THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Five

When the going gets tough, some Cantonese go, chin sai. (I.e. previous life i.e. what did I do in my previous life?) On the one hand we don’t want to blame others. But on the other hand we don’t want to be too rough on ourselves – our present selves. So we blame our past selves. Really it’s not so much blame as some sort of resignation: The past self ran up a debt that the present self has to pay off lor. (Lor, by the way, is a sound that sums up Ng Man Tat, that walking talking sideshow of comic resignation in a Stephen Chow show. “I’m getting my gun and I’m going to die with you lor,” Ng tells Chow, beta policeman to alpha policeman, in his most memorable line in Fight Back To School.) It does get us going.

But coming to relationships, chin sai starts to sound negative: What did I do to you in my previous life? Do I owe you a debt from my previous life? The lover becomes a creditor, love’s loan shark, Shylock come for a pound of flesh.

So Cao Xueqin is the poet who has taken much of the bitterness out of the equation, if you ask me, by giving an account of what the creditor did. In his Dream Of The Red Chamber (the version I vaguely remember from reading the first few chapters aeons ago), Jia Baoyu is the incarnation of a magic stone and Lin Daiyu, that of a flower. In their previous lives, the stone was rolling along when it ran into the flower which it liked so much, it watered it every day (in my mind’s eye, the stone was rolling here, there and everywhere to gather water for the thirsty flower – I don’t know if I’m remembering or imagining that). So the flower was so thankful, it said it would repay the stone for the water in their next lives. In Daiyu’s tears.

Beautiful story, isn’t it? I feel so. I felt so. How I did drown, in my own way, in the beauty of the story. When I was with Oscar – through the break-ups and the kiss-and-make-ups – I thought there had to be a reason. Why did he come back for more after the nth parting? Why did I go back for more? I thought there had to be a debt. I tried to think of it positively. Sometimes I even scolded myself, “You owe him means you owe him. Run away now and you will still owe him in your next life.”

When the big one came – the 9 Richter break-up of no return – so did a sense of relief: I’m not as deep in debt as I believed.

But the tale of the debt of tears is beautiful. I do want to read the rest of that book.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Four

These are a few of my comfort foods: my mother’s rice noodles, Milo with crackers and Meteor Garden. Meteor Garden – it’s Pride And Prejudice lite with Jerry Yen as Darcy – is my chocolate. On downhearted days I pop it into the DVD machine’s mouth and press Play. Instant happiness.

There are days chocolate isn’t enough though. Like when first love crashes, becomes first break-up in a foreign country – a friend’s friend takes you in, gives you a shoulder to cry on – you go broke calling friends back home – you don’t know what to do with yourself. I didn’t know what to do with myself that summer Down Under. Then I found myself buying a book, Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels, for the friend’s friend and in the middle of writing her a thank-you-for-everything note, I began to reread the book in her kitchen.

Davies has been one of my friends from the first time we met in NUS. That was where I borrowed my first Davies, that is. I really don’t remember if I found him on my own or only after reading his obituary, an inspiring one by The Economist. But I thank the day we met. His is the warmest and wisest of voices – he wrote his best books late in life when he was in his 50s and 60s – and that day in the kitchen, he wasn’t just telling me about Maria Magdalena Theotoky, this beautiful brilliant scholar of Rabelais and how she gets her man and her manuscript; about the body-personality types, ectomorph (scrawny, sex-starved, intellectual), mesomorph (muscular, go-getting), endomorph (plump, pleasure-seeking); about Simon Darcourt, this professor of Greek who may or may not be in love with Maria after he accidentally drinks coffee mixed with her menstrual blood…

Davies was telling me, it’s gonna be okay girl.

"I believed he was pregnant"

Isabella Rossellini on her famous - and fat - father:

Until recently, both my parents were in just about every encyclopaedia. I check. When my father's entry emphasises his marriage to my mother, I know it's an American edition. When the emphasis is on his revolutionary and innovative work as a film-maker, I know it's a European edition. In Chinese encyclopaedias my mother isn't mentioned at all and my father's work is described as "non-bourgeois telling true stories about the proletariat." That's the communist edition. There are many ways to love my parents. Then there is my way, which is mine only.

Let me add something about my dad that I can say only now that he's dead. He was fat. In my family, this fact was always diplomatically diminished with: "He's not fat, he's robust."

When we were children (there were seven of us), one of our favourite games was throwing ourselves on to daddy's body. Lying on his side, he pretended to be the sow and we were the piglets. My daddy always regretted not being able to nurse us in real life, though for a long time I believed he was pregnant.

I liked him just as he was, fat or robust, whatever one wants to call it. People who talked to him about dieting irritated me - I didn't want less of him. He was soft to embrace, and there was a lot of him. I wanted him a lot, and I wanted all of him.

Most of all, I remember my dad in bed - he loved being in bed. He stayed in bed all day long; he didn't want to waste energy. You can call him lazy, but I still connect physical laziness to the kind of spiritual and intellectual wisdom my father possessed. If someone strikes me as lazy, my first reaction is to listen carefully to what he says for some possible great truth. As an adult, I like a "lazy body" look in bed. An athletic body with muscles I could never love.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Three

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She was more of a buyer of Chinese storybooks, when we were kids. Before my brother and I went to school and on the stock school kids’ diet of Tintin, Enid Blyton and Asterix, she fed us stories about the foolish monkeys who believed four acorns in the morning and three at night was better than three in the morning and four at night; the fool who got his feet measured to go shopping for shoes but forgot the measurement and had to go home empty-handed; and so on and so forth. Never mind that we were too young for some of the stories, which were simplified but not dumbed down from Zhuangzi, Hanfeizi and other old philosophy texts.

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. She married one, isn’t it enough? She would be the one who bought us a kids’ edition of Journey To The West and my father would be the one who brought it to life for us, with exciting exaggerations, in weekly instalments. His hero in storytelling was Lei Dai Soh, Rediffusion’s Cantonese charmer in the 1950s (Dai Soh, Big Fool, what a name). Week after week, as he ad-libbed his way through Journey To The West, my father became our Lei Dai Soh.

My mother has never been much of a storyteller. But as kids, we came to expect a good story from her every time she had a fight with my father. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Fight. Story. Telling us stories, it was her therapy. These were all true stories of my father’s Dickensian days as a child coolie. He hardly told us these stories, so we had to hear them from my mother, who told them so well, she must have told them, line for line, as they were told to her by her Lei Dai Soh. She must have loved these stories. She did only one thing differently: Her stories always ended with, “Your father is a good man.”

I am my mother’s daughter. Oscar was a man with many tales. Of central Asia, of central Europe, of Effendi.

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