Price Label

For those of you who came in late, my flatmate Amanda is Singapore’s undisputed – though admittedly, uncrowned – Queen of Labels. Open any one of her cupboards and it’s likely you’ll see a flash of Salvatore Ferragamo here, a whiff of Prada there, a fleeting glimpse of Giorgio Armani perhaps, and a big eyeful of Hermès. Her handbags are from Chanel and Bottega Veneta. Her jewellery is from Van Cleef & Arpels, and Tiffany’s. Her shoes are by Jimmy Choo and Christian Louboutin, whilst her underwear is from Agent Provocateur and Carine Gibson.

            When we first moved in together, Saffy decided to rifle through Amanda’s underwear drawer. Apparently, this is a thing that girls do when they live together, though, at the time, my mother, who has never been seen even by her children without her makeup, insisted she’d never heard of such ritual. “Why do the young have no boundaries?” she moaned over the clatter of tiles to all her mahjong kakis. 

            “At least those girls are straight,” Auntie Ching-ling sighed, her youngest daughter Mavis having come out to the whole family at the recent Chinese New Year festivities.

            Her sisters said nothing and kept swirling the tiles.

            Anyway, during her inspection, Saffy pulled out a Carine Gibson thong. “I’ll just never understand how people wear these things,” she observed. “It’s like a dirty piece of dental floss! Seriously, what is the point?”

            Amanda who was folding her laundry paused. “Excuse me,” she said icily, “but please don’t speak ill of my Carine Gibsons. That thong costs, like, two hundred, OK?”

            Saffy coughed and lifted the thong. “This costs two hundred? What, rupiah?”

            Amanda sniffed. “You wish! You-essdollars!”

            “But it doesn’t cover anything!”

            According to Saffy, that was the moment she knew that she’d never be able to borrow any of Amanda’s clothes the way, apparently, other female flatmates do. “Can you imagine?” she told Sharyn, the next day. “If her underwear costs that much, what must her outer wear cost? What if I spilled some laksa on her Miu Miu dress?”

            “You die, lor!” Sharyn said. “You sell your body in Geylang for tree month oh-so cannot pay back, ah!”

            Saffy stiffened. “I beg your pardon, but I’m sure men would pay a lot of money for this body!” she snapped, at which point I suggested that surely, she was getting outraged about the wrong issue. 

            Over the years, we’ve become used to the sight of Amanda swanning home with bags and bags of the latest season clothes and accessories. Old stuff, and by old, I mean anything more than two seasons, she pulls out to make way for the new. She pays one of her office interns to come over on the weekends to catalogue, photograph and post on Carousel all the stuff she is no longer interested in. 

            Originally, Saffy wheedled a few items for herself, thrilled to be wearing genuine Prada and Gucci. But after years of telling everyone that she only shops at G2000 sales, all her friends refused to believe she was, for instance, swinging an actual Fendi bag.

            “That is so not a real Ferragamo!” Lynette told her. “Look, the stitching is all wrong!”
            “Chanel got this colour, meh?” Sharyn said, completely forgetting the fact that when Amanda carried the very same bag to dinner two weeks before, she, Sharyn, had fallen instantly in lust with it and had obsessed about it for days. 

            “It’s so ridiculous,” Saffy muttered. “If Amanda wears it, it’s fabulous. If I wear it, it’s a cheap Patpong knock-off! How is it that I actually cheapen an expensive accessory just by putting it nearmy body?”

            Then, a few days ago, Sharyn spotted an article on the web and immediately forwareded it to Saffy and Amanda. It said that a good number of the garment and accessories factories of the major luxury houses in Italy are staffed and run by Chinese immigrants. Which means that when a label reads “Made in Italy”, whilst that’s technically correct, the item might as well be made in China because no Italian hands ever touched it. 

            “Wah lau!” Sharyn’s message read.

            Amanda has been outraged by this conundrum. “What is the point then?” she fumed this morning. “I might as well schlep to Shenzhen and get a knock-off.” 

            “And still have enough extra cash for a down-payment on a car!” Saffy pointed out without a trace of sarcasm in her voice, though privately, she confided to me that if Amanda stops buying branded goods, all of Italy will shut down and even the Chinese workers will go out of business. 

