High Ambitions

When I was in high school, there was a girl in the class below me who ice-skated. Needless to say, she was one of those annoying people who got straight-As, and her parents were both surgeons. Well, technically her mother was a surgeon in the sense that she actually cut into human beings, whilst her father was a tree surgeon (yes, that’s an actual thing) who made his fortune from the cyclones that would rip through Western Australian gardens every winter, but the way Swee Ling would go on about it, you had to feel sorry for her because she was obviously over-compensating. 

Anyway, the point is, the girl was freakishly smart and gifted. And, as if life wasn’t already unfair enough, she had also hit the genetic jackpot by way of long legs, slender arms with delicate fingers, and a face so perfectly sculpted I swear people would, today, take a screen shot of off Facebook and bring to their plastic surgeon and say, “I want these cheekbones and that nose!”

As for her ice-skating…the girl was going places. Everybody said so. And by everybody, I mean her mother, Auntie Mui who was in my mother’s mahjong group. 

“Swee Ling’s coach says she’s so gifted,” she would say, for instance, right after she’d ponged the whole table. “She’s almost perfected the triple sachow! The coach says that if Swee Ling hadn’t gone off to Paris during the holidays to practise her French, she would have landed that jump by now!”

It was the sort of child boasting you hear at every mahjong table around the world, but what made Auntie Mui particularly galling was the fact that the other ladies at the table had all, by some odd turn of fortune, given birth to children who’d done nothing but grow up and bring unending shame on the family.

Auntie June’s middle child, for instance, had just been diagnosed as a pyromaniac – a shocking diagnosis that Mother said made her glad we didn’t live next door. “This whole house is made of wood! Can you imagine?”

Meanwhile, Auntie Diana’s eldest daughter was dating the newspaper boy – something Auntie Diana put a stop to as soon as she found out, but she lived to regret it because twenty years later, Daniel became a super-rich hedge fund tycoon and named his mega-yacht after his mother-in-law. “That could have been me!” she would tell my mother who could only cluck in sympathy.  

Meanwhile, my sister was going through her Goth phase, I had undiagnosed short-sightedness so I was always walking into walls and failing exams, while my brother Jack, at age 7, insisted he could see dead people. Which also explained why after a while, Mother’s mahjong sessions were always held at Auntie June’s house. Who could blame them when Jack would wander into the mahjong room and stare at a spot two inches above Auntie Diana’s shoulder and smile like he’d just bumped into his best friend. 

“So what happened to this Swee Ling?” Amanda asked the other day at home as we all watched a replay of Nathan Chen’s short programme at the world championships. “My God, he’s so good!”

“His triple axels are flawless,” I said as I absent mindedly dipped a hand into the bowl of popcorn. “Swee Ling? Oh, during practice one day, she attempted a quod, landed badly, broke her ankle, and that was the end of her career.”

Saffy gasped. She hit pause on the laptop and turned to me. “Oh my God! That’s horrible!”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t feel too sorry for her,” I told her. “Now that she didn’t have to spend three hours a day practising, she put all that extra time into her studies and graduated top of her class. She went to Harvard and became the youngest partner in Morgan Stanley in New York. Then she married a plastic surgeon, so she’s going to look gorgeous for the rest of her life. And meanwhile, all her children are Mensa geniuses. At least that’s what Auntie Mui tells everyone at mahjong.”

Amanda sat back in her chair and pouted. “Seriously, who are these people?”

“I know, right?” I said, helping myself to another handful of popcorn. “I still take the bus!”

Saffy had been silent for a while, staring at the frozen screenshot of Nathan Chen in mid-triple-lutz. “So how old is Nathan Chen?” she suddenly asked. “Is it just me, or is he seriously cute?”

As Amanda later said to me, this is exactly the sort of thing that people make award-winning investigative documentaries about. 

