Four candles

At 6.46pm I stole out of work (after sending some more career-suicide notes out to tell the supes what I think of the story schedule tomorrow). I had to be home for a birthday dinner, mine. I had said I didn’t want anything fancy so Ma made abalone conpoy fish maw soup and stir-fried enough noodles for about two armies. I had said I didn’t want any cake so Fei and his girl P got a black forest.

“I won’t be eating it,” I said (desserts after dinner have a strange way of showing on the scales the next morning).

“But we will be,” Bak said.

“What about W next door?” Fei said.

Okay, okay. I did get my own way on the matter of, matter. As they were about to tear out tissue to eat the cake on, I said, “Save paper?” So the five of them – Pa, Ma, Fei, P and Bak – used only one piece between them. Trees…three-one…trees…three-one…it wasn’t a bad day.

A tony day

So my mother calls me during lunch to ask if she should stay in Chungking Mansion when she goes to Hong Kong, oh, this weekend. Is it a good establishment?

“It is on Nathan Road……” I say as my mind zooms in and out of Chungking Express – Tony – Takeshi Kaneshiro – Lin Ching-hsia, blonde hair, white heels, on the run from Indian hit men in the maze of Chungking Mansion – “……there are many Indians there……it is Hong Kong, it should be safe.”

Today is Tony Day, when a few Tony-loving friends and I have a birthday party for him (it is his 45th birthday and our third party); my mother and brother are taking a capricious trip à la Faye Wong to Hong Kong in time for a birthday fireworks display (10 of the 50 years under “one country, two systems” have flashed by); it is all quite Chungking Express.

Then……and now.

Did you know…

The boys, Pa, Fei and Bak, talk the talk over breakfast every Saturday. I just listen and learn.

• The employment act applies to employees who earn a salary not exceeding $x a month. So some lawyers pay their personnel $(x+1) a month. (At present the gahmen has x as 1,600.)

• When is a bar not a bar? When it is a laundry. Some bars sell zero drinks but record reams of sales. All the alcohol that was sold on paper is sold in actuality to second-hand men through TNP ads.

• Before you try your luck in an Asian casino, stop by a café and steal a sugar cube or two. Some casinos keep ghosts in VIP rooms to bleed you dry. Say you win so much money, the house invites you to the VIP room to win the money back. Go, but sprinkle sugar underneath your seat to pay the ghosts off.

The summer of our discontent

So Ms Chia calls me tonight. “Eh, 3820 third prize leh.”

There is a play, 3 Years, 8 Months, 20 Days, that we were talking cock about the other day.

“3 Years, 8 Months…World War Two, is it?” “Pol Pot. It’s 3 Years…8 Months…20 Days.” “Aiya, what year, what month, what day, so difficult. 3-8-2-0! So easy. Like 4D.”

We talked the number into being – a nice number it is, will you look at all its curves? – and didn’t put money on it.

I have been discontented for weeks now. I don’t know if it is the wacky sun-with-rain weather or the one-month-to-go-before-my-31st-birthday climate of fear. Going on leave makes me want to go on leave again, permanently perhaps. I want to be a housewife, I think. But a housewife needs a backer and I have nobody. Besides, I think, I can’t be latching on to a backer because I don’t know what to do with myself; I can’t be hatching a baby because it will free me from the office for three months; I should be keeping to myself my karma of discontent.

There was the answer, 3820, that was staring me in the face – a ticket to three months, four months, five months of unpaid leave? – and I didn’t even think of putting one penny on it. It is a sign, I think, that I should be resigned.

FOC in the ROC

What I want, when I think about it, is to be a DVD. Slot me in a greater Chinese city and if I can, I will switch audio tracks. In Hong Kong I wouldn’t be caught dead saying leui (Straits Cantonese for money); I say chin. In Singapore I speak a less singsong Mandarin to taxi drivers so they will stop taking me for a Chinese karaoke hostess. In Taipei I would never say bu yao jin la (Straits Mandarin for no problem); I say mei shi’r to sound more pan-blue or mei guan xi la to sound more pan-green.

