Veggie Might

You have to watch out for karma. It’s always ready to pounce, just when you’re at your most unsuspecting and vulnerable.

            For years, Amanda has been waging a bitter war against vegetarians, sniffing at the slightest hint of a preference for green leaves instead of slabs of red meat, or cold cuts of left over roast pork.

            Whenever we’re at a restaurant and the waiter asks her if she has any dietary restrictions, her answer will be: “Yes, bad food.”

            “Why on earth would anyone prefer to eat a broccoli salad when you could be cutting into a thick juicy cut of wagyu?” she once asked the world at large as she allowed a strip of said wagyu to dissolve on her tongue. “God, isn’t this so good?”

            Saffy looked at Amanda sideways. Her ample bosom trembled like a pot of water on simmer. “I think you and that sixty dollar steak need to get a room!”

            And then one day, a few weeks ago, on a plane from Tokyo back to Singapore, Amanda, having finished her satay sticks in Business Class, fished out from her handbag a book her friend Janet had insisted she read.

            “It’s life-changing!” Janet had said a few days before, thrusting “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” into Amanda’s reluctant hands.

            “But I don’t need to read this, I have no dilemma!” Amanda had protested as she tried to push the book back at Janet, but she was no match for a hard-core TRX practitioner. Defeated, she dropped it into her voluminous Hermès Birkin and forgot all about it until she was on the plane rooting around in it for a wet-wipe. With nothing else worth reading, she settled back, turned to page one and started.

            By the time SQ631 landed in Singapore, Amanda had not only finished the book (“I’m a speed-reader,” she told a skeptical Saffy), she was literally trembling.

            The first person she called was Janet.

            “Oh. My. God!”

            Janet was smug. “I told you! Didn’t I tell you it’s life-changing?” she said in her crispest Katong Convent accent.

            “Is it all true though?” Amanda asked as she marched through immigration towards the taxi-stand. “About those poor cows and those poor chicken?”

            “Of course it is! It’s all documented! That book is why I became a vegetarian in the first place! I cried for days!”

            “But…but…isn’t the solution then to just eat organic meat?” Amanda’s mouth started watering at the idea of a steak tartare.

            “Well, that’s what I thought as well, but then my yoga teacher started telling me about how when a cow is slaughtered, they are flooded with adrenaline and fear and panic and anger and pain and it all goes into their flesh, which we then consume and it all manifests in our own emotions and behaviour!”

            “I guess that’s that then…” Amanda sniffled.

            Of course, when Sharyn heard that Amanda had decided she was going to be a vegetarian, her response was to the point. “Aiyoh, you siow, issit?”

            “Those poor cows, Shazz. You don’t…” Amanda began.

            Sharyn waved her hands. “Aiyah, you become vegetarian, how you expect people to invite you to dinner? Or-redi so difficult to cook, now must cook extra dish for you! You think I very free, issit?”

            “But your maid does all the cooking!” Amanda pointed out.

            “Yah, but I have to direct her, you know!”

            “OK, but before you totally condemn me, I want you to read this,” Amanda said as she pushed “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” across the table at Sharyn.

            Sharyn pursed her lips and looked at the book in much the same way a cow probably looks at Aston’s. “Ay, I very busy, you know…” she began uneasily.

            “Just read the first three chapters,” said Amanda in her silkiest sultry voice that has been the downfall of many a married man.

            “Well…”

            Two days later, Sharyn announced on Facebook that she was giving up meat. She ended her announcement with “Aiyoh!”

            Saffy was astonished. “Really? Just like that? Whatever happened to all that stuff about having to cook extra dishes and stuff?”
            “For udder people! But if for myself, then OK, what! Saffy, ah, you must read dat book. The England very powderful some time, but hor, easy to read. So scary, I tell you! The poor cow and pig.”

            “And chicken!” Amanda chimed.

            “Yah, and chicken! Aiyoh, the poor chicken!”

            All of which has made Saffy extremely curious about the book. “But I can’t read it now. Bradley is taking me to Morton’s this weekend. I’ll read it after.”

