Up in smoke

Hopefully, by the time you read this, the haze would have lifted and we’d all be able to breathe normally again without hyperventilating from taking short breaths, and obsessing about toxic micro-particles and checking the PSI readings every five minutes.

            In the little flat I share with my crazy flatmates Saffy and Amanda, we get down on our knees every morning and thank God we had the foresight years ago to invest in two hospital strength air-purifiers.

            At the time, Amanda had objected to buying them on account of the fact that they’re the ugliest things she’d ever seen.

            “They look like paper-shredders!” Amanda exclaimed. “They won’t go with anything in our flat!”

            “Like you do, you mean?” Saffy muttered mutinously under her breath.

            Amanda’s head swivelled around. “Excuse me?”

            “I said, ‘I so know what you mean!’” Saffy replied smoothly.

            Now, of course, you couldn’t pry the air-purifiers out of Amanda’s hands for all the Louis Vuitton bags in the world.

            “Thank God we got these!” she said the other day as she knelt beside the machine and inhaled the air. “What’s the PSI, Saf?”

            “Still the same, 400!” Saffy reported, her eyes never leaving the live-feed she was getting on her phone from dashsell.com.

            “Honestly, it’s like the end of the world!” Amanda said.

            Just then, Saffy’s phone pinged with a message. “Oooh, it’s from Sharyn!” There was a brief silence as Saffy swiped the screen and read the message, her lips moving as she mouthed the words.

            “What’s she saying? What’s the visibility over at Bishan like?” Amanda asked.

            “She says, ‘I got my n95 mask!! From Quantam safety. Block 998 Toa Payoh north #3-14/15! $48 for box of 10! Hurry got queue!’ Isn’t that like just down the road?”

            “Did she get extra boxes for us?” I asked.

            “All those numbers are giving me a headache!” Amanda complained, though I couldn’t help but wonder if the headache wasn’t coming from all the oxygen-enriched air she was breathing.

            That’s the thing about this haze. It’s making otherwise normal people do all sorts of odd things. Like get excited about a box of face-masks. Sure enough, news soon reached us through Facebook that Sharyn had decided to turn a quick buck and was selling her N95 masks on eBay for $20 each. Within a few hours, she’d made a 400% profit on her initial investment.

            She immediately headed down to Toa Payoh Central – without any protective face mask – and put it all down on 4D, buying the highest PSI numbers of the past few days. The very next day, she woke up with a raspy throat and a low grade fever which kept her in bed for the next 48 hours.

            Of course, when our friend Barry came through Singapore from Hong Kong with a box of N95 masks which he sold to us at cost for $40 for a box of 20, Sharyn threw an uncharacteristic tantrum.

            “Aiyoh, $40! For twenty!” she shouted over the phone from her sick-bed. “I pay $48 you know. For ten! How like that? Some more, I did not strike 4D! Not fair. I must complain! Ay, Amanda, I ask you, who to complain to, hah?”

            “Someone who cares?” Amanda replied, her eyes never once lifting from her current issue of Vogue. She handed the phone over to Saffy just as Sharyn was asking, “Got gah-men department like that, meh?” It was a question that led Saffy to later remind Amanda that such finely tuned sarcasm was wasted on some people. Especially if they’re called Sharyn.

            Meanwhile, the PSI numbers continue to fluctuate between 350 and 400. We’ve been indoors for days now. All the windows are sealed shut and the gap under the front door is blocked with a damp rolled up towel.

            We are, of course, ignoring the fact that some of that hazy air must still be coming in. “Otherwise, we’d all be dead, no?” Saffy pointed out with penetrating scientific insight. We solved the conundrum by placing one air-purifier at the door.

            It’s all starting to look and feel like a scene out of some post-apocalyptic horror movie but without any good looking movie stars in the lead role. Our food supplies are still holding up though Saffy says she wishes our favourite char kway teow stall down the road does home delivery. “I’m really sick of eating that tinned tuna and tinned peaches.”

Amanda said if this haze keeps up, we’re going to start turning feral and eat each other.