Head Space

I’ve been going to yoga classes for years now and despite all my best efforts, I’ve never been able to do a headstand. Which makes it sound like I’m a pro at the Crow and the Peacock postures, and that it’s just the headstand that’s missing from my comprehensive yogic repertoire. 

The truth is, I’m barely competent at even the standing postures. I still get confused between Warrior 1 and Warrior 2. The forward fold continues to elude me – whilst everyone else in the class can place their entire palms on the ground next to their feet, it was a real moment of triumph the day I managed to connect all ten finger tips to the mat.

And so you can imagine what a hurdle the headstand has been for me. What a torment every time the teacher announces, “Now, sirshasana, everyone!” My chest deflates, my spine slumps, and my mouth droops. 

In class, there’s a group that gets down on their knees and instantly, they’re upside down, rigid like a popsicle. And they can stay like that all day. 

Meanwhile, another group goes up against the wall, and suddenly, they’re upside down too – though in yoga politics, I get the sense that people who need the wall for a headstand are regarded as second-class citizens. 

Me…I struggle even with the wall. Over the years, teachers have tried their best with me. “You’re collapsing on your shoulders!” one sighed. “Stick your chest out,” said another. “Pull your stomach in!” “Lift your legs higher!” “Tighten your thighs!”

“Why do you torment yourself?!” Saffy once asked. 

“I really want to be able to do it!”

Her bosom inflated to a dangerous volume. “How will doing a headstand make your life better?”

I tried to explain that it wasn’t about making my life better. That lately, I’d realized that as I’ve gotten older, I’m not learning anything new. 

In school, you were always learning. And for years, you never stopped. Every day, something new was inserted into your brain. And then one day, you find yourself watching Dr Pimple Popper and wondering if this is what life is all about. Somewhere between your first job and Kim Kardashian’s feud with Taylor Swift, you’ve stopped learning. 

And then, some random thing like a headstand pops up and suddenly, that’s all you care about. 

“You are so incredibly strange!” Saffy told me. 

A couple of weeks ago, I bumped into my friend Vivienne. She’s a hot shot hotel executive who, a few years ago, took time off work, shaved her head and became a yoga instructor. Of course, I immediately began moaning about my lack of progress with the headstand.

“You must come to this great school I go to!” she said. “It’s in Serangoon Gardens. They have inversion classes, and they do headstands and variations for beginners!”

Which is how, a few days later, I found myself at Yoga Kalari in a room full of pretty young women who were contorting themselves into unimaginable poses. And it was all so quiet, too. No one spoke. Just a lot of quiet movement. All you needed was some steam, some sticky goo, and it would have been exactly like that scene where Ripley stumbles into the egg pod room in ‘Aliens’, and all the eggs start hatching. I was scared out of my wits. 

“Are you mad?!” I hissed at Vivienne who was currently serenely upside down. “This is a basic inversion class?” But before she could reply, the master came around. He sat on a mat and pointed at a spot in front of him. 

“Come!” he commanded. “Put your head down here. Put your hands like this. Now lift your hips. Move your legs closer. Closer! Closer! Lift your hips! Lift!”

And suddenly, I was upside down. Swaying like a drunk – back and forth and sideways – and I would have toppled over any number of times, but the master calmly nudged my hips with a finger to steady me, and at one stage, I was in a full unassisted headstand for, like, three seconds.

“Now practise against the wall,” the master said as he moved onto the Alien hatchlings.

I can’t begin to describe what that class represented to me. After all these years, someone, with minimal words and a few finger jabs, had achieved what none of the teachers before had managed to teach me. And finally, I had learnt something new. 

I went back to Yoga Kalari the following week, and by the end of the lesson, I was, admittedly in a very wobbly way, getting up into the posture unassisted. But still…I beamed for days.

Saffy says the next thing I need to learn is to get a life. 

Job Satisfaction

I read somewhere once that in their lifetime, Millennials will have between ten to 20 different careers. And that doesn’t mean promotions in the same job or field, so that you might start out as a bookkeeper when you’re 23 and by the time you’re 65, you’re an auditor.

