Love Bites

A few mornings ago, Saffy emerged from her bedroom looking like something a cat might have dragged home at two in the morning. Her hair was a wild mess, her eyes were bloodshot, and she walked like she was dragging five kilo weights on each ankle. 

If you were a twenty-year-old, the overall look would have been a surefire sign of a fabulously wild night out the night before. But if you’re not, you have to diagnose something else. 

“I’ve not slept a wink!” Saffy moaned as she shuffled to the couch and face-planted herself onto the cushions.

At the dining table, Amanda lifted her eyes from the newspaper and stared. “Don’t tell me you bought yourself a new battery-operated toy…” she began.

Saffy’s groan was muffled into the cushion. With a supreme act of core strength, she lifted her head and turned it to the side. “Oh, I wish! No! I was bitten alive by mosquitoes the whole night! I mean, look at my arms and legs!”

Her afflicted appendages twitched on cue but even from where we were sitting, we could see, now that she mentioned it, numerous white lumps scattered all over otherwise pure white skin. 

Amanda sucked in her breath. “That’s really gross, Saff!”

“I even turned the air-con up full blast and down to the lowest setting and buried myself under the duvet!” Saffy went on. “But I could still hear them whining about my head and I swear a few of them managed to get under the covers. I was itching and scratching all night!”

“It’s so strange,” Amanda observed, “how you always get bitten and I don’t!”

“I read somewhere that mosquitoes tend to go for people with a certain blood type,” I said. “Type O-plus, maybe? I can’t remember. What’s your blood type, Saff?”

“After last night, I have no blood left!” Saffy announced, already casting herself in the role of the tragic heroine Mina in ‘Dracula in Toa Payoh’. “I’ve been sucked dry!”

When Sharyn heard about Saffy’s nocturnal trauma, she said it was because of the recent monsoon rains. “I hope you don’t get dengue!” she said with all the empathy and sympathy of a harassed mother of three. “Wah, I ever get dengue! Jia-lat!”

In the next cubicle, Saffy looked up from her computer. Absent-mindedly, she scratched her forearm and stared at Sharyn. “That is the most horrible thing you could say to someone, Shazz!” she told her best friend. “As if I’m not already literally scarred for life, you’ve now made me paranoid about dengue!”

Sharyn, her face the very image of bo-chap, waved her hands. “Aiyoh, you so drama! You won’t die from dengue, one, lah!”

“Ugh, what am I going to do? I’m scared to sleep now!” Saffy stared grumpily up at the ceiling. “I mean, how do the mosquitoes get into my room in the first place? I have no plants. The windows are always closed. Meanwhile, Amanda and Jason have blemish-free skin. No mosquitoes ever bother them!”

“Your blood is sweeter, mah! Like my eldest son. If he in the room and got mosquito, he sure kena! The rest of us are like, got mosquito, meh?”

In spite of herself, Saffy was quite taken by the idea that she had sweet blood. After all, if she couldn’t be as rich, tall and Harvard-educated as Amanda, at least she could take comfort in the fact that her blood was alluringly sweet, whilst Amanda’s was, well, blandly tasteless. The fact that the yardstick for this comparison was an annoying, whining blood-sucking insect was neither here nor there. 

For the rest of the day, she went around the office telling everyone that she had sweet blood, an announcement she delivered while discretely scratching her arms.

That evening, she came home to find that Amanda had bought her citronella candles and essential oils. “I have also placed open cans of beer in the corners of your room,” she said. “The yeast is supposed to attract the mozzies, and once they get into the can, they can’t get out again and they drown!”

At which Saffy burst into tears. Amanda’s eyes swivelled to me. I shrugged and retreated to the kitchen where I pretended to be busy looking for pasta. In the lounge room, I could near Saffy sniffle loudly. 

“That’s just about the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me!” she hiccupped through her tears. 

“Seriously, Saff, you need to get a life!

