Something old, something new 2

In the first few frames rolling hills roll, undulating waves undulate, mournful music mourns, impressing on us an impression of pastoral China-ness. Now we see a village sign. Now we are in the village. Now we see and hear a band, men and women in white uniforms, playing and working their way past paddy fields, up steps, to a house. Now we are in the house and near a transparent box, nearer – face to face with the star of the show, my uncle, 80, mouth agape, as if he is amazed to be in the air-conditioned comfort of his coffin on a summer’s day.

It came in the mail the other day, his funeral, an all-out seven-day send-off deep in the Chinese countryside, on DVD. We didn’t know what to think. Ma, who I think loves her older brother more than she likes him, had visited him on his sickbed in the village last month but didn’t want to watch his funeral, not all on her own. Fei and I wanted to watch Bourne, Jason Bourne, not two discs by a village Zhang Yimou. Well, we watched the funeral and I came to admire Mr Auteur’s long continuous takes, which set us shoulder to shoulder with all the action. With my cousins, who are crying as they circle the coffin in multicoloured clothes (don’t they have to be in solemn colours, eh?); as their sire is covered with cloth to be spared the indignity of having his decay on display; as they are handed, while pillars built of brown cakes loom on the altar in the background, the mourning – white linen gowns that are Ming-dynasty fabulous (ah).

My uncle’s one and only son died young. Having lived with the Cultural Revolution and learned nothing from it, he believed sons to be more equal than daughters, the daughter whose other half renounced his family name to bear my uncle’s to be more equal than the other daughters and the grandsons bearing the family name to be more equal than the other grandsons. So we watch as the renouncer is anointed as the chief mourner and handed a short staff…

But now the soundtrack has become a swelling song. I have never heard it before but let me bet you 10 yuan the title is The Good People of the Plum River or something. Mr Auteur pans to the yard and I see it isn’t the radio. It is someone in the multitalented band singing with keyboard accompaniment. I have never seen a busier funeral band, actually. Now they are ambling halfway across the village, drums a-banging and trumpets a-blasting, to grandly receive guests. Now they are ambling out again to grandly take delivery of garlands. Night falls and they are not only singing but also dancing in all their getai glory. Four women are swirling around in Chinese costumes, then twirling sleeves that have been tacked on their band uniforms, then swirling around in slips – to the Alishan song by Teresa Teng, she who still reigns supreme in Chinese hearts. Seeing the show are chattering children, nattering women and twinkling men, one of whom has just fingered his armpit. “You saw what that man said?” Ma says. “What did he say?” “He is laughing at that dancer’s hairy armpits.” Mr Auteur pans back to Mr Armpit and I see it now. “But he has hairy armpits himself!”

All the village are here, bushy armpits and all. Hell, it is the funeral of the year. They will be here too for the finale. They are the finale - an all-encompassing procession at dawn that encompasses dozens of children, two by two, shouldering banners on bamboo poles, the band and everyone else. At the end of the procession - after my uncle is carted to a crematorium rather than a cemetery, one of the few times the funeral breaks with tradition to not break the new laws - the closing credits come on. Somebody has brushed on New-Year-red paper all the contributors to the funeral fund and as the camera pans down and up we see, satisfyingly, each and every name and number - a round of applause, please, for the village Zhang Yimou.

Something old, something new

In 笑傲江湖 (sorry, there is too much meaning in the title for me to translate it), Linghu Chong, swordsman in a secret operation, takes a wine test at the Plum Villa by the West Lake. To advance to the next challenge and the next (it is a long compelling chapter, vintage Louis Cha), he has to taste his host’s wine and analyse it. So he takes a sip. “I can’t put my finger on it, but the wine tastes as if it is more than 100 years old, yet three years old.” His host cannot believe his ears. He won the wine from a Turk in the West three years ago and the Turk, gracious in his defeat in the duel, told him the wine would not keep after his journey back to the East and he would need to distil it again, which he did. So the old wine was old-new, or new-old, and Linghu Chong could tell…

When I think of China now I think of that new-old wine. If you bear in mind the new-oldness of China you won’t be taken aback at the news of boys being abducted to become slaves and women being murdered to become corpse brides. The Middle Kingdom lives feudally on, side by side with the People’s Republic of China that chats about such scandals on the Internet. Cultural DNA dies hard.