            Me, I’m staying well away from the Devil’s Handbook.

In Sickness and In Health

My mother always says that if you want to find out who your real friends are, fall sick.

“You’ll be surprised by how quickly everyone gets suddenly very busy,” she said that time my father was seriously ill and had to be hospitalized for a week. “Good times are one thing, but nobody wants to be around you when you’re sick. Nobody.” I remember how her mouth drew itself into a thin line. My sister said you could just tell Mother was making a mental list of who wasn’t going to get a Hahn Family Christmas card that year.

Of Mother’s three regular mahjong kakis, two found themselves with urgent personal matters that required their undivided attention. Only Auntie Lynne showed up faithfully each day with a stack of Women’s Weekly, a thermos flask of yin-yong, and the previous day’s juicy gossip carefully culled from her maid’s mafia network to while away the hours while the two old ladies sat by Daddy’s hospital bed trying to pretend they were just having a picnic when, really, they were frightened to death.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you,” Auntie Lynne would say. “Joanne’s maid told my Anna that Joanne’s good for nothing daughter is getting a divorce!”

“Good riddance,” Mother would sniff. “I never liked that Mavis, but I liked her husband even less. He tried to sell us insurance once and he never once looked us in the eye. He kept looking at the Ming vase in the study!”

Even at lunch, Auntie Lynn would still be tutting over what she scornfully referred to as “some people”, a category, which, by then, had grown to include Auntie Wei and Auntie Ching, who were still busy with their mysterious urgent personal matters.

            So, a couple of weeks ago, Amanda woke up with a heavy chest cough. Over the next few days, it became a hacking, phlegmy monster. Saffy said every time Amanda coughed, she sounded like her father’s beat up Toyota Corolla.

            “It sounds exactly like that!” she told me. From behind the closed door to Amanda’s bedroom, you could hear her rumbling cough.

“It’s like an automotive fart!” Saffy added as she adjusted her mask, snapped on surgical gloves, and slipped on goggles. Suitably attired, she slid into Amanda’s bedroom with a tray of hot ginger and Manuka tea.

“You sound terrible!” she said cheerfully. “Here drink, this! Would you like some air in here? You could kill a chicken in here, it’s so still!”

             At one stage, Amanda dragged herself out of bed to see our neighbourhood doctor. He prescribed her four days worth of antibiotics.

            “Aiyoh, these doctors, ah!” Sharyn pronounced that evening when she showed up with a pot of home-made chicken soup in which drifted slices of ginseng and red dates. “Every-ting must give antibiotic! Dat day, hor, my youngest son got pimple on his face, the doctor must oh-so give antibiotic. Siow, one!” Sharyn looked around to make sure Amanda wasn’t lurking behind a bookshelf and leaned in. Her voice dropped several octaves. “Some more, hor, he go to Harvard!” she hissed. “If you go to Harvard, how come you doctor in HDB block in Yio Chu Kang, I ask you?”

            “That’s very elitist of you, Shazz,” Saffy murmured, ever the politically correct HR manager. Sharyn sniffed.

Amanda emerged from her room, her hair wild like Halle Berry’s at the Oscars. As one, the three of us pushed up our Air+ face masks.

            “I’m not contagious!” Amanda said before dissolving into a series of turbo-engine-like coughs.

            “That’s probably what the Ebola Patient Zero said,” Saffy told her. She pushed Sharyn’s pot across the table. “Sharyn made you soup. You want some?”

            “Yes please,” Amanda moaned and sank into the dining chair. She looked listlessly around her, and sighed. “You know, I just realized I have 785 friends on Facebook and only two of them are here with me right now, keeping me company.”

            Sharyn stared hard at the ceiling and then looked at me and Saffy. Saffy patted her on the arm. “I left Facebook last month, remember?” 

            “Oh, issit?” Sharyn looked relieved to have avoided a potentially awkward moment.

            “That’s why you should be on Instagram,” I told Amanda. “On Instagram, no one pretends to be your friend.”

