Someone got your goat? And what the fish!

For ethnic Chinese everywhere, the Year of the Dragon is about to give way to the Year of the Snake. Many Chinese think the dragon is auspicious, even if it is just a mythical creature; hence, the rush by many couples to "produce" Dragon Year babies.

But ST's Beijing correspondent wrote an interesting article in The Sunday Times (Jan 6) in which the Goat -- another of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac -- is not only "lionised" by some; they claim the Chinese are descended from goats! I suspect there's an element of truth in that belief, but only insofar as it applies to those Chinese sporting Fu Manchu-type goatee beards. I assure you the rest of us are descended from our human parents and their parents, and so on and so forth (even though I've heard it jocularly bantered within our family circle that we are descended from "sea-faring cockroaches"). But here's the said story:

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Meanwhile, in the same Sunday Times issue, the fish was invoked in ambassador-at-large Tommy Koh's carefully crafted depiction of tiny Singapore as an agile fish able to manoeuvre its way around bigger, predatory, fishes (once upon a time, Singapore self-described itself as a "poisonous shrimp" but that imagery was abandoned when it was felt that a shrimp still gets eaten up, anyway).

Be that as it may, the artist unfortunately unravelled Prof Koh's efforts, by illustrating the article with tiny Singapore fish leading a school of other tiny fishes into the jaws of a big fish (instead of outswimming it, in the other direction, of course)!...