Till death did they part

…as much as the priest tried to capture the importance of Mr Saint Laurent, it was his former companion and business partner, Pierre Bergé, who spoke most movingly.
The two men, who remained business associates and friends long after their romance ended, decided to create a civil union together in the days before Mr Saint Laurent died, Mr Bergé said. The French union, known as a “civil pact of solidarity”, carries mutual rights and responsibilities, but is short of a marriage.
“It’s going to be necessary to part now,” Mr Bergé said, addressing his friend in the coffin. “I don’t know how to do it because I never would have left you. Have we ever left each other before? Even if I know that we will no longer share a surge of emotion before a painting or a work of art.”
Mr Bergé’s voice broke. “But I also know that I will never forget what I owe you, and that one day I will join you under the Moroccan palms.”
Mr Saint Laurent, born in Oran, Algeria, will be cremated and his ashes buried in a botanical garden he restored in Marrakesh, Morocco, near a home he and Mr Bergé bought together… (NYT)

Pierre Bergé was with Yves Saint Laurent for 50 years.

Being with the greatest living couturier wasn’t 50 years of sweetness and light: How could it have been? From Saint Laurent sprang not just extreme creativeness – he put women in trousers, tuxedos, safari jackets, camouflage, transparent blouses and ethnic dresses, all styles that are in fashion even today – but also extreme destructiveness. There were bitter, dark years when he was depressed, on drugs and falling for homme fatal Jacques de Bascher and further into self-destruction and what did Bergé do? He stayed. He stayed to look after Saint Laurent’s fashion house. He stayed to look after him. He stayed even after officially moving out and moving on to other boyfriends.

This is qing. It isn’t the first flower of love. It is the plant that has to be watered day in day out year in year out - or two trees too intertwined to be free of each other.

One country, two telethons

Two telethons for the Sichuan earthquake were on last night, one in Beijing and the other, across the Taiwan Strait and a socio-political gulf, in Taipei. On one show on China’s CCTV Faye Wong was going to come out of de facto retirement to sing just one song, on the other on Taiwan’s CTV Jay Chou was going to come on anytime now and at my end I was having an anxious, tedious time channel-hopping. Yes, tedious. Because CCTV’s telethon was about state power (the motherland will help you, dear victims) and CTV’s, star power (dear viewers, you can help Jay, Jolin Tsai and Ma Ying-jeou help the victims) and both were, in the end, boring.

On CCTV’s show there were kingly leading men bellowing away, reciting from big red books (they were big and they were red, really) verses of how China would rise to the challenge of the earthquake…there were three children of Sichuan, tearfully swearing to soldier on and take their exams come hell or high water…there was a elderly man bawling away, saying he felt for the victims, the People’s Liberation Army and most of all the central leadership comrades. It was painful for him and for me too. I would hop to CCTV in the hope of seeing Faye, then flee to CTV in under five minutes.

Away from the high-flown pain on CCTV, CTV’s low-key show was a relief. Somewhat. Where CCTV had well-dressed comrades CTV had dressed-down celebs, from pop kings to drama queens to the top idol du jour, presidential pin-up Ma. Where CCTV had stirring songs CTV had next to none. The drama was all in the stars actually appearing, actually answering donors’ phone calls, or rather, it was all in the assumption that the more the stars and the more the calls, the more the drama. A star would appear, say something sappy or stupid about the earthquake and attempt to answer a donor’s call as a host tried to contribute comments like, “Do you know you are talking on the phone with Jolin Tsai? Jolin Tsai, did you tell her she was talking on the phone with you?”

Amid such starry and starstruck senselessness Jay’s was a rare voice of reason. He didn’t (and doesn’t) do sappy or stupid. When he appeared he said simply that there should be concern not only for the short-term work of relief but also for the long-term work of reconstruction. When he was answering the phone in place of Mr Ma and a host tried to dramatise the situation – “Do you know who sat in your seat?” – he signed that he was busy. Admirably and adorably he wouldn’t play the game.

Likewise Faye wouldn’t play the game on CCTV. When she did come on, almost as an afterthought to the propaganda, she didn’t say a word. All the things she could have said were in the way she sang, too briefly, the song May We Live Long; she had never sounded warmer to me.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Twelve

A couple of my mummy friends are concerned that their tots may not be bilingual enough and I can completely understand. When I was with Oscar, who speaks English and Dari, I was preposterously, prematurely determined that if and when there were kids they would speak – and think in – two to three languages. Through the windows of multiple languages they would have multiple views of the world; single-celled monoglots they wouldn’t be, not my kids; and my plan was to reverse-engineer them as their grandfather had reverse-engineered me once upon a time.

My father hadn’t planned us (we were all accidents) but once we were born he planned long and hard to bring us up bilingual, I think. Seeing as we were in a Chinese-speaking house, he decided he wouldn’t have to teach us Chinese. We would learn it by osmosis and when we were old enough we would learn it better by reading a couple of Chinese books. Not that we would be force-fed any novel. Delicious books by Louis Cha and others were left all about the house (some were my father’s, some were a stranger’s which had been thrown at the void deck and picked up by my mother); no one said we should read them and no one said we shouldn’t; we were left to find out for ourselves and we did.

My father didn’t leave English to chance though. (He hadn’t received much formal schooling and had learnt English by pure will – enough English to understand legalese better than I will in my lifetime – by reading newspapers cover to cover, word by word and looking up all the new words in his dictionary. It would take him a week to read a daily.) As he saw it, our Chinese-speaking circumstances put us at a disadvantage. He couldn’t disadvantage us more by doing what others did: which was, as he saw it, to speak to their children in either bad English or a middling mix of English and Mandarin and doom them grammatically. So he didn’t speak English to us and nor did he make my Chinese-speaking mother speak English to us. He decided to make us memorise whole books in English instead. Kids in ancient China were made to learn the four books and five classics by heart so that they would, in later life, never compose a bad Chinese sentence, weren’t they? My father was convinced that English syntax could be hardwired into us too.

I must have been three or four or five, at an age when I would rather draw manga princesses with starry eyes than memorise The Frog Prince, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, when I was put on the Rote Learning 2.0 programme. I must have memorised a fairy tale every week, learning a page every day and reciting it to my father every night. I was a good girl too, barring the days I had my head buried in colouring books and forgot to be frightened of his disapproval.

The Frog Prince isn’t the Analects of Confucius, of course, and nor is it the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. (Would I sound smarter now had I been exposed to Gibbon then...? Maybe… Maybe not.) But I don’t think my brothers and I are relatively bilingual by accident; my father may have got something there.

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.