Sweep Stakes

Saffy’s latest gripe is that just as she was coming to terms with how expensive the iPhone X is, along comes the iPhone XS to blow up that world view. 

            “O. M. G!” she said the other day. “It costs like a milliondollars! Who do they think is going to buy it?”

            “Lots of people,” said Amanda, as she reached for her iPhone X to call her broker to place an order for another lot of Apple shares. “And when they do, my shares will go up in value and I’ll get me one as well as a bonus.”

            Saffy turned to me, her bosom inflated to a dangerous volume. “Are you seeing and hearing this?”
            I shrugged.

            “You,” said Saffy, pointing a chipped fingernail at Amanda, “are the reason why poor people all over the world are revolting! You’re sucking the life out of all of the working class!”

            Amanda arched a perfectly drawn eyebrow. “Says the woman who just got off a business class flight from Dubai!”
            Never one to stay focused on any subject for any length of time, Saffy turned pink. “Oh, Emirates!” she moaned. “Seriously, that was the most amazing thing that’s ever happened to me in my entire life! Well, except for that one time my boyfriend Brian did this thing with his little finger? Oh my God!”

            “Speaking of amazing, how are you finding our new robot vacuum cleaner?”

            Saffy moaned again.

            A few weeks ago, when our cleaning lady Ah Chuan went off on her annual holiday back to Malaysia, Amanda said she was far too busy to lift a mop, never mind scrub a toilet. So, she went online and bought one of those round vacuum cleaners that hums around the house sweeping up dust. 

            The first one we got earlier this year had literally blown a fuse one day and stopped dead in its tracks. What got Saffy mad was that it had only done half the flat when it died, but because she’d not been paying attention, she didn’t know which half was still dirty. 

All of which meant that she had to get out the Kao Magic Mop and do the whole flat all over again, which she said was such a waste of time. “I could be watching Dr Pimple Popper now,” she muttered as she crouched under the sofa, her arm working the mop like a piston. 

            The minute she laid eyes on our new LG Home-Bot Turbo+, she declared she was in love. “It’s way better than that Chinese vacuum we had before,” she tells everyone. 

The other morning, I found her telling Uncle Yuan, our aging security guard downstairs, how life-changing the Home-Bot was. “It was always chatting to me in Chinese and I had no idea what it was saying! I always felt like I was in a Crystal Jade restaurant! Was it telling me it needed to be changed? Or that it had lost its wi-fi connection? I didn’t know! So stressful!”

            You could tell poor Uncle Yuan was completely lost, because he kept nodding helplessly. Every so often, he said, “Issit?” 

Much later, when he caught me coming home, he said, “Ay, your old maid from China, issit? I thought Ah Chuan was from Muah?”

The other feature of the Home-Bot that Saffy has fallen in love with is its built-in camera, which can be linked to the handphone. All of which means that she has spent valuable hours at work, remotely piloting the machine around the flat. Endlessly. From room to room. Like Wall-E in the tropics.

“But what are you looking at?” Amanda asked. “There’s no one home!”

Saffy shrugged. “I don’t know. I just love the fact that I cansnoop around my own flat. And if someone does break in, I’d be there to see it! If only the camera can actually takephotos!”

            Against her better judgement, Amanda asked why. 

            “Well, if your husband was cheating on you, you’d have hard evidence you could give to the divorce lawyer! Oooh, LG should also put in a microphone, so that if there’s a break-in, you can say, ‘The police are on their way!’ while you’re walking to lunch!”

            Which then led to Saffy’s other brain-wave that LG should install a motion sensor that triggers the camera and sends an alert to the handphone if something moves in the flat.

            When she heard this, Sharyn, who is still in post-Ghost Month mode, asked, “What if it can see ghost? Den how?”

            Amanda says that would make a truly terrifying Korean horror movie.

            

Seeing Things

The other day at breakfast, Sharyn suddenly observed how pleased she was that Ghost Month has finally come to an end. 

As comments go, it’s not the most head-turning thing the woman has ever uttered, but still, it did cause Amanda to pause her spoonful of chicken congee halfway to her mouth. Her eyes swiveled towards to Saffy, who merely shrugged.

Sharyn, who raised three children and therefore notices everything, noticed Amanda’s look. “Is true, what!” she said. “Every Ghost Month, I get visitor! Damn sian!”

Amanda put down her spoon. “Wait, are you talking about your perio…”

Sharyn waved her hand in exasperation. “Aiyoh, no lah! Got ghost visit me!”

Amanda’s eyes popped. “Like in ‘The Nun’?”

“Not so scary,” Sharyn offered, “but same same!”

