It’s taken me a long time to realize this, but it’s only clear to me now that the idea of children means different things to different people.
For me, children have always been kind of like a flowering shrub: Pretty to look at, but I don’t spend too much time lingering. It’s just another flowering shrub. Move on. Plenty of those around.
I just don’t get it when people hover over the pram of a complete stranger’s baby and coo, making mushy gushy noises like someone with a very bad cold.
I tried doing that once to a friend who came into the office with her new baby. Dutifully, I bent over the pram and went, “Awww, she’s so cute!”, to which the mother icily said, “It’s a boy!”
“How was I to know it was a boy?” I later complained to Sharyn who rolled her eyes.
“Aiyoh! How you not know? Nine months she tell us in the office is a boy and when she had her going away party, we all sign a card that said ‘Good luck, Son-shine!’ and you still doh-no! How like that?” she pleaded, her worried eyes huge behind her Coke-bottle thick spectacles.
But my bigger point is that as I bent over the child and cooed, I felt nothing except a mild case of disinterest. Like I said, another flowering shrub.
And then there are people like Amanda who go into hormonal spasms at the merest hint of a baby within 20 metres. She’ll stop and gaze at the child with such penetrating wistfulness that, eventually, the parent will get all uncomfortable and push the pram off hurriedly in the other direction.
My sister says that she could never bring a child into a world as whacked out as this one is. “This is not a safe world,” she said the other day when I told her I was going to write about children for my next column. “You’d have to be criminally negligent to have children in a world that thinks it’s ok to blow up cars and eat whales.”
“So you don’t want kids. Interesting,” I said, as I scribbled into my notebook.
“No, I didn’t say I didn’t want kids,” Michelle said. “I want kids so badly, I sometimes think I could just die from the sheer unhappiness of it all. But I think I’d be so worried for its future, I’d be one of those anal-retentive mothers who has a nervous breakdown when her child fails her Chinese exam!”
“Interesting!” I repeated, scribbling harder.
My mother on the other hand firmly believes that her children were put on this earth to look after her and our father when they get old. “Why else would you have children?” she would tell her table of mahjong-kakis who, as one, would nod solemnly.
“Do you think,” she once asked in a voice that could penetrate steel, “that I endured three years of morning sickness, got all out of shape, and had three epidurals on top of a total of 28 hours of eye-popping labour pain just for fun?”
I remember my father leaning over the dining table and whispering to me, “Do not answer that question! Don’t even look her in the eye!”
Meanwhile, Saffy, never one for toning down her drama-meter, once had to sit down and blow into a paper bag when she made the mistake of walking through the Forum. “All these baby clothes!” she wailed as she puffed hysterically.
By the time she pulled herself together, an interested crowd of Sunday shoppers had gathered around her.
“Ay, what’s wrong, hah?” someone asked.
“Doh-no, I think she lost her baby!”
“Aiyoh, really ah? Where’s my Sharon, ah? Girl? Where are you!”
Later, as she recovered her composure at Starbucks, Saffy said that being in such proximity to all those baby clothes made her realize that her biological clock was ticking very loudly.
“It’s deafening! Can you hear it?” she asked Amanda who actually stopped sipping her latte and listened.
“I think I’m hearing my own clock,” Amanda concluded sadly. She looked down at her bag of children’s outfits that she’d bought while Saffy was having her breakdown in front of Mommy’s Lil’ Sweetheart. “Did I really just buy all these kids’ clothes? I don’t have kids! Is that sad? I don’t even have a boyfriend! What’s wrong with me?”
“I don’t think that’s sad at all,” Saffy said stoutly. “What’s sad is that I actually think just being inside Forum has made me lactate! My bra feels wet! Here, feel this! No seriously, Jason, feel it! Hey, where are you going?”
Friday, May 28, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Mother Dearest
My sister has never had an easy relationship with our mother. Father likes to say that Michelle was born literally screaming at Mother. “And she’s not stopped screaming since,” he said recently with the doting, indulgent smile of a father who’s never fallen out of love with that wrinkled bundle of squawking, pooping mess he first cradled in his arms.
When she was 15, Michelle got into a great row with Mother over a pair of diamond ear-rings.
“Why can’t I wear them to Dionne’s birthday party?” she yelled.
“Because unless you’re the Queen of England, you do not wear Van Cleef and Arpel ten-carat flawless diamonds to a fifteen-year old’s birthday party!” Mother said in that maddeningly serene way of her’s.
Upstairs in our bedroom, my brother Jack turned to me and said seriously, “You know, I stopped understanding that sentence after ‘England’!”
“You’re so mean!” Michelle’s scream reverberated through the house. “I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!”
“Be my guest,” Mother said calmly. “I’m sure these diamonds would look much better on your brothers’ wives anyway!”
Michelle, who’s always had the instincts of a barracuda, promptly shut up. She dropped the subject and showed up at Dionne’s birthday party in a pretty pink Target frock paired with cheap costume jewellery. But for years, she always brought up the Diamond Incident as an example of Mother’s uncaring feelings for her.
“Oh my God, is she still going on about those stupid Rip Van Winkle diamonds?” Jack cried the other day all the way from Rio where’s he hiding from another of Mother’s mad match-making schemes.
“Van Cleef and Arpel,” I said automatically. “And I’ve always wondered if Mother still has them or if she’s given them to the Mother Teresa’s nuns like she was always threatening to do.”
“It would just be so typical of her if she has,” Michelle said when I spoke to her. “I always believed she would have been much happier if she’d had three sons!”
And there it was. The unspoken fear that haunts us all at some stage of our relationship with our parents – that suspicion that we were, in fact, not wanted. For how else did you explain the careless words, the unthinking glances of disapproval and quick silences between half meant words?
More than Jack or I ever did, Michelle has struggled the most in her ongoing love-hate relationship with Mother. If it wasn’t Mother’s critique about Michelle’s hair (“Darling, do you really think purple is an appropriate colour for hair?”), it was about her sense of dress (“Darling, why are you always wearing black?”); make-up (“Darling, less is more!”); boyfriends (“Those are a lot of tattoos, dear!”); and grades (“How do you fail in Chinese? It’s your mother tongue!”).
Of course, looking back on it now, you can see so clearly where Mother was coming from but I suppose when you’re dealing with a rebellious 18, you just can’t win as a parent. You just learn to tread a little more carefully which, in turn, is interpreted as uncaring. But there’s very little you can do about the accumulating pile of little wounds which never really heal.
I remember Mother once wondering which of her three children she’d come to stay with when she got old.
“Why would you want to stay with us?” Michelle immediately asked.
“Well, you can’t expect me to stay in an old folks home!”
“What are we, life insurance policies?” Michelle murmured to me later.
“Yes, if you want her to leave you those diamonds,” I said, wise beyond my nineteen years.
Of course, one of the things about growing up is that you slowly, and belatedly, come to realise that things are never quite as black and white as they once were when you were a child shouting for your mother’s attention; that the wall we build up to keep from getting hurt might also be what’s keeping us from being loved.
“Was I a handful when I was a kid?” Michelle suddenly asked the other day on Skype.
“Define ‘handful’.”
There was a hesitation. Then: “Was I really mean to Mother?” A pause. “I think I was. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I behaved as a child.”
And just like that, a piece of brick in that high wall came loose. It couldn’t have been an easy admission to make. After a lifetime of fighting, what would Michelle’s busy heart now do with itself? Which is not to say that she’s ready to let go of a lifetime of hurt, tears and anger. There’s still the issue of the diamonds.
But it’s a good start.
When she was 15, Michelle got into a great row with Mother over a pair of diamond ear-rings.
“Why can’t I wear them to Dionne’s birthday party?” she yelled.
“Because unless you’re the Queen of England, you do not wear Van Cleef and Arpel ten-carat flawless diamonds to a fifteen-year old’s birthday party!” Mother said in that maddeningly serene way of her’s.
Upstairs in our bedroom, my brother Jack turned to me and said seriously, “You know, I stopped understanding that sentence after ‘England’!”
“You’re so mean!” Michelle’s scream reverberated through the house. “I’m moving out as soon as I’m 18!”
“Be my guest,” Mother said calmly. “I’m sure these diamonds would look much better on your brothers’ wives anyway!”
Michelle, who’s always had the instincts of a barracuda, promptly shut up. She dropped the subject and showed up at Dionne’s birthday party in a pretty pink Target frock paired with cheap costume jewellery. But for years, she always brought up the Diamond Incident as an example of Mother’s uncaring feelings for her.
“Oh my God, is she still going on about those stupid Rip Van Winkle diamonds?” Jack cried the other day all the way from Rio where’s he hiding from another of Mother’s mad match-making schemes.
“Van Cleef and Arpel,” I said automatically. “And I’ve always wondered if Mother still has them or if she’s given them to the Mother Teresa’s nuns like she was always threatening to do.”
“It would just be so typical of her if she has,” Michelle said when I spoke to her. “I always believed she would have been much happier if she’d had three sons!”
And there it was. The unspoken fear that haunts us all at some stage of our relationship with our parents – that suspicion that we were, in fact, not wanted. For how else did you explain the careless words, the unthinking glances of disapproval and quick silences between half meant words?
More than Jack or I ever did, Michelle has struggled the most in her ongoing love-hate relationship with Mother. If it wasn’t Mother’s critique about Michelle’s hair (“Darling, do you really think purple is an appropriate colour for hair?”), it was about her sense of dress (“Darling, why are you always wearing black?”); make-up (“Darling, less is more!”); boyfriends (“Those are a lot of tattoos, dear!”); and grades (“How do you fail in Chinese? It’s your mother tongue!”).
Of course, looking back on it now, you can see so clearly where Mother was coming from but I suppose when you’re dealing with a rebellious 18, you just can’t win as a parent. You just learn to tread a little more carefully which, in turn, is interpreted as uncaring. But there’s very little you can do about the accumulating pile of little wounds which never really heal.
I remember Mother once wondering which of her three children she’d come to stay with when she got old.
“Why would you want to stay with us?” Michelle immediately asked.
“Well, you can’t expect me to stay in an old folks home!”
“What are we, life insurance policies?” Michelle murmured to me later.
“Yes, if you want her to leave you those diamonds,” I said, wise beyond my nineteen years.
Of course, one of the things about growing up is that you slowly, and belatedly, come to realise that things are never quite as black and white as they once were when you were a child shouting for your mother’s attention; that the wall we build up to keep from getting hurt might also be what’s keeping us from being loved.
“Was I a handful when I was a kid?” Michelle suddenly asked the other day on Skype.
“Define ‘handful’.”
There was a hesitation. Then: “Was I really mean to Mother?” A pause. “I think I was. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I behaved as a child.”
And just like that, a piece of brick in that high wall came loose. It couldn’t have been an easy admission to make. After a lifetime of fighting, what would Michelle’s busy heart now do with itself? Which is not to say that she’s ready to let go of a lifetime of hurt, tears and anger. There’s still the issue of the diamonds.
But it’s a good start.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Happily Never After
One of the rituals of growing up is the bedtime fairy tale. Cinderella, Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Princess and the Pea, Hansel and Gretel…All miniature stories where the hero, after battling a bunch of evil stepmothers, giants and nasty witches, triumphs and heads off into the sunset.
My sister Michelle especially loved the fairy tales where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. “One day,” she told me very seriously when she was eight, “one day, I’m going to marry Prince Charming! And then he’s going to lock Mummy up in a dark prison!”
To which our mother, who’s always had the sensitive hearing of a bat, shouted from the kitchen, “Not if I get to him first!” Not surprisingly, Michelle would grow up blaming Mother for all her social inadequacies. “If I die a lonely spinster, it will be all her fault!”
But the one thing fairy tales never really tell you is just what exactly happens after the “happily ever after” bit. Did Snow White get bored of her sex life with the Prince and have an affair with one of the dwarves? (This would be the cue for my mother to tell you about the live sex floor show she once saw in Amsterdam featuring a transvestite Snow White and seven real life dwarves.) Did Sleeping Beauty turn out to be a nagging shrew and divorce her good for nothing Prince?
For some reason, all these questions raced around my head as I listened to our friend Lynette sob on our couch. Her husband Tim, it seemed, was having an affair with his secretary.
What made the revelation all the more shocking was we’d always thought Lynette and Tim were the golden couple. They were the ones we all aspired to be one day. They were high-school sweethearts. Married when they were 24. Three children by the time they were 28. He, a devastatingly handsome and successful lawyer. She, a gorgeous high flying banker.
“I want to have children with that man,” Saffy drunkenly told everyone at her table at Tim’s wedding. “Heck, pour me another gin and tonic, and I’d have children with that woman, too!”
“They’re going to have such beautiful children,” Amanda predicted without a single note of jealousy in her voice.
Which is why news of Tim’s affair struck not just Lynette, but it wounded my flatmates. For here was absolute proof that landing the man of your dreams was no guarantee that the happily ever after glow was going to last forever.
For days, it was all the girls could talk about. What Saffy couldn’t understand was why Tim would cheat in the first place.
“Doesn’t he know how horrible the dating scene is?” she asked. “What are the odds of finding someone who likes you back?”
“Six trillion to one!” said Amanda, who’s actually done the maths.
“It’s the jackpot!” Saffy sang like some gospel choir. “And he wants to give all that up? For what?”
“It just goes to show that you never can tell,” Amanda said.
“Men are stupid!” Saffy decided.
Of course, what worried the girls more was the fact that if two such perfectly matched people as Lynette and Tim couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for singletons like them? And more importantly, what was the point of all the dates they’d been subjecting themselves to, if the end result was an unhappy marriage?
“I’d be better off speaking French!” Saffy declared.
“Learning French, you mean,” Amanda said. She was rewarded with a Look.
“My point,” Saffy said with stiff dignity, “is that we might as well all just stop dating. It’s pointless. I don’t want to torture myself every Friday night, primping, waxing, exfoliating, getting dressed and going on a date only to have it all end up in a divorce court!”
“Oh, they’re not getting divorced,” I piped up. “They’re getting marriage counseling. Tim told me at lunch.”
Both heads swiveled around in my direction. “You’re having lunch with that cheating prick?” Saffy asked, her bosom heaving.
“Hey, there are two sides to this, you know,” I said stoutly.
“That’s such a cop-out! You don’t go have an affair just because you have marriage problems!” Amanda said.
“That’s so typical of you men, always sticking together even when you’re clearly in the wrong,” Saffy sniffed.
The latest is that Lynette is making Tim get a blood test to check for any nasty sexually transmitted diseases, but Amanda says he should also be taking an IQ test. Meanwhile, Saffy has signed up for French lessons. “Je suis not taking any chances,” she told the bewildered woman at Alliance Francaise.
My sister Michelle especially loved the fairy tales where the princess marries the prince and lives happily ever after. “One day,” she told me very seriously when she was eight, “one day, I’m going to marry Prince Charming! And then he’s going to lock Mummy up in a dark prison!”
To which our mother, who’s always had the sensitive hearing of a bat, shouted from the kitchen, “Not if I get to him first!” Not surprisingly, Michelle would grow up blaming Mother for all her social inadequacies. “If I die a lonely spinster, it will be all her fault!”
But the one thing fairy tales never really tell you is just what exactly happens after the “happily ever after” bit. Did Snow White get bored of her sex life with the Prince and have an affair with one of the dwarves? (This would be the cue for my mother to tell you about the live sex floor show she once saw in Amsterdam featuring a transvestite Snow White and seven real life dwarves.) Did Sleeping Beauty turn out to be a nagging shrew and divorce her good for nothing Prince?
For some reason, all these questions raced around my head as I listened to our friend Lynette sob on our couch. Her husband Tim, it seemed, was having an affair with his secretary.
What made the revelation all the more shocking was we’d always thought Lynette and Tim were the golden couple. They were the ones we all aspired to be one day. They were high-school sweethearts. Married when they were 24. Three children by the time they were 28. He, a devastatingly handsome and successful lawyer. She, a gorgeous high flying banker.
“I want to have children with that man,” Saffy drunkenly told everyone at her table at Tim’s wedding. “Heck, pour me another gin and tonic, and I’d have children with that woman, too!”
“They’re going to have such beautiful children,” Amanda predicted without a single note of jealousy in her voice.
Which is why news of Tim’s affair struck not just Lynette, but it wounded my flatmates. For here was absolute proof that landing the man of your dreams was no guarantee that the happily ever after glow was going to last forever.
For days, it was all the girls could talk about. What Saffy couldn’t understand was why Tim would cheat in the first place.
“Doesn’t he know how horrible the dating scene is?” she asked. “What are the odds of finding someone who likes you back?”
“Six trillion to one!” said Amanda, who’s actually done the maths.
“It’s the jackpot!” Saffy sang like some gospel choir. “And he wants to give all that up? For what?”
“It just goes to show that you never can tell,” Amanda said.
“Men are stupid!” Saffy decided.
Of course, what worried the girls more was the fact that if two such perfectly matched people as Lynette and Tim couldn’t make it work, what hope was there for singletons like them? And more importantly, what was the point of all the dates they’d been subjecting themselves to, if the end result was an unhappy marriage?
“I’d be better off speaking French!” Saffy declared.
“Learning French, you mean,” Amanda said. She was rewarded with a Look.
“My point,” Saffy said with stiff dignity, “is that we might as well all just stop dating. It’s pointless. I don’t want to torture myself every Friday night, primping, waxing, exfoliating, getting dressed and going on a date only to have it all end up in a divorce court!”
“Oh, they’re not getting divorced,” I piped up. “They’re getting marriage counseling. Tim told me at lunch.”
Both heads swiveled around in my direction. “You’re having lunch with that cheating prick?” Saffy asked, her bosom heaving.
“Hey, there are two sides to this, you know,” I said stoutly.
“That’s such a cop-out! You don’t go have an affair just because you have marriage problems!” Amanda said.
“That’s so typical of you men, always sticking together even when you’re clearly in the wrong,” Saffy sniffed.
The latest is that Lynette is making Tim get a blood test to check for any nasty sexually transmitted diseases, but Amanda says he should also be taking an IQ test. Meanwhile, Saffy has signed up for French lessons. “Je suis not taking any chances,” she told the bewildered woman at Alliance Francaise.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Vege Might
A few months ago at dinner, Saffy looked up from her bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and announced that she was going to become a vegetarian.
Her statement was greeted with the kind of scepticism that must have greeted Jesus when he said he was going out for a stroll on the sea.
“Why?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” Amanda predicted.
“I love how supportive you are!” Saffy said stiffly.
“No, really, why?” I asked.
Saffy’s bosom shifted slowly as she thought. “Well, I read somewhere that eating beef is really bad for the environment. Apparently they fart a lot and all that gas is choking us to death!”
Amanda later said that if Saffy had been involved with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, that movie would have sunk under the weight of her sloppy research.
“Not eating beef isn’t going to save the planet!” she sniffed with all the disdain that a Harvard law degree can generate. To which Saffy replied that if Amanda had to kill a cow to get her hamburger, she’d be a vegetarian too.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Amanda exclaimed. “What about vegetables?”
Saffy blinked. “What about them?”
“Well, you’re killing a carrot when you uproot it! Does that mean you can’t eat vegetables too?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Vegetables don’t have feelings!”
Amanda snorted. “Just because they don’t moo or cluck or bleat doesn’t mean vegetables don’t feel things. It’s probably more traumatic to rip an onion from the ground than it is to put a bullet between a cow’s eyes!”
