A mini-diaspora

How come Li Yapeng was born in Xinjiang, the wild west of China?

Long story: His grandpa was a Kuomintang man. And in 1949, when the Kuomintang was losing the mainland to the communists, he went from Nanjing to Guangzhou, ahead of his wife and two daughters, with every plan to go back for them as soon as he set everything up. But the Kuomintang lost Nanjing and he was cut off from his girls. And he swam with the tide of the Kuomintang retreat, to Taiwan. His wife was as good as widowed. No, worse. She was a Kuomintang wife in Red China; she and her daughters were pariahs politically; and so the elder girl went into her own exile, taking off for Xinjiang, where she would wed and bear two sons, Yawei and Yapeng.

The boys’ grandpa did go home to their grandma. He flew in from Hong Kong in 1988, when cross-strait relations were warmer than ever. She even went to Taiwan with him and they had one more go at their marriage. After a couple years, however, she moved back to the mainland. It was not to be. She died and he ended up emigrating to the States.

Mr Li and his Mrs Li – née Faye Wong – have been in the States with their baby Yan and he blogs about how he has been getting to know his 92-year-old grandpa. Once Mr Li asked his grandpa whose side he would take now, the Kuomintang or the communists’. His grandpa said, “Doesn’t matter. Next week I have to go sing The Star-Spangled Banner. I’m now an American citizen.”

He hopes, however, to be buried in his homeland. (Li Yapeng’s Blog)

Prince Ah Boy

One sleepy Saturday morning, my brother Fei and I were, as always, readwatching. What I mean is he was readwatching – reading the papers while watching television – and I was sprawled on the same sofa. Miss Mashed Couch Potato. Japan’s newborn prince was on the news and I said to no one, 悠仁, 好名字叻.

悠. In only one Chinese character, you have the hopes that the boy has a leisurely, kingly life and that through him, the empire is everlasting. It’s a stately name.

Fei agreed. But being a smarter arse than me, he said, it was picked by professionals, how many manhours do you think were spent by this committee, that committee to think of one name?

Maybe. As an auntie of Prince Ah Boy – when I met him for the first time last Saturday, he was a handsome two-day-old who had a houseful of grown-ups at his beck and bawl – I have been sitting on such a committee myself, actually. I don’t get to make any decisions, as a non-executive non-blood member. What I get to do, with pleasure, is advise the executive members (his parents) on the names I have helped gather. Sometimes, I report some recommendations from the mentor (my mother).

Many months ago, I made a case for 宁 (calmness – “it’s a boy’s name, 宀 covering 丁, your roof covering your boy”).

Last week, my case was made for 斌 (refinement – “文 and 武, well-versed in arts and martial arts”).

Today, when I wake up to the haze – after the seventh month and the leap seventh month, the attack of polluted air makes this a third seventh month, if you ask me – 彬 springs to mind. Sounds the same as 斌. Refers to a gentleman just as refined. But do you see what I see, the tree, tree and stream in the Chinese character? Once, my friend S and I spoke of what we wanted for our friends’ as-yet-unborns. She said, “Luck.” She meant luck of the Woody Allen Match Point type. I said, “Fresh air? I don’t know…you know…high EQ? That he will weather whatever life casts to him?” I want him to be at ease. I want him to have the ease of a man who, even when life isn’t easy, has kept in his heart the woods and brook. 彬.

Boy Ah Boy

At about half past five, I am typing a review of two restaurants, tingly – the SMS comes, declaring, “You’re an auntie!”

Yes I am. No more Jer Jer.

“What are you thinking?” the mother says, hours after the birth.

The father has stepped out to take the grandparents home. The son is in good hands in the ward. I am fresh – more like old – out of the office. We are alone, hand in hand, stoic mother and silly auntie.

“I am thinking you’re a mommy…and I’m an auntie.” The tears come.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Eight

“I’m not very smart.” That’s Sugar’s sad-funny refrain in Some Like It Hot, the manic masterpiece, my favourite 50s film which I watched on the big screen for the first time at The Picturehouse the other day. Sugar, played by the one and only boop-boop-de-boop Marilyn Monroe, is a singer who keeps falling for no-good sax players, who love her then leave her with no more than “a pair of old socks and a tube of toothpaste, all squeezed out”. She just can’t help it. So to stay out of harm’s way, she runs off with an all-girl jazz orchestra. To Miami. Where she may meet a Shell Oil millionaire and marry money.

Well she doesn’t. She meets Joe (Tony Curtis), a sax player who dolls up as Josephine to get a job with the orchestra then masquerades as a shell-collecting millionaire to woo her. She’s “not very smart”. That’s why she falls for Shell Oil Junior, not finding it fishy when he says of water polo, “I had two ponies drowned under me.” When she finds out he is a sax player, a no-good one, she falls harder for him. “Not very smart,” she laughs – it isn’t a happy laugh. Conscience-stricken, he tries to tell her he is no better than all her previous sax players.

