Hands Up

I love Japan. I love everything to do with Japan. Its cities. The shops and shrines. The crazy fashion. The crazy good food. 

I absolutely adore all the bowing. I always tell my depressed friends that they need to go to a major departmental store in Japan at opening time and then take the escalator all the way up to the top floor. On every floor, the entire staff is lined up to bow deeply and to wish you good morning, their flawless faces wreathed in beatific smiles. Every floor. “By the time you get to the top floor,” I tell my depressed friends, “you’ll be so fulfilled and calm and happy. Better than a bottle of Prozac!”

“They can’t be that happy to see us,” Amanda said once as we sailed up Takashimaya in down-town Tokyo. 

I shrugged. “Who cares? My self-esteem is going through the roof right now.”

Later, when we went to the bank to change some money, we were greeted by a white-gloved attendant who bowed us all the way to the Forex desk. Amanda said it seemed a little embarrassing to be receiving so much attention when we were only changing fifty Singapore dollars.

“I’m feeling very centred, right now,” I told her. “Can you imagine this happening at DBS?”

I especially love the toilets – specifically the Toto Washlets. You know the ones? They look just like ordinary toilets except the cover is a bit bulkier and it beeps at you when you enter the cubicle and the cover rises. And they have warm seats and warm water jets that wash your bits and crevices, then blow dry you, all while puffing out ozone into the air so that icky odours are masked. Whenever I encounter a Toto, even if I don’t need to do a number two, I’ll still sit down just so I can get the full wash and blow-dry. 

“Leave it to the Japanese,” said Saffy once, after a quick business trip to Osaka, “to elevate even the toilet to a fine art form! We really should get one!”

“It costs $3,000!” Amanda said, at which Saffy coughed into her soya bean drink. “And that’s for the starter model. If you want the one that puffs out ozone, it goes all the way up to $6,000!”

Saffy was astonished. “Six thousand dollars? Seriously? For a toilet? Well, maybe not, then.” Her bosom shivered with disappointment. “Oh, that’s such a shame. I barely left my hotel room in Osaka. I just sat on the Toto for hours. Except I don’t think mine was an actual Toto, but the minute I sat down on it, it started piping bird song and the sound of a running stream! I asked my colleague about that and she said it was to hide the noise made by your number ones and twos!”

Amanda shook her head in admiration. “Only in Japan.”

A few days later, uncharacteristically early for a lunch appointment, Saffy found herself with time to kill and wandered into Tokyu Hands.

She immediately texted me. “Have you been here? It’s the craziest place!”

“I practically live there,” I replied. 

That evening at home, Saffy said going to Tokyu Hands was like being in a scene from ‘Alice in Wonderland’, except in this version, Alice goes shopping with the Mad Hatter. “I went back there after lunch and spent, like, three hours just wandering around the shop. I just couldn’t work out where I was! I started out looking at magnifying glasses and teapots. Then I tried on all kinds of eyebrow pens, and then suddenly, I was looking at something for exercising your jaw muscles.”

“I nearly got that for you for Christmas,” Amanda said. “But it was so expensive, so I got it for me instead. It’s supposed to be like yoga for the face!”

Saffy shook her head. “Isn’t it the craziest thing? And they’ve got all kinds of pens and lovely stacks of paper, and even household cleaning products at the back! I mean, it’s just a totally nut job of a shop! I love it!”

Amanda said there probably isn’t a single thing in Tokyu Hands that she wouldn’t buy if she lived in a house the size of the Istana. “It’s all so cute!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I don’t think cute even begins to describe it! What I can’t believe is that it’s taken me this long to get there. Sharyn is always going on about it, but you know, I just thought it was Sharyn being just…well…her usual weird self!”

All of which got Amanda wondering what a Japanese hospital must be like. 

“That would be totally sick!” Saffy said. 

Die Hard

It’s such a cliché that one someone dies suddenly, his friends and family start re-examining their own lives. We immediately start wondering, “What’s it all about? What would I do if I knew I was going to die tomorrow?”

