All quiet

On this misty Good Friday morning, as is the tradition, we cab to the Lim Chu Kang Chinese Cemetery at the end of the universe to hang around with Grandma for an hour.

It isn’t even eight but there is a small crowd at the cemetery already. There are Chinese families such as mine, working the public holiday to pay Qingming visits to our dead as faithful Christians commemorate their dead Jesus, and there are NSboys, working on a public holiday to keep us safe from terrorists, oh yeah. Off the block where Grandma lies, the boys in green have set up Checkpoint Cemetery, where they are examining every car in case Mas Selamat Kastari, who has been on the loose for more than three weeks, is trying to smuggle himself into a graveyard.

We watch as two of them go through someone’s boot. Umbrella-ella-ellas, check. Food for the dead, check. Flowers for the dead, check. Billion-dollar hell notes to be burned and sent by smoke to the dead, check. Nothing questionable unless they are Al Gore – concerned about the Qingming effect on global warming.

“Eh tell the NSmen leh,” goes Fei, “Good Friday, Chinese cemetery, Muslim terrorist: What are the odds?”

“You don’t read Gu Long meh?” I go, “the unlikeliest place is the likeliest place mah.”

To be honest I don’t read Gu Long myself. But if you have seen half a show based on his books you know he is about mystery men who mysteriously appear, disappear and reappear. So we are trooping up to Grandma’s block on full alert when what should we see but strange red spots on the back of her and her neighbours’ units. “Why are some tombs marked and not others?” goes Fei.

Yes, why? Some Muslims spring to mind – the 40 thieves! Ali Baba! – but the idea limps off quickly when I realise what is afoot. Aha. “The grass on the marked tombs is nice and the grass on the unmarked tombs isn’t. They are marking who has paid and who hasn’t.” (Yes, I should so be in Home Affairs.)

Talking of “them”, the maintenance men show up soon for their fee, $40 a year, and regale us with tales of 4D fanatics who visit the tombs with Taoist mediums after dark. Would-be lottery winners, we are told, run round the knolls, possessed by either ghosts or their own madness, in search of a lucky number.

These hills are alive with extremists after all, but not the type the NSboys are after.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eleven

When I think about it the Taiwanese ones are taller and the Korean ones are heavier.

When I think of a Taiwanese rom com that works, like It Started with a Kiss, I think of its dizzy heights – girl gets giddy when she gets to be in the same building as boy. When I think of a Korean rom com that works, like My Girl, I think of its weight. I feel it and I weep it. Might it have to do with how serious the Koreans are about everything?

Yes, be it in Taiwan or Korea, rom coms are almost always about how the good girl gets the guy. But in Korea they don’t just tell you she is good and absolutely adorable. They also put her through the wringer of extreme Confucian ethics and test her goodness time and again – or they do in My Girl.

(SPOILERS AHEAD.)

This is a roller coaster of a show constructed on the conceit that the heroine is a liar with a heart pure as snow. The rom com of errors starts slow, with how she is hired by the hero to pose as his long-lost cousin at his grandpa’s deathbed; then it goes up, down and round steep narrative slopes when grandfather lives and won’t let granddaughter leave and she has to keep lying – and suffering.

Oh, there is comedy here. Oh, there certainly is (as well as lived-in loverly banter). I really remember laughing.

But the weeping is more memorable. Late in the rom com the heroine has to sound cheerful saying goodbye to the hero. He thinks this is goodbye for now; she is just going to Jeju Island, isn’t she, and he is joining her ASAP. But she knows she is going somewhere else and never coming back; this is goodbye forever. After their goodbyes she is about to fill in a departure form at Incheon airport when the dam bursts. The last lie she told him weighs so heavily, she can’t stay on her feet any more. All she can do is sink to the ground and bawl. Very, very bitterly.

This bitterness I somehow took with me when I went jogging last Saturday. I went up, down and round a hill, bawling. So few things get under my skin these days, however, it felt good feeling bad that day.

Cheapness is a crime

Chip Tsao on The Photos:

But in the thousand or so leaked pictures, be they standing, lying, caressing their breasts or parting their legs, the female stars strike poses that are traditional and not in the least creative – postures that have been in magazines from Lou Ye Che in the 70s to Lung Fu Pao later. There is no attention to light and colour in the works. The bedroom is disorderly. Please, couldn’t the toy bears and such have been moved out of the way? The photos are too cluttered and slightly too cheap, any bleach-blond boy in Yau Ma Tei, Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok could have taken pictures of the same standard.

