The Transporter

The recent announcement that Singapore is freezing the number of cars on the road has thrown my friends into that uniquely Singaporean blend of panic and rage.

            “This is ridiculous! How am I supposed to get around without a car?” moaned Ming on Facebook, a comment that led our mutual friend Elliot who lives in Dallas to comment, “Honey, you live in a country that takes half an hour to cross from one end to the other. Try living in Texas!”

            In a private message to me, Ming said this was exactly the sort of thing that had made her loathe Elliot when we were all at school. “Zero empathy! Must always have the last word! Honestly, why is that some men just won’t let you have the last word!” I remained discretely silent. My mother didn’t raise any stupid children.

            “But why does Ming even need a car?” Amanda asked. “She has no children and she works from home!”

            “She says she’s sick and tired of taking the train everywhere, and she’s been saving up for three years for the down-payment, surviving on economy mee for lunch, and now this announcement…”

            “I’m with her, though,” Saffy said, putting her feet up on the coffee table, as she burrowed deeper into the sofa with her iPad. “It would be so nice to have a car. Sometimes, you just want to get somewhere without having to go through the whole hassle of taking the train or the bus!”

            “The solution is called Grab, Saf,” I told her.

            From the depths of the sofa, Saffy’s enormous bosom inflated like a life-jacket. “Yes, but that’s an extra step of tapping details on my phone and then waiting. And the drivers always get lost finding us, and we waste time hanging around the lobby waiting for and waiting, watching them go up and down the road on the phone because they can’t find our huge entrance! It’s aggravating!”

            “Good ting I orredi got car,” Sharyn announced that evening when we met for dinner at Wisma’s Japan Food Town. “Udderwise-hor, chiam, ah! How to take my mudder-in-law see doctor, or fetch my chil-ren to school and tuition?”

            Saffy sniffed. “You spoil your kids, Shaz. When we were growing up, we took buses to school and walked everywhere.”
            Amanda raised an eyebrow. “It’s probably why you have such strong, sturdy calf muscles.”

            Saffy, for whom sarcasm is like frying eggs on a Teflon pan, giggled good-naturedly. “No, seriously. I just don’t understand this whole business about driving children everywhere. Especially when they’re over 13!”

            Sharyn waved her chopsticks. “Yah, I oh-so same as you when I grow up: take bus and walk everywhere. But chil-ren today, hor, they got so many ting on their schedule, wah, if you make dem take bus, confirm they can do oh-nee one ting a day, ah! And then, end of year, sure fail all their exam because dey neh-ber make it to tuition!”

            “If I had children, I’d drive them everywhere, too,” Amanda said, her lovely eyes dreamily lost in a parallel universe in which her son and daughter, dressed in this season’s Dolce & Gabbana Kids were ferried to ballet and judo classes – her two current obsessions. “Or at least, the chauffeur would be driving them.”

            “Amanda is so sensible,” I told Karl, my best friend and long-suffering unhappily married father of four. “Whilst everyone is moaning about not having a car, her life goal is to have a car and a driver!”

            Karl looked put out. “Why would anyone want a car in Singapore? It’s such a nightmare finding parking!”

            I told him he was missing the whole point of the chauffeur. “You just get out of the car and walk away,” I said. “Where he parks or what he does with the car while you’re having lunch or at the gym is not your problem! So long as he’s there to pick you up when you’re done and ready to go to your next appointment!”

            Karl was unmoved. “I make my kids take the bus and MRT everywhere. Matthew moaned for an entire year that he wanted to join the school’s football team, so finally I said, ‘Sure, go ahead, you can join, but you will take the train to practice every Saturday morning, because I’m not driving you!’ That was the last I heard about football!”

             “You and Saffy should get married,” I said.

            “Don’t think I don’t have fantasies about that!” Karl moaned. “I’d drive anywhere with that woman and her air-bags!”

            When I told Saffy, she said she couldn’t decide if she was offended or aroused.

What Lies Beneath

My cousins Emily and Jane are still slowly going through the home of their recently deceased parents. By the sounds of it, it’s a slow process.

            For starters, Uncle Cam and Auntie Lucy lived in the Nassim Road house for 50 years and as Emily points out, you can accumulate a lot of stuff in that time. She and her sister have been posting on Facebook memorabilia, stuff they’ve uncovered in one dusty box after the other – photos, mainly, of the family when everyone was younger, more optimistic and had more hair.

My main memories of my uncle and aunt are of a strict, hard-faced wrinkly couple who could barely muster a laugh between the two of them. And yet, in Emily’s Facebook feed, here they were dancing at parties, Auntie Lucy in white flowing dresses, smiling up at Uncle Cam, surprisingly handsome in his neat suit and his pants hiked up nearly to his rib cage.

And here they were posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, looking very chic in the late 1960s, him with his shiny Brylcreemed hair, and she with her bouffant perm – both completely unaware that in their not too distant future was a son, my cousin Luke, who would escape from boarding school in England and end up as a go-go dancer in a dingy nightclub in Patpong who could do some unusual anatomical tricks with a ping-pong ball.

“Well, to be fair, who would seen that one coming?” my sister Michelle told me on WhatsApp.

“Mother did,” I said. “She always said Luke would end up in a bad way.”

Michelle sighed. “She says the same thing about all the cousins!”

Then, a few days ago, Cousin Emily texted to say that she needed a break from the house clearing. “OMG. Its 2 much! I hv to buy a facemask! So much dust! We leave the house covered with grey soot!”

When we caught up for lunch, it was all she could talk about. “I’m not kidding!” she said, reaching over the table to clutch my hand. “My parents literally kept everything! In one room, stacked up to the ceiling are bundles of The Straits Times dating back to the 1970s! There are boxes just filled with receipts of everything they bought in their lives. And chests full of photos! And don’t get me started on the books! My God….”