“I hope you like gnawing on bones, because that’s all there’s going to be left of me,” Saffy said as she grudgingly stuck another spoonful of tinned tuna into her mouth. 

Food Fight

Regular readers will know that in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda, we’re prone to flash obsessions.

            One minute we’re hyperventilating at the mere mention of “The Following” and the next, we’re cyber-stalking Kai Kai and Jia Jia, the two insanely cuddly pandas at River Safari.

            Of course, we’re triumphant at dinner parties because we can talk about just about anything to anyone. Amanda can switch effortlessly from the latest Victoria’s Secret Fashion collection to why Hillary Clinton is, despite her fondness for pant-suits, the best Secretary of State. Ever.

I once completely charmed my boss when I spent the whole evening at a party discussing with his fifteen-year old daughter just how unsuitable Selena Gomez was for Justin Bieber. We were, like, instant BFF. The next day, he gave me a pay rise.

            Our current obsession is food in general, and food in China specifically.

            The other day, at breakfast, Saffy was scrolling through her iPhone when she suddenly squealed.

            “Oh my God, you guys have got to see this!” she said. Immediately, our phones pinged with incoming messages.

            It was a website link called Ministry of Tofu and the first item was a sequence of photos that showed someone inserting a piece of rubber into the forehead of a dead duck so that it would now look like a dead goose.

            “But why…” Amanda began. “Oh…”

            Apparently, roast goose is more expensive than a roast duck, so some clever Billy in Guangdong decided to cheat and pretend a duck was a goose and sell it at a higher margin.

            Saffy was impressed. “I tell you, the Chinese are just so entrepreneurial!”

            Amanda blinked. “Uhm, you’re not in the least bit outraged?”

            “Why? You think your precious Birkin bag actually costs $15,000 to make?”

Amanda was outraged. “Excuse me, but how is making a fake goose the same as an authentic made in France bag?”

Saffy was unruffled by the italics. From experience, she knew the best way to win an argument with a lawyer, especially one educated at Harvard, is to change the subject while pretending it’s still the same subject, thereby completely derailing the conversation. “It’s whatchamacallit, caveman empty?”

Amanda blinked again. “What?”

“You know, when it’s your responsibility to check what you buy and if you don’t, it’s your fault if you bought a dud!”

It took a moment. “Oh, you mean caveat emptor!”

Saffy beamed. “There you go. God, you’re so clever, Amanda, to know all that satin, I mean, Latin!”

Unused to praise, Amanda visibly swelled. Then she frowned. “Wait, so what are we talking about?”

            For days, we trawled through the Ministry of Tofu, alternating between horror at the chemicals and additives and downright culinary cheating to be found in Chinese restaurants, and complete admiration that someone actually found the time to come up with the different scams in the first place. It was riveting.

Of course, Sharyn had her own perspective on the whole thing.

“Yah, lah, the world got food shortage, mah! Sure must find substi-tute, right? We Chinese are very clever, one!”

“Food shortage?” said Amanda who only ever eats a salad leaf for dinner these days.

“Abaden? You know, hah, in America, each American throw away 400 pound of food, you know or not? UK lagi worse, ah, I tell you. Each year throw away 7.2m tonne! How not to have food shortage like that, I ask you?”

Saffy, unused to having numbers thrown at her like this from a best friend who normally only complains about the quality of her married sex life, was reduced to silence and a blank stare. Only the rhythmic heave of her bosom indicated she was still alive.

“Some more, hor,” Sharyn went on, “the world throw away thirty to fifty per cent of the food it produce! And now America got worse drought in fifty year! One six of corn production kena! I tell you, ah, ten year from now, we all con-firm die, one!”

Amanda later said that it was one of the most unsettling conversations she’s ever had in her life, including the one she had when she was thirteen with her mother about how a new friend was going to be visiting her every month for the rest of her life. “What the hell was that?”

“It was like a scene out of ‘Rain Man’,” Saffy confirmed, adding, “but in Singlish!”