“I would just die!” Saffy announced the other day at the funeral of our friend, James.

We were seated in the Church of St Mary of the Angels and, just a few moments before, Amanda had wondered aloud what she would do if she knew she would die the next day. Would she live her life any differently, for example, she asked.

Which is what provoked Saffy’s statement: “I would just die!” She noticed our looks. “What! It’s true!”

“You would die today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?” Amanda asked. You could tell her brain was starting to shrivel up trying to come to grips with the logic.

Saffy shrugged. “Might as well. What would be the point of stretching it out another 24 hours?”

We lapsed into silence as our eyes were drawn towards the coffin at the front of the church. After a while, Amanda said she was so relieved it was a closed casket. “The last time I was at a funeral, it was my Aunt Lucy’s and it was an open casket, I couldn’t sleep for days.”

“I hate open caskets!” Saffy said. “When it’s my turn, please make sure the coffin lid is sealed shut!”

Amanda piously crossed herself. “The entire time I was up there paying my respects to Aunt Lucy, I kept saying to myself, ‘Oh dear God, please don’t let her open her eyes! Please don’t open your eyes!’”

“Oh my God, if that ever happened, I would just die!” Saffy sighed in horror. 

“Will you please stop saying that?” Amanda hissed. “You are really starting to freak me out!”

“Oooh, look! It’s Elizabeth!” Saffy’s bosom puffed up against her black top. She waved across the pews as she got up. “I’m going over to say hello.”

That’s the other thing about funerals. They’re such social occasions. If you have friends you’ve not seen in a while, chances are you’ll see them again at a funeral. James’s funeral was no exception. We’d barely taken our seats before everyone started waving at everyone else across the church. 

Old friends hugged one another. We commiserated with one another and tut-tutted about what a shame it was that James had died so young and so suddenly.

“His poor kids!”

“Poor Mary. They just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary!”

“He was so young!”

“He was so gorgeous!”

“I had the biggest crush on him when we were at school!”

“I slept with him one New Year’s Eve a few years ago!” Saffy suddenly confessed.

“Shut up!”

“Don’t tell anyone! If Mary ever found out , she would just die!”

“Ay, Laura, did you know Saffy slept with James?”

“Shut up!”

“Oh my God!” Saffy moaned.

In the midst of this confessional, phone numbers were exchanged. Quick bites of gossip were exchanged. Promises were made to catch up for lunch the following week. 

When Saffy came back to us, Amanda gripped her by the arm and pulled her down to the hard wooden seat. “You slept with James?”

Saffy’s eyes widened and her bosom inflated to unholy dimensions. “Oh my God! How could you possibly have heard about that! I only just told Cathy that like two seconds ago!”

“The whole church knows!” Amanda’s voice carried clear to the top of the roof.

Saffy sighed. “I don’t know what came over me! Why did I tell Cathy that? I think I just got so caught up in the moment of gossiping!”

Amanda looked severe. “Do you even understand how gossip works? You gossip about other people! You don’t go and implicate yourself!”

“Oh oh,” I said. I slid down further into my seat. 

Saffy and Amanda turned to me. “What?”

I lifted my hand to hide my face. “I think Mary just heard about you sleeping with her dead husband.”

Amanda gasped. “How do you know?” 

“Because she’s looking this way and she doesn’t look too happy?”

“Well, why would she look happy?” Saffy began, turning her head to look. “It’s her husband’s funera…Oh crap! She’s staring straight at me! Oh my God, she knows! She knows!”

We slinked out of church faster than you could say ‘Hellboy’. Saffy only stopped screaming after we arrived back in the flat and Amanda slammed the door shut. 

“Wah, jia you, man!” Sharyn later said with deep admiration. “Even at someone funeral you can still cause havoc!”

“I am so embarrassed I could just die!” Saffy told her. 

Flight Pattern

News that Singapore Airlines now flies direct to New York has filled our little flat with a mix of incredulous joy and deep skepticism.

