Gift Rap

When I was a child, I would pass by one of those red slot machines whose Perspex cover held little plastic balls filled with cheap toys, and beg my parents to let me have some coins.

“The last one you got was a plastic toy car. The wheels didn’t work!” Mother would tell me.

“Please?” I moaned. “I want one!”

“He’s so whiny!” she later told my father. “He clearly gets it from your side of the family!”

And as I grew up, my avariciousness for cheap rubbish continued. I especially loved entering lucky draws at shopping centres. Even the third prize of $5 vouchers kept me thrilled for days.

And when credit cards started offering freebies for every dollar I put on the Visa, I was ecstatic. And impatient. I was never able to wait long enough to accumulate enough to buy anything worthwhile. Like, say, a spa treatment. As soon as I had enough points to get a free drink at Swensen’s, I cashed it in.

All of which explains why I ended up with drawers filled with random stuff. Hello Kitty Ezylink card holders. Batman coffee cups. Sachets of soap and moisturisers picked up from those persistent shop assistants at the Wisma tunnel. I had an entire drawer of tissue paper packets.

Another drawer was filled to the brim with stuff that family and friends had given me for Christmas and birthdays. Or people might come to dinner and bring a gift. I’d always be genuinely happy receiving these things, even if I had absolutely no use for any of it. Like salad spoons in the shape of hands. Or a book on bonsai plants. “Oh, I love this!” I remember saying and genuinely meaning every word. “I’ve always wanted to grow a stunted tree!”

Of course, I never used any of it, and yet, if you had suggested that I throw it all out because it was basically junk, I would have stared at you with mild amusement and incomprehension. “But these are presents”, I would say. “You can’t throw presents away!”

Every time I moved house, everything went into a box which I duly marked ‘Miscellaneous’, and they would be unpacked at the new home, and immediately forgotten about. 

Then, one day, Marie Kondo came into my life. I opened one drawer after the other, took one look at the magpie collection – a lifetime of patient collecting and filling out entry forms – and realized that none of it sparked any joy in me. So, it all went into the bin or was handed out to various kids in the neighbourhood.

And now I look back at all those years I spent filling drawer, and it feels like it had happened to someone else. It’s an odd sense of disassociation. But it wasn’t as odd as last weekend’s dinner party in our flat.

Things were proceeding as they generally do – in other words, most people were tipsy by the second cocktail Saffy had mixed up – when Amanda’s friend Jennifer arrived.

She held out a little paper bag at the door. “Here’s a little something!” she announced. “I made it myself!”

“Oh, how lovely!” I said automatically since old habits die hard. Peeking in, I drew out two white cubes, each the size of a clenched fist that was covered in what looked like white felt. “What are they?” I asked eventually as I turned the cubes over in my hand.

Jennifer tossed her long blue-tinted hair. “They’re my latest thing! I collect all the fur from my dogs and I mould them into these decorative cubes!”

Saffy, who was just passing by behind me, stopped dead in her tracks and peered around my shoulder. “Wait, what?” she said, pressing her bosom against my back. 

“Aren’t they lovely?” Jennifer continued. “I think they’re perfect presents for people who don’t have dogs. Plus they’re so environmentally friendly!”

“That’s dog hair?” Saffy asked.

“It takes ages to collect enough to pack into a cube.”

“Like actual dog hair?”

“I was thinking I could maybe make smaller ones like those dice cubes to dangle off the car’s rear-view mirror!”

“Made of dog hair?”

For days, it’s all we’ve been able to talk about. 

“Who gives dog hair as a present?” Amanda wondered.

“Well, to be fair, she didn’t just give a bag of it,” Saffy said in a rare display of balanced criticism. “It can’t have been easy moulding it into a cube!”

“I still don’t know how it’s all held together though,” Amanda said, turning a hair cube in her hand.

Sharyn told Saffy she was convinced dried dog saliva was involved. “How can you give such a present?” she complained. “So kiam siap!” 

Saffy shook her head in amazement. “Dried dog saliva!” she repeated.