“Speaking of, did you know that Dustin Hoffman is now seventy-six?” Amanda piped up.

“Shut. Up!”

“No, really. I wonder what skin care he’s using. He looks amazing!”

“I am ob-sessed with him!” Saffy said. Her eyes shone.

Fan Wrong

It’s funny how sometimes people you’ve never met can have such a huge impact on your life. My brother Jack, for instance, went through a heavy metal phase in his teens on account of his obsession with Black Sabbath and KISS.

For years, my mother shuddered whenever she thought of how close she had came to losing her son to a band whose greatest hits included such memorable titles as ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Children of the Grave’. And then, when she finally watched Ozzie Osbourne in the reality show “Meet the Osbournes” doddering about his house in his bi-focals trying to keep his family of screaming wife and bratty children in line, she was completely disarmed.

“He’s such a lovely man!” she told her astonished mahjong kaki. “I don’t know why I was ever worried about his influence on Jack!”

“He bit the head off a live chicken!” her sister, Wai-ling, pointed out.

“It was a dove!” Mother said in a tone that indicated that this made all the difference.

Meanwhile, Jack, whose musical tastes graduated from Black Sabbath to Tracy Chapman without the slightest sense of irony, doesn’t see what the fuss is all about. “I liked their vibe,” he says. “And anyway, anyone with half a brain could see that Ozzie was completely harmless. Even when he was completely coked up and booze was seeping out of his pores,” he adds amiably.

My flatmate Amanda, on the other hand, is a card-carrying member of the Singapore Chapter of the “We Love Angelina Jolie” fan club. The fact that the club comprises entirely of her and honorary member, Sharyn, doesn’t faze her one bit.

“She’s my hero and my earth mother,” Amanda will tell anyone who cares to listen. “If it was legally possible, she’d be my religion!”, a comment that led Saffy to write yet another stinging letter to Harvard demanding that they immediately withdraw their law degree from Amanda.

“How could anyone not worship that woman?” Amanda would wonder to the world at large. “She rescues African children and fights for world peace! She deserves the Nobel Peace Prize!”

Saffy’s formidable chest will inflate. “She deserves to be in jail! She stole Brad Pitt from Jennifer Aniston!”

“It takes two hands to clap,” Amanda will reply cryptically.

At this point, Saffy will go bug-eyed. “What the hell does that even mean?”

Of course, all this became moot when news broke that Angelina had had a double mastectomy. In the world according to Amanda, this event has elevated Angelina to the status of sainthood.

Even Saffy had to pause in her ongoing vendetta against a Hollywood actress she’s never met, on behalf of another Hollywood actress she’s never met either.

“Really? She had both cut off?”

            Amanda’s eyes were shining. “Isn’t she just amazing? So brave!”

            By the look of doubt now etched on Saffy’s face, you could tell that she was conflicted by her lust for vengeance and her unexpected admiration and newfound respect. She’d not felt this way since she suddenly found herself rooting for JR Ewing in the new ‘Dallas’.

            Leave it to Sharyn to put things into perspective.

            “Aiyoh, I tell you, ah, I doh-no why some people, hor, must go and tell their personal life to the whole world! Your personal life is your personal life, right? You share share share until no more privacy! Seow, ah, I tell you!” Sharyn paused to draw breath and plunged back in.

“You break up with your boyfriend, break up, lah! Why must go and conduct interview with 8DAY? And then, hor, two second later, got new boyfriend, and lagi go call up 8DAY for another interview and this time say how much you love your new boyfriend and this time con-firm is the one! Last time you or-redi confirm is the one, what! Aiyoh, I just cannot stand these people!”

Saffy turned to Amanda and whispered out of the side of her mouth, “Do you have any idea who she’s talking about?”

Amanda, who only ever reads 8DAYS for the Hollywood gossip, hazarded a guess. “Gurmit Singh?”

Saffy was astonished. “Gurmit Singh is gay?”

Amanda coughed. “Wait, Gurmit Singh is a man? Oh, I had no idea, I was just picking random names.”

