The sister hen diaries

It has been quiet in the house after the youngest and noisiest one flew the coop to America, where they don’t know what hit them. Bak is not just out-studying them – 21 study credits to their average of 12 – but also stupendously out-singing them, in Chinatown, Atlanta, at least.

“The Chinese here are awful singers, awful lor,” he updates us over Gmail video chat. In the midst of William Hungs he is Aretha Franklin: minus the bodacious range, plus puppyish eagerness, dogged attempts at high notes and the superpower to mean every of the earnest Wang Lee Hom love songs he sings. “Everybody says, ‘Do you take private lessons?’”

We are taking all the credit of course. Clearly he has improved since he started singing with me – I really should patent my matchless stand-up-and-sing-in-the-KTV method, which is genius in its very obviousness – and also in the hearing of the Cowells, Fei and Y. “Wah, American Idol ah? We taught him. We insulted him.”

We are about tough love, much as we miss him. We miss him primarily during major dinners. On Chinese New Year’s Eve we wake him up at 6am his time to show him, over video, the food we have to somehow finish without him. “See, Bak? Roast pig.” (Roast pig, not to be confused with roast pork, is a festive must in the family. It is rare in Singapore and can be bought only from cleaver-wielding fierce Cantonese old women in Kreta Ayer market.)

Hugging his pillow, he just grunts. We are fooling about; he is playing along, time zones away.

Capricorn

So Jay says he isn’t that into astrology. So much for fantasies (mine, all mine) that we would be on the same page in our interview, he with his album titled after his sun sign, Capricorn, and I with my birth-chart craze. There we were in Taipei county, in the same studio, at the same table and so not on the same page.

When asked about the title he said, “Many people are fascinated by astrology, aren’t they?” (Translation: My album is for the masses and they are fascinated by astrology, aren’t they?)

He said, when asked about astrology, he used to think it was true but doesn’t now. Jerry Yen is a Capricorn like him, isn’t he, but they aren’t alike. “Astrology is what other people say about you. You have to believe in the things you do.”

So he said and so I scrawled in my notes. It was a professional interview, not a personal conversation, and I didn’t feel free to stop him to say – I could have, I should have, said –

Lun-lun, you are so Capricorn lor. Your sun, Mercury and Mars are in Capricorn. You are a Capricorn talking the Capricorn talk and walking the Capricorn walk. Why do your albums sell by the million? Because you can’t bring yourself to release a record that doesn’t sell – that isn’t successful. You are a goat with your feet on the ground and your eyes on the prize. Some might call you cold and calculating – but not me. My moon is in Capricorn and I get you.

Jerry, poor Jerry, why isn’t he like you? Because his chart isn’t like yours. His planets aren’t aligned. He has a hard sun-Pluto aspect and isn’t good with transformation (he is “…prone to inner tension and negative, self-destructive behaviour…”). You know him, don’t you, and how negative he was when he shot to stardom? All the F4 fellows but him basked in it a bit. I had to write him and nag him to be less negative, the one and only time I wrote any star.

You, with your powerful sun-Mars conjunct, aren’t like him naturally. You have more willpower (“…you are enterprising and have powerful stores of energy that you can draw upon when needed…”). So although you and Jerry both began life as underachievers, as Capricorns do, you made the much smoother transit to overachieving.

You are such a superstar and it was written in your chart lor.

A little luxury

The news of M’s death broke in what was a bad week for me. I had to write a story about a Chinese painter’s gift of art to our Republic, which involved interviewing people who didn’t want to talk. As an interviewer as unwilling as my interviewees I didn’t want to talk to them too. So I had a weary week picking up the phone to call them while wishing they wouldn’t pick their phones up – while wishing I could get out of work, mourn for M and go live a little.

The irony of it wasn’t lost on me. There was M, snatched from life suddenly in her 50s, and here was the painter, deliberately delineating his legacy in his 80s. Life is random. Some people are lucky and have all the time to do all the things they want to do – to plan proper exits – others don’t. Time is a luxury.

So as soon as I was free from the story I went KTV-ing, twice in three days. I lined up meetings with as many friends as possible. I went to Kinokuniya and got Proust, all six books. I had a ceremonial lunch with a fellow friend of M’s – we had Asahi Super Dry in memory of her – to which I wore a new Prada-esque black lace sheath, price tag barely torn off. I had to be all dressed up, not only for M but also for me.