No, it means a Millennial might graduate with a law degree, and then in her 20s, decides she wants to be a baker, a farmer at 35, a drummer at 40, a journalist at 45 and, by the time she’s 65, she’s a junior dog groomer. 

Apparently, this is a real thing, but leave it to my mother to announce that this kind of nonsense can only happen if you haven’t moved out of home by the time you’re 25.

“You know what keeps a person in the same job?” she asked the other day during lunch at Crystal Jade. A perfectly manicured eyebrow lifted in disdain, though you could tell she was careful not to frown on account of the age lines she’s been careful to avoid her entire life. “Panic! Panic, that’s what. If you need a job to pay your mortgage and feed the kids, and your parents have made it perfectly clear that they’re spending all your inheritance on first-class round the world trips, you can bet you won’t be ditching your law degree to become a baker!”

As my sister Michelle later pointed out, it was really amazing how Mother could place such an inflection on the word ‘baker’ that she gave it the kind of emotional resonance you normally associate with a conversation about a hooker with a troubling yeast infection. 

“I mean, lookat you!” she said.

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I don’t have a troubling yeast infection!”

Michelle giggled. “I meant you gave up law and became a writer. You haven’t turned out so bad.”

“Which reminds me,” I said, “can I borrow two hundred bucks? It’s my turn to buy groceries this week.”

Michelle stopped in her tracks. “Seriously?”

Later, as I was browsing the cereal aisle at Cold Storage, I remembered the old lady in my Accounting 100 course back in my university days. I say she was old, but she was probably in her 50s at the time, but when you’re 18 years old, 50 might as well be time for the hospice. 

Anyway, every Tuesday and Thursday mornings, this lady would slip into the lecture hall. Dressed in sensible heels, dress falling below her knees and wearing a light cardigan, she’d sit quietly in the front row. And because she always came in a few seconds before the lecture began, she never spoke to anyone and as soon as it was over, she’d disappear just as quickly out the door. 

Well, it wasn’t till our second year when several classmates transferred to medicine that we realized the quiet ‘old lady’ from Accounting 100 was, in fact, the Med School’s head of surgery. Apparently, she took lectures on consolidated balance sheets and inventory aging as a way to destress and to learn something new. Which, to a 19-year-old, made absolutely no sense at all. 

Though my friend Jane recently announced that she was giving her journalism career a bit of a break. “I’m going to do private home dining!” she said with a level of enthusiasm that caused Saffy to remark she’d always found Jane a bit weird and here was proof. 

“Why would you invite complete strangers into your house and cook for them?” she asked.

“Cause you could clear a thousand dollars a night,” I told her. 

Saffy’s eyes widened. “My God, is that how much Jane’s making? Hey, maybe we should do that too!”

“You literally cannot make rice in our rice cooker,” Amanda said. “What makes you think you can cook an eight course dinner for ten people?”

Saffy’s bosom deflated as she saw her dreams of a thousand dollars a night evaporate under the full glare of Amanda’s reality check. “Ugh…I just hate my job so much, you have no idea! Why did I ever decide to work in HR? Seriously, I’m like a porn star who shows up for work only because there’s work. And there’s free cookies between takes.”

Amanda says there must be a bug in the air because she just found out her friend Joanne is quitting her auditors job to start a new career in clinical psychology.

“Emotional traumas and neuroses? That’s going to make her happier?” I asked.

Amanda shrugged. “I guess it’s all relative. Out there somewhere is a porn star dreaming of a much more fulfilling life as an HR executive.”

Child Proof

It seems only yesterday that my god-daughter, Mina was born. When I first saw her, she was a bundle of wrinkled skin – her eyes shut tightly and her tiny crab-like hands clenched in the kind of vice grip a District 9 tai-tai grabbing a heavily discounted Yohji dress at a Club21 sale would recognise. She looked so delicate and precious. 