            “I’m not sure I like the term ‘followers’ though,” Saffy said. “It makes you sound like you’re Jesus or something.”

            “Can you imagine what Jesus’s Facebook page would look like?” I asked.

            “Loads of selfies,” Saffy said, confidently.

            Sharyn, who went to a Catholic girls school, looked pained. “Aiyoh, you all, ah!”

Light Work

According to President Trump, we live in precarious times. Any moment now, someone somewhere is going to press a button and send us all to Kingdom Come.

Which is very depressing because I recently spring cleaned my room. Which is actually less Marie Kondo than it sounds. My idea of spring cleaning largely involves me opening drawers, staring at them for a while and then shutting them again. The idea of having to sort through the accumulated rubbish is just too stressful.

But I did find a sheet of paper dated 2015 on which I had listed my new year’s resolutions for the coming year.

What gets me is that I’d actually gone to the trouble of typing it all up and printing it out. That, and the fact that it didn’t take Einstein to figure out that I’ve not fulfilled a single thing on the 10-itemed list. It’s too embarrassing to tell you what’s on the list. Suffice to say, one of them was: “Go to the gym”.

I do this every year. I look back. Take stock of what I did right. What I did wrong. Get depressed.

A few years ago, I resolved to stop making a list of New Year resolutions. Instead, I set myself one goal on the assumption that it can’t be difficult to accomplish just one thing. Three hundred and sixty-four days later, it’s always unfulfilled. One year, I decided that I would learn French. To this day, I can only say, “Voici l’hotel!” which is French for “Here is the hotel!” It’s not a very useful phrase.

            Another year, I made it my goal to be nice to people. That lasted all of two days before I lost my temper coming down on the City Hall MRT escalator because everyone was ignoring the keep left rule, and I missed my train.

It’s endlessly mortifying to realise just how unfulfilled your life is, though, to be honest, I’m not sure that I feel particularly unfulfilled because I didn’t get to a gym.

These days, when I get on the bus, I realize I am no longer the youngest person on the bus. Sometimes, kids call me “uncle”. Sharyn says the next person who calls her “auntie” is going to get, in her words, “one tight slap”.

But the bigger question, especially as the new season of ‘Stranger Things’ approaches, is this: What have I done with my life? When the time comes and I breathe my last, will my last thought be: “I’ve had a great time, I have no regrets! Oooh, what’s that bright shining light?” Or would it be: “Are you kidding me? I skipped dessert and now I’m dying? Oooh, what’s that bright shining light?” 

I hope Mr Trump has gotten it wrong and that the world isn’t full of scary people wanting to blow us all up. Because, to be honest, I’m not quite done yet.

There are still so many things to do. Or, rather, not do. Like read the newspapers. There’s nothing in them, except bad news. I should also spend less time on Facebook because it just makes me anxious. And besides, according to my 10-year-old god-daughter, only “old people” are active on Facebook. She’s lucky Sharyn wasn’t around when she said that.

I should also stop feeling guilty that I watch so much TV and just enjoy every second of ‘Real Housewives of Nassim Road’. I should have second helpings at every meal instead of watching my waistline. More to the point, I should eat at more buffets.

I should stop pretending that I enjoy the company of people I don’t particularly like (ie, my cousin and his awful wife and children). I mean, really, talk about hours you can’t get back. I should read more books, see more movies and dance more instead of wasting all that time sleeping in late and taking afternoon naps.

I should call my sister more often and check up on her eczema, and tell the people I really do like how much I enjoy their company. I should also learn how to bake a cake because, as I’ve learnt on Nigella’s cooking shows, nothing says “I love you” more than a home-made cake.

But most of all, I should stop making lists. Because what I kind of get now is that you can’t control your destiny. Every day is Life’s way of surprising you. But what you do with that surprise is entirely up to you.

