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.

            

Who Wants to be a Billionaire?

Saffy says that if she had her life all over again, she’d never listen to her parents on the subject of studying.

            “I mean, what was the point?” she said recently at breakfast, holding up her phone at us. “I mean, lookat this! Just look!”

            From across the table, Amanda squinted. “Seriously, even when I had perfect vision, which I don’t now, I wouldn’t have been able to see that.”

            Saffy’s enormous bosom expanded. “It’s Kylie Jenner!”

            “Love her!” Amanda replied unexpectedly.

            Saffy paused. “You do?”

            Amanda arched an eyebrow. “What’s not to love? She’s young and pretty and rich. I should hate her, but that just leads down a slippery slope of having to hate the other sisters, and I really don’t have the energy for that. Anyway, why, what’s she done?”

            Saffy sucked in her breath. “Well, according to Forbes, she’s about to become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire!”

            Even Amanda was impressed. “From what?!”

            “Her make-up line! Her company is worth a billion dollars! How did that happen?”

            “I can’t decide if you’re happy or upset by this news,” I piped up as I went onto the internet on my phone.

            “A little bit of both,” Saffy admitted. “I mean, she’s barely twenty and she’s running a billion dollar company. When I was that age, I was dating inappropriate boys and trying to get through my stupid commerce degree.”

            “It says here she runs the company mainly through her phone and a handful of staff,” I read, speed-scrolling through the article. 

            “My point exactly!” Saffy huffed, turning pink. “How come some people are so smart?”

            I remember when I was growing up, my mother seemed to spend her whole life telling us we had to study hard because that was the only way to avoid the fate of our drunken Uncle Lee Siong who dropped out of school when he was fifteen and washed dishes for most of his life. 

            “What’s wrong with washing dishes?” my little brother Jack once asked.

            I remember how the room suddenly went still. My mother’s head rotated around to stare at her youngest offspring. “Whuh….”

            Jack shrugged. “No stress, and it’s a steady living,” he said, demonstrating, not for the first time in his life, his ability to find a silver lining even when confronted by a stack of dirty pots. 

            “He had a point though, your brother,” Saffy said, years later. “I mean, we spent a million hours trying to get to grips with algebra and trigonometry and valence tables and crap like that. For what?”

            “Well…” Amanda began.

            “When was the last time you had to know the co-sine of ninety degrees?” Saffy interrupted. “And how has knowing the capital of Algeria ever helped anyone in their life?”

            Amanda suggested perhaps the pilot of the plane flying to Algeria.

            Saffy rolled her eyes. “That’s like one kid in a class of 35. It sure hasn’t helped the restof us! And certainly not Kylie Jenner! I bet she’s never opened a grammar book in her life!”

            Even Amanda was unable to disagree with that kind of brutal assessment of our collective education.

            “I’m telling you, going to school was a complete waste of time!” Saffy went on, warming up to her theme of total educational anarchy. 

            Meanwhile, Kylie Jenner’s impending billionaire-hood has obsessed us. It’s all we’ve been able to talk about. 

            “Can you imagine how wealthy Kris Kardashian is?” Amanda said recently. “Even if she gets ten percent commission as agent’s fee from each of her daughters, she’d never be able to spend it all for the rest of her life!”

            “I don’t think Kourtney is making much money though,” Saffy observed, putting to good use the intel she’d gathered from all the National Enquirer magazines she’d read in her life. “Or Khloe. It’s those other three daughters who are minting it.”

            “That’s probably enough,” Amanda sighed with aspirational greed as she imagined how, if she had as much money as Kris Kardashian, she’d probably just move into Gucci.

            Not for the first time, Sharyn wondered what a billion dollars would even look like. “I think, hor, the box in my internet bank statement got not enough space for all those zero, ah, I tell you!”

            “And she didn’t do her ‘O’-levels either, Shazz!” Saffy said, still very much on a mission to sabotage the very foundation of Singapore’s education system. “Orstudy Chinese!”

            “Yah, lor,” Sharyn said. You could tell she was thinking of all the money she was now spending on her kids’ Chinese tuition. 

