A better 25-year-old

On Christmas Eve everything happened and nothing did.

In the morning it was cloudy, not yet rainy, I was on the train, on the way to dim sum with the whole clan, half-seeing all the new lines on my aunt’s face as she spoke to my mother and half-hearing them as well as Jay Chou’s Chrysanthemum Terrace on my MP3 player – as my uncle and father, my cousin and two brothers, five men with five phones, talked to each other and many others – when A, the bride-to-be, SMSed me: Her grandfather died yesterday, would I go to the wake today?

I would, I said. My grandfather had died years ago on the Winter Solstice. His funeral was on Christmas Day, as A’s grandfather’s would be. Lots of ha gau, siu mai and pigs’ trotters later, half the clan headed home; one brother had gone shopping with his girlfriend and the other, with his cousin; another friend SMSed me with news of her grandmother’s death.

The train we were on went on. My wrangle with my mother went on. My aunt and uncle, professional photographers, had taken my picture months ago for my new identity card. (“Re-registration is required for all Singapore IC holders who have attained 30 years of age.”) When I tried to show them the new IC, my mother tried to snatch it and when I snatched it back, she hissed, “But you haven’t shown me! Why don’t you ask your aunt to be your mother?” I hissed back, “Why don’t you ask P to be your daughter?” (P is One Brother’s girl – an aspiring daughter-in-law.) The train saved us by drowning us out. No one else heard our nursery-level war.

Then who should I see but my colleague and her freakily tall five-year-old. “She’s eight. She’s in Primary Two,” the mother said. Oh. The last time she had told me of the child was more. Than. Two. Years. Ago. I was on a junket to Korea days after a break-up, we were on the bus, and I was happy to hear her story, which she was happier to tell me: She met a Korean man in Turkey; they have a child and haven’t married; they live apart, he in Korea and she with the child in Singapore, and they have stayed together, a long-time long-distance couple. She told me she would spend one day with him after the junket. I said, “One day only?” She said she would rather spend the second day with her child. Meeting them now, I could see how closely they clung to each other, girlish giggles and all. I saw what I could have been. As she stood with her child and I sat with my “children” – who go with me to Ho Chi Minh on the eve of New Year’s Eve – I could hear myself blithely saying, “Primary Two! So tall! So pretty!”

In the evening the storm clouds couldn’t keep themselves back any more. I was rained on on my way from the wake to a party, where I would see Ms O, who would ask me, “How was 2006?” Mine were all non-answers. “Like that lor.” “Good friend had a kid.” “Like that lor.”

In 2006 everything happened to everyone else (K became a mother, A got a proposal, L became a magazine boss), I got nowhere – and I am okay with being here. To maybe misquote Nancy Chan, I have become a much better 25-year-old than I was at 25. Next year I may become a better 30-year-old.

Father and son

I’m slow, so slow, it’s taken me 29 years to notice how alike my brother and father are. On the morning Fei was 29 years and a handful of minutes old we three were heading towards breakfast and I was at the tail end. From the front they had never looked alike. (I look more like Pa: I have his pale skin. We are also honest-to-goodness exaggerators: not good enough not to exaggerate but too honest to lie.) But from the back, I noticed for the first time, they had the same skinny arms, which they swung, when they strolled, at the same angle – like the pendulums of two clocks striking the same time.

They talked their men’s talk, of tax, tax, tax, which went over my head. Which was okay. I was happy to watch them and wonder: Nature, nurture, how does it all work? Thirty years apart, without always getting along, they made the same calculations and came to the same decision: of working on a degree in accountancy while keeping the day job. As far as I know, Fei didn’t talk to Pa about it; he just went for it, with a vengeance I could never have worked up. He hits the gym with the same vengeance…Pa’s vengeance.

Weeks ago his girlfriend was in Tokyo. She came home with clothes for us all and all the clothes (sweaters for Pa and Ma, slacks for me and shirts for Fei and Bak) were a perfect fit. Fei has always been a charmer who turns it on for his nearest and dearest – and girls – and of all the girls he could have charmed and brought home, he has chosen a girl who has gone and bought us all clothes. As I slipped into my new black velvety slacks, which were a better fit than a similar pair I bought myself, it struck me: She reminds me of my mother.