Amanda stuffed a clenched fist to her mouth. “Shut up!”

According to Sharyn, every year during Ghost Month, she gets at least one night of disturbed sleep when someone – or to be precise, something – physically molests her and not, in her words, in a good way.

The first time, she says, she woke up to the sensation of someone shaking her shoulder, as if to say, ‘Wake up!’

“At first, I thot is my husband or maybe my chil-ren, but den I remember, ay?, dey are all at my mudder-in-law, so cannot be dem!”

“Oh my God!” Amanda moaned. “Then what happened?”

“Naah-ting!” Sharyn drawled. “I keep my eyes shut and say a few Hail Mare-lee, and then he stop shaking me.”

            The next year, she said she woke up to the sensation that there was someone at the end of her bed. “And den, hor, I feel he get on the bed and crawl up over my body! Aiyoh!”

            Amanda turned to Saffy who was still casually slurping up her zhwee kueh. “How are you not reacting to this?” she demanded. 

            Through a full mouth, Saffy mumbled, “I’ve heard it all before. Why do you think my bedroom is covered with crucifixes and Buddha statues? I couldn’t sleep for days when she first told me this!”

            “And den, one year,” Sharyn went on, “I wake up and someone is sitting on my chest and I cannot breathe! Lagi cannot open my eye or scream for help. I so scare! In my mind, I shout and shout! Den sah-dun-lee, he go away. But wah! My heart! Tum tum tum!”

            “And this happens every year?” Amanda asked. As Saffy later remarked, if her face had been any whiter, SKII would have come calling to make her their newest spokesperson. 

            “Some year, no one disturb me, but most year, got! Dis year, dohn have, but I tink maybe is because I go to St Ignatius every day for a month before Ghost Month and ask for blessing!”

            “You know, I always thought you were Buddhist!” Saffy said.

            Sharyn shrugged. “I am, lah, but I try every ting! Last year, I go to Kuan Yin temple for blessing. This year, I go to St Ignatius. Next year, maybe I go to Sri Mariannam!”

            Later, back in the apartment, it was all Amanda could talk about. 

            “I swear, if a ghost visited me every year, I would just die!”

            “So would I,” Saffy said. “I know they can’t really hurt you, but still, it’s all so creepy! And I love how Sharyn is so practical about the whole thing. ‘Oh, this year, I got blessed at St Ignatius! Oh, next year, I’m getting blessed at Sri Mariannam!’ I mean, seriously, that woman is my absolute hero!” Saffy’s eyes shone with admiration. 

            A thought occurred to Amanda. “So have you had any visitors? During Ghost Month? You never talk about it, so I’m assuming all the charms in your bedroom are working?”

            Saffy knocked twice on our dining table. “Touch wood, no! But I have to say that they may be blocking not just ghosts, but also potential boyfriends! I’ve just realized that I’ve not had any luck dating since I started putting up all those crucifixes!”

            “I don’t think crucifixes repel potential boyfriends, Saf,” Amanda told her. 

            Saffy was unconvinced. “You don’t know that. I mean, who’s to say that boyfriends aren’t really bad spirits? That last guy I dated? Tim whatshisface? Three great dates and then suddenly, he doesn’t reply to any of my messages. He basically ghosted me!”

            “Well, I don’t have anything in my room and I’venot had any dates recently!” Amanda pointed out.

            “Our rooms are next to each other. Maybe my charms are so powerful, they’re affecting your love life, too!”

            “Wah lau!” Sharyn said when she heard this.

            

Like and Cher

Well, clearly, this one is a historical post, but just pretend it's current affairs, ok?:

News that Cher is about to drop an album of ABBA covers has been greeted by my friend Barney Chen with the kind hysteria one normally reserves for the sighting of, say, Cher’s first scene in Mamma Mia 2.

            “September 28!” he said the other day at Toast Box. Fresh from a two hour work out at the gym, he was looking impossibly buff as set down a bowl of ten eggs that he then proceeded to crack open, carefully separating the whites from the yolks. 

            “How are you eating that stuff?” Amanda said frowning.

            “Honey, you don’t think I look like this…” he paused to clumsily gesture one hand, currently clutching half an egg shell, up and down his torso, “…by eating that, do you?” With his head, he nodded towards her stack of kaya toast. “It’s all about the protein, my darling!”

He noticed Saffy watching his biceps bounce up and down beneath his tight black tee-shirt. “You can touch them, if you like.”

            Saffy shook herself out of her hypnotized state. “It’s just such a shame I’m not your type,” she sighed. 

            Barney leaned over and laid a hand the size of a Subway sandwich over Saffy’s. “Yes, it’s a shame you’re not Bradley Cooper…Speaking of, oh my God, have you seen the new trailer for ‘A Star is Born’ trailer?...”

