A better 25-year-old

On Christmas Eve everything happened and nothing did.

In the morning it was cloudy, not yet rainy, I was on the train, on the way to dim sum with the whole clan, half-seeing all the new lines on my aunt’s face as she spoke to my mother and half-hearing them as well as Jay Chou’s Chrysanthemum Terrace on my MP3 player – as my uncle and father, my cousin and two brothers, five men with five phones, talked to each other and many others – when A, the bride-to-be, SMSed me: Her grandfather died yesterday, would I go to the wake today?

I would, I said. My grandfather had died years ago on the Winter Solstice. His funeral was on Christmas Day, as A’s grandfather’s would be. Lots of ha gau, siu mai and pigs’ trotters later, half the clan headed home; one brother had gone shopping with his girlfriend and the other, with his cousin; another friend SMSed me with news of her grandmother’s death.

The train we were on went on. My wrangle with my mother went on. My aunt and uncle, professional photographers, had taken my picture months ago for my new identity card. (“Re-registration is required for all Singapore IC holders who have attained 30 years of age.”) When I tried to show them the new IC, my mother tried to snatch it and when I snatched it back, she hissed, “But you haven’t shown me! Why don’t you ask your aunt to be your mother?” I hissed back, “Why don’t you ask P to be your daughter?” (P is One Brother’s girl – an aspiring daughter-in-law.) The train saved us by drowning us out. No one else heard our nursery-level war.

Then who should I see but my colleague and her freakily tall five-year-old. “She’s eight. She’s in Primary Two,” the mother said. Oh. The last time she had told me of the child was more. Than. Two. Years. Ago. I was on a junket to Korea days after a break-up, we were on the bus, and I was happy to hear her story, which she was happier to tell me: She met a Korean man in Turkey; they have a child and haven’t married; they live apart, he in Korea and she with the child in Singapore, and they have stayed together, a long-time long-distance couple. She told me she would spend one day with him after the junket. I said, “One day only?” She said she would rather spend the second day with her child. Meeting them now, I could see how closely they clung to each other, girlish giggles and all. I saw what I could have been. As she stood with her child and I sat with my “children” – who go with me to Ho Chi Minh on the eve of New Year’s Eve – I could hear myself blithely saying, “Primary Two! So tall! So pretty!”

In the evening the storm clouds couldn’t keep themselves back any more. I was rained on on my way from the wake to a party, where I would see Ms O, who would ask me, “How was 2006?” Mine were all non-answers. “Like that lor.” “Good friend had a kid.” “Like that lor.”

In 2006 everything happened to everyone else (K became a mother, A got a proposal, L became a magazine boss), I got nowhere – and I am okay with being here. To maybe misquote Nancy Chan, I have become a much better 25-year-old than I was at 25. Next year I may become a better 30-year-old.

Father and son

I’m slow, so slow, it’s taken me 29 years to notice how alike my brother and father are. On the morning Fei was 29 years and a handful of minutes old we three were heading towards breakfast and I was at the tail end. From the front they had never looked alike. (I look more like Pa: I have his pale skin. We are also honest-to-goodness exaggerators: not good enough not to exaggerate but too honest to lie.) But from the back, I noticed for the first time, they had the same skinny arms, which they swung, when they strolled, at the same angle – like the pendulums of two clocks striking the same time.

They talked their men’s talk, of tax, tax, tax, which went over my head. Which was okay. I was happy to watch them and wonder: Nature, nurture, how does it all work? Thirty years apart, without always getting along, they made the same calculations and came to the same decision: of working on a degree in accountancy while keeping the day job. As far as I know, Fei didn’t talk to Pa about it; he just went for it, with a vengeance I could never have worked up. He hits the gym with the same vengeance…Pa’s vengeance.

Weeks ago his girlfriend was in Tokyo. She came home with clothes for us all and all the clothes (sweaters for Pa and Ma, slacks for me and shirts for Fei and Bak) were a perfect fit. Fei has always been a charmer who turns it on for his nearest and dearest – and girls – and of all the girls he could have charmed and brought home, he has chosen a girl who has gone and bought us all clothes. As I slipped into my new black velvety slacks, which were a better fit than a similar pair I bought myself, it struck me: She reminds me of my mother.

BOOKS | The movements of unchanging things

The New Yorker on R.K. Narayan:

With his fourth novel, The English Teacher (1945), Narayan’s point of view began to change, and this change is almost certainly related to a tragic event in his life. In the novel, Krishna, the protagonist, is, like earlier Narayan heroes, unhappy with his place in the world, “constantly nagged by the feeling that [he] was doing the wrong work”. One day, Krishna and his wife, Susila – their happy marriage nothing like the miserable one of The Dark Room – go house-hunting. Strolling through the grounds of one property, Susila takes leave of Krishna to use an outhouse in a distant corner of the garden. Once she closes the door, though, it jams, trapping her in the fetid, fly-filled dark. When Krishna, who grows concerned at her absence, hears Susila’s cries and locates the outhouse, kicking in its door, his wife is frantic: A fly, then a carrier of incurable diseases, has landed on her lip. Weeks later, she dies of typhoid.

Narayan, once an English teacher like Krishna, lost his own young wife, Rajam, to typhoid, in 1939, after just such an encounter with a fly. Her death affected Narayan deeply. “The world appears very vacant and vague now,” he told Greene in a letter, “and I too feel dead.” For years, Narayan was unable to write, but, when he resumed, his books had changed – a change that was both a function of what he had lost and what, through the nature of that loss, he discovered. Narayan had first seen his wife on a street corner and had courted her against the conventions of the time, which favoured arranged marriages. Having already ignored convention, the couple then learned that their horoscopes – the consideration of which was essential to marriage – deemed them incompatible: Narayan and Rajam were told that they must not marry. Were they to defy the stars, their charts made clear, Narayan would be a young widower. Deciding that superstitions and conventions did not apply to him, Narayan married the woman he loved. When the tragedy came, it seems to have instilled in him a deep sense of the inexorability of fate, a conviction that, naturally, influenced his view of character. “We are what we are,” Narayan later told a biographer. “Whether you grow older, more decrepit, inside, the sense of awareness, of being, is the same throughout. I don’t see any difference between myself when I was seven years old in Madras and now here in Mysore. The chap inside is the same, unchanged.”

If the novels that Narayan wrote before the death of his wife were all documents of frustrated flight, those that came after chart the comedy of trying to resist fate at all. Now resistance isn’t so much futile as fundamental to our humanness: We are always resisting only ourselves, a fact that – once you get over the abject horror of it – is really very funny. As the titles suggest – The Printer of Malgudi (1949); The Financial Expert (1952); The Guide (1958); The Vendor of Sweets (1967); The Painter of Signs (1976) – the protagonists of Narayan’s mature novels are all defined by their lot in life. All the books are comic, animated by the degree to which the inner self, however much it might question its place in the world, is constantly shown to be stubbornly consistent. These are not documents of frustration but, rather, delicately tuned farces of being.

The richest of these is The Guide. Upon his release from prison, a man must once again find a place for himself in the world. Raju, when we meet him, is sitting on steps that lead into a river, the very river where Savitri failed to end her life. Raju has no suicidal thoughts, only worries and sorrows. At the opening of the novel, a stranger approaches:

Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to relieve the loneliness of the place. The man stood gazing reverentially on his face. Raju felt amused and embarrassed. “Sit down if you like,” Raju said, to break the spell. The other accepted the suggestion with a grateful nod and went down the river steps to wash his feet and face, came up wiping himself dry with the end of a checkered yellow towel on his shoulder, and took his seat two steps below the granite slab on which Raju was sitting cross-legged as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine. The branches of the trees canopying the river rustled and trembled with the agitation of birds and monkeys settling down for the night. Upstream beyond the hills the sun was setting. Raju waited for the other to say something. But he was too polite to open a conversation.

It transpires that the man, a villager named Velan, is not being polite but reverential: Raju’s seated pose by the shrine has led Velan to mistake him for a holy man. This initial error furnishes the book’s premise; Raju, content to be misconstrued, begins dispensing advice to Velan, and then to his neighbours. It is, after all, to Raju’s profit: His worshippers bring him offerings of food, leaving him no reason to go anywhere else. Sweetly comic sections in which Raju shares his wisdom—inscrutable non-answers that exhort the villagers to seek answers within themselves—are all narrated in the third person. They alternate with Raju’s first-person account of the life that has brought him to this pass: his childhood in his father’s shop; his work as a successful tour guide, ignorant of history but adept at spinning colourful lies about attractions; his seduction of a tourist’s wife; and his attempt to defraud the woman by forging her name. This is the act that lands him in prison, and there is a comic counterpoint between the legal punishments for not being oneself and the worldly rewards that such behaviour attracts. As Raju concludes his life story, and as his fame as a spiritual guide ironically reaches its apex, we realise that he has been confessing his misdeeds to Velan. Raju asks if Velan has heard his confession:

“Yes, Swami.”
Raju was taken aback at still being addressed as “Swami”.
“What do you think of it?”
Velan looked quite pained at having to answer such a question. “I don’t know why you tell me all this, Swami. It’s very kind of you to address at such length your humble servant.”