Her voice trailed off. It was as if she was telling me the plot of a spectacularly terrifying horror movie. You could see it in her eyes.

The more practical part of me piped up with a question I’d been dying to ask. “But how did all that have survived this long? The humidity should have rotted everything!”

“They had the air-con on all day, and there were dehumidifiers running full blast. It’s no wonder their maids never lasted more than three months. And now that I think about it, there was one who had to be hospitalized for a severe asthma attack.”

Another practical question popped into my head. “I’m sorry, I’m not pointing fingers, but how could you guys not know? I mean, didn’t you ever visit?”

Emily rolled her eyes. “Oh, the ground floor where the living room, dining room and kitchen are is neat and tidy, but once we all moved out, we never went upstairs. My parents always said it was untidy or something, but upstairs,” Emily leaned in, her eyes widening in horror, “upstairs is where it all goes to hell! Every single room! Like my old room? You literally can take just one step in. It’s stacked up to the ceiling with stuff. Old clothes, video recorders, cassette tapes, my primary 2 textbooks! It’s all there! A thousand years from now, archeologists would think they’d died and gone to heaven, but today in 2017, I feel like I’m in desperate need of an Oprah intervention!”

When I recounted it all to Saffy and Amanda, they were simultaneously appalled and intrigued.

“I would so love to go have a look at this place!” Amanda moaned. “I only ever get to see stuff like this on The Secret Life of Hoarders! It must be so amazing to see one in real life!”

“Emily says that when this is all done, she will probably need to go for a full lung scan, and then she’s going to go see a therapist to process what it all means,” I said.

“It really just goes to show, doesn’t it?” Saffy said, her bosom inflating. “You think you know someone, but in their bedroom is a 45-year-old copy of the The Straits Times!”

 

Occupational Hazard

My cousin Emily recently sent an email around to the family asking if anyone wanted a set of hand-painted pictures of dogs her parents had bought in Paris way back in the 50s. Her mother died earlier this year, eight months after her father, so she and her sister are slowly going through the old house, clearing away the dust and the past, one tchotchke at a time.

            “There’s so much to clear,” she wrote. “You can’t imagine how much stuff they accumulated over the years! We need Marie Kondo on the case!”

            My sister sent me a private message saying that the thought of having to go through a lifetime of belongings was giving her the hives. “As it is, I have too much junk of my own. I’d be absolutely insane to take on other people’s crap!”

            “You wouldn’t say the same if Emily offered you a Rembrandt!” I told her.

            “Well, that goes without saying, but I’m thinking it’s more likely Auntie Mary would have an Ikea print of a poodle than a Rembrandt.”

            Meanwhile, our cousin Nick, who loves dogs, said, normally, he would be the first to put his hand up for the pictures but he and his girlfriend were currently deacquisitioning. “We’re selling up the house in Boston and moving down to the farm to live a simpler life,” he wrote, a comment that led to yet another private email thread, this time with my mother who commented that if by a simpler life, Cousin Nick meant the two-story, five-bedroom, seven-bathroom farmstead in Vermont he had bought when he sold his hedge-fund firm last year for eight figures, then, she was all for it.

            “It must be so amazing to be able to retire at 38!” Amanda said with the kind of deep admiration she normally reserves for the release of a new Kardashian line of cosmetics.

            “He’s not retired,” I said. “He’s now training to be a nurse.”

            On the other side of the dining table, Saffy coughed up some coffee. “Wait, what?” she said, hurriedly dabbing the table with a napkin. “Nick Khoo, that tall, gorgeous hunk of gym-toned meat is training to be a nurse?”

            “How…” I began.

            “I follow him in Instagram. He’s always taking selfies in front of some random bathroom mirror. He’s shameless and hot. He’s literally got an eight-pack stomach. It’s just amazing. A nurse? Really? He’s going to hide all that hotness in a nurse’s uniform?”

            “Right?” Amanda said. “Plus, he’s a filthy rich hedge-fund manager!”

            “Who is having a severe mid-life crisis!” I said. “That’s what happens when you have so much money you don’t know what to do with the rest of your life!”

            To hear Cousin Nick tell it, he is never so happy as when he’s giving an elderly patient a sponge-bath, or inserting a catheter into the frail body of a cancer patient. “It’s given me such a purpose in life, you know?” he wrote. “Every day, I work with the sick and I really feel like I’m making a difference!”

            “I know how he could make a real difference,” Saffy said with some dissatisfaction as she read the email behind my shoulder. “He could marry me! Let’s start with that!”

            “He’s got a long-term girlfriend, Saf,” I said.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Yes, but he’s still not married her! They’ve been dating for, what, seven years? If he’s not asked her to marry him after seven years, he’s never gonna, so there’s still hope for me!”

            “You have a boyfriend!”

            Saffy sniffed. “Who’s showing no sign of wanting to marry me either, so I need to have a Plan B!”

            My mother says it completely escapes her why anyone would want to go from being a rich fund manager to being a nurse. “I mean, I was a nurse for a brief second before I married your daddy, so I know from personal experience that it’s a tough slog! Really, what would be the point, especially when you’re that rich?”

            “It’s not for the money, clearly,” I said.

            “Speaking of which, he should just travel now and enjoy life!”
            “Saffy wants him to marry her!”

            “That’s not enjoying life!” Mother said immediately, a comment I decided not to share with Saffy.

            Meanwhile, the image of Cousin Nick squeezing his impressive pecs and biceps into a tight white nurse’s uniform haunts Saffy’s days. “He could give me a sponge bath any day,” she told Sharyn as she showed her Nick’s Instagram feed.

            “Wah liau,” Sharyn sighed as she scrolled up. “The world got such people, one, ah?”

            “Amazing, isn’t it?” Saffy said.