At our wits’ end at the year-end

Friday, 10amish. The very dead deadline for my Best & Worst 2007 Western and Eastern entertainment wraps is dusk; I am very brain-dead; I have warned a sub that my stories might be very late and she has warned me that she might have to kill me. Clock is ticking. Brain is deading. I have to complain to someone.
“I don’t know how to write! How to Best & Worst gossip? What’s good gossip what’s bad gossip it’s either exciting gossip or boring gossip what! What five Bests what three Worsts everything is the worst what!”
“Have you told Meigao?” (Meigao is Ms M’s Mandarinised nickname for the ed.)
“Can’t be bothered.”
“I love your attitude.”

Friday, 4pmish. Ms H and I are worrying about other people’s wraps when I should be writing mine.
harry potter not in book wrap!
i know, i know. n lust caution not in film wrap!
sicko, death proof, were they even shown in sg. no 881! but sam has it in his music wrap
sam is good. but alamak. book wrap no harry potter. film wrap no lust caution. wheres the zeitgeist? talk to dt?
i cant get through to him
i try?
“Eh eh eh I kaypoh ah. Your best-movie wrap…Sicko and Death Whatever shown here meh?”
“Yes they opened here lah.”
“Meh? One week? Two days? Your list sounds like you hid in your home and saw lots of ang mor DVDs leh.”
“No they opened here lah.”
“Okay.” (Ms H was right. You can’t get through to DT.)
i tried. he said they were shown. shall i say something to the supes casually?
no need. put them in ur ent wrap so i can put them in my preamble? u can save the paper from irrelevance!
i try i try

Friday, 7pmish. My stories have gone to Meigao. The worst has come to the worst.
“Are you saying Anna Nicole Smith’s death is a good thing? I’m not comfortable with it.”
“Well, in death, she won? Front-page treatment, thoughtful essays, she got an Economist obituary, remember? XY wrote about that? In Culture Vulture?”
“Don’t remember…I’m not comfortable with it.”
“Er” (eating my words and my attitude) “what’s the Best gossip? What’s the Worst gossip? Best to whom? Worst to whom? Paris Hilton in jail, I turned that into a good thing, should that be turned into a bad thing now? We don’t have enough Bests.”
“One year and there are not enough Bests?”
“Er. Britney is not a Best? Lindsay, is that a Best? Amy Winehouse, is that a Best?”
“No. Amy Winehouse is bad. ……… Do celeb babies?”
“Er. No one new was born this year?”
“Do celeb babies.”
“Okay.” (Relevance shrelevance. Hey I only work here okay?)

Today, 8amish. The clouds of sleep are clearing and I think I hear… “Eh I saw three of the five best movies leh,” Fei is saying somewhere in the house. (He is up? Who else is up?) So DT has made Fei’s day with his fanboy’s wrap; I can’t complain about that; my mind hazes over with more sleep.

Idol drama

What sets a singer apart from a truly talented KTV warbler is interpretation. The singer sings somebody else’s song as if it is his own, as if he has never heard the original – and I know as a karaoke enthusiast just how hard that is.

Taiwan is KTV country so maybe more Taiwanese, coming to a talent contest, are able to appreciate how good a contestant is when he sings a familiar song very, very differently. Of course, they then go try the song they have rediscovered at karaoke, trying their best to sound as good as the contestant.

And this year everyone, from the man in the night market to the comic from Everybody Speaks Nonsense, wanted to sing the Gary Chaw song Betrayal very, very sadly – as popularised by Aska Yang, the contestant from One Million Star (click here).

I don’t know how he does it and I don’t know how much of it is instinctive but he somehow opens up the song and lets in a lot more emotional colour. Okay, in English: When he sings it you feel it. Surely the Taiwanese were feeling it (one of his nicknames is Yang-tsung Wei, Onion Wei, a play on his Chinese name and his talent for reducing them to tears) and singing it (Betrayal is No.1 in the KTV charts this year). It helped that there then came Jam Hsiao, a PK contestant who challenged Yang with his very own Broadwayish version of Betrayal; out of the blue there were not one but two interpretations to admire and aspire to (click here). (Onion? Jam? Yes, and there is also a Yoga Lin.)

For coming close to beating Yang, Hsiao became a star overnight. (Okay, over three weeks in the contest.) The 20-year-old has done a duet with A-mei and will release his own record next year. Yang went on to quit the show when he was found to have lied about his age (29, not 24) and faked a Xerox of his IC. Had he stayed in the contest, he would have won it, not that he needs to. He is so preposterously popular now, a capacity crowd would want to hear him sing phone numbers – very, very heartrendingly.

FILM | The day good taste died

Good taste died in Hong Kong cinema in the 1960s the day Loke Wan Tho of the high-class Cathay studio died in a plane crash; bad taste in the shape of low-class Shaw films then dominated the decade.

That is the Chinese film history my father feeds me at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays which I have always filed away with every intent of checking every fact before I unleash it upon the unsuspecting world as an amateur movie historian.

Now I don’t have to. Grady Hendrix, a true professional, has gone and written that story, fleshing it out with more details and theories than I could have come up with in a zillion years (“Peter Chen plays the romantic lead in Mambo Girl but really, who cares? Actors at Cathay were an endless gallery of nobodies, with the faces of civil servants and spines of spaghetti, no match for the radiant screen goddesses who surrounded them”).

Read him here.

And here. (Post-1997 Hong Kong cinema is slimmer and sexier than ever!)

And here. (Lust and no caution in Japan’s 1960s Nikkatsu action cinema!)

And here. (The Spielbergs of Nippon’s porn!)

And here. (A celebrity has directed a movie based on the book said celebrity wrote - it isn’t terrible!)

