When did you come to Singapore from China?

Random pic:
What are these?
Bought them from Tekka Market.

Somehow I've been meeting up with quite a few former colleagues in the past few weeks. Some planned, others not. Ran into one while window shopping in a furniture store just before my Korean class. Ran into another while meeting up with yet another.

Some of these people, I used to interact with every single working day. Our recent catch-ups made me realise  how little we knew of one another.

During our conversation, this particular former colleague mentioned bilingualism twice, and, after 10 years,  revealed that he had always thought that I was Chinese. As in... from People's Republic of China?!

I gathered that a combination of factors led to his conclusion:

• My command of Mandarin
• My name
• The interior decoration of my parent's house

WIN. O_o
Remember how my St Nicks classmate likes to call me 'Commie'?

After the 'shocking revelation', we proceeded to discuss the definition of 'being Chinese' in today's context.

• What are 'Chinese values'? 
• Are these values limited to Chinese only? 
• Or are they really Confucian values? 
• If so, Confucian values aren't 'racial'. More cultural. 
• Koreans subscribe to Confucian values too. 
• Which is the more 'Confucian' group? Mainland Chinese or Overseas Chinese? And amongst Overseas Chinese, which sub-groups are more 'Confucian'?
• Etc. 

Halfway through the conversation, we began to realise that our upbringings were similar, i.e. a pair of 南大 Chinese-educated folks who ended up in teaching/academia.

Side note: This demonstrates why I am unable to enjoy social group gatherings, and much prefer one-to-one interactions. The former does not allow indepth interaction, which results in a total waste of time (a few hours each session, each person taking polite turns to contribute something trite to the group conversation). One leaves a group gathering wasted mentally, i.e. not being able to learn more about someone/ something.