Bloc Party

It’s funny what people of different nationalities talk about when they get together. Spend two minutes with an American, and inevitably, the subject will turn to Donald Trump. With a Brit, it’s Brexit. And with a Singaporean, it’s an en-bloc sale. 

Amanda reports that she had barely seated herself during her recent lunch at Chatterbox when June immediately launched into a blow-by-blow account of the latest en-bloc drama at her condo.

“She didn’t even give me any time to look at the menu,” Amanda complained later that evening. “And you know how I like to order first before I start gossiping!”

Saffy looked up from her da-bao chicken rice. “I’m totally with you. Priorities, people! But I can’t believe you went to Chatterbox again!”

Amanda shrugged. “They have the best chicken rice in town.”

Saffy’s eyes rolled back as she pursed her lips. “For like fifty bucks! This packet,” she gestured at her pile rice and scraggly chicken sitting on oil-stained wax brown paper, “cost $3.50! And it’s just as good!”

Amanda raised an eyebrow. 

Saffy’s chest deflated. “Oh, alright. It’s not as good. But still! Seventy bucks for chicken rice!”

“One of these days, you’re going to get into so much trouble for exaggerating,” Amanda told her. 

But Saffy was unrepentant. “Donald Trump does it all day and he seems to be doing just fine!”

“Funny you brought him up, because June says that the collective sales committee running the en-bloc at her condo has clearly been taking lessons from that man!”

It turns out that that ever since the decision was made a year ago to try to en-bloc the condo, the committee has been using every trick in the book to convince all the residents that it would be in their best interests to sell. 

“They’ve got people lurking around the car-park every day,” June said. “And the minute someone pulls up, they pounce with their clipboards. We don’t want to sell because we just bought the place and spent a bazillion renovating and we’d have to pay the stamp duty, but they’ve been such pests! They’ll call, they’ll email, they’ll even come knocking on the door!”

Amanda put up a finger. “Wait a minute. How do they even know you haven’t signed? That information is meant to be confidential.”

June sighed. “The real estate agent handling the sale gave the committee our details!”

“They’re not allowed to do that!”

“I know! So, when my husband complained, the real estate woman told him, ‘Oh, if you hadn’t wanted us to give out your details, you should have told us!’”

Apparently, when June’s husband said, again, that he wasn’t signing, the committee member who accosted him in the carpark then told him he was being irresponsible. “You must think about your children’s future!” 

“We have no kids.”

“Oh. You must think about your retirement nest-egg!”

“My company just had an IPO. My nest-egg is set.”

The member hesitated. “Uhm…your parents?”

“Both dead.”

“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!” the member said desperately. “It will never happen again!”

“That’s what you told the previous owner five years ago when you tried to en-bloc. It didn’t work then and it’s not going to work now. Plus even with the extra money, we’d have to downsize and downgrade to get an apartment that’s the same size and in the same convenient location!”

Amanda was impressed. “Wow, your husband is good!”

June preened. “Yes, I married well. Yale Law School, ok?”

“I went to Harvard and…” Amanda began, but June was not going to be derailed. Because she went on to say that the following week, the police were called in to the block across from her. 

“Apparently, two residents, one remainer and one seller, got into a fight and one guy spat at the other!”

“Wait!” Amanda said, again putting up a finger. “They spat at each other? And these were two guys? What kind of fight is that?”

June hesitated. “Well…”

“And someone called the police? Because of spitting?”

“Welcome to Singapore,” June said, stabbing her fork into her rojak, which Saffy later told everyone cost a hundred bucks. 

Amanda said that if this is how grown men behave, it’s no wonder the world is in such a state. 

“God, if anyone spat at me, I’d smack them so hard their teeth would get jammed into the back of their head!” Saffy threatened. 

“You’d be arrested and thrown into jail!” Amanda told her. 

Saffy was unmoved. 

Amanda tried again. “Think of your children’s future!”

