Creative Writing: Kungfu Panda

“Mai, have you watched Kungfu Panda?”

I looked up, contemplating the relationship between Kungfu Panda and winding 10000 loops of wires around 4 miniature makeshift cellulose bobbins.

“When Panda asks Shifu, ‘How can you change me into the Dragon Warrior? What does Shifu do?”

“Nothing?”

“He says, ‘I don’t know.’ So, Mai, I don’t know a fast way to wind this coil, but I will leave the path open to you,” he smiled … then left.

There I was, a disoriented and dispirited engineering apprentice who had to start on a completely new project when my research paper was chasing me like a grey leopard hunting down the panda. Working at the innovation capital of Singapore (The Institute of Materials Research and Engineering) under Dr Nikolai, I taught myself the most rugged

- I don’t know if that will work, but you may try.

So under the drill’s “rizz rizz”, I wound the first layer, sealing them with the thinnest layer of UHU glue spread by the screwdriver’s blade. If I could not set it loop by loop, I could layer by layer. The room was at 20°C but my hand and forehead were soaked, my lips mumbling the layer’s number. After every 10 layers, I turned off the drill, wiped my palms against my shirt, and swung my arms in a yin-yang motion, inhaled and exhaled Taichi-istically to calm my mind and my limbs.

2498… 2499… 2500! After 1 hour, I completed the 1000th loop. I held my breath while trembling, pushing the ohmmeter leads to the end.

Blink! 110! The sweetest number in the world!

I could have finished this task by brute force (either with loop-by-loop winding or with the mystic power of notes). But for many Kungfu Panda fans, the most memorable moment of the movie was not how Tai Lung crashes explosively into a rubble after colliding with Po’s tummy; it was when Po elegantly defeated him with a flexed pinky in the Wuxi Finger Hold. And that touch of technology, that was