            “Seriously,” Amanda exclaimed, “have you always been like this? It’s like you’re on speed or something! Rewind, rewind! What’s this about September 28?”

            Barney sucked in his breath and put down his bowl of ten egg-whites. “That’s when Cher’s new album is being released! Can you imagine it? ABBA covers! Cher and ABBA! It’s like all my Christmases are happening at the same time!”

            “All your Christmases happening at the same time would be if Cher and Barbra Streisand did a duet of ‘I Will Survive’ and Bette Midler was singing back-up,” I said reaching for another tile of kaya toast. 

            “That would just killme,” Barney promised.

            Later that day, back in our apartment, Amanda put on the soundtrack to the new “Mamma Mia 2” soundtrack, which was basically just an excuse for her and Saffy to dance and sing at the top of their lungs in the middle of our lounge. 

            Eventually, they collapse onto the sofa, eyes shining, faces flushed, and voices hoarse from the multiple key changes in ‘Dancing Queen’.

            “You know,” Amanda said, breathing heavily, “they just don’t write songs like that anymore.”

            “Nope,” Saffy said, her face a bright shade of pink.

            “I mean, I tried listening to this guy Troye Sivan the other day? Because Apple Music said I should? All I could think of was, what is going on? What is he saying?”

            Saffy turned her head to look at Amanda. “What do you mean? It wasn’t in English?”

            “I have no idea! I couldn’t understand a word he was singing. All I kept hearing was ‘seventeen’ and everything else sounded like mumbo jumbo!”

            “Well, Sharyn’s kids introduced me to this guy called Blac Gangsta?”

“Black gangster?” Amanda said. 

“No. Blac as in black with no k, and gangster but spelt with an a!”

Amanda closed her eyes to work out the spelling. 

“It was so rude and full of swearing! All I could think of was,” Saffy went on, “do you talk like that to your mother? Seriously, I would be mortified to play that song in public!”

Amanda nodded. “Whereas you could play ‘Waterloo’ at your aunt’s funeral and it would be perfectly appropriate!” 

Sharyn, when Saffy told her about her children’s inappropriate song choices, barked out a laugh. “Not Blac Gangsta, lah, aiyoh! Is call Blac Youngsta!”

“Oh my God, you’ve heard him?!” Saffy shrieked. 

“Aiyah, nowaday, ah, my chil-ren oh-nee listen to this kind of music!”

“But he’s so…so rude!”

Sharyn shrugged. “What to do? They say they like, so they listen, lor! Early on when I complain, my mudder say, when she young dat time, she love the Beatle, but her mudder say, why must listen to ang moh with long hair and take drug? So I tink, yah hor…every generation sure got people sing song that their parent dohn-like, one. Is liddat, lah! As long as dey go to university and become doctor can, orredi. Who care if they like Blac Youngsta!”

            Saffy’s bosom puffed up. “Well, I don’t get it,” she said firmly. “I had to have a shower after listening to two tracks! And not in a good way!”

            

A Shred of Evidence

In my lifetime, I’ve been called many things by unkind people. Usually, they say things like, “You cannot be that dumb! Is that really the best you can do?” or “You are ungrateful! If your grandmother were alive today, she’d turn in her grave.”

            To which I usually say, “Leave me alone, Mother.”

            But the one thing no one has ever called me is a hoarder. Because I don’t hoard. Long before Marie Kondo came along to tell me to throw something out if I bought something new, I was already living her mantra. Hell, I could have written that book of hers because nothing gives me a bigger thrill than to pull something off a shelf and pop it down the rubbish chute. 

            “Where’s that magazine that was on the coffee table?” Saffy once asked.

            “You mean that two-year-old copy of 8DAYS? I threw it out!”

            “Oh my God! I was saving it for that hot Shirtless Guy of the Week!” she shrieked.

            “I cut it out, laminated it, and it’s in your bedside drawer next to your electric, uhm, massager.”

            Safft turned pink and muttered, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. And will you please stop opening my drawers!”

            My bedroom looks like no one lives in it, it’s so empty of unnecessary personal belongings. I have no duplicates of anything. When I run out of shampoo, I buy a new one, unlike my flat-mates who have multiple bottles of everything.

            “I’ll never understand how you use just the one bottle of cleanser,” Amanda said the other day. 

            I was astonished. “But I have only one face. Why do I need two?” It was apparently a question that highlighted what a Neanderthal I am. 

            But the thing that still defeats me are my financial statements, receipts, tax records and bank statements. Every year, I empty my files, neatly bundle up the papers and put them away in my cupboard. Over the years, those piles have grown and multiplied. They now take up over half the shelving space.