FILM | Good Mr Yee, bad Mr Yee

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart” – W.H. Auden

It was chilly in the hotel in Kyoto and my mind fevered, the night I met Eileen Chang’s Mr Yee.

(LUST, CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Legend has it that Mr Yee is based on Ms Chang’s first husband, Hu Lan-cheng, a onetime official in the puppet government during the Sino-Japanese war, a writer as cold-eyed as she was. (He once wrote, “I cannot accept all sorts of things about Eileen. She never bemoans the state of the universe and pities the people nor sympathises with anybody nor donates anything at all. In her world no one is aggrandised and no one is aggrieved. She is extremely selfish, extremely cruel. She is extremely severe with good people and good things and with ordinary people and ordinary things she is also this strict. She really is egalitarian.”)

In Lust, Caution the short story the heroine has seduced (and been seduced by) Mr Yee, a collaborator, to spy on him for a few amateur actors turned amateur Resistance assassins. The tale is told through the stream of her consciousness and he breaks in only twice. The first time we hear his thoughts he is at a jeweller’s with her and feeling slightly sorry for himself: He thought she was drawn to him, not only to his power but also to him. He knew women would want presents, oh, he knew, but he thought… He thought he could indulge a little longer in his middle-aged man’s fantasy of love. (She doesn’t hear his thoughts but when she sees his sorrowful smile…she wavers. She dies for it.) The second time we hear his thoughts he is at home and fearing for his safety after the botched assassination, blaming his missus for bringing home the spy…and feeling somewhat smug: So she did love him. She had to have hated him before her execution. But he who has no venom is no man. Were he not such a man she couldn’t have loved him. Anyway, alive, she was his woman and dead, she is and will be his ghost.

This Mr Yee is ruthless and remorseless. Drop-dead hot somehow. He occupied my mind for two entire days as Ms Chang’s words played in my head over and over. She had slept with the enemy, hadn’t she, and known the warm hands that came with the cold unrepentant heart.

I wonder what she would have thought of Lee Ang’s Mr Yee (Tony Leung), who slinks home in Lust, Caution the film after his lover’s execution, steals into her bedroom and sits on her bed pensively. This Mr Yee is the picture of ageing romantic regret, the latest in a long line of men of non-action from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s reserved swordsman Li Mubai to Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome cowboy Ennis Del Mar. He isn’t the man I pictured. Being also middle-aged and male, might Mr Lee have been too sensitively sympathetic?

Yes way

We won, I think.

When BVI said last month they were releasing Lust, Caution without Tony Leung’s bits I declared war on them. I was as indignant as I had been in my teens, when I would write in to the broadsheet to complain about avaricious distributors who had cut movies to sell more tickets. No I was more indignant than I had ever been. Didn’t BVI realise a movie like Lust, Caution was more than a movie? A movie that is Eileen Chang, Lee Ang and Tony throwing caution to the wind, a movie that has been the talk of Greater China, a movie that is making front-page news in Shin Min, is not just a movie. It is an event. It is as important this year as Beijing 2008 will be next year. Did BVI think nobody in Singapore would notice the missing bits? Could they be that out of touch? But they were and I couldn’t write in to complain, being inconveniently in the employ of the broadsheet. So I held a council of war with S, who is smarter than me, then sold an idea for a story to KC and DT: Let’s go after BVI, let’s go after every movie-cutting distributor, let’s go to town on every movie that has been sneakily snipped by a distributor. The plan was to get everyone mad so they would get even with the distributors, boycott BVI, boycott Lust, Caution (NC16). “This is your NKF,” I said to DT. But the clock was ticking; he was taking an eternity with the story; I couldn’t leave things to chance. Shin Min had announced to all and sundry on its front page that not a lot was left of Lust, Caution (I heart Shin Min). SF had stated in her review that Lust, Caution (NC16) was a lesser movie (I heart SF - and I checked with the editor, who checked with KF, that the review would make front-page blurbs). I then mass-mailed my boycott appeal, which made the news in a Chinese freesheet and a Chinese broadsheet the day DT’s story was published.

When the movie opened at No.1 it looked like we had lost. Then it fell to No.4, then No.7. Its gross of about $500,000, on 20 prints, is nothing to write home about. Re-releasing a movie is costly. Would BVI be putting money into the R21 re-release if they had been making money in the NC16 release? I think not.

Am I over the moon? No. But it is nice to have a thing that went wrong go right.

No mood

The editor has intuited that Tony is Chinese cinema’s best leading man sometime between seeing some stills of Lust, Caution and investigating the truth about his sad childhood on Wikipedia. So in the thrill of her discovery – and because nobody else had the time – I ended up having to write a “why Tony’s the bestest” story for Sunday in 24 hours flat.

And I didn’t write the bestest story, I know, but I had a nasty feeling when she said to send it to the rewriter, a former Fleet Streeter who is intelligent but has a tendency to overwrite. Soon enough the story came back with comments like, “Why are we writing this story?” So I told her the ed wanted a “why Tony’s the bestest” story, 60cm, and this was my attempt to rave meaningfully. Like I said, she is intelligent. She gave me an “ah, that kind of story” look and said I should rewrite the intro to better contextualise Tony and the story would be okay. So I thought maybe I was wrong about her.

But I wasn’t. In a matter of mere minutes she came to the ed and me with an idea: Why don’t we sex things up with sexy stills of Lust, Caution, sexy allusions to the sex scenes, sexy Lust, Caution puns? Okay. So I wrote about Tony’s testes, nudity, emotional nakedness, which no one in Singapore would see in the NC16 cut. But the ed said, “Let’s not rub it in.” She had a go at the story. The rewriter had a go at it. By the time it came back the intro was a long Lust, Caution pun I didn’t get. Who would start a story about Tony’s greatness with wordplay so meaningless? Oh foreign talent would. Also the ed had made Ms M call Mr and Ms Expert then beefed up the intro with two quotes on Tony’s greatness. I felt sick.