Stars

I have been publishing, unpublishing and republishing this post for a few nights now, which tells you one thing: I am obsessive. My birth chart, however, tells me another thing: There is a name for my obsessing and it is “Mars in Virgo”.

Astrology, if you ask me, is actually emotional physics. It is the study of celestial movements and positions and the effect that they have on emotional energy. It is not so much the horoscope that forecasts what will happen to you as the birth chart that maps where the sun, moon, planets and stars were when you were born – and shows how you happen to be who you are. You are too complex to be just one of the 12 sun signs in the simplified horoscope. You are also your moon sign (what you are like in your emotional life), your Venus sign (what you are like in love), your Mars sign (what you are like in lust, in action, in anger – when you are being a total animal), and so on. If you want one thing when you need another, if you say one thing when you mean another, if you love a man but can’t live with him, the push and pull may show in your birth chart.

The last time I was into birth charts, I was inspired by a Jeanette Winterson article on astrological truth. This time I am into them with S, my story-geek friend, so we can speak in astrological shorthand in discussions of stories and people (“Daoming Si, passionate, possessive, crazy jealous – Venus in Scorpio”). Along the way though I have found out quite a few things about myself, family, friends and Jay Chou – well, mostly about myself.

If I have ever been proud of how painstaking I can be about work, I am not now. Is a crab proud it can move sideways? Is a bird proud it can fly? Now I know I am a Mars in Virgo girl, I can’t be proud. When other people turn into total animals they are rams, bulls or Hulks. When I am a total animal I turn into a cranky old maid, fussing over spelling or rewriting an article yet again. I don’t do it because I am good at work. I do it because I do it. Now I know.

To get your birth chart drawn up, click here.
To read Jeanette Winterson on how she got her birth chart drawn up, click here.

Goodbye

Sometimes life snatches the goodbyes –

I found out a friend died and sometime between reading the shock message and getting the shock all I could do was try to remember: When was the last time we talked? When was the last time we said goodbye?

My Japanese friend M was a writer, a fan girl, a believer in writing of the things she was a fan of with an interested, objective understanding. She was 20 years older than me yet younger, bolder. She was interested in things: people, travel, movies, Korean Wave, Bollywood, men… She would say, “That is SO interesting,” and mean it. She had friends who travel not so much to countries as to hotels, who explore not so much the world as deluxe Shangri-La bubbles in distant realms. She would say, “Don’t be like them.” She was never like them. She stayed curious about things, from Tony Leung’s wedding to the effect of cross-strait flights on Chinese-Taiwanese extramarital love to HDB heartland malls.

She was going to come to Singapore next month. Her last e-mails to me were about the trip. My last e-mails to her were about Jane Juska, the divorced schoolteacher who wanted a sex life at age 66, got it and wrote of it in A Round-Heeled Woman. I said I would send her a copy of Ms Juska’s new Vogue column on being a mistress at age 75. I haven’t had a chance to and won’t now –

The (merry) widows

We who have observed Tony’s birthday for five years wouldn’t have overlooked his wedding.

So we had a black widows’ bash to commemorate our loss and our liberty, Grunge Widow, Mob Widow, Ballet Widow and I. Black was worn gratuitously; pasta was eaten copiously (La Strada was Mob Widow’s choice); we had studied all the bridal snaps and worried about whether Tony’s smiles were real or resigned and now we were having fun.




Photos: Zann

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Fourteen

I can only take our mother’s word for it because I was too small at the time. I was one year and five months old when Fei was born and when he was brought home from hospital, according to her, my first act as big sister was to offer my little brother my bed. It was one of my few acts as big sister probably because by the time I was old enough to remember he was big-brothering me more than I was big-sistering him. I would be in trouble with our mother, trying to hide from her and her cane maybe after I talked back to her too much, and he would be saving my hide. It was a three-room flat and there weren’t many hiding places. If I ran out of ideas (again) and ran to the bathroom, he would run with me, get me inside and locked, stay outside and stop my mother. He wasn’t even five years old then.

