When I was younger, the neighborhood gossipy auntie would go around all the non-working mothers and gather them together for their regular chit-chat sessions. Unfortunately, there will always be one or two non-working mothers that would be left out of the picture, and for good reason too. At least according to the gossipy auntie.
She would make special effort to ensure that the person that she is gossiping about was never present, and the way she went about it was prove of her tenacity as the neighborhood gossip. So in this one occasion I wandered into one of their secret sessions and there they were, all crowded around the stone table by the void deck, yakking away at the juicy details.
Of course I could not understand what the adults were saying then, and the only words that I could hear was "Chin Jia Cham". Apparently, from the little I could decipher from her heavily accented Hokkien, she was referring to a so-and-so non-working mother who obviously was not invited to the gathering, that her husband was caught for some drug-related offenses, and as a result, the family finances became an issue as her estranged husband was incarcerated.
"Chin Jia Cham" is a local slang or expression to refer to someone or a family who are suffering as a result of a direct consequence of another person's action or some circumstances. There is typically a lot of human drama involved, and sometimes, the usage of the term may be overtly exaggerated for effect. "Chin Jia Cham" or in our Singaporean way of explaining it, means "very cham" the nearest English equivalent expression would be "terribly miserable".
No comments:
Post a Comment