“Oh, that is so amazing!” Amanda gushed when she first heard the news. “All the way through! No more stops in Frankfurt or London!”

Saffy bosom trembled with doubt. “Really? Sit in a plane for 18 hours? That doesn’t sound like too much fun…” she said, completely ignoring the fact that she had just completed a marathon binge of an entire season of ‘24’, rising from the sofa only to go to the loo or to let in the Deliveroo guy. 

“Shall we go to New York for Christmas?” Amanda said, her face beaming with the kind of joy normally associated with a Victoria’s Secret model wearing the million dollar diamond bra. 

I said no, immediately. “I’m not flying for 18 hours straight in economy.”

Amanda smiled beatifically. “The plane doesn’t have an economy section. It’s either Premium Bee Hoon or Satay Class.”

Saffy sniffed. “I’ve never trusted the premium economy cabin. You get like two centimetres more leg room and the chair tilts back three extra degrees. Big deal!”

“Well Sharyn said she did the Premium Bee Hoon flight to Perth and she enjoyed it!”

Saffy’s bosom rose like perfectly kneaded dough in the oven. “That woman gets excited when a Toyota Prius shows up on her Grab booking. I’m sorry, but she’s not my benchmark for transportation.”

I nodded. “I’m with Saffy on this one.”

“So we can go Satay Class, then!”

“And how much will that cost?” Saffy wanted to know. 

Amanda pulled out her phone and tapped a few buttons. She turned pale and murmured something. 

Saffy frowned and leaned in. “What?”

Amanda dropped her head. “Sdhsven hadnand…”

Saffy turned to me. I rolled my eyes. “She said ‘seven thousand’!”

“Seven thousand?!”

Amanda rallied. “It’s not too bad…” she began.

“Compared to what? Walking? Seven thousand dollars for a plane ticket? Are you mad? Do you know how many char kway teows that is?”

“Two thousand,” I told her. 

“Two thousand!” Saffy repeated. By now, her breasts had inflated to a dangerous volume. 

“Well, they’ll serve you satay!” Amanda bleated. 

For days after, it was all Saffy could talk about. 

“Seven thousand!” she told Miriam, our condo security guard. 

“Who has that kind of money?” she asked the office tea-auntie who, clearly, had better things to do because she snapped, “Ay girl, I’m very busy, hor. You want biscuit or not?”

“Seven thousand!” Saffy repeated to Sharyn who said that didn’t sound so bad considering that it was already more or less that amount to fly Satay Class from Singapore to London. “And New Yock is much further away than London!”

Saffy told Sharyn that clearly she, Sharyn, was being paid far more than any HR administrator she knew. “And the thing is, I actually do want to go to New York for Christmas, but seven thousand would have been my budget for the entire trip and not just for the airfare. And we’ve not even included the hotel or food or shopping!”

Sharyn shrugged. “Who ask you study arts in uni? If you study law, now you can fly Wedgewood Class! Even Satay Class too low class for you! Can you imagine? Aiyah, you fly Bee Hoon Class, lah. Is good enough.”

Saffy’s chin stuck out stubbornly. “Not for 18 hours, Shazz. I think I’d rather die.”

Still, the idea of spending a white Christmas in the Big Apple haunts Saffy’s waking moments. Every hour or so, she’ll stop whatever she’s doing and go online to Singapore Airlines’ website in the hope that miraculously, they’ll have a fire sale and slash prices off the business class fares. This despite Sharyn assuring her that Singapore Airlines only ever has sales for economy flights. 

“When you are rich, you dohn need discount, mah! Is like Prada. Prada where got discount, one!”

“It’s just not fair!” Saffy puffed. “That’s discriminating against rich people. Rich people should also get discounts!”

Meanwhile, Amanda has been trying to recruit me for the Christmas trip. “We have no children! Who are we saving our money for?” she asked the other day. 

But I held fast. The other day, I was on the 105 bus home and I was scrolling through my online bank statement. It made for depressing reading. As I later told Saffy, I could easily stop working today and live quite comfortably for the rest of my life – so long as I died by Saturday. 