Sure we did brawl, we did fight and we did have our wars growing up. If he thrashed me in chess, I would be a bad loser and I would have to thrash him back or die trying in countless rematches. I wasn’t adult enough then to accept that he would know better; now I am.

He knows his chess and his Chinese history (he is well-versed in Qing history, having read the non-fiction that I haven’t bothered to because “you can’t write like Louis Cha by reading him – he read history”); he knows his economics and his engineering; he knows how the world works. (When I think about it I think I got most of our parents’ silliness and he got most of their sense.)

When I had problems with a previous boss he said, “Didn’t you read The Deer and the Cauldron?” I did, I said. I read all five books of the Louis Cha novel more than 10 times and laughed myself silly each time. He got very different things out of the very same books, however. He gleaned from the tale of Wei Xiaobao, his Manchu boss, Emperor Kangxi, his anti-Manchu boss, Chen Jinnan, his seven wives and three children the art of human relations.

When I had knee problems he ran with me. He came down to my level and ran at my pace, to teach me a better technique – Chi Running – to save my knees from me.

When I was in real trouble, the one time I was in real trouble, he did what he could. Although I didn’t say anything at the time, he somehow knew why I was in a black mood (…Oscar…) and why my mood was changing from black to bleak (…our parents…). So he took me to How the Grinch Stole Christmas and when it didn’t work he took me to breakfast. Over kway chap he fed me a Louis Cha tale I hadn’t read, about a couple with the most ideal, happy marriage. Who never fight. Who are the envy of every other couple in the whole jianghu. But as it transpires, their marriage is a sham. So. People fight in real relationships, he said. We know how our parents’ fights go. Our mother will do this and our father will do that. We know how their fights come and go as wayang do, he said. I heard him; I heard the things he said and the things he didn’t say; and when there was no more to be said to me in my darkest moments he went shopping with me.

So. He is married and moving out soon. For years I thought I was prepared for the day we would have very separate lives. I had bought extra Louis Cha books for the day we would have very separate libraries, hadn’t I? I was big-sister prepared, wasn’t I?

Silly me.

BEIJING | Day three

On a windy wintry day we conquer the Great Wall. Which is to say three of us, Bak, Fei and my mother, climb to the seventh, topmost tower at the Badaling leg of the wall while five of us do the we came, we saw, we waited thing. Then we go and celebrate by getting ice cream at the foot of the wall, guzzling beer on the way to lunch at a rundown rural restaurant and getting eaten alive.

There we are in the restaurant, too tired to study the menu or manage anything other than saying yes to the waitress’ thoughtful recommendations (yes, waiting was tiring too). Do we want greens fresh from their farm? Okay. Lamb? Okay. Fish fresh from their pond? Okay. We have never heard of xunyu; sounds good; how much could it cost anyway?

The fish arrives tail first. It is a most impressive steamed tail, about as long as a forearm and as jiggly as J.Lo because it is so cooked but still so springy. Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle…it is brought to the table. Altogether six dishes of the fish arrive (soup, sweet and sour and so on). So does the lamb. So do the greens. We eat or try to, those of us who are not trying to digest all the ice cream and beer. Then it is their turn to eat us for lunch: The bill is 2,700 yuan (S$540), inclusive of an impressive 1,700 yuan for the impressive fish. My father, finding himself in a surreal Money No Enough moment in the cheap and good country, has to pool his cash with my uncle’s and is none too thrilled.

Ever quick on the uptake, the waitress takes us on a tour of their pond (she doesn’t know Cantonese, I don’t think, but she knows disbelief when she hears universal sounds such as hah and wah) and in it we see some 34,000 yuan swirling, whirling and swimming.

It is the most mesmerising thing, swimming money. Not enough to hypnotise the older ones, however. They spend the rest of the day theorising that our drivers (400 yuan per man per day) conspired with the restaurant against us. They are old-world about things like justice: A person is guilty until proven innocent. “Didn’t he tell us not to eat too much on the way there?” my mother goes. “Didn’t he tell us 2,000 yuan wouldn’t be too much for a meal?”

They spend the rest of the week philosophising about it. My father, the master of nicknames, decides to call their driver “our teacher”. “There is our teacher,” he goes when he sees the man at the car park at the hotel. “Our teacher has taught us a lesson and we have learnt it. Now we go to the food court next door.”