            “It’s a fire hazard,” Saffy said the other day. “If you ever lit a match in your cupboard, this whole apartment will just blow up like a Dwayne Johnson movie!”

            “Yes, because paper has such a combustible quality!” I replied in as sarcastic a tone as I could manage. But my heart wasn’t really in it because I knew she had a point. 

            The thing is, I have no idea what to do. I can’t just throw those documents down the rubbish chute the way I would anything else. I’ve read stories about rubbish collectors selling this information to identity thieves. 

            “It’s got all my bank account details and everything!” I told Sharyn. 

She looked at me exasperated. “Aiyoh, you tink you are Bill Gate, issit? You make so little mah-ney! Who want to steal your identity? Or hack your bank data?”

“Wow, way to kick someone when he’s down!” I said. 

Sharyn shrugged. “Is true what!” She paused and gave the matter some thought. “Why you don’t buy a paper shredder?”

“I have financial records going back 15 years, Sharyn. Each year is about a foot thick and shredders do two pages a time. The last time I tried, I got to March, and the machine starting smoking!”

“Professional company, leh?”

“They want big loads, not little piles like mine!”

“And you doh wan to just trowdown the bin?”

“Nope. I’m not risking the karung guni man, either!”

“Aiyoh, how liddat?”

Leave it to Saffy to come up with the solution. That evening she burst into the flat. “It’s Ghost Month!” she announced. “Everyone is burning stuff! We’ll just wait till it’s late one night, and we’ll burn all your papers in one of those bins downstairs in the garden!”

A quiet silence settled into the room as we gave the matter some thought. 

“But,” I said eventually, “you’re supposed to burn stuff that you want to send into the afterlife to keep your ancestors company. You don’t want tax records and bills to go up into heaven! Such bad luck!”

Saffy waved her hands. “No, no! It’ll be bad luck only if we burnt the stuff when you’redead, but you’re not dead yet, so those bills will be someone else’s problem!”

I turned to Amanda for help. She shrugged. “It’s got a certain twisted logic to it.”

“Really? You think?”

“It’s that or run the nightly risk of being burned alive when your stupid tax returns catch fire!” Amanda said.

“You spend too much time talking to my mother,” I told her.

Stock Cube

Say what you will about parents, but there probably isn’t a single father or mother out there who hasn’t, at one stage or another, been convinced that their child is a genius.

            In my family, first my sister, then me and finally my brother were held up as the modern equivalent of Albert Einstein. When Michelle produced her first finger painting in her pre-school arts and crafts class, my mother told everyone from the gardener to her dentist that, finally, Leonardo da Vinci’s reincarnation had arrived. 

But at the next class, Michelle squeezed an entire tube of blue paint into her mouth and then spent the next 24 hours sitting on the toilet pooing out blue-tinted poo. Mother’s sister Auntie Wai-ling asked archly if this was the sort of thing geniuses did, and was rewarded with three months of Not Being Spoken To. 

When I was two, I was plopped in front of the piano. I hit the keys a few times with enthusiasm and was immediately sentenced to lessons on the electric organ on the basis that the noise I’d pounded out was, according to my famously tone-deaf father, distinctly the first two bars of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.24. That all came to an abrupt end during a group recital when the teacher realised that though I was happily moving my fingers across the keyboard, my organ was making no sound at all because I hadn’t turned it on. Which, now that I think about it, bears all the hallmarks of creative thinking. 

Meanwhile, until Jack was three, he spoke only in grunts and howls. My parents told everyone this was a sure sign of genius. “Michaelangelo didn’t speak till he was five,” my mother told the family pediatrician, who replied that there was absolutely no historical record or evidence for that statement. 

The upside is that by the time we were all teenagers, my parents had more or less abandoned any pretense that any of us was ever going to amount to anything more substantial that slightly above average. “Michelle is going to be an accountant,” Mother would say half-heartedly, hardly a ringing endorsement as any Tiger Mother would have immediately noticed she had not said charteredaccountant. 

“Well, at least she’s not going to be a nurse,” said Auntie Wai-ling, whose son was going to MIT to study engineering. Normally, that kind of provocative statement would have earned her at least two months of Not Being Spoken To, but by then – following so soon after my decision to study law in Perth and not in Cambridge, which I couldn’t get into because my grades were so below par – my mother’s spirits had been crushed.

The nail was firmly smashed into the coffin of my parents’ ambitions the morning Jack came down to breakfast and announced, between noisy chews of his muesli, that he was turning vegetarian and would henceforth eat only tofu and lentils, and devote his life to making music to play to whales.

