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.

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.