Chop Sticks

*This story was published in the Philippines Free Press, August 11, 2007, and was anthologized in the anthology of Flash Fiction in English, “Very Short Stories for Harried Readers” by Milflores Publishing, December 2007.

By Jean Claire A. Dy

“People from the West are uncivilized,” he said half-jokingly as he nudged the fork in her bowl with the tips of his ivory chopsticks. “So unhygienic lah,” he added with a wink. “We Chinese do it different lah. See.” He lifted his chopsticks for her to look, “just two contact points. But the fork, the fork,” he stopped in mid-sentence and nudged her fork again as though to make his point.

She looked at the fork submerged in her bowl of Ramen soup, then slowly picked it up to examine its four silver sharp tines meant to stake a claim on a piece of meat or dig into a bowl of pasta or rice. But it is also meant for noodles, she thought. Filipinos find forks easy to use–just twirl the noodles around the tines then shove one gob of noodles into your mouth.

“I can never do that,” she told him as she watched him deftly pick a tiny green pea from his almost empty bowl. “You mean you can really pick a tiny bean like that with chopsticks?”

MEGAPoem

i tried creating an animated powerpoint presentation for this (just to experiment on interactivity using office tools). unfortunately, wordpress does not allow me to embed powerpoint docs in my entry. boohoo. anyway, since the conversion from ppt. to video format is on the way, just get a preview of the small thing i made here.

or click on image

Digital Storytelling Mindanao debuts

This is from podcastingnews.com:

“The Mindanao News and Information Cooperative Center, a cooperative composed of independent, professional journalists, has teamed with Jean Claire A. Dy, a Media Arts professor at Univ. Phillipines Mindanao, to create a Digital Storytelling Center Mindanao. While the project initially was created for the college students to store their stories, the partnership with the journalists has expanded the initiative to include stories gathered at “digital storytelling workshops” around the region…” Read the rest of the news here.

The feed for Digital Storytelling Mindanao here.