Final Destination

My mother says it’s a sure sign of aging when you spend a lot of time at the doctors or hospitals. “It’s usually the beginning of the end,” she tells all her friends. Of course, this kind of gloomy announcement invariably follows news that someone has died unexpectedly. 

            Like the time one of my great aunts, who’d been playing mahjong for twelve hours straight without getting up, bent over to pick up a tile that had fallen to the floor. The blood rushed straight to her head and she died instantly of a massive stroke.

            For years after, the unnatural manner of Great Aunt Rhonda’s death was trotted out as a salutary lesson every time the conversation turned from boasting about the accomplishments of one’s children to one’s medical appointments.

            “Just like that. Kweck!” an aunt would said, bending her right index finger into a crook. 

            “That’s why every year I book myself in for a full medical check-up!” Great Aunt Rhonda’s elder sister, Great Aunt Teresa, would pipe up. To which everyone at the mahjong table would sing out, “Aiyah, Terry, you put us all to shame!”

            And later, behind her back, those same aunts would say to each other that the only reason Great Aunt Teresa was still alive and kicking at 94 was because she was determined to outlive her daughter-in-law just so the dreadful woman wouldn’t inherit her jewels. 

            When my great aunt eventually died at 98 – after lunch, she lay down for a nap, and never woke up again – it surprised noone that when her safety deposit box was opened by the lawyers, it was empty. Apparently, she’d sold everything and spent the money on that four-month cruise around the world the year before. Her daughter-in-law had to be sedated. 

            “What a great life Terry had,” everyone agreed at the funeral even as they were busy making phone calls to their respective cardiologists and oncologists for a full body work-up that week. As my mother observed, you can always tell when someone in the family has died by the subsequent stampede to the doctors’ waiting rooms. Nothing makes you realize how fragile your grip on life is until someone you know lets go of theirs.

            And recently, came news that one of Amanda’s classmates had died suddenly after a routine gallstone operation. It was so unexpected.

            “We were meant to have lunch next week!” Amanda told Saffy in the taxi as it zoomed towards Gleneagles hospital in Novena. As soon as the news hit social media, she immediately booked a full medical exam. “Something happened to her heart!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated and deflated with a sigh. “That’s so scary. And she was our age, too!”

            “Exactly! And she had everything going for her. She’d just had a promotion. She was engaged finally. Then she goes into the hospital and never comes out again!”

            “And here we are rushing towards one,” Saffy observed.

            “Well, when was the last time we had a medical check-up?” Amanda asked. “Since never! We could all be ticking time-bombs right now!”

            “Well, as long as I don’t die before the Il Divo concert, I’ll be ok,” Saffy said, demonstrating, not for the first time, her shaky grasp on priorities and life goals.

            The whole check up took a few hours, the girls being shuttled from one room to the other. “They did everything,” Saffy later reported to Sharyn. “Blood-test, heart, blood pressure, kidney scan, chest X-rays. The doctor even asked me if I wanted to do a prostate test and I said, I don’t think so. I told her that I don’t even let my boyfriend touch me there, so what made her think I was going to let her anywhere near it?”

            “Aiyoh,” Sharyn sighed.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I know right!”

            But apparently, what the girls couldn’t get over was that they had to produce a stool sample. Amanda says it’s not so much that they had to provide one on the spot, but it was the idea that some lab person somewhere in the hospital would have to open the container and examine the contents. 

            “And they’d have to do it all day!” Amanda exclaimed. “I mean, that’s his job! Open one container of poop after the other and then look at it through a microscope. All day!”

            Saffy wonders if when that lab person was growing up and his relatives asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, whether he could ever imagine that looking at other people’s poop all day long would be in his future.

            “I think I would just die!” Saffy predicted.

             

Cold Front

It’s been so hot lately. Every day, I poke my head out the window to scan the sky, hoping for the slightest sign of a dark gathering of rain clouds. And every day, I see the same bright blue dome and shimmer of heat that promises another scorching day. 

            Of course, it hasn’t helped that the unreliable air-con unit in our lounge room decided to pack up again. As did the one in Saffy’s bedroom.