Dirty Laundry

Despite her strict Catholic upbringing and therefore jaundiced view of the loose morals of today’s generation, my mother has always been in favour of couples co-habiting before getting married. When news arrived that my cardiovascular surgeon cousin and her Goldman Sachs banker husband had filed for divorce, Mother told her sister Wai-ling that if Ethel and Mark had only lived together first, they probably would never have been married, and thus divorced, in the first place. Remarkably, they both blamed their sister, Ethel’s mother for the mishap.

            “Ching-ling wouldn’t even let Mark sleep over while he and Ethel were dating!” Wai-ling sniffed. 

            “And look what happened!” Mother said in the same smug tone of satisfaction she used when she found out Facebook had been busy giving away the personal data of 87 million users. “I told her: if you don’t live together, you won’t know what terrible habits the other person has.”

“What were Mark’s bad habits?” Auntie Wai-ling asked.

“He wears his underwear two days in a row! On the third day, he just turns it inside out and wears that for another two days!”

“Alamak! Really, ah?” Auntie Wai-ling shook her head. “Lucky Ching-ling locked up Ethel’s assets in Cayman Island shell companies!”

            “The only good thing to come out of that marriage!” said Mother, her mouth drawn into a thin disapproving line.

            Amanda later said she was amazed at how progressive my parents are.

            “I know, right?” Saffy exhaled, her ample bosom deflating. “Meanwhile, my parents think I’m still a virgin!”

            Amanda looked at her. “How is that even humanly possible?”

            Saffy shrugged. “People only see what they want to see.”

            Which reminded me of the time I had lunch with Donna at the new restaurant for which she was doing publicity. After we’d done the obligatory chit-chat about our jobs, the conversation turned personal.

            “I’m married,” she said, her thick eyelashes batting rapidly. “But my husband is based in Dubai, so I only see him twice a year!”

            “That must be lonely,” I observed.

            “No, it’s ok. I have the whole bed to myself. Nobody ka-chow me!”

            “I know what you mean. I love rolling around a big bed.”

            Donna blinked. “I don’t roll. I stick to one side of the bed so that I don’t dirty the sheets.”

            I paused and gave the image some thought. Eventually, I said: “Uhm…what?”

            She giggled. “I’m very lazy. I don’t like housework. So, I sleep on my side of the bed for three months, and then, the next three months I sleep on my husband’s side. Then, I wash the sheets just in time for my husband’s return!”

            When I repeated the story at home, everyone shrieked.

            “She doesn’t wash her sheets for six months?!” Amanda yelled. 

            “Aiyoh!” Sharyn moaned. “My tree hour wash cycle oh-so cannot clean, ah!”

            Saffy sucked in her breath. “Wait, what?”

            Sharyn paused. “What?”

            “Three hours?” Saffy repeated. Her bosom inflated like a soufflé. “You wash your clothes on the three hour cycle?”

            “Abuden? Why? You wash how long?”

            “Thirty minutes!”
            Sharyn’s eyes bugged. “Hah? How can? Your clothes so dirty!”
            Saffy turned pink. “I don’t see how! I sit at a desk all day. It’s not like I’m shoveling dirt in Mongolia!”

            Sharyn turned to us. “You, leh? You wash how long?

            Amanda hesitated. “Umm…I use the express cycle.”

            “Which is how long?” Sharyn pressed.

            “Umm…fifteen minutes?”

            Sharyn sat back and sighed. “Wah lau, eh! You all so dirty one, ah?”

            Amanda looked offended. “I wash and exfoliate twice a day and I don’t sweat! My clothes are clean!”

            “More to the point,” Saffy said, “it’s no wonder you’re always complaining your clothes don’t last!”
            “Aiyah, my clothes all make in China, of course don’t last one, lah!”
            Saffy pursed her lips. “Stop blaming the poor children of China! Your clothes are falling to pieces because you’re torturing them with the three hour wash cycle!”

            Sharyn peered at Saffy through her thick spectacles. “You know, ah? Maybe dat’s why you still single. Men can tell you oh-nee wash for thir-tee minute. And you,” she turned to Amanda, “lagi worse! Fit-teen minute. Wah lau!”

            “First of all,” Amanda said, ice in her voice. “Hurtful. Second, this Donna chick washes every six months and she’smarried!”