As I later said to Karl, if that horrific image didn’t make me want to become a vegetarian myself, I didn’t know what would.
As it was, Saffy said she didn’t care what anyone thought. She was going to give vegetarianism a go. And so, the next night, she struggled home from Cold Storage with bags of broccoli, spinach, tofu and tins of beans.
“Beans?” Amanda whispered to me. “She’ll be farting the whole night!”
I looked at all the food spread out over the kitchen counter. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Saf?” I asked. “Going cold turkey, pardon the expression, may not be the wisest thing to do, you know.”
“I’m doing this for the cows,” Saffy said.
“But it doesn’t make sense! Whether you eat them or not, they’re still going to be around and farting into the atmosphere.”
“Only if we keep breeding them for food! If we stop eating them, then they’ll all die off naturally and we’ll have a cow-free world!”
“So, you’d rather they went extinct?”
Saffy shrugged. “Better them than me!”
For days, her strange but oddly compelling logic haunted me and for a brief moment, I too flirted with the idea of making a vegan-burger a lifestyle choice. But by then, Saffy had turned into a raving lunatic.
Her body, so used to its daily infusion of char-siew, beef rendang, chicken tikka and sop kambing, and now so suddenly deprived, began turning on her. She trembled and became grumpier by the day and her eyes took on a glazed sheen whenever the perfume of fried chicken wings from our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy’s kitchen wafted in through our window. She even began looking at the food bowl of Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, in a way that made him so nervous that he would gulp down his dinner of minced beef and rice with both eyes cocked in her direction.
“You’re giving that dog indigestion!” Amanda said one day.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Saffy murmured. “Pooch keeps transforming into a hot dog!”
Which got us all so concerned that I took Pooch with me everywhere, even into the toilet. “I’m not letting him out of my sight!” I reported to Karl.
And of course, Amanda and I began eating our meals in hawker centres. We didn’t know what would happen if we ever unwrapped a packet of chicken rice in front of Saffy.
The breaking point occurred when Saffy was aimlessly flipping TV channels and suddenly, Nigella Lawson came on. “Now, I love spring!” Nigella chirruped in her provocatively posh English accent. “And for me, nothing says spring more than a juicy roast leg of lamb!”
Hypnotised, Saffy watched Nigella stuff the leg with garlic and herbs and by the time it emerged from the oven, brown and sizzling, she was dialing McDonalds.
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” Amanda said smugly. But I’m not taking any chances.
My bedroom door is still locked while Pooch is tucked in with me in bed.
Her statement was greeted with the kind of scepticism that must have greeted Jesus when he said he was going out for a stroll on the sea.
“Why?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t last a week,” Amanda predicted.
“I love how supportive you are!” Saffy said stiffly.
“No, really, why?” I asked.
Saffy’s bosom shifted slowly as she thought. “Well, I read somewhere that eating beef is really bad for the environment. Apparently they fart a lot and all that gas is choking us to death!”
Amanda later said that if Saffy had been involved with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, that movie would have sunk under the weight of her sloppy research.
“Not eating beef isn’t going to save the planet!” she sniffed with all the disdain that a Harvard law degree can generate. To which Saffy replied that if Amanda had to kill a cow to get her hamburger, she’d be a vegetarian too.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!” Amanda exclaimed. “What about vegetables?”
Saffy blinked. “What about them?”
“Well, you’re killing a carrot when you uproot it! Does that mean you can’t eat vegetables too?”
Saffy’s bosom inflated. “Vegetables don’t have feelings!”
Amanda snorted. “Just because they don’t moo or cluck or bleat doesn’t mean vegetables don’t feel things. It’s probably more traumatic to rip an onion from the ground than it is to put a bullet between a cow’s eyes!”
As I later said to Karl, if that horrific image didn’t make me want to become a vegetarian myself, I didn’t know what would.
As it was, Saffy said she didn’t care what anyone thought. She was going to give vegetarianism a go. And so, the next night, she struggled home from Cold Storage with bags of broccoli, spinach, tofu and tins of beans.
“Beans?” Amanda whispered to me. “She’ll be farting the whole night!”
I looked at all the food spread out over the kitchen counter. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, Saf?” I asked. “Going cold turkey, pardon the expression, may not be the wisest thing to do, you know.”
“I’m doing this for the cows,” Saffy said.
“But it doesn’t make sense! Whether you eat them or not, they’re still going to be around and farting into the atmosphere.”
“Only if we keep breeding them for food! If we stop eating them, then they’ll all die off naturally and we’ll have a cow-free world!”
“So, you’d rather they went extinct?”
Saffy shrugged. “Better them than me!”
For days, her strange but oddly compelling logic haunted me and for a brief moment, I too flirted with the idea of making a vegan-burger a lifestyle choice. But by then, Saffy had turned into a raving lunatic.
Her body, so used to its daily infusion of char-siew, beef rendang, chicken tikka and sop kambing, and now so suddenly deprived, began turning on her. She trembled and became grumpier by the day and her eyes took on a glazed sheen whenever the perfume of fried chicken wings from our neighbour Lydia Kumarasamy’s kitchen wafted in through our window. She even began looking at the food bowl of Pooch, my beloved adopted mongrel dog, in a way that made him so nervous that he would gulp down his dinner of minced beef and rice with both eyes cocked in her direction.
“You’re giving that dog indigestion!” Amanda said one day.
“I think I’m hallucinating,” Saffy murmured. “Pooch keeps transforming into a hot dog!”
Which got us all so concerned that I took Pooch with me everywhere, even into the toilet. “I’m not letting him out of my sight!” I reported to Karl.
And of course, Amanda and I began eating our meals in hawker centres. We didn’t know what would happen if we ever unwrapped a packet of chicken rice in front of Saffy.
The breaking point occurred when Saffy was aimlessly flipping TV channels and suddenly, Nigella Lawson came on. “Now, I love spring!” Nigella chirruped in her provocatively posh English accent. “And for me, nothing says spring more than a juicy roast leg of lamb!”
Hypnotised, Saffy watched Nigella stuff the leg with garlic and herbs and by the time it emerged from the oven, brown and sizzling, she was dialing McDonalds.
“I told you it wouldn’t last,” Amanda said smugly. But I’m not taking any chances.
My bedroom door is still locked while Pooch is tucked in with me in bed.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Past Tense
My sister sent me a book for my birthday. It’s called “Letter to my 16 Year Old Self”. In it, a whole bunch of famous people like Yoko Ono, Will Young and Annie Lennox write a letter to, well, their 16 year old self telling them they should expect from their future and how they should deal with growing up. It’s easily one of the best books around: Incredibly moving in some bits, deeply funny in others, and always thought provoking.
In her birthday card, my sister wrote that she would tell her 16 year old self that “diets are stupid and stay away from Marie Chen, cause she’s going to steal your boyfriend, that self serving little cow”. And she wrote in her postscript that she would also tell her younger self to hug her brother Jason more because “he’s always going to be there for you”.
When Saffy read the card, she burst into tears.
“That’s such a lovely thing to…to…sniff…to say! I wish someone would say that about me!” she snuffled into a tissue.
Which, of course, got us all thinking. If we had a chance, what would each of us say to our 16 year old self? For days, we thought about it, and then one Sunday evening, we sat down at the dining table with pen and paper, and this is what we wrote:
Amanda’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dear Princess, you’re probably not going to believe this, but you know how you’ve got this dream of becoming a supermodel like Naomi Campbell? Well, you’re going to end up a lawyer. Sorry to break it to you like this, but the good news is, you’ll be earning a tonne of money and you’ll be wearing all those expensive runway clothes you read about in Vogue. Oh, and you should snap up shoes by Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. And as soon as you can afford it, I want you to buy shares in Apple. That company is going to get really huge! But don’t buy the first iPod or iPhone or iPad. Wait till the third generation. You’re also going to meet a guy who looks like a cockroach. DO NOT give him your number! Seriously. He’s bad news. It’s OK to be single. Really. Love you lots, A”
Jason’s letter to his 16 year old self:
“Dear Me, This will come as a bit of a shock, but you’re going to hate being a lawyer. A law firm looks nothing like what you see on TV. You’ll be drafting stupid documents that no one will ever read and making your bosses very rich. The people you will be working with will be fat and ugly, and they’ll also be screaming at you a lot. The money isn’t going to be worth the hassle. The good news is you’ll switch career mid-way and you’ll be a lot happier. Poorer, but happier. Your parents are wrong: you can actually be happy when you’re poor. But you need to sit down once in a while and have a chat with your mother. Not just because she might leave you a lot of money, but because, sometimes, she gets lonely (you, Michelle and Jack are all going to leave home…I know, what a shocker!). Stay strong. Me”
Saffy’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dearest Saff, I have so much to tell you! But first things first. Stop crying about your flat chest. Next year, around June, you will wake up and be shocked when you look down! Trust me. Next, you shouldn’t be so mean to that pimply kid who sits next to you in drama class. After high school, he’s going to go to Hollywood and be a star! His skin will clear up, he’ll go to the gym and he’s going to be super hot! So you need to be his best friend. I also wouldn’t bother too much with physics. You’re never going to be a scientist. And you’re also going to meet this incredibly gorgeous guy called James. He’s going to break your heart. (He’s going to cheat on you with Mary-Louise Tan, that stinker.) And it’s going to really hurt. You’ll think the world is going to come to an end. But it won’t. So, you should cry over him for about a week MAX and then just get over it. Oh, and James Cameron is going to make a movie about the Titanic. Put all your money and savings with the bookies and bet that it’s going to win 11 Oscars. XOXO. S”
In her birthday card, my sister wrote that she would tell her 16 year old self that “diets are stupid and stay away from Marie Chen, cause she’s going to steal your boyfriend, that self serving little cow”. And she wrote in her postscript that she would also tell her younger self to hug her brother Jason more because “he’s always going to be there for you”.
When Saffy read the card, she burst into tears.
“That’s such a lovely thing to…to…sniff…to say! I wish someone would say that about me!” she snuffled into a tissue.
Which, of course, got us all thinking. If we had a chance, what would each of us say to our 16 year old self? For days, we thought about it, and then one Sunday evening, we sat down at the dining table with pen and paper, and this is what we wrote:
Amanda’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dear Princess, you’re probably not going to believe this, but you know how you’ve got this dream of becoming a supermodel like Naomi Campbell? Well, you’re going to end up a lawyer. Sorry to break it to you like this, but the good news is, you’ll be earning a tonne of money and you’ll be wearing all those expensive runway clothes you read about in Vogue. Oh, and you should snap up shoes by Christian Louboutin, Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo. And as soon as you can afford it, I want you to buy shares in Apple. That company is going to get really huge! But don’t buy the first iPod or iPhone or iPad. Wait till the third generation. You’re also going to meet a guy who looks like a cockroach. DO NOT give him your number! Seriously. He’s bad news. It’s OK to be single. Really. Love you lots, A”
Jason’s letter to his 16 year old self:
“Dear Me, This will come as a bit of a shock, but you’re going to hate being a lawyer. A law firm looks nothing like what you see on TV. You’ll be drafting stupid documents that no one will ever read and making your bosses very rich. The people you will be working with will be fat and ugly, and they’ll also be screaming at you a lot. The money isn’t going to be worth the hassle. The good news is you’ll switch career mid-way and you’ll be a lot happier. Poorer, but happier. Your parents are wrong: you can actually be happy when you’re poor. But you need to sit down once in a while and have a chat with your mother. Not just because she might leave you a lot of money, but because, sometimes, she gets lonely (you, Michelle and Jack are all going to leave home…I know, what a shocker!). Stay strong. Me”
Saffy’s letter to her 16 year old self:
“Dearest Saff, I have so much to tell you! But first things first. Stop crying about your flat chest. Next year, around June, you will wake up and be shocked when you look down! Trust me. Next, you shouldn’t be so mean to that pimply kid who sits next to you in drama class. After high school, he’s going to go to Hollywood and be a star! His skin will clear up, he’ll go to the gym and he’s going to be super hot! So you need to be his best friend. I also wouldn’t bother too much with physics. You’re never going to be a scientist. And you’re also going to meet this incredibly gorgeous guy called James. He’s going to break your heart. (He’s going to cheat on you with Mary-Louise Tan, that stinker.) And it’s going to really hurt. You’ll think the world is going to come to an end. But it won’t. So, you should cry over him for about a week MAX and then just get over it. Oh, and James Cameron is going to make a movie about the Titanic. Put all your money and savings with the bookies and bet that it’s going to win 11 Oscars. XOXO. S”
Monday, April 26, 2010
Date Line
Flip open any women’s magazine these days, and every other page will have an article on how to dress to thrill, which shoes best accentuate your calves, how to take a day look into evening glam, what make-up to buy, and how to catch and keep a man.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the sub-text here. If you’re not looking as good as the models in the magazines, here’s how you do it. And once you’ve done it, you’ll be so busy dating, you won’t have time to sit around on Thursday nights watching the American Idol results show. The sub-sub text to that is that you won’t be a loser. Any more.
The corollary is that if you’re not dating, that means you’ll still be single come Chinese New Year. Which means more pitying looks from relatives than you know what to do with. And nobody wants that.
See how you get from shoes to pity?
All this came up the other day over lunch with my friend, Janet. Janet is a successful, thirty-something lawyer. She’s smart, she’s sassy. She’s a banker. Owns her own apartment. She’s also well-travelled, well-read and, in the immortal words of my best friend Karl after meeting her at a party, “well-stacked”.
And she’s single.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said, munching vigorously on her chicken salad. “I wear all the right clothes and make-up. And I look hot in a bikini! Any mother-in-law would be proud to have me marry her son, but for some reason, I’ve not been on a date since Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister. What’s wrong with the men in this town?”
I ventured that maybe her CV scared men off. “If you were a man, I’m sure you’d be onto your third marriage and fifth mistress by now.”
“You know,” Janet said, “I never thought of it that way. If I were a woman, I know I’d marry me!”
And Janet being Janet, she’s decided that she’s taking matters into her hands. Shortly after our lunch, she went back to her office, shut the door, went online and signed herself up with a dating profile.
A few days later, she Facebooked that she’d been on two dates already.
Saffy was deeply impressed. “Really? With an actual real man?” she asked in much the same tones Mrs Moses must have used when her husband came down from the mountain and reported that he’d met God. “Huh. I always thought you only ever met complete losers on these dating sites.”
“Oh, you do!” said Amanda, veteran of the dating scene. “They’re all liars! Remember that guy I once met online? Said he was a doctor and it turned out he was a vet?”
“You are such a job-ist!” Saffy accused. “He was perfectly lovely! Well, except for his bad breath.”
“And his cross-eyes!” Amanda said, warming up to her theme.
I said that Janet’s first date had been a cinematographer with National Geographic. “He’s into wild life!” I said.
“That’s no way to talk about Janet!” Saffy said and for the rest of the day, amused herself immensely with this witticism.
“And her second date was with a lawyer!” I went on. “It went really well, she said.”
“I give that relationship two months,” Amanda predicted. “Lawyers make terrible boyfriends. They look good on paper, but they’re never around. They’re either working late or stuck in some stupid long distance, late night conference call with New York!”
“But you’re a lawyer!” Saffy pointed out.
“Yes, but I’m a woman. And that means I can multi-task. I can mentally draft a brief while having dinner. A guy can’t.”
Janet says that so far her two dates have been working out really well. Mr National Geographic is rugged, outdoorsy and tanned, while Mr Lawyer is rich, successful and looks like the Chinese version of Jude Law. And the bonus is that neither of them lives at home. “Do you know how difficult it is to find a guy in this town who doesn’t live with his mother? And I’m dating two of them!” she said, looking very pleased with her good fortune.
Saffy says it’s so unfair that Janet is dating two guys. “Maybe I should be using her dating site as well? After all, at the rate this year is disappearing, it’ll be Chinese New Year again soon!”
Amanda says Saffy is better off placing a bet at the casino, but last I heard, Saffy was online busy creating a profile. I just got an SMS from her: “If anybody asks, I’m a model with Victoria’s Secret!”
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out the sub-text here. If you’re not looking as good as the models in the magazines, here’s how you do it. And once you’ve done it, you’ll be so busy dating, you won’t have time to sit around on Thursday nights watching the American Idol results show. The sub-sub text to that is that you won’t be a loser. Any more.
The corollary is that if you’re not dating, that means you’ll still be single come Chinese New Year. Which means more pitying looks from relatives than you know what to do with. And nobody wants that.
See how you get from shoes to pity?
All this came up the other day over lunch with my friend, Janet. Janet is a successful, thirty-something lawyer. She’s smart, she’s sassy. She’s a banker. Owns her own apartment. She’s also well-travelled, well-read and, in the immortal words of my best friend Karl after meeting her at a party, “well-stacked”.
And she’s single.
“It’s ridiculous,” she said, munching vigorously on her chicken salad. “I wear all the right clothes and make-up. And I look hot in a bikini! Any mother-in-law would be proud to have me marry her son, but for some reason, I’ve not been on a date since Lee Kuan Yew was prime minister. What’s wrong with the men in this town?”
I ventured that maybe her CV scared men off. “If you were a man, I’m sure you’d be onto your third marriage and fifth mistress by now.”
“You know,” Janet said, “I never thought of it that way. If I were a woman, I know I’d marry me!”
And Janet being Janet, she’s decided that she’s taking matters into her hands. Shortly after our lunch, she went back to her office, shut the door, went online and signed herself up with a dating profile.
A few days later, she Facebooked that she’d been on two dates already.
Saffy was deeply impressed. “Really? With an actual real man?” she asked in much the same tones Mrs Moses must have used when her husband came down from the mountain and reported that he’d met God. “Huh. I always thought you only ever met complete losers on these dating sites.”
“Oh, you do!” said Amanda, veteran of the dating scene. “They’re all liars! Remember that guy I once met online? Said he was a doctor and it turned out he was a vet?”
“You are such a job-ist!” Saffy accused. “He was perfectly lovely! Well, except for his bad breath.”
“And his cross-eyes!” Amanda said, warming up to her theme.
I said that Janet’s first date had been a cinematographer with National Geographic. “He’s into wild life!” I said.
“That’s no way to talk about Janet!” Saffy said and for the rest of the day, amused herself immensely with this witticism.
“And her second date was with a lawyer!” I went on. “It went really well, she said.”
“I give that relationship two months,” Amanda predicted. “Lawyers make terrible boyfriends. They look good on paper, but they’re never around. They’re either working late or stuck in some stupid long distance, late night conference call with New York!”
“But you’re a lawyer!” Saffy pointed out.
“Yes, but I’m a woman. And that means I can multi-task. I can mentally draft a brief while having dinner. A guy can’t.”
Janet says that so far her two dates have been working out really well. Mr National Geographic is rugged, outdoorsy and tanned, while Mr Lawyer is rich, successful and looks like the Chinese version of Jude Law. And the bonus is that neither of them lives at home. “Do you know how difficult it is to find a guy in this town who doesn’t live with his mother? And I’m dating two of them!” she said, looking very pleased with her good fortune.
Saffy says it’s so unfair that Janet is dating two guys. “Maybe I should be using her dating site as well? After all, at the rate this year is disappearing, it’ll be Chinese New Year again soon!”