            “What is wrong with these machines?” Amanda said the other day as she stood under the unit in the lounge, looking up at it with the kind of dissatisfaction you normally associate with the arrival of the scrawny male stripper at the bachelorette party. “This is the third time this stupid thing has conked out.”

            “I couldn’t sleep last night,” Saffy moaned as she lolled listlessly on the sofa, trying to find a cool spot. “Even with the fan on full blast, I woke up in a pool of sweat!”

            I pointed out to Amanda that it’s been two days since we rang the air-con man. “Where is he?”

            “He’s coming on Friday.”

            Saffy struggled up onto her elbows, her forehead shiny with sweat. “Friday! But it’s only Wednesday today. Why is he only coming on Friday?”

            “Do I look like Mavis from Panasonic Service Centre?” Amanda snapped. “How should I know? That was the only time she had when I called up.”

            “Did you tell her it was an emergency?”
            “I did and she said every client who calls her up tells her it’s an emergency,” Amanda said. Apparently, you could tell that Mavis was sick and tired of other people’s cooling emergencies. 

            Saffy collapsed onto her back. “Oh. My. God. You know, I can’t stand it another night. I’m just going to have sleep with you tonight, Jas…”

            “No.”

            “…Amanda,” Saffy went on smoothly. She went on in a rush as Amanda opened her mouth. “No really, you can’t say no. I have an interview for a job promotion on Friday and I need to look my best. I simply cannot afford to have bags under my eyes! You don’t want it to be your fault I didn’t get the promotion, do you?”

            Later that afternoon, Amanda texted me in a major mood. “I don’t know why you don’t sleep with her!”

            “I’m embarrassed. I wear a mouth-guard and drool in my sleep,” I replied. Hand on my heart, both true. 

            Needless to say, Saffy’s sleepover didn’t go too well. Because the next morning, both girls emerged from Amanda’s bedroom looking like sorority girls who just woke up inside a trash bin with no memory of the last 18 hours. Amanda went into the bathroom to pee and when she emerged, she said, “I look like a mug shot.”

            Saffy slumped into a chair at the dining table where I was having breakfast. She reached for my coffee and took a noisy slurp. 

            “I’m going to lose that promotion,” she sighed into the cup. 

            I chewed my muesli slowly and looked from one to the other. “But the air-con worked, right?” I asked.

            “I didn’t sleep a wink. Amanda snores like a bulldog in heat!” Saffy reported. 

            Amanda stiffened. “I don’t see how that’s humanly possible since I didn’t sleep a wink either! Because you talk in your sleep!” She turned to me. “She talks. And it’s not random sentences, either. It’s a complete conversation with both sides speaking.”

            I frowned. “What…”

            “As in, she speaks one sentence, and then she replies to herself and then she replies to herself replying to herself! It’s the craziest thing!”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I do no such thing!”

            Amanda rolled her eyes. “Oh, yeah? Then how do I know that you love it when your boyfriend Bradley sticks the last two fingers of his right hand into…”

            Saffy’s hands flew to her mouth as her eyes widened in horror. 

            Amanda pursed her lips in satisfaction as she went on. “That’s right! And as he’s doing it, you say, ‘Who’s your hot sassy bi…’…”

            “Shut up!” Saffy screamed in panic. “Ohmygodohmygod!”

            Amanda glowed with righteousness. “All night!” she told Saffy. “All night, I had to listen to you replaying your dirty sex talk with your boyfriend! And it went on for hours!”

            Mortified, Saffy immediately got on the phone with Mavis at Panasonic and spent an hour begging her to move the repair appointment up. Eventually, in desperation, she told Mavis about her inadvertent sleep sex-chat to Amanda. Saffy says Mavis must have blabbed because when the aircon guy showed up that afternoon, “He kept twitching his fingers and giving me funny looks!”   

Hot Topic

Saffy says she’s always wondered why fashion retailers in Singapore bother with their whole spiel about their spring/summer and fall/winter collections. 