“That’s right. Pour it on. Talk me out of it,” she purrs. Tremulously.

It amazes me, how I hear Monroe’s smile and tears as she is saying this. Sugar is drunk and drowning, she knows it. She knows romance promises nothing but itself. Happiness? She might as well fish for the moon in a river. For a very insane farce, Some Like It Hot is very sane on the subject of romance. It’s very smart.

THE FUNCTIONS OF FICTION | Chapter Seven

You forget what it is like to badly want someone.

It has hit you belatedly, weeks after you and your mother watched, rewatched and revised the rom com It Started With A Kiss: This girl really, really wants this boy. She, a dullard, is helplessly, helplessly in love with the star student. She writes him a love letter, which he refuses to read, and everyone in school ridicules her. But she still adores him. She may say she doesn’t. But she does. They go to the same school; they go home to the same house; there is no getting away from him. Not that she wants to get away. She can’t get enough of him as it is. If he joins the tennis team she has to join too. He is a waiter after school so she is a regular at the restaurant, naturally. If he wants to be a doctor then she has to be a nurse or die trying. All she wants is to be his Mrs Jiang Zhishu.

You feel for her, because the part is played by the truly adorable Ariel Lin. You found Lin annoying at first, actually. But she grew on you. If she was a fruit, you reckon, she would be a plum – small, round, sweet, soft, bruises easily. She isn’t like Barbie Hsu of Meteor Garden, Rainie Yang of Devil Beside You or Zhang Ziyi. There is a hardness to Hsu, Yang and Zhang. They don’t look like they will ever lay themselves as open to love as Lin. As open to being hurt. When Lin says, “How? I don’t know how to stop loving him,” she sounds so dazed, it endears her to you. You want to buy her ice cream.

You feel for her, because you remember now. You had a Gor Gor who lived under the same roof long ago. You were a four-year-old or five-year-old driving him potty, going, Gor Gor this, Gor Gor that and he was a tween or teen pushing you away, telling the adults how much he hated you. But when you went swimming for the first time, he was the one paddling all around the pool with you… In JC, you were smitten by so-and-so – a broad-shouldered long-fingered so-and-so who played the piano, mahjong and football well – and somehow everyone in your science class knew. The other day, somebody sent you an SMS, “Met so-and-so who is with ERA now. Had to tell you. He was your idol!” It has been more than 10 years and they still think of you as a subset of him… A memory is thawing out after a year in the freezer. It feels like a lifetime ago. But didn’t you once write Oscar a bloody bad poem?

Happily, Kiss is a rom com and not reality. It fulfils girls’ fantasies that the boys they want will be worth it. Zhishu is worth it. Not because he is brighter and better-looking than her. But because despite his apparent aloofness, he sees how she suffers. Another boy, her classmate, has carried a torch for her for years and on a rare lucid day, she says to him, “I am luckier than you. Zhishu may look like he doesn’t care. But he sees what I feel. He knows.”

Jay’s way

The release of a new Jay Chou record – his seventh in seven years, okay, and I am so proud of him, it’s almost parental – counts as a red-letter day on my calendar. In celebration let me count the things I love about him.

1. I shall start with Taiwan, the land of 10,000 TV shows where country kids from Jacky Wu to Chen Shui-bian can talk their way to fame, fortune and sometimes the presidency. When I was with China Desk years ago, I had dinner once with two Taiwanese attachés and one of them said that the first time he had a listen to Singapore’s National Day Rally, he was taken aback. A prime minister speaking seriously about national affairs on prime-time TV? It was unheard of in Taiwan, he said. What is more, I have realised that when a Taiwanese says he is zibi, he doesn’t mean he is autistic. He means he isn’t a talker. Maybe he is a little introspective? Inexpressive? And Jay is the type who is slower to speak – he would sooner compose a song. Somehow, the things he is unable to verbalise go to his tunes, then he gets Fang Wen-shan and Huang Chun-lang to write the words, then he sings the songs in that Jay way, opening up little by little by little.

And it’s so moving, somehow.

2. The closest I ever came to Jay, physically, was on the red carpet at the MTV Asia Awards the year big Eastern names were rubbing shoulders with big Western names. He was looking like a little Bruce Lee, composed in his Cheena best of black tracksuit with white dragon embroideries. When I asked him if he had designed his outfit, he said he had asked someone to design him something Chinese. Then he kept the flag flying when he went on stage, performing his gongfu hit Long Quan with some drumstick action here, some sticks-and-chain action there and out of nowhere, a verse he sang in his Beijing opera voice. It was some knockout of a show. Backstage, Brett Anderson sounded star-struck speaking about Jay.