Amanda says Saffy is better off placing a bet at the casino, but last I heard, Saffy was online busy creating a profile. I just got an SMS from her: “If anybody asks, I’m a model with Victoria’s Secret!”
Friday, April 16, 2010
The Mirror Crack'd
When I first saw Robert Pattinson in one of the Harry Potter movies and then again in Twilight, the thing that struck me most was what it must be like to walk about looking like him. What does he see when he looks into the mirror? I wondered. Does he see someone who is unspeakably good looking or does he just see a face with two eyes, a nose, a mouth and perhaps a pimple or two?
Which then made me wonder about what other people see when they look at me, perhaps for the first time. Do they also think, “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous!” or do they think, “Seriously, only a mother could love that one!”?
“I think of you like a door knob,” said Saffy after thinking about the question for a while before adding in a rush, “but not that you look like a door knob! But you know, it’s kind of like it doesn’t matter how beautiful a door knob is, after a while, when you’ve seen it a thousand times a day, it’s just a…well, you know, it’s just a door knob! But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful!”
“So you don’t look at me and think I’m good looking?” I asked.
“Define good looking,” Saffy said cagily.
“Richard Gere in a tuxedo in Pretty Woman.”
“Oh, definitely not,” Saffy replied promptly. “I’d say more Jackie Chan in Lust, Caution!”
There was a moment of silence when mental visual libraries were rifled through, and then rifled again. “Jackie Chan wasn’t…” I began.
“It doesn’t matter,” Saffy said smoothly. “It’s six of one and a dozen of the other! The point is, you’re you, and you’re a beautiful child of God! Surely, that’s enough?”
The next morning, at breakfast, Amanda suddenly looked up from her cereal and asked, “What do you guys see when you look at me?”
Saffy choked into her coffee.
“There isn’t anything about your looks that I’ve not already said many times in my blog, Amanda,” I said loyally before turning sharply to Saffy. “Who else have you been gossiping to?”
Saffy looked shifty for a moment and decided that the best way out of this was to just go on the offensive. “Seeing as you looked so hurt about that door knob comment, I was just looking for a second opinion! What is your problem? You are always making such a big fuss about nothing!”
“You look nothing like a door knob, Jason,” Amanda said kindly, patting my hand. “I was just asking because I’ve seriously been thinking about getting a nose job.”
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out that the most beautiful woman I personally know has secret issues of her own. Apparently, Amanda’s nose has long been a bone of contention between her and her sister. “It’s why we’re not very close,” Amanda admitted. “I always thought that my parents preferred her because she has the prettier nose.”
“But Amanda, you’re identical twins!” Saffy said, her eyes wide as saucers.
“No, if you look at her profile, her nose is one degree higher than mine. I know this because we once took a Polaroid from exactly the same position and then we measured the angle. One point three degrees higher to be exact. So that gives her the edge in the looks department,” Amanda added with great dissatisfaction.
For days afterwards, the look on her face haunted me. Here we have a highly successful, driven career woman with the kind of looks that stops traffic and she wants a nose job because she thinks her parents prefer her identical twin because her nose is one point three degrees higher.
This, obviously, is a woman who does not see in the mirror what the rest of us see. Which, in turn, leads to me to wonder, yet again, what Robert Pattinson sees when he looks into the mirror each morning.
“Maybe he sees Ricky Gervais?” my best friend Karl suggested.
“No, he doesn’t,” Barney Chen said firmly. “Beautiful people like Robert Pattinson will always say that they don’t think they look very special, but deep down, in the darkest part of their personality, they know they’re drop dead gorgeous, but they just have too good manners to actually say it!”
“So, who do you see when you look in the mirror?” Karl asked.
“Someone I’d definitely date if I wasn’t already dating someone!” Barney replied. “I have no issues with my looks! None at all!”
Meanwhile, Saffy is trying to decide what she sees when she looks into the mirror. So far, the list includes Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz.
Which then made me wonder about what other people see when they look at me, perhaps for the first time. Do they also think, “Oh my God, he’s gorgeous!” or do they think, “Seriously, only a mother could love that one!”?
“I think of you like a door knob,” said Saffy after thinking about the question for a while before adding in a rush, “but not that you look like a door knob! But you know, it’s kind of like it doesn’t matter how beautiful a door knob is, after a while, when you’ve seen it a thousand times a day, it’s just a…well, you know, it’s just a door knob! But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful!”
“So you don’t look at me and think I’m good looking?” I asked.
“Define good looking,” Saffy said cagily.
“Richard Gere in a tuxedo in Pretty Woman.”
“Oh, definitely not,” Saffy replied promptly. “I’d say more Jackie Chan in Lust, Caution!”
There was a moment of silence when mental visual libraries were rifled through, and then rifled again. “Jackie Chan wasn’t…” I began.
“It doesn’t matter,” Saffy said smoothly. “It’s six of one and a dozen of the other! The point is, you’re you, and you’re a beautiful child of God! Surely, that’s enough?”
The next morning, at breakfast, Amanda suddenly looked up from her cereal and asked, “What do you guys see when you look at me?”
Saffy choked into her coffee.
“There isn’t anything about your looks that I’ve not already said many times in my blog, Amanda,” I said loyally before turning sharply to Saffy. “Who else have you been gossiping to?”
Saffy looked shifty for a moment and decided that the best way out of this was to just go on the offensive. “Seeing as you looked so hurt about that door knob comment, I was just looking for a second opinion! What is your problem? You are always making such a big fuss about nothing!”
“You look nothing like a door knob, Jason,” Amanda said kindly, patting my hand. “I was just asking because I’ve seriously been thinking about getting a nose job.”
To everyone’s surprise, it turns out that the most beautiful woman I personally know has secret issues of her own. Apparently, Amanda’s nose has long been a bone of contention between her and her sister. “It’s why we’re not very close,” Amanda admitted. “I always thought that my parents preferred her because she has the prettier nose.”
“But Amanda, you’re identical twins!” Saffy said, her eyes wide as saucers.
“No, if you look at her profile, her nose is one degree higher than mine. I know this because we once took a Polaroid from exactly the same position and then we measured the angle. One point three degrees higher to be exact. So that gives her the edge in the looks department,” Amanda added with great dissatisfaction.
For days afterwards, the look on her face haunted me. Here we have a highly successful, driven career woman with the kind of looks that stops traffic and she wants a nose job because she thinks her parents prefer her identical twin because her nose is one point three degrees higher.
This, obviously, is a woman who does not see in the mirror what the rest of us see. Which, in turn, leads to me to wonder, yet again, what Robert Pattinson sees when he looks into the mirror each morning.
“Maybe he sees Ricky Gervais?” my best friend Karl suggested.
“No, he doesn’t,” Barney Chen said firmly. “Beautiful people like Robert Pattinson will always say that they don’t think they look very special, but deep down, in the darkest part of their personality, they know they’re drop dead gorgeous, but they just have too good manners to actually say it!”
“So, who do you see when you look in the mirror?” Karl asked.
“Someone I’d definitely date if I wasn’t already dating someone!” Barney replied. “I have no issues with my looks! None at all!”
Meanwhile, Saffy is trying to decide what she sees when she looks into the mirror. So far, the list includes Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz.
Monday, April 12, 2010
Don't Look Down
I don’t know if it’s a sign of age, but lately, I find myself talking a lot about the state of my stomach. I will finish a meal, burp, rub my tummy and mutter, “Oy, I really shouldn’t have eaten so much!” And then, I’ll spend the rest of the day complaining that my tummy feels terrible.
“I’m incredibly gassy,” I will confide to my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who I know will never judge me.
“Don’t walk so close behind me,” I instruct Saffy when we’re navigating the crowds along Orchard Road. Because I know she will be the first to judge me.
Of course, when this goes on for more than a couple of days, I start to worry. After all, you can’t be a card-carrying hypochondriac like me (and a fan of ‘House’, to boot) without thinking that even a simple case of indigestion might actually be early signs of advanced bowel cancer.
So I speed-dialed Dr Chan, my lovely gastroenterologist and demanded an immediate appointment.
“Next week?” I asked her receptionist. “Next week? Seriously? I could be dead next week! Do you want that on your conscience?”
Which is how, a few hours later, I found myself waiting my turn to see Dr Chan. From behind the surgery’s brand new copy of Tatler, I peeked at the two other people who were waiting and entertained myself wondering what specific gastroenterological problem had brought them here. I decided that the fat old man was here for his bi-yearly colonoscopy while the Indonesian lady with the big hair and Bottega Veneta bag was probably keeping her husband awake all night with her thunderous farts.
“Please, lah!” Dr Chan looked scandalized when I asked her. “Have you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“Who am I going to tell?” I asked in a wounded tone while trying not to think too much about this column.
“So what’s the matter with you this time?” Dr Chan asked as she flipped through my thick file. So, I told her all about my rumbling stomach and the discomfort I felt whenever I sat for too long.
“Are you regular?” she asked as she began prodding my stomach.
“Listen, if you’re going to keep doing that,” I said urgently, “I suggest you get out your nose-plugs!”
“I’ve got a cold today, so I can’t smell a thing!” she giggled rather inappropriately for someone who got her medical degree from Oxford. “So are you regular?”
“Every morning, at 7 am,” I replied promptly. “You could set the clock by me.”
“What colour?”
I blinked. “What?”
“What colour? And what shape?”
“What do you mean what shape?” I demanded.
Dr Chan sighed and looked up. “What is the colour and shape of your stools?”
“What sort of a question is that? How would I know?”
“Don’t you look?”
There might have been a brief moment when I squealed like a girl, but in my defence, I repeat, what sort of a question is that to ask someone who, at that moment, is lying in a very vulnerable position while someone is prodding you in the stomach?
“What do you mean you never look?” Saffy demanded later that night.
I was astonished. “You mean you do?”
“Always!”
“But why?” I cried.
It was Saffy’s turn to look a little put out. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do. Just in case there are any nasty surprises!”
Amanda, who was brought up in a Catholic boarding school, looked ill. “That’s just disgusting, Saf,” she said. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to look!”
“But apparently, you’re meant to look,” I said, telling them that Dr Chan had spent a very unpleasant half hour explaining to me what healthy poo should look like. “And she says the shape is very important! We should all be aiming for an S shape,” I reported.
“I’ve never heard of anything more revolting in my life,” Amanda declared firmly, adding, “and since living with you two, I’ve heard a lot!”
Saffy looked intrigued. “Really? An S shape is good? You know, I’ve never noticed. Did she say what it meant if you had other letters?”
“Round balls aren’t good, she said. Apparently, that means you’re not getting enough roughage.”
Saffy sat back in her chair, more stunned by these revelations than she’d been after reading ‘The Da Vinci Code’. “Huh!” she said and you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what she was planning to do the next morning in the toilet. Meanwhile, Amanda says that she’s been so disturbed by our conversation that she’s been constipated for the past two days.
“I’m incredibly gassy,” I will confide to my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch who I know will never judge me.
“Don’t walk so close behind me,” I instruct Saffy when we’re navigating the crowds along Orchard Road. Because I know she will be the first to judge me.
Of course, when this goes on for more than a couple of days, I start to worry. After all, you can’t be a card-carrying hypochondriac like me (and a fan of ‘House’, to boot) without thinking that even a simple case of indigestion might actually be early signs of advanced bowel cancer.
So I speed-dialed Dr Chan, my lovely gastroenterologist and demanded an immediate appointment.
“Next week?” I asked her receptionist. “Next week? Seriously? I could be dead next week! Do you want that on your conscience?”
Which is how, a few hours later, I found myself waiting my turn to see Dr Chan. From behind the surgery’s brand new copy of Tatler, I peeked at the two other people who were waiting and entertained myself wondering what specific gastroenterological problem had brought them here. I decided that the fat old man was here for his bi-yearly colonoscopy while the Indonesian lady with the big hair and Bottega Veneta bag was probably keeping her husband awake all night with her thunderous farts.
“Please, lah!” Dr Chan looked scandalized when I asked her. “Have you never heard of doctor-patient confidentiality?”
“Who am I going to tell?” I asked in a wounded tone while trying not to think too much about this column.
“So what’s the matter with you this time?” Dr Chan asked as she flipped through my thick file. So, I told her all about my rumbling stomach and the discomfort I felt whenever I sat for too long.
“Are you regular?” she asked as she began prodding my stomach.
“Listen, if you’re going to keep doing that,” I said urgently, “I suggest you get out your nose-plugs!”
“I’ve got a cold today, so I can’t smell a thing!” she giggled rather inappropriately for someone who got her medical degree from Oxford. “So are you regular?”
“Every morning, at 7 am,” I replied promptly. “You could set the clock by me.”
“What colour?”
I blinked. “What?”
“What colour? And what shape?”
“What do you mean what shape?” I demanded.
Dr Chan sighed and looked up. “What is the colour and shape of your stools?”
“What sort of a question is that? How would I know?”
“Don’t you look?”
There might have been a brief moment when I squealed like a girl, but in my defence, I repeat, what sort of a question is that to ask someone who, at that moment, is lying in a very vulnerable position while someone is prodding you in the stomach?
“What do you mean you never look?” Saffy demanded later that night.
I was astonished. “You mean you do?”
“Always!”
“But why?” I cried.
It was Saffy’s turn to look a little put out. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just do. Just in case there are any nasty surprises!”
Amanda, who was brought up in a Catholic boarding school, looked ill. “That’s just disgusting, Saf,” she said. “You couldn’t pay me enough money to look!”
“But apparently, you’re meant to look,” I said, telling them that Dr Chan had spent a very unpleasant half hour explaining to me what healthy poo should look like. “And she says the shape is very important! We should all be aiming for an S shape,” I reported.
“I’ve never heard of anything more revolting in my life,” Amanda declared firmly, adding, “and since living with you two, I’ve heard a lot!”
Saffy looked intrigued. “Really? An S shape is good? You know, I’ve never noticed. Did she say what it meant if you had other letters?”
“Round balls aren’t good, she said. Apparently, that means you’re not getting enough roughage.”
Saffy sat back in her chair, more stunned by these revelations than she’d been after reading ‘The Da Vinci Code’. “Huh!” she said and you didn’t have to be a mind reader to know what she was planning to do the next morning in the toilet. Meanwhile, Amanda says that she’s been so disturbed by our conversation that she’s been constipated for the past two days.
Thursday, April 01, 2010
Sleeping with the Enemy
Now I realise that there are some people out there who will frown at what they’re about to read next, but I don’t care. I pay my taxes every year. I’m a decent citizen. I don’t jay walk and, most importantly, I have nothing but the highest undiluted praise for the government (my proposal for the PAP’s next general election campaign is “Yay, Mr Lee!” Catchy, no?).
So, my point is that I think I’ve earned the right to declare, loudly and proudly, that I like to sleep in public. Not – for those of you with bad eyesight or mild dyslexia – sleep around in public, but just sleep. Whichever mode of transportation I may be taking – planes, trains, automobiles or, indeed, anything in which a rhythmic rocking motion is involved (a camel is my absolute favourite mode of transportation) – you will find me napping. It doesn’t matter that I might be leaning against the train door, sitting upright on the bus, or slouched down on my plane seat, within two minutes of settling down, I’m sound asleep.
It’s a talent, I know. Some people can sing in tune. Some people can play a Bach concerto. Some people can programme a new TV while others can bend over and touch their toes. I can nap anywhere.
Meanwhile, my friend Warren thinks that people who sleep in public are a disgrace and should be locked up.
“Isn’t that a bit severe?” I once asked him.
“Certainly not! You don’t poo in public, do you?”
Leave it to Saffy to pipe up at that moment to admit at she had once been forced to pee in the Botanic Gardens on account of the fact that she had had too much coffee to drink over lunch and as she pointed out, “When you gotta go, you gotta go!” And so she did. Right behind some bushes in the Orchid Garden.
“Yes, but that was an emergency,” said Warren who has always had a crush on Saffy and would rather have his finger-nails pulled out than to contradict anything she says. “Sleeping in public is not an emergency. You can sleep at home. You don’t need to sleep in public. But peeing in public in an emergency is acceptable!” he said firmly, while beaming at her.
“But what about on the plane?” I asked, cleverly finding a loophole in his argument.
“You’re crossing time zones. Sleeping in those circumstances is a natural and equally acceptable activity.”
“Huh,” said Saffy. Later in private, she told me that it was a great pity that Warren was already married to the obnoxious Mary Wong because there was nothing more sexy about a man than a piercing intelligence.
“I still think he’s being ridiculous about this whole sleeping in public thing,” I said stubbornly. “There’s no rule that says you can’t! And let me tell you, if there was, Singapore would have had it years ago!”
“Well, I think it’s an amazing skill,” Saffy said loyally. “I wish I could sleep like you. I am still suffering from the worst insomnia!”
Amanda says she’s with Warren on this one. “There’s nothing more unattractive than watching people sleep on the train. Their heads are lolling all over the place, sometimes they dribble, and then they lean their heads on your shoulder and start snoring! It’s disgusting!” she said with a delicious shiver.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Saffy interrupted. “When was the last time you were on a bus?”
“Oh, never!” Amanda replied without the least trace of social embarrassment. “A friend of mine sent me this YouTube clip of this person who fell asleep on the train. It’s actually quite interesting how spacious the MRT is!”
Saffy later said that it constantly astonished her that there were people in this world like Amanda. “You know, if I didn’t actually live with her, I wouldn’t believe she existed. How do you live your life without once getting on a train? I’m horribly jealous! I want to never have been on a train! Dammit, why did my parents have to be school teachers and not property developers?”
I said that I was sure the Prime Minister had never been on a train either.
“That’s different, he’s the Prime Minister!” Saffy said, a soft misty look clouding her eyes whenever the subject of the PM came up. “If he was wasting time on the MRT, no one would be running this country.”
Which, in turn, led me to wonder if the Prime Minister ever sleeps. That, and what other public bushes Saffy has peed behind. Amanda says you could go blind thinking about things like that.
So, my point is that I think I’ve earned the right to declare, loudly and proudly, that I like to sleep in public. Not – for those of you with bad eyesight or mild dyslexia – sleep around in public, but just sleep. Whichever mode of transportation I may be taking – planes, trains, automobiles or, indeed, anything in which a rhythmic rocking motion is involved (a camel is my absolute favourite mode of transportation) – you will find me napping. It doesn’t matter that I might be leaning against the train door, sitting upright on the bus, or slouched down on my plane seat, within two minutes of settling down, I’m sound asleep.
It’s a talent, I know. Some people can sing in tune. Some people can play a Bach concerto. Some people can programme a new TV while others can bend over and touch their toes. I can nap anywhere.
Meanwhile, my friend Warren thinks that people who sleep in public are a disgrace and should be locked up.
“Isn’t that a bit severe?” I once asked him.
“Certainly not! You don’t poo in public, do you?”
Leave it to Saffy to pipe up at that moment to admit at she had once been forced to pee in the Botanic Gardens on account of the fact that she had had too much coffee to drink over lunch and as she pointed out, “When you gotta go, you gotta go!” And so she did. Right behind some bushes in the Orchid Garden.
“Yes, but that was an emergency,” said Warren who has always had a crush on Saffy and would rather have his finger-nails pulled out than to contradict anything she says. “Sleeping in public is not an emergency. You can sleep at home. You don’t need to sleep in public. But peeing in public in an emergency is acceptable!” he said firmly, while beaming at her.
“But what about on the plane?” I asked, cleverly finding a loophole in his argument.