In a Western comedy of mistaken identity, the revelation of the hero’s falsity would be a likely dénouement. But, in Narayan’s comedy, the joke is that Raju’s sense of who he is is trumped by the world’s view of him. After all, if one acts as a guide – dispensing wisdom, fasting when appropriate, attracting followers – one is a guide.

It is through this idea – that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one – that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not – indeed, cannot – chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land”, are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things.

Little woman

My next-door neighbour is three years old, a budding fashionista. “Top, beautiful. Bottoms, shoes, bag, beautiful. Hair, not beautiful,” was her short and not sweet assessment of my look, from Zara top to scrunched-up hair, yesterday.

She’s a linguist. Today she came up with a new way to say “your brother’s girlfriend”. She said as she stood at her door and I at mine – “Gor Gor – Gor Gor’s – Gor Gor’s Jer Jer has come.”

She’s a security guard. When my parents came home after me, she was able to report to them, “Three people came. Gor Gor, Gor Gor’s Jer Jer and Jer Jer.”

She was the best bit of my day today.

Auntie-killer

Boy was born to my friend, K, mere days after my gym membership ran out. At the age of three weeks, he’s the best boy I know apart from my two brothers and Jay Chou because he smiles a small baby’s smile in my arms. Because he doesn’t cry when I sing a Faye Wong song to him – he is all straight-faced and serious. He is long and one day he will be tall, taller than me. He has as much hair as Rain – or Elvis, to the age bracket to which Rain still means shower. He is better-looking than Rain. He is so new to the thing you and I call life, every breath is an event. Events I follow when he is sound asleep. I like looking at him when he takes a bigger gulp of air than usual and all of him quakes as the air fills his lungs, forces his ribs out and up, then flows down to his toes. When he is wide awake, he is my new trainer.

Like last weekend, when we did weight training (Boy-lifting as his mum lunched), running (Boy-lifting-and-jogging as he didn’t like me sitting on my arse) and Boyrobics (Boy-lifting-and-leaning-from-side-to-side to rock him to sleep). He is no featherweight; my arms were aching after a couple hours. If I was in the gym, I would have put down the weights and gone home light years ago. But Boy is unputdownable. When he was in my arms, I didn’t want him out of them; when he was in his gran’s arms, I wanted him back in mine.

He’s small but his life is large with possibility. It is why I want to hold him. It is what weighs my arms down.

A mini-diaspora

How come Li Yapeng was born in Xinjiang, the wild west of China?

Long story: His grandpa was a Kuomintang man. And in 1949, when the Kuomintang was losing the mainland to the communists, he went from Nanjing to Guangzhou, ahead of his wife and two daughters, with every plan to go back for them as soon as he set everything up. But the Kuomintang lost Nanjing and he was cut off from his girls. And he swam with the tide of the Kuomintang retreat, to Taiwan. His wife was as good as widowed. No, worse. She was a Kuomintang wife in Red China; she and her daughters were pariahs politically; and so the elder girl went into her own exile, taking off for Xinjiang, where she would wed and bear two sons, Yawei and Yapeng.

The boys’ grandpa did go home to their grandma. He flew in from Hong Kong in 1988, when cross-strait relations were warmer than ever. She even went to Taiwan with him and they had one more go at their marriage. After a couple years, however, she moved back to the mainland. It was not to be. She died and he ended up emigrating to the States.

Mr Li and his Mrs Li – née Faye Wong – have been in the States with their baby Yan and he blogs about how he has been getting to know his 92-year-old grandpa. Once Mr Li asked his grandpa whose side he would take now, the Kuomintang or the communists’. His grandpa said, “Doesn’t matter. Next week I have to go sing The Star-Spangled Banner. I’m now an American citizen.”

He hopes, however, to be buried in his homeland. (Li Yapeng’s Blog)

Prince Ah Boy

One sleepy Saturday morning, my brother Fei and I were, as always, readwatching. What I mean is he was readwatching – reading the papers while watching television – and I was sprawled on the same sofa. Miss Mashed Couch Potato. Japan’s newborn prince was on the news and I said to no one, 悠仁, 好名字叻.

悠. In only one Chinese character, you have the hopes that the boy has a leisurely, kingly life and that through him, the empire is everlasting. It’s a stately name.

Fei agreed. But being a smarter arse than me, he said, it was picked by professionals, how many manhours do you think were spent by this committee, that committee to think of one name?

Maybe. As an auntie of Prince Ah Boy – when I met him for the first time last Saturday, he was a handsome two-day-old who had a houseful of grown-ups at his beck and bawl – I have been sitting on such a committee myself, actually. I don’t get to make any decisions, as a non-executive non-blood member. What I get to do, with pleasure, is advise the executive members (his parents) on the names I have helped gather. Sometimes, I report some recommendations from the mentor (my mother).

Many months ago, I made a case for 宁 (calmness – “it’s a boy’s name, 宀 covering 丁, your roof covering your boy”).

Last week, my case was made for 斌 (refinement – “文 and 武, well-versed in arts and martial arts”).

Today, when I wake up to the haze – after the seventh month and the leap seventh month, the attack of polluted air makes this a third seventh month, if you ask me – 彬 springs to mind. Sounds the same as 斌. Refers to a gentleman just as refined. But do you see what I see, the tree, tree and stream in the Chinese character? Once, my friend S and I spoke of what we wanted for our friends’ as-yet-unborns. She said, “Luck.” She meant luck of the Woody Allen Match Point type. I said, “Fresh air? I don’t know…you know…high EQ? That he will weather whatever life casts to him?” I want him to be at ease. I want him to have the ease of a man who, even when life isn’t easy, has kept in his heart the woods and brook. 彬.

Boy Ah Boy

At about half past five, I am typing a review of two restaurants, tingly – the SMS comes, declaring, “You’re an auntie!”

Yes I am. No more Jer Jer.

“What are you thinking?” the mother says, hours after the birth.

The father has stepped out to take the grandparents home. The son is in good hands in the ward. I am fresh – more like old – out of the office. We are alone, hand in hand, stoic mother and silly auntie.

“I am thinking you’re a mommy…and I’m an auntie.” The tears come.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eight

“I’m not very smart.” That’s Sugar’s sad-funny refrain in Some Like It Hot, the manic masterpiece, my favourite 50s film which I watched on the big screen for the first time at The Picturehouse the other day. Sugar, played by the one and only boop-boop-de-boop Marilyn Monroe, is a singer who keeps falling for no-good sax players, who love her then leave her with no more than “a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out”. She just can’t help it. So to stay out of harm’s way, she runs off with an all-girl jazz orchestra. To Miami. Where she may meet a Shell Oil millionaire and marry money.

Well she doesn’t. She meets Joe (Tony Curtis), a sax player who dolls up as Josephine to get a job with the orchestra then masquerades as a shell-collecting millionaire to woo her. She’s “not very smart”. That’s why she falls for Shell Oil Junior, not finding it fishy when he says of water polo, “I had two ponies drowned under me.” When she finds out he is a sax player, a no-good one, she falls harder for him. “Not very smart,” she laughs – it isn’t a happy laugh. Conscience-stricken, he tries to tell her he is no better than all her previous sax players.

“That’s right. Pour it on. Talk me out of it,” she purrs. Tremulously.

It amazes me, how I hear Monroe’s smile and tears as she is saying this. Sugar is drunk and drowning, she knows it. She knows romance promises nothing but itself. Happiness? She might as well fish for the moon in a river. For a very insane farce, Some Like It Hot is very sane on the subject of romance. It’s very smart.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Seven

You forget what it is like to badly want someone.

It has hit you belatedly, weeks after you and your mother watched, rewatched and revised the rom com It Started With A Kiss: This girl really, really wants this boy. She, a dullard, is helplessly, helplessly in love with the star student. She writes him a love letter, which he refuses to read, and everyone in school ridicules her. But she still adores him. She may say she doesn’t. But she does. They go to the same school; they go home to the same house; there is no getting away from him. Not that she wants to get away. She can’t get enough of him as it is. If he joins the tennis team she has to join too. He is a waiter after school so she is a regular at the restaurant, naturally. If he wants to be a doctor then she has to be a nurse or die trying. All she wants is to be his Mrs Jiang Zhishu.

You feel for her, because the part is played by the truly adorable Ariel Lin. You found Lin annoying at first, actually. But she grew on you. If she was a fruit, you reckon, she would be a plum – small, round, sweet, soft, bruises easily. She isn’t like Barbie Hsu of Meteor Garden, Rainie Yang of Devil Beside You or Zhang Ziyi. There is a hardness to Hsu, Yang and Zhang. They don’t look like they will ever lay themselves as open to love as Lin. As open to being hurt. When Lin says, “How? I don’t know how to stop loving him,” she sounds so dazed, it endears her to you. You want to buy her ice cream.

