Year of the Tigger!.

You remember that line from Oscar Wilde about "Two countries divided by the same culture."?  Yes?

Well, that's definitely what's happening here in Kuala Lumpur with the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger celebrations!

In HK and the rest of China, tigers are highly respected and always depicted as huge, powerful, charismatic, dangerous etc, etc etc.

 Chinese tiger-perception.

 Hong Kong Tiger-perception.

Not in Malaysia. Let me show you just a small sample of their Tiger-perception before I delete these photos forever:

 Smiling despite the teeth.

And that's how they say 

"Kung Hei Fat Choi".

And how offensive is this frontpage shot:

 How you make real tigers "cute"!

The only image of a strong tiger we saw the whole time was in the window of an Australian shop, with an image designed and executed back in Australia:

 What do they say about "using local knowledge"? 

These Oz guys obviously didn't.

And this toy owned by a nice Tamil man, who obviously doesn't share the Malaysian-born-Chinese tiger-perception:

 Only winsy-bit cute.

Even the photo in their Sun newspaper of Rio's Carnivale tiger-float showed a stronger and fiercer tiger-perception than any in KL:

 Only borderline cute.

Wondering about this strange view and thinking all sorts of profound thoughts about psycho-sexual whatchamacallits and stuff like that. Or maybe this:

 Celebrating a traditional festival 

within a large group of alien cultures, 

so staying very nonthreatening and low key.

... but in the end decided maybe it could be because the almost extinct Malaysian tiger is just so gosh-darn cute.

Hey, remember how I met one in the Singapore Night Zoo and when it would itself around my legs and "meowed" up at me, I felt all "If this is a tiger, we've been lied to our whole lives?"

Posted that story.  Should really link you to it if you haven't read it already.

Mmmm, just read the post and that was a Malaysian Clouded Leopard. Honestly, my memory!

Anyway, isn't this interesting. Two countries: One tiger: Two perceptions!  Oscar Wilde really nailed it, didn't he.