“You’re crossing time zones. Sleeping in those circumstances is a natural and equally acceptable activity.”
“Huh,” said Saffy. Later in private, she told me that it was a great pity that Warren was already married to the obnoxious Mary Wong because there was nothing more sexy about a man than a piercing intelligence.
“I still think he’s being ridiculous about this whole sleeping in public thing,” I said stubbornly. “There’s no rule that says you can’t! And let me tell you, if there was, Singapore would have had it years ago!”
“Well, I think it’s an amazing skill,” Saffy said loyally. “I wish I could sleep like you. I am still suffering from the worst insomnia!”
Amanda says she’s with Warren on this one. “There’s nothing more unattractive than watching people sleep on the train. Their heads are lolling all over the place, sometimes they dribble, and then they lean their heads on your shoulder and start snoring! It’s disgusting!” she said with a delicious shiver.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Saffy interrupted. “When was the last time you were on a bus?”
“Oh, never!” Amanda replied without the least trace of social embarrassment. “A friend of mine sent me this YouTube clip of this person who fell asleep on the train. It’s actually quite interesting how spacious the MRT is!”
Saffy later said that it constantly astonished her that there were people in this world like Amanda. “You know, if I didn’t actually live with her, I wouldn’t believe she existed. How do you live your life without once getting on a train? I’m horribly jealous! I want to never have been on a train! Dammit, why did my parents have to be school teachers and not property developers?”
I said that I was sure the Prime Minister had never been on a train either.
“That’s different, he’s the Prime Minister!” Saffy said, a soft misty look clouding her eyes whenever the subject of the PM came up. “If he was wasting time on the MRT, no one would be running this country.”
Which, in turn, led me to wonder if the Prime Minister ever sleeps. That, and what other public bushes Saffy has peed behind. Amanda says you could go blind thinking about things like that.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Hissy fit
The subject of snakes came up the other day during dinner. On the menu was spaghetti and meatballs, and for some reason, Amanda suddenly announced that the slippery texture of the pasta reminded her of snakes.
Of course, that was all it took for Saffy and me to put our folks down and push our chair back from the table. To my credit, I remained outwardly calm but Saffy’s formidable bosom began to heave asthmatically.
“Seriously, Amanda,” I began.
“You are just sick!” Saffy hissed, her eyes narrowing to slits.
Amanda looked astonished. “What?”
“You know how we feel about those…those things!” I said.
Saffy nodded. “And thanks to you, I can’t ever eat pasta again because every time, I do, I will be thinking about…about what they look like…and, oh God, I need to get away from this table!”
And with that, Saffy got up from the table and disappeared into her room. The next morning, she said she didn’t sleep a wink. “I kept imagining there were snakes crawling up my bed and under my sheets!” she reported. “And the air-con kept me awake because it kept hissing at me, so I turned that off, and then it got too hot and I had to open the window, but then I‘d read somewhere that there are snakes that can climb up trees and leap ten feet in the air and I kept thinking it would be just my luck that one of them decided to leap into my open window right onto my bed! So, I got up and closed the window and of course, I couldn’t sleep because it was so hot. I am a mess!” Saffy moaned.
Now, I know there are readers out there who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. “Snakes?” they’re probably thinking. “What’s he on about? Nothing wrong with them! Not the friendliest creatures I know, but I’ve got nothing against them anymore than I have against, ooh, say, chickens. And they taste good in a soup too!”
The thing is, I’ve always been afraid of snakes. Can’t stand them. Can’t stand the idea of them. Can’t stand the look of them. Can’t stand even the word. And, of course, like all phobias, it’s utterly irrational since as far as I can tell, I’ve never actually met a real snake. My sister, who has the same fear, thinks it must be a reincarnation thing. “We probably fell into a snake pit in a previous life,” she told me when she was 10 and I was eight. I had nightmares for six months and for years afterwards, I would ask everyone I met what their Chinese horoscope was and if the answer was ‘snake’, I ran for the distant horizon and never looked back.
Leave it to my mother to tell us the story of when her father fell ill, he drank his way back to health with a tonic made from a snake marinated in alcohol. Even at the age of seven, I remember thinking it was the most revolting thing I’d ever heard of in my life.
Years later, I read about this stupid schmuck who kept an anaconda as a pet and then one day when it got hungry, the dumb thing turned around, strangled its owner and then swallowed him. It was the grossest thing I’d ever read but all I could think about was that it served the guy right. “Why, oh why would anyone be stupid enough to have an anaconda as a pet?” I asked Barney Chen who replied that thinking about questions like that gave you wrinkles.
Meanwhile, Saffy is so annoyed with Amanda that they’ve not spoken in days. “Can you believe that anyone would be so cruel to say such a thing? I love pasta and now I can’t even walk past an Italian restaurant!” she posted on Facebook.
Her best friend Sharyn said all this reminded her of the time when she was growing up in a kampong in Kelantan in Malaysia and one day, while her granny was squatting on outdoor toilet, she looked down and saw a snake peering back up at her. When she heard that story, Saffy was simultaneously frightened out of her wits and furious. That night, she took Sharyn off her Facebook friends list.
“Oh God,” she groaned to me. “Now, I can’t even go to the toilet! Why do people tell us such horrible stories?”
“They’ll be punished in their next lives,” I promised her while thinking about the SMS I’d received that afternoon from Amanda: “In HMV. Am buying ‘Snakes on the Plane’ for Saffy. Haha!”
Of course, that was all it took for Saffy and me to put our folks down and push our chair back from the table. To my credit, I remained outwardly calm but Saffy’s formidable bosom began to heave asthmatically.
“Seriously, Amanda,” I began.
“You are just sick!” Saffy hissed, her eyes narrowing to slits.
Amanda looked astonished. “What?”
“You know how we feel about those…those things!” I said.
Saffy nodded. “And thanks to you, I can’t ever eat pasta again because every time, I do, I will be thinking about…about what they look like…and, oh God, I need to get away from this table!”
And with that, Saffy got up from the table and disappeared into her room. The next morning, she said she didn’t sleep a wink. “I kept imagining there were snakes crawling up my bed and under my sheets!” she reported. “And the air-con kept me awake because it kept hissing at me, so I turned that off, and then it got too hot and I had to open the window, but then I‘d read somewhere that there are snakes that can climb up trees and leap ten feet in the air and I kept thinking it would be just my luck that one of them decided to leap into my open window right onto my bed! So, I got up and closed the window and of course, I couldn’t sleep because it was so hot. I am a mess!” Saffy moaned.
Now, I know there are readers out there who have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. “Snakes?” they’re probably thinking. “What’s he on about? Nothing wrong with them! Not the friendliest creatures I know, but I’ve got nothing against them anymore than I have against, ooh, say, chickens. And they taste good in a soup too!”
The thing is, I’ve always been afraid of snakes. Can’t stand them. Can’t stand the idea of them. Can’t stand the look of them. Can’t stand even the word. And, of course, like all phobias, it’s utterly irrational since as far as I can tell, I’ve never actually met a real snake. My sister, who has the same fear, thinks it must be a reincarnation thing. “We probably fell into a snake pit in a previous life,” she told me when she was 10 and I was eight. I had nightmares for six months and for years afterwards, I would ask everyone I met what their Chinese horoscope was and if the answer was ‘snake’, I ran for the distant horizon and never looked back.
Leave it to my mother to tell us the story of when her father fell ill, he drank his way back to health with a tonic made from a snake marinated in alcohol. Even at the age of seven, I remember thinking it was the most revolting thing I’d ever heard of in my life.
Years later, I read about this stupid schmuck who kept an anaconda as a pet and then one day when it got hungry, the dumb thing turned around, strangled its owner and then swallowed him. It was the grossest thing I’d ever read but all I could think about was that it served the guy right. “Why, oh why would anyone be stupid enough to have an anaconda as a pet?” I asked Barney Chen who replied that thinking about questions like that gave you wrinkles.
Meanwhile, Saffy is so annoyed with Amanda that they’ve not spoken in days. “Can you believe that anyone would be so cruel to say such a thing? I love pasta and now I can’t even walk past an Italian restaurant!” she posted on Facebook.
Her best friend Sharyn said all this reminded her of the time when she was growing up in a kampong in Kelantan in Malaysia and one day, while her granny was squatting on outdoor toilet, she looked down and saw a snake peering back up at her. When she heard that story, Saffy was simultaneously frightened out of her wits and furious. That night, she took Sharyn off her Facebook friends list.
“Oh God,” she groaned to me. “Now, I can’t even go to the toilet! Why do people tell us such horrible stories?”
“They’ll be punished in their next lives,” I promised her while thinking about the SMS I’d received that afternoon from Amanda: “In HMV. Am buying ‘Snakes on the Plane’ for Saffy. Haha!”
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Bag of Tricks
They say that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he packs his luggage. And when I say ‘They say’, I really mean ‘I say’.
People who are naturally messy in life – messy desk, unmade bed and even messier love life – will just throw their clothes into their Samsonite. They then find that the luggage won’t close naturally and will have to sit on the lid to lock it. These are usually also the same people who, at the airport check-in counter, are told that they are overweight and need to either unload some things or pay excess luggage. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy standing behind these people as they are forced to open their luggage in front of everyone and everything spills out: dirty underwear, tacky souvenir purchases, crushed boxes of chocolates, flattened soft toys, terrible fashion and dog-eared copies of porn magazines, I’ve seen them all. And when you’re stuck in a check-in queue, this kind of drama is hugely entertaining.
Then you have people like my friend Barney Chen who carefully sorts out all his clothes into neat vacuum sealed packs. I’ve never quite worked out what his system is. Sometimes, the packs are organized by days. Sometimes, it’s by outfit. Sometimes, it’s by occasion. Meanwhile, his toiletries – all neatly decanted into matching Muji bottles – are carefully slipped into ziplock bags.
Barney Chen is the god of packing, and he’s my idol. I’m convinced if everyone packed like him, the world would be a much nicer place.
“I really don’t think it’s normal to pack like that,” Saffy said firmly the other day after she came back from a visit to Barney’s flat. Out of a combination of sheer boredom and idle curiosity, she’d spent the afternoon watching him pack for a three day business trip to Hong Kong. “His suitcase was like when you open the box that your new TV arrives in. Everything fit together like a neat jig-saw puzzle. If you ask me, it’s the sign of an unhealthy mind,” she declared, her bosom trembling a little.
I replied that this was really rich coming from a woman who carefully arranges the magazines on our lounge table into a fan pattern.
“That’s so different!” Saffy puffed and disappeared into her room with a whiff of Chanel No. 5 and injured dignity.
A few days later, Amanda announced that she and her on-again, off-again insectile looking boyfriend – aka The Cockroach – were going off to Hong Kong for a week’s holiday.
“Why?” Saffy asked.
“Well, because we both have holidays to clear and there are cheap flights to Hong…”
“No, what I meant was, why are you still dating that loser?”
Amanda later complained to me that it was a pity she’d ever told Saffy all her deepest and darkest secrets, because she’d have kicked Saffy out of our flat in a New York second if she wasn’t so frightened that Saffy would turn right around and blackmail her.
As it was, Amanda nobly ignored Saffy’s question. “My point is,” she said icily, “it came up during our conversation that I would be bringing my Louis Vuitton trolley bag and Cockroach said that I should just bring a back-pack.”
This time, it was Saffy’s turn to sit up. “What, in addition to your trolley bag?”
“No. Instead of.”
“And check-in luggage?”
“None.”
“What, a week in Hong Kong with just a back-pack?” Saffy asked.
“Yes. And he got a little upset when I said I needed to check in some luggage. He says he hates waiting for luggage to come off a plane.”
“And you’re still dating this man because…”
“Oh, shut up, Saffy!”
For days, it was all Amanda could talk about. “What is it with some guys? Does he seriously think that I wake up each morning looking like this?” she demanded, waving her hand over her perfectly made up face, expensively coiffed tresses and this season’s Prada and Jimmy Choo slingbacks. “I need a separate bag just for my make-up and toiletries. And what about my shopping? Does he think it can all fit into a back-pack?” Her face wrinkled into a frown. “And you know what, I don’t think I even know what a back-pack is!”
Saffy says this is one of the reasons why she’s sometimes actually glad that she’s single. It’s just too disheartening, she says, to have to discover that the man you might actually want to have children with has the EQ of a coffee bean. “If he’s like this on the subject of holiday bags, what will he be like when the topic of vasectomies comes up?” she wondered.
People who are naturally messy in life – messy desk, unmade bed and even messier love life – will just throw their clothes into their Samsonite. They then find that the luggage won’t close naturally and will have to sit on the lid to lock it. These are usually also the same people who, at the airport check-in counter, are told that they are overweight and need to either unload some things or pay excess luggage. I can’t tell you how much I enjoy standing behind these people as they are forced to open their luggage in front of everyone and everything spills out: dirty underwear, tacky souvenir purchases, crushed boxes of chocolates, flattened soft toys, terrible fashion and dog-eared copies of porn magazines, I’ve seen them all. And when you’re stuck in a check-in queue, this kind of drama is hugely entertaining.
Then you have people like my friend Barney Chen who carefully sorts out all his clothes into neat vacuum sealed packs. I’ve never quite worked out what his system is. Sometimes, the packs are organized by days. Sometimes, it’s by outfit. Sometimes, it’s by occasion. Meanwhile, his toiletries – all neatly decanted into matching Muji bottles – are carefully slipped into ziplock bags.
Barney Chen is the god of packing, and he’s my idol. I’m convinced if everyone packed like him, the world would be a much nicer place.
“I really don’t think it’s normal to pack like that,” Saffy said firmly the other day after she came back from a visit to Barney’s flat. Out of a combination of sheer boredom and idle curiosity, she’d spent the afternoon watching him pack for a three day business trip to Hong Kong. “His suitcase was like when you open the box that your new TV arrives in. Everything fit together like a neat jig-saw puzzle. If you ask me, it’s the sign of an unhealthy mind,” she declared, her bosom trembling a little.
I replied that this was really rich coming from a woman who carefully arranges the magazines on our lounge table into a fan pattern.
“That’s so different!” Saffy puffed and disappeared into her room with a whiff of Chanel No. 5 and injured dignity.
A few days later, Amanda announced that she and her on-again, off-again insectile looking boyfriend – aka The Cockroach – were going off to Hong Kong for a week’s holiday.
“Why?” Saffy asked.
“Well, because we both have holidays to clear and there are cheap flights to Hong…”
“No, what I meant was, why are you still dating that loser?”
Amanda later complained to me that it was a pity she’d ever told Saffy all her deepest and darkest secrets, because she’d have kicked Saffy out of our flat in a New York second if she wasn’t so frightened that Saffy would turn right around and blackmail her.
As it was, Amanda nobly ignored Saffy’s question. “My point is,” she said icily, “it came up during our conversation that I would be bringing my Louis Vuitton trolley bag and Cockroach said that I should just bring a back-pack.”
This time, it was Saffy’s turn to sit up. “What, in addition to your trolley bag?”
“No. Instead of.”
“And check-in luggage?”
“None.”
“What, a week in Hong Kong with just a back-pack?” Saffy asked.
“Yes. And he got a little upset when I said I needed to check in some luggage. He says he hates waiting for luggage to come off a plane.”
“And you’re still dating this man because…”
“Oh, shut up, Saffy!”
For days, it was all Amanda could talk about. “What is it with some guys? Does he seriously think that I wake up each morning looking like this?” she demanded, waving her hand over her perfectly made up face, expensively coiffed tresses and this season’s Prada and Jimmy Choo slingbacks. “I need a separate bag just for my make-up and toiletries. And what about my shopping? Does he think it can all fit into a back-pack?” Her face wrinkled into a frown. “And you know what, I don’t think I even know what a back-pack is!”
Saffy says this is one of the reasons why she’s sometimes actually glad that she’s single. It’s just too disheartening, she says, to have to discover that the man you might actually want to have children with has the EQ of a coffee bean. “If he’s like this on the subject of holiday bags, what will he be like when the topic of vasectomies comes up?” she wondered.
Friday, March 12, 2010
White Wash
Apparently, when girls are growing up, between loving the colour pink and scheming to steal their father away from their mother, they dream of a wedding dress.
I say ‘apparently’ because I have no real reference point for this statement. My mother says she can’t remember when she grew up because that would actually involve her having to pinpoint an actual decade and she gave up on that kind of pointless mental activity round about the time she turned 35.
Meanwhile, my sister says that, thanks to our mother, she had such a traumatic childhood it would take decades of repressed childhood therapy to dig up anything useful from that period let alone any recollection of any dreams of wedding dresses. And besides, she always says, men are scum, so why would anyone want to have anything to do with them let alone have a wedding with them? “Let alone in a wedding dress!” she will add, somewhat unnecessarily.
But I have it on good authority – ie, my two psychotic flatmates – that most normal girls, with relatively normal parents and a normal childhood, grow up dreaming of a wedding dress.
Apparently, girls don’t dream of the actual wedding, or the groom, or the wedding banquet, or even the stacks of ang pows piling up on the reception desk. Which is really weird because if I ever knew that a load of money in shiny glossy red packets was in my future, money would be all I would dream about. But then, girls are just strange. They don’t care about these practical things. Because as my mother once asked my fifteen year old sister with penetrating insight, “Do you think a wedding just pays for itself?” after Michelle announced that even if the Prince of England proposed to her, she would reject him.
But, no, girls don’t think about such things. They just dream of the wedding dress. And it’s usually a big fat fluffy white puff ball of a dress that makes the girl look like a collapsed soufflé.
“I don’t know what it is,” Amanda sighed at a recent dinner at home. She paused mid-twirl of her spaghetti and looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe it’s the whole romance of the dress and what it represents, you know? I mean, my parents always had a framed picture of their wedding in their bedroom and I grew up looking at that picture. My father looked so dashing in his suit and my mother…my God, my mother!” Amanda actually put her hand on her chest and sighed. “She was radiant! Even in that black and white picture, she was radiant! And I wanted to be her!”
From the other end of the table, Saffy snorted. “Me, too!” she snuffled into her spaghetti. “Your father was a hottie! What? Why are you looking at me like that? I’m just saying!”
Maybe little girls dream about wedding dresses for the same reason they love fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. That collapsed soufflé represents the idea of happiness which, in turn, represents the safety and comfort of home. Because isn’t a wedding supposed to be the happiest day of your life?
“Not for me, it wasn’t,” my mother said when I asked her. “I was five months pregnant with you when I got married to your father and I was petrified I wouldn’t be able to fit into that stupid dress! You were a big baby. I always thought you’d grow up to be fat like your Third Uncle. Thank God, you didn’t. Your sister, on the other hand…”
The other day, Amanda came home with a bundle of wedding magazines. “That whole discussion about wedding dresses the other night got me all wistful!” she told me with an accusing look. “The check out girl at Borders actually asked me when I was getting married. I had to make up a date, otherwise I would have looked like such a loser buying a stack of wedding magazines when I don’t even have a boyfriend!”
That evening, she curled up on the sofa flipping through page after page of cakes, wedding favours, to-do lists, decorating tips and dresses. Every so often, she’d murmur, “Mmm, that’s lovely!”, her fingers tracing the outlines of a dress on the smooth glossy page. And I’d catch the same look on her face she had when she was describing her mother’s wedding picture
I sent Saffy a text message: “Amanda is acting all weird. She’s reading a stack of wedding magazines and talking to herself!”
