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.