You feel for her, because you remember now. You had a Gor Gor who lived under the same roof long ago. You were a four-year-old or five-year-old driving him potty, going, Gor Gor this, Gor Gor that and he was a tween or teen pushing you away, telling the adults how much he hated you. But when you went swimming for the first time, he was the one paddling all around the pool with you… In JC, you were smitten by so-and-so – a broad-shouldered long-fingered so-and-so who played the piano, mahjong and football well – and somehow everyone in your science class knew. The other day, somebody sent you an SMS, “Met so-and-so who is with ERA now. Had to tell you. He was your idol!” It has been more than 10 years and they still think of you as a subset of him… A memory is thawing out after a year in the freezer. It feels like a lifetime ago. But didn’t you once write Oscar a bloody bad poem?

Happily, Kiss is a rom com and not reality. It fulfils girls’ fantasies that the boys they want will be worth it. Zhishu is worth it. Not because he is brighter and better-looking than her. But because despite his apparent aloofness, he sees how she suffers. Another boy, her classmate, has carried a torch for her for years and on a rare lucid day, she says to him, “I am luckier than you. Zhishu may look like he doesn’t care. But he sees what I feel. He knows.”

Jay’s way

The release of a new Jay Chou record – his seventh in seven years, okay, and I am so proud of him, it’s almost parental – counts as a red-letter day on my calendar. In celebration let me count the things I love about him.

1. I shall start with Taiwan, the land of 10,000 TV shows where country kids from Jacky Wu to Chen Shui-bian can talk their way to fame, fortune and sometimes the presidency. When I was with China Desk years ago, I had dinner once with two Taiwanese attachés and one of them said that the first time he had a listen to Singapore’s National Day Rally, he was taken aback. A prime minister speaking seriously about national affairs on prime-time TV? It was unheard of in Taiwan, he said. What is more, I have realised that when a Taiwanese says he is zibi, he doesn’t mean he is autistic. He means he isn’t a talker. Maybe he is a little introspective? Inexpressive? And Jay is the type who is slower to speak – he would sooner compose a song. Somehow, the things he is unable to verbalise go to his tunes, then he gets Fang Wen-shan and Huang Chun-lang to write the words, then he sings the songs in that Jay way, opening up little by little by little.

And it’s so moving, somehow.

2. The closest I ever came to Jay, physically, was on the red carpet at the MTV Asia Awards the year big Eastern names were rubbing shoulders with big Western names. He was looking like a little Bruce Lee, composed in his Cheena best of black tracksuit with white dragon embroideries. When I asked him if he had designed his outfit, he said he had asked someone to design him something Chinese. Then he kept the flag flying when he went on stage, performing his gongfu hit Long Quan with some drumstick action here, some sticks-and-chain action there and out of nowhere, a verse he sang in his Beijing opera voice. It was some knockout of a show. Backstage, Brett Anderson sounded star-struck speaking about Jay.

3. Jay isn’t an over-managed pop idol who can’t fart without written consent. Because he started out behind the scenes as a songwriter, because he has a strong track record, because he knows what he is doing, no one tells him what to do. He tells them. They don’t call him Chairman Chou for nothing. He decides on a duet with Fei Yu-ching and all of a sudden, that uncle of uncool is damn diao.

4. Jay is a good, thoughtful son. His parents are divorced. At his dos, he seats his father and mother tables apart; then, siding with neither, he sits elsewhere with his grandmother. But maybe he loves his mother more. There is a tale of how one Valentine’s night, he surprised her with a fireworks show outside her apartment – he didn’t want her to be on her own that night. Now, after naming an album after her and making Yeh Hui-mei one of the most Googled names in 2003, he honours her in the song, Ting Ma Ma De Hua. Listen to mama when she tells you to play the piano, the grown-up Jay raps to his kiddie self, when you grow up everyone will be singing your songs.

I want sons just like him.

5. Reading Huang Chun-lang’s cute complaint that Jay doesn’t have a single cent in the Mr J’s French-Italian Restaurant that has his face on the logo – Jay persuaded friends to take his restaurant fantasy and run to realise it without his money – I want to wire them my cash. “I could have secretly changed the name to Mr Lang when I was designing it and changed the face to Chiling Lin’s,” writes Jay’s friend. “All I can say is, because Jay has helped many people and has never been ungenerous to friends (it is forever his treat and whatever valuables friends want, he never wrinkles his brow), many people are willing to help him complete a dream and are willing to open a restaurant that completely belongs to him.”

6. My all-time No.1 Jay video is Yi Fu Zhi Ming, in which he is a sinfully hot hit man in Sicily. Okay, I don’t have a point, other than to point you to the video.

7. The thing about Jay is, he is both boy and uncle. It was the Golden Melody Awards, which I was watching from my couch. Somehow he was on stage for a tribute to Ni Min-jan, a funnyman who had been found dead recently, and Matilda Tao was on the phone with the dead man’s 10-year-old or 11-year-old son, saying, hey, how about we pass the phone to your idol Jay? Things were as awkward as could be. Jay stood shyly, his cap over his eyes, trying to think of something to tell his little fan. After a silence – one beat, two beats, three beats, four beats – “So…have you done your homework?”

I really wished I could reach out, over an ocean, to hug him.

A karaoke queen comes of age

I’m 30. It’s terrific. Because for the first time in my life, at my karaoke-thon birthday bash, I found I could sing Anita Mui songs with a confidence – a conviction – that wasn’t there before.

She was the wounded older woman of Cantopop, a drama queen to her dying day, with both the deep voice and the depth of emotional expressiveness. She could sound sultry, strong, poignant, proud. She could, in the ebb and flow of voice and emotion, move you to tears. (Like Jacky Cheung: I heard him live at Snow Wolf Lake last year and what he had wasn’t only vocal power but also emotional precision, working his way round even a bad song to your heart.)

She wasn’t like Teresa Teng, who, in spite of the nominal sorrow of her songs about parting lovers and all, didn’t really sound sad. Teresa preferred to wrap her wounds in pretty plasters, so in the studio and on stage, she had maybe two modes: sweet and sweeter. Faye Wong is her heir. They have similar soprano ranges and Faye, in her trip-hop cool-cat way, is as emotionally mute as Teresa.

In my years in karaoke, because I began as a soprano in school, I have tried to ape them and other girl-women. But what I have found is that, actually, I am a better wounded older man (Wu Bai) than whimsical wispy girl (Rainie Yang). And it was nice that night, when I was at last old enough to inhabit an Anita Mui song and mean every word. Almost.

Between a mike and a cake at Party World.

TV | The sense of nonsense

Nothing in the real world makes any sense, sometimes. How can it be that Singapore, with its world-class gahmen, world-class airline, world-class airport, world-class hawkers, world-class housing, world-class et cetera, is the unhappiest Asian country on the Happy Planet Index, behind not only Vietnam and Bhutan but also Malaysia and Palestine? Malaysia and Palestine! How can it be that Taiwan, which isn’t even a real country, is ahead of Singapore? But it is. What it has that Singapore doesn’t is freedom of speech, satire, et cetera, and most priceless of all, 全民亂講之全民大悶鍋 Everybody Speaks Nonsense.

In the reel world of this daily satirical TV show, chat-show guests from “Auntie A-ching, Chen Shui-bian’s housekeeper” to “Kim Jong Il” will come on to mouth off about, say, the birth of the real Mr Chen’s grandchild and what it all means with Chao Chien-ming, the child’s father and Mr Chen’s son-in-law, being indicted for insider trading.


“Mr Kim”: (In Mandorean) I come to your Taiwanyo, and I see people protesting against Chen Shui-bianyo. This is the trouble with democracyo. In our North Koreayo, one of the benefits of being an autocrat is that people are always pleased to see meyo. They are always cheering for meyo.

Then “Jimmy Lai”, the evil paparazzo publisher of Apple, sorry, Mango News, comes on. First he gets his reporters to repeat sex-and-death-sell mantras like, “Naked bodies plus dead bodies!” Then they will go through the news.


Reporter: How do we play the birth of Chen Shui-bian’s third golden grandchild?
“Mr Lai”: (In Mandonese) How do other media play it? They want the child to be called Chao Kai-kuo (Turn Over) or Chao Tzu-hsin (New Leaf)? Why don’t they just call the child Chao Sorry or Chao Apology, yes or no ah? What is the story? The story is, Chao Chien-ming is behind bars and can’t see his wife and newborn. The story is human tragedy mah, yes or no ah?

Then comes the pricelessly, intensely insane call-in segment. Real people phone in with questions for the reel chat-show guests. Some of them seem to think they are talking to the real Auntie A-ching or the real Mr Kim. And the reel Auntie A-ching or the reel Mr Kim will answer so nonsensically, everything starts making sense, sometimes. Only in Taiwan.


Everybody Speaks Nonsense, CTiTV (StarHub 52), Mondays to Fridays, 10pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am.

Sock-cer

It was a sad night for soccer. Not because Italy beat sentimental favourites France to the World Cup but because of how the French – and Zidane – lost. But as the IHT’s Roger Cohen blogs:

Genius has a dark side. How else to reconcile the divine smile on Zinedine Zidane’s face throughout the French victory he orchestrated over Brazil with the man, fist-clenched, possessed, driving his head into Marco Materazzi’s chest in the 110th minute of the World Cup final and so concluding his career in shame?