According to my father, that was the day my mother sprouted her first white hair.

“Boy, you guys were such disappointments!” Amanda said recently. 

“Not as much as my Harvard-educated cousin Eng Kiat who went to jail for embezzling!” I replied.

“Yes, but that’s white collar crime,” said Amanda, Singapore’s Queen Snob, “which is not as bad as going to law school in Perth!”

From the couch, Saffy looked up from her iPad. “Did you see the story about this kid from Georgia? He solved six Rubik’s Cubes while he was underwater for one minute and forty-four seconds! Six!” Saffy seighed, though it was not immediately clear whether she was impressed by the kid’s intelligence or the pointless stupidity of the achievement. 

            As Sharyn later asked, “Like that, smart, meh?” 

            “I can’t decide,” Saffy admitted. “I’ve never been able to solve a single one and this kid did six of them in less than two minutes! So that should be impressive enough, but it’s the fact that he did it while holding his breath underwater that throws me. I mean, was there a need to show off like that?”

            “Yah, lor! If he can do six Loo-bik Cube in a pah-blikwet mar-cattoilet, den, ok, lah. But, hor, in clean swimming pool – no smell. So easy!”

            “Are wet market toilets smelly?” Amanda asked, a question that caused Sharyn to break down into hysterical laughter. 

            Amanda blinked. “What’s so funny?”

            “You, ah,” Sharyn gulped. “Make me laugh so hard, later I get stomach ache! Aiyoh…can die!”

            

For Richer or For Poorer

Months after she was given it as a birthday present, Amanda has finally finished reading Kevin Kwan’s bestseller ‘Crazy Rich Asians’.

            “It’s not high literature though, is it?” she said the other day as she closed the back cover, put the book on her lap, and looked up at the ceiling and sighed.

            Saffy shot a glance at me.

            “I mean, it’s quite fun trying to work out who the characters really are,” Amanda went on, “but, I mean, it’s not as if it’s ‘War and Peace’ or anything like that.”

            Saffy sighed. “Thank God it’s not, because if that book had been published today, it would have been in the sale bin by tomorrow!” She paused. “I really enjoyed it. Quite fun to read about Singapore without all the usual angst and depressed characters who are always hanging around void decks.”

            “What I’m saying is that wecould have written this book!” Amanda told her. “And then we’d be so rich now!”

            When Saffy repeated the conversation to Sharyn, her best friend rolled her eyes so far back she practically had rear vision. 

            “Aiyah, you tink so easy write novel, meh? If so easy, I oh-so write one ah, I tell you!” she said, shaking her head at the foolish pipe-dreams of some Harvard graduates. “Dat Kevin Kwan so crah-va, hor, write about the tai-tai and dee-ahsecret. If he write about poor people in Singapore, who want to read?”

            “Maybe people would read it if he wrote it, now that he’s famous?” Saffy suggested.

            “What for you want to read about poor people?” Sharyn demanded. “You or-redi poor, why you want to waste money and buy a book and read about your own life?”

            Saffy stiffened. “Excuse me, but I am not poor!”

            “OK, lah, but you are not rich. And den, hor, the rich people look at you, confirm dey tink you are poor, one! Like you tink Mr Chan, our CEO, even know where the MRT station is?”

            “Oh God, that’s just so depressing!”

            “Yah, lor! Why you tink I always buy 4D?”

            Meanwhile, Amanda thinks that Sharyn may just have come up with the next big Singaporean bestseller. “No really!” she said the other day. “I honestly think ‘Crazy Middle-Class Singaporeans’ would be such a bestseller! We’remiddle-class! We could write it!”

            Saffy looked doubtful. “It doesn’t really roll off the tongue though, does it? The title, I mean.”

            Amanda airily waved her hand. “Oh, we can always call it something else later. It’s just a working title.”

            “But what would it be about? What crazy things do we do?” Saffy asked. “I go to bed by 10pm! I eat take-away lunches at my desk and every year, we take the same one week holiday to Bali!”

            By the thoughtful silence and faraway look in her eyes, you could tell Amanda realized she’d hit a major snag in her quest for literary fame and Hollywood riches. Who, as Saffy later pointed out, would pay good money to watch Henry Golding sweat through lunch at Lau Pa Sat and then take the MRT home every night to his walk up in Toa Payoh for dinner with his mother, Michelle Yeoh? 

            “Unless the whole movie he is naked, lah!” Sharyn offered.

            Saffy brightened. “Oh my God, totally! Him and that ‘Glee’ kid!”

            “Which…” Amanda began

            “Dere…dat Hally Shooom!” Sharyn translated. 