            “In name, oh-nee!” Sharyn said stiffly. “Dat’s why, hor, the husband work in Dubai, and dohn come back!”
            “She has a point,” Saffy told Amanda, who shrugged. 

            “Wah,” Sharyn mused. “I tink, hor, next time before I hug someone, I must ask first how long is their wash cycle!”

            

            

Marry, Quite Contrary

When they’re blocked and need inspiration, some artists go for a walk in the forest. Apparently, the clean air and quiet helps unlock their creative juices. Though after recently watching ‘The Blair Witch Project’, Saffy says the only juices shewould be unlocking in the forest would be her pee. “Oh my God, I cannot believe how scary that movie is!” she moaned the next morning, having spent the night with all the lights on in her bedroom. “I think I might actually have peed a little!”

            Amanda was astonished. “How have you only just watched it? It’s like a million years old!”

            “And still scary as hell!” Saffy told her, her magnificent bosom still trembling at the memory of the final moments in that creepy house. 

            “I know right?” Amanda said. “I remember watching it and thinking there was no way I was ever walking in any forest. Not even in daylight!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “And that whole shaking camera thing! I thought I was going to throw up.”

            “So, I guess you’re not coming with us to MacRitchie later?” I asked.

            “Not on your life,” Saffy said firmly. “You’d better leave your phone on, so I can track you in case you don’t come back by dinner!”

            “Your loss,” Amanda said as she stuffed a water-bottle into her backpack.

            “I just don’t see the attraction of walking through a bunch of trees,” Saffy said, sinking, with each syllable, deeper into the sofa. “All those insects. Mosquitoes especially. They love me. They must smell my sweet blood a mile away!”

            Apparently, they can smell mine too because we were barely ten minutes into our walk along the boardwalk before I was madly scratching at five bites on my arms and legs. 

            “I had better not get dengue from this!” I swore. 

            A voice floated up from behind me. “Choy! No joke, ah. I ever get dengue before. Wah! Must take MC for a month, ah, I tell you!” Sharyn emerged from the gloom of the forest, spritzing the air around her with a fog of mosquito repellent. 

            Already, I was beginning to think maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. The humidity was pressing down and I could feel a thick film of sweat form over my skin, which seemed to make the itching even worse. I considered turning back, but with my sense of direction, I was nervous I’d end up in Mandai, either dead or half chewed up by an alligator. 

            “Do they have alligators in Mandai?” I asked.

            Sharyn gave the matter some thought. “Maybe, but I think more likely you get swallowed by a big snake!”

            There was a moment of silence as the three of us imagined the scene. When you’re in the middle of a thick forest, and it’s hot and stifling, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of thing lurking in the shadows. We stiffened at a rustling in the bushes off to the side.

            “Aiyoh!” 

            Just then, some voices came up from behind us. 

            “So, tell me, what do you like about me?” a woman’s voice asked. 

            “What, ah? Uhm,” said a man. “You’re very ar-tick-cu-lert!”

            “Ay? Really ah? What else?”

            “Yah. Uhm…you have very good interpersonal skills!”
            “Chayyy!” The woman giggled. 

            We looked around. For once, even Sharyn was silent. 

            In the middle of MacRitchie, she was in a short white mini-skirt with three-inch wedge heels, and he in a Dolce & Gabbana floral tee-shirt and tight jeans that showed off his skinny legs and flat ass. 

            “Marry me, lah, Cheryl!” he begged, linking his arm tighter around her waist as she tottered next to him. “We can be Singapore’s power couple!”

            She giggled again. “Cannot, lah! My sinseh say this year cannot marry! Dog year no good for union!”

            We caught a good glimse of his pout as they walked past, oblivious to our presence. “So what you want?” he whined. “I cannot keep this post open forever you know! I am so ellie-ger-ble!” 

            “I sleep with you, can orredi lah, baby!”

            “But only once, leh!”

            “Next year, we marry, ‘K?”

            Later that evening, it was still all we could talk about. 

            “That is such good dialogue!” Saffy sighed. “I wish I’d been there! I watched ‘Suits’ all afternoon.”
            “He told her she had good interpersonal skills!” Amanda marveled. “It was like he was interviewing her for a job.”

            “Ay, isn’t that what marriage is all about?” Sharyn asked.

            “That’s so unromantic,” Saffy observed, no doubt still thinking about Meghan Markle and Prince Harry.