BOOKS | The movements of unchanging things

The New Yorker on R.K. Narayan:

With his fourth novel, The English Teacher (1945), Narayan’s point of view began to change, and this change is almost certainly related to a tragic event in his life. In the novel, Krishna, the protagonist, is, like earlier Narayan heroes, unhappy with his place in the world, “constantly nagged by the feeling that [he] was doing the wrong work”. One day, Krishna and his wife, Susila – their happy marriage nothing like the miserable one of The Dark Room – go house-hunting. Strolling through the grounds of one property, Susila takes leave of Krishna to use an outhouse in a distant corner of the garden. Once she closes the door, though, it jams, trapping her in the fetid, fly-filled dark. When Krishna, who grows concerned at her absence, hears Susila’s cries and locates the outhouse, kicking in its door, his wife is frantic: A fly, then a carrier of incurable diseases, has landed on her lip. Weeks later, she dies of typhoid.

Narayan, once an English teacher like Krishna, lost his own young wife, Rajam, to typhoid, in 1939, after just such an encounter with a fly. Her death affected Narayan deeply. “The world appears very vacant and vague now,” he told Greene in a letter, “and I too feel dead.” For years, Narayan was unable to write, but, when he resumed, his books had changed – a change that was both a function of what he had lost and what, through the nature of that loss, he discovered. Narayan had first seen his wife on a street corner and had courted her against the conventions of the time, which favoured arranged marriages. Having already ignored convention, the couple then learned that their horoscopes – the consideration of which was essential to marriage – deemed them incompatible: Narayan and Rajam were told that they must not marry. Were they to defy the stars, their charts made clear, Narayan would be a young widower. Deciding that superstitions and conventions did not apply to him, Narayan married the woman he loved. When the tragedy came, it seems to have instilled in him a deep sense of the inexorability of fate, a conviction that, naturally, influenced his view of character. “We are what we are,” Narayan later told a biographer. “Whether you grow older, more decrepit, inside, the sense of awareness, of being, is the same throughout. I don’t see any difference between myself when I was seven years old in Madras and now here in Mysore. The chap inside is the same, unchanged.”

If the novels that Narayan wrote before the death of his wife were all documents of frustrated flight, those that came after chart the comedy of trying to resist fate at all. Now resistance isn’t so much futile as fundamental to our humanness: We are always resisting only ourselves, a fact that – once you get over the abject horror of it – is really very funny. As the titles suggest – The Printer of Malgudi (1949); The Financial Expert (1952); The Guide (1958); The Vendor of Sweets (1967); The Painter of Signs (1976) – the protagonists of Narayan’s mature novels are all defined by their lot in life. All the books are comic, animated by the degree to which the inner self, however much it might question its place in the world, is constantly shown to be stubbornly consistent. These are not documents of frustration but, rather, delicately tuned farces of being.

The richest of these is The Guide. Upon his release from prison, a man must once again find a place for himself in the world. Raju, when we meet him, is sitting on steps that lead into a river, the very river where Savitri failed to end her life. Raju has no suicidal thoughts, only worries and sorrows. At the opening of the novel, a stranger approaches:

Raju welcomed the intrusion—something to relieve the loneliness of the place. The man stood gazing reverentially on his face. Raju felt amused and embarrassed. “Sit down if you like,” Raju said, to break the spell. The other accepted the suggestion with a grateful nod and went down the river steps to wash his feet and face, came up wiping himself dry with the end of a checkered yellow towel on his shoulder, and took his seat two steps below the granite slab on which Raju was sitting cross-legged as if it were a throne, beside an ancient shrine. The branches of the trees canopying the river rustled and trembled with the agitation of birds and monkeys settling down for the night. Upstream beyond the hills the sun was setting. Raju waited for the other to say something. But he was too polite to open a conversation.