“No, really! I love you so much! Come here, I need to give you a hug. Wait, where are you going? Come back! I need to hug you! Amanda! Oy!”

Leave Job

When my cousin Chin-Yee turned 32, she announced she was giving up her job as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs to become a yoga teacher. Her mother – my mother’s sister, Ee-Ling – promptly fainted. When she came to, she immediately flew off to Colorado, my mother tagging along for moral support, and checked into a very expensive health spa from which they didn’t emerge for two weeks, drinking cold pressed kale juice and getting their chakras re-aligned with burning sage and crystals. 

When they finally returned to Singapore, Auntie Ee-Ling – her emotions now completely balanced and focused – headed straight from Changi airport to the family lawyer in Raffle Place, where she rewrote her will, basically giving Chin-Yee’s share of the estate to the SPCA.

“Ungrateful child!” she told all her mahjong friends. Which was the cue for all the aunties present to parade stories of their ungrateful children who, despite all their privileges and expensive education, had, one and all, proven to be such disappointments. 

But Chin-Yee didn’t care. She went off to India, entered an ashram where you didn’t speak for weeks, perfected her head-stand, and when she came out, she didn’t speak to her mother for five years until Auntie Ee-Ling’s cancer scare.

“Wah, your family very drama, hor?” Sharyn said recently when I told her the story over lunch at Lau Pa Sat.

“Tell it!” I told her. “When my grandfather died and was lying in his casket at home, in the other room, his eleven children were fighting over the will. For the next twenty years, at least one child was not speaking to at least two other siblings!”

Sharyn was goggle-eyed. “He got so much money, meh?” she asked, as she slurped her sugar cane juice.

I waved a spoonful of laksa at her. “It’s never about the money, Shazz. When people fight over money, it’s usually about something deeper.”

Sharyn shook her head. “Wah, you all, ah. Even your family ploh-blem so cheem!”

Later, when she got back to the office, she repeated my family history to Saffy who said her friend Jenny was going through the exact same thing as Chin-Yee.

It turns out that after ten years of practice at a huge Sydney law firm, Jenny recently told her boss she was resigning.

“But why?” her boss asked. “You’re up for partner next year!”

Apparently, Jenny shrugged and essentially told her boss that she just wasn’t “feeling it” anymore. 

“I don’t want to end up like Mr Gilmore,” she said, referring to one of the firm’s senior partners who had gone into the office on a Sunday morning to work on an urgent file. Some time before lunch, he suffered a major heart attack and died, face-planted into his laptop. By the time he was discovered on Monday morning, still at his desk, rigor mortis had set it and he basically had to be carted out on the ambulance gurney in a position that Chin-Yee would have recognized as the happy baby pose from yoga. 

As Amanda remarked that night over dinner, “You really can’t make up this kind of thing!”

“But didn’t his family wonder where he was?” Saffy asked.

“Divorced,” Amanda said tersely. “He was never home, always at the office. Jenny says she was turning into him.”

“Oh. My. God,” Saffy sighed. “Imagine dying like that.”

“Hannor,” Sharyn said.

“The last thing you see is your keyboard!” Saffy went on. “That’s almost as bad as dying and the last thing you ate was a salad!”

What was Jenny’s next step then, I asked. 

“She’s going to become a Reiki master!”

Saffy paused and frowned. “Wait. What? A Reiki master? That’s a thing? Like a Jedi master?”

Amanda stared. “No,” she said slowly. “A Jedi master is not a thing. But a Reiki master is. My spa therapist is a Reiki master.”

Saffy looked unconvinced. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a Reiki session. Don’t they just sit there and put their hands over your body? What would be the point of that?”

She remained unconvinced even after Amanda had explained that energy flows from the hands, and into the areas that need healing. “How much could that possibly pay?” she wondered. “Compared to being a lawyer, especially.”

Sharyn nodded. “Hannor! I oh-so say! Her mud-der sure angry, one. Confirm kick out of her will, like Jason cousin.”