Saffy replied: “SHUT UP! I’m in a wedding boutique actually TRYING ON a wedding dress!”
I say ‘apparently’ because I have no real reference point for this statement. My mother says she can’t remember when she grew up because that would actually involve her having to pinpoint an actual decade and she gave up on that kind of pointless mental activity round about the time she turned 35.
Meanwhile, my sister says that, thanks to our mother, she had such a traumatic childhood it would take decades of repressed childhood therapy to dig up anything useful from that period let alone any recollection of any dreams of wedding dresses. And besides, she always says, men are scum, so why would anyone want to have anything to do with them let alone have a wedding with them? “Let alone in a wedding dress!” she will add, somewhat unnecessarily.
But I have it on good authority – ie, my two psychotic flatmates – that most normal girls, with relatively normal parents and a normal childhood, grow up dreaming of a wedding dress.
Apparently, girls don’t dream of the actual wedding, or the groom, or the wedding banquet, or even the stacks of ang pows piling up on the reception desk. Which is really weird because if I ever knew that a load of money in shiny glossy red packets was in my future, money would be all I would dream about. But then, girls are just strange. They don’t care about these practical things. Because as my mother once asked my fifteen year old sister with penetrating insight, “Do you think a wedding just pays for itself?” after Michelle announced that even if the Prince of England proposed to her, she would reject him.
But, no, girls don’t think about such things. They just dream of the wedding dress. And it’s usually a big fat fluffy white puff ball of a dress that makes the girl look like a collapsed soufflé.
“I don’t know what it is,” Amanda sighed at a recent dinner at home. She paused mid-twirl of her spaghetti and looked up at the ceiling. “Maybe it’s the whole romance of the dress and what it represents, you know? I mean, my parents always had a framed picture of their wedding in their bedroom and I grew up looking at that picture. My father looked so dashing in his suit and my mother…my God, my mother!” Amanda actually put her hand on her chest and sighed. “She was radiant! Even in that black and white picture, she was radiant! And I wanted to be her!”
From the other end of the table, Saffy snorted. “Me, too!” she snuffled into her spaghetti. “Your father was a hottie! What? Why are you looking at me like that? I’m just saying!”
Maybe little girls dream about wedding dresses for the same reason they love fairy tales like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. That collapsed soufflé represents the idea of happiness which, in turn, represents the safety and comfort of home. Because isn’t a wedding supposed to be the happiest day of your life?
“Not for me, it wasn’t,” my mother said when I asked her. “I was five months pregnant with you when I got married to your father and I was petrified I wouldn’t be able to fit into that stupid dress! You were a big baby. I always thought you’d grow up to be fat like your Third Uncle. Thank God, you didn’t. Your sister, on the other hand…”
The other day, Amanda came home with a bundle of wedding magazines. “That whole discussion about wedding dresses the other night got me all wistful!” she told me with an accusing look. “The check out girl at Borders actually asked me when I was getting married. I had to make up a date, otherwise I would have looked like such a loser buying a stack of wedding magazines when I don’t even have a boyfriend!”
That evening, she curled up on the sofa flipping through page after page of cakes, wedding favours, to-do lists, decorating tips and dresses. Every so often, she’d murmur, “Mmm, that’s lovely!”, her fingers tracing the outlines of a dress on the smooth glossy page. And I’d catch the same look on her face she had when she was describing her mother’s wedding picture
I sent Saffy a text message: “Amanda is acting all weird. She’s reading a stack of wedding magazines and talking to herself!”
Saffy replied: “SHUT UP! I’m in a wedding boutique actually TRYING ON a wedding dress!”
Friday, March 05, 2010
Love Actually
One of the greatest mysteries of the world is not why Julia Roberts keeps making such forgettable movies or why people still take up both sides of the escalator, but rather why we fall in love with the people we do.
A few nights ago, my flatmates and I were invited to a cocktail party at our friend Mary’s house. “Very casual, one, so don’t dress up too much!” she’d instructed over the phone earlier in the day. As it turned out, everyone we knew was there at the party and by the looks of it, they’d all followed Mary’s dress code to the letter.
“Seriously,” Amanda, in full Miu-Miu, murmured out of the corner of her mouth, “I wouldn’t go to the wet market in anything these people are wearing! It’s disgraceful. Sharon!” she suddenly exclaimed, her bright eyes sparkling as she leaned over to kiss. “So lovely to see you! I love your denim shorts! Is it vintage?”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Saffy was busy mixing herself a particularly lethal gin and tonic. Her recipe, which she claims has been handed down to through the generations, basically involves a full glass of gin, and a teaspoon of tonic water. You could unclog a drain with the stuff.
“That looks like a strong drink,” said the girl next to her.
As Saffy later told us, the girl looked like she’d just stepped off a Victoria’s Secret fashion runway show. “She was just missing the glitter and the wings!” she reported enviously.
And as girls do at parties, they got to talking while silently sizing each other up. (“Su-ann has such lovely skin!” Saffy noted with approval.) First, it was about innocuous things like the outfits they were each wearing. Weekend plans were next, and by the seven minute mark, they had moved onto boyfriends.
“I’m here with my boyfriend,” said Su-Ann. “He and Mary went to university together. Oh! There he is over there talking to that...girl over there.”
Saffy, the world’s foremost expert on the pregnant pause, immediately swivelled her head in the direction of Su-ann’s finger and found herself looking at Amanda talking to a guy she would later describe on Facebook as a fat Borneo monkey.
“How is this world fair?” she posted. “A pretty girl dating someone so fugly!”
In turn, Amanda posted a comment that one shouldn’t judge someone on his looks and that Fat Borneo Monkey was actually quite interesting.
“He is fugly!” Saffy repeated. “No man would ever date a woman who looked like FBM. It’s a man’s world, I tell you!”
Of course, what really killed Saffy was the fact that someone who looked like FBM had actually managed to convince someone so pretty as Su-ann to go out with him. And, in her books, what was even more astonishing was the fact that Amanda had actually found FBM interesting enough to talk to him.
And the underlying rant here was this: if gorgeous girls like Su-ann were dating Neanderthal apes like FBM, what did you have to look like to date the actual good-looking men in this town?
“There’s no hope for me!” she wailed later that night in the cab home. Amanda made soothing but ultimately ineffectual noises. “And there’s more! They just got engaged. They’re getting married next month!”
A silence fell over the cab. After a while, a nagging thought finally managed to get Amanda’s attention. “Uhm,” she began slowly. “She hasn’t invited you to the wedding has she?”
“She’s asked me to be one of the freaking brides-maids!” Saffy screamed out loud, nearly causing the poor uncle taxi-driver to swerve dangerously on the CTE. “Oh. My. God. First of all, how do you fall in love with someone who looks like that? And secondly, why would you ask someone you just met to be a bridesmaid? Don’t you have any friends? Oh, speaking of which, Amanda,” Saffy added, looking a little guilty in the strobe-light of the street lamps, “uhm, you’re not invited to the wedding.”
Saffy later said that she was so relieved that Amanda hadn’t asked why. “Because if she had,” she told me, “I would have had to lie. But can you imagine that Su-ann was actually jealous Fat Ugly Borneo Monkey was talking to her?”
“That’s what he’s called now?” I asked. “Fat Ugly Borneo Monkey?”
“Well, I think the ‘ugly’ is essential, don’t you? The only problem is that it only makes Su-ann’s engagement to him all that more incomprehensible. God, I’m so depressed.”
Recently, Saffy changed her Facebook profile. In her “Relationship” status, she’s now put “Doomed to be discovered by the smell seeping from under her flat’s door”.
A few nights ago, my flatmates and I were invited to a cocktail party at our friend Mary’s house. “Very casual, one, so don’t dress up too much!” she’d instructed over the phone earlier in the day. As it turned out, everyone we knew was there at the party and by the looks of it, they’d all followed Mary’s dress code to the letter.
“Seriously,” Amanda, in full Miu-Miu, murmured out of the corner of her mouth, “I wouldn’t go to the wet market in anything these people are wearing! It’s disgraceful. Sharon!” she suddenly exclaimed, her bright eyes sparkling as she leaned over to kiss. “So lovely to see you! I love your denim shorts! Is it vintage?”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, Saffy was busy mixing herself a particularly lethal gin and tonic. Her recipe, which she claims has been handed down to through the generations, basically involves a full glass of gin, and a teaspoon of tonic water. You could unclog a drain with the stuff.
“That looks like a strong drink,” said the girl next to her.
As Saffy later told us, the girl looked like she’d just stepped off a Victoria’s Secret fashion runway show. “She was just missing the glitter and the wings!” she reported enviously.
And as girls do at parties, they got to talking while silently sizing each other up. (“Su-ann has such lovely skin!” Saffy noted with approval.) First, it was about innocuous things like the outfits they were each wearing. Weekend plans were next, and by the seven minute mark, they had moved onto boyfriends.
“I’m here with my boyfriend,” said Su-Ann. “He and Mary went to university together. Oh! There he is over there talking to that...girl over there.”
Saffy, the world’s foremost expert on the pregnant pause, immediately swivelled her head in the direction of Su-ann’s finger and found herself looking at Amanda talking to a guy she would later describe on Facebook as a fat Borneo monkey.
“How is this world fair?” she posted. “A pretty girl dating someone so fugly!”
In turn, Amanda posted a comment that one shouldn’t judge someone on his looks and that Fat Borneo Monkey was actually quite interesting.
“He is fugly!” Saffy repeated. “No man would ever date a woman who looked like FBM. It’s a man’s world, I tell you!”
Of course, what really killed Saffy was the fact that someone who looked like FBM had actually managed to convince someone so pretty as Su-ann to go out with him. And, in her books, what was even more astonishing was the fact that Amanda had actually found FBM interesting enough to talk to him.
And the underlying rant here was this: if gorgeous girls like Su-ann were dating Neanderthal apes like FBM, what did you have to look like to date the actual good-looking men in this town?
“There’s no hope for me!” she wailed later that night in the cab home. Amanda made soothing but ultimately ineffectual noises. “And there’s more! They just got engaged. They’re getting married next month!”
A silence fell over the cab. After a while, a nagging thought finally managed to get Amanda’s attention. “Uhm,” she began slowly. “She hasn’t invited you to the wedding has she?”
“She’s asked me to be one of the freaking brides-maids!” Saffy screamed out loud, nearly causing the poor uncle taxi-driver to swerve dangerously on the CTE. “Oh. My. God. First of all, how do you fall in love with someone who looks like that? And secondly, why would you ask someone you just met to be a bridesmaid? Don’t you have any friends? Oh, speaking of which, Amanda,” Saffy added, looking a little guilty in the strobe-light of the street lamps, “uhm, you’re not invited to the wedding.”
Saffy later said that she was so relieved that Amanda hadn’t asked why. “Because if she had,” she told me, “I would have had to lie. But can you imagine that Su-ann was actually jealous Fat Ugly Borneo Monkey was talking to her?”
“That’s what he’s called now?” I asked. “Fat Ugly Borneo Monkey?”
“Well, I think the ‘ugly’ is essential, don’t you? The only problem is that it only makes Su-ann’s engagement to him all that more incomprehensible. God, I’m so depressed.”
Recently, Saffy changed her Facebook profile. In her “Relationship” status, she’s now put “Doomed to be discovered by the smell seeping from under her flat’s door”.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
Free for all
My overseas friends are always asking me what I do in my spare time. And they ask this with such serious fascination – a concerned frown creasing their forehead the way one mother might look at another mother if the latter announced that her 15-year old kid was still breast-feeding.
And I usually hesitate, because I’m never quite sure what to say. All my local friends like to joke that there’s nothing to do in Singapore except eat, shop and go to the movies. Well, now they can also go gambling, provided, of course, they can get past the queues of people outside, slowly baking in the hot sun. You’d have thought that they’d also be having sex, but judging by the recent surveys of Singapore’s falling birth rate and abysmal condom sales, apparently, that’s not happening either.
Which brings me back to my original source of embarrassment. I mean, you don’t really want to tell people that all you do on the weekends is eat, shop and watch movies, do you? What kind of an impression will that create in the minds of these impressionable foreigners?
But then, should I lie? Should I tell my American friends that on the weekends, I can be found abseiling down the Marina Bay Sand casino building? Or jet-skiing around Punggol? Which, in turn, gets me depressed because I can’t help but think how much more fun my life would be if I actually did any of these things. Nothing is more sobering than being forced to see your life from the perspective of a big fat lie.
The truth is, I just like to do nothing. Even when I’m meant to be busy. I could never do what Barack Obama does, for instance. All that stress of running a country and then having to make all those long boring speeches. In fact, I would never have run for office in the first place, let alone get out of bed.
But the one thing that I really like to do is to get free things. Now, I realise that some people may object to this on the grounds that this isn’t exactly an activity as such, but I like to think that seeing as the physical act of accepting the free thing requires actual effort, that’s got to count for something.
Recently, my flatmate Saffy returned home from what appeared to be a very successful shopping spree. ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve been doing!’ she announced immediately as she dropped what looked like ten Mustafa shopping bags.
‘You’ve been shopping. At Mustafa!’
‘Well, yes, I have,’ Saffy admitted, her impressive bosom deflating a little. ‘But that’s not all. I am the proud owner of a Mustafa loyalty card! Look!’ she said waving the little laminated card in my direction.
I sat up with interest. ‘What does it do?’ I asked.
‘I have no clue,’ Saffy replied. ‘I was just buying some toothpaste and shampoo and the girl at the counter asked me if I wanted to be a member, so I said yes.’
‘Did she say what the benefits are?’
‘She didn’t know either. She said the programme wasn’t going to launch for another couple of months.’
I eyed all the bags on the floor and wondered aloud how much toothpaste and shampoo Saffy had bought.
'Well, that’s the thing. I got so excited about my new card that I figured I might as well get more things while I was there.’
‘You get points with this card?’
‘I have no idea!’ Saffy repeated. ‘The girl didn’t know either, but we both figured it couldn’t hurt to start racking up the Mustafa dollars. Otherwise, what’s the point of a loyalty card?’
‘That’s what they’re called? Mustafa dollars?’
‘No, it’s what I’m calling them. They better be worth something,’ Saffy threatened, ‘otherwise I’ve just bought a lot of flavoured condoms for no reason!’
So here’s the thing. It’s mindless consumer behaviour like this that makes me love this country. People just willy-nilly giving away their private NRIC number to complete strangers in the vague hope that the little piece of plastic they’re given in exchange might one day get them something. Like a packet of sweets, or maybe a desk calendar, if they’re lucky.
When she heard about Saffy’s retail adventure in Little India, Amanda announced that it was women like Saffy that were causing the country’s falling birth rate. Saffy said privately that this was really rich coming from someone who had just dropped $13,000 on a stupid handbag that didn’t even have a zip. And, of course, first thing tomorrow, I’m heading out to Mustafa to get my card.
And I usually hesitate, because I’m never quite sure what to say. All my local friends like to joke that there’s nothing to do in Singapore except eat, shop and go to the movies. Well, now they can also go gambling, provided, of course, they can get past the queues of people outside, slowly baking in the hot sun. You’d have thought that they’d also be having sex, but judging by the recent surveys of Singapore’s falling birth rate and abysmal condom sales, apparently, that’s not happening either.
Which brings me back to my original source of embarrassment. I mean, you don’t really want to tell people that all you do on the weekends is eat, shop and watch movies, do you? What kind of an impression will that create in the minds of these impressionable foreigners?
But then, should I lie? Should I tell my American friends that on the weekends, I can be found abseiling down the Marina Bay Sand casino building? Or jet-skiing around Punggol? Which, in turn, gets me depressed because I can’t help but think how much more fun my life would be if I actually did any of these things. Nothing is more sobering than being forced to see your life from the perspective of a big fat lie.
The truth is, I just like to do nothing. Even when I’m meant to be busy. I could never do what Barack Obama does, for instance. All that stress of running a country and then having to make all those long boring speeches. In fact, I would never have run for office in the first place, let alone get out of bed.
But the one thing that I really like to do is to get free things. Now, I realise that some people may object to this on the grounds that this isn’t exactly an activity as such, but I like to think that seeing as the physical act of accepting the free thing requires actual effort, that’s got to count for something.
Recently, my flatmate Saffy returned home from what appeared to be a very successful shopping spree. ‘You’ll never guess what I’ve been doing!’ she announced immediately as she dropped what looked like ten Mustafa shopping bags.
‘You’ve been shopping. At Mustafa!’
‘Well, yes, I have,’ Saffy admitted, her impressive bosom deflating a little. ‘But that’s not all. I am the proud owner of a Mustafa loyalty card! Look!’ she said waving the little laminated card in my direction.
I sat up with interest. ‘What does it do?’ I asked.
‘I have no clue,’ Saffy replied. ‘I was just buying some toothpaste and shampoo and the girl at the counter asked me if I wanted to be a member, so I said yes.’
‘Did she say what the benefits are?’
‘She didn’t know either. She said the programme wasn’t going to launch for another couple of months.’
I eyed all the bags on the floor and wondered aloud how much toothpaste and shampoo Saffy had bought.
'Well, that’s the thing. I got so excited about my new card that I figured I might as well get more things while I was there.’
‘You get points with this card?’
‘I have no idea!’ Saffy repeated. ‘The girl didn’t know either, but we both figured it couldn’t hurt to start racking up the Mustafa dollars. Otherwise, what’s the point of a loyalty card?’
‘That’s what they’re called? Mustafa dollars?’
‘No, it’s what I’m calling them. They better be worth something,’ Saffy threatened, ‘otherwise I’ve just bought a lot of flavoured condoms for no reason!’
So here’s the thing. It’s mindless consumer behaviour like this that makes me love this country. People just willy-nilly giving away their private NRIC number to complete strangers in the vague hope that the little piece of plastic they’re given in exchange might one day get them something. Like a packet of sweets, or maybe a desk calendar, if they’re lucky.
When she heard about Saffy’s retail adventure in Little India, Amanda announced that it was women like Saffy that were causing the country’s falling birth rate. Saffy said privately that this was really rich coming from someone who had just dropped $13,000 on a stupid handbag that didn’t even have a zip. And, of course, first thing tomorrow, I’m heading out to Mustafa to get my card.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The Periodic Table
People are always asking me what it’s like living with two girls. I always reply that it’s like being stuck in an endless episode of ‘Sex and the City’. But without the glamourous clothes, two inch Manolo Blahniks, sound-track and neat half-hour resolution of issues.
And it’s unbearable when it’s that time of the month.
When I was growing up, my mother would refer to the occasion as ‘the friend’. As in, “I think my friend is coming.” This was usually the hint for my father to suddenly have late night conference calls in the office and early breakfast meetings the next morning. As he once explained to my brother and me, “It’s not a good time to be around your mother when her friend visits.” To which my sister Michelle mumbled that when it came to Mother, it’s never a good time.
For the first two days, she would retreat to her bedroom in a foul temper with a hot-water bottle and every so often, she would send a message through the maid to one of us to pop down to the chemist to buy more pain-killers. Occasionally, we’d hear sharp yelps from behind closed doors and this would usually be accompanied by the sound of our father’s retreating footsteps as he scurried for the front door.
And when Mother eventually emerged from her room, looking pale and wan, we’d eye her cautiously, our emotions ranging between concern and barely retrained panic.