            Still mystified, Amanda turned to Saffy. “Harry Shum, Jr!” said Singapore’s widely acknowledged Sharyn Whisperer.

            “Oh him!” Amanda sighed. “He is gorgeous. I mean, he was always gorgeous on ‘Glee’, but now that he’s been going to the gym…I mean, is he even legal?”

            “Oh who cares?” Saffy puffed, now firmly in the grip of illegal cinematic lust. “Just a movie with Henry and Harry! The entire movie with just the two of them! Naked! And they wouldn’t even have to actually doanything! They could just walk up and down Orchard Road!”

            “Ay,” Sharyn nudged Saffy. “Don’t forget Pierre Pung, hor! In this movie, he oh-so naked, right?”

            Saffy moaned. “Totally! I completely forgot about him! OK, the cast is Pierre Png, Harry Shum and Henry Golding. And they’re naked! The whole time!”

            Sharyn clapped her hands. “And der title is ‘Crazy Hot Naked Sing-gah-pore-ian’!”

            “Oh my God, Shazz, that’s just genius!” Saffy told her, her voice vibrating with admiration. “Can you imagine the queues at Cathay? The whole country would come to a stand-still!”

            Amanda looked into her future and saw dollar signs. “We’d be rich!”

            “Filthyrich,” Saffy said. 

            

            

            

            

Silk Would (Not)

As some of you may know, Saffy and Amanda have been dallying with the vegetarian cause for some time now. Which is to say that in public, they delicately eat steamed tofu and brown rice, but in the privacy of our little flat in Toa Payoh, they basically inhale char siew and roast duck.

            “What is the point of telling people you’re vegetarian, then?” I complained the other night as I watched Amanda vacuum up a plate of lor bak. It was like a scene out of ‘Van Helsing’. 

            Amanda raised a finger as she chewed. After she swallowed, she dabbed the corner of her mouth and spoke. “I ama vegetarian, but I’m also an occasionalcarnivore. Besides, I need some meat in me, otherwise I’m at a higher risk of dementia! It’s a medical fact!”

            “Told to you by your aunt,” I reminded her, “who the last time I checked, was a tai-tai and not a trained gastro-biologist.” 

            “Yes, but she has children who are in the medical field and I’m not even sure gastro-biology is actually a thing.”

            As I later complained to Sharyn, it was like talking to a climate-change denier.

            From behind her Coke bottle-thick glasses, her abnormally enlarged eyes blinked slowly. “What is climate change denier?”

            “Someone who says it’s not true that our climate is changing because of human-caused pollution and habits.”

            Sharyn blinked again. “Who say?”

            I paused. “Uhm…they do? The climate change deniers.”

            She shook her head. “This world is so strange, hor? Ay, that remind me, I must tell Amanda about her silk scarf!” She whipped out her phone, tapped a few buttons and pressed ‘Send’, and went back to sipping her soya bean milk drink out of her plastic straw, looking like the cat that just finished licking the bowl of cream.  

             That evening, the minute Amanda stepped in the front door, she began waving her phone at us. “Did you see what Sharyn sent me?”

            I told her I had been there, but I didn’t know what she’d sent. 

            “It’s this horrific video about silkworms! Have you seen it?” Amanda asked Saffy, who sighed.

            “She sent it only to you! I really do wonder how Harvard ever gave you a law degree. Did you sleep with the dean or something?”

            Amanda ignored the jibe. “They boilthe worms!” she exclaimed in the same ringing tone one normally associates with a horror movie.

            Silence descended on the room as even Saffy hesitated, trying to connect the dots of this conversation. 

            “Uhm…” she said.

            Amanda sighed impatiently. She tapped her phone and passed it to Saffy.

            A few minutes later, Saffy put the phone down and sat back against the couch cushion. “Oh. My. God. Is thathow silk is made?”

            “They boil the worms!” Amanda repeated, her eyes glazed. You could tell her mind was now mentally cataloguing all the expensive silk scarves hanging in her wardrobe, some of which still had the price tag attached to them because they were just too beautiful and expensive to be actually worn.

            “Ay, I thought you know?” Sharyn said innocently the next day. “I thought you say you go to Har-vhat? Even Jason know, what. Hor, Jason?”

            I nodded virtuously, though I couldn’t help but be aware of a certain unspecified insult lurking beneath the question. 

            “I had a dream last night,” Amanda said, her eyes puffy, “that Saffy was in a bathtub, and Jason poured boiling water all over her and then pulled a silk thread out of her bum!”

            Saffy put down her folk and pushed her plate of zhee cheong funaway. “Seriously, Manda, that is really so gross!”