Take the chauffeur of my cousin’s then-bureaucrat husband in Shenzhen. He would charge through a traffic jam as if he owned all the roads, cycle paths and footpaths. Hey, if he didn’t own them his boss or boss’s boss did. I remember the bumpy, up-kerb down-kerb rides in his Jeep from the time I went to Shenzhen with my mother in the 90s. It didn’t feel like we were in an action film, no. It felt like we were in a Chinese costume drama, driven about by a mandarin’s dogsbody who would crush all the carts in his way – because he could. His Jeep might have been new but the assumptions that his behaviour was based on were as old as the hills.

Lost and found 2

Back at work after three days off. As some 72 hours of mail came in my eye caught “Grady Hendrix” and “Re: zeeyee and tcheky” and my heart pirouetted. Oh my –

History: Mr Hendrix manned a rollicking blog on Asian gossip and Asian movies at Kaiju Shakedown. When it closed I wrote him to say that I missed the blog and that if he missed the gossip here was the news of the day on Zeeyee Zhang’s hot date with either Tchéky Karyo or his clone (it was multimillionaire Vivi Nevo actually – naturally). He wrote back to thank me – he wrote back! – so why would he write again?

Oh…the blog is back. At Variety Asia. Okay, so it was a mass mail for the eyes of all who had ever emailed him – not for mine only, aiya – but the blog is back!

Lost and found

You are you. An IC is an IC. You aren’t your IC, it isn’t you and you shouldn’t need it: Why should you need more proof of you than you?

Pardon the outbreak of third-rate philosophising. I lost my IC for a few hours yesterday (with my wallet – with my Party World KTV gold card! which I was to record reflexively as a very important personal object when I filled in a lost-and-found form) and it has been a whole heap of work.

I have a Taoist vaccine against reality (things aren’t lost; when they aren’t with you they are still somewhere in the cosmos, where they have always been – er, doesn’t Zhuangzi say so?) so all I felt at first was mild alarm. “Hold the sashimi?” I told the Ngee Ann Sushi Tei staff as soon as I established the wallet had escaped. I searched my mind for the last time I had touched it: Party World? Heeren? “I’m going to get my wallet back. I’m coming back.” “You can cancel…?” “Could you hold? I’m coming back.”

I did go back to the sashimi after an hour, wallet-less, IC-less, gold card-less; I had $50, a loan from Fei’s girl, who happened to be near (a drop of luck for me in the ocean of not-luck); I needed my fix of fish. Reports of the loss had been made to the mall, the bank…what more was a girl to do, right?

Wrong. When I came home Pa piled on the paranoia. What if someone sold my IC to snakeheads? Used it to borrow money from loan sharks? Buy mobile phones? That someone wouldn’t even have to look like the woman on my IC. That someone could be a man. Those telcos wouldn’t care. So I had to go phone them and ask them not to sell anything to anyone using my IC. I had to go to the police: a sweet young policeman with small eyes who spelt Ngee Ann “Mgee Ann”. I could have corrected him. But he seemed such a sweet young man, oh, and he had a gun.

To tell the truth, I am a veteran in the wallet-losing department. I misplaced it twice in my schooldays, in the pre-9/11, pre-paranoia age. The first time it was sent back to me. The second time it was sent to TransitLink, which eventually gave it back to me when I eventually went to reapply for a concession card. I am truly not a terminal optimist so I didn’t bank on getting it back a third time. The call came from Heeren, however, after I went to the police. A cleaner had found it in a rubbish bin. The cash was somewhere else in the cosmos, the ez-link too. But everything else was safe. It was really raining luck.

So, you know, I have told the police to hold their search. Now there are notes to send the telcos so they won’t have me arrested when they find me in their shop using my IC. It’s a whole heap of work – I haven’t had time for Secret!

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.