The other day,
Amanda looked up from her latest issue of Vanity Fair and said, “Poor Jennifer
Lawrence!”
Saffy blinked rapidly. “You know, I
always get momentarily confused between her and Jennifer Lopez! This must be
what it’s like to get early Alzheimers.”
Amanda stared hard at Saffy in much
the same way a hungry lion might look at a passing gazelle and sees breakfast.
Saffy shifted in her seat. “Anyway,
what about Jennifer Lawrence?”
“She had those sex photos leaked all
over the internet! Poor thing.”
Saffy sighed with the delicious
horror of it all. “Gosh, if pictures of my va-jay-jay
ever got out there, I think I would just die!”
“But why would you take pictures of
your va-jay-jay in the first place?”
Amanda wanted to know.
“Why do we take pictures of
ourselves at parties or by the beach? To celebrate the moment! So that when
we’re seventy-five and wrinkly and saggy, we can look back and remember what it
was like to be young and taut and everything was a few inches higher!”
Amanda later said that just when you
think you’ve got Saffy all figured out, she turns around and surprises you with
a penetrating insight like that.
“Of course, that doesn’t mean it was
a smart move to take that kind of
picture!” she went on. “It’s such a dangerous world out there, these days.”
“You’re beginning to sound like my
mother,” I told her.
Jennifer Lawrence’s predicament
haunts Amanda. “You just can’t trust anyone anymore!” she said over lunch at
Maxwell Market. The air was thick with the greasy smell of smoky fried yummies.
“I mean, these hackers are just looking for any opportunity to hack into our
private lives and broadcast it for all the world to see!”
Leave it to Sharyn to put things
into perspective.
“Aiyoh, you very rich and famous, is
it?” she asked, her Coke-bottle thick spectacles fogging over from the steam
rising from her laksa. She dabbed at her mouth with a tissue. “If hacker got
hack into your phone, what will they find? Phone number for Prada shop at
Paragon, pic-ture of the salad you eat
for lunch, and Ang-lee Bird app! They
want to hack, go ahead and hack, lor!”
Amanda turned to Saffy whose face
was currently buried in a mound of mee goreng. “How is this woman your best
friend?” she demanded.
Sharyn giggled and waved her
orange-stained tissue at Amanda. “Aiyah, friend cannot joke, meh?”
Saffy came up for air. “She keeps me
real! But she’s got a point. I’m just thinking of what privacy I’d be losing if
someone hacked into my phone.” She fished her iPhone out of her handbag and
began flicking the screen. “I mean, here’s a picture of me drinking a glass of
Chardonnay. Here’s me and you at Esquina. A picture of a bowl of ramen. A
selfie at the fish stall at the wet market. Me pointing to a cake. Picture of
my shopping trolley at Cold Storage…Hmmm, there seem to be a lot of pictures of
me eating and drinking.”
“My point, lah!” Sharyn said.
“Nobody care about us, one, lah!”
Amanda wasn’t giving up so easily, especially not against
someone who hadn’t gone to Harvard. “But it’s the whole issue of privacy!”
“Aiyah!” Sharyn interrupted. “No doubt must have
privacy, but you must also be – ay, what’s the word, ah, Saffy, you taught me
the udder day…”
“Tossed salad?”
“No, the other one.”
“Tonsil tickler?”
“No.”
“Discovering the oyster?”
“No, the other one.”
“Long Dong Silver?”
“No! Aiyah, ne-ber
mind. What I’m trying to say is, if you are famous, hor, why you must go and
take neck-ked picture on your phone?
Ask for trouble, right! Aiyoh!”
Amanda pursed her lips. You could tell the debate
with Sharyn wasn’t going the way she’d hoped. “Well, all I can say is that if I
ever have a daughter and her naked pictures end up getting splashed all over
the internet, I will just die!”
“Yah, true,” Sharyn said. “But if my Jeanette like
that, I will kill her first, and den
I will die!”
Of course, Barney Chen thinks the whole iPhone
hacking thing is just so overdramatic. “Even for me!” he growled.
“But the issue of privacy…” Amanda began. Barney
placed a huge hand on her shoulder.
“Girl, please! JLaw is, like, 23. Her body is never
going to look so good than it does now. Imagine if she was 93 and she was still taking nude pictures of herself
and those got leaked!”
“Aiyoh!” Sharyn said.
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