The BBC has a story out today about how Singapore parents often push their children to study and learn, resulting in a less-than-joyous childhood.

Andrew Wood, the editor of Teach magazine, a monthly journal about the Singapore educational system, says that traditionally, children in Singapore are put under a huge amount of pressure.

“Every parent seems to want their child to become a doctor, a professor or a government scholar, and that puts an enormous amount of pressure on children to learn things at a very early age,” Mr Wood said.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the case in many Asian societies? I know I saw it in China and Hong Kong….

UPDATE: BWG tells a similar story about students in HK, where some are pushed so hard they are apparently jumping out windows, which is definitely not a good sign.

Mark Kleiman has some thought-provoking comments on the subject, and I don’t think the topic is going away anytime soon:

Jane Galt objects to the release of the 28 censored pages about Saudi involvement in the 9-11 massacres on the grounds that, once we acknowledge publicly that the Saudi Royal Family was directly responsible for the murder of 3000 Americans, we will have no alternative but to go to war, conquer the Kingdom, and then face the rage of the “Arab street” at the spectacle of infidel boots marching through Mecca and Medina.

I don’t agree with her analysis, but she deserves credit for putting the real issue on the table; the Administration’s “protecting sources and methods” story just won’t wash.

Of course it won’t wash, but I am still shocked (though perhaps not surprised) over the lack of outrage at the Administration’s sloughing off the issue. Kleiman holds no punches and sees it, as do I, as ample grounds for rejecting Bush come November ’04:

Now an argument could be made — and it’s one I’m not professionally competent to judge — that the US national interest is best served by appeasing the Saudis rather than confronting them. That argument would be politically very unpopular if the report were released; that is why the Bush team is so intent on not releasing it.

But if this President is so incapable of leadership that his only means of restraining popular fury is to keep the public in the dark about who attacked us on 9-11, that’s the best argument I’ve heard yet for getting ourselves a new President.

Emphasis is mine.

Is anone getting this? Are we willingly going to allow the president to blindfold us?

It does seem, from these thousands of miles away, to be a politically extraordinary time in America. I’ve really never seen anything like it before.

If you have the patience to wade through her cutesy, tiresome, sing-song prose, larded with the same weary jokes she’s been spouting for years, you may find Maureen Dowd’s latest column downright shocking.

Dowd predicts with a steely confidence nothing less than the “retirement” of Colin Powell himself (along with Richard Armitage, for those who remember who he is) come Bush’s second term. If you know Dowd and her track record, you’ll know that for all the nonsense, she is extraordinarily connected and doesn’t make such pronouncements willy-nilly.

More shocking are her predictions for Powell’s replacements including the scourge of the early Clinton years, Newt Gingrich. (I really hope — I pray — that if he is nominated, someone will dig up the old interview with him and Phil Donahue in which he warns, with a totally straight face, how the US is in danger of invasion from….Nicaragua. Now, if that sort of prescience doesn’t qualify him to be SOS, what does?)

It’s hard to believe. They knew it was coming, they knew the Marriott was on the JI hit list, they took “precautions” and it didn’t matter a bit.

Police on Wednesday said they seized documents last month showing that terrorists had planned to target the area around Jakarta’s Marriott Hotel that was devastated by a powerful car bomb, and that they had increased security around Marriott thereafter, anticipating an attack.

The revelations came as the Australian government said intelligence showed more attacks across Indonesia, particularly in its capital, were likely in coming days.

The intelligence also indicates Jakarta could be in for more such attacks over the next few days.

According to today’s Times, an age-old Chinese tradition is about to be made extinct, another victim of Western marketing:

For many tourists, one of the indelible images of China is that of the cutie-pie baby wearing the pants with the giant hole on the bottom. If their timing is right, the tourists might even catch a toddler relieving himself, right on the street.

Visitors may find this disgusting, or delightful, but they may not see such sights much longer, at least in the cities. China’s famous split pants may soon be eclipsed by the disposable diaper.

The article goes into copious detail about every conceivable aspect of the Diaper Revolution, for those who care.

My laptop is being completely overhauled; Windows is being uninstalled and reinstalled, all my data saved on a separate drive, and I won’t get it back for at least another day, so again, no evening or morning posting. It feels downright weird to be at home with no email or Internet for four whole days. Nightmare.

It all started on Saturday night, after I downloaded McAffee anti-virus software (legally). Suddenly my cable modem stopped responding. The computer repairpeople and Starhub (my cable provider) told me McAffee is notorious for screwing up a computer’s software. I sure wish I had known that before I forked over $60 for their antivirus and firewall package (I never even got to download the firewall). One more of life’s myriad headaches….

That question arose in yesterday’s comments and I’d like to answer it as a post, maybe more for myself than anyone else.

If you look at the little legend to the side of the page — “A peculiar hybrid…” — you’ll see that I describe my journeys to/from Hong Kong, Beijing and Singapore as occurring “for reasons that are still not entirely clear” to me. And those are the truest words I ever wrote.