3. Jay isn’t an over-managed pop idol who can’t fart without written consent. Because he started out behind the scenes as a songwriter, because he has a strong track record, because he knows what he is doing, no one tells him what to do. He tells them. They don’t call him Chairman Chou for nothing. He decides on a duet with Fei Yu-ching and all of a sudden, that uncle of uncool is damn diao.

4. Jay is a good, thoughtful son. His parents are divorced. At his dos, he seats his father and mother tables apart; then, siding with neither, he sits elsewhere with his grandmother. But maybe he loves his mother more. There is a tale of how one Valentine’s night, he surprised her with a fireworks show outside her apartment – he didn’t want her to be on her own that night. Now, after naming an album after her and making Yeh Hui-mei one of the most Googled names in 2003, he honours her in the song, Ting Ma Ma De Hua. Listen to mama when she tells you to play the piano, the grown-up Jay raps to his kiddie self, when you grow up everyone will be singing your songs.

I want sons just like him.

5. Reading Huang Chun-lang’s cute complaint that Jay doesn’t have a single cent in the Mr J’s French-Italian Restaurant that has his face on the logo – Jay persuaded friends to take his restaurant fantasy and run to realise it without his money – I want to wire them my cash. “I could have secretly changed the name to Mr Lang when I was designing it and changed the face to Chiling Lin’s,” writes Jay’s friend. “All I can say is, because Jay has helped many people and has never been ungenerous to friends (it is forever his treat and whatever valuables friends want, he never wrinkles his brow), many people are willing to help him complete a dream and are willing to open a restaurant that completely belongs to him.”

6. My all-time No.1 Jay video is Yi Fu Zhi Ming, in which he is a sinfully hot hit man in Sicily. Okay, I don’t have a point, other than to point you to the video.

7. The thing about Jay is, he is both boy and uncle. It was the Golden Melody Awards, which I was watching from my couch. Somehow he was on stage for a tribute to Ni Min-jan, a funnyman who had been found dead recently, and Matilda Tao was on the phone with the dead man’s 10-year-old or 11-year-old son, saying, hey, how about we pass the phone to your idol Jay? Things were as awkward as could be. Jay stood shyly, his cap over his eyes, trying to think of something to tell his little fan. After a silence – one beat, two beats, three beats, four beats – “So…have you done your homework?”

I really wished I could reach out, over an ocean, to hug him.

A karaoke queen comes of age

I’m 30. It’s terrific. Because for the first time in my life, at my karaoke-thon birthday bash, I found I could sing Anita Mui songs with a confidence – a conviction – that wasn’t there before.

She was the wounded older woman of Cantopop, a drama queen to her dying day, with both the deep voice and the depth of emotional expressiveness. She could sound sultry, strong, poignant, proud. She could, in the ebb and flow of voice and emotion, move you to tears. (Like Jacky Cheung: I heard him live at Snow Wolf Lake last year and what he had wasn’t only vocal power but also emotional precision, working his way round even a bad song to your heart.)

She wasn’t like Teresa Teng, who, in spite of the nominal sorrow of her songs about parting lovers and all, didn’t really sound sad. Teresa preferred to wrap her wounds in pretty plasters, so in the studio and on stage, she had maybe two modes: sweet and sweeter. Faye Wong is her heir. They have similar soprano ranges and Faye, in her trip-hop cool-cat way, is as emotionally mute as Teresa.

In my years in karaoke, because I began as a soprano in school, I have tried to ape them and other girl-women. But what I have found is that, actually, I am a better wounded older man (Wu Bai) than whimsical wispy girl (Rainie Yang). And it was nice that night, when I was at last old enough to inhabit an Anita Mui song and mean every word. Almost.

Between a mike and a cake at Party World.

TV | The sense of nonsense

Nothing in the real world makes any sense, sometimes. How can it be that Singapore, with its world-class gahmen, world-class airline, world-class airport, world-class hawkers, world-class housing, world-class et cetera, is the unhappiest Asian country on the Happy Planet Index, behind not only Vietnam and Bhutan but also Malaysia and Palestine? Malaysia and Palestine! How can it be that Taiwan, which isn’t even a real country, is ahead of Singapore? But it is. What it has that Singapore doesn’t is freedom of speech, satire, et cetera, and most priceless of all, 全民亂講之全民大悶鍋 Everybody Speaks Nonsense.

In the reel world of this daily satirical TV show, chat-show guests from “Auntie A-ching, Chen Shui-bian’s housekeeper” to “Kim Jong Il” will come on to mouth off about, say, the birth of the real Mr Chen’s grandchild and what it all means with Chao Chien-ming, the child’s father and Mr Chen’s son-in-law, being indicted for insider trading.