Life is no fairy tale. Zidane was to lift the trophy and come full circle eight years after the French triumph in Paris, when he scored two goals in the final. That was the script. Instead, Italy won and Zidane came full circle to another moment in the 1998 tournament: the one in which he snapped, stamped on a Saudi Arabian player's chest, and was sent off.

Rage resided in Zidane, somewhere deep in the soul of a humble man who had a gift, who could see what others could not, who caressed the ball and who took games and the people who watched them to unsuspected and lovely places. Rage cannot undo or lessen his gift. We must accept the two together as, in the end, we must accept all the contradictions of life. Only in fairy tales does everything come out right.

Do not belabour this moment of madness. Of course, we want to know what the provocation might have been. Our curiosity demands that we discover what Materazzi may have said to spur such ugliness. But let us respect Zidane’s silence. We know that he is suffering. We may begin to imagine what it was like for him to walk off the field, past the trophy he coveted, head bowed, to a silent pain. He must live with the terrible ambiguity he showed the world in this tournament…

Italy scarcely deserved the victory on the night. It hung on and seized its chance. But over the course of the tournament it had earned the title. Its football was the smoothest and most cohesive, and its defense was made of iron. If you do not see beauty in defence, you cannot understand the essence of the Italian game.

Italians are sentimental about many things. But football to them is more serious than that. They carry the game in their blood as no other nation except Brazil. Four titles now demonstrate that. By comparison, the English and the French are parvenus when it comes to this sport.

Vin 1, Vinho 0

Italy have the best goalkeeper in the world, Buffon. In the World Cup final on Sunday, it will be the Italians against France and Buffon against the bona fide buffoon the French have for a goalie. That’s Barthez, a bald clown who has been struggling with simple saves and all but cost the French the semi-final against Portugal.

“There are goalkeepers who bring out funny little toys and put them in the back of the net as good luck charms. For France’s veterans, Barthez is the funny little good luck charm. Laurent Blanc, the centre half on the run to the final in 1998, used to kiss the top of the goalie’s bald head before every game. It is tough on Gregory Coupet, the best goalkeeper in France last season, who stood in while Barthez served a five-month suspension for spitting at a referee. At 33, Coupet is sitting on the bench watching his last chance of appearing in a World Cup slide away. But Domenech is concerned with the well-being of the team as a whole...it is a one-for-all, all-for one philosophy,” says the IHT’s Peter Berlin.

Because as badly as the vets, like Zidane, like Thuram, like Makelele, want to win, they don’t want to win at any cost. Not without their buffoon, their buddy, their Barthez. My brother calls them cliquey. You can also call them musketeer-y.

Vino 2, Bier 0

Italy is a land of artists, from Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and da Vinci to Dolce & Gabbana and Prada to Pirlo. Pirlo? Pirlo. The name is Andrea Pirlo and the game is soccer at its most sublime.

With two more minutes of extra time vs Germany, in the 119th minute of the semi-final, with the score still nail-bitingly at 0-0, the ball bounced out from a corner to Pirlo’s boot. In front of him, there was the goal, as well as three Germans. Somehow, they didn’t at all know how, he passed the ball just a bit out of their path.

“How, after almost two hours of football played at a relentless pace, he was able to control the ball, make as if to shoot, then move right and slip a gorgeous little pass through to Grosso, must remain a mystery to lesser mortals,” blogs the IHT’s Roger Cohen.

Pirlo’s pass became the first goal, curled in by Grosso. In the 121st and last minute, another Italian artist, Del Piero, came up with the second goal. The Germans were in tears. All I could do was chant, “Del Piero! Del Piero! Del Piero! Italia! Italia! Italia! Italia!”

I feel for the Germans. They are like us. We are like them. They are kiasu. They are famous for their competence. They have everything down to a science. But art won last night – inspiring Italian art – and it was really something to see.

My friend, M, has a fine theory of taste in football. Beer people go for beer countries like Germany and wine people, for wine countries like Italy, she says. I am, at heart, a wine person. Which may be why, in spite of my sympathy for Germany’s bier, I ended up going for Italy’s vino last night.

Tonight it is Portugal’s volatile vinho vs France’s vintage vin. France and Zidane are so vintage, they can’t keep for four more years. It has to be now or never. It has to be France and Italy in the final. It better be.

Soccer schizo

They don’t call it the World Cup for nothing. Like other World somethings – World Wars One and Two spring to mind – the fun is in being for or against a team. Are you cheering your country or continent on? Are you for the Allied forces of Beautiful Football, like France, or the Axis powers of Boring Football, like Germany? Have you put your heart where your mouth is?

We in Singapore are free from the tyranny of having to cheer our country on – the team never made the finals – so many Singaporeans end up as default England fans. Those who are colonial or sold on the brand of David Beckham, that is. I am pro-Asia. Well, more pro-South Korea than pro-Japan. It is one thing for me to be fond of Japanese films, Japanese food and my Japanese friends and another thing to be a flag-flying fan of the Japan team, somehow. When Australia played Japan, I was for Japan but my boos at Australia were louder than my cheers for Japan, somehow. Maybe I didn’t know how to cheer for an Asian country that might not want to be an Asian country. Or it might have been simpler to support South Korea, because those tigers played harder than Japan.

After the Asians got kicked out, I briefly went Brangelina, rooting for Ghana, the Brazil of Africa, the top dog of the underdogs. But the African Brazil got outplayed by the Brazilian Brazil, who have now been beaten by the most African of the European teams, France.

So it is France vs Portugal and Germany vs Italy in the semi-finals and I am about to go schizo here.

On the one hand, as a Francophile and a Zinedine Zidanephile, I want France to win. On the other hand, I don’t want Portugal to lose badly. The Ah Lian in me loves the Portuguese Ah Beng, Cristiano Ronaldo, the bad boy who wears too much hair mousse and allegedly winked at his bench after he allegedly encouraged the referee to dismiss English striker Wayne Rooney in the quarter-final. I adore bad. On the third hand, I love Italy’s fashion sense and silky footwork. On the fourth hand, I don’t hate Germany. Their goalie had notes on Argentinian penalties in the quarter-final! The kiasu Singaporean student in me gets that.

To be all mugger about it:
France = world-class retirees (Zidane, Lilian Thuram, Claude Makelele)
Portugal = world-class Beng (Ronaldo) + world-class coach (Luiz Felipe Scolari)
Italy = world-class (con) artists
Germany = world-class 11-man machine
How?

Drink drank drunk #2

“How did you quit?”

My friend, who is addicted to the treasure trove of videos on YouTube, puts a question to me, the Mike Ho-YouTube addict apparently on the mend. Actually I am not. I didn’t quit. All I have done is give up one addiction for another, to the World Cup.

Mike, for all his marvellous mischievous qualities, is one boy. The World Cup is many boys – and men – on the pitch whom I watch with the boys in my living room. I am not a natural football fan. Footwear, not footy, is more me. But once in four years, it is just a joy to be drunk on the World Cup with my brothers.

And to be united not only in our love of the beautiful game but also in our dislike of, say, Australia’s Socceroos. They play such a physical ugly game they should have signed up for rugby, really. Mr T, the professional football fan, calls them Planet Of The Apes.

How do we dislike them? Let me count the ways.

Last Monday night, I gave up the press preview of Superman Returns. Because I had to be home for Italy vs Australia, because I wanted to watch them lose. (Don’t ask me which them.)

Minutes after I made up my mind to give up the preview, my brother, Fei, SMSed to remind me: We had to be home for the match, we wanted to watch them lose.

We wanted it so much, we even bet on them. As he put it to me, “We want Italy to win right? We are willing to lose money for them right? It’s investing in Italy right? If they win we will be glad to lose money, if they lose we will be si beh sad but we will win $60 right?”

Right, right, right, right. His plan made perverse sense to me. We bet $10 each on Australia. So Italy won, Australia lost and in China a CCTV commentator went into a crazy pro-Italy anti-Australia rant, “Goooooal! Game over! Italy win! Beat the Australians! They do not fall in front of Hiddink again! Italy the great! Left back the great! Happy birthday to Maldini! Forza Italia! The victory belongs to Italy, to Grosso, to Cannavaro, to Zambrotta, to Buffon, to Maldini, to everyone who loves Italian soccer! Hiddink…lost all his courage faced with Italian history and traditions…he finally reaped fruits which he had sown! They should go home!”

He is a man after my own crazy heart. Me, I got a great kick out of losing $10.

Drink drank drunk #1

We are girls who get a bit drunk on Tony Leung Chiu Wai films auteured by Wong Kar Wai, the master of moody cinema; Faye Wong songs authored by Lin Xi, the sad-love-song specialist; movies that match Tony with Faye (Chungking Express, Chinese Odyssey 2002 and 2046); and above all, the retro resplendence of the world of Wong Kar Wai.