It transpires that the man, a villager named Velan, is not being polite but reverential: Raju’s seated pose by the shrine has led Velan to mistake him for a holy man. This initial error furnishes the book’s premise; Raju, content to be misconstrued, begins dispensing advice to Velan, and then to his neighbours. It is, after all, to Raju’s profit: His worshippers bring him offerings of food, leaving him no reason to go anywhere else. Sweetly comic sections in which Raju shares his wisdom—inscrutable non-answers that exhort the villagers to seek answers within themselves—are all narrated in the third person. They alternate with Raju’s first-person account of the life that has brought him to this pass: his childhood in his father’s shop; his work as a successful tour guide, ignorant of history but adept at spinning colourful lies about attractions; his seduction of a tourist’s wife; and his attempt to defraud the woman by forging her name. This is the act that lands him in prison, and there is a comic counterpoint between the legal punishments for not being oneself and the worldly rewards that such behaviour attracts. As Raju concludes his life story, and as his fame as a spiritual guide ironically reaches its apex, we realise that he has been confessing his misdeeds to Velan. Raju asks if Velan has heard his confession:

“Yes, Swami.”
Raju was taken aback at still being addressed as “Swami”.
“What do you think of it?”
Velan looked quite pained at having to answer such a question. “I don’t know why you tell me all this, Swami. It’s very kind of you to address at such length your humble servant.”

In a Western comedy of mistaken identity, the revelation of the hero’s falsity would be a likely dénouement. But, in Narayan’s comedy, the joke is that Raju’s sense of who he is is trumped by the world’s view of him. After all, if one acts as a guide – dispensing wisdom, fasting when appropriate, attracting followers – one is a guide.

It is through this idea – that a self is not a private entity but a fixed, public one – that Narayan’s novels break most meaningfully with those of the West and establish their own tradition. Their significance derives less from the mere fact of being some of the first important Indian fiction in English than from being the first English writing to infuse the novel with an Eastern existential perspective. Though crammed with incident, Narayan’s novels do not – indeed, cannot – chart a progression toward the formation of character. His characters, “strangled by the contour of their land”, are doubly circumscribed: by their nation’s political fate and by the inexorable fate of Hindu cosmology. In Narayan’s world, no less than in his lived life, we do not become; rather, we become aware of that which, for good or ill, we cannot help being. Through the novel, a form long used to show how things change, Narayan mapped the movements of unchanging things.

Little woman

My next-door neighbour is three years old, a budding fashionista. “Top, beautiful. Bottoms, shoes, bag, beautiful. Hair, not beautiful,” was her short and not sweet assessment of my look, from Zara top to scrunched-up hair, yesterday.

She’s a linguist. Today she came up with a new way to say “your brother’s girlfriend”. She said as she stood at her door and I at mine – “Gor Gor – Gor Gor’s – Gor Gor’s Jer Jer has come.”

She’s a security guard. When my parents came home after me, she was able to report to them, “Three people came. Gor Gor, Gor Gor’s Jer Jer and Jer Jer.”

She was the best bit of my day today.

Auntie-killer

Boy was born to my friend, K, mere days after my gym membership ran out. At the age of three weeks, he’s the best boy I know apart from my two brothers and Jay Chou because he smiles a small baby’s smile in my arms. Because he doesn’t cry when I sing a Faye Wong song to him – he is all straight-faced and serious. He is long and one day he will be tall, taller than me. He has as much hair as Rain – or Elvis, to the age bracket to which Rain still means shower. He is better-looking than Rain. He is so new to the thing you and I call life, every breath is an event. Events I follow when he is sound asleep. I like looking at him when he takes a bigger gulp of air than usual and all of him quakes as the air fills his lungs, forces his ribs out and up, then flows down to his toes. When he is wide awake, he is my new trainer.

Like last weekend, when we did weight training (Boy-lifting as his mum lunched), running (Boy-lifting-and-jogging as he didn’t like me sitting on my arse) and Boyrobics (Boy-lifting-and-leaning-from-side-to-side to rock him to sleep). He is no featherweight; my arms were aching after a couple hours. If I was in the gym, I would have put down the weights and gone home light years ago. But Boy is unputdownable. When he was in my arms, I didn’t want him out of them; when he was in his gran’s arms, I wanted him back in mine.