And you always knew that her ‘friend’ had packed up and left the house when she weakly lifted the phone to call Auntie Wai-ling to find out when the next mah-jong session was.
The funny thing was that I never heard any other woman use the term ‘my friend’ till I moved into the little flat with Saffy and Amanda and my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch.
One morning, not long after we moved in together, Amanda drifted out of her room, her hair limp and listless and her normally bright skin a shade duller. “Oh God,” she moaned as she slumped into the dining table chair. “I think my friend is here!”
I froze.
See, here’s the thing. It’s one thing to agree to live with two girls, but it’s quite another for them to become so comfortable with you that they’re able to discuss freely with you – at the dining table, no less – their assorted bodily functions. I mean, what’s next? Communal waxing sessions?
So, there and then, I decided to nip the problem in the bud. “We don’t have a guest-room,” I muttered as I got up and hurried into the kitchen with my cereal bowl.
Apparently, Amanda later said to Saffy that they had just moved in with a Neanderthal. In turn, Saffy is reported to have replied, “Ok. I don’t really know you all that well, Amanda, so don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re going to call your period your friend, I’m going to have to seriously reassess our living arrangements.”
“But I hate the P-word!” protested Amanda, effortlessly betraying her convent school education. “It’s such a terrible word!”
Saffy’s bosom puffed up. “And ‘friend’ is better? Are you serious? There’s nothing friendly about something that comes every month and gives you crippling cramps, nausea and migraines! If men got periods, they would have killed themselves and the human race would have died out in the Jurassic period!”
Amanda later said that the fiery look in Saffy’s eyes prevented her from pointing out that humans were actually not around during the Jurassic period.
What followed was a curious four months as the two negotiated a mutually acceptable term to apply to what I still referred to everyone as “that time of the month”.
“Aiyoh, why they so cheem, one?” Sharyn complained. “By right is called menses, right?”
“Oh really, Sharyn,” I said urgently. “Don’t talk to me about this. Please.”
One night, I came home to find the girls sitting triumphantly on the sofa while toasting each other with a glass of champagne. “We’ve found a mutually acceptable term for our periods!” Saffy crooned.
I grunted, already making a beeline for my room. “And meanwhile, we’re in a war against terror. But that’s a small side show compared to this summit!”
Saffy giggled. “Oh really, don’t be such a baby!”
“It’s just too much information!” I pleaded.
Amanda sniffed. “We’re going to tell you anyway. As of now, our former friend is called our moon cycle!”
Saffy added, “It celebrates our woman-hood.”
I couldn’t help but think that they never had this kind of dialogue on ‘Sex and the City’. If they had, the show would probably have died out with the dinosaurs.
And it’s unbearable when it’s that time of the month.
When I was growing up, my mother would refer to the occasion as ‘the friend’. As in, “I think my friend is coming.” This was usually the hint for my father to suddenly have late night conference calls in the office and early breakfast meetings the next morning. As he once explained to my brother and me, “It’s not a good time to be around your mother when her friend visits.” To which my sister Michelle mumbled that when it came to Mother, it’s never a good time.
For the first two days, she would retreat to her bedroom in a foul temper with a hot-water bottle and every so often, she would send a message through the maid to one of us to pop down to the chemist to buy more pain-killers. Occasionally, we’d hear sharp yelps from behind closed doors and this would usually be accompanied by the sound of our father’s retreating footsteps as he scurried for the front door.
And when Mother eventually emerged from her room, looking pale and wan, we’d eye her cautiously, our emotions ranging between concern and barely retrained panic.
And you always knew that her ‘friend’ had packed up and left the house when she weakly lifted the phone to call Auntie Wai-ling to find out when the next mah-jong session was.
The funny thing was that I never heard any other woman use the term ‘my friend’ till I moved into the little flat with Saffy and Amanda and my beloved adopted mongrel dog Pooch.
One morning, not long after we moved in together, Amanda drifted out of her room, her hair limp and listless and her normally bright skin a shade duller. “Oh God,” she moaned as she slumped into the dining table chair. “I think my friend is here!”
I froze.
See, here’s the thing. It’s one thing to agree to live with two girls, but it’s quite another for them to become so comfortable with you that they’re able to discuss freely with you – at the dining table, no less – their assorted bodily functions. I mean, what’s next? Communal waxing sessions?
So, there and then, I decided to nip the problem in the bud. “We don’t have a guest-room,” I muttered as I got up and hurried into the kitchen with my cereal bowl.
Apparently, Amanda later said to Saffy that they had just moved in with a Neanderthal. In turn, Saffy is reported to have replied, “Ok. I don’t really know you all that well, Amanda, so don’t take this the wrong way, but if you’re going to call your period your friend, I’m going to have to seriously reassess our living arrangements.”
“But I hate the P-word!” protested Amanda, effortlessly betraying her convent school education. “It’s such a terrible word!”
Saffy’s bosom puffed up. “And ‘friend’ is better? Are you serious? There’s nothing friendly about something that comes every month and gives you crippling cramps, nausea and migraines! If men got periods, they would have killed themselves and the human race would have died out in the Jurassic period!”
Amanda later said that the fiery look in Saffy’s eyes prevented her from pointing out that humans were actually not around during the Jurassic period.
What followed was a curious four months as the two negotiated a mutually acceptable term to apply to what I still referred to everyone as “that time of the month”.
“Aiyoh, why they so cheem, one?” Sharyn complained. “By right is called menses, right?”
“Oh really, Sharyn,” I said urgently. “Don’t talk to me about this. Please.”
One night, I came home to find the girls sitting triumphantly on the sofa while toasting each other with a glass of champagne. “We’ve found a mutually acceptable term for our periods!” Saffy crooned.
I grunted, already making a beeline for my room. “And meanwhile, we’re in a war against terror. But that’s a small side show compared to this summit!”
Saffy giggled. “Oh really, don’t be such a baby!”
“It’s just too much information!” I pleaded.
Amanda sniffed. “We’re going to tell you anyway. As of now, our former friend is called our moon cycle!”
Saffy added, “It celebrates our woman-hood.”
I couldn’t help but think that they never had this kind of dialogue on ‘Sex and the City’. If they had, the show would probably have died out with the dinosaurs.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
My Word
I had a revelation the other day. And it took place in, of all places, my bathroom.
Imagine the scene…There I was in a hot, steaming bath, frothy with bubbles and squeezing a squeaking yellow rubber duck that belonged to my flatmate Amanda, all the while happily singing a show stopping, but admittedly off-key rendition of Barry White’s ‘You’re My First, My Last, My Everything’.
There is something about the comfort and sanctuary of lying in a tub of hot scented water, the steam fogging the bathroom and the world’s worries put on hold for a while. (Though I have to admit I stopped taking baths for a couple of years after watching Michelle Pfeiffer in ‘What Lies Beneath’.)
Anyway, in a bath, the muscles loosen up and the body relaxes. All is blissful. Bubbly. Comforting. And funny things happen to the brain. It begins opening up neural paths that are usually shut down for permanent repairs and maintenance. Must be the heat or something. Not surprisingly, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes came up with the theory for buoyancy while he was soaking in the bath.
And that afternoon, in my bath, I had my Archimedes moment. One moment I was crooning, ‘My kind of wonderful, that’s what you are…I know, there’s only…only one like you…There’s no way they could have made two…’ and the next, it occurred to me – completely out of the blue – that I had a favourite word.
Out of all the hundreds of thousands of words I knew, I realized that there was one word that I loved above all. A word that, like a bowl of laksa, made me happy and forced my facial muscles into a smile.
“Celebration?” my flatmate Saffy said later that night at our dining table. “Why is that your favourite word?”
“It makes me happy,” I said. “Celebration. See, I’m smiling!”
“That’s a nice word,” our other flatmate Amanda said as she speared her pasta. “I actually think it reflects your personality.”
I was pleased. “Really? You think I have a celebratory personality?”
“Well, you wouldn’t know it when you wake up in the morning,” Amanda mused, “but I think there’s something to this. Hmm, I wonder what mine is. Let me think about it in the bath. I hope you cleaned up after yourself,” she added as she got up from the table and disappeared into our bathroom.
“What’s my favourite word?” Saffy wondered to the world at large. “Stupid? I use ‘stupid’ a lot. Dumb-ass? Is that two words? Does that qualify? Crap! Ooh, ‘crap’! Maybe that’s my favourite word? But it’s not very glamourous, is it?”
When Amanda eventually emerged from the bathroom, dense steam billowing out before her as she emerged like Tina Turner at a concert, she had narrowed her list to two candidates. “I’m thinking it’s a toss-up between Chanel and Dior!” she said dreamily. “I always get such a warm fuzzy feeling when I utter those names.”
“Ooh, that’s so you, Manda!” Saffy cooed. “My turn in the bathroom!”
The subject of our favourite words fully occupied our attention for days after. And to her eternal distress, despite taking multiple baths, Saffy was unable to come up with a meaningful selection. “All the words on my list are hateful words!” she complained, her impressive bosom trembling with self-loathing. “Strangle. Pain. Diet. Spit. I love the sound of them, but I mean, these are not words that I think should reflect my personality, do you? How come you get to pick ‘celebration’? It’s so unfair!” she moaned.
“Bitch!” said my friend Barney Chen immediately when I asked him for his favourite word.
I coughed into my coffee. “That’s your favourite word?”
“Yes,” Barney said firmly, shifting his muscled bulk on the chair and winking at the cute Toast waiter. “It’s very moi.”
“Uh huh, interesting.”
“Mine, hah?” My office manager Sharyn pursed her lips and concentrated. “My favourite word. Doh-no, leh! How about ‘Increment’? Oh, no, no! I like ‘Bonus’!” You could practically see the capitals glowing in the air.
“Sleep,” said my friend Karl, whose wife has just given birth to twins. “It’s definitely ‘sleep’.”
And Amanda was right. The emotional beam of the words that my friends chose as their favourite bounced off their personalities, shining a bright light through the polite, public fa̤ade Рto uncover what lay beneath. With one word, a tiny capsule of compressed images of that person spun off into the world.
Meanwhile, Saffy continues to struggle with her selection. “I like the sound of ‘thin’,” she said worriedly this morning. “What do you think that means? I think I need another bath!” she decided and wandered off mumbling. “Fat? Food? How about food? Ooh, I hate this game! Or things related to food…Cheese! No…”
Imagine the scene…There I was in a hot, steaming bath, frothy with bubbles and squeezing a squeaking yellow rubber duck that belonged to my flatmate Amanda, all the while happily singing a show stopping, but admittedly off-key rendition of Barry White’s ‘You’re My First, My Last, My Everything’.
There is something about the comfort and sanctuary of lying in a tub of hot scented water, the steam fogging the bathroom and the world’s worries put on hold for a while. (Though I have to admit I stopped taking baths for a couple of years after watching Michelle Pfeiffer in ‘What Lies Beneath’.)
Anyway, in a bath, the muscles loosen up and the body relaxes. All is blissful. Bubbly. Comforting. And funny things happen to the brain. It begins opening up neural paths that are usually shut down for permanent repairs and maintenance. Must be the heat or something. Not surprisingly, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes came up with the theory for buoyancy while he was soaking in the bath.
And that afternoon, in my bath, I had my Archimedes moment. One moment I was crooning, ‘My kind of wonderful, that’s what you are…I know, there’s only…only one like you…There’s no way they could have made two…’ and the next, it occurred to me – completely out of the blue – that I had a favourite word.
Out of all the hundreds of thousands of words I knew, I realized that there was one word that I loved above all. A word that, like a bowl of laksa, made me happy and forced my facial muscles into a smile.
“Celebration?” my flatmate Saffy said later that night at our dining table. “Why is that your favourite word?”
“It makes me happy,” I said. “Celebration. See, I’m smiling!”
“That’s a nice word,” our other flatmate Amanda said as she speared her pasta. “I actually think it reflects your personality.”
I was pleased. “Really? You think I have a celebratory personality?”
“Well, you wouldn’t know it when you wake up in the morning,” Amanda mused, “but I think there’s something to this. Hmm, I wonder what mine is. Let me think about it in the bath. I hope you cleaned up after yourself,” she added as she got up from the table and disappeared into our bathroom.
“What’s my favourite word?” Saffy wondered to the world at large. “Stupid? I use ‘stupid’ a lot. Dumb-ass? Is that two words? Does that qualify? Crap! Ooh, ‘crap’! Maybe that’s my favourite word? But it’s not very glamourous, is it?”
When Amanda eventually emerged from the bathroom, dense steam billowing out before her as she emerged like Tina Turner at a concert, she had narrowed her list to two candidates. “I’m thinking it’s a toss-up between Chanel and Dior!” she said dreamily. “I always get such a warm fuzzy feeling when I utter those names.”
“Ooh, that’s so you, Manda!” Saffy cooed. “My turn in the bathroom!”
The subject of our favourite words fully occupied our attention for days after. And to her eternal distress, despite taking multiple baths, Saffy was unable to come up with a meaningful selection. “All the words on my list are hateful words!” she complained, her impressive bosom trembling with self-loathing. “Strangle. Pain. Diet. Spit. I love the sound of them, but I mean, these are not words that I think should reflect my personality, do you? How come you get to pick ‘celebration’? It’s so unfair!” she moaned.
“Bitch!” said my friend Barney Chen immediately when I asked him for his favourite word.
I coughed into my coffee. “That’s your favourite word?”
“Yes,” Barney said firmly, shifting his muscled bulk on the chair and winking at the cute Toast waiter. “It’s very moi.”
“Uh huh, interesting.”
“Mine, hah?” My office manager Sharyn pursed her lips and concentrated. “My favourite word. Doh-no, leh! How about ‘Increment’? Oh, no, no! I like ‘Bonus’!” You could practically see the capitals glowing in the air.
“Sleep,” said my friend Karl, whose wife has just given birth to twins. “It’s definitely ‘sleep’.”
And Amanda was right. The emotional beam of the words that my friends chose as their favourite bounced off their personalities, shining a bright light through the polite, public fa̤ade Рto uncover what lay beneath. With one word, a tiny capsule of compressed images of that person spun off into the world.
Meanwhile, Saffy continues to struggle with her selection. “I like the sound of ‘thin’,” she said worriedly this morning. “What do you think that means? I think I need another bath!” she decided and wandered off mumbling. “Fat? Food? How about food? Ooh, I hate this game! Or things related to food…Cheese! No…”
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Die die must try
I like to think of myself as a fairly calm guy. Theoretically, nothing ruffles me. There are, of course, exceptions to this general rule. Several, in fact. Oh, alright, many things annoy me. But other than that, I’m generally fairly calm.
Since we’re on the topic though, can I just say that one of the things that really bugs me is those dumb-ass ‘1000 Places to See Before You Die’ books?
First of all, who has time to visit 1000 places before they die? The unemployed sure don’t. They’re too busy trying to feed a family on a dollar. And I know for a fact that Donald Trump doesn’t. He’s running a real estate empire, flying around in his helicopter and firing people.
So that leaves people like me. And let me tell you that these days, I don’t have time to pee.
“I’m sure they don’t mean it literally,” Amanda said the other day at Borders as she tried to hide behind her copy of Vogue while I furiously waved a copy of ‘1000 Places to See Before You Die’ at her.
“It’s ridiculous!” I said, flipping through the book. “Look at this…the Ring Road in Iceland? A country full of bankrupt banks! Who goes there?”
“Uhm, I hear it’s quite pretty,” Amanda said vaguely.
“And look at this,” I went on. “Doubtful Sound in New Zealand! Seriously, would you go anywhere that had ‘Doubtful’ as part of its name?”
Saffy says she’s with me on this one, but her beef is with books that are titled ‘1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ or ‘1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die’.
“Does anyone realize how expensive the whole exercise would be?” she snapped recently. “At $20 per album, 1000 albums is $20,000, and just like that, we’re looking at a down-payment for a retirement village!”
“I don’t know why you two are getting so upset,” Amanda said. “They’re just gimmicky books. No one takes them seriously.”
Saffy took a deep breath and puffed up. “Yes, but these books are deliberately written to make me look dumb! And that’s unacceptable. They always include obscure things on those lists that no one has ever heard of. If I wanted to listen to a Nigerian acapella group, I sure wouldn’t wait for you to write a book to tell me about it! I want to listen to Spice Girls and are any of their fabulous albums on the list? No, but Rachmani-bloody-koff is, though!” Her bosom inflated dangerously at the musical slight to Posh and Baby.
And there you have it. The problem with these books is the assumption that someone else knows better than we do about what we like and what we should read, watch and listen to. And the fact that there are apparently a thousand books, movies and albums that we’ve not heard of only serves to make us feel guilty.
Saffy, for one, is not having any of it. As she points out, if she’d listened to all those dumb-asses who told her that ‘Titanic’ was a crap movie, she would have missed out on what she insists is one of the most moving cinematic experiences of her life. “Though,” she recently conceded at a Harvard cocktail party which she attended as Amanda’s plus-one, “I probably should have listened to them about ‘Rocky Balboa’, but that’s so not the point!”
Amanda says it’s a good thing that Saffy has such an incredibly high self-esteem that she can feel intellectually superior even in a room full of Harvard professors.
“I don’t know what the big deal about Harvard is,” Saffy sniffed recently, and noticing Amanda’s hurt look, she hurriedly added, “But not you, Amanda! Not you! You’re a big deal!”
“Shut up, Saffy!”
The other day, Saffy rang me in a state of excitement. “I’ve got a great idea that will make us an obscene pile of money!” She drew in an audible breath. “OK, we should write a book called ‘1000 Crappy Books You Should Not Bother Reading Before You Die’! Huh? What do you think? And then when we’re done, we can move onto movies and music! We’d have no problem getting material. There’s just so much junk out there!”
“It’s a catchy title,” Amanda later admitted. “But aren’t you afraid people may sue you for saying their work is crap?”
“Let them!” Saffy huffed. “It’ll be great publicity! Oooh, who knows, we might even end up on Oprah’s Book Club!”
And in spite of myself, I’m getting excited about the idea. Amanda thinks we’re nuts. Saffy says we’ll see who’s nuts when Oprah comes calling.
Since we’re on the topic though, can I just say that one of the things that really bugs me is those dumb-ass ‘1000 Places to See Before You Die’ books?
First of all, who has time to visit 1000 places before they die? The unemployed sure don’t. They’re too busy trying to feed a family on a dollar. And I know for a fact that Donald Trump doesn’t. He’s running a real estate empire, flying around in his helicopter and firing people.
So that leaves people like me. And let me tell you that these days, I don’t have time to pee.
“I’m sure they don’t mean it literally,” Amanda said the other day at Borders as she tried to hide behind her copy of Vogue while I furiously waved a copy of ‘1000 Places to See Before You Die’ at her.
“It’s ridiculous!” I said, flipping through the book. “Look at this…the Ring Road in Iceland? A country full of bankrupt banks! Who goes there?”
“Uhm, I hear it’s quite pretty,” Amanda said vaguely.
“And look at this,” I went on. “Doubtful Sound in New Zealand! Seriously, would you go anywhere that had ‘Doubtful’ as part of its name?”
Saffy says she’s with me on this one, but her beef is with books that are titled ‘1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die’ or ‘1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die’.