So it was that Ms C, Ms H and I, dressed in our retro best, came together to celebrate Tony’s birthday yesterday over dinner at the Wong Kar Wai-esque New Majestic Hotel. To be more drunk, I had champagne. The party truly began before that, however. It was in the air all day at work, as colleagues stopped us to say, “Show me your dress,” or, “So who are you?”

Ms H: I’m Faye from 2046.
Me: I’m Su Lizhen.
Colleague: Ni hao.
Su Lizhen: Ni hao.
Faye: Why did you speak to Su Lizhen only ah?
Colleague: Because Faye seldom says anything mah.

Actually, Su Lizhen is also a woman of few words. Her cheong sam are louder than her. She overdresses for occasions like buying noodles downstairs. What she wants is to feel more alive and I know what that feels like. I’m just not as good as her at getting in and out of a car when wearing a tight cheong sam. But by the end of yesterday, after a couple of almost-injuries to my knees when I went in feet first, I learnt to roll in and out on my rump with relative ease. Notice I didn’t say elegance.


Faye and Su Lizhen.


Mrs Tony and shark fin soup.


A Faye Wong music video moment: How well the dress goes with the wall!


Kiasu mugger method acting: This Su Lizhen has a wuxia book because that Su Lizhen in that movie had a wuxia book, too.


After dinner. My dress tighter.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Six

In the first few frames of Ex-Lover, Akari is a woman who has everything. She has an apartment with a view of Tokyo Tower; she has a jet-setting job with a jeweller that just took her to Paris; best of all, she has the perfect man. He’s tall, dark, handsome, a highflying accountant, he’s perfect down to his Tokyo University degree and to make things even more perfect, he’s in her bed now. In the sweet afterglow of lovemaking, she gets him to try on his new nude tie from Paris. He tries it on. Then he gets up to announce he’s going home. She asks him to stay. He’s out her door. And her night sours.

In the light of day, it is also obvious that she’s terrible at her job. Her heart isn’t in it. She’s 29, marriage is on her mind but she’s also terrible at getting a man to marry her. The perfect man, Hayato, isn’t interested. He says he wants to be with her forever without ever having to marry her. She says she wants what he wants…she’s lying. And the thing is…he’s a bit of an iceberg. Sometimes being beside him is as lonely as being on her own.

So she falls in bed with her ex-boyfriend, Arashi. He was nuts about her seven years ago but she broke up with him for being a ne’er-do-well. Now he’s successful – but married – but still nuts about her. And as she says to the iceberg, she’s better off being with the matrimonially unavailable man than the emotionally unavailable one.

The iceberg was playing it cool all along. But he can’t be cool anymore. Someone has to save her from a life as a mistress. He has to marry her. She says no thanks at first. But he hears her parents aren’t doing well – they haven’t been happy since their small toy shop closed down – and he calls on them to cheer them up. So it is that she comes home to such heart-warming domestic bliss and has second thoughts, “Is this what the lie of marriage is about?”

And you are going, why is she going on and on about this TV show?

Actually I don’t know if this is such a good show. (Er I have a thing about the iceberg i.e. Abe Hiroshi?) But to me it shows the pain-pleasure cycle of some relationships so well: the smallness of the joys snatched, the comforts you cling to, the uncertainties that eat away at you, the untruths and half-truths you feed each other and yourself.

A couple months ago, I was looking for a little misery to mark the first year of the death of a relationship. Ex-Lover was just perfect for my purposes.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Five

When the going gets tough, some Cantonese go, chin sai. (I.e. previous life i.e. what did I do in my previous life?) On the one hand we don’t want to blame others. But on the other hand we don’t want to be too rough on ourselves – our present selves. So we blame our past selves. Really it’s not so much blame as some sort of resignation: The past self ran up a debt that the present self has to pay off lor. (Lor, by the way, is a sound that sums up Ng Man Tat, that walking talking sideshow of comic resignation in a Stephen Chow show. “I’m getting my gun and I’m going to die with you lor,” Ng tells Chow, beta policeman to alpha policeman, in his most memorable line in Fight Back To School.) It does get us going.

But coming to relationships, chin sai starts to sound negative: What did I do to you in my previous life? Do I owe you a debt from my previous life? The lover becomes a creditor, love’s loan shark, Shylock come for a pound of flesh.

So Cao Xueqin is the poet who has taken much of the bitterness out of the equation, if you ask me, by giving an account of what the creditor did. In his Dream Of The Red Chamber (the version I vaguely remember from reading the first few chapters aeons ago), Jia Baoyu is the incarnation of a magic stone and Lin Daiyu, that of a flower. In their previous lives, the stone was rolling along when it ran into the flower which it liked so much, it watered it every day (in my mind’s eye, the stone was rolling here, there and everywhere to gather water for the thirsty flower – I don’t know if I’m remembering or imagining that). So the flower was so thankful, it said it would repay the stone for the water in their next lives. In Daiyu’s tears.

Beautiful story, isn’t it? I feel so. I felt so. How I did drown, in my own way, in the beauty of the story. When I was with Oscar – through the break-ups and the kiss-and-make-ups – I thought there had to be a reason. Why did he come back for more after the nth parting? Why did I go back for more? I thought there had to be a debt. I tried to think of it positively. Sometimes I even scolded myself, “You owe him means you owe him. Run away now and you will still owe him in your next life.”

When the big one came – the 9 Richter break-up of no return – so did a sense of relief: I’m not as deep in debt as I believed.

But the tale of the debt of tears is beautiful. I do want to read the rest of that book.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Four

These are a few of my comfort foods: my mother’s rice noodles, Milo with crackers and Meteor Garden. Meteor Garden – it’s Pride And Prejudice lite with Jerry Yen as Darcy – is my chocolate. On downhearted days I pop it into the DVD machine’s mouth and press Play. Instant happiness.

There are days chocolate isn’t enough though. Like when first love crashes, becomes first break-up in a foreign country – a friend’s friend takes you in, gives you a shoulder to cry on – you go broke calling friends back home – you don’t know what to do with yourself. I didn’t know what to do with myself that summer Down Under. Then I found myself buying a book, Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, for the friend’s friend and in the middle of writing her a thank-you-for-everything note, I began to reread the book in her kitchen.

Davies has been one of my friends from the first time we met in NUS. That was where I borrowed my first Davies, that is. I really don’t remember if I found him on my own or only after reading his obituary, an inspiring one by The Economist. But I thank the day we met. His is the warmest and wisest of voices – he wrote his best books late in life when he was in his 50s and 60s – and that day in the kitchen, he wasn’t just telling me about Maria Magdalena Theotoky, this beautiful brilliant scholar of Rabelais and how she gets her man and her manuscript; about the body-personality types, ectomorph (scrawny, sex-starved, intellectual), mesomorph (muscular, go-getting), endomorph (plump, pleasure-seeking); about Simon Darcourt, this professor of Greek who may or may not be in love with Maria after he accidentally drinks coffee mixed with her menstrual blood…

Davies was telling me, it’s gonna be okay girl.

"I believed he was pregnant"

Isabella Rossellini on her famous - and fat - father:

Until recently, both my parents were in just about every encyclopaedia. I check. When my father's entry emphasises his marriage to my mother, I know it's an American edition. When the emphasis is on his revolutionary and innovative work as a film-maker, I know it's a European edition. In Chinese encyclopaedias my mother isn't mentioned at all and my father's work is described as "non-bourgeois telling true stories about the proletariat." That's the communist edition. There are many ways to love my parents. Then there is my way, which is mine only.

Let me add something about my dad that I can say only now that he's dead. He was fat. In my family, this fact was always diplomatically diminished with: "He's not fat, he's robust."

When we were children (there were seven of us), one of our favourite games was throwing ourselves on to daddy's body. Lying on his side, he pretended to be the sow and we were the piglets. My daddy always regretted not being able to nurse us in real life, though for a long time I believed he was pregnant.

I liked him just as he was, fat or robust, whatever one wants to call it. People who talked to him about dieting irritated me - I didn't want less of him. He was soft to embrace, and there was a lot of him. I wanted him a lot, and I wanted all of him.

Most of all, I remember my dad in bed - he loved being in bed. He stayed in bed all day long; he didn't want to waste energy. You can call him lazy, but I still connect physical laziness to the kind of spiritual and intellectual wisdom my father possessed. If someone strikes me as lazy, my first reaction is to listen carefully to what he says for some possible great truth. As an adult, I like a "lazy body" look in bed. An athletic body with muscles I could never love.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Three

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She was more of a buyer of Chinese storybooks, when we were kids. Before my brother and I went to school and on the stock school kids’ diet of Tintin, Enid Blyton and Asterix, she fed us stories about the foolish monkeys who believed four acorns in the morning and three at night was better than three in the morning and four at night; the fool who got his feet measured to go shopping for shoes but forgot the measurement and had to go home empty-handed; and so on and so forth. Never mind that we were too young for some of the stories, which were simplified but not dumbed down from Zhuangzi, Hanfeizi and other old philosophy texts.