“Er isn’t it like quoting experts on how powerful the MM is?” I said.

“Not everybody knows Tony’s great what,” the ed said. Right. She hadn’t known before she saw those stills of Lust, Caution so how could Singapore know? Infernal what?

Anyways there was no time for me to unwrite the rewrite. It was out of my hands. All that could be done was to have my byline deleted. Tony deserves a better story that I could write within 24 hours, I know.

The dresses are alive…

It’s all too much, and that’s where the loveliness – the couture moment – begins. The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don’t seem camp. They don’t seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is – younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little moments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of our life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up – Adam Gopnik

The day I had my first period and became a woman, so to speak, I was 13, coming home from the Pasir Ris chalets with the clan. I was wearing my favourite white cotton blouse with epaulettes (made in Japan; found in the $10 bargain bin in Isetan by Ma; fits me now), red berms (…don’t fit me now, no). For my first date I travelled to Melbourne; then I tried to look like I couldn’t be bothered in crazy hair, crumpled slacks, off-one-shoulder top that was sliding this way and that crazily. The day I was interviewed for my first job I was wearing Ma’s close-fitting black sheath. Awkwardly, under an ugly beige jacket - I used not to know better.

We all have them, the vital, voluptuous moments – the little emotional events that become our history. And although I have not always been fashion-conscious (in my benighted Before-L years I didn’t know Miu Miu was by Prada, Miuccia Prada, and associated the label with kittens) most of my memories of those moments have always been tinted, textured by what I was wearing. Sometimes it was the moment that was so singular, my body memorised it down to how my dress was hugging me. Sometimes I was so in love with the dress, my mind hugged all my self-romanticised moments in it.

Some garments, as we know, have soundtracks. Maybe it is the flounce of the fabric, the swish of the skirt, the ping, ping, ping of light ricocheting off that glistening goldish dress. Maybe it is the murmur of the name that came to us when we zipped up that skin-tight dress for the first time in the fitting room, the name that came with a million dollar question: Will he love me in this? It may even be an actual orchestral soundtrack.

There is a navy and white slightly stiff boat-necked sheath that was my 2046 dress. After seeing the achingly beautiful set-in-1966 show twice in two days I wore the 60sish sheath to work and all I could hear in my head, particularly while negotiating a narrow aisle between cubicles crammed with computers and phones, was the swaying soundtrack. I was at work but not. My steps were not mine but Faye Wong’s. And then the music died one day, when after an angry call from a boyfriend I distractedly dressed for work in the sheath. Little did I know that there would be increasingly livid calls and finally a nail-in-the-coffin voice message. By noon I could not be at work any more but couldn’t quite be at home. My clearest memory that day was asking a cabbie to stop some distance from my block. Bending stiffly in the stiff dress I squatted uneasily and pressed the phone to the ear to hear the break-up message. I played it 10 times, 20 times. Then deleted it, straightened up, smoothed down the sheath and tried to walk free. It has been two years and I am okay. But the dress hasn’t got its music back. Last week he wrote asking to be let into my life again. I refuse to reply; I refuse to even remember what I was wearing while reading that email.

Something old, something new 2

In the first few frames rolling hills roll, undulating waves undulate, mournful music mourns, impressing on us an impression of pastoral China-ness. Now we see a village sign. Now we are in the village. Now we see and hear a band, men and women in white uniforms, playing and working their way past paddy fields, up steps, to a house. Now we are in the house and near a transparent box, nearer – face to face with the star of the show, my uncle, 80, mouth agape, as if he is amazed to be in the air-conditioned comfort of his coffin on a summer’s day.

It came in the mail the other day, his funeral, an all-out seven-day send-off deep in the Chinese countryside, on DVD. We didn’t know what to think. Ma, who I think loves her older brother more than she likes him, had visited him on his sickbed in the village last month but didn’t want to watch his funeral, not all on her own. Fei and I wanted to watch Bourne, Jason Bourne, not two discs by a village Zhang Yimou. Well, we watched the funeral and I came to admire Mr Auteur’s long continuous takes, which set us shoulder to shoulder with all the action. With my cousins, who are crying as they circle the coffin in multicoloured clothes (don’t they have to be in solemn colours, eh?); as their sire is covered with cloth to be spared the indignity of having his decay on display; as they are handed, while pillars built of brown cakes loom on the altar in the background, the mourning – white linen gowns that are Ming-dynasty fabulous (ah).

My uncle’s one and only son died young. Having lived with the Cultural Revolution and learned nothing from it, he believed sons to be more equal than daughters, the daughter whose other half renounced his family name to bear my uncle’s to be more equal than the other daughters and the grandsons bearing the family name to be more equal than the other grandsons. So we watch as the renouncer is anointed as the chief mourner and handed a short staff…

But now the soundtrack has become a swelling song. I have never heard it before but let me bet you 10 yuan the title is The Good People of the Plum River or something. Mr Auteur pans to the yard and I see it isn’t the radio. It is someone in the multitalented band singing with keyboard accompaniment. I have never seen a busier funeral band, actually. Now they are ambling halfway across the village, drums a-banging and trumpets a-blasting, to grandly receive guests. Now they are ambling out again to grandly take delivery of garlands. Night falls and they are not only singing but also dancing in all their getai glory. Four women are swirling around in Chinese costumes, then twirling sleeves that have been tacked on their band uniforms, then swirling around in slips – to the Alishan song by Teresa Teng, she who still reigns supreme in Chinese hearts. Seeing the show are chattering children, nattering women and twinkling men, one of whom has just fingered his armpit. “You saw what that man said?” Ma says. “What did he say?” “He is laughing at that dancer’s hairy armpits.” Mr Auteur pans back to Mr Armpit and I see it now. “But he has hairy armpits himself!”