He’s small but his life is large with possibility. It is why I want to hold him. It is what weighs my arms down.

A mini-diaspora

How come Li Yapeng was born in Xinjiang, the wild west of China?

Long story: His grandpa was a Kuomintang man. And in 1949, when the Kuomintang was losing the mainland to the communists, he went from Nanjing to Guangzhou, ahead of his wife and two daughters, with every plan to go back for them as soon as he set everything up. But the Kuomintang lost Nanjing and he was cut off from his girls. And he swam with the tide of the Kuomintang retreat, to Taiwan. His wife was as good as widowed. No, worse. She was a Kuomintang wife in Red China; she and her daughters were pariahs politically; and so the elder girl went into her own exile, taking off for Xinjiang, where she would wed and bear two sons, Yawei and Yapeng.

The boys’ grandpa did go home to their grandma. He flew in from Hong Kong in 1988, when cross-strait relations were warmer than ever. She even went to Taiwan with him and they had one more go at their marriage. After a couple years, however, she moved back to the mainland. It was not to be. She died and he ended up emigrating to the States.

Mr Li and his Mrs Li – née Faye Wong – have been in the States with their baby Yan and he blogs about how he has been getting to know his 92-year-old grandpa. Once Mr Li asked his grandpa whose side he would take now, the Kuomintang or the communists’. His grandpa said, “Doesn’t matter. Next week I have to go sing The Star-Spangled Banner. I’m now an American citizen.”

He hopes, however, to be buried in his homeland. (Li Yapeng’s Blog)

Prince Ah Boy

One sleepy Saturday morning, my brother Fei and I were, as always, readwatching. What I mean is he was readwatching – reading the papers while watching television – and I was sprawled on the same sofa. Miss Mashed Couch Potato. Japan’s newborn prince was on the news and I said to no one, 悠仁, 好名字叻.

悠. In only one Chinese character, you have the hopes that the boy has a leisurely, kingly life and that through him, the empire is everlasting. It’s a stately name.

Fei agreed. But being a smarter arse than me, he said, it was picked by professionals, how many manhours do you think were spent by this committee, that committee to think of one name?

Maybe. As an auntie of Prince Ah Boy – when I met him for the first time last Saturday, he was a handsome two-day-old who had a houseful of grown-ups at his beck and bawl – I have been sitting on such a committee myself, actually. I don’t get to make any decisions, as a non-executive non-blood member. What I get to do, with pleasure, is advise the executive members (his parents) on the names I have helped gather. Sometimes, I report some recommendations from the mentor (my mother).

Many months ago, I made a case for 宁 (calmness – “it’s a boy’s name, 宀 covering 丁, your roof covering your boy”).

Last week, my case was made for 斌 (refinement – “文 and 武, well-versed in arts and martial arts”).

Today, when I wake up to the haze – after the seventh month and the leap seventh month, the attack of polluted air makes this a third seventh month, if you ask me – 彬 springs to mind. Sounds the same as 斌. Refers to a gentleman just as refined. But do you see what I see, the tree, tree and stream in the Chinese character? Once, my friend S and I spoke of what we wanted for our friends’ as-yet-unborns. She said, “Luck.” She meant luck of the Woody Allen Match Point type. I said, “Fresh air? I don’t know…you know…high EQ? That he will weather whatever life casts to him?” I want him to be at ease. I want him to have the ease of a man who, even when life isn’t easy, has kept in his heart the woods and brook. 彬.

Boy Ah Boy

At about half past five, I am typing a review of two restaurants, tingly – the SMS comes, declaring, “You’re an auntie!”

Yes I am. No more Jer Jer.

“What are you thinking?” the mother says, hours after the birth.

The father has stepped out to take the grandparents home. The son is in good hands in the ward. I am fresh – more like old – out of the office. We are alone, hand in hand, stoic mother and silly auntie.