Even so you can be caught out. Touring Taiwan last week – junket: great way to flee the office – I fooled everyone with my pirated northern accent, everyone but a girl in the group who could tell my accent wasn’t purebred. “Your accent…you curl your vowels like a northerner…you lengthen your vowels like a Taiwanese.” Oh, she heard me. I could tell her accent was a hybrid as well, of soft Malaysian and hard Taiwanese tones. Takes a crossbreed to catch a crossbreed, as the saying goes.

And when it isn’t the accent it is the semantics. On the coach trips from Kaohsiung to Tainan to Taichung I made friends with a girl and two guys from Zaobao, Wanbao and My Paper, all birds of a Chinese-speaking, Everybody Speaks Nonsense-watching, Chinese-singing feather. Naturally we flocked to a KTV on our only night in Taipei (for the record, there are a few more Cheer Chen songs in Taipei than in Singapore but also more time-eating ads, which play at the end of each and every song). But before we could get to our mikes, there was a staff member to get through to, a girl who said we would have to spend such and such an amount as per package. So could we have shui, we said. Shui was free, would we have something else, she said. But we didn’t want food, we wanted shui, we said. Shui was free, she said. We kept running round in circles when it clicked: Water. She meant water. She didn’t mean beverages, as we had in our coffee-shop Chinese.

For all the Taiwanese TV we watch, all the imitations we do of Tsung-tsung’s imitation of Chen Shui-bian, we aren’t quite plugged in, no. Or we are, but DVDs storing one layer too many of data will act up, break down, stop. I will have to work on my game.

One night in the Starck-esque Grand Victoria in Taipei, FOC.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Ten

Lyricist Lin Xi, in an interview, speaks of the levels to writing a love song. Level one is when you are at least writing Chinese; level two is when you want people to weep and they do; level three: Not only do your words bring tears they also bring back memories; level four: When the weepers have done weeping they are philosophical, able to see the unhappy past in a happier light; then there is what Mr Lin terms the Huang Yaoshi level, when a love song is also about the world, politics – going beyond “one couple, two systems” to “one country, two systems” and back, as it were.

Coming to the Huang Yaoshi ref in the interview – thanks Ms O for posting parts of it – I felt a flicker of satisfaction. Hey, I thought, Mr Lin reads Louis Cha too. The master lyricist is reading the same master novelist as me. Then I thought, hey, everyone in Hong Kong, in China, reads Mr Cha or learns him by osmosis: Mr Lin is making the ref to Huang Yaoshi (an exceptionally multitalented man in Legend of the Eagle-Shooting Heroes, a genius) without a second thought and everyone there gets the ref without a second thought. So in mere seconds I went from feeling I wasn’t quite alone to feeling I was quite alone. I am a shorthand typist using signs that few of my friends here know. Worse, I thought, we don’t have our own similarly resonant shorthand. We don’t have our own Louis Cha stories, our own rich (if a bit middlebrow) mythology. We are poorer for it.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Pamukkale

In the village at the bottom of the snow-white cliff-side calcium terraces of Pamukkale we were in a shoebox of a bus office when a man said, “台北人?” He didn’t guess Tokyo or Seoul, hmm. Since his sleeve said 武士攻略, I guessed, “You got your T-shirt from Taiwan?” “Korea,” he shrugged and said, “all the Asians know what it says.”

Over apple tea in tulip glasses we waited at his father’s for the 6pm bus which wouldn’t be here before 6.20pm; he waited. He had a baby, six months old, he said. “We marry too young, make babies too much and they run everywhere.” He wanted another baby as soon as next year, he said, but his father, the village bus agent, wanted him to wait.

Had he been in Korea on business, the reporter in me reared its head to ask. “My wife, Korean.” Then he was on and off the phone, declared, “Korean dinner ready,” and was out of the office. He had been waiting for dinner – prepared by, perhaps, an ex-tourist.

So some men do want you – just as others want your money.

When I came home from Turkey M wrote from Tokyo, “So you survived the world-famous romantic attack?” The first wave of Japanese tourists, sold on Turkey’s campaign, swept the country in the mid-90s, she said, where some fell for men they would marry and others fell for “I love you” tricksters. (Who sound as infamous to the Japanese as China-born CPF-killers are to Singaporeans.)

