Spring Festival Gala 2015: the day we become a single Malaysian race, traditions light up...

The day we become a single Malaysian race

I have celebrated Chinese New Year my entire life. And being a Malay Muslim and living in Malaysia, I feel myself very unique and special for doing so.

It is not hard to understand why. I have Chinese and Malay blood in me. My grandmother on my mother's side is Chinese and the ethnic influence is very strong.

My brothers and I all speak Cantonese (however poor our pronunciation is) and when we speak English, we are very easily mistaken for being Chinese because of our accent.

When I was in primary school, some Malay classmates would tease me and say that I am committing a sin by celebrating Chinese New Year and collecting ang pows.

At first I was confused, but very quickly I realised that they were all just stupid and did not know what they were talking about. I was proud of that.

Of course, our family celebrated Hari Raya too and so did all our Chinese relatives who would gather at our house every single year without even needing an invitation.

And as how life naturally is, my Chinese grandmother eventually died and this year is the second Chinese New Year without her being with us.

So now, during Chinese New Year's eve, we joke that we are really just a bunch of Malays flipping salmon in plum sauce with chopsticks and gulping down “chai choy” without any real reason to do so!

The pure Chinese immediate family member is gone. But it is alright. We have her blood running in our veins. And we still celebrate the first and second day with the entire Ang clan.

And what makes me even more proud is the fact that our huge clan celebrates every single main Malaysian festival because we are marrying all kinds of people.

We have Malays, Chinese, Indians, Muslims, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, Christians and more in our family. And the circle seems to just get bigger and bigger.

The tradition that we have celebrating our melting pot of cultures and religions will hopefully never die and continue through the generations.

Initially, I was proud that I was so unique compared with all my other friends and acquaintances as I celebrated various festivals. But I feel differently now.

I want to feel even more proud once every single person in Malaysia celebrates every single festival in the country because we have become, and identify as, a single Malaysian race.

Al-Fatihah to my dear grandmother Ang Swee Poh (we visit her grave during Hari Raya and Chinese New Year) and happy Chinese New Year to all Malaysians. Kong Hei Fatt Choy! – February 20, 2015.

Source: The Malaysian Insider.
By Zan Azlee, a documentary filmmaker, journalist, writer, New Media practitioner and lecturer. He runs Fat Bidin Media www.fatbidin.com


Traditions light up Lunar New Year

A resident show the dumplings his family make in Harbin, capital of China's Northeast Heilongjiang province, Feb 18, 2015. [Photo/IC]

Spring Festival is a time to observe old traditions and celebrate China's cultural inheritance.

Food is an important part of New Year celebration. In northern China, dumplings are indispensable on New Year's eve and the first meal of the New Year.

Wang Yuzhe, of Caoxian County of Shandong Province, got up early on Thursday morning, swept the courtyard floor to clear up firecracker residue and woke the whole family to prepare for the New Year breakfast together -- dumplings.

While wrapping up a coin into a dumpling, Wang said that the person who finds this dumpling will make big money in the coming year.

This associating between dumplings and fortune is said based on the supposed resemblance to "yuan bao" a boat-shaped gold ingot used as currency in ancient times.

In southern China, most people prefer rice to wheat, so families eat "tang yuan", balls of glutinous rice. On Thursday morning, Zhang Menghui in Hangzhou will put on new clothes and sit down to enjoy tang yuan with her family,

"Whenever I return home for New Year, we eat sweet tang yuan together," she said. Zhang works in Hong Kong and returns to home twice a year. "For the festivals when I am in Hong Kong, I eat tang yuan with friends to express my longing for home."

In Beijing, temple fairs and crowded Spring Festival gatherings featuring acrobats shows, song and dance performances and stalls selling snacks and souvenirs are the order of the day.

In Ditan Park, the Temple of Earth in the northeast of Beijing, stalls selling traditional handicrafts attract flocks of sightseers.

Xiao Jing brought his hand-made "hairy monkeys" -- tiny humanoid figures made from furry magnolia buds and sloughed cicada shells.The monkeys are set in old-fashioned Beijing street scenes, drinking big bowls of tea and eating sugarcoated haws.

"I inherited the skill from my grandfather. Although this is an ancient craft, it is still appealing today. The scenes are close to life and can still touch people's hearts," he said.

In Tibet, Lunar New Year is doubly joyful this year as it coincides with the Tibetan year of the Wooden Ram.

At 8 am, the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa is surrounded by people praying. La Tso left home for the temple at 5 am with her mother. "I am here praying for good health and peace for the family," she said.

In Qamdo, the lunch on the New Year's day is a big family gathering. Yak meat is de rigueur, and people also eat rice cooked with ginseng fruits which symbolize longevity.

In Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang, despite a temperature of minus 12 degrees centigrade, the city streets, decorated with red lanterns, are filled with festivities.