Saffy shrugged. “I think I’d have enough if I died by Friday morning.”

Checking Out

One of the things I love about Instagram is how you end up being close friends with complete strangers. And that’s because, for some reason, people love to overshare. 

One post, it’s them having a nonsensical conversation with their child who’s having a bit of a pre-nap meltdown, and the next, they’re celebrating their birthday at a fancy schmancy restaurant with ten of their best friends, each of whom is helpfully tagged, so you can check out the intimate details of their lives and them become friends with them. 

I especially love the holiday posts where they’re leaping into a pool on some remote island vacation. And just in case you missed the splash down the first time, they helpfully film the whole thing in Boomerang mode, so you get to watch it on an eternal re-loop. And they always look so happy.

And then there was the time @markshark posted not just his wedding invitation with the exact date, but also the RSVP address which turned out to be his home address.  

As Saffy, having just watched ‘Ocean’s 8’, pointed out at the time, “This guy has 6,585 followers. One of them is bound to be a burglar!”

Amanda shook her head. “An empty apartment for the whole day of the wedding. The burglars could take a break and have lunch duringthe heist! And he’s got such nice stuff too!” And we know @markshark has nice stuff in his apartment because he’s posted a lot of videos and photos of it over the years.

Of course, there are people who are the complete opposite and who only post pictures of themselves in a hospital, invariably a random shot of them looking unamused whilst posing in their hospital gown.

“Aiyoh!” Sharyn said the other day as we were waiting in line at Tiong Bahru for our weekend dose of zhwee kueh and everyone was scrolling through Instagram. She slurped loudly on her container of sugar cane juice. “Why is she in hospital again?”

Saffy looked up. “Who?”

“Aiyah, this person I follow, lah! I doh-no her, but my son say I should follow her, but all her post is her in hospital. One day, got break leg, another day got headache. Today, doh-no what. She just post picture of hospital bed!”

“Some people are just strange,” Saffy advised. “Meanwhile, can I just say that I’m wishing I was on holiday with Kourtney Kardashian?”

Amanda looked up from her phone where she’d been drooling over someone decorating a cake. “Why, where is she now?”

“Bali! And she looks like she’s having a great time!”

“Oh yes, I saw that. Kim and Khloe are there too, but I think they’ve left already,” said Amanda with the kind of easy familiarity I recognized from knowing the exact location and wedding date of someone I’d never met.

“And did you notice she wears a different outfit in every picture?” Saffy sighed as she shuffled forward in the zhwee kueh line. “Those sisters have the best holidays. My last holiday was to Bintan! What a bust!”

The air turned frosty. “Excuse me,” Amanda said, “but we went to Bintan together!”

Saffy shrugged. “Yes, but we didn’t go with the Kardashian sisters to Bali. They stayed in a five star resort. We stayed in some rickety old beach hut. I’m just saying!”

Amanda’s irritation deflated. “Yeah, alright. That was a crappy holiday,” she admitted with a sigh. “I wish I was on holiday with the Kardashians, too! I bet they flew in on a private jet, or something. And they probably brought a stylist along to style their babies, too!”

“There are times I wish that I, too, had made a sex tape!” Saffy announced. I couldn’t help but notice that several heads in the zhwee kueh line swiveled around in our direction. “Imagine how rich and famous I’d be right now!”

“Yah, you probably got PA to line up for you to get your zhwee kueh!” Sharyn said, completely and loyally buying into the commercial upside of Saffy’s R-rated fantasy. 

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “I know right? I’d never have to line up for anything ever again in my life! I’d be so rich I’d pay someone to do it for me!”

Sharyn nodded. “Hannor!” 

“But who would you make that sex tape with?” Amanda asked, demonstrating, not for the first time, her talent for detail.

Saffy barely paused. “Donald Trump!” 

Sharyn coughed up some sugar cane juice.

“If that sex tape didn’t make you millions, I don’t know what would,” Amanda told her.

Saffy’s bosom trembled. “I know, right?”