“Wait!” I told her mother. “Let me sit down first before you hand her to me. I’m petrified I’ll drop her!”

May rolled her eyes. “Oh, for goodness sakes, it’s a baby, not a Lalique vase!”

“Which, if you ask my mother, I did in fact drop when I was a child!”

May’s look of indifference was immediately replaced by one of nervous concern. “Oh, really? OK, maybe you should just sit down first, then.”

At some stage, I must have blinked because suddenly Mina is about to turn 13.

“Thirteen?” I said the other day on FaceTime with May. “How is she turning 13? Didn’t you just give birth to her?”

May’s image sighed. “Scary, isn’t it? I have no idea what happened. And she’s turned so sassy! She’s always rolling her eyes at me!”

“So what are y0u getting for her birthday present?”

May rolled her eyes.

It turns out that a few months ago, Mina’s baby brother Johann turned ten and his parents had asked him what hewanted for his birthday.

He turned his lovely almond-shaped eyes up at them and announced that he wanted nothing. His parents were bewildered. This, after all, was the child who, when asked the same question the previous Christmas, had said he wanted to go on the Virgin Galactic flight to space with Richard Branson. “It only costs $250,000!” he said, adding with the kind of economic precision that bodes well for a future in financing, “US dollars!”

And now he wanted nothing. 

“What do you mean nothing?” his parents asked.

“I already have everything I need. I don’t need more stuff!”

“A new iPad?” his father ventured.

“My old one still works.”

“A game station?”

“No.”

May hesitated. “A new bike?”

Limpid brown eyes stared up at her. “No.”

“Who are you?” his father said eventually.

It turns out that Johann had just binge watched Marie Kondo’s ‘Tidying Up’ and YouTube clips of ‘Hoarding’ and, in the process, the boy has developed a severe phobia of, well, stuff. May reports that since that conversation, he essentially emptied out his room, and reduced himself to just three items of everything. Three books, three underwear, three toys…

“His room echoes!” May said the other day. 

“What a strange child,” I said.

“Actually, I’m quite proud of him. I was so scared he would turn out to be grasping and materialistic.” Here she paused and then added with a dramatic flourish, “Like your god-daughter!”

It seems that when Mina’s parents asked her what she wanted for her birthday, they’d been half hoping that, like her brother, she would also say, “Nothing.”

Instead, the girl pulled out a piece of A4 paper on which was neatly typed in Georgia 12-pitch a long list of birthday presents, at the top of which was an a trip to Disney World. 

“And not the one in Tokyo, mind you!” May said. “She wants to go to the one in Orlando, Florida!”

I leaned closer towards the phone screen. “What else is on the list?”

May’s features hardened. “I’m so glad you asked. Because number two is a trip to Paris. With you. Not with us – the people who have fed her, clothed her, wiped up her drool and vomit, and generally cost us a fortune. Not with me, the mother who literally pushed her out into the world. No. She wants to go to Paris with someone she sees once a year! What’s wrong with this picture?”

I shrugged. “It’s not my fault your child gets along with me better than she does with you. That’s so incredibly sweet. Well, clearly, Disney and Paris with her beloved god-father isn’t happening. What else does the Golden Child want?”

“A Tiffany charm bracelet, a party dress sewn with Swarovski crystals, a French bulldog puppy, and at the bottom of the list is an iPad Pro. She’s getting the iPad.”

Mina later WhatsApped to say she’d made a deal with Johann that she would give him her iPad which she’d got for her last birthday because she wanted the new iPad Pro. “I really like the retina recognition function and the new one has it. But I knew Mama wouldn’t get it for me because the one I have is only a year old, so I freaked them out with Disney World and Paris with you, and put the iPad Pro at the bottom of the list. So that’s what I got! I love it!”

“Really,” I told Saffy. “Children are so devious !”