House Visit

Amanda has always said that of all the free websites out there, the only one she would voluntarily pay money for is YouTube. 

“It really is the best!” she marveled the other day as she watched a decades old interview with the then crown prince of Thailand after she read about it in the newspaper. “I mean, back in the old days, I don’t know how I would ever have gotten my hands on this video.”

“Some dusty library, probably,” Saffy said as she peered over Amanda’s shoulder. “Goodness, his English accent is so posh!”

“Expensive boarding schools,” Amanda said with the kind of knowledgeable authority you can only get from months of ruthlessly following every single aspect of the king’s coronation.

“The new queen is pretty. I wouldn’t mind being a queen one day,” Saffy said as she allowed her imagination free rein to gallop. “Her Royal Majesty, the Serene Queen Saffy of Monaco. That’s got a ring to it, don’t you think?”

“They don’t have kings and queens in Monaco,” Amanda murmured, demonstrating, not for the first time, her encyclopaedic grasp on European royal heads of state.

Saffy paused. “Oh, well, in that case, I should marry the king of Bhutan, or something. He’s so hot!”

The idea of her royal Bhutanese nuptials occupied Saffy’s fevered fantasies for days, until Sharyn told her that Bhutanese winters are dire. 

“I ever saw a documentary on YouTube,” she said. “Wah, dey all, ah, look so damn cold! Minus sick degree in January! My husband set our air con to 22 degree, I or-redi cannot tahan!”

“Minus six?” Saffy said, her eyes wide. “No way!”

“Confirm, cannot,” Sharyn said. “You want to marry, must marry someone who live somewhere warm. Like Bel Air!”

Which is how Saffy found herself trawling through YouTube videos of Bel Air, a suburb that, until the death of her dream of being Bhutanese royalty, she’d given absolutely no thought to at all. 

One day, shortly after lunch, she was randomly clicking through the videos that YouTube’s algorithms had generated, and found herself watching a real estate video of a house that had just come onto the Bel Air market.

She immediately forwarded the link to Shayrn who sits next to her. “Ohmygod, Shaz, you’ve got to watch this. This 22,000 sqft Bel Air house costs $88 million! Eww-ess dollars! And it’s on the market!” she said in tones that suggested this was an absolute steal. 

Sharyn immediately clicked on the link. “Siow, ah! Must be for Chinese market, if asking price is eighty-eight! Ang-moh where got so much money?”

“It’s got nine bedrooms, seven guest-rooms, 15 baths, and something like eight bars!”

“Wah, got hair salon and spa room!”

“Did you see the car elevator?”

“Aiyah, Singapore oh-so got what!”

“The one on Scotts Road? That can fit only one car, I think. This one fits six!”

For days, it was all the girls were able to talk about. What boggles the mind, Amanda observed recently, is that you don’t just buy an $88 million house and call it a day. “You need a full time staff of, like, 20! You can’t have one part time maid cleaning a 22,000 sqft house! It’ll take you two days just to mop the floor!”

“I don’t even know what 22,000 sqft means!” Saffy pointed out as she scrolled through YouTube. “Ooh, what’s this?”

She clicked on it and gasped. As if the Bel Air mansion wasn’t sufficiently OTT, she’d just stumbled on a 38,000 sqft, 12 bedroom house. 

“How much is it?” Amanda called out from the kitchen.

“$188 million!” Saffy shouted back.

There was a clatter in the sink. Amanda’s head popped out. “Seriously?”

“It’s available for rent, and it comes with its own helicopter!” Saffy reported. 

Amanda sidled up behind Saffy’s chair. “Who are these people?” she demanded.

“And why are we not married to them?” Saffy added.

It turns out the house also has a $300,000 quartz sink in the guest bathroom, 350 built-in speakers, a $250,000 onyx garden wall, and a $2m staircase. But what’s captured everyone’s attention are the fire extinguishers that are literally made of bottles of Dom Perignon. 

“Wait, you’re extinguishing fires with actual champagne?” Amanda asked.