“Well, money isn’t everything,” Amanda said, an observation that led Saffy to tell all her friends that it’s only rich people who say such stupid things. 

Food Issues

According to my mother, I was a picky eater as a child. 

“Terrible!” she remembered the other day at dinner. “It’s a good thing we had a cook because if I’d had to deal with your ridiculous dietary requirements, I would have taken you out for a car ride to Malaysia and left you there!”

This is how my mother talks. In terms of child abandonment.

“You would only eat carrots and no other vegetables,” she went on, even as she delicately picked up a mushroom with her silver chopsticks. 

This was when my father pointed out this was not entirely true. “Remember, he went through a whole year eating only fried chicken wings and hard-boiled eggs?” he said, looking at me with the kind of unflinching affection that once led my mother to comment that Father was the only reason I hadn’t been hustled off to the orphanage before I hit kindergarten. 

Like I said, this is how my mother talks. It’s a miracle I’m not in therapy.

Anyway, family legend has it that I even went through a phase when I refused to eat anything except bananas on rice with soya sauce dribbled over it – a concoction that seems so incredibly outrageous that it must have been true because no one could possibly have made that up.

But somewhere along the way, I grew out of my gastronomic peculiarities and eventually took part in normal family meals with such gusto that between primary 2 and 3, I gained ten kilos and had to be put on a diet. 

All this came back to me when my friend Tony visited recently from New York and in the middle of Tiong Bahru’s hawker centre, buffeted by the perfume of freshly fried carrot cake and roti prata, he announced that he wanted pizza. “Are there pizzas in Singapore?”

I stopped and looked him. Even Saffy paused to peer up at him. “You’ve just arrived from New York,” I said finally. “You have pizzas on every street corner. You’ve come all the way to Singapore to eat pizza? Seriously?”

Tony lifted his shoulders in a ‘What can you do?’ kind of shrug.

            

The same thing happened when Amanda caught up with a former work colleague, Caroline, a journalist from Paris. “I have a, how you say, craving for bouef Bourgignon!”

For days, it was all we could talk about. Amanda just couldn’t understand why anyone would come to Singapore and turn their nose up at the city’s glorious offerings of dim sum, salted egg yolk goodies and succulent roast meats for something they could eat every day at home. 

For me, the joy of travelling has always come from dining on the local cuisine, discovering new ingredients, new flavours, new dishes. Leave it to my mother to reveal that when she went to Munich last year, she packed a jar of sambal to spread over her boiled sausages. “German food!” she exclaimed in a way that indicated the term said it all. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

Of course, I sniffed. But then, a few weeks ago, I was holidaying in Istanbul. I ate my way through the local mezzes – grilled eggplants, barbequed skewers of beef and perfectly fried fish seasoned with nothing more than sea salt and squirts of lemon, and munched happily on pastries sweetened with honey and pistachios. 

On the fifth day, I woke up with a craving for soy sauce. I tried to ignore it but it was still with me when I arrived in Paris two days later. A heavy dinner of garlicky escargots and a big bowl of bouillabaisse later, I still couldn’t shake it off. With every bite of the fabulous caramel macarons from Pierre Herme, I could sense the umami edge of soy hovering in the background. It was almost a physical ache.

Which is how the next day I found myself schlepping halfway across Paris to Chinatown when I practically inhaled a plate of char siew rice. Each bite of the salty sweet meat was like a hit of endorphins, each breath of the grainy perfume of cooked rice an addictive rush of...of something.

I couldn’t quite work out what it was till a week later when I was back in Singapore and queuing up for rojak at my favourite stall in Toa Payoh. Immersed in the smells and hustle of the coffee shop, I finally recognized what I’d felt back in that dimly lit Chinese restaurant in Paris.

It was the embrace of coming home.   

And not eating any German food.