Ages to Go

My mother says one of the reasons she studiously avoids hanging out with people her own age is that they’re always complaining about their ailments. 

It all starts innocently enough, she says. Someone might mention, in passing, a little ache in the knee after a round of golf. Or a case of slight breathlessness after walking from the car-park and up the stairs to the club.

“And then, one day,” she said the other at lunch at Crystal Jade, “they’ll say that they need to get their eyes checked because they can’t see as well at night when driving. Invariably, it’ll be cataracts and for weeks, you have to listen about the upcoming operation, and for weeks after about the post-op results!”

From the other side of the table, my father looked up from his dumpling soup. “Who’s this?”

Mother waved a hand, the low light above catching the glint off her diamond ring. “Oh, that Mei-sian! The way she goes on about it, you’d think she had stage three cancer! Which, by the way,” Mother’s voice lowered into a hush, “is what Uncle Charlie has!”

My sister Michelle coughed into her soup. She dabbed her mouth, eyes wide. “Uncle Charlie has stage three cancer? Oh my God! But he’s so young!”

Mother sniffed. “If you can call eighty-four young, then, sure. The ladies at mah-jong were shocked because they all thought he was already dead!” She reached for a siew-mai, shaking her head. “Anyway, my point is, that’s all I get to hear about. Ailments. I’m so glad I never became a doctor!”

Michelle later said she wasn’t sure what was worse – listening to Mother’s friends talk about their hip operations and double by-passes, or her own friends about their children.

“A few years ago, every dinner party involved someone who was trying to get pregnant, or who was pregnant, or who had just given birth,” she said as we dodged and weaved our way through the Orchard Road crowds. “And now, they’re stressing about how little time they have with the children and feeling guilty because they’re at work. Or they’re pregnant again, so I have to listen to the pre-natal crap all over again! I tell you, it’s just never ending drama with these married couples!”

Meanwhile, my Sixth Uncle Harry just announced on the family group-chat that his cardiologist has discovered a potentially fatal faulty heart valve.

“Potentially fatal?” Saffy said when she found out. “I would have thought a faulty heart valve is, by definition, fatal. Isn’t that like discovering you have a hole in the hull of the ship? I mean, surely it’s just a matter of time?”

“They’re running more tests,” I told her. “They’re hoping they can fix it. Uncle Harry says that a few years ago, this kind of thing would have killed him but now, the technology is so much more sophisticated.”

“Isn’t he the one who married his secretary?” Amanda asked, proving once again her capacity to cross-reference family scandals like a true Korean soap opera addict. 

“She’s half his age!” I reminded her. “Mother says she and her sisters are on his case to grant them the enduring power of attorney rather than to his child-bride just in case she runs off with the loot while he’s in surgery.”

“She’s forty-five,” Amanda pointed out. “She’s hardly a child-bride.”

Saffy’s formidable bosom inflated. “I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with this kind of drama as I have no money for anyone to fight over.”

Meanwhile, all this talk about aging and ailments has encouraged Amanda to update her Medisave provisions whilst signing us all up for another comprehensive health check up at Gleneagles. “You never know,” she says darkly.

Sharyn says that she’s putting off having her check up for as long as humanly possible. “I very pantang! Skali they find I got brain tumour, den how?”

“I’ll come visit you every day at the hospital,” Saffy said loyally. “And I’ll hold your hand during chemo!”

Mother worries that Saffy is hanging out with the wrong kind of people. 

Fresh On The Boat

So, here we are on-board the Seabourn Ovation on a 14-day cruise up to Hong Kong.  

“Fourteen days?” Saffy had said a few months earlier when Amanda first floated the idea. “Do I want to be stuck with you guys for 14 days on a ship?”

“It’s a big ship!” Amanda had replied. “You won’t even need to see us if you don’t want to. Not even for meals. They have, like, six restaurants on-board. And there are only 300 rooms and every room is a suite with its own private balcony. And there’s Wi-Fi. Oh, come on, you’ll love it!”