            “How did I not know that’s how they make silk?” Amanda shook her head of glossy hair. “I am so seriously disturbed!”

            “And you have an entire cupboard full of silk scarves,” I said, rather enjoying myself.

            “A cupboard full of death! Slow, screaming agonizing death by boiling!” Amanda pronounced slowly, like a woman in a trance. 

            “Aiyah, is ok, lah,” Sharyn went on. “You tink your fi-laymig-nyon oh-so die peacefully, meh? Confirm the cow not happy when he die, one!”

            As I later told Saffy, Sharyn’s performance really was a master-class.

            “I know,” she said, her bosom inflating. “It’s why she’s so good at firing people. A few choice sentences here and there and the person practically resignson the spot. I feel so sorry for her husband and children.” 

            “Amanda says she’s going to stop buying silk,” Saffy told me. 

            Meanwhile, Sharyn says she’s waiting for the precise moment to send Amanda a video about how they make leather.

            

            

            

Pierre Pressure

So, this happened a few months ago.

            Amanda looked up from her latest issue of 8DAYS. “How am I going to read this thing once it goes online?” she asked the world at large.

            From the other end of the sofa, Saffy said, “Well, isn’t it going to be more or less the same content?”

            “Yes, but it’s not the same as flipping a page, is it?

            “I guess not. Apparently, flipping pages is very 90s,” Saffy sighed. Which then reminded her of the time she was in Boulder in Colorado for work. One day after a meeting, she and a colleague walked past a restaurant specializing in pulled pork, and she did a double take because it was called ‘Pork and Mindy’. 

            Saffy barked out a laugh. “Oh my God, that’s so funny! Nanoo, nanoo!!”

            Candi looked up at the awning and blinked. “Why? What’s so funny?”

            Still laughing, Saffy said, “What do you mean? That’s hysterical! ‘Pork and Mindy’! You don’t get it?”

            She was rewarded with a bemused look. The same one, she said later, you give your granny when she shows up at the dinner table wearing her bra on the outside of her blouse.

            Saffy sucked in her breath. “You’ve never heard of ‘Mork and Mindy’, that seventies show?”

            Comprehension broke on Cindi’s “Oh, ‘That 70’s Show’! Yes, of course, but that’s such an old show, lah. But was there a Mork and Mindy in it?”

            For days after, it was all Saffy could talk about. “How could she not have heard of ‘Mork and Mindy’?”

            “Hie-ah!” Sharyn said. “Young people today, where got watch seventy show, one?”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “But it’s where Robin Williams became famous! And we were in Boulder, where the show is set!”

            “How you expect Candi to know dat?” Sharyn shook her head. “She born in 1995, you know! The udder day, I ask her to help me trow out the old fax machine in the back room and half an hour later, she come back and ask me what does the fax machine look like! I almost vomit blood, ah, I tell you!”

            “It’s so awful how just when you’re getting used to something, it gets replaced,” Saffy said, casting a lingering look down her list of company employees.

            “Like books, lor!” Sharyn sighed. “My son tell me Eight Day is going online, oh-so!”

            “Yes, well, don’t bring that up with Amanda. She’s so upset by the whole thing,” Saffy said. “She says it’s ridiculous to expect anyone to read 8DAYS on a phone.”

            “Is liddat, one! Technology, mah! One day, a computer will be doing our HR job!”

            “Choy!” Saffy said automatically.

            “Yah, boy!”

            Amanda recently said she was considering starting a petition to keep 8DAYS as a printed magazine. To emphasize her point, she picked up her latest issue and waved it at us. “I mean, look at this. So useful! You can roll it up to bash a cockroach. You can sit on it when the chair is wet. You can…”

            “Oh my God!” Saffy moaned. She snatched the magazine out of Amanda’s hands and peered at the cover. “Is that Pierre Png? He is so gorgeous. I can literally feel my ovaries catching fire!”

“I’m sure you don’t mean literally,” Amanda began.

Saffy would not be derailed. “How has he not aged a single day?”

            “Isn’t it sickening?” Amanda said. “He looks like he’s 18!”

            Saffy brought the magazine closer to her face to give Pierre’s face the full benefit of her adoring gaze. “I bet you he’s been air-brushed! What is he now, 56? How do you look that good at that age?”
            “Alamak!” Sharyn exclaimed. “Pierre Pung where got 56?”

            Never one to be daunted by being called out for spreading fake news, Saffy changed the subject. “I mean, look at those eyebrows! Are they even real? They’re so thick! I swear, he’d be such a good spokesman for Browhaus!”

            “Did you see his stomach muscles in that ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ trailer?” Amanda sighed. 