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She married one, isn’t it enough? She would be the one who bought us a kids’ edition of Journey To The West and my father would be the one who brought it to life for us, with exciting exaggerations, in weekly instalments. His hero in storytelling was Lei Dai Soh, Rediffusion’s Cantonese charmer in the 1950s (Dai Soh, Big Fool, what a name). Week after week, as he ad-libbed his way through Journey To The West, my father became our Lei Dai Soh.

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. But as kids, we came to expect a good story from her every time she had a fight with my father. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Telling us stories, it was her therapy. These were all true stories of my father’s Dickensian days as a child coolie. He hardly told us these stories, so we had to hear them from my mother, who told them so well, she must have told them, line for line, as they were told to her by her Lei Dai Soh. She must have loved these stories. She did only one thing differently: Her stories always ended with, “Your father is a good man.”

I am my mother’s daughter. Oscar was a man with many tales. Of central Asia, of central Europe, of Effendi.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Two

I shouldn’t – but sometimes I blame that book.

The night before I began my big mistake with Oscar, I read Eucalyptus. In that Australian take on Arabian Nights, there is an old man with one daughter and hundreds of gum trees. When she is 19, he decides to marry her off to the man who can name all his trees. Then who should she chance on but a young man who tells her stories, day after day.

Among his dozens of stories, one stayed on my mind. The girl-meets-boy one about the restless woman from Geelong and her Spaniard. They meet in Corunna in north-west Spain. She doesn’t know he is the love of her life until she leaves him for London and realises she shouldn’t have.

In London at the most unexpected moments she saw the room in Corunna, which seemed from a distance to be jammed in at an angle among the black rocks. She kept seeing him across the room and close up. It was their room. He had a long face and hairs on his shoulders: she liked his solemn expression. She could feel his month and hear his voice.

They never meet again.

At strange important moments a person is given one and only one chance; and that had been one.

Did I want to be with Oscar? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to be the woman from Geelong. It was on my mind that I shouldn't be making her mistake. I ended up making worse mistakes – but they were mine, mostly mine.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter One

I don’t know how Oscar said goodbye to Lucinda – did he say it at all? I didn’t read all of Oscar And Lucinda, you see. I began reading the Peter Carey book, believing it to be a lovely love story about two gamblers, the tale of how the narrator’s grandfather, Oscar, ended up with the narrator’s grandmother, Lucinda. I was wrong.

I am more Apollonian than Dionysian. I like order, harmony and happy endings. I can, and do, live with unhappy endings in movies. Most movies end before I can invest in them emotionally, after all. Books demand more of my time. When I like a book, when I like its protagonists, I want happy endings for them and a big positive payoff for me. So I fast-forward books to find out. I read one chapter here, another chapter there, then I go to the ending: Is it happy, is it unhappy and if it is unhappy, how unhappy do things get? For example, I knew Anna Karenina wouldn’t live happily ever after – it meant nothing to me for I didn’t like her – but I had to know if her in-laws, Kitty and Levin, would. (They would.) For example, What I Loved was sad but bearably so. After I read the ending, I could rewind the book and read the rest. Maybe the title, in past tense, had prepared me for the ending. Maybe I had learnt to be less cowardly, more grown-up. Maybe I had learnt not to box books – nor life – up.

But back when I was younger and reading Oscar And Lucinda, I couldn’t continue past the part when Mrs What’s-her-name, that tricky terrible widow, somehow seduced Oscar. She as good as raped him, really, then she got pregnant with his child, then she got him tied to her for life. Untied from Lucinda. I hated her, that Mrs What’s-her-name. How could she? How could Oscar? I was cross with Carey, too. I wanted to tell him, “It’s Oscar And Lucinda, not Oscar And That Woman. I want Lucinda to be the grandma. I don’t want that woman to be the grandma.”

The book went back to the library. That was the end of that, I thought. How was I to know the book would come back to bite me? I didn’t know the Oscar in my life would turn out to be an Oscar. I didn’t know I would turn out to be an Oscar-less Lucinda. I never saw that chapter with Mrs What’s-her-name coming. It came, oh it came. There was a child, their child, and there may be a grandchild, their grandchild, one day, not that I am hoping to hear from them.

How did Lucinda take it? What did she say? What did she do? Who ended it with whom? I don’t know. Never read the rest. But the tale of my Oscar and I came to the bitter end one morning, after months of mutual misery. He called me. One of the first – one of the last things he said to me, with a very final finality, was, “This is goodbye.”

And I have lived with it.

An MRT car named Desire

A Chinaman on the MRT caught my eye. His was a northern Chinese visage, narrow, all cheekbone and no cheek, but with dreamy bedroom eyes. He wasn't tall, he was small. On his elbows, it was snowing scuffed skin, all marks of his unmoisturised maleness. He was in a beige tee and beige trousers, which had a high, too high, waist. He was maybe in his 30s or 40s. He didn't have to say a single word, for his trousers did the talking for him: "So I'm an uncle from China. So?" So I minded my own business, my business now being to look at his eyes - at, not into - and he was looking, too, into the eyes of an auntie. A broad.

When I say broad, I mean broad. She was broad and her arms, larger than life (larger than mine). Her look - bottle-brown short hair, beige sleeveless baggy top, red short skirt and beige strappy shoes - was flapper fashion via This Fashion. Could she be his older sister? Maybe. Maybe it is common in China for a woman to tug her brother towards her every two minutes and molest his manly chest, for a man to lean a little on his sister in public and for a woman to hike up the hem of her skirt as she babbles to her brother. No, they couldn't be brother and sister. Maybe they were married (yes, to other people), making the M18 most of their time on the MRT while on their way to a borrowed apartment.

They didn't just catch my eye, they arrested my attention. I had never seen such foreplay in broad daylight. As the amorous two were alighting, the loving didn't let up. She hugged him from behind, blowing a kiss onto his neck. He shuddered. And I said to myself, "Chui qi!" Wow. I had read about this blowing in Louis Cha classics but I hadn't seen it, not on TV, nor in movies. I thought this move had died with the Xinhai Revolution, the Cultural Revolution or the raising of the Bamboo Curtain. How heartening that such sauciness lives on.

I ate it, now it is eating me

When I flew home from Taipei last Thursday, my hair still smelled of the hot springs of Beitou, of salt and sulphur. The scent of my holiday faded fast, however, when a rash erupted on my limbs. Soon all I smelled of was medicated oil, ointment, insecticide and desperation.

On my last night in Taipei, I had some wild boar stir-fried with basil. It was fresh boar, fresh from the mountains of Taitung, fresh from a hunt by an aboriginal friend of a friend who had brought the pig back to Taipei. It was the wildest boar I ever had. Later, I would report to my mother I had just "one, two bites". But between you and me, it was ten, twenty bites - maybe many, many more - and it was yummy. So now I have a rash, an angry, itchy rash that looks like a pox or a Pollock - I am trying to be positive - and feels like an attack by guerrilla ants.

In Chinese medicine, I am yin and boar is yang, too yang for me. It has made my breath fiery. It is making fires break out here on my arm, then there on my leg. "Let it come out, let it all come out," says my physician, who has given me a potion for the purging of the so-called heaty poison. What she seems to mean is the rash has to get worse before it gets better, so for a few days now, it has been furiously worse. The rash - I can't call it my rash. I do not own it, it owns me. As the itch inches up and down, I have counter-attacked it with medicated oil, menthol ointment and a made-in-China cream that smells like insecticide. The latter, labelled Shun Feng Kang Wang Compound Ketoconazole and Clobetasol Propionate Cream, is lethal. It not just kills the rash - the rash has more than nine lives though - it also kills my skin a little, leaving it tingly and unnaturally tight. Ageing-Hollywood-actress tight. No thanks. Sometimes I give up and give my arms and legs a good scratch, even making myself bleed; I give thanks for pain; painful is better than itchy. Or I sit on my hands. Or I sleep on the floor, the cool, cool floor. I don't sleep, actually. I snatch some shut-eye between attacks. Today I have tried tough love (body scrub), then tender love (moisturising cream) - I will be all out of love soon.

Will I have boar again? Yes! But maybe not as many bites next time.

THE AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE | The greatest hits

Breakfast at...Maison Vanille, a world-class bakery at 49 Phan Chu Trinh Street. I have been a fan of the French bakes and crepes (right) here since my maiden trip to Hanoi. Now that Ms N and the children are also fans, they won't want to go to Delifrance again. Mon Dieu, what have I done?

Brunch at...1 Hang Manh Street. There is no menu here. There is no need. There is just bun cha (right), a humble, ass-kicking Hanoi lunch of grilled pork and rice noodles that kicks some serious ass with its green-papaya-in-fish-sauce dip.

Lunch at...Green Tangerine, a fancy restaurant at 48 Hang Be Street. I don't know if it was the US$6 lunch or the charming tile-lined courtyard that did it for my uncle. But before he even digested his first meal here, he wanted to come back for a second bite of the Tangerine. So we lunched here on Saturday and again on Monday.

On Saturday, I had sea bass and leek a la orange, then pear a la chocolate. On Monday, I had tri-coloured soup - it was green with vegetable, grey with onion and yellow with passion fruit - then creme brulee in red-wined apples (right)!