Some may say, “These are but hasty works of life, don’t have such high expectations.” They would be wrong. Since it is a celebrity, a son of a wealthy family who went to the West to study and who comes from a film and television background, why shouldn’t the public have higher expectations? Entertainment is a specialised line. When taking photos of the human body is your hobby it isn’t easy, you have to be passionate. While you are at it do it diligently and do it well. As it is the author’s talent doesn’t show in the leaked pictures. Learn from Lee Ang, okay? Uncle Lee Ang is in his 50s and a senior but in his Lust, Caution, Tang Wei and Tony Leung Chiu Wai’s sex scenes are dangerously creative – gentle and yet intense. Hong Kong entertainers in their 20s and their generation have pretensions to being current, in and young. In these thousand or so leaked nude photos, however, the lighting and angles are unimaginative and the poses, old hat. This is the sin. (Apple Daily)

BEIJING | Day n

Even in Beijing I am a creature of habit; every night I have to come back to TV. To countless marriage-and-the-city Chinese shows that are not so much watchable as native-spoken listenable, to ads that make up for their visual simplicity with their verbal sophistication – and to Shankou Baihui (Yamaguchi Momoe).

I have been hypnotised by her 80s serial, Xie Yi (Akai Giwaku), since I found it on a Chinese channel. Boy meets girl, she’s going to get leukaemia, he’s going to find out that he’s her half-brother – I can foretell it all but I can’t bear switching channels.

“Eh, you don’t have to bathe, meh? Haven’t you seen this show?” says my room mate for the week, Fei.

“Yes, but I was too young.”

I was six or maybe seven: too young to remember her going to Paris, getting a wedding gown and looking rosebud lovely in a red beret. “Did you see that? The French look never goes out of fashion.”

“But the skirt is so 80s,” says Issey Feiyake.

“But the colour is so not 80s.”

Seeing and hearing it anew now, I am also intrigued by how in the Chinese dubbing she is described as a guniang. Not nuhai, not nusheng, but guniang. Quaint, isn’t it?

Sometimes we do hop to the news or something. Although you don’t get stories about China’s ban on the film Lost in Beijing, you do get weather reports and stories about the comrade of the day. (“Today, a tourist reported losing his comb on the train on the way from City A to City B. Rail workers in City A combed through the train for the comb and sent it to City B…”)

“You are right. This is so fictional,” says Fei tonight. (He is right more often than me, okay, so when he says I am right – ahem.)

“Why do you think I watch those serials? You might as well watch real fiction, right?”

BEIJING | Day seven

It is freezing outside but warm in the Beijing airport, where we are waiting to fly home. Two of us are silently boiling. My father is angry at something his children might or might not have done and my aunt, at something her husband and child might or might not have done. The boys – Bak, Y, Fei and my uncle – look like they cannot be bothered. My mother is annoyed that it has not snowed in Beijing. (The snowstorms would start after we went home.) I have been PMSing for a few days now. I have yelled at my mother and even my brother Fei, whom I have not raised my voice at for about a decade. We have been noisily travelling together for a week – nattering, nagging, nattering and gratuitously swearing – and here we are now, slouching in silence in what might be the calm before a couple of family storms. And yet. And yet. My mother and I are, for once, on the same secret happy wavelength.

“The next time we go anywhere as a family, it isn’t going to be just us,” she says.

“I know.”

Our Fei will marry P next month: We won’t be monopolising him on the next trip.

Jay-diation sickness

When I finally found them they were sitting slumped in their seats – as if somebody had zapped their souls. None of them had picked up when I tried to phone them so I had to walk all the way to their seats in the front of the Singapore Indoor Stadium, wave and yell before one of them looked up and saw me.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“He was awesome,” breathed one of my four friends. Translation: They were okay – they were suffering from exposure to a superstar of Jay Chou’s magnitude but okay, more or less.

As for me, I might need therapy.

Coming to Jay’s concert, I had been as sceptical as anyone could humanly be who was in a cowboy hat in keeping with the subject of Jay’s single Cowboy on the Run. I knew he wouldn’t be as exhilarating a live performer as Wu Bai or as exceptional a live singer as Jacky Cheung – and he wasn’t. His cold was bad, his voice scratchy and his high notes, on several of his own trickier compositions, shaky. But it worked even when it didn’t work. Because this wasn’t a concert I was attending – this was a microcosm of a real relationship with my Jay.