All the village are here, bushy armpits and all. Hell, it is the funeral of the year. They will be here too for the finale. They are the finale - an all-encompassing procession at dawn that encompasses dozens of children, two by two, shouldering banners on bamboo poles, the band and everyone else. At the end of the procession - after my uncle is carted to a crematorium rather than a cemetery, one of the few times the funeral breaks with tradition to not break the new laws - the closing credits come on. Somebody has brushed on New-Year-red paper all the contributors to the funeral fund and as the camera pans down and up we see, satisfyingly, each and every name and number - a round of applause, please, for the village Zhang Yimou.

Something old, something new

In 笑傲江湖 (sorry, there is too much meaning in the title for me to translate it), Linghu Chong, swordsman in a secret operation, takes a wine test at the Plum Villa by the West Lake. To advance to the next challenge and the next (it is a long compelling chapter, vintage Louis Cha), he has to taste his host’s wine and analyse it. So he takes a sip. “I can’t put my finger on it, but the wine tastes as if it is more than 100 years old, yet three years old.” His host cannot believe his ears. He won the wine from a Turk in the West three years ago and the Turk, gracious in his defeat in the duel, told him the wine would not keep after his journey back to the East and he would need to distil it again, which he did. So the old wine was old-new, or new-old, and Linghu Chong could tell…

When I think of China now I think of that new-old wine. If you bear in mind the new-oldness of China you won’t be taken aback at the news of boys being abducted to become slaves and women being murdered to become corpse brides. The Middle Kingdom lives feudally on, side by side with the People’s Republic of China that chats about such scandals on the Internet. Cultural DNA dies hard.

Take the chauffeur of my cousin’s then-bureaucrat husband in Shenzhen. He would charge through a traffic jam as if he owned all the roads, cycle paths and footpaths. Hey, if he didn’t own them his boss or boss’s boss did. I remember the bumpy, up-kerb down-kerb rides in his Jeep from the time I went to Shenzhen with my mother in the 90s. It didn’t feel like we were in an action film, no. It felt like we were in a Chinese costume drama, driven about by a mandarin’s dogsbody who would crush all the carts in his way – because he could. His Jeep might have been new but the assumptions that his behaviour was based on were as old as the hills.

Lost and found 2

Back at work after three days off. As some 72 hours of mail came in my eye caught “Grady Hendrix” and “Re: zeeyee and tcheky” and my heart pirouetted. Oh my –

History: Mr Hendrix manned a rollicking blog on Asian gossip and Asian movies at Kaiju Shakedown. When it closed I wrote him to say that I missed the blog and that if he missed the gossip here was the news of the day on Zeeyee Zhang’s hot date with either Tchéky Karyo or his clone (it was multimillionaire Vivi Nevo actually – naturally). He wrote back to thank me – he wrote back! – so why would he write again?

Oh…the blog is back. At Variety Asia. Okay, so it was a mass mail for the eyes of all who had ever emailed him – not for mine only, aiya – but the blog is back!

Lost and found

You are you. An IC is an IC. You aren’t your IC, it isn’t you and you shouldn’t need it: Why should you need more proof of you than you?

Pardon the outbreak of third-rate philosophising. I lost my IC for a few hours yesterday (with my wallet – with my Party World KTV gold card! which I was to record reflexively as a very important personal object when I filled in a lost-and-found form) and it has been a whole heap of work.

I have a Taoist vaccine against reality (things aren’t lost; when they aren’t with you they are still somewhere in the cosmos, where they have always been – er, doesn’t Zhuangzi say so?) so all I felt at first was mild alarm. “Hold the sashimi?” I told the Ngee Ann Sushi Tei staff as soon as I established the wallet had escaped. I searched my mind for the last time I had touched it: Party World? Heeren? “I’m going to get my wallet back. I’m coming back.” “You can cancel…?” “Could you hold? I’m coming back.”

I did go back to the sashimi after an hour, wallet-less, IC-less, gold card-less; I had $50, a loan from Fei’s girl, who happened to be near (a drop of luck for me in the ocean of not-luck); I needed my fix of fish. Reports of the loss had been made to the mall, the bank…what more was a girl to do, right?

Wrong. When I came home Pa piled on the paranoia. What if someone sold my IC to snakeheads? Used it to borrow money from loan sharks? Buy mobile phones? That someone wouldn’t even have to look like the woman on my IC. That someone could be a man. Those telcos wouldn’t care. So I had to go phone them and ask them not to sell anything to anyone using my IC. I had to go to the police: a sweet young policeman with small eyes who spelt Ngee Ann “Mgee Ann”. I could have corrected him. But he seemed such a sweet young man, oh, and he had a gun.

To tell the truth, I am a veteran in the wallet-losing department. I misplaced it twice in my schooldays, in the pre-9/11, pre-paranoia age. The first time it was sent back to me. The second time it was sent to TransitLink, which eventually gave it back to me when I eventually went to reapply for a concession card. I am truly not a terminal optimist so I didn’t bank on getting it back a third time. The call came from Heeren, however, after I went to the police. A cleaner had found it in a rubbish bin. The cash was somewhere else in the cosmos, the ez-link too. But everything else was safe. It was really raining luck.

So, you know, I have told the police to hold their search. Now there are notes to send the telcos so they won’t have me arrested when they find me in their shop using my IC. It’s a whole heap of work – I haven’t had time for Secret!

Four candles

At 6.46pm I stole out of work (after sending some more career-suicide notes out to tell the supes what I think of the story schedule tomorrow). I had to be home for a birthday dinner, mine. I had said I didn’t want anything fancy so Ma made abalone conpoy fish maw soup and stir-fried enough noodles for about two armies. I had said I didn’t want any cake so Fei and his girl P got a black forest.