            “This is so going into my next column,” I promised. “I was beginning to stress I had nothing to write about!”

            

Facing Facts

For the last two years, I’ve been spending less and less time on Facebook. Nothing makes you realise how strange the world really is than scrolling through your feed during a political crisis. Someone posts an inflammatory article or writes a very politically incorrect comment, and I think, “Huh. She really believes that?”

            “She said that?” my sister Michelle PM’d me once.

            “She’s posted two articles like that in the past three days!”

            “How is she our mother?!?”

            And now, it turns out that so much of what we were reading on Facebook at the time simply wasn’t true. It was made up or heavily tweaked by other users.

            “So bad, hor?” Sharyn said the other day over a breakfast of roti prata at Lau Pa Sat. “Why they must make story up, har? Dey all very free, issit?”

            “I wonder what else is fake?” Saffy mumbled through her mouthful of economy bee-hoon. “Maybe David Bowie is really still alive?”

            “No, I’m pretty sure that one is true,” Amanda said, her eyes misting over at the mere mention of her All Time Favourite Singer.

            “How you know?” Sharyn said. “Maybe he and Carrie Fisher have affair and run away and hide on his private island?”

            Saffy, Amanda and I paused chewing, three sets of eyes staring hard at the wrought-iron rafters of Lau Pa Sat as we imagined Princess Leia exchanging witty jokes with Ziggy Stardust whilst sipping margheritas under a palm tree.

            Saffy’s bosom trembled. “As far-fetched stories go, I’ve heard worse.”

            “Yah what!” Sharyn said, warming up to her theme. “How you know Russia did not kidnap them and Whitney Houston and that whole jing gang and replace them with loh-bot like in Westworld?”

            Amanda turned to Saffy, widely acknowledged from Sengkang to Serangoon as the country’s leading Sharyn Whisperer.

            “Robots!” Saffy said.

            “Oh.”

            “But that doesn’t make any sense, Shazz,” Saffy said. “What would Russia replace them with robots? They’re already dead!”

            Sharyn sighed. “Put in the coffin, lor! Aiyoh! Some time funeral got open casket, mah! Cannot anyhow put dummy inside, right?”

            And then a few days later, the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. For a whole week, Amanda was glued to her newsfeed as the full extent about how personal data of 50m Facebook users had been harvested and sold to a company that then manipulated the information to influence the US election.

            “My God!” she sighed at one stage. “And that’s just the US and this one company! Who else has this information been sold to?”

            Saffy’s Instagram feed that morning had a meme that said: “On reflection, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to give Facebook all my personal information in exchange for seeing a picture of what my cousin had for dinner.”

            “Yes, but Facebook also owns Instagram!” Amanda told her.

            “We’re so screwed,” Saffy sighed. “And not in a good way.”

            My 13 year-old god-daughter Mina doesn’t know what the fuss is all about. When I FaceTimed her, she shrugged. “I’m on SnapChat. Facebook is for old people,” she pouted, a comment I found particularly inflammatory and dangerous considering she’s the principal beneficiary of my extremely small estate.

            Anyway, this morning, in protest, I deleted my Facebook account. I had to read several online articles on how to do it, and I had to click through several barriers, but I did it. At first, I felt a bit of a panic. How will I get in touch with all my friends? I thought, but then I realized that in the two years I’d been drifting away, I’d been staying in touch just fine.

            “What, you just deleted it? You didn’t deactivate it?” Amanda asked.

            “Nope. It’s been practically deactivated all this time, and I’ve not missed it at all, so I just hit delete!”

            “But you delete, then how I get in touch with you?” Sharyn bleated.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Hello, you see him practically every day!”

            Sharyn turned pink. “Oh, yar, hor?”

            “Oh my God Shazz, I swear one of these days you’re going to give me a heart attack!”

            “Choy!”

            Meanwhile, the world hasn’t come to an end. None of my 359 Facebook friends have sent frantic messages wondering if I’d died. Saffy says this only just goes to prove that you really could count on one hand all the real friends you have in the world.

            “No, lah, I must need two hand, at least,” Sharyn said even as she mentally ticked names off on her fingers.

            Like.

Dead Certain

Netflix is scary. You watch one film and suddenly, it suggests other movies you might like.

Usually, when friends say to me, “Oh, I watched such and such the other day. It’s exactly your kind of movie!”, invariably I blink.