“Mr Kim”: (In Mandorean) I come to your Taiwanyo, and I see people protesting against Chen Shui-bianyo. This is the trouble with democracyo. In our North Koreayo, one of the benefits of being an autocrat is that people are always pleased to see meyo. They are always cheering for meyo.

Then “Jimmy Lai”, the evil paparazzo publisher of Apple, sorry, Mango News, comes on. First he gets his reporters to repeat sex-and-death-sell mantras like, “Naked bodies plus dead bodies!” Then they will go through the news.


Reporter: How do we play the birth of Chen Shui-bian’s third golden grandchild?
“Mr Lai”: (In Mandonese) How do other media play it? They want the child to be called Chao Kai-kuo (Turn Over) or Chao Tzu-hsin (New Leaf)? Why don’t they just call the child Chao Sorry or Chao Apology, yes or no ah? What is the story? The story is, Chao Chien-ming is behind bars and can’t see his wife and newborn. The story is human tragedy mah, yes or no ah?

Then comes the pricelessly, intensely insane call-in segment. Real people phone in with questions for the reel chat-show guests. Some of them seem to think they are talking to the real Auntie A-ching or the real Mr Kim. And the reel Auntie A-ching or the reel Mr Kim will answer so nonsensically, everything starts making sense, sometimes. Only in Taiwan.


Everybody Speaks Nonsense, CTiTV (StarHub 52), Mondays to Fridays, 10pm, Tuesdays to Saturdays, 10am.

Sock-cer

It was a sad night for soccer. Not because Italy beat sentimental favourites France to the World Cup but because of how the French – and Zidane – lost. But as the IHT’s Roger Cohen blogs:

Genius has a dark side. How else to reconcile the divine smile on Zinedine Zidane’s face throughout the French victory he orchestrated over Brazil with the man, fist-clenched, possessed, driving his head into Marco Materazzi’s chest in the 110th minute of the World Cup final and so concluding his career in shame?

Life is no fairy tale. Zidane was to lift the trophy and come full circle eight years after the French triumph in Paris, when he scored two goals in the final. That was the script. Instead, Italy won and Zidane came full circle to another moment in the 1998 tournament: the one in which he snapped, stamped on a Saudi Arabian player's chest, and was sent off.

Rage resided in Zidane, somewhere deep in the soul of a humble man who had a gift, who could see what others could not, who caressed the ball and who took games and the people who watched them to unsuspected and lovely places. Rage cannot undo or lessen his gift. We must accept the two together as, in the end, we must accept all the contradictions of life. Only in fairy tales does everything come out right.

Do not belabour this moment of madness. Of course, we want to know what the provocation might have been. Our curiosity demands that we discover what Materazzi may have said to spur such ugliness. But let us respect Zidane’s silence. We know that he is suffering. We may begin to imagine what it was like for him to walk off the field, past the trophy he coveted, head bowed, to a silent pain. He must live with the terrible ambiguity he showed the world in this tournament…

Italy scarcely deserved the victory on the night. It hung on and seized its chance. But over the course of the tournament it had earned the title. Its football was the smoothest and most cohesive, and its defense was made of iron. If you do not see beauty in defence, you cannot understand the essence of the Italian game.

Italians are sentimental about many things. But football to them is more serious than that. They carry the game in their blood as no other nation except Brazil. Four titles now demonstrate that. By comparison, the English and the French are parvenus when it comes to this sport.

Vin 1, Vinho 0

Italy have the best goalkeeper in the world, Buffon. In the World Cup final on Sunday, it will be the Italians against France and Buffon against the bona fide buffoon the French have for a goalie. That’s Barthez, a bald clown who has been struggling with simple saves and all but cost the French the semi-final against Portugal.

“There are goalkeepers who bring out funny little toys and put them in the back of the net as good luck charms. For France’s veterans, Barthez is the funny little good luck charm. Laurent Blanc, the centre half on the run to the final in 1998, used to kiss the top of the goalie’s bald head before every game. It is tough on Gregory Coupet, the best goalkeeper in France last season, who stood in while Barthez served a five-month suspension for spitting at a referee. At 33, Coupet is sitting on the bench watching his last chance of appearing in a World Cup slide away. But Domenech is concerned with the well-being of the team as a whole...it is a one-for-all, all-for one philosophy,” says the IHT’s Peter Berlin.

Because as badly as the vets, like Zidane, like Thuram, like Makelele, want to win, they don’t want to win at any cost. Not without their buffoon, their buddy, their Barthez. My brother calls them cliquey. You can also call them musketeer-y.