Dinner at...Wild Lotus at 55A Nguyen Du Street. A die, die must the moment one enters the manor and steps over a small man-made stream, into a little Buddhist palace of pleasure. Beige. Brown. Gold. Paintings. Pools. Statues. Steamed fish fillet with soya sauce and a herb that might or might not be dill. Peanut-crusted shrimp. Black sticky rice with vanilla ice cream. Mmm...

THE AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE | And the quartet played on

For 15 fearful minutes on Friday, as I stood with Ms N at the entrance of the Sofitel Metropole Hanoi, waiting, worrying and waiting, I thought I had lost the children. We had been in Hanoi for all of two hours on the four-days-three-nights-nine-meals trip. I had tucked the four children into a cab, telling the driver, "Metropole hotel," before Ms N and I cabbed there to meet them for Meal No.1: dinner at Le Beaulieu. But where were they? Where had their cabbie taken them? Why weren't they picking up their phones? They don't speak Vietnamese. Three of them were new to Vietnam. The one who wasn't is very blur.

Yet - "who would want to kidnap such old children?" I tried to tell myself.

My phone rang. It was the children! The hotel - think French colonial-style Raffles Hotel but with more old-world beauty in the air - has entrances on Ngo Quyen Street and Ly Thai To Street. The children, i.e. my parents, uncle and aunt, had been dropped off at a different entrance. Aiya.

After all the needless excitement, our night at Le Beaulieu - a first-rate French restaurant whose head chef, Didier Corlou, has been called a "mad scientist" by the New York Times - more than matched up as a merry, mind-boggling culinary adventure.

The children aren't used to French food. I had to handhold them through the menu in Cantonese as a kindly kindergarten teacher might have. "These are entrees, and these are all the foods done traditionally, and these are all the same foods done innovatively...so this is salmon -" "I want fish -" "You want it in the traditional Russian or -" "Will there be rice?"

So first came the free entree: a ".........soup.........and salmon on a hot stone", said the waiter, drowning out the name of the soup with his accent. Is he a native of Hanoi? Ho Chi Minh City? Hao Binh? Was he speaking English? French-glish? Viet-glish? Heaven knows. The mystery soup looked like melted green ice cream. It was tasty, with a mystery seafood-y morsel in it which was fried and tasty, too. "Whatever that thing is, lip it up!" said my uncle.

Then came the entrees - foie gras, salmon and snails - we were all sharing. One of them looked like a UFO which had come all the way from Planet Kiwi, only to crash onto our table, spewing some of its green insides. We made giggly guesses. Ms N ate a bite of the UFO and identified it as a vegetable croquette with shelled snails inside it. On the far side of the dish, a fair limb was buried beneath some snails: a singular fried frog leg. My aunt, Ms N and I lipped it up.

Then came the mains. Beef and foie gras for the boys; a lovely, succulent lobster a la Tahiti vanilla and coconut for my mother; John Dory for my aunt; veal for Ms N; and duck and foie gras for me. (Guess which was my favourite main?) The mains were served with sides of brussel sprouts and potatoes in cheese. What scrumptious simplicity.

Last but not least, the desserts, including a soft cake which came under chocolate in the menu and was served in a bowl, beneath a candied canopy. We oohed and aahed at the artistry. Over our cacophony, a string quartet played on. Ms N and I went at the soft cake, which tasted of egg whites, and wondered where the chocolate was. Right at the end of the dessert, we realised the cake had been sitting in a white chocolate sauce all along. Monsieur Corlou, ladies and gentlemen.

US$40 a head was a steal for such fine food. Dinner at a decent French restaurant in Singapore could cost S$100 a head, sans foie gras. And above all, at Le Beaulieu, we learnt there was more to dining than devouring and paying - we learnt to pay attention.

LE BEAULIEU
Sofitel Metropole Hanoi
15 Ngo Quyen Street

The crash-landee

She was a neighbour I never knew. Was she 30something? Or 20something? I don’t know. (My mother, the HDB detective, hears different ages from different neighbours, some of whom have put their 4D money where their mouth is.) What was her favourite song? What colour were her favourite shoes? What were her fantasies? I don’t know.

All I know is, civil defence was on the way – and still she jumped. Over Cheer Chen songs I am playing, I hear the wood clapper and funereal chant. Namo Amitabha.

A crash-landing

Out of the blue, an ah soh who lives in the next block rang us this morning.

“Where’s your mommy?” she said, as aunties often do.

My father had picked up the phone, so he said, “My mommy? My mommy has been dead for a long time.”

But she had called with some serious news: Someone was dead at the foot of my block, someone who seemed to have jumped out a window.

My father and I walked from window to window in our home to see that someone for ourselves. What we saw, in the end, was bright red newly-spilled blood, a handful of policemen and the contours of a body – man? woman? young? older? it was impossible to tell – that the police had covered with white canvas.

I looked up and down the block, looking for an open window. Which home had he or she fallen from?

“It’s either the 5th floor or the 7th floor. Windows are wide open,” I said to my father.

He went to the next room to tell my mother, who had come out of the bathroom.

I stood at the window myself, feeling nothing. Then, the tears came. If indeed it was a suicide, how desperate had he or she been to think of jumping, then do it? The worst I wished for, the one time I was desperate, was a convenient car accident to end everything. I did not think of jumping, of actually, actively dying. I am sad for this someone. Namo Amitabha.

Truly deeply

The first time I heard of the D spot, I was probably still in primary school. There was some silly Taiwan cartoon about some silly monks which I watched with my brother and cousin and in it, there is an old monk teaching new monks how to breathe very, very deeply.

氣運丹田 – 深呼吸 –

So someone breathes in such depth, sucking in so much air from all around him into his nostrils, towards the dantian, that everything not nailed down flies to his face – including an older monk. Breathing with the D spot was no joke, that much I knew then.

When I was in the choir in secondary school, we were told to stand and sing with the dantian, never mind that we didn’t know where it was. Our teacher said it was the diaphragm. Or she might have said it was the abdomen. I did what I could with my stomach. And maybe my intestines.

In yoga school, I have been learning how to breathe deeply and the trick, I am told, is to leave the nose out of it.

Pinch a point at the base of the neck with the hand when you take a breath, my teacher says. Think that you are breathing in and out there. Your breaths should be a bit deeper, a bit lower, than when you were breathing in with the nose and out with the mouth. You should sound like Darth Vader. Keep breathing but without bodily heaving.

Lie down on a floor with the buttocks against the wall. Keep the legs closed and up on the wall. Breathe. Be here for about a minute.

Keeping the legs on the wall, open them sideways such that they look like a V. Keep breathing. Be here for about a minute.

Keeping the legs on the wall, lower them sideways such that you seem to sit on the wall with the soles kissing each other. Keep breathing. Your breaths are now so deep, so low, you seem to be inhaling and exhaling from somewhere far below your belly button, close to your pubic region?

You are breathing with your dantian now, my teacher announces.

Oh. Oooh. Well, watch out, world.

Life actually

At this large terminal we call life, someone is always arriving or departing. Others are on the way. Some of us are in transit, with an eye on VIP departures.

When Leslie departed (you know which Leslie), I made many calls to many friends just to wail, “Leslie died!”

When Christopher Reeve died, I SMSed Mr T. He was so shaken by the news, he took more than an hour to reply.

On Tuesday night, he called me to tell me, “Dana Reeve died.”

Poor Dana. She died of lung cancer, less than two years after Christopher died. I had happy news for Mr T though. Ms C’s baby boy has arrived, I said.

+ + +

Fortnights ago, we were tasked to pick the nicest picture of my mother from a pile my uncle had taken of her at his studio, which he would then enlarge. That’s about 20 photos of the same woman in the same I-got-it-at-OG-for-less-than-$40 blue kimono-style blouse. But to me, they were all different.

“You don’t look like you,” I said of one picture – and about 10 others.

“Why’s your smile so weird? All your grandkids will say, ‘Why’s Ah Mah’s mouth so weird?’” I said of another. (Ah Mah means paternal grandmother. Even in my hypothetical mentions of my mother’s hypothetical grandkids, I make them my brothers’ kids, not mine.)

She protested, “Your uncle and aunt kept telling me to smile wider.”

Okay okay.

My uncle had numbered the photos. So my picks were No.7 and No.11; my uncle and aunt’s picks were No.18, then No.7; my father’s pick was No.6.

In No.7, she has a soft smile, the smile I like, and is facing my left. In No.11, she has a similar smile and is facing my right. Her smile is even softer in No.6 (my father and I were on the same page, after all), except the picture is somewhat shadowy. In No.18, her beam is wide. She looks nothing like the woman we know.

As for my mother, her pick was No.13. I didn’t get it at first. But then I saw what she saw. Her half-smile here was the same as that in her old photos, when she was young, half-smiling and looking keenly ahead at someone or something off-camera – was it the future?

“You looked like this when you were 19, too,” I said.

“I’ve looked like this all of my life,” she said.

Many ah soh her age prepare nice pictures of themselves. Just in case. I might not have known what she was up to, had I not studied No.13.