“I am thinking you’re a mommy…and I’m an auntie.” The tears come.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eight

“I’m not very smart.” That’s Sugar’s sad-funny refrain in Some Like It Hot, the manic masterpiece, my favourite 50s film which I watched on the big screen for the first time at The Picturehouse the other day. Sugar, played by the one and only boop-boop-de-boop Marilyn Monroe, is a singer who keeps falling for no-good sax players, who love her then leave her with no more than “a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out”. She just can’t help it. So to stay out of harm’s way, she runs off with an all-girl jazz orchestra. To Miami. Where she may meet a Shell Oil millionaire and marry money.

Well she doesn’t. She meets Joe (Tony Curtis), a sax player who dolls up as Josephine to get a job with the orchestra then masquerades as a shell-collecting millionaire to woo her. She’s “not very smart”. That’s why she falls for Shell Oil Junior, not finding it fishy when he says of water polo, “I had two ponies drowned under me.” When she finds out he is a sax player, a no-good one, she falls harder for him. “Not very smart,” she laughs – it isn’t a happy laugh. Conscience-stricken, he tries to tell her he is no better than all her previous sax players.

“That’s right. Pour it on. Talk me out of it,” she purrs. Tremulously.

It amazes me, how I hear Monroe’s smile and tears as she is saying this. Sugar is drunk and drowning, she knows it. She knows romance promises nothing but itself. Happiness? She might as well fish for the moon in a river. For a very insane farce, Some Like It Hot is very sane on the subject of romance. It’s very smart.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Seven

You forget what it is like to badly want someone.

It has hit you belatedly, weeks after you and your mother watched, rewatched and revised the rom com It Started With A Kiss: This girl really, really wants this boy. She, a dullard, is helplessly, helplessly in love with the star student. She writes him a love letter, which he refuses to read, and everyone in school ridicules her. But she still adores him. She may say she doesn’t. But she does. They go to the same school; they go home to the same house; there is no getting away from him. Not that she wants to get away. She can’t get enough of him as it is. If he joins the tennis team she has to join too. He is a waiter after school so she is a regular at the restaurant, naturally. If he wants to be a doctor then she has to be a nurse or die trying. All she wants is to be his Mrs Jiang Zhishu.

You feel for her, because the part is played by the truly adorable Ariel Lin. You found Lin annoying at first, actually. But she grew on you. If she was a fruit, you reckon, she would be a plum – small, round, sweet, soft, bruises easily. She isn’t like Barbie Hsu of Meteor Garden, Rainie Yang of Devil Beside You or Zhang Ziyi. There is a hardness to Hsu, Yang and Zhang. They don’t look like they will ever lay themselves as open to love as Lin. As open to being hurt. When Lin says, “How? I don’t know how to stop loving him,” she sounds so dazed, it endears her to you. You want to buy her ice cream.

You feel for her, because you remember now. You had a Gor Gor who lived under the same roof long ago. You were a four-year-old or five-year-old driving him potty, going, Gor Gor this, Gor Gor that and he was a tween or teen pushing you away, telling the adults how much he hated you. But when you went swimming for the first time, he was the one paddling all around the pool with you… In JC, you were smitten by so-and-so – a broad-shouldered long-fingered so-and-so who played the piano, mahjong and football well – and somehow everyone in your science class knew. The other day, somebody sent you an SMS, “Met so-and-so who is with ERA now. Had to tell you. He was your idol!” It has been more than 10 years and they still think of you as a subset of him… A memory is thawing out after a year in the freezer. It feels like a lifetime ago. But didn’t you once write Oscar a bloody bad poem?

Happily, Kiss is a rom com and not reality. It fulfils girls’ fantasies that the boys they want will be worth it. Zhishu is worth it. Not because he is brighter and better-looking than her. But because despite his apparent aloofness, he sees how she suffers. Another boy, her classmate, has carried a torch for her for years and on a rare lucid day, she says to him, “I am luckier than you. Zhishu may look like he doesn’t care. But he sees what I feel. He knows.”