair and plump Aunty Lee kept
track of the news story and became
involved in solving the mystery.
“But there are certain
standards, certain rules of behaviour, that everyone accepts,”
said Lucy, one of the dinner
guests who was visiting Singapore for the first time.
Mrs Lucy
Cunningham expressed her views.
“ People know what’s right. And
what’s wrong. Everyone agrees on that.”
“But how do you know everybody
agrees?” Aunty
Lee asked, seemingly intent on washing mustard greens in one of the sinks. She
squinted and picked out what might have been a bug or dirt or a specimen of
plant life not developed along consumer-advocate guidelines.
“It is obvious, isn’t it ? The
people you talk to, it’s in the papers. It’s just normal, good , human values.”
There had been a slight waver before she said ‘human,” as though
Lucy had had to make a quick substitution for another, less neutral word.
“God made us all individuals,”
Aunty Lee observed.
“ God gave us rules to live
by,” Lucy Cunningham said quietly. Again she was on guard, focused on her
shallots.
In the story, Mr
and Mrs Cunningham had to struggle with accepting their son’s relationship with
another man.
Ovidia wrote, “ As far as Aunty Lee was
concerned, people ought to go through the ideas they carried around in their
heads as regularly as they turned out their store cupboards. No matter how
wisely you shopped, there would be things in the depths that were past their
expiration dates or gone damp and moldy – that had been picked up on impulse
and were no longer relevant. Aunty Lee believed everything inside head or cupboard could affect
everything else in it by going bad or just taking up more space than it was worth.”
Aunty Lee’s
Delights reminds me of Agatha Christie’s crime stories not that I have read
many Agatha Christie’s novels. I read from the
conversation between Ovidia Yu and Louise Penny, another mystery novel writer
that Ovidia is a lifelong Agatha Christie fan and so
she explains how she came to write
the story that would be set in Singapore.
The central character, Rosie Lee was described by her late husband as “em zhai se – not afraid to die”
and to the dismay of her daughter-in- law, she fed her Filipino domestic helper
the Brands Essense of Chicken to give her more strength and more meat on her
bones. Odivia has made Auntie Lee out to be nosy but a kind hearted and
independent minded widow who serves tantalizing nyonya culinary delights. Inside the book, the author has
included a recipe for Aunty Lee’s amazing achar. Odivia Yu’s novel
was a delightful find purely by chance when I visited Kinokuniya book store recently.
When I read the end of the story, as if
on cue, my husband suggested nyonya lunch at either a restaurant nearby or a
beach café that required some ten minutes drive. There has been heavy downpour throughout the week and it was a welcoming change to see a sunny day. Where we were seated, some cool breeze was blowing and we managed to get ourselves shaded from the midday sun. As I tucked into the steamy hot and spicy fish curry against the backdrop of
clear blue sky and sea frontage,
I could not ask for a more perfect
Sunday.
Batu Ferringhi, Penang |
Ahh the issues surrounding our gender-- great fodder for books and life too!
ReplyDeletehi Julie I think so too. It is all part of the human psyche that I am trying to understand and put together. It is a tall order as I find myself arguing in circles on such issues. Cheers
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