Saffy had wrinkled her nose. “Won’t it be full of retirees?” 

Amanda stared. “Uhm…You just came back from aerobics at the local community centre where the median age is 67.”

Saffy shrugged. “Well, that’s only because the instructor is super cute and he’s got thighs that could choke a bear!”

“Well, they’ll have Ukrainian gym instructors on the Ovation, so you’ll love it!”

Saffy had remained unconvinced. “But it’s going to be so expensive! We’re not all made of money like you are!”

“You have no children,” Amanda had pointed out. “Think how much you’re already saving from not having to raise, house, feed, educate and entertain two ungrateful kids!”

“And who, when they turn fifteen, will tell you how much they hate you and wish you were dead,” I’d added, having just spent two hours at lunch listening to my best friend Karl moan about how he wished he’d never had his evil ungrateful offspring.

Which is how last weekend we found ourselves crossing the gang-plank at the cruise centre in HarbourFront to board the all-white Ovation, the pride and joy of the Seabourn line.

“Well, this is rather nice,” Saffy said, a little reluctantly, as she settled into the lounge chair on her balcony, a chilled flute of champagne by her side as she looked out over the leafy hills of Sentosa. 

By our second day out at sea, she’d basically fallen under a spell, spending hours on the pool deck, alternately lazily flipping the pages of volume two of ‘Game of Thrones’ and being hypnotized by the unending blue horizon that circled around us.

One afternoon, she leaned over her chaise lounge and peered at me over the top of her sunglasses. “Don’t tell Amanda, but I’m totally sold on this whole cruise thing.”

“Isn’t this just the life?” I murmured as I stretched supine on my towel, drowsy from the warm sun and hazily wondering if I could be bothered to lift my hand to check the time. “When’s lunch? I’m thinking of sushi.”

Saffy picked up her daily schedule and scanned the list of activities. “There’s lobster tonight at the Colonnade,” she said. “And escargots! Or we could do Thomas Keller?”

“I can’t think that far ahead,” I told her. “Let’s just get through lunch first.”

The passengers are, as Saffy predicted, mostly on the retiree end of the spectrum. Large contingents of Americans and Germans, almost all broiled by the sun and happy to spend the whole day playing bridge or parked by the pool bar drinking spritzers, and gin and tonics.

After lunch, we retreat to our suites for a nap, waking up just in time for afternoon tea of fluffy scones, cakes and cucumber sandwiches, after which Amanda invariably heads off to the spa for a manicure or a facial, whilst Saffy and I sprawl on the couch in my suite and watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

Tomorrow, we arrive in Thailand. All around us, people are busy planning day trips, their guide-books and maps spread out around them. 

“Do we want to go into Bangkok?” Amanda asked this morning at breakfast. “Or do a temple tour or something?”

Saffy’s bosom deflated with a sigh. “Not really. I’m too lazy to move. I might do an acupuncture session for my knee with that cute Japanese acupuncturist. And I want to watch ‘The Favourite’ as well. Plus there’s pizza at the Patio today.”

Amanda turned to me with an enquiring look. 

“There’s a dancing class that I want to try out,” I said. 

Amanda looked relieved. “Oh good, no one wants to go. I wasn’t keen to get off the ship either, but I didn’t want to spoil the party. Great, I’ll get a hair treatment, then.”

Tonight, there’s a magic show after dinner, an entertainment prospect that, if someone had suggested it on dry land, would have caused us all to raise our collective eyebrows. But here, out on the blue on blue of the South China Sea, with the salt-tinged air ruffling our hair, it just feels like the most natural way to end a day of complete, indolently pleasurable non-activity. 

Honestly? I could not be happier. 

Eating Disorder

It's hard to believe it's May already. It feels like the new year was just last week when our friend Jodie invited us to her home for yet another Chinese New Year dinner.

“Are you sick of loh-hei, yet?” she’d asked earlier on the phone. 