How did I end up here? As in nearly all of the phases of my life, it just sort of happened. An act of happenstance. Not just Singapore but practically everything I’ve ever done. This struck me as something of an epiphany. I’ve let myself be taken from one place to another to another, very rarely plotting the course or steering the ship.

My first three jobs all came to me when various friends recommended me to their bosses. In fact, that seems to be how I’ve got nearly all my jobs. I’m not saying this is bad. But it was something of a scary revelation to see that my life has not been so much about choice as it has been about quirks of fate, an unexpected recommendation, a phone call in the middle of dinner, an invitation…someone else’s initiative.

My being an executive in my field sometimes seems so absurd I can laugh out loud. A background in classical music and German, and here I am doing high-tech marketing in Asia! It’s simply too outlandish to even consider. But that’s my life. Ever since I let go of my initial dreams, I’ve basically let life lead me around.

I just went back in my archives because this conversation reminded me of somthing I wrote back in January. (Sorry, can’t link to it.) Sure enough, I had written:

Experienced, well read, a couple of degrees and good marks, a labrynthine knowledge of Wagner and the World Wars and a few other topics, I still feel that I am adrift, anchorless and rudderless in a world that I have allowed to pass me by. When I was young, things seemed to just come to me, and I always thought that would continue. Surprise. Not that there haven’t been successes and extraordinary experiences, including my living and working right now in China. But I made the mistake of which Joseph Campbell warns us so eloquently — I never followed my bliss. I allowed myself to be talked out of pursuing a career in classical music, my life and my passion and my joy; I took the path of least resistance and dropped out of my advanced music theory course because the professor, Louise Thalmadge, terrified me. I allowed my close friend, who meant no harm, to talk me out of my dream, and in giving up that dream I gave up a very big part of myself. I can hardly look back to that moment without a flood of poignancy that goes straight to the heart, and my eyes fight back tears as I wonder how I could have been so stupid. There’s a passage in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, toward the end, where the hero looks back on how he had “simply given up the best years of his life,” to paraphrase. That heartache, that realization that our love and our dream and our passion have gone to waste, it hurts and haunts as does nothing else.

Sorry to bring such a whiny, mawkish post up again, but it is key to figuring out my existence — and, if you are still young enough, maybe it will help provide an important learning. Do what you love. Don’t waste time. Choose your life and your course and don’t get blown around like a feather.

So anyway, getting back to what led me to Singapore before I went off on that endless sidetrack. The short answer is that I was quite desperate to escape from Beijing. I was physically cold and emotionally battered, and when the opportunity arose, again by happenstance, I seized it. It hasn’t been bad, I enjoy my co-workers and most aspects of my job, and it’s certainly warm enough. But again, it isn’t who I am. It’s not what I was meant to do. As always, I’ll stick to it and do it well enough, but I have made a promise to myself that when I return to America I’ll take a new course, one where I can feel wholly alive and thrilled about what I am doing.

So you see, Singapore is one more stop along the way, something of a lifesaver tossed to me by the Lifeguards On High. I’ve certainly had worse experiences, but I have never before, ever, ever, ever felt so adamantly that is time for me to get into the boat and chart the course instead of being dragged along, grasping a lifesaver.

And now that I have totally overused and abused that metaphor, I’ll call it a day.

The problem wasn’t with my cable modem but with my laptop, which is now being worked on. So I can only post from the office before and after work, and maybe during lunch. In any case, posts will be few until the problem is fixed.

(Is life anything more than moving from one headache to the next? Probably not. Whenever I reach the state where there are no immedite headaches, I get restless and bored….)

During the month of April in Beijing, when Sars was at its peak, I was getting as many as 3,000 unique visitors a day, which for me was pretty amazing. Now I feel lucky if I get 150 (though I still keep getting traffic to my old blogspot site, often more than I get here thanks to all the old links out there.)

I knew the minute I left China that I would have to give up most of that traffic; I would no longer be able to post around the clock and I would no longer be a mole in a mysterious country going through an unprecedented political, social and medical crisis. As I’ve said before, controversy is all but unknown here in Singapore, and there isn’t much to take a stand on. And I know that my style of writing plays to a limited audience, to say the least.

So why am I writing this? I guess I am just feeling philosophical, wondering whether this exercise is worth the time and effort. I’m not calling for a vote; I’m going to continue because I enjoy it and I keep making new cyberfriends, even now when my traffic is at a trickle. Still, I have to say, those days when I knew thousands of people were coming to my dinky site to read about what Beijing was going through — that was one of the most exciting times of my life. Not necessarily happy, but certainly exciting, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it.

Okay, pardon this little cathartic exercise. All part of my effort to come to terms with Singapore and my new life here….

On Saturday night my brand-new cable modem went into a coma and I haven’t been able to get online until now. It should be repaired later today, but until then I am pretty helpless. Please bear with me….