On this misty Good Friday morning, as is the tradition, we cab to the Lim Chu Kang Chinese Cemetery at the end of the universe to hang around with Grandma for an hour.
It isn’t even eight but there is a small crowd at the cemetery already. There are Chinese families such as mine, working the public holiday to pay Qingming visits to our dead as faithful Christians commemorate their dead Jesus, and there are NSboys, working on a public holiday to keep us safe from terrorists, oh yeah. Off the block where Grandma lies, the boys in green have set up Checkpoint Cemetery, where they are examining every car in case Mas Selamat Kastari, who has been on the loose for more than three weeks, is trying to smuggle himself into a graveyard.
We watch as two of them go through someone’s boot. Umbrella-ella-ellas, check. Food for the dead, check. Flowers for the dead, check. Billion-dollar hell notes to be burned and sent by smoke to the dead, check. Nothing questionable unless they are Al Gore – concerned about the Qingming effect on global warming.
“Eh tell the NSmen leh,” goes Fei, “Good Friday, Chinese cemetery, Muslim terrorist: What are the odds?”
“You don’t read Gu Long meh?” I go, “the unlikeliest place is the likeliest place mah.”
To be honest I don’t read Gu Long myself. But if you have seen half a show based on his books you know he is about mystery men who mysteriously appear, disappear and reappear. So we are trooping up to Grandma’s block on full alert when what should we see but strange red spots on the back of her and her neighbours’ units. “Why are some tombs marked and not others?” goes Fei.
Yes, why? Some Muslims spring to mind – the 40 thieves! Ali Baba! – but the idea limps off quickly when I realise what is afoot. Aha. “The grass on the marked tombs is nice and the grass on the unmarked tombs isn’t. They are marking who has paid and who hasn’t.” (Yes, I should so be in Home Affairs.)
Talking of “them”, the maintenance men show up soon for their fee, $40 a year, and regale us with tales of 4D fanatics who visit the tombs with Taoist mediums after dark. Would-be lottery winners, we are told, run round the knolls, possessed by either ghosts or their own madness, in search of a lucky number.
These hills are alive with extremists after all, but not the type the NSboys are after.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eleven
When I think about it the Taiwanese ones are taller and the Korean ones are heavier.
When I think of a Taiwanese rom com that works, like It Started with a Kiss, I think of its dizzy heights – girl gets giddy when she gets to be in the same building as boy. When I think of a Korean rom com that works, like My Girl, I think of its weight. I feel it and I weep it. Might it have to do with how serious the Koreans are about everything?
Yes, be it in Taiwan or Korea, rom coms are almost always about how the good girl gets the guy. But in Korea they don’t just tell you she is good and absolutely adorable. They also put her through the wringer of extreme Confucian ethics and test her goodness time and again – or they do in My Girl.
(SPOILERS AHEAD.)
This is a roller coaster of a show constructed on the conceit that the heroine is a liar with a heart pure as snow. The rom com of errors starts slow, with how she is hired by the hero to pose as his long-lost cousin at his grandpa’s deathbed; then it goes up, down and round steep narrative slopes when grandfather lives and won’t let granddaughter leave and she has to keep lying – and suffering.
Oh, there is comedy here. Oh, there certainly is (as well as lived-in loverly banter). I really remember laughing.
But the weeping is more memorable. Late in the rom com the heroine has to sound cheerful saying goodbye to the hero. He thinks this is goodbye for now; she is just going to Jeju Island, isn’t she, and he is joining her ASAP. But she knows she is going somewhere else and never coming back; this is goodbye forever. After their goodbyes she is about to fill in a departure form at Incheon airport when the dam bursts. The last lie she told him weighs so heavily, she can’t stay on her feet any more. All she can do is sink to the ground and bawl. Very, very bitterly.
This bitterness I somehow took with me when I went jogging last Saturday. I went up, down and round a hill, bawling. So few things get under my skin these days, however, it felt good feeling bad that day.
When I think of a Taiwanese rom com that works, like It Started with a Kiss, I think of its dizzy heights – girl gets giddy when she gets to be in the same building as boy. When I think of a Korean rom com that works, like My Girl, I think of its weight. I feel it and I weep it. Might it have to do with how serious the Koreans are about everything?
Yes, be it in Taiwan or Korea, rom coms are almost always about how the good girl gets the guy. But in Korea they don’t just tell you she is good and absolutely adorable. They also put her through the wringer of extreme Confucian ethics and test her goodness time and again – or they do in My Girl.
(SPOILERS AHEAD.)
This is a roller coaster of a show constructed on the conceit that the heroine is a liar with a heart pure as snow. The rom com of errors starts slow, with how she is hired by the hero to pose as his long-lost cousin at his grandpa’s deathbed; then it goes up, down and round steep narrative slopes when grandfather lives and won’t let granddaughter leave and she has to keep lying – and suffering.
Oh, there is comedy here. Oh, there certainly is (as well as lived-in loverly banter). I really remember laughing.
But the weeping is more memorable. Late in the rom com the heroine has to sound cheerful saying goodbye to the hero. He thinks this is goodbye for now; she is just going to Jeju Island, isn’t she, and he is joining her ASAP. But she knows she is going somewhere else and never coming back; this is goodbye forever. After their goodbyes she is about to fill in a departure form at Incheon airport when the dam bursts. The last lie she told him weighs so heavily, she can’t stay on her feet any more. All she can do is sink to the ground and bawl. Very, very bitterly.
This bitterness I somehow took with me when I went jogging last Saturday. I went up, down and round a hill, bawling. So few things get under my skin these days, however, it felt good feeling bad that day.
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