“I’ve had 12 so far,” Amanda told her.

“I’ve had 33!”

There was a brief silence as Amanda struggled to wonder if she’d misheard. “Thirty-three?” she said eventually. “How can you have had 33 loh-hei? This is only like the fifth day of Chinese New Year!”

“Oh, I started about two weeks before and as we approached the New Year, I had it for lunch and dinner with the family and my clients.”

“Thirty-three?” Saffy said when Amanda told her. 

“She’s so competitive! Just like at Uni!”

“I feel sick just thinking about all that sweet sauce!”

“Which is why tonight’s version is going to be Indonesian!” Amanda said. “She’s basically doing a gado-gado.”

Saffy blinked. “And what’s she using for the fish?”

“Otah-otah!”

“It’s going to be cooked, right?” I asked. “Because I’m not eating raw spiced mackeral!”

“She said she’s just unpacking the whole thing from the banana leaf.”

Saffy shrugged. “That’s just weird, but whatever. She just shouldn’t call it loh-heior Instagram us tossing,” she warned. “Can you imagine how that would look? All those great chunks of tofu and otah-otah flying up in the air? I don’t want to become a viral sensation for all the wrong reasons!”

Screaming with laughter at the image, we piled into a cab and zoomed towards Jodie’s apartment at Peach Garden. 

“God, that Jodie is such a China Doll,” Saffy said. “Even her condo sounds like a restaurant.”

When we arrived at the guard-house, Amanda poked her head out the window to announce who we were there to see. She hadn’t even opened her mouth when the security guard waved us through, leading Saffy to wonder if this sort of thing would also happen if we’d dropped by the Istana for loh-hei with the President. 

“The same thing happened to me the other day when I visited Shaun’s mother, do you remember?” Amanda said as the taxi pulled up at Jodie’s block. “I don’t think the guard even looked up from his phone. I mean, I could have been a robber for all he knew! He just happily waved me through.”

“Well, you’re in top-to-toe Chanel. You don’t exactly look like a robber,” Saffy pointed out, though I couldn’t help but think neither did the girls from Ocean’s 11. 

Amanda turned pink with pleasure that someone had noticed what she was wearing. “You know what the problem is? Singapore is just too safe! Which makes me wonder why anyone bothers with security guards anyway.”

“So that retirees have something to do!” said Saffy, HR executive to the Nation. 

“I mean, who would be stupid enough to commit a crime in this country?” Amanda went on, warming to her theme, though as Saffy later said privately, you could tell she was mentally role-playing her favourite fantasy as a PAP minister on the campaign trail. “You’d be tracked down, charged and jailed before you even had a chance to put your bag down to count your stolen cash!”

When we finally made it up to Jodie’s apartment, she said that after years of living in New York and being regularly terrified on her way home from work at night, she fully intended to live out the rest of her life in this country, secure in the knowledge that probably the most dangerous thing that would ever happen to her would be to go through an ERP gantry without enough money in her CashCard.

“So, did you read about that Go-Jek driver?” she asked as she carefully assembled her gado-gado loh-hei, which she’d since renamed galoh-gahei. “I’m telling you, this dish could fund my retirement. It’s just a question of clever marketing!”

“What about the Go-Jek driver?” Amanda interrupted. “You mean that girl and the ERP?”

“Yes! Did you see the video and how she was yelling that she was being kidnapped?”

“Hadn’t the driver brought her to the police station or something?” Amanda said, surprising us all with the depth of her knowledge of Singapore current affairs.  

“Only in Singapore,” Jodie said, in the solemn tone of a BBC newsreader announcing the birth of a new heir to the throne, “can you be kidnapped and the kidnapper brings you straight to the police station so that you can file a complaint!”

Amanda giggled while Saffy’s bosom inflated. “You see, that’s the kind of viral sensation you don’t want to be involved in!

