THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Two

I shouldn’t – but sometimes I blame that book.

The night before I began my big mistake with Oscar, I read Eucalyptus. In that Australian take on Arabian Nights, there is an old man with one daughter and hundreds of gum trees. When she is 19, he decides to marry her off to the man who can name all his trees. Then who should she chance on but a young man who tells her stories, day after day.

Among his dozens of stories, one stayed on my mind. The girl-meets-boy one about the restless woman from Geelong and her Spaniard. They meet in Corunna in north-west Spain. She doesn’t know he is the love of her life until she leaves him for London and realises she shouldn’t have.

In London at the most unexpected moments she saw the room in Corunna, which seemed from a distance to be jammed in at an angle among the black rocks. She kept seeing him across the room and close up. It was their room. He had a long face and hairs on his shoulders: she liked his solemn expression. She could feel his month and hear his voice.

They never meet again.

At strange important moments a person is given one and only one chance; and that had been one.

Did I want to be with Oscar? I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t want to be the woman from Geelong. It was on my mind that I shouldn't be making her mistake. I ended up making worse mistakes – but they were mine, mostly mine.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter One

I don’t know how Oscar said goodbye to Lucinda – did he say it at all? I didn’t read all of Oscar And Lucinda, you see. I began reading the Peter Carey book, believing it to be a lovely love story about two gamblers, the tale of how the narrator’s grandfather, Oscar, ended up with the narrator’s grandmother, Lucinda. I was wrong.

I am more Apollonian than Dionysian. I like order, harmony and happy endings. I can, and do, live with unhappy endings in movies. Most movies end before I can invest in them emotionally, after all. Books demand more of my time. When I like a book, when I like its protagonists, I want happy endings for them and a big positive payoff for me. So I fast-forward books to find out. I read one chapter here, another chapter there, then I go to the ending: Is it happy, is it unhappy and if it is unhappy, how unhappy do things get? For example, I knew Anna Karenina wouldn’t live happily ever after – it meant nothing to me for I didn’t like her – but I had to know if her in-laws, Kitty and Levin, would. (They would.) For example, What I Loved was sad but bearably so. After I read the ending, I could rewind the book and read the rest. Maybe the title, in past tense, had prepared me for the ending. Maybe I had learnt to be less cowardly, more grown-up. Maybe I had learnt not to box books – nor life – up.

But back when I was younger and reading Oscar And Lucinda, I couldn’t continue past the part when Mrs What’s-her-name, that tricky terrible widow, somehow seduced Oscar. She as good as raped him, really, then she got pregnant with his child, then she got him tied to her for life. Untied from Lucinda. I hated her, that Mrs What’s-her-name. How could she? How could Oscar? I was cross with Carey, too. I wanted to tell him, “It’s Oscar And Lucinda, not Oscar And That Woman. I want Lucinda to be the grandma. I don’t want that woman to be the grandma.”

The book went back to the library. That was the end of that, I thought. How was I to know the book would come back to bite me? I didn’t know the Oscar in my life would turn out to be an Oscar. I didn’t know I would turn out to be an Oscar-less Lucinda. I never saw that chapter with Mrs What’s-her-name coming. It came, oh it came. There was a child, their child, and there may be a grandchild, their grandchild, one day, not that I am hoping to hear from them.

How did Lucinda take it? What did she say? What did she do? Who ended it with whom? I don’t know. Never read the rest. But the tale of my Oscar and I came to the bitter end one morning, after months of mutual misery. He called me. One of the first – one of the last things he said to me, with a very final finality, was, “This is goodbye.”

And I have lived with it.

An MRT car named Desire

A Chinaman on the MRT caught my eye. His was a northern Chinese visage, narrow, all cheekbone and no cheek, but with dreamy bedroom eyes. He wasn't tall, he was small. On his elbows, it was snowing scuffed skin, all marks of his unmoisturised maleness. He was in a beige tee and beige trousers, which had a high, too high, waist. He was maybe in his 30s or 40s. He didn't have to say a single word, for his trousers did the talking for him: "So I'm an uncle from China. So?" So I minded my own business, my business now being to look at his eyes - at, not into - and he was looking, too, into the eyes of an auntie. A broad.

When I say broad, I mean broad. She was broad and her arms, larger than life (larger than mine). Her look - bottle-brown short hair, beige sleeveless baggy top, red short skirt and beige strappy shoes - was flapper fashion via This Fashion. Could she be his older sister? Maybe. Maybe it is common in China for a woman to tug her brother towards her every two minutes and molest his manly chest, for a man to lean a little on his sister in public and for a woman to hike up the hem of her skirt as she babbles to her brother. No, they couldn't be brother and sister. Maybe they were married (yes, to other people), making the M18 most of their time on the MRT while on their way to a borrowed apartment.

They didn't just catch my eye, they arrested my attention. I had never seen such foreplay in broad daylight. As the amorous two were alighting, the loving didn't let up. She hugged him from behind, blowing a kiss onto his neck. He shuddered. And I said to myself, "Chui qi!" Wow. I had read about this blowing in Louis Cha classics but I hadn't seen it, not on TV, nor in movies. I thought this move had died with the Xinhai Revolution, the Cultural Revolution or the raising of the Bamboo Curtain. How heartening that such sauciness lives on.

I ate it, now it is eating me

When I flew home from Taipei last Thursday, my hair still smelled of the hot springs of Beitou, of salt and sulphur. The scent of my holiday faded fast, however, when a rash erupted on my limbs. Soon all I smelled of was medicated oil, ointment, insecticide and desperation.

On my last night in Taipei, I had some wild boar stir-fried with basil. It was fresh boar, fresh from the mountains of Taitung, fresh from a hunt by an aboriginal friend of a friend who had brought the pig back to Taipei. It was the wildest boar I ever had. Later, I would report to my mother I had just "one, two bites". But between you and me, it was ten, twenty bites - maybe many, many more - and it was yummy. So now I have a rash, an angry, itchy rash that looks like a pox or a Pollock - I am trying to be positive - and feels like an attack by guerrilla ants.

In Chinese medicine, I am yin and boar is yang, too yang for me. It has made my breath fiery. It is making fires break out here on my arm, then there on my leg. "Let it come out, let it all come out," says my physician, who has given me a potion for the purging of the so-called heaty poison. What she seems to mean is the rash has to get worse before it gets better, so for a few days now, it has been furiously worse. The rash - I can't call it my rash. I do not own it, it owns me. As the itch inches up and down, I have counter-attacked it with medicated oil, menthol ointment and a made-in-China cream that smells like insecticide. The latter, labelled Shun Feng Kang Wang Compound Ketoconazole and Clobetasol Propionate Cream, is lethal. It not just kills the rash - the rash has more than nine lives though - it also kills my skin a little, leaving it tingly and unnaturally tight. Ageing-Hollywood-actress tight. No thanks. Sometimes I give up and give my arms and legs a good scratch, even making myself bleed; I give thanks for pain; painful is better than itchy. Or I sit on my hands. Or I sleep on the floor, the cool, cool floor. I don't sleep, actually. I snatch some shut-eye between attacks. Today I have tried tough love (body scrub), then tender love (moisturising cream) - I will be all out of love soon.

Will I have boar again? Yes! But maybe not as many bites next time.

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.