My Favorite Writer
Ching Ching
After a lot of reading of stories and posts on Medium, I have chosen Ching Ching as my favorite writer to date. Why? English is not Ching Ching’s native language but you may not know it. English is a tough language to learn to speak, let alone write as an adult. I know this from experience being a homestay parent for 8 years with students from Japan, Mexico, Korea, Switzerland and South America. Dinner conversations were interesting, to say the least with questions being asked of my wife and I about why we used certain words and more about our colloquialisms. I grew up in New Zealand and my wife in Ireland so though we both speak English, we each speak a different kind of English.
Ching Ching brings a certain savoir-faire to her writing style. She writes with a lovely flow. What many people forget is that English is a language constantly in flux. Many of Ching Ching’s sentence structures are not 100% correct but they are very interesting and what is so important to readers, they flow. Correct English can be boring.
There is no longer “proper” English as it was once called, this being the standard that all English speakers were expected to strive for. Now, there are so many “English’s” spoken who is to say what is correct English and what is not. Ching Ching has seemed to grasp many of the nuances of the English language and does not allow the fact she is not a “native” speaker to impede her creativity and the structure of her many articles.
I have been fortunate enough to have visited Malaysia twice with the result that Kuala Lumpar is in my top five favorite cities, hence the image for this article. Ching Ching, in her writing, has managed to reflect all that KL is in her writing style. A flavorful, tasty, eclectic, invigorating, multicultural, and stimulating metropolis. She writes with all the flavor of the city she lives in.
The stories she writes of her travels always take the reader to the place Ching Ching is writing about, a difficult task unless the writer is immersed in the place and has a great feel for the subject matter. This, Ching Ching has. I love her stories on the foods she grew up with. A good example is the mooncakes and dried shrimp sambai and Mee Siam, a Spicy Nostalgic Noodles of My Childhood. Her food stories have caused me to be more adventuresome in my…
