EP Renewal Application and 4-day Interpretation

On Tuesday, I submitted yet another application for my visa renewal. Of course, I’m not optimistic after what I had to go through last year.

Yesterday, I finished a 4-day interpretation job. The environment was not ideal as there were participants from other countries too. This kind of environment is always tough for me as someone starts saying something while I’m still speaking (interpreting). Surely, interpretation cannot be perfect. But I always struggle to deal with this situation. So much easier if all the participants are from Japan. I hope I’ve done an okay job.

Hello to my fugitive. Shame on you.

Harry and Tony

Work in Yishun today. Haven’t been there for some months. This work went well as I believe by the client’s reaction.

Coming back home on MRT, it occurred to me suddenly and without reason that maybe Harry Murata and Tony Lee, both my former colleagues but at different companies, one in Japan and the other in Singapore, were really walking in the campus of the same university, Sophia University. Both were a few years older than I. If so, that should be really amazing.

Harry disappeared without a trace from the Osaka office of the company we were working at apparently after some trouble with a Japanese man, who in a sense is (or was) superbly memorable because of our engaging and deep talks and his way of spending. Once, his house in Osaka was broken into by patients of a mental hospital in Wakayama, and NHK broadcast the incident live from its helicopter hovering over his house. I saw the footage at the Osaka office (still live) only because Harry asked me to come into a small room with a TV set in the office to see the broadcast. That night, at least another station (NTV with Sakurai Yoshiko as caster) was broadcasting the break-in. And the news of the death of Tony came from a Nikkei correspondent stationed in Singapore when I was working as the interpreter for Sheldon Adelson. I regret I haven’t asked Tony if he knew anyone whose name was Harry Murata. (I remember asking him about Agnes Chan, though.)

Tony is dead. And I don’t know where Harry is and how she is doing now.

Lessie, you are a fugitive.

Romanized Vietnamese

Vietnamese writing was changed that based on Chinese characters to Roman ones, as devised by a French man, Alexandre de Rhodes. “… roughly 80 percent of Vietnam’s population was more or less literate in the Chinese ideographs used for written Vietnamese. Aiming at break Vietnam’s cultural continuity, the French banned the Chinese characters and replaced them with either French or quoc ngu, the romanized alphabet perfected by Alexandre de Rhodes in the seventeenth century (p. 115, “Vietnam: A History”).”  I don’t know exactly when they banned it.

SHAME ON YOU, LESSIE. SHOW YOUR FACE TO THE WORLD AND REPENT AND ACCEPT THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR STUPID ACTIONS. YOU ARE NOT A HUMAN BEING, JUST SCUM. AND YOU ARE A FUGITIVE.