            “For starters, we’re not American. So, it’s ‘autumn’, not ‘fall’!” she said the other day as we trailed Amanda around Louis Vuitton like beggars who’d accidentally wandered onto the set of ‘Crazy Rich Asians’. 

            “Unless you’re a Singaporean radio DJ with a fake American accent,” I pointed out.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated with enthusiasm. “Yes, that’s a very good point. I mean, we’ve discussed this since forever, but really, what is with that accent? And they can’t even keep it up consistently. I was in the taxi yesterday? And the radio was on, and this DJ was rolling her ‘r’s like she was from east LA but she kept slipping in a Singaporean ‘right’?”

            By then, I’d lost interest in the conversation because I suddenly remembered where I was. “Oh God, why are we here?” I moaned, my entire spine going soft as I looked around for a place to sit. “We can’t afford a button in this shop!”

            Just at that moment, Amanda sailed past with an armful of clothes, heading for the changing room. “Please behave. You guys are embarrassing me!”

            Saffy eyed the pile of clothes. “Seriously, you’re going to buy all that?”

            “Not buy. Try!”

            “But why?” Saffy pressed. “Thick coats and sweaters. Where are you going to go in them? Katong Shopping Mall?” At which she and I fell about laughing. 

            Amanda floated up closer to us, her head barely visible over the pile. “Seriously? If you guys can’t behave, you should go!”

            Saffy perked up, swiveled on her heels and headed for the door. “We’ll be at Muji! C’mon, Jason.”

            “But I want to have ice-cream!” I whined.

            “The café there has cake!”

            Later, as we wandered the pristine, calm setting at Muji, fingering the cotton tee-shirts and stroking the spines of the lovely notebooks, Saffy said she just didn’t understand how Louis Vuitton made any money.

            “I mean,” she began as she ran her fingers over the soft fabric of the bedsheets, “who buys anything there? Everyone I know who has an LV bag and wallet has just come back from Bangkok, so we know where their stuff came from. I don’t know anybody who buys their books. So, what does that leave us? The clothes and shoes. How does that even pay their rent?”

            “I think Amanda pays LV’s rent,” I said. 

            “And Prada’s, I think,” Saffy said. She bent over to sniff the scented vapour of the diffusers. “Last weekend, she came back with three huge shopping bags. She buys all this stuff, but all she ever seems to wear or carry is Gucci!”

            “She’s paying their rent too,” I told her. 

            “One of the things she bought was this gorgeous sweater, but she’s not going anywhere cold,” Saffy went on.

            Which reminded me of one my aunts, Su-ling, who spent so much time in Switzerland as a child that she only ever felt comfortable if the ambient temperature was below 12 degrees. So, you can imagine how trapped and suffocated she felt when she returned to Singapore where the only time the temperature hits 12 is in the cinema, or on the 105 bus to Toa Payoh. 

            One day, when she was at Fendi in Rome and was so taken by the fur coats on sale that she bought a full length mink sable and then spent the next twenty years trying to hide its existence from her husband. 

            “How did that work out?” Saffy asked.

            “She kept the coat in a commercial cold storage facility.”

            “That’s a thing?”

            I shrugged. “If you have enough money, anything is a thing.”

            “Well, it seems like such a waste to keep something so expensive locked away,” Saffy said.

            Not so much, as it turned out. Her husband, my uncle Raymond, was always away for work. The minute the chauffeur drove him out of the driveway towards the airport, Auntie Su-ling would get the maid to collect the Fendi fur, crank the air-con down to the lowest setting and then spend the next few days walking around her Binjai mansion rugged up in 70s chic. 

            And when she died a few years ago, she was buried in the Fendi. “It was an open casket as well!” my mother reported after the funeral. “I felt hot just looking at her!”

            “She looked fabulous, though,” Auntie Wai-ling said. “That woman always had style.”

            Saffy says I’m not to repeat this story to Amanda. “It’ll give her ideas.” 

Class System

Every January, Saffy and Amanda ring in the new year with a vow to get fit and healthy. For a few days, they get out the juicer and make a mess in the kitchen as they whizz up oddly coloured vegetable and fruit combos including, one memorable year, a carrot and bean sprout mix.