“I can’t believe you don’t know who Gurmit Singh is!”

“You know I don’t watch local TV!”

Sharyn suddenly noticed that no one was paying her any attention. “Ay, what are you two talking about?”

Later, Amanda said that Sharyn’s unique brand of tough love could be a little hard to take.

“God, imagine if she had a talk show.”

“There’d be no one on it!” Amanda predicted. “Not even Angelina Jolie!”

Die die must diet

While the rest of the world is obsessing about falling employment, rising inflation, deflation, stagflation, collapsing economies and devalued currencies, in the little flat I share with Saffy and Amanda, all anyone can talk about is the new crazy assed diet that Amanda has gotten us on.

             As I told my sister over the phone, given that half the world’s population is undernourished or starving, it’s astonishing that some of us are even contemplating a diet.

            “It’s a First World problem!” Michelle said with firm authority, completely ignoring the fact that she has been on just about every single diet ever invented.

            “And I’m not even fat!” I said.

            “Fat has nothing to do with it,” said Amanda in the kind of tone you normally associate with Moses delivering the Third Commandment. “It’s about living a clean, healthy and responsible lifestyle!”

            From the dining table, Saffy looked up from her lunch and piped, “Exactly!”

            There was a brief moment of silence as Amanda and I stared at our flatmate.

            “Saf,” I said eventually, “you’re literally eating your third packet of mee goreng.”

            “Shut up!” Saffy mumbled through a mouthful of noodles. “This is my cheat day. I can eat anything I want.”

            “But you’ve already eaten, like, a thousand calories in half an hour!”

            “That’s the beauty of this diet!”

            During one of her regular trawlings through the diet section of the Internet, Amanda had come across an article that said that you can lose an unusual amount of weight if, for two days of the week, you only consume 600 calories, and you can eat whatever you want for the other five days.

            Demonstrating once again the mental agility that got her through a Harvard law degree, Amanda worked out that if she went on this diet for a month, she’d drop a dress size just in time for the wedding of her Best Enemy Forever, Francine Seow.

            And because no one likes to diet alone, she recruited Saffy and me into the campaign.

            “But we’re not even invited to the wedding,” Saffy had protested at first. “What’s in it for us?”

            “You’ll be able to fit into all my Dolce & Gabbana dresses!” Amanda said brightly.

            Saffy looked doubtful. “Well, only if I had a breast reduction. Your bustiers have absolutely no give!”

            I said firmly that I was not going on the diet. “Do you even know what 600 calories is?”

            Amanda paused. “Uhm…an apple and an egg white?”

            “No, I’m really asking. I really have no idea. But it doesn’t sound like a lot! You know what happens when I get hungry. I get cranky and my migraines start acting up!”

            Amanda sniffed. “Oh, you’ll be fine! Besides, according to the article, modern society consumes too much calories. Apparently, we only need about half the amount because we’re no longer doing any hard manual labour like our ancestors used to!”

            This time, it was Saffy’s turn to stare. “Seriously,” she said finally, “you sound like Richard Attenborough in some ass-numbing documentary about farm animals!”

As it turns out, 600 calories is the equivalent of two pints of semi-skimmed milk, four portions of vegetables, one portion of fruit, two pints of water, and a multivitamin pill.

            “Hah? Really, ah?” Sharyn pronounced when she heard about it. “That’s like my breakfast!”

            “You know, you could lose some weight, Sharyn,” Saffy said after casting a critical eye over her best friend.

            “Where got? I am 53 kay gee, OK!”

            Saffy was impressed. “Really? You eat all that fatty hawker food and you’re only 53?”
            “Abaden?” If Sharyn had been blessed with pneumatic breasts, they would have inflated at this stage.

            Of course, what no one can understand is how you could lose any weight if you starve for two days and then eat your normal diet of char kway teow and bah kut teh for the rest of the week.

            “Sure cannot work one, lah!” Sharyn said with a sneer etched over her face. “And then, hor, I tell you, people who go on diet are always unhappy! Confirm, one!”