            “Did I see it!” Saffy told her. “I paused the scene and practically lickedmy computer screen!”

            “Ay-yuhhhh!” Sharyn said, her mouth puckering up. 

Of course, a few days later, when Saffy and Sharyn were in the office collectively drooling over the same 8DAYS cover of Pierre Png, Candi happened to walk by and asked, “Hey, who’s this guy?” 

Sharyn later reported that Saffy’s jaw dropped open. “Wah, damn funny! She look like a steam fish!”

“It’s ridiculous!” Saffy puffed. “That Candi has the IQ of a blood-clot!”

“Wah, so cheem!” Sharyn said.

Date Line

Some weeks ago, Amanda’s friend Gwen came home from an overseas trip to discover that her boyfriend of six years had left her. 

            “She walked in her front door and the apartment was completely empty,” Amanda reported. “Like, he’d literally stripped it bare. He took everything. The curtain hooks, the aircon remote controls. He even took the toilet brush.”

            Saffy gasped. “The toiletbrush?”

            Amanda nodded significantly. “The toilet brush. He left nothing behind. Not even a note. But that’s probably because he also took all the pens and paper.”

            “The toilet brush?” Saffy repeated. “Who takes that?”

            “Poor Gwen,” Amanda sighed. “She says she didn’t see it coming. Just before she went to Shanghai, they’d been making holiday plans to go to the Maldives. He took all her clothes, even her bikinis.”

            “That is so weird,” Saffy pronounced, her breasts pumping pneumatically. “I never did like him. He always looked like he had something to say, even when he was actually talking to you!”

            Of course, Gwen is still in shock, though to hear Amanda tell it, Gwen’s mother is taking it the hardest. As it turns out, she and my mother play mah-jong together every second Sunday afternoon after church.

            “It’s so tragic,” Mother told me over the phone. “Hwee Meng keeps saying Gwen gave that man six of the best years of her life. And now what does she have to show for it? Nothing! Not even a diamond engagement ring. Sucked dry and kicked to the kerb. Those were her exact words.”

            “She went to Harvard, but which man is going to marry her now?” Auntie Hwee Meng said to everyone last Sunday and promptly burst into tears. “My daughter is second hand goods now!”

            “Gosh, that’s progressive,” Amanda told Gwen. “Does your mother know which century we’re in?”

            “Oh my God,” Gwen moaned, sinking her head into her arms. “You know what fills me with dread?”

            Amanda blinked. “You mean other than you being literally cleaned out by your boyfriend of six years?”

            “Yes, other than that!” Gwen said, her voice amplified by the crook of her arms. She looked up, eyes red from days of crying. “I’ll get over this eventually, I know that. But what scares me,” she paused, gathering courage to speak, “what is scaring me witless is that I’m going to have to start dating again!”

            There was a brief silence as Gwen’s words settled in and made themselves comfortable. “Oh,” Amanda said eventually.

            “I never even thought of that,” Saffy said later, her eyes blinking in horror. “Can you imagine dating again at this age? Ellen says it’s awful once you turn forty!”

            Amanda sniffed. “Forty! It’s horrible even when you’re 20!”

            “Yes, but it gets worse as you get older,” Saffy insisted. “Ellen says when you’re past forty, the only guys you meet out there are scammers! They’re just preying on your loneliness.”

            Amanda looked doubtful. “That’s not true!” There was a moment of hesitation. “Is it?”

            According to Saffy, Ellen’s best friend Gina got divorced at 42, and got straight back into the dating game with the same kind of determination and gutsy ambition that had made her the youngest partner at her investment bank. Apparently, she met a guy online, they met, fell in love and got engaged. “He was a lawyer,” Saffy said. “He moved in with her and everything was hunky dory and they were planning their wedding in Bali and stuff when one day, she got a call from this woman who said she was this guy’s wife!”

            Amanda sucked in her breath. “He wasmarried?”

            Saffy nodded. “With two kids! And still living with them the entire time he was with Gina!”

            “But how…” Amanda began.

            Saffy was already at the end of that sentence. “He told both of them he was travelling! So, when he said he was in Shenzhen for work, he was with Gina, and when he was supposed to be in Beijing, he was with the wife and kids! He’d say he was exhausted from work and travelling, that’s why they always stayed home and never went out where…”

            “Where he might be seen by the other woman.” Amanda sighed at the deviousness of the scheme. “But it must be so stressful living a double life like that!”

            “Wait,” Saffy went on. “When the wife went through his phone, she discovered the guy had two othergirlfriends!”

            Apparently when she heard this story, Gwen announced she was going to become a nun. My mother says Auntie Hwee Meng had to be sedated.