Face Off

I have a friend on Facebook who’s a real downer. Actually, I have a few of them. Just about every single post is about something bad. Corruption in some Third World country. Toxins in a brand of baby formula. A complaint about how stupid most people are. How the service at a particular restaurant sucked so badly, you’d think you were at a candy store. The rudeness of Singaporean drivers and this is accompanied by a video of a car that’s straddling two parking lots. A video of an aunty on a bus arguing with a young man, which ends with her spitting at him. A video of Kellyanne Conway demonstrating how not to answer a question.

            Amanda just told me a friend on Facebook posted an article about how someone who is long-winded could actually be showing signs of early Alzheimers.

            “Can you imagine?” she wondered to the world at large. “That would mean that just about everyone I know in my office is two lunch appointments from having full-blown Alzhimers! Isn’t that just about the scariest thing?”

            “I think we need to stop being on Facebook,” I told her. “Have you noticed how angry people are on it? They’re always complaining about something, or posting something that either scares me or makes me afraid. Just the other day,” I went on, “Barney posted this video of a spider fighting with a snake! A snake!”

            “Oh my God, I saw that one! Facebook doesn’t give you notice for that kind of thing, it just suddenly starts playing! I was on the escalator and I nearly jumped back. Luckily, it was rush hour and there was a cushion of people behind me. Otherwise, I would have tumbled down the escalator, snapped my neck and died.”

            “And someone would have been there to capture the whole thing on his phone and then upload it!” I said.

            “What is wrong with this world?” Amanda asked.

            Sharyn says it’s why she’s no longer on Facebook. “Aiyah, so sian!” she declared the other day over lunch at Maxwell Market. “All my friend got some-ting to complain, one. The worse hor, is when they post some-ting like…like…what ah?, wait, lemme tink…oh yah, dat day my friend post ‘So disappointing!’ Nah-ting else. Aiyoh, liddat also got time to post! Say why, lah! Skali, all your friend must message you and ask, ‘Ay, what happen, ah? Are you ok?’ Waste my time!” Sharyn sniffed as she savagely speared a piece of cucumber from the plate of rojak.

            “Is that why I never see you on Facebook, anymore?” Saffy said, looking up from her heaped plate of nasi padang.

            “Yah, I leave Facebook or-redi. Now I am on Instagram! So happy. All day, I look at pretty picture! No stress!”

            “Really?” Amanda said, putting down her spoonful of laksa. “I’ve always wondered if I should be on Instagram.”

            “Confirm, must!” Sharyn said, her eyes abnormally enlarged behind her Coke-bottle-thick spectacles. “I real kay-poh, so I follow Kim Kardashian and Preston Gerber!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Who’s Preston Gerber?”

            “Aiyoh, you doh-no, ah? He is the son of Cindy Crawford. Wah lau, so han-some! His sister lagi better looking, ah! I wish my chil-ren got so good looking, but dey look like their father, so all got flat nose!” Sharyn’s nose wrinkled at the injustice of such an unfair gene pool.

            Meanwhile, Saffy had been busy tapping her phone. “Gerber, Gerber…oh here we go…oooh, he’s gorgeous!”

            Amanda leaned over to look at the screen. “Seriously, he looks like he’s fifteen!”

            “Oooh, is that his father? OK, the son may be cute, but the father is seriously hot!”

            “Randy!” Sharyn piped up.

            Saffy sighed. “I know. Bradley has been away for a week, I am climbing the walls!”

            “Noooo,” Sharyn drawled. “The father. His name is Randy! Randy Gerber!”

            Saffy blinked. “Seriously?”

            By then, Amanda had abandoned her laksa to set up an Instagram account on her phone. She then spent fifteen minutes following people that Sharyn told her to.

            “Ah, you must also follow Peepy and Mother Lee!”

            “OK, let me find them. Who are they?”

            “Mudder and son. Whenever I sad, I look at their picture and I laugh and laugh. So funny, they all…”

            Amanda peered at her screen. “What is she wearing? Is that a hat?”
            Sharyn barked out a laugh and slapped her thigh. “No, is her real hair! So funny right? Aiyoh, I got so many more you must follow! So fun, Instagram!”

            Saffy says if she had shares in Facebook, she’d sell everything now.