“I won’t be eating it,” I said (desserts after dinner have a strange way of showing on the scales the next morning).

“But we will be,” Bak said.

“What about W next door?” Fei said.

Okay, okay. I did get my own way on the matter of, matter. As they were about to tear out tissue to eat the cake on, I said, “Save paper?” So the five of them – Pa, Ma, Fei, P and Bak – used only one piece between them. Trees…three-one…trees…three-one…it wasn’t a bad day.

A tony day

So my mother calls me during lunch to ask if she should stay in Chungking Mansion when she goes to Hong Kong, oh, this weekend. Is it a good establishment?

“It is on Nathan Road……” I say as my mind zooms in and out of Chungking Express – Tony – Takeshi Kaneshiro – Lin Ching-hsia, blonde hair, white heels, on the run from Indian hit men in the maze of Chungking Mansion – “……there are many Indians there……it is Hong Kong, it should be safe.”

Today is Tony Day, when a few Tony-loving friends and I have a birthday party for him (it is his 45th birthday and our third party); my mother and brother are taking a capricious trip à la Faye Wong to Hong Kong in time for a birthday fireworks display (10 of the 50 years under “one country, two systems” have flashed by); it is all quite Chungking Express.

Then……and now.

Did you know…

The boys, Pa, Fei and Bak, talk the talk over breakfast every Saturday. I just listen and learn.

• The employment act applies to employees who earn a salary not exceeding $x a month. So some lawyers pay their personnel $(x+1) a month. (At present the gahmen has x as 1,600.)

• When is a bar not a bar? When it is a laundry. Some bars sell zero drinks but record reams of sales. All the alcohol that was sold on paper is sold in actuality to second-hand men through TNP ads.

• Before you try your luck in an Asian casino, stop by a café and steal a sugar cube or two. Some casinos keep ghosts in VIP rooms to bleed you dry. Say you win so much money, the house invites you to the VIP room to win the money back. Go, but sprinkle sugar underneath your seat to pay the ghosts off.

The summer of our discontent

So Ms Chia calls me tonight. “Eh, 3820 third prize leh.”

There is a play, 3 Years, 8 Months, 20 Days, that we were talking cock about the other day.

“3 Years, 8 Months…World War Two, is it?” “Pol Pot. It’s 3 Years…8 Months…20 Days.” “Aiya, what year, what month, what day, so difficult. 3-8-2-0! So easy. Like 4D.”

We talked the number into being – a nice number it is, will you look at all its curves? – and didn’t put money on it.

I have been discontented for weeks now. I don’t know if it is the wacky sun-with-rain weather or the one-month-to-go-before-my-31st-birthday climate of fear. Going on leave makes me want to go on leave again, permanently perhaps. I want to be a housewife, I think. But a housewife needs a backer and I have nobody. Besides, I think, I can’t be latching on to a backer because I don’t know what to do with myself; I can’t be hatching a baby because it will free me from the office for three months; I should be keeping to myself my karma of discontent.

There was the answer, 3820, that was staring me in the face – a ticket to three months, four months, five months of unpaid leave? – and I didn’t even think of putting one penny on it. It is a sign, I think, that I should be resigned.

FOC in the ROC

What I want, when I think about it, is to be a DVD. Slot me in a greater Chinese city and if I can, I will switch audio tracks. In Hong Kong I wouldn’t be caught dead saying leui (Straits Cantonese for money); I say chin. In Singapore I speak a less singsong Mandarin to taxi drivers so they will stop taking me for a Chinese karaoke hostess. In Taipei I would never say bu yao jin la (Straits Mandarin for no problem); I say mei shi’r to sound more pan-blue or mei guan xi la to sound more pan-green.

Even so you can be caught out. Touring Taiwan last week – junket: great way to flee the office – I fooled everyone with my pirated northern accent, everyone but a girl in the group who could tell my accent wasn’t purebred. “Your accent…you curl your vowels like a northerner…you lengthen your vowels like a Taiwanese.” Oh, she heard me. I could tell her accent was a hybrid as well, of soft Malaysian and hard Taiwanese tones. Takes a crossbreed to catch a crossbreed, as the saying goes.

And when it isn’t the accent it is the semantics. On the coach trips from Kaohsiung to Tainan to Taichung I made friends with a girl and two guys from Zaobao, Wanbao and My Paper, all birds of a Chinese-speaking, Everybody Speaks Nonsense-watching, Chinese-singing feather. Naturally we flocked to a KTV on our only night in Taipei (for the record, there are a few more Cheer Chen songs in Taipei than in Singapore but also more time-eating ads, which play at the end of each and every song). But before we could get to our mikes, there was a staff member to get through to, a girl who said we would have to spend such and such an amount as per package. So could we have shui, we said. Shui was free, would we have something else, she said. But we didn’t want food, we wanted shui, we said. Shui was free, she said. We kept running round in circles when it clicked: Water. She meant water. She didn’t mean beverages, as we had in our coffee-shop Chinese.

For all the Taiwanese TV we watch, all the imitations we do of Tsung-tsung’s imitation of Chen Shui-bian, we aren’t quite plugged in, no. Or we are, but DVDs storing one layer too many of data will act up, break down, stop. I will have to work on my game.

One night in the Starck-esque Grand Victoria in Taipei, FOC.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Ten

Lyricist Lin Xi, in an interview, speaks of the levels to writing a love song. Level one is when you are at least writing Chinese; level two is when you want people to weep and they do; level three: Not only do your words bring tears they also bring back memories; level four: When the weepers have done weeping they are philosophical, able to see the unhappy past in a happier light; then there is what Mr Lin terms the Huang Yaoshi level, when a love song is also about the world, politics – going beyond “one couple, two systems” to “one country, two systems” and back, as it were.