In Istanbul a man told me of his factory and showed me a photo album of him in it. Another man told me of his life in the States and showed me his chequebook printed with his name and stateside address.

So some men do want you…or want you to think they want you…oh, I don’t know what they want.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Ayasofya

For a few hours, as my thoughts galloped like horses, I imagined my surrender. I’ll call him and we’ll… We? Yes, we. We’ll have Turkish wine, he said we would, and we’ll… But you are already drunk on him. Should you be having any actual alcohol? He said… Think. Think market. Think supply and demand. You had to buzz an old man to have him unlock the ladies, a lone room, in the Grand Bazaar. So there are not many girls in the market in the first place. So your being in demand was mere mathematics. Eh are you listening? Stop looking in the mirror and smiling like a moron leh. …and didn’t you see and hear how he said to me…

I called him. I said 7pm. He said 9pm; he had work to do. I said Ayasofya. He said he would park there and wait to pick me up. “I k–iss you,” he said in such an Italian way, broken English was whole and Humpty Dumpty unbroken happily ever after.

Once off the phone, however, I was in a panic. You don’t want him to come to the hostel. But do you want to cross the car park in the dark to go to the Ayasofya, close as the church is to the hostel? Do you want to be slain by someone else while waiting for him to come in his car – to take you who-knows-where for who-knows-what? Think of the headlines. Think of the parents.

I had to call the thing off. I said, “Nine is a little late.” He said, “I will n–ot kill you.” I said tomorrow. He said 8pm. But I didn’t call him again.

Daydreams are safer.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Grand Bazaar

Going into the Grand Bazaar, the “mother of all tourist traps…anything but pleasant”, in Frommer’s book, I was wary. Coming out of it I was so high, I wasn’t walking – I was floating. It wasn’t the shopping, no (I did lose myself, for half an hour, in the cute clutter of the children’s shop, Deli Kizin Yeri Junior). It was the men. One man. Half Turkish, half Italian, completely sexy.

What was it about him? He said he would sell me a “dream jacket” but after I stepped into his shop he squired me, with my hand on his arm, to another of his shops, sat me down for a cup of tea and started selling himself. He was a cook at “Sir Raffles Hotel” in Singapore. He lived in Hong Kong years ago. Oh, and he was, is and will be trim. For ever and ever. “Ganetics,” he said. “Genetics…? Yes, your Italian gene, yes,” I said. (Was I sounding breathy? Why was I sounding breathy?)

He wasn’t the only one to give me tea and his number. But he alone didn’t make me uncomfortable: He didn’t feel my hand up as he was shaking it (one man did and I had to scram when he tried to take me in his arms too); he didn’t ask what my room number was (another man did and I had to say I didn’t remember); he didn’t use “Turkish hospitality” as a pretext for inviting me into his shop.

What was it about him? Our fifteen minutes were so snug, it might last me a lifetime of never again being chatted up.

TURKISH DELIGHT | Blue Mosque

Turkish kids are a delight. Gaggles of them go on school tours of Topkapi Palace, see us, smile bigger and twitter, “Konichiwa! Konichiwa! Toshiba!” East Asian is spoken here, okay. (When I tell a girl I am not Japanese she takes a wide-eyed guess, “Turkish?” It must be my golden coat.)

All around Sultanahmet, the historic thus touristy district, Turkish men speak much more Asian. They usually try Japanese, then Korean, then Mandarin, all the better to tout restaurants.

Then there is the Turkish carpet salesman. We were minding our own business heading for the Blue Mosque one morning when a man – short, with long eyelashes – came over, made out our accent, “Chinese Singapore?” and advised us to hurry up to avoid the noon-prayer throng. He then showed us round the mosque, the bazaar beside it and his shop. He would sound upfront about this and that (he has a shop in Taipei 101; he hopes to master Mandarin; he has a Chinese ex-girlfriend; we haven’t been to Boracay in the Philippines? “They have the best beaches!”), then roll out his rugs. He would show us snapshots of a cousin in Tokyo, then roll out more rugs. By the time we walked out of the shop D had a new kilim and all I knew was: I didn’t know anything about the man behind those long lashes.