Sunday, March 28, 2010
Latest update on my very boring life: I'm going to Taiwan for my first conference at the end of next month.
It's only a graduate student conference organized by a not-very-famous university with a funny name in Hsinchu (so you know it's not Tsinghua), but it's an international conference nonetheless, and since the conference has no specific theme and I know very well how unimpressive my paper actually is, I decided that was the best bet for a first-time experience. And since I thought I would be going on my own, I knew my parents wouldn't freak out since Taiwan is only four and a half hours away from Singapore. Moreover, thanks to ten years of compulsory mother tongue classes, I can manage moderately well in a Chinese-language environment (I think).
But it turns out my mother has decided to accompany me. I have rather ambivalent feelings about this. On the one hand I do appreciate the presence of someone I know when I'm lost in an unfamiliar place (and I'm bound to be lost half of the time) but on the other hand, I was rather looking forward to being a 'big girl' and taking up the challenge of travelling to a foreign country on my own. My mother has promised to treat this trip as a test for me and to let me take the lead, but within 2 minutes at the counter of the travel agency (more will be said about this in a later post) she intercepted me and began talking to the agent even though she had hardly any idea of what we're going to do in Taiwan... =__=;
But my mother isn't half as annoying as my father. Once again he is reminding me how much I can't stand petty men who feel that they absolutely must be in control of everything in order to believe that they haven't already been castrated down there. Almost immediately after telling me parents that my abstract had been selected (I had chosen not to tell them I was submitting an abstract until I received confirmation because I knew the alarm bells would have gone off prematurely), my father went into Mr Ramsay mode. I seriously think he actually regards planning for overseas travel as an affirmation of his personal worth as a man.
So my father started making all sorts of plans and talking to my mother at the dinner table the day after the announcement about what he was going to do as if he were the one going for the conference, until I stopped him and told him I wanted to deal with the preparations myself because this was MY personal affair and I didn't want him to spend his time doing something that was supposed to be MY responsibility. I also told him (quite politely, I thought) that I would ask him for help when I needed it.
He ought to have been glad to be relieved of extra work and to see his daughter becoming independent but instead he took it as a personal affront and gave me the most hilariously disgusting show of wounded male pride I have seen in recent days. He had printed out some maps of Taiwan from Google at the office but because he couldn't remember which county the university was located in (then why print the maps so soon, darling?), he printed out the most general map of the whole island and another where he partially zoomed into the wrong part of the general map. So, after I told him that I wished to handle the preparations myself, we had this very interesting exchange:
Father (with patented wounded-male-pride pout): So, this means you don't need these maps anymore ah? So I can use them, right?
Me: Yeah, those are too general to be useful. You can go ahead and use them as rough paper.
Father: So you really don't need them anymore ah? These maps (points to printouts) can ZOOM IN one you know.
Me: ... ... ... Erm, you didn't print out the zoomed-in version...
Apparently my mother spoke to him later that evening to tell him to let me handle everything by myself. Nevertheless, he is bugging me at every meal (in the most friendly manner possible) to check-in online NOW so that my mother and I can pick our seats, and telling me what I should and should not do once we reach Hsinchu, and shoving thick stacks of information printed out from the websites of the hotels that I have booked, as if I'm not sick enough already of looking at those websites from the days I struggled to find cheap hotels with available rooms at such short notice.
And the only reason why the conversation is remaining civil is that I'm busy writing the introduction of my thesis and I want as much peace and quiet I can get right now.
kaoru said at 8:34 AM
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