Coming to the Huang Yaoshi ref in the interview – thanks Ms O for posting parts of it – I felt a flicker of satisfaction. Hey, I thought, Mr Lin reads Louis Cha too. The master lyricist is reading the same master novelist as me. Then I thought, hey, everyone in Hong Kong, in China, reads Mr Cha or learns him by osmosis: Mr Lin is making the ref to Huang Yaoshi (an exceptionally multitalented man in Legend of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes, a genius) without a second thought and everyone there gets the ref without a second thought. So in mere seconds I went from feeling I wasn’t quite alone to feeling I was quite alone. I am a shorthand typist using signs that few of my friends here know. Worse, I thought, we don’t have our own similarly resonant shorthand. We don’t have our own Louis Cha stories, our own rich (if a bit middlebrow) mythology. We are poorer for it.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Pamukkale

In the village at the bottom of the snow-white cliff-side calcium terraces of Pamukkale we were in a shoebox of a bus office when a man said, “台北人?” He didn’t guess Tokyo or Seoul, hmm. Since his sleeve said 武士攻略, I guessed, “You got your T-shirt from Taiwan?” “Korea,” he shrugged and said, “all the Asians know what it says.”

Over apple tea in tulip glasses we waited at his father’s for the 6pm bus which wouldn’t be here before 6.20pm; he waited. He had a baby, six months old, he said. “We marry too young, make babies too much and they run everywhere.” He wanted another baby as soon as next year, he said, but his father, the village bus agent, wanted him to wait.

Had he been in Korea on business, the reporter in me reared its head to ask. “My wife, Korean.” Then he was on and off the phone, declared, “Korean dinner ready,” and was out of the office. He had been waiting for dinner – prepared by, perhaps, an ex-tourist.

So some men do want you – just as others want your money.

When I came home from Turkey M wrote from Tokyo, “So you survived the world-famous romantic attack?” The first wave of Japanese tourists, sold on Turkey’s campaign, swept the country in the mid-90s, she said, where some fell for men they would marry and others fell for “I love you” tricksters. (Who sound as infamous to the Japanese as China-born CPF-killers are to Singaporeans.)

In Istanbul a man told me of his factory and showed me a photo album of him in it. Another man told me of his life in the States and showed me his chequebook printed with his name and stateside address.

So some men do want you…or want you to think they want you…oh, I don’t know what they want.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Ayasofya

For a few hours, as my thoughts galloped like horses, I imagined my surrender. I’ll call him and we’ll… We? Yes, we. We’ll have Turkish wine, he said we would, and we’ll… But you are already drunk on him. Should you be having any actual alcohol? He said… Think. Think market. Think supply and demand. You had to buzz an old man to have him unlock the ladies, a lone room, in the Grand Bazaar. So there are not many girls in the market in the first place. So your being in demand was mere mathematics. Eh are you listening? Stop looking in the mirror and smiling like a moron leh. …and didn’t you see and hear how he said to me…

I called him. I said 7pm. He said 9pm; he had work to do. I said Ayasofya. He said he would park there and wait to pick me up. “I k–iss you,” he said in such an Italian way, broken English was whole and Humpty Dumpty unbroken happily ever after.

Once off the phone, however, I was in a panic. You don’t want him to come to the hostel. But do you want to cross the car park in the dark to go to the Ayasofya, close as the church is to the hostel? Do you want to be slain by someone else while waiting for him to come in his car – to take you who-knows-where for who-knows-what? Think of the headlines. Think of the parents.

I had to call the thing off. I said, “Nine is a little late.” He said, “I will n–ot kill you.” I said tomorrow. He said 8pm. But I didn’t call him again.

Daydreams are safer.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Grand Bazaar

Going into the Grand Bazaar, the “mother of all tourist traps…anything but pleasant”, in Frommer’s book, I was wary. Coming out of it I was so high, I wasn’t walking – I was floating. It wasn’t the shopping, no (I did lose myself, for half an hour, in the cute clutter of the children’s shop, Deli Kizin Yeri Junior). It was the men. One man. Half Turkish, half Italian, completely sexy.

What was it about him? He said he would sell me a “dream jacket” but after I stepped into his shop he squired me, with my hand on his arm, to another of his shops, sat me down for a cup of tea and started selling himself. He was a cook at “Sir Raffles Hotel” in Singapore. He lived in Hong Kong years ago. Oh, and he was, is and will be trim. For ever and ever. “Ganetics,” he said. “Genetics…? Yes, your Italian gene, yes,” I said. (Was I sounding breathy? Why was I sounding breathy?)

He wasn’t the only one to give me tea and his number. But he alone didn’t make me uncomfortable: He didn’t feel my hand up as he was shaking it (one man did and I had to scram when he tried to take me in his arms too); he didn’t ask what my room number was (another man did and I had to say I didn’t remember); he didn’t use “Turkish hospitality” as a pretext for inviting me into his shop.

What was it about him? Our fifteen minutes were so snug, it might last me a lifetime of never again being chatted up.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Blue Mosque

Turkish kids are a delight. Gaggles of them go on school tours of Topkapi Palace, see us, smile bigger and twitter, “Konichiwa! Konichiwa! Toshiba!” East Asian is spoken here, okay. (When I tell a girl I am not Japanese she takes a wide-eyed guess, “Turkish?” It must be my golden coat.)

All around Sultanahmet, the historic thus touristy district, Turkish men speak much more Asian. They usually try Japanese, then Korean, then Mandarin, all the better to tout restaurants.