For Li Jianjun, 68, the best part for this Spring Festival is that his son has come back home from Shanghai with his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Li and his wife spent a whole week preparing the New Year dinner. "We stay at home on the first day of new year according to tradition. We see our in-laws tomorrow and visit other relatives the day after tomorrow," he said.

Li Xinyong, vice president of National Folk Association of China, said, the Spring Festival should not be a carnival, it should be a celebration of folk traditions.

Besides inheriting customs, Chinese people should foster a deeper understanding of their cultural identity, he suggested. - China Daily, Asia News Network


Related posts:

2015 Hack of a year ahead!

2014 has seen a tsunami of epic hacks and identity thefts, including the recent massive cyber attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment. Sec...

Enter the Chinese Century: China is now the world’s No.1 economic power

The natural American reaction would be to “contain” China—and that would be a mistake . SOFT POWER For America, the best response to Chi...

 Welcome Goat, may you goad us to greater heights 2...

6 ways your tech is spying on you

Embedded data: Foreign tourists taking a selfie with red roses on display for Valentines Day outside a shopping mall in Bangkok, Thailand. Exif data in your pictures can contain a lot of information about where you have been. — EPA

Compared with what’s already happening, Samsung’s warning not to discuss sensitive issues in front of its TVs seems pretty tame. But you can fight back.

SO, your TV might be spying on you. It probably just wanted to join in with the rest of the technology in your life because, let’s face it: if you live in the 21st century you’re probably monitored by half a dozen companies from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. (And if you wear a sleep tracker, it doesn’t even stop then.)

Compared with some of the technology that keeps a beady eye fixed on you, the news that Samsung’s privacy policy warns customers not to discuss sensitive information in front of their smart TVs is actually fairly tame. The warning relates to a voice-recognition feature that has to be explicitly invoked, and which only begins transmitting data when you say the activation phrase “hi, TV.”

But other tech that spies on you might not be so genteel. The uncomfortable fact is that your personal data is just another way to pay for products and services these days.

The adage “if you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold” was coined in 2010, a lifetime ago in web terms, but it’s as true today as it always has been.

What’s changed now, though, is the number of ways companies are discovering to make sharing our data with them not something we grudgingly accept, but enthusiastically embrace.

Sure, they tell us, you can turn it off. But do you really want to?

1. Facebook’s “like” button

Even if you don’t use Facebook, you will have seen the company’s “like” button springing up in more and more places around the Internet, like a nasty case of chicken pox. If you click on it, you can like the page of a company, person or brand, all without leaving the website you’re on.

The uncomfortable fact is that your personal data is just another way to pay for products and services.

And then there’s Facebook share buttons and Facebook comments, both of which hook in to the company’s servers to provide their own features.

But it’s a two-way relationship: the price you pay for being able to interact with Facebook even without going to their website is that they can see the other websites you’re on, following you around the Internet and using that information to better target ads and content to you back on the mothership.

How to stop it: if you log out of Facebook when you’re done, the site’s ability to track your browsing is severely hampered. Of course, equally hampered is your ability to like things and comment on posts. Are you happy making that trade-off?

2. Smartphone location services

If you have an iPhone, try this: click on settings, then privacy, then location ­services, system services and frequent locations. You’ll notice a list of all the cities you’re in regularly.

Click on any specific city, and you’ll find that your phone knows all the locations you frequently visit. For me, that includes my home, local tube station and office, and also the pub I play Netrunner in, the house of one of my best friends and the comics shop I frequent.

Don’t feel smug if you use Android instead: Google keeps just as copious notes on your location and, unlike Apple, it is stored in the Cloud, where it can theoretically be subpoenaed by law enforcement or accessed by a suspicious partner who happens to know your password.

How to turn it off: both companies let you turn off location histories from the same pages you can look at yours. But if you do that, they’ll get a lot worse at giving you accurate and useful location suggestions. There’s that pesky trade-off again.

3. Uber

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a company that sells you cheap cabs through a slick app keeps data on your journeys. And that data is well-used by Uber to reassure customers that their journey is safe: the company will show you your ride history as well as information about your driver which can be crucial for solving disputes or, if the worst happens, ensuring justice.

But Uber hasn’t got the best history of using that data well. The company has had to apologise before for accessing a jour­nalist’s journey details in order to make rhetorical points, as well as remove a piece of “data journalism” looking at ride histories in aggregate to find out how many of their customers were using the service for one-night stands. They titled the post “rides of glory”.

How to turn it off: the best way would be not to use Uber. But there’s that trade-off again: old-school taxis, whether hailed from the street or called from a dispatch office, are going to end up charging you a lot more for your newly anonymous journey.

4. Mobile phone networks

Your mobile phone works by sending encrypted communications to and from masts, known as “cells”. Of course, especially in a built-up area, there’s likely to be more than one cell in range of your phone at any given time, and things would get confusing if they were all trying to run the call at the same time.

