The Hakka self-righteousness was in its full glory, bestowed upon an unlikely victim—one of my sisters, a university professor.
An anonymous self-appointed moral police—obviously the cowardly kind—sent a letter to my sister via her mother-in-law. The writer admonished my sister for displaying inappropriate behaviour in public—the reason, she shakes her leg sometimes when she’s seated. Now I don’t know about anybody, but I often shake my leg unconsciously too. It’s not a jerky movement. Okay really, do I even need to justify it?
Another sister, the one who hopes to write an expose´ on humour in everyday stuff that bugs her, thinks the motions may actually benefit the body if one considers any physical activity better than being inert. Ah... pity...the writer implied that such movements are vulgar and only fit for women who worked in tea and beer houses in the old days in China.
Is there a lesson to be learned here? Apart from giving us a good laugh, the anonymous writer has wasted precious time and energy, especially if he or she is an old…insert whatever you want here. Clearly these people have too much time on their hands. In the writer’s own words, they’ve taken it upon themselves to call out behaviour that is unbecoming, e.g. smoking, drinking, and of course, bouncing legs. Who gave these gossip-mongers the right to sit on the high moral pedestal?
Labels: Culture, Hakka, Rant