“Does anyone realize how expensive the whole exercise would be?” she snapped recently. “At $20 per album, 1000 albums is $20,000, and just like that, we’re looking at a down-payment for a retirement village!”
“I don’t know why you two are getting so upset,” Amanda said. “They’re just gimmicky books. No one takes them seriously.”
Saffy took a deep breath and puffed up. “Yes, but these books are deliberately written to make me look dumb! And that’s unacceptable. They always include obscure things on those lists that no one has ever heard of. If I wanted to listen to a Nigerian acapella group, I sure wouldn’t wait for you to write a book to tell me about it! I want to listen to Spice Girls and are any of their fabulous albums on the list? No, but Rachmani-bloody-koff is, though!” Her bosom inflated dangerously at the musical slight to Posh and Baby.
And there you have it. The problem with these books is the assumption that someone else knows better than we do about what we like and what we should read, watch and listen to. And the fact that there are apparently a thousand books, movies and albums that we’ve not heard of only serves to make us feel guilty.
Saffy, for one, is not having any of it. As she points out, if she’d listened to all those dumb-asses who told her that ‘Titanic’ was a crap movie, she would have missed out on what she insists is one of the most moving cinematic experiences of her life. “Though,” she recently conceded at a Harvard cocktail party which she attended as Amanda’s plus-one, “I probably should have listened to them about ‘Rocky Balboa’, but that’s so not the point!”
Amanda says it’s a good thing that Saffy has such an incredibly high self-esteem that she can feel intellectually superior even in a room full of Harvard professors.
“I don’t know what the big deal about Harvard is,” Saffy sniffed recently, and noticing Amanda’s hurt look, she hurriedly added, “But not you, Amanda! Not you! You’re a big deal!”
“Shut up, Saffy!”
The other day, Saffy rang me in a state of excitement. “I’ve got a great idea that will make us an obscene pile of money!” She drew in an audible breath. “OK, we should write a book called ‘1000 Crappy Books You Should Not Bother Reading Before You Die’! Huh? What do you think? And then when we’re done, we can move onto movies and music! We’d have no problem getting material. There’s just so much junk out there!”
“It’s a catchy title,” Amanda later admitted. “But aren’t you afraid people may sue you for saying their work is crap?”
“Let them!” Saffy huffed. “It’ll be great publicity! Oooh, who knows, we might even end up on Oprah’s Book Club!”
And in spite of myself, I’m getting excited about the idea. Amanda thinks we’re nuts. Saffy says we’ll see who’s nuts when Oprah comes calling.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The Parent Trap
It’s hard to believe it now, but once upon a time, my parents were party animals. They loved dancing and every Saturday, they’d put on their dancing shoes and head out for a bit of fox-trot and two-step. And if they were feeling particularly energetic, they’d round up some friends and have dinner at the Tropicana.
These days, their idea of an exciting evening out is to watch an R-rated movie at the cinema. Sometimes, this involves a bit of blood and guts – they loved “300” – but who knew that my mother would enjoy “Saw” so much that she’s recently came home with the DVD box-set? And there was an anxious moment when my father thought his pace-maker had stopped right in the middle of “Ring” in the scene where that girl with all that hair rises out of the water.
When Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” came out a few years ago, my mother said to my father, “Let’s go watch this. I hear it’s very art-house and nostalgic.”
Apparently, all went well with the first third of the movie when the handsome group of terrorists was trooping all over Shanghai and Hong Kong, but then when the first of the sex scenes came on, Mother actually screamed.
“And not in a good way either,” my father later said to my sister. Michelle replied that it was thoughtless comments like that which explained why all his children had grown up with severe emotional issues.
“Aiyoh!” Mother moaned the next afternoon to her mahjong group. “You could see everything! Even Tony Leung’s pee-gu!”
“Eeee!” said my Auntie Wai-ling. “Are you sure or not? Pong! Where got such thing?”
“Ay, I must go watch this movie then. Worth my movie ticket!” said Auntie Ming.
“I’m telling you, it was disgusting!” Mother said firmly, with a delicious shiver. “Young people today just have no shame! Can you imagine having sex with someone you’re not married to, in front of a director and his rolling camera?”
There was a brief embarrassed silence when Mother suddenly realized that Auntie Kwai at the table had divorced her husband for precisely that reason, except in his case, he and his trollop of a secretary had been using a hand-held Sony-Cam – and according to reliable eye-witnesses of the movie, ie the mahjong group, the shaky picture quality left a lot to be desired.
“I really need to join your mother’s mahjong sessions,” Saffy said the other day.
“It sounds like so much fun!”
I grunted. “It’s a vicious group,” I said. “They’ve been playing for years and they know every secret there is to know about each other. They’re all best friends but they’re scared to leave the table to pee because the minute they’re out of the room, the remaining three will start bitching!”
“They look like such sweet old ladies,” Saffy said.
“I’m telling you, I’m surprised they’ve not developed any urinary tract infections!”
Then, a few days ago, I got a call from my mother. “Jason, dear,” she began. “Your father and I are in Switzerland, and we’re about to jump off a mountain. I don’t want you to worry, but just in case, this is where we’ve hidden the jewels…”
As I later complained to everyone on Facebook, the way my mother started the whole conversation, it sounded that she and Father were about to put in motion a double-suicide pact in a glamorous location. “I have aged 10 years!” I posted.
It turned out that my parents had recently joined an over-60 leisure group that did exciting, life-threatening things like parachuting and abseiling. And now, the group had jetted off to Interlakken in Switzerland where they got to jump off a sheer cliff and hang-glide around the lake. Just the thing for a man on his second pace-maker, my sister observed when I told her. “I hope she told you where they kept the wills!”
“She said that you only die once!” I reported.
“So what, now she Jane bloody Bond?” my sister said. You could tell she was getting agitated.
Amanda thinks my parents are heroic. “They’re living life to the full! When was the last time any of us did something like that?” she demanded. “I wake up, go to work, come home. I have the occasional date, but I spend most of my time watching ‘American Idol’. Meanwhile, your parents are diving off mountains! It’s inspirational, I tell you! We’re the old people! We should learn from your parents!”
Saffy looked doubtful. “Can’t just start with some ballroom dancing first?”
Me, I've got bigger fish to fry. I'm going to go dig up some family jewels from our garden.
These days, their idea of an exciting evening out is to watch an R-rated movie at the cinema. Sometimes, this involves a bit of blood and guts – they loved “300” – but who knew that my mother would enjoy “Saw” so much that she’s recently came home with the DVD box-set? And there was an anxious moment when my father thought his pace-maker had stopped right in the middle of “Ring” in the scene where that girl with all that hair rises out of the water.
When Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” came out a few years ago, my mother said to my father, “Let’s go watch this. I hear it’s very art-house and nostalgic.”
Apparently, all went well with the first third of the movie when the handsome group of terrorists was trooping all over Shanghai and Hong Kong, but then when the first of the sex scenes came on, Mother actually screamed.
“And not in a good way either,” my father later said to my sister. Michelle replied that it was thoughtless comments like that which explained why all his children had grown up with severe emotional issues.
“Aiyoh!” Mother moaned the next afternoon to her mahjong group. “You could see everything! Even Tony Leung’s pee-gu!”
“Eeee!” said my Auntie Wai-ling. “Are you sure or not? Pong! Where got such thing?”
“Ay, I must go watch this movie then. Worth my movie ticket!” said Auntie Ming.
“I’m telling you, it was disgusting!” Mother said firmly, with a delicious shiver. “Young people today just have no shame! Can you imagine having sex with someone you’re not married to, in front of a director and his rolling camera?”
There was a brief embarrassed silence when Mother suddenly realized that Auntie Kwai at the table had divorced her husband for precisely that reason, except in his case, he and his trollop of a secretary had been using a hand-held Sony-Cam – and according to reliable eye-witnesses of the movie, ie the mahjong group, the shaky picture quality left a lot to be desired.
“I really need to join your mother’s mahjong sessions,” Saffy said the other day.
“It sounds like so much fun!”
I grunted. “It’s a vicious group,” I said. “They’ve been playing for years and they know every secret there is to know about each other. They’re all best friends but they’re scared to leave the table to pee because the minute they’re out of the room, the remaining three will start bitching!”
“They look like such sweet old ladies,” Saffy said.
“I’m telling you, I’m surprised they’ve not developed any urinary tract infections!”
Then, a few days ago, I got a call from my mother. “Jason, dear,” she began. “Your father and I are in Switzerland, and we’re about to jump off a mountain. I don’t want you to worry, but just in case, this is where we’ve hidden the jewels…”
As I later complained to everyone on Facebook, the way my mother started the whole conversation, it sounded that she and Father were about to put in motion a double-suicide pact in a glamorous location. “I have aged 10 years!” I posted.
It turned out that my parents had recently joined an over-60 leisure group that did exciting, life-threatening things like parachuting and abseiling. And now, the group had jetted off to Interlakken in Switzerland where they got to jump off a sheer cliff and hang-glide around the lake. Just the thing for a man on his second pace-maker, my sister observed when I told her. “I hope she told you where they kept the wills!”
“She said that you only die once!” I reported.
“So what, now she Jane bloody Bond?” my sister said. You could tell she was getting agitated.
Amanda thinks my parents are heroic. “They’re living life to the full! When was the last time any of us did something like that?” she demanded. “I wake up, go to work, come home. I have the occasional date, but I spend most of my time watching ‘American Idol’. Meanwhile, your parents are diving off mountains! It’s inspirational, I tell you! We’re the old people! We should learn from your parents!”
Saffy looked doubtful. “Can’t just start with some ballroom dancing first?”
Me, I've got bigger fish to fry. I'm going to go dig up some family jewels from our garden.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Career prospects
Not to sound like my mother, but kids these days have it easy when it comes to their careers. They can be almost anything they want. When I was growing up, there were only three acceptable professions: lawyer, banker or doctor. And by doctor, my mother meant a real doctor. Not a dentist. And by banker, she meant a vice-president, not the guy sitting behind the teller looking bored as he shuffled money through the machine. If you deviated from that holy trinity, Mother would walk around the house for months clutching her heart and grimacing in pain.
“After all we’ve sacrificed for you, this is how you repay us!” she told my brother Jack after he said that he wanted to be architect. “You could at least become an engineer!” In the end, Jack became an art teacher and on the day he graduated, Mother cancelled her week’s mahjong sessions and took to bed with a splitting migraine.
How the world has changed since then. Today, little Alice can come home and announce that she wants to become a musician and immediately the parents have images of her CD at the top of the charts. Or if little Meng says he likes cars, daddy will start fantasizing about a career in F1.
It’s fascinating to imagine how our lives would have turned out if we’d had the same choice of careers while growing up. And at a party the other day, the topic came up between the seventh margarita and the fifth vodka shot.
“I thhhink I would have been a fash…uhm…fashion model,” my flatmate Amanda slurred modestly while sprawled on the sofa. “I have amazing cheekbones!”
“And you also have such lovely long legs!” Saffy said, her face turning pink.
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you! You really think I have nice legs?” Amanda stretched her legs and peered down. You could see several guys shift uncomfortably in their seats.
“They’re fabulous!” Saffy insisted.
“What would you be if you had your life all over again, Saffy?” someone asked.
“I’d probably be a princess!”
In the gathering quiet, faces screwed up as brains tried to connect with ears and eyes tried to focus.
Eventually, someone else said, “That’s not a profession, surely? Don’t you have to be born into a royal family or something?”
Saffy’s formidable bosom shifted. “Oh, that’s too much hard work. I would have just married a prince. I think Prince William is a total fox!”
“Losing his hair though,” said Amanda, regular reader of the gossip magazines.
“OK, his hunky brother Harry, then!”
There was a general rumble of agreement on that point and everyone agreed that Saffy would have made a terrific princess, if only her ridiculously short-sighted parents hadn’t insisted that she enrolled in a management course at university, and now she was forever stuck as a lowly paid, unappreciated HR manager.
“But it could have been worse,” Saffy said, sniffling into her gin and tonic. “I could have been a…a…oooh…what do you call those people?”
“Astronauts?” Amanda hazarded.
“Noooo…”
“Uhm, a gardener?” someone else guessed, as Saffy gestured wildly.
“No! No! Those people! You know! Those people who do that thing with their fingers!” Saffy made pinching motions.
“Oh, I know! I know! Prostitutes!” I shouted. And got hit several times with a sofa cushion.
This went on for a while before finally someone said, “Do you mean beauty therapists?”
Saffy beamed with pleasure. “That’s it! Beauty therapish…therapist! Oh, I would hate to do their job!”
“Vile!”Amanda agreed.
“Listen, if there is a more vile job out there, I can’t think of it!” Saffy declared. “Imagine spending your whole day pressing crap out of people’s noses and chins!” Saffy’s fingers pinched and squeezed the air as everyone at the party turned their minds towards a lifetime of pore extraction.
The next morning, the three of us sat at the dining table, feeling very sorry for ourselves and passing around the bottle of Panadol.
“Someone please stop the world from spinning!” Amanda moaned.
“I’m never touching alcohol ever again,” Saffy swore. “What’s wrong with you, Jason?”
I gingerly touched my face. “My nose hurts.”
Amanda leaned forward and peered. “Hmm, it’s a bit red. Especially around the chin and…”
You could feel the world spin to a stop as the events of the previous night caught up with our hangovers. Suddenly, I got flashes of Saffy’s face looming large over me and people laughing and cheering. Amanda frowned as she thought. Meanwhile, Saffy stared at me and then down at her fingers. Snapshots of memory slid treacherously into place.
We started screaming at the same time.
“After all we’ve sacrificed for you, this is how you repay us!” she told my brother Jack after he said that he wanted to be architect. “You could at least become an engineer!” In the end, Jack became an art teacher and on the day he graduated, Mother cancelled her week’s mahjong sessions and took to bed with a splitting migraine.
How the world has changed since then. Today, little Alice can come home and announce that she wants to become a musician and immediately the parents have images of her CD at the top of the charts. Or if little Meng says he likes cars, daddy will start fantasizing about a career in F1.
It’s fascinating to imagine how our lives would have turned out if we’d had the same choice of careers while growing up. And at a party the other day, the topic came up between the seventh margarita and the fifth vodka shot.
“I thhhink I would have been a fash…uhm…fashion model,” my flatmate Amanda slurred modestly while sprawled on the sofa. “I have amazing cheekbones!”
“And you also have such lovely long legs!” Saffy said, her face turning pink.
“Oh, that’s so sweet of you! You really think I have nice legs?” Amanda stretched her legs and peered down. You could see several guys shift uncomfortably in their seats.
“They’re fabulous!” Saffy insisted.
“What would you be if you had your life all over again, Saffy?” someone asked.
“I’d probably be a princess!”
In the gathering quiet, faces screwed up as brains tried to connect with ears and eyes tried to focus.
Eventually, someone else said, “That’s not a profession, surely? Don’t you have to be born into a royal family or something?”
Saffy’s formidable bosom shifted. “Oh, that’s too much hard work. I would have just married a prince. I think Prince William is a total fox!”
“Losing his hair though,” said Amanda, regular reader of the gossip magazines.
“OK, his hunky brother Harry, then!”
There was a general rumble of agreement on that point and everyone agreed that Saffy would have made a terrific princess, if only her ridiculously short-sighted parents hadn’t insisted that she enrolled in a management course at university, and now she was forever stuck as a lowly paid, unappreciated HR manager.
“But it could have been worse,” Saffy said, sniffling into her gin and tonic. “I could have been a…a…oooh…what do you call those people?”
“Astronauts?” Amanda hazarded.
“Noooo…”
“Uhm, a gardener?” someone else guessed, as Saffy gestured wildly.
“No! No! Those people! You know! Those people who do that thing with their fingers!” Saffy made pinching motions.
“Oh, I know! I know! Prostitutes!” I shouted. And got hit several times with a sofa cushion.
This went on for a while before finally someone said, “Do you mean beauty therapists?”
Saffy beamed with pleasure. “That’s it! Beauty therapish…therapist! Oh, I would hate to do their job!”
“Vile!”Amanda agreed.
“Listen, if there is a more vile job out there, I can’t think of it!” Saffy declared. “Imagine spending your whole day pressing crap out of people’s noses and chins!” Saffy’s fingers pinched and squeezed the air as everyone at the party turned their minds towards a lifetime of pore extraction.
The next morning, the three of us sat at the dining table, feeling very sorry for ourselves and passing around the bottle of Panadol.
“Someone please stop the world from spinning!” Amanda moaned.
“I’m never touching alcohol ever again,” Saffy swore. “What’s wrong with you, Jason?”
I gingerly touched my face. “My nose hurts.”
Amanda leaned forward and peered. “Hmm, it’s a bit red. Especially around the chin and…”
You could feel the world spin to a stop as the events of the previous night caught up with our hangovers. Suddenly, I got flashes of Saffy’s face looming large over me and people laughing and cheering. Amanda frowned as she thought. Meanwhile, Saffy stared at me and then down at her fingers. Snapshots of memory slid treacherously into place.
We started screaming at the same time.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Lo Tech
It’s a little known fact that while I have the memory of an elephant for song lyrics (who else on this planet can sing flawlessly the first two verses of the Ewok Celebration Song?*), when it comes to technology, I might as well still be beating a jungle drum. You could send me off to a one week boot-camp on how to download an iTune, but at the end of the week, I’ll be back to sticking a CD into the player.
Saffy, on the other hand, is a freak of nature. This is the girl who once got lost for half an hour in Raffles Place MRT station (“Why are there so many levels in this place!” she screamed at me on the handphone) but put her in front of a machine, and she’s Rain Man. When Amanda’s laptop suddenly went blank, Saffy tapped a few buttons, keyed in a string of code, rebooted and all was well again. If an alien space-ship ever crash landed on Earth, she could probably repair, and then fly it back home while filing her nails.
“I don’t know how I do it,” Saffy said recently when she fixed our aging desk top computer. “It must be sheer natural talent. Now if only I could apply those skills to finding me a husband!”
Meanwhile, I’ve got my eye on the iPhone. Everyone I know has one. Even Ah Chuan, our fierce, semi-literate cleaning lady has one. In between mopping our floors, she can be seen busy flipping screens with her callused fingers. For the longest time, we wondered what she was doing until one day Amanda plucked up the courage to ask her.
“Apparently, she’s checking the stock market!” she reported that night.
“She owns shares?” I asked.
“Seems that way. And she says she’s making a killing, especially on her pharmaceuticals.”
“We pay her enough to own shares?” Saffy asked, looking thoroughly dissatisfied at Life’s unequal distribution of wealth.
The point is, we seem to be the only ones on the planet without an iPhone. But for different reasons. Amanda just got a phone from Prada and is reluctant to, in her words, trade down. Saffy says she doesn’t have two cents to rub together, and I, of course, am afraid that I won’t even know how to open the box in which the phone comes.
And I just know that the minute I fork over a year’s salary to buy the phone and then spent literally weeks learning how to turn it on, a new model will come out on the market.
And now, of course, there’s the Kindle. Everyone is talking about it. I’ve seen a few people on the MRT reading on it. And I love that it can hold thousands of books. Imagine going on holiday and just packing that thin machine instead of my usual pile of magazines and novels.
A few days ago, I came home to find Ah Chuan sitting at the dining table surrounded by mops and buckets of detergent.
“I’m not slacking, I’m resting!” she screamed at me the minute I walked in. “It’s incredible how you young people are so untidy and dirty!”