Then there is the Turkish carpet salesman. We were minding our own business heading for the Blue Mosque one morning when a man – short, with long eyelashes – came over, made out our accent, “Chinese Singapore?” and advised us to hurry up to avoid the noon-prayer throng. He then showed us round the mosque, the bazaar beside it and his shop. He would sound upfront about this and that (he has a shop in Taipei 101; he hopes to master Mandarin; he has a Chinese ex-girlfriend; we haven’t been to Boracay in the Philippines? “They have the best beaches!”), then roll out his rugs. He would show us snapshots of a cousin in Tokyo, then roll out more rugs. By the time we walked out of the shop D had a new kilim and all I knew was: I didn’t know anything about the man behind those long lashes.

The promise

In the honeymoon of our friendship, when we first fell in like, A and I went to Taipei. Every day was a joy. We were in the city of authentic Taiwanese sausages, the National Palace Museum, Jerry Yen and Jay Chou, who was with us not only in spirit but also on surround sound: All the shops in Ximending, the two-bit Taiwanese Harajuku, would play his songs and we would feel luckier than Toto top-prize winners. We were happy when it rained or didn’t rain, shone or didn’t shine, or even when a taxi took us past an Italian Tomato restaurant. Italian Tomato! Maybe Meteor Garden was shot there! The thought alone was bliss.

I was so in like with A, I never once thought to tease her about her Teochew-twanged Cantonese when we went to Hong Kong from Taipei. She was so in like with me, she told all her other friends about me. She didn’t - and doesn’t - like spending sprees but she went with me when I wanted retail therapy. On one occasion, she asked, “Would you ever marry me if I was a man?” and answered, “You wouldn’t.” “You would be too nice to me,” I said. I do like my men lean and mean.

Now A has married my hanyu pinyin namesake, a not-lean, not-mean man who is nice to her and her grandma. She has always been more sensible than me.

In the weeks leading up to her wedding in the InterContinental, she didn’t turn into Bridezilla but I became Bridesmaidzilla. I hardly had dinner; I bought my first SK-II facial mask, first concealer and first anti-frizz hair balm; I weighed myself so much, the scales capitulated and said I had shed 2kg of my Chinese New Year blubber.

Feicius, the Confucius of our house, counselled, “What is your job as a bridesmaid? Your job is to make her look good. Your job is to make her look thin. Eat.”

“But I bought a BCBG dress,” I said, offering my official line. Unofficially… Maybe my mother knew… Maybe she smelled something… “Do you want diamonds with your dress?” “No, no, no, not my wedding.” Did I protest too much? Didn’t I?

I did do my job as a friend. Minutes before the big moment, as A was waiting to make a bridal entrance, she seemed to lose her nerve. “I know it is a little late but am I doing the right thing?” Not quite knowing how to answer, I asked, “Is he good to you?” It was the right question. “Yes. He’s very good to me. I’ll be very good to him.” She made the vow with such a solemnity, I blinked back tears; then we stood in the suite, held hands and went back to waiting for the wedding marshal’s signal.

No LoVe lost

We have fallen behind. Fashion, as anyone who has visited Hong Kong knows, is a race to wear this season’s die-die-must-have or the best copy from Causeway Bay, maybe – why else should models strut along run-ways? – and somehow or other, when we were ransacking our bedroom closets for the worst clothes to wear to the market, the competition has come to little Bukit Batok.

So it is that Fei and I are at the market one morning, watching the world go by with her LV. “Wah, atas, siah. See the girl with the –” says Issey Feiyake, naming a limited-edition zillion-dollar canvas bag I have never ever heard of. Monogram-less and on a girl in shorts and sandals, it looks like any other canvas carryall. But what do I know? The guru has spoken. I’m just a shoe slut – the CK in my life is not Calvin Klein but Charles & Keith.

Then I catch sight of the chic monogram: a woman dressed up and made up to the nines, in pink high heels, with two bagfuls of food and in a pink shirt-and-skirt set so sheer, the world can read most of the multicoloured LVs on her undies. She is quite a sight on many, many levels. “Made in China,” says Fei. “The undies or the woman?” “Both.”

Like little children again, we point her out to Pa and Ma, but they act all blasé. We are told of a newcomer to the neighbourhood who goes for morning walks in her qipao. “Fresh off the boat, trying not to lose face,” says Ma, who travelled here on the same boat some 50 years ago. (She is not the same, she maintains. Her parents had made her here before her mother took the boat to, and gave birth in, China.)

We have fallen behind, not that we want to be ahead – it is our birthright to look as laidback as we want in the heartland – but where has Bak gone? For one thing, he has gone bottle-blond (Fei says it makes him look like a Johor video pirate). For another thing, he has gone temping for LV, manhandling in its store and warehouses all the bags we will not buy. Bak, LV runner, our pride and joy.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Nine

Last year I talked and talked of going to Paris, then I read Orhan Pamuk’s essay The Pamuk Apartments and talked and talked of going to Istanbul. Now that I’m booked to go to his home city I’ve been reading his novel My Name Is Red, for emotional preparation. I was looking to fall more in love with Turkey through his fiction – maybe to be dazzled by his brilliance and fall in love with a book – when I found an answer I hadn’t been looking for.

Let me describe for you how our embrace might’ve been depicted by the master miniaturists of Herat, if this tragic story of mine were one day recorded in a book. There are certain amazing illustrations that my father has shown me wherein the thrill of the script’s flow matches the swaying of the leaves, the wall ornamentation is echoed in the design of the border gilding and the joy of the swallow’s matchless wings piercing the picture’s border suggests the elation of the lovers. Exchanging glances from afar and tormenting each other with suggestive phrases, the lovers would be depicted so small, so far in the distance, that for a moment it’d seem like the story wasn’t about them at all, but had to do with the starry night, the dark trees, the exquisite palace where they met, its courtyard and its wonderful garden whose every leaf was lovingly and particularly rendered. If, however, one paid very close attention to the secret symmetry of the colours, which the miniaturist could only convey with total resignation to his art, and to the mysterious light infusing the entire painting, the careful observer would immediately see that the secret behind these illustrations is that they’re created by love itself. It’s as if a light were emanating from the lovers, from the very depths of illustration. And when Black and I embraced, well-being flooded the world in the very same manner.

