ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

1. Soup with cabbage, carrots, fungus strips of rice flour and quail's egg 2. Flat bread with mutton, capsicum, carrot and onion gravy as topping 3. Stretching dough for the handmade noodles 4. Grilling mutton kebabs over a charcoal fire There are about 27 million Muslims in China-more than the population of Malaysia, Taiwan or Australia. The Uighur, Tartar, Uzbek, Tajik and Hui live mostly in the provinces that border Central Asia and Tibet, in the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningsia and Qinghai. Except for the Hui they are distinguishable from the real Chinese, the Han; having a more Mongolian look with deeply slanted eyes and a more stocky body. Their food is different too, and mutton forms a large part of their diet- a testimony to their nomadic past on the steppes. In Shanghai, I found a small Muslim eatery next to my hotel, and it was a 24-hour joint, the Uighur family that owned it working in two shifts. The clear soup above was flavored with bits of mutton, and was a r...

1. My Besta 636 language computer: Chinese, English, and 10 other languages. 1. A Perankan lady dressed in their traditional Sarong Kebaya 3. An early Peranakan house in Katong district preserved as a heritage building .Note the ornate tiles and motifs 4. A plate of Kueh Lapis a Peranakan cake with colors of the rainbow, each color a dye derived from natural ingredients such as flowers and leaves. The Beauty of the Chinese Language I am a Singaporean classified as being of Chinese ethnicity in the official personal documents I hold. However, the truth is, I could not speak Chinese [Mandarin] fluently until the last few months, when I did some serious self-study using a Besta language computer. [see picture above] Now, as to why I was not able to speak Chinese, part of it lies in the fact that during my schooling years, Singapore was a British colony, and of course we learned English in school. But the main reason for my poor command of the Chinese language is a confluence of histori...