            “Eeee,” said Sharyn when she was presented with a glass of it. “Care-lot and dau-gay? Are you sure or not? So disgusting!”

            She took a sniff and immediately gagged, a sight that made Amanda push her drink aside. Saffy took a big swig and spent the next ten minutes in the toilet throwing up. For the rest of the January, every time she saw bean sprouts at the hawker centre, she dry-retched.

            This year, the girls got a second wind round about August and decided to try again, though this time they decided to do something considerably less damaging to the stomach. The solution? A six month membership with Como Shambhala.

            “The studio is amazing,” Amanda gushes to everyone. “They only do yoga and pilates and everybody smells fabulous!”

            “It’s hideously expensive!” Saffy told Sharyn, who, being a true blue Singaporean, immediately asked, “How ex?”

            “Four figures!” Saffy whispered, a little embarrassed by her unaccustomed profligacy. “But low four figures!”

            Sharyn sighed. “Wah lau! Four figure for six month? Siao, ah, you two!”

            Saffy bristled defensively. “Well, it’s their unlimited package, Shazz. You can go to as many classes as you like!”

            “And how many you go to so far?”

            Saffy paused. “Well…you know, I’ve been so busy at work, and…”

            “How many?” Sharyn pressed.

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “God, you’re so bossy! Three, alright? I’ve been to three classes. But they were each ninety minutes, which is longer than the usual one hour, so that’s really, uhm, like…” she paused and struggled to make the math stretch. “Like…five classes!”

            “Ay, nearly two month or-redi and you only do three class, ah? Wah, so waste money!”

            “Amanda hasn’t don’t that many either!” said Saffy, Stool Pigeon of the Year.

            When this bit of treachery was later reported to Amanda, she stiffened. “Excuse me, but I go at least three times a week! This week, I’ve been four times, and it’s only Thursday!”

            “How you find it?” Sharyn asked. “I go online and look at picture. Wah, so cheem the way dey describe the yoga! Got power this, lah, got hatha that, lah. Wah!”

            “I did this advanced class the other day?” Amanda said, her eyes shining. “The teacher is mega hot! He has the most amazing body and he hides it all under loose clothing. If I was running the place, I’d make sure he had to wear short shorts and a tight singlet.”

            Saffy clapped her hands. “Oooh, I know the one you mean! They should make him teach with his shirt off!”

Amanda moaned. “Oh my God! Can you imagine?”

“I did his class too once,” Saffy went on, “but I didn’t realise how advanced it was till he said, ‘Ok, let’s do the blah-de-blah-asana’ and I was like, ‘What did he say?’ And suddenly everyone went from a crow straight into a handstand!”

            Apparently, everyone who takes Mega Hot Yoga Teacher’s advanced class is a freak of nature. 

“I think it’s a prerequisite that you have no bones,” Saffy told Sharyn. “There was this little Japanese girl next to me. You could tell she only eats a lettuce leaf for dinner because she looks like she would just blow over if you breathed on her. But when the teacher said we were doing the yak-de-yak-asana next, she just spread her legs to 180 degrees and folded her whole body forward onto the floor! It was so unnatural!” 

Sharyn, who can barely touch the top of her knees, was impressed. “Ay, I ask you, what is this blah-de-blah-asa-what-ah?”

“Oh who knows? Every other yoga class I’ve ever been to will say ‘headstand’ or ‘cow pose’, but they’re so strict at Como, they only seem to use the Hindi term which means I have to see what other people are doing first before I try it.”

“Wah, so cheem, hor?” Sharyn repeated.

“Tell it!”

Amanda says she is going to make friends with the Japanese girl. “I need to learn how to do the splits, too! It’s such a useful life-skill!”

Saffy is unconvinced. “If you had a boyfriend, it might be,” she said the other day. “Otherwise, what would be the point?”

Sharyn says it’s better than nothing, especially if you’re paying a low four figure sum for it.