“I think you’re talking about Saffy,” I replied coolly in a combination of fractured Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka. “I’m very clean and tidy. It’s practically a sickness!”
“You three are my weirdest employers! It’s a good thing I like you!” Ah Chuan shouted. “Do you want me to fix you lunch? I was just playing with my new toy!”
Which was when I noticed that our $10 an hour cleaning lady was fiddling with the latest version of the Kindle.
“She’s got a Kindle?” Amanda asked incredulously that night.
“Apparently, she’s learning English on it.”
“My God, how much are we paying that woman?” Saffy huffed.
“It’s just so unfair,” I complained, “that I can walk into any room and immediately, the tech quotient in the room drops by 75 points!”
“These days when I walk into a room, men just turn away,” Saffy said morosely. “What’s that all about?”
Amanda thinks we should just buck up and confront our fears. “It’s a phone, not the Space Shuttle!” she said firmly to me. And to Saffy, she said, “Men are just animals with a dumb-stick between their legs!”
Saffy blinked. You could tell her brain was turning.
I said, “Huh.”
Yesterday, Saffy asked John from HR out on a date. Meanwhile, here I am standing in front of the Apple store. I’m trying to be brave. And very softly, I’m humming the Ewok Celebration Song.
* If anyone is interested, this is the link to the Ewok Celebration Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUWk1WBfDP8
Saffy, on the other hand, is a freak of nature. This is the girl who once got lost for half an hour in Raffles Place MRT station (“Why are there so many levels in this place!” she screamed at me on the handphone) but put her in front of a machine, and she’s Rain Man. When Amanda’s laptop suddenly went blank, Saffy tapped a few buttons, keyed in a string of code, rebooted and all was well again. If an alien space-ship ever crash landed on Earth, she could probably repair, and then fly it back home while filing her nails.
“I don’t know how I do it,” Saffy said recently when she fixed our aging desk top computer. “It must be sheer natural talent. Now if only I could apply those skills to finding me a husband!”
Meanwhile, I’ve got my eye on the iPhone. Everyone I know has one. Even Ah Chuan, our fierce, semi-literate cleaning lady has one. In between mopping our floors, she can be seen busy flipping screens with her callused fingers. For the longest time, we wondered what she was doing until one day Amanda plucked up the courage to ask her.
“Apparently, she’s checking the stock market!” she reported that night.
“She owns shares?” I asked.
“Seems that way. And she says she’s making a killing, especially on her pharmaceuticals.”
“We pay her enough to own shares?” Saffy asked, looking thoroughly dissatisfied at Life’s unequal distribution of wealth.
The point is, we seem to be the only ones on the planet without an iPhone. But for different reasons. Amanda just got a phone from Prada and is reluctant to, in her words, trade down. Saffy says she doesn’t have two cents to rub together, and I, of course, am afraid that I won’t even know how to open the box in which the phone comes.
And I just know that the minute I fork over a year’s salary to buy the phone and then spent literally weeks learning how to turn it on, a new model will come out on the market.
And now, of course, there’s the Kindle. Everyone is talking about it. I’ve seen a few people on the MRT reading on it. And I love that it can hold thousands of books. Imagine going on holiday and just packing that thin machine instead of my usual pile of magazines and novels.
A few days ago, I came home to find Ah Chuan sitting at the dining table surrounded by mops and buckets of detergent.
“I’m not slacking, I’m resting!” she screamed at me the minute I walked in. “It’s incredible how you young people are so untidy and dirty!”
“I think you’re talking about Saffy,” I replied coolly in a combination of fractured Cantonese, Mandarin and Hakka. “I’m very clean and tidy. It’s practically a sickness!”
“You three are my weirdest employers! It’s a good thing I like you!” Ah Chuan shouted. “Do you want me to fix you lunch? I was just playing with my new toy!”
Which was when I noticed that our $10 an hour cleaning lady was fiddling with the latest version of the Kindle.
“She’s got a Kindle?” Amanda asked incredulously that night.
“Apparently, she’s learning English on it.”
“My God, how much are we paying that woman?” Saffy huffed.
“It’s just so unfair,” I complained, “that I can walk into any room and immediately, the tech quotient in the room drops by 75 points!”
“These days when I walk into a room, men just turn away,” Saffy said morosely. “What’s that all about?”
Amanda thinks we should just buck up and confront our fears. “It’s a phone, not the Space Shuttle!” she said firmly to me. And to Saffy, she said, “Men are just animals with a dumb-stick between their legs!”
Saffy blinked. You could tell her brain was turning.
I said, “Huh.”
Yesterday, Saffy asked John from HR out on a date. Meanwhile, here I am standing in front of the Apple store. I’m trying to be brave. And very softly, I’m humming the Ewok Celebration Song.
* If anyone is interested, this is the link to the Ewok Celebration Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUWk1WBfDP8
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Idol Worship
I don't care what anyone says, but American Idol rocks! If you're having a bad day or feeling sorry for yourself, you just need to watch the auditions. I swear, there's nothing like a good laugh at other people's delusions to put your own problems into perspective.
Venus Trap
The other day, our friend Mavis threw a housewarming party in Holland Village and invited us along.
“Just bring a bottle of wine and nothing else!” she commanded. “I have too many things as it is. I don’t need more stuff.”
Saffy was perplexed, unable to conceive of anyone who would say ‘No’ to a free present. “I love stuff,” she said firmly. “If any of you ever feel the need to give me stuff, don’t hesitate. Now, Amanda, what are you wearing to this party?”
By the time we showed up on the day, the party was in full swing. The lighting was flatteringly low. The balcony doors were swung open to the cool evening. The guests were a glamorous mix of long haired beauties, cool looking nerds and buff models. Meanwhile, the dining table was laden with bottles of tequila, gin, wines and vast bowls of corn chips.
“This girl knows how to throw a party,” Amanda said approvingly, and immediately caught the eye of a guy on the far side of the room who looked like he’d just stepped off the runway.
Saffy clung to my arm. “Whatever you do, don’t let me near those corn chips!” she pleaded. “You know what I’m like. I can’t stop at just one!”
I pulled away. “You’re on your own. I just spotted booze.”
A few hours later, I found myself sitting on my own, one hand on a glass and the other clutching a bottle of gin. And at the other end of the table, Saffy was foraging around the bottom of a bowl of corn chips while moaning, “Oh my God. I can’t believe I just add this whole bowl! Oh my God!”
And that was when Amanda materialized out of the gloom. Saffy’s antennae for drama, never offline even when she was in a state of carb, fat and salt-induced shock, sat up. “What’s the matter? You look like you just watched the growing old scene in ‘Up’!”
“Nothing,” Amanda whispered as she looked helplessly around the table for a clean cup. And the tears started to flow in great fat drops. Saffy carefully pushed the bowl of corn chips aside and went to Amanda, gently pulling her outside the apartment where we sat on the stairs and waited for the tears to stop.
It turned out that some of the girls at the party had made rather disparaging comments about Amanda. Apparently, no one had bothered to be discrete. “SPG” and a word that rhymed with “switch” had been uttered.
Saffy’s formidable bosom inflated to a dangerous volume as she struggled to get up. “Which ones? Show me! Those fat cows. Someone is going to be pushed off a balcony tonight! No, don’t try to stop me! Let go of me! Seriously, let go! My God, Amanda, how did you get to be so freakishly strong?”
As I later said to Karl over a beer at our local bar, if there’s one thing Saffy is really good at, it’s her uncanny ability to muscle her way into any good drama and seize the spotlight.
“But what did Amanda do though?” asked Karl who’s always had a crush on her.
“She’s beautiful,” I said flatly. “That’s all she did. This happens all the time. She just has to show up at a party and every woman in that room will immediately start to hate her just a little. And if they have a husband or a boyfriend, they’ll make sure she doesn’t get beyond ‘Hello’. And if she talks to a guy is single and unattached, they’ll hate her even more.”
Karl looked shocked. “But, but…that’s just like…”
“That’s just like high school,” I finished. “And the fact that she’s totally unaware of her own beauty makes other women hate her just that little bit more.”
“Huh.” Karl peered into his beer. “I had no idea. I’m just trying to think now what happens when a good looking guy walks into a room.”
“I think you’d just feel a little bit of envy and then drink some more beer. Guys aren’t very complicated that way. Or so I’m told.”
What I didn’t tell Karl was that after Saffy had calmed down at Mavis’s party, she’d gone back in and identified the mean girls. Then she went downstairs to a payphone and called the police and told them there were illegal prostitutes in Mavis’s flat. She gave very precise descriptions of the girls. We left the party just as the first police car pulled up.
Amanda says she hopes she never falls out with Saffy. I’m just glad I’m not a woman.
“Just bring a bottle of wine and nothing else!” she commanded. “I have too many things as it is. I don’t need more stuff.”
Saffy was perplexed, unable to conceive of anyone who would say ‘No’ to a free present. “I love stuff,” she said firmly. “If any of you ever feel the need to give me stuff, don’t hesitate. Now, Amanda, what are you wearing to this party?”
By the time we showed up on the day, the party was in full swing. The lighting was flatteringly low. The balcony doors were swung open to the cool evening. The guests were a glamorous mix of long haired beauties, cool looking nerds and buff models. Meanwhile, the dining table was laden with bottles of tequila, gin, wines and vast bowls of corn chips.
“This girl knows how to throw a party,” Amanda said approvingly, and immediately caught the eye of a guy on the far side of the room who looked like he’d just stepped off the runway.
Saffy clung to my arm. “Whatever you do, don’t let me near those corn chips!” she pleaded. “You know what I’m like. I can’t stop at just one!”
I pulled away. “You’re on your own. I just spotted booze.”
A few hours later, I found myself sitting on my own, one hand on a glass and the other clutching a bottle of gin. And at the other end of the table, Saffy was foraging around the bottom of a bowl of corn chips while moaning, “Oh my God. I can’t believe I just add this whole bowl! Oh my God!”
And that was when Amanda materialized out of the gloom. Saffy’s antennae for drama, never offline even when she was in a state of carb, fat and salt-induced shock, sat up. “What’s the matter? You look like you just watched the growing old scene in ‘Up’!”
“Nothing,” Amanda whispered as she looked helplessly around the table for a clean cup. And the tears started to flow in great fat drops. Saffy carefully pushed the bowl of corn chips aside and went to Amanda, gently pulling her outside the apartment where we sat on the stairs and waited for the tears to stop.
It turned out that some of the girls at the party had made rather disparaging comments about Amanda. Apparently, no one had bothered to be discrete. “SPG” and a word that rhymed with “switch” had been uttered.
Saffy’s formidable bosom inflated to a dangerous volume as she struggled to get up. “Which ones? Show me! Those fat cows. Someone is going to be pushed off a balcony tonight! No, don’t try to stop me! Let go of me! Seriously, let go! My God, Amanda, how did you get to be so freakishly strong?”
As I later said to Karl over a beer at our local bar, if there’s one thing Saffy is really good at, it’s her uncanny ability to muscle her way into any good drama and seize the spotlight.
“But what did Amanda do though?” asked Karl who’s always had a crush on her.
“She’s beautiful,” I said flatly. “That’s all she did. This happens all the time. She just has to show up at a party and every woman in that room will immediately start to hate her just a little. And if they have a husband or a boyfriend, they’ll make sure she doesn’t get beyond ‘Hello’. And if she talks to a guy is single and unattached, they’ll hate her even more.”
Karl looked shocked. “But, but…that’s just like…”
“That’s just like high school,” I finished. “And the fact that she’s totally unaware of her own beauty makes other women hate her just that little bit more.”
“Huh.” Karl peered into his beer. “I had no idea. I’m just trying to think now what happens when a good looking guy walks into a room.”
“I think you’d just feel a little bit of envy and then drink some more beer. Guys aren’t very complicated that way. Or so I’m told.”
What I didn’t tell Karl was that after Saffy had calmed down at Mavis’s party, she’d gone back in and identified the mean girls. Then she went downstairs to a payphone and called the police and told them there were illegal prostitutes in Mavis’s flat. She gave very precise descriptions of the girls. We left the party just as the first police car pulled up.
Amanda says she hopes she never falls out with Saffy. I’m just glad I’m not a woman.
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Name Dropping
When I was in school, I remember thinking that Americans gave their children strange names. “Whitney Houston?” I asked my best friend, Paul when we were browsing in HMV. “What kind of a name is that?”
“It’s an African-American name,” said Paul who, even at 15, knew everything in a way that, if it had been anyone else, would have made you look for the nearest bus to push him in front of. “They like unusual names, like Toni and Oprah, Maya, Tellulah, Dinah, Mariah and Aretha.”
“Huh.”
I went home and told my mother. She sniffed that the Americans had nothing on the Chinese. “Your Auntie Mary just called her baby girl Precious Jade, and let me tell you that there’s nothing precious nor jade-like about that ugly child!” To which my horrified father said that this was not the sort of thing one said in front of impressionable children like his son.
“Well, it’s true!” my mother went on stubbornly. “Have you seen that baby? Well, I have and you’d have to be blind to name her Precious Jade!”
As it turned out, Precious Jade grew up to be juvenile delinquent and when she was hauled before the magistrate’s court for breaking and entering our local library, Mother was triumphant.
“Stupid Rock would have been a better name for her!” she said. “Who’d ever heard of anyone trying to rob a local council library? What, did she think there was a big black market for the 1994 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary? Poor Auntie Mary, I must call to see how she’s coping with this scandal!”
And then, one day, after I was all grown up, I visited my brother Jack in Hong Kong, and that was when I found new champions in the category of “What Were Your Parents Thinking When They Named You That?”
At a party thrown by my brother, I was introduced to a pair of identical twin girls wearing matching Chanel boots and a Karl Lagerfeld dress. (I know they were Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld because my sister was with me, and she can spot a label from ten paces.)
“Jason, I want you to meet…” Jack paused and pursed his lip in an effort not to laugh, “…I want you to meet the lovely Yuan sisters, Million and Billion.”
I blinked. “Uh, hello?”
“You can call us Milly and Billy!” the girls sang in their melodic Hong Kong accent.
“Wait a minute,” my sister said. “Your names are Million and Billion?”
“Yes!”
“Million and Billion Yuan?”
“Yes!”
From across the room, Jack shouted, “And their surname is written just like the currency!”
Two days ago, my flatmate Saffy came back from her friend Jane’s baby shower. “Can I just say that it’s taken me an hour to get home from Jurong East? I feel like I should have brought my passport!” Her formidable bosom rose like shifting continental plates.
“How was the baby shower?” I asked.
Saffy paused. “I don’t want to be rude, but some people have some very strange ideas about what’s acceptable to call their children. Jane’s expecting twins, as you know, and guess what she’s going to call them?”
I waited.
Saffy stared at me. “Guess!” she said, finally.
“Oh, you weren’t being rhetorical! Uhm, Million and Billion?” I hazarded.
“Not even!” Saffy puffed. “Even those would have been acceptable names. No, she and that dolt husband of her’s are going for, wait for it, Messiah and Concept!”
You could practically see the italics hanging in the air.
It turned out that Jane is an editor at a magazine and two of the interns working there are called Messiah and Concept, and she’s so taken by the names she’s going to call her off-spring the same things.
It’s all Saffy has been able to talk about since then. “Messiah? Isn’t that a lot of pressure to place on a child?” she posted on Facebook.
“What if he grows up to be a bus driver?” she wondered aloud this morning at breakfast. “Or what if he has a lisp? A lisping Messiah! How uninspiring would that be? Or what if Concept turns out to have the IQ of a door-knob?”
What I wanted to know, I said, was what Jane thought the other kids at school would do to her children the minute their names were announced to the class.
“If they’d been in my class when I was growing up, they’d never have survived to recess,” Saffy said firmly. “Did I tell you when I was in the third grade, I made five boys in my class cry?”
Their crime: they were making fun of her name.
“It’s an African-American name,” said Paul who, even at 15, knew everything in a way that, if it had been anyone else, would have made you look for the nearest bus to push him in front of. “They like unusual names, like Toni and Oprah, Maya, Tellulah, Dinah, Mariah and Aretha.”
“Huh.”
I went home and told my mother. She sniffed that the Americans had nothing on the Chinese. “Your Auntie Mary just called her baby girl Precious Jade, and let me tell you that there’s nothing precious nor jade-like about that ugly child!” To which my horrified father said that this was not the sort of thing one said in front of impressionable children like his son.
“Well, it’s true!” my mother went on stubbornly. “Have you seen that baby? Well, I have and you’d have to be blind to name her Precious Jade!”
As it turned out, Precious Jade grew up to be juvenile delinquent and when she was hauled before the magistrate’s court for breaking and entering our local library, Mother was triumphant.
“Stupid Rock would have been a better name for her!” she said. “Who’d ever heard of anyone trying to rob a local council library? What, did she think there was a big black market for the 1994 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary? Poor Auntie Mary, I must call to see how she’s coping with this scandal!”
And then, one day, after I was all grown up, I visited my brother Jack in Hong Kong, and that was when I found new champions in the category of “What Were Your Parents Thinking When They Named You That?”
At a party thrown by my brother, I was introduced to a pair of identical twin girls wearing matching Chanel boots and a Karl Lagerfeld dress. (I know they were Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld because my sister was with me, and she can spot a label from ten paces.)
“Jason, I want you to meet…” Jack paused and pursed his lip in an effort not to laugh, “…I want you to meet the lovely Yuan sisters, Million and Billion.”
I blinked. “Uh, hello?”
“You can call us Milly and Billy!” the girls sang in their melodic Hong Kong accent.
“Wait a minute,” my sister said. “Your names are Million and Billion?”
“Yes!”
“Million and Billion Yuan?”
“Yes!”
From across the room, Jack shouted, “And their surname is written just like the currency!”
Two days ago, my flatmate Saffy came back from her friend Jane’s baby shower. “Can I just say that it’s taken me an hour to get home from Jurong East? I feel like I should have brought my passport!” Her formidable bosom rose like shifting continental plates.
“How was the baby shower?” I asked.
Saffy paused. “I don’t want to be rude, but some people have some very strange ideas about what’s acceptable to call their children. Jane’s expecting twins, as you know, and guess what she’s going to call them?”
I waited.
Saffy stared at me. “Guess!” she said, finally.
“Oh, you weren’t being rhetorical! Uhm, Million and Billion?” I hazarded.
“Not even!” Saffy puffed. “Even those would have been acceptable names. No, she and that dolt husband of her’s are going for, wait for it, Messiah and Concept!”
You could practically see the italics hanging in the air.
It turned out that Jane is an editor at a magazine and two of the interns working there are called Messiah and Concept, and she’s so taken by the names she’s going to call her off-spring the same things.
It’s all Saffy has been able to talk about since then. “Messiah? Isn’t that a lot of pressure to place on a child?” she posted on Facebook.
“What if he grows up to be a bus driver?” she wondered aloud this morning at breakfast. “Or what if he has a lisp? A lisping Messiah! How uninspiring would that be? Or what if Concept turns out to have the IQ of a door-knob?”
What I wanted to know, I said, was what Jane thought the other kids at school would do to her children the minute their names were announced to the class.
“If they’d been in my class when I was growing up, they’d never have survived to recess,” Saffy said firmly. “Did I tell you when I was in the third grade, I made five boys in my class cry?”
Their crime: they were making fun of her name.
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