“It’s a movie about a kid with a physical disfigurement. How is that my kind of movie?” I will say, having giving the matter some thought.

            “But you liked ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’!”

            Saffy says that as she gets older, it takes a lot for her to be surprised about how stupid some people can be. “What does a movie starring Julia Roberts have in common with a movie starring a shirtless Chris Pratt?”

            “I am Grooooot!” I told her. That evening at dinner, we were still laughing.

            Netflix, on the other hand, is eerily precise. I watched one old episode of ‘Friends’ and the next thing I knew, I was binge watching ‘Riverdale’. Which, three flicks later – ‘Jessica Jones’, ‘The Danish Girl’ and ‘A Korean Odyssey’ – had morphed to ‘Whitney: Can I Be Me?’

            “How did you get from ‘Riverdale’ to ‘Whitney’?” Amanda asked the other day?

            “Teenage angst to adult issues of death, violence, unsolved mystery, infidelity and sequined outfits to adult themed documentary!” Saffy said in a tone that suggested Harvard sure could have done better by giving a law degree to someone else; someone, if it wasn’t already clear, other than Amanda.

            “Such a sad movie,” I said. “What a waste of a great voice.”

            “An amazing funeral, though,” Amanda sighed. “I want Kevin Costner to give the euology!”

            Saffy pursed her lips. She looked doubtful. “Really? I want Harrison Ford at mine!”

            Amanda’s eyes lit up. “Oooh, yes! Good choice! Now there’s a man who gets sexier the older he gets! Who else would you want?”

            “I get two eulogies?” Saffy said.

            Amanda shrugged. “I don’t see why not. It’s not like we have any Friday night plans.”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Well, in that case, I want Beyoncé to sing. Anything from ‘Lemonade’! Maybe all the tracks!”

            Amanda clapped her hands. “Ok, ok! I want the Prime Minister to follow Kevin Costner!”

            “Mmm, yes!” Saffy swooned. She turned to me. “Who would you have at your funeral?”

            I said finding someone to speak at my funeral would be the least of my problems. I’d be lucky if anyone showed up in the first place.

            Saffy shot Amanda a glance. “Wow! Way to spoil Friday night role play!”

            “It’s true!” I said. “I can barely get anyone to commit to lunch! What makes you think they’ll come to my funeral?”

            “I’ll come,” Saffy said.

            Amanda stuck her hand up. “Me, too!”

            I rolled my eyes.

            The next day, over a breakfast of economy mee at her desk, Saffy asked Sharyn if she’d come to the funeral.

            Sharyn paused in mid-inhale of her beehoon and raised her eyes. “Whose funeral?” she mumbled.

            “Mine!” Saffy said. “Oh my God, you’re choking! Here! Sip some water!”

            Sharyn waved her hands frantically, like she was trapped in a glass box filled with mosquitoes. “Aiyoh! You are dying?!”

            It took a while, but she calmed down eventually, though not without the occasional moan. “Why you must say such tink, har? My heart cannot tahan stress, you know!”

            “You are such a drama queen, Shazz!” Saffy said. “It’s going to happen eventually, so it’s always good to be prepared. So…would you come?”

            Sharyn’s eyes misted. “Choy! Of course, lah! But not for a long time, ok?”

            Saffy whipped out her phone and tapped Notes. “OK, so you’re confirmed. That’s five so far!”

            “Har? You are taking RSVP now, ah?”

            “Amanda says she’ll need numbers for the venue and catering.”

            Apparently, Sharyn later posted on Facebook a cryptic note that said, “Some people!”

            Amanda told me that over the past two days, her phone has been ringing non-stop. “Saffy’s been WhatsApping people, and asking if they’ll come to her funeral without any context!” she complained to me. “Who does that? No wonder they’re all frantic!”

            “But why don’t they just ask her?” I said.

            “Because she sent out those messages just before she got on the plane to New York! So when they didn’t get an immediate reply, they panicked. They all think she’d dead!”

            When she arrived in JFK and turned on her phone, Saffy was immensely gratified by the number of frantic messages that appeared in a long, intense download.

            “You may need to book the Ritz-Carlton ballroom for my wake,” she WhatsApped Amanda.

            Out of curiosity, Amanda emailed the hotel. So far, there’s been dead silence.