So your phone pairs with one particular cell, and “hands off” to a new one when you move around (the annoying clicks you get if you leave a phone next to an unshielded speaker is your phone checking in with a cell, to confirm it’s still alive).

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll realise what this means: your mobile phone network has a record of where you’ve been, accurate to at least the range of the closest phone tower.

In practice, it’s probably quite a bit more accurate than that, as they can triangulate in using information from other towers in your area.

How to turn it off: stop using a mobile phone. Seriously, this one isn’t going away. If you’ve got a removable battery, you can try taking that out when you don’t want to be tracked, but whenever you turn your phone back on, your mobile phone network is going to know where you are.

5. Exif data in your pictures

Did you know that digital photographs contain information about the picture? Known as Exif data, the standard was ­created to hold stuff that photographers might find useful to know alongside the image, such as the focal length and aperture they used while taking it.

It’s used by professionals to embed contact information and copyright details, as well.

Of course, as with most standards, there’s been a bit of feature-­creep, and these days, Exif data can contain a whole lot more information.

In fact, if you’ve taken a picture with a smartphone, or even a modern digital ­camera, there’s a good chance that the picture records where it was taken using the built-in GPS.

That’s great for building maps of your holidays, but not so good if you’re trading snaps with strangers.

How to turn it off: most ­cameras let you disable embedding location data in the files, but the good news is that social networks are one step ahead of you – and this time, they’re on your side. Facebook and Twitter both strip the metadata from ­images uploaded to the site, causing a headache for users who need the extra information but protecting those who don’t know that they’re uploading potentially sensitive data.

6. Facial recognition

Have you ever used Facebook’s tag suggest feature? The social network can scan through your uploaded pictures to find ones with friends who haven’t been tagged, and offer you suggestions for who to add.

It’s a wonderful time-saver over doing it the manual way, even if careless use can lead to some social faux pas (try to avoid tagging someone you don’t like just because they’re in the background of another picture).

But Facebook, and Google – which offers a similar feature – can only do that because it’s been running facial-recognition software on photos uploaded to the site for years.

In September 2012, Facebook was even forced to disable the feature after the Irish data protection commissioner scolded it for doing so without permission.

How to turn it off: try to avoid being in photos or having friends. Easy! — ©Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2015

By Alex Hern Sunday Star

ISIS targeting the rich, especially Chinese tycoons, said Malaysian Home Minister

Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said that Isis terrorists would most likely employ kidnap and ransom tactics by preying on wealthy Malaysians to funds their activities. – The Malaysian Insider pic, February 13, 2015

The Home Ministry raised the alarm bell on the threat of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), saying that the radical Islamist group, is plotting to kidnap wealthy Malaysians and stage bank robberies in the country, major Chinese dailies reported .

Its Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, in a joint interview recently, said the tactics employed by Isis is to hold these tycoons for ransom and use the money to funds their terrorist activities, Sin Chew Daily reported.

Other Chinese dailies involved in the special interview with Zahid included China Press, Nanyang Siang Pau, Oriental Daily and Guang Ming Daily.

Sin Chew Daily also reported that so far, authorities have yet to determine who is on the so called list of Isis' targets but are working hard trying to determine the matter.

He said, based on intelligence reports, such plots are already developing and the ministry is trying to track down and investigate suspicious movements by the group and their sympathisers in the country.

“Anyone who is a rich is considered a potential target for Isis, and in Malaysia, most of them are not Malays,” he was quoted as to saying.

“As of now, we can only affirm that they have already laid eyes on some of these people; We do not know who but we will do our best in protecting these potential victims,” he added.

The Chinese daily said Zahid also advised these potential targets to beef up security.

“Do not let your guard down, be alert regardless whether you are a tycoon or not, you can be easily kidnapped if you are not cautious.”

During the interview, Sin Chew Daily said Zahid also emphasised on the need to implement pre-emptive measures to face possible Isis threats in the country.

He urged Malaysians to support the upcoming anti-terrorism laws, citing the Prevention of Terrorism Act, saying that it is “extremely critical.”

The Chinese daily reported that according to Zahid, the Caliphate system that Isis propagates does not agree with the existing democratic system.

"Everyone will be brainwashed under the ideology and those who do not buy into their idea will be alienated and killed, especially those who oppose the ideology.

“Isis threats is real in this country. It is also possible that they will kill Malaysians within the borders of this nation,” he stressed.

“Their targets will also comprise of non-Muslims and various factions of Islam who they consider them heretic.”

To date, about 59 Malaysians are officially known to have joined Isis.

More than 65 have been arrested by police either on their way to Syria and Iraq or on their way back since the start of last year. - Malaysian Insider

Related post:

Are they terrorists or militants ?

LATELY, the use of the words militants and terrorists has become very common and people are sometimes confused as to whether an act of ... 

 

F 

Ini Malaysia Boleh? Fighting for Syrian jihadist! ...