Benjamin "Mr Miyagi" Lee
Tomorrow we visit the factory I spent many of my primary school holidays at, to say goodbye to the man whose fantastic life spanned nine decades and witnessed the end of Empire and the start of Federation, but more importantly, who made the best Hainanese kopi and kaya in Peninsular Malaysia.
My father’s older brother passed away peacefully in Seremban this morning. I think he was 90. He was born in Qionghai County, Hainan Island and moved with my grandfather to Port Dickson in the 1930s.
The other day at the ATM doing the mundane thing of topping up a cashcard (why hasn’t the system improved over more than a decade), I felt a rumble in my stomach that to my mind, warranted a fart, and so I let a silent one rip.
It was to my shrinking horror that I turned slightly and saw from the very corner of my eye that there was someone in line behind me.
I am sorry for this most un-civic conscious act, and that you had to stand in the wake of the stinker, possibly debating whether to leave the queue to come back later or to weather the malodour, before you were overcome into inertia.
I rode in a cab yesterday to a meeting, and the driver was apologetic the moment I got on. He didn’t know where my destination was, and asked if I had a preferred route I knew of, and if I could guide him. He said it was only the second day he’d been driving, and that it was his friend’s taxi.
I asked why his friend would let him drive the cab when he was so blur with directions, and by further admission, didn’t know how to use a GPS. He replied that he was, with two other friends with taxi driver licenses, helping out the renter of the taxi to make the daily rental of $130 while he recuperated from treatment for a “mild stroke”.
Apparently, their efforts in asking the taxi company for a rent-free period had been in vain, and the company had actually said that if the rent was in arrears for more than three days, the taxi would be leased to someone else, and the renter would have to start over with a new application if he so wished, but only after paying his dues.
If this is true, then, I commend the taxi company for trying to keep more cabs on the road. We, the public, really don’t care if your drivers are sick or not.