I try to remind them about the basics of the case, “We didn’t read the menu, did we?” Fei goes and speaks man to man with the accused, who says he didn’t know about any xunyu. But they don’t believe him.

In the end it is Y who solves the case. At dinner mere days after we come home he says he spoke of our fishy banquet to a China-born co-worker and discovered we hadn’t been overcharged. We had eaten a whole zhonghuaxun, a Chinese sturgeon, a first-class protected animal in China – “as protected as pandas”. Right away everyone agrees that the restaurant was right not to have warned us of the price, absolutely right. “We wouldn’t have eaten it. We would have missed out,” my uncle says.

Many months later a sturgeon, bitten to death by barracudas in Hong Kong, hits the world’s headlines. “A state funeral was almost held. Hu Jintao almost attended,” my father says with pride so palpable, I have to laugh.

When my family come round we really come round.

The wedding

So Tony, our Tony, has married his Carina in the world’s loudest quiet wedding.

By all accounts, the five-star Buddhist wedding at the five-star Uma Paro in the hills of Bhutan was a marriage of the highly spiritual and the deeply material: There were lamas, there was a cake from the Oriental Hotel Bangkok, there was champagne and there were reporters all over one of the most remote sites in the world. In other words, it was so Carina.

When her best friend Faye has a quiet wedding it is so quiet, no one finds out until it is over. Faye doesn’t say she hopes for a quiet one; she just has one.

Not that you can blame Carina for announcing that she hoped for a quiet day with her Tony. The woman has, over two decades, got Hong Kong’s most noncommittal man to commit. You are allowed to brag, aren’t you, when you get Tony to marry you?

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Thirteen

My mother wasn’t looking at the time. She was what, 18 or 19, staying with a kinswoman for a couple of days, putting the rubbish out in the alley. She wasn’t well. She thought she was looking a little wan. But someone in the alley kept looking at her. Some boy next door, having a smoke outdoors. The boy who would be my father. Reportedly – according to my mother’s reports – he clapped eyes on her in the alley in Kota Bharu and he knew they were going to be together. He just knew.

This was the mother of all tales I grew up with. It wasn’t a fairy tale but it was fantastic enough to have damaged my brain. This was, I thought, proof of destiny, proof that it was knowable. You could meet the love of your life just like that; he would know just like that, even if you didn’t; and you could live happily ever after or not-unhappily for decades. Not-unhappily isn’t shabby.

I was fascinated by fate. I was a fan. One of my favourite films, when I was 18 or 19, was Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: Red, in which a young model and a youthful judge don’t quite meet. But as she connects with an old ex-judge it becomes profoundly plain the three are connected by the dotted lines of destiny. You know she is meant for the judge, even if she doesn’t. It was a movie after my own heart.

Away from fiction I saw more dotted lines. A friend studied at the same poly as her Mr Right, lived in the same district as him but never got to know him, not until she resigned from a company, he replaced her – getting her work, her desk, odds and ends like her slippers – and they got to know each other as almost-colleagues. Where some would have seen chance I saw fate.

If a friend’s faith in her relationship wavered I would recall the fortune teller’s positive prognosis. I wouldn’t be telling her, “The fortune teller said so.” I wouldn’t be thinking it. I would be thinking about the science of relationships – thinking about psychologist John Gottman, who can analyse 15 minutes of a married couple talking, track negative emotions from defensiveness to contempt and predict with 90 percent accuracy whether they will still be married 15 years later – thinking about the absence of contempt in the friend’s relationship – and quietly believing the fortune teller.

I was sold on the idea of cosmic certainty, the bigger the more inevitable the more inescapable the better. I am still. Of course, in my lucid moments I don’t think my father knew. He was as old then as Bak is now: Would Bak know destiny if it kicked him in the face like a football hooligan? Maybe my father said the same thing to a lot of girls. Maybe my mother was the only one who believed him. It might have been luck that a hardworking woman like her happened to a high-maintenance man like him. (I also don’t think Oscar knew. He said a similar thing to me and I now think – I now know – it was talk.)

In my normal moments, however, you can still sell me a show by titling it Destiny Love or I Was Fated to Love You. It gets me every, every time.