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.
2 comments:
I think I've said this before, but what the hell. It's worth repeating: it's the mistakes we've made that make us better for our lives now.
You have to screw up as a 25 year old to be able to be a better 25 year old. Of course, that always takes time.
Or from Proust, because I like to show off ;p:
"There is no such thing," he said, "as a man, however clever he may be, who has never at some time in his youth uttered words, or even led a life, that he would not prefer to see expunged from memory. He should not find this absolutely a matter for regret, as he cannot be sure he would ever have become as wise as he is, if indeed getting wisdom is a possiblility for any of us, had he not traversed all the silly or detestable incarnations that are bound to precede that final one. I know there are young men, sons and grandsons of distinguised men, whose tutors, since their earliest high-school years, have taught them every nobility of soul and excellent precept of morality. The lives of such men may contain nothing they would wish to abolish; they may be happy to endorse every word they have ever uttered. But they are the poor in spirit, the effete descendants of doctrinarians, whose only wisdoms are negative and sterile. Wisdom cannot be inherited―one must discover it for oneself, but only after following a course that no one can follow in our stead; no one can spare us that experience, for wisdom is only a point of view on things. The lives of men you admire, attitudes you think are noble, haven't been laid down by their fathers or tutors―they were preceded by very different beginnings, and were influenced by whatever surrounded them, whther it was good, bad, or indifferent. Each of them is the outcome of a struggle, each of them is a victory..."
showing off is good for the soul. :P
some souls.
proust, i gotta get round to reading him. after you know pamuk, gopnik...
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