+ + +

On Wednesday morning, I picked a nice Washington Post obituary of Dana for publication: the only one that told of the night she swam with Christopher at a pond, after a 10-day flirtation, and gave him their first kiss.

That afternoon, a good girl friend told me that she was pregnant.

That evening, in an old tradition of welcoming new arrivals to this world, Ms H and I went shopping for kid-sized stuff for Ms C’s boy.

Bookmarks

Sometimes a movie or a song works as a bookmark.

Maybe the movie, True Lies or whatever, didn't matter much to you when you were first watching it and it was the last day of the A Levels.

But catching the movie on cable years afterwards, it somehow takes you back to that page in your life. You remember that you were 18 and what a beautiful day it was and when the closing credits rolled - Sunshine Of Your Love comes rocking on and you run out with the song in your head and you run and run and run all the way to the MRT on some sort of adrenalin high. That song, that sunny day, that wide-necked top, those too-tight jeans. You really remember. You even remember that the next day, you were wearing the same clothing when you went and sat for the SAT and there was an American boy, with a head of cute curly hair, who smiled at you.

So you are still watching the movie - "Arnie, hasn't he always been hotter than Sly?" you say to no one - and you have cranked up the volume as you wait for your song. But just as the song comes on, the tot next door calls to you. So you go to the door, bouncing up and down to Sunshine Of Your Love like a loony - and it's bad for the ankles, your 29-going-on-30-year-old ankles - and she sees you. She shrieks her happy shriek. She starts to mini-bounce to a song she has never heard before...

Maybe when I next chance on the movie, I will remember that day when I was 18 and this day when she was two.

OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS | Day Eight

Yu sang in this house is an epic. Not for us the mainstream thing - tossing raw fish and everything else all at once, drowning it in a dribble of New Year cliches, getting it over with in under five minutes - no, that is not for us.

Ours is Pearl River, once-upon-a-time-in-Canton, this-is-how-my-great-grandmother-did-it yu sang. The fish does not appear until Act Two. Act One is just lime juice and sugar, which is mixed on a dish until the sugar melts. The fish is tossed in the juice in Act Two, for the fish - which was sliced by hand by my mother and laid out by me on paper for drying purposes - to soak up the sweetness and sourness. Act Three: Oil is added. Stir, stir, stir. Act Four: Salt, pepper and a dash of alcohol are added. Stir, stir, stir. Acts Five to N: Sesame, peanut, pickled ginger, pickled onion, parsley, chilli, radish, carrot, et cetera are added one after another. The idea is to start with the small things that will stick to the fish. After 30 minutes of stirring - we are too out of breath from the chopstick action to mouth many cliches - dinner is served.

OLD DOG, NEW TRICKS | Day One

I have two brothers, Fei and Bak. Fei was born one year after me and Bak, nine years after him. (Nope, there was no planning on my parents' part.) Bak tells me that I trust Fei more than I trust him - he's right - and I tell him, "What to do? I've known your brother longer." I've known him longer: He has been there at all the New Years that I remember.

When we were kids, New Year was a time for coin-shaped chocolates, White Rabbit Creamy Candies and our grandmother’s "yam shrimps" (fried ribbons of yam and ginger, a savoury Cantonese snack we never learned to love). On the first night of the year, seven of us - our parents, uncle, aunt, cousin and us - squeezed into our uncle's car to go to our grandaunt and granduncle's one-room home in Tiong Bahru; the adults would talk among themselves as the kids squatted on the floor and snacked; our grandaunt and granduncle would hand each of us a lai si of $1.10. ($1.10 for cheut yan tau dei: The dollar denoted people that we, the coin, were to rise head and shoulders above.)

After they passed away, we were a little lost. We didn't know where to go when the first night of the year came round. So we turned to calling on Jackie Chan – at the movies, that is. His First Strike - he skis in Ukraine! swims with sharks in Australia! speaks Cantonese and no one dubs him! - was one of the fun ones. But soon my parents started saying, "Jackie Chan's losing it."

Now my uncle, aunt and cousin just come round for chitchat and dinner (this year's special was my mother's pun choi, basically a big buffet in a basin which would turn into the loveliest, slurpiest leftovers the next day). But before that, in the morning, my brothers and I pay our uncle and aunt a call at their home in Bukit Timah. Then we walk to the temple round the corner - spouting silly rubbish all the way as Fei and I tease Bak and half-tell him tales of New Years past - to pay our respects to our late grandparents. This time that the three of us spend together is my favourite New Year tradition for now.

Purple roses

If ever my consciousness does converse with my subconsciousness, here is how their heart-to-heart might go.

Mr Con: We were there at all her kisses, right, which weren’t that terrific, right?
Ms Sub: More or less, yah.
Mr Con: Then how come you know things I don’t know? How did you come up with that kiss in last night’s dream?
Ms Sub: I improvised lah.
Mr Con: Don’t bluff. What about that –
Me: Eh, eh, eh. Shaddup leh.

So…I was with Viggo in my dream. It was a sweet dream, oh, it was sweet. I’m not about to kiss and tell – well, not more than what Mr Con and Ms Sub have told – but shall we say I woke up with an idiotic smile which would not go away, not even when I got to the office.

Maybe, just maybe, this, this waking life, is a dream and when I wake up, Viggo will be there again.

No…I didn’t believe that, not even when I was typing it. As beautiful as the butterfly dream is, I don’t think Zhuangzi means for us to think there is more to our dreams than we think. I think he means for us to think there is less to our waking lives than we think. I think I should stop thinking and go back to bed.

Good night, all, sweet dreams.

In search of a lost self

I used to know this 17-year-old girl who wrote these intelligent, eloquent essays in under two hours. I used to be that girl. That girl has now devolved into me, this woman who wonders how she could have said all these things she meant to say about tear-jerking telethons in an editing-proof watertight essay – four days after it was published in a very rubbish version.

Where was that girl when I needed her?    

Saturday

Some days are more equal than other days. A couple Saturdays ago, the baby brother turned 19; I was told that I would be talking to Takeshi Kaneshiro, then, after a few happy hours, I was told I would not be; in a blithe burst of spontaneity, the whole family went KTV-ing - but the night ended on a less happy note when I was slow with my credit card, my uncle beat me to the bill and my father was silently unhappy. (And I knew, I just knew.)

I remember that Saturday. I also remember that as the day my new little neighbour paid a call on us for the first time. Little Ms T is two. She's a smart girl. She's not a girl who will agree to kai kai with you because you buy her candy. She's a girl who says no. But in a big change of heart that day, she was paying us a visit, playing on our computer and squealing at the wonders of the sliding small black thing that we call a mouse.

When I told her that she had to go home as I had to go out, she said she would kai kai with me. Hand in hand, we walked to our lift lobby, and as she walked her adorable two-year-old's wobbly walk, always leaning against me trustingly, I remembered another little girl.

I realised that once upon a time, I had been a fool wishing to be loved by a little girl more than she would love her own mother, while wishing her father would love me more than he loved his own little girl. I realised I had been ridiculous. And I had to realise it before I could put it behind me...

Postscripts

Postscript One

I am doing the most mundane of things - peeling a long label off a plastic box in the kitchen - when from the far side of my consciousness, a film floats back to me.

Far Side Of The Moon...it's a lovely French Canadian film about a loser academic trying to get his thesis on the cosmos read, dealing with his mother's recent death and trying not to kill his only other loved one: his younger brother, an annoying weatherman. A fluid film, it can flow from a childhood memory about a day at the laundry - straight to space. One moment our eyes are on a boy who is watching a washing machine, the next moment we are on the other side of the machine door, and the next moment the round machine door morphs into the round window of a rocket and we are adrift. It's by Robert Lepage, who not only directs and portrays both brothers - it was his auntie-like face which bobbed, without warning, to the surface of my memory today, which is not as scary as it might sound, seriously - but also directed it when it was his one-man play!

Yep...because I didn't know Lepage the film director was the same man as Lepage the stage director. I loved his first film, The Confessional, and I knew Ms O loved his plays and I didn't know it was the same man. I just didn't. Not until I heard he would be here in June last year with his play, The Busker's Opera. Then he was here, in my country, and I was there, at his play, and he was on stage for a Q & A and I asked him a question!

But I digress. What I mean to say is, with Far Side Of The Moon, I have six and three-thirds fave films...

Postscript Two

There I am at Kaiju Shakedown, my fave Asian film blog of the moment, and what have we here?

Chen Kaige has given a quote on his own film, The Promise, that goes, "I think the way I did The Promise is very interesting - I told myself that the first thing to consider is not the story, not the characters, but the imagination. Yes, you have some real material from life, but you have to eat it up and make it yours to express. Adults eventually lose their imagination about everything. Only children can have a great imagination about everything, because they have a whole future. You can say you are old if three things around you start to occupy your mind: one is that you start to love money; second, you're afraid of death; third, you don't have any imagination." (Kaiju Shakedown, Monsters and Critics.)

Maybe, just maybe, what we have is an instance of yan gao shou di, when the eye is high and the hand is low i.e. when there is too much imagination but not as much inventiveness to express what was imagined.