By this stage, Saffy was so numb by the excesses of the house, she just shrugged. “You know what’s depressing is that I shop at Sheng Siong. And the owner of this house probably doesn’t even know what the inside of a supermarket looks like! I’m going to die poor,” Saffy decided.

Sharyn says the owner probably isn’t a Passion Card holder either, an observation that, days later, still has us all in stitches. 

Fortune Selling

I grew up in a traditional family in the sense that we always greeted our elders with a “Hello, Auntie Wai” or “Hello, Uncle Shiong”. When we sat down for meals, we would chorus in Cantonese, “Papa, eat! Mama, eat!” 

Once when he was eight, my brother Jack was diagnosed with anemia. For a few months after, he was fed with a daily broth made of ginger and boiled liver which our Amah swore would boost his iron count, and nobody, not even my mother, ever dared disagreed with anything that came out of that woman’s mouth. 

Years later, Jack said that broth with its floating grey liver bits reminded him of the final scene in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ when everyone disintegrated after Thanos’s finger snap. It was also one of the reasons why he turned vegetarian. “So incredibly gross.”

Anyway, my point is, we were that kind of family. We may have looked modern, we may have been dressed in the latest fashions, and we may have spoken like Michelle Yeoh, but we might as well have been characters in ‘Growing Up’. 

I especially remember the yearly visits of Master Fu to our house. A short man with thick glasses and bald head, he was a fengshui expert who, every December, would arrive, slightly disheveled from his long drive from Kuala Lumpur. After being plied with hot tea, cold towels and cakes and polite conversation, he would then wander around the house with his bak-kwa, stopping every so often to scribble into his note pad.

He would murmur under his breath. Behind him trailed my anxious parents, straining to make sense of what he was saying. After that, he’d sit down again and chat some more, asking whether there’d been any new staff or children since his last visit. And if there were, he’d want to see them and interrogate them about their family history and birthdates, and he’d peer at their faces, and make more notes.

And then Master Fu would ask if there’d been any major events in the house over the last year. Had anyone close to us died? If so, how did they die? Had there been an increased number of quarrels? How was Father’s business? Had we lost any friends or made any new enemies?

Eventually, he would sit back with a sigh and announce all the things that needed to be done to the house. Usually, this involved nothing more than putting a mirror here, moving a pot there, planting a new tree outside a window…that kind of small cosmetic thing. Once he wrote out an incantation on a piece of white cloth and pinned it to my bathroom entrance. Another time, he suggested the kitchen door be moved two inches to the left, and the front door removed and a new one be placed facing a few degrees inwards.

And that would be that. Another cup of tea. A fat red packet would be discretely handed over, and that would be the last we saw of Master Fu till the next year.

“God, I wish my fengshui master was that easy!” my cousin Lin said recently. After a few months of bad dreams involving her running away from Freddy Krueger who kept screaming “Mummy!” while loping after her, falling ill with dengue, losing her diamond bracelet when she was snorkeling in the Maldives, and the discovery that her husband was having an affair with his secretary, she decided that she needed professional help.

With great diligence, she tracked down Master Fu’s son who said he was really busy and couldn’t make a house-call, but to WhatsApp him her house plans. Within 20 minutes, he FaceTimed her and told her she needed to move house. 

“He said in all his years of practice, he’s never seen a house this bad!” Lin reported morosely. “Normally he said most houses can be fixed, but this one is unsalvageable. If I stay, more disasters will happen to me.”

“Not even a pot plant?” I asked.

“Not even if we demolished the house!” Lin sighed. “Everything about the site conflicts with me!”

Amanda was horrified when I told her. “But Lin lives in Nassim Hill! Where would she go?” As far as she’s concerned, being told to leave a Nassim address is like having losing your PPS status, a catastrophe not to be wished on your worst enemy.

Saffy said she needed to get the number of Master Fu, Jr., to which Sharyn said that was a terrible idea. “Skali he say if you ever move out of the flat from Jason and Amanda and you have bad luck forever, den how?”

Amanda says she wishes she’d taken a picture of Saffy’s face.