Crush Hour

Saffy’s obsession with Candy Crush continues. As with Sudoku, Pokemon and every other global game phenomenon to have hit us in the last ten years, invariably, she will only sign onto it round about the time that everyone else has grown tired of chasing cute furry avatars all over town and moved onto the next big game.

Candy Crush was no exception. For a year, she would get on the train and quietly sneer at everyone around her who was intently bent over their phones, fingers swiping away so busily one auntie completely missed her Novena stop.

“You should have heard her,” Saffy later reported. “The doors were just closing shut with that tuk tuk tuk sound? And she suddenly looks up and screams, ‘Aiyah! I miss my stop!’ I laughed all the way to Somerset!”

“I bet she kept on playing though,” Amanda said.

Saffy’s bosom shifted. “Yep, she kept on playing. Honestly, it’s so weird how obsessed people are with that stupid game!”

“It’s not stupid,” Amanda said stiffly. “I play it!”

Saffy’s eyes shifted towards me. I noticed the glance. “Don’t look at me,” I said. “I play it, too!”

“You, I get,” Saffy replied tartly. “You graduated from the University of Western Australia, after all. She graduated from Harvard. She has no excuse!”

The air turned icy. “Excuse me,” said Amanda. “But Candy Crush requires mental agility, coordination, and the ability to think three steps ahead! You should try it, Miss I was Late for My Plane Because I Thought I Could Get to New Delhi Airport in Twenty Minutes!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Oh my God. Are you still going on about that? How was I to know that Hrithik Roshan was attending a party at a hotel that was on the way to the airport and all the paparazzi in India would be there and blocking the road?”

“It’s New Delhi!” Amanda exclaimed. “Of course, there are going to be delays!”

Saffy looked put out. “Well, alright then, Smarty Pants. You should just go work with Siri as Apple’s built-in traffic monitor!” 

But to no one’s surprise, a week later, she was on Candy Crush. By the second game, she was hooked like a Jingle Jangle addict on Riverdale.

At meetings, she’d look like she was busy taking notes on her phone, nodding seriously at key moments, but she wasn’t really. Which is how, when her boss suddenly asked her a question, she smoothly said, “Yes, of course”, and later discovered that she’d agreed to take on an intensive three month HR audit of the company with no budget allocated to the job.

“Oh my God!” she moaned. “How did this happen?”

“Your fault, what!” said Sharyn with all the sympathy of a harassed working mother of three. “You dun pray attention, mah! Who ask you?”

“One of the orange time bombs was about to explode, and I just needed to get to the next level! I’m so close to hitting a hundred!”

Sharyn raised her eyebrows. “Hah? You play so much and you only on Level 100?”

“Well excuse me if I’m not buying packages like Amanda’s mother is!”

Sharyn looked impressed. “Issit? She oh-so pray, meh?”

“She’s addicted!” Saffy confided, momentarily distracted from her Candy Crush addiction by her addiction to gossip. “But she’s not very good, which is why she’s always buying extra gold bars and candy bombs! Apparently,” here, Saffy leaned in to whisper, “Apparently, she was spending $1000 a week, until Jason’s dad found out and he blocked her credit card!”

“Wah liau,” Sharyn sighed. “These rich people, hor?”

“Tell it!” Saffy said. “But Amanda says that didn’t work because she then used her husband’s credit card details! And when he found out about that, she turned around and threatened to renovate all the bathrooms in the house with all the extra spare time she would have if she stopped playing Candy Crush! He caved.”

“Dey got so many bathroom, meh?” Sharyn asked.

“They have seven,” Saffy told her. 

“Wah liau!” Sharyn sighed again. “But dey got only two people in the house, what for need seven bathroom?”

“Have you seen that house, Shazz? It’s the size of Takashimaya! You practically need a Segway to get from one end of the bedroom to the other!” 

“And still got time to play Candy Crush, hor?”

“Some people are too free, Shazz,” Saffy agreed, even as she reached for her phone. She swiped the screen and waited patiently for Level 105 to load.