He would surprise me (he had more showmanship than I had expected), stress me out (he sounded sick and the more he had to catch his breath, the more I had to hold mine) and move me (he sounded sad rasping out Rosemary). I would be on, off and on tenterhooks. I took pride in his R & B improvisations. I took pride in his piano, drum and zither playing. I loved how he was adorably unaware of how adorable he was. I was proud when he wasn’t awkward and was talking to the audience. I was pleased when he was awkward with the female dancers feeling him up. I wished he would go back to the hotel and get better. I wished he would never ever go. I was happy, unhappy, contented, discontented, in heaven, in hell and finally, dead beat.

Two and a half hours: longer than a music video, as long as most movies, shorter than an idol drama, enough for a fool like me to feel I know him better and find myself saying girlfriend things like, “He doesn’t do humble, you know. He doesn’t say sorry, he has a cold. But he suffers and I suffer…”

Over-exposure to Jay does odd things to your head.

At our wits’ end at the year-end

Friday, 10amish. The very dead deadline for my Best & Worst 2007 Western and Eastern entertainment wraps is dusk; I am very brain-dead; I have warned a sub that my stories might be very late and she has warned me that she might have to kill me. Clock is ticking. Brain is deading. I have to complain to someone.
“I don’t know how to write! How to Best & Worst gossip? What’s good gossip what’s bad gossip it’s either exciting gossip or boring gossip what! What five Bests what three Worsts everything is the worst what!”
“Have you told Meigao?” (Meigao is Ms M’s Mandarinised nickname for the ed.)
“Can’t be bothered.”
“I love your attitude.”

Friday, 4pmish. Ms H and I are worrying about other people’s wraps when I should be writing mine.
harry potter not in book wrap!
i know, i know. n lust caution not in film wrap!
sicko, death proof, were they even shown in sg. no 881! but sam has it in his music wrap
sam is good. but alamak. book wrap no harry potter. film wrap no lust caution. wheres the zeitgeist? talk to dt?
i cant get through to him
i try?
“Eh eh eh I kaypoh ah. Your best-movie wrap…Sicko and Death Whatever shown here meh?”
“Yes they opened here lah.”
“Meh? One week? Two days? Your list sounds like you hid in your home and saw lots of ang mor DVDs leh.”
“No they opened here lah.”
“Okay.” (Ms H was right. You can’t get through to DT.)
i tried. he said they were shown. shall i say something to the supes casually?
no need. put them in ur ent wrap so i can put them in my preamble? u can save the paper from irrelevance!
i try i try

Friday, 7pmish. My stories have gone to Meigao. The worst has come to the worst.
“Are you saying Anna Nicole Smith’s death is a good thing? I’m not comfortable with it.”
“Well, in death, she won? Front-page treatment, thoughtful essays, she got an Economist obituary, remember? XY wrote about that? In Culture Vulture?”
“Don’t remember…I’m not comfortable with it.”
“Er” (eating my words and my attitude) “what’s the Best gossip? What’s the Worst gossip? Best to whom? Worst to whom? Paris Hilton in jail, I turned that into a good thing, should that be turned into a bad thing now? We don’t have enough Bests.”
“One year and there are not enough Bests?”
“Er. Britney is not a Best? Lindsay, is that a Best? Amy Winehouse, is that a Best?”
“No. Amy Winehouse is bad. ……… Do celeb babies?”
“Er. No one new was born this year?”
“Do celeb babies.”
“Okay.” (Relevance shrelevance. Hey I only work here okay?)

Today, 8amish. The clouds of sleep are clearing and I think I hear… “Eh I saw three of the five best movies leh,” Fei is saying somewhere in the house. (He is up? Who else is up?) So DT has made Fei’s day with his fanboy’s wrap; I can’t complain about that; my mind hazes over with more sleep.

Idol drama

What sets a singer apart from a truly talented KTV warbler is interpretation. The singer sings somebody else’s song as if it is his own, as if he has never heard the original – and I know as a karaoke enthusiast just how hard that is.

Taiwan is KTV country so maybe more Taiwanese, coming to a talent contest, are able to appreciate how good a contestant is when he sings a familiar song very, very differently. Of course, they then go try the song they have rediscovered at karaoke, trying their best to sound as good as the contestant.

And this year everyone, from the man in the night market to the comic from Everybody Speaks Nonsense, wanted to sing the Gary Chaw song Betrayal very, very sadly – as popularised by Aska Yang, the contestant from One Million Star (click here).