To Pee or Not to Pee

Not to be politically indelicate, but the world is divided into two kinds of women: those who are done peeing in a minute, and those who aren’t. 

In the first group, the women might as well be men. A few garment adjustments, a ruthlessly efficient contraction of floor muscles, and they’re out the door. My Mother, the founding member of this group, even manages to find time to check her lipstick in the mirror. 

Meanwhile, in the second group, Saffy would still be marching up and down the toilet stalls, cautiously pushing each door open as she cranes her neck in to check the state of the floor, the toilet bowl and the general state of cleanliness.

Sometimes, nothing meets her expectations, in which case she will emerge from the bathroom with a look of grimness and announce that we need to go to another level.

“Oh God, Saff!” Amanda moaned the other day. “The movie is about to start, and you want to go look for a toilet on the next floor? What’s wrong with this one? I just used it and it’s fine!”

Saffy’s bosom stiffened. “There’s no toilet paper in there! How am I going to line the seat if there’s no toilet paper?”

Amanda shot me a look, but I was busy examining my shoe-laces. “Then don’t sit!” she said eventually. “Just squat over the loo!”

“Well excuse me if I don’t have your core muscles,” Saffy snapped, as she began moving towards the escalator. “I need to sit! Look, just go in first. It’ll just be the movie previews, anyway!”

“But those are the best bits of a movie!” Amanda called out, but Saffy’s back had, by now, disappeared into the crowd.

I turned to Amanda. “You squat?” 

“Sure! It’s the fastest way to pee!”

I hesitated. “But wouldn’t you have to be very careful about where you aim?”

Amanda gave me a look. “Unlike a man, you mean?” she said, never having forgotten that one time she was in desperate need to pee but there was such a long line to the ladies, whereas the men’s loo next door looked and sounded completely empty. So, she dashed in and nearly died of shock.

“Filthy and smelly!” she later told all her girlfriends. “The floor in front of all the urinals was wet!”

“Wet?” Cindy asked. “Why?”

“Wet with pee!” Amanda said in ringing tones that carried straight across the tables at Les Amis. Heads turned. She leaned in and lowered her voice. “Men can’t aim straight!”

Cindy, who’d been trying to get pregnant for years, sniffed. “You don’t have to tell me!” she said. 

Amanda waved her hands. “No, really. It’s disgusting. I mean, if you think about it, it’s basically a hose, right? You just aim it and direct the flow. I noticed that the urinals even have a little bee painted at the base.”

Cindy’s eyebrows arched. “A bee? What for?”

“Well, I asked Jason and he says it’s so that men know where to aim!”

Cindy put down her fork. “Shut up!”

“No, really! And yet somehow, they still miss and the pee gets all over the floor. Either that,” Amanda paused as she gave the matter some thought, “either that, or most guys have really small di…”

Cindy coughed as the maître d’arrived with the foie gras, followed by the sommelier to discuss the next wine pairing.

Leave it to Sharyn to find the silver lining in everything. “Aiyah,” she said the other day, after Amanda had complained that we’d missed the first two movie previews while waiting for Saffy to return from the loo. “At least, she only need to line the toilet when she outside. Not like my sister-in-law! That woman ah, really one kind! My mah-dur-in-law scold and scold her, you know.”

“Why, what does she do?”

Sharyn looked triumphant that for once, she was the centre of attention. She drew in breath, the better to prolong the moment. “You know when she go to toilet at home? She must oh-so line the seat with toilet paper!”

Amanda paused. “Wait. What? She lines the toilet seat at home?”

Sharyn’s mouth pursed into a thin line. “So strange right? Every day, the maid clean, but must still line. And she got bladder ploh-blem, some more, so she must go shee-shee every fie minute. Can you imagine? One day can use up tree toilet roll!”

Amanda sighed.

“Dat’s why kena scolding from my mah-dur-in-law! So you see, Saffy not so bad. Not like my sister-in-law. She really one kind!” Sharyn repeated.