Thank God I’ve seen enough of life to know that such well-being never lasts for long.

Once upon a time in my Iran phase one of the first films I watched was Abbas Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees. The movie starts simply, with a man standing in front of a tree. Then he says, “I’m Mohamad Ali Keshavarz, the actor who plays the director,” and the film seems less simple. To cut a long story short the movie is about the making of a fictional film about life after a non-fictional quake – about a couple who bury their families, then marry each other as they have no one else – and who should be cast as the couple but a schoolgirl, an orphan of the quake, and her suitor, an out-of-work bricklayer whom she won’t talk to. And the ending is a mystery: The schoolgirl still doesn’t talk to her suitor, who still doesn’t give up. He follows her down a hill, through olive trees and into an open field – but the camera doesn’t follow – and all the eye sees of him and her are smaller and smaller dots.

I’ve hoped it is a happy ending. Now I know: I’m sure I saw swaying leaves.

TRAVEL | Eat drink Brangelina

I confess. When the Jolie-Pitts toured Saigon on Thanksgiving last year the story that was published in the paper was much less informative than it might have been – and I had everything to do with that. No sooner had I seen the photos of the Jolie-Pitts’ night in Saigon than I made out the neon blur in the background: Temple Club! They had dined at the atmospheric temple-turned-restaurant that was on my to-go list for Saigon! I didn’t want the whole world following in their starry footsteps and jamming the restaurant, not during my vacation in Vietnam. I had to not do my job. Usually I am a conscientious celebrity gossipmonger, squeezing more breathless specifics into a story than anyone needs or wants to know; that day I didn’t breathe a word about Temple Club as I assembled the Jolie-Pitts article.

But I came home and told Bak, who told Fei, who told our cousin, Young Master Y, and so it was that by the time the clan did lunch at Temple Club, on New Year’s Eve, Y had told his Jolie joke umpteen times, saying in a sad stalker’s voice, “Can sit on Angelina Jolie’s chair?”

Boys don’t talk, you know. Not the boys. They repeat half-funny refrains, bark when they are annoyed and grunt when they are amused. When I am with the boys, reciting lines from Stephen Chow films is communication. For example, if somebody says, “英文?” it’s a cue for somebody else to say, “英文, 我來! A呀, B呀, C呀, OK!” (It’s OK, you either know the movie or you don’t.)

But back to Temple Club, the old-world romantic restaurant with the high ceiling, exposed-brick walls and tapestries, as charming as nothing we would ever see in Singapore. Except time seemed to stand still too in the kitchen. The food was so slow, Bak, then Pa, were sound asleep by the end of lunch. We cancelled the final course, woke them and came away.

But Bak had to know – “Where did Brad Pitt sit?”

The waitress answered, “At the window.”

For his fearless question, however, the boy got growled at for being shamelessly star-struck. “I didn’t say Angelina Jolie, whaaat, I said Brad Pitt.” More growling.

So I had to speak up for my kind, “Whaaat? Good reporter, whaaat.”

TRAVEL | Eat drink man woman

The NS boy wanted to meet girls on New Year’s Eve. Bak really, really did, never mind that he was with the whole clan in Saigon and that if he was to go clubbing, it would be with at least three chaperones: his cousin, Young Master Y, his brother, Fei, and his sister, me. The four parents were having their party of wild shopping in Chinatown – an area called Cho Lon by the Vietnamese and Tai Ngon by the Cantonese, to which two grandaunts were among the many to migrate years ago and which is famous in my family for its Cantonese food, quite untouched by time, capitalist time-is-money tenets and the evils of the food court – and so we hit Catwalk club, chosen out of the hotel’s Time Out guide by the clerk after Bak asked with all his NS urgency, “What’s a good club to go to? Good one, good one.”

Oh, it was first-rate. An ad at the door mentioned hip-hop music. “Looks okay,” said Fei, the sensible one. We paid, popped in and there they were, 10,000 prom queens. Okay, maybe 231. Necklines were going down, down, down; hemlines were going up, up, up; feet arched on high, high heels; but to a woman, they were classier than Britney Spears. They looked expensive, not cheap. No one was dancing. Everyone looked like they were waiting. Not for us – it was nine, we were too early and we were embarrassed – but maybe for johns who had booked the booths all around us. (One card read “Mr John”, really.)

“Good one, good one,” Fei and Y said. “Sexy time!” Bak whooped with his best Borat accent. But we kept to ourselves and our drinks. They are good boys, good boys. Okay, they didn’t look away when short skirts and long legs would zip past the cabs we were in on motorcycles – the skirts are more mini in Saigon than Hanoi, which, up in the hard-line north, has a different climate, meteorologically and socially – then again, they didn’t do more than look and share such info as, “Three o’clock, 2564, skirt damn short.”

So off we went to a posh part of town, in search of a better party. Except so many motorcyclists and their pillion clans were riding there, no cabbie would drive there. We had to go on a Long March through the mad traffic. I, in my inappropriate high heels, was tired out from trying not to be killed. When we arrived in the posh part, the parties were so truly posh, alas, we voted, three to one, for nibbles at a cheap café.

Bak’s bubble did burst then. “Never mind,” said Fei. “We love you long time,” chirped Fei and Y in one Vietnamese singsong voice. “20 years is a long time okay,” said Fei.

It is. Time flies though, when you are having fun.