I don’t know how he does it and I don’t know how much of it is instinctive but he somehow opens up the song and lets in a lot more emotional colour. Okay, in English: When he sings it you feel it. Surely the Taiwanese were feeling it (one of his nicknames is Yang-tsung Wei, Onion Wei, a play on his Chinese name and his talent for reducing them to tears) and singing it (Betrayal is No.1 in the KTV charts this year). It helped that there then came Jam Hsiao, a PK contestant who challenged Yang with his very own Broadwayish version of Betrayal; out of the blue there were not one but two interpretations to admire and aspire to (click here). (Onion? Jam? Yes, and there is also a Yoga Lin.)

For coming close to beating Yang, Hsiao became a star overnight. (Okay, over three weeks in the contest.) The 20-year-old has done a duet with A-mei and will release his own record next year. Yang went on to quit the show when he was found to have lied about his age (29, not 24) and faked a Xerox of his IC. Had he stayed in the contest, he would have won it, not that he needs to. He is so preposterously popular now, a capacity crowd would want to hear him sing phone numbers – very, very heartrendingly.

FILM | The day good taste died

Good taste died in Hong Kong cinema in the 1960s the day Loke Wan Tho of the high-class Cathay studio died in a plane crash; bad taste in the shape of low-class Shaw films then dominated the decade.

That is the Chinese film history my father feeds me at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays which I have always filed away with every intent of checking every fact before I unleash it upon the unsuspecting world as an amateur movie historian.

Now I don’t have to. Grady Hendrix, a true professional, has gone and written that story, fleshing it out with more details and theories than I could have come up with in a zillion years (“Peter Chen plays the romantic lead in Mambo Girl but really, who cares? Actors at Cathay were an endless gallery of nobodies, with the faces of civil servants and spines of spaghetti, no match for the radiant screen goddesses who surrounded them”).

Read him here.

And here. (Post-1997 Hong Kong cinema is slimmer and sexier than ever!)

And here. (Lust and no caution in Japan’s 1960s Nikkatsu action cinema!)

And here. (The Spielbergs of Nippon’s porn!)

And here. (A celebrity has directed a movie based on the book said celebrity wrote - it isn’t terrible!)

FILM | Good Mr Yee, bad Mr Yee

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart” – W.H. Auden

It was chilly in the hotel in Kyoto and my mind fevered, the night I met Eileen Chang’s Mr Yee.

(LUST, CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Legend has it that Mr Yee is based on Ms Chang’s first husband, Hu Lan-cheng, a onetime official in the puppet government during the Sino-Japanese war, a writer as cold-eyed as she was. (He once wrote, “I cannot accept all sorts of things about Eileen. She never bemoans the state of the universe and pities the people nor sympathises with anybody nor donates anything at all. In her world no one is aggrandised and no one is aggrieved. She is extremely selfish, extremely cruel. She is extremely severe with good people and good things and with ordinary people and ordinary things she is also this strict. She really is egalitarian.”)

In Lust, Caution the short story the heroine has seduced (and been seduced by) Mr Yee, a collaborator, to spy on him for a few amateur actors turned amateur Resistance assassins. The tale is told through the stream of her consciousness and he breaks in only twice. The first time we hear his thoughts he is at a jeweller’s with her and feeling slightly sorry for himself: He thought she was drawn to him, not only to his power but also to him. He knew women would want presents, oh, he knew, but he thought… He thought he could indulge a little longer in his middle-aged man’s fantasy of love. (She doesn’t hear his thoughts but when she sees his sorrowful smile…she wavers. She dies for it.) The second time we hear his thoughts he is at home and fearing for his safety after the botched assassination, blaming his missus for bringing home the spy…and feeling somewhat smug: So she did love him. She had to have hated him before her execution. But he who has no venom is no man. Were he not such a man she couldn’t have loved him. Anyway, alive, she was his woman and dead, she is and will be his ghost.

This Mr Yee is ruthless and remorseless. Drop-dead hot somehow. He occupied my mind for two entire days as Ms Chang’s words played in my head over and over. She had slept with the enemy, hadn’t she, and known the warm hands that came with the cold unrepentant heart.

I wonder what she would have thought of Lee Ang’s Mr Yee (Tony Leung), who slinks home in Lust, Caution the film after his lover’s execution, steals into her bedroom and sits on her bed pensively. This Mr Yee is the picture of ageing romantic regret, the latest in a long line of men of non-action from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s reserved swordsman Li Mubai to Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome cowboy Ennis Del Mar. He isn’t the man I pictured. Being also middle-aged and male, might Mr Lee have been too sensitively sympathetic?