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.