            “A billionaire,” Saffy repeated, shaking her head. 

            

            

En Vogue

With all the fuss about Justin Bieber’s engagement and England winning against Sweden, you might have missed the other big news event that’s currently making the rounds: the condo I live in with Saffy and Amanda may be going en-bloc.

            It’s a possibility that fills us with existential dread.  

            “They can’t make us move!” Saffy had moaned when the first newsletter arrived from our management office. “I don’t want to move! I hatemoving!”

            “Well, I don’t want to move either, but realistically, if the landlady sells, what can we do?” Amanda had pointed out. “And besides, we can’t live here for the rest of our lives.”

            Saffy’s bosom had inflated like a life-jacket demonstration on a plane. “I don’t see what not! Lots of people die alone in their apartment and no one knows about it for years!”

            Amanda stared. “And that’s what you want to happen to you?”

            Saffy shrugged, her face the very image of bo-chap. 

            A few days later, she bumped into the estate manager Warren who has long fancied her from a distance.

            “Yah, hello, Miss Saffy!” he said, immediately turning pink from the unaccustomed proximity to the object of his nocturnal desire. 

            “Are we really going to go en-bloc, Warren?” Saffy said, getting right down to brass tacks. “And it’s all so confusing. We keep getting these nasty anonymous letters from the people who want to sell bitching about the people who don’t want to! I mean, what’s going on?”

            “Aiyah, these people, they all very free, lah. We’ve tried to put a stop to it. But, you know, lah,” he added, the mole above his right eyebrow trembling, “when you’re talking about nearly two million dollars per apartment, people can get very emotional!”

            Saffy gave the matter some thought. Warren took the opportunity to let his eyes drop innocently, past her straining bosom and then back up.

            “Well, I guess I would get emotional too,” Saffy said eventually, “if someone offered me two million bucks!”

            “But is only on paper, lah!” Warren said. “Even if we get the 80 percent, we still have to find a developer willing to pay that much money. But to be honest, even if you get two million, where are you going to go? My HDB is almost a million dollars already, you know! You buy, must still do renovation work and there goes your profit margin! Right or not?” he declared to Saffy’s breasts. 

            Meanwhile, the vote for en-bloc is currently at the 75 percent mark which apparently is throwing the real estate agent in charge of the process into a real frenzy. When Amanda was paying our monthly rent to our landlady, Mrs Chen, she seized the opportunity to size up the situation.

            “So, are you voting for the sale, Mrs Chen?” she asked with as much disinterest as she could muster. 

            Bedecked in fake Versace and Gucci, our landlady sniffed. “Chay! They’re only offering one point seven million for the flat. Hardly worth my while! I bought it off your previous owner for one point one a year ago and if I sell it now, I have to pay the stamp duty! It makes no financial sense for me to sell!”

            “We keep getting these letters from a group that’s desperate to sell!” Amanda said. 

            “I know, and the real estate agent is always hounding me. I have blocked his phone number. Such a pest. Just like my ex-husband!”

            A few days ago, Saffy came back from another conversation with Warren who had updated her on the situation with the apartment a few floors above us. “You know the one with that old man, Mr Wong?”

            “The one in the wheelchair?” Amanda asked.

            “That’s the one. You know how he died four months ago, right?”

            Amanda was shocked. “He did? Of what?”

            Saffy paused. “He was like ninety! Of old age, of course!”

            “Oh.”

            “Anyway, apparently, his executors told Warren’s office that they are signing up for the en-bloc!”

            “Oh crap!” Amanda said. “Why’d he have to go and die?”

            “He was ninety-five!” Saffy said, giving in once again to her unvarnished love for fake news. 

            “Still. It’s really selfish. He might have voted against it in his will!” Amanda told her. 

            Sharyn later said old Mr Wong must be kicking himself for dying so early. “Imagine, hor, if he get two million. Wah, so shiok!”

            “He was a hundred years old, Shaz,” Saffy said. “How was he ever going to spend two million bucks?”

            “Ay, you don’t anyhow say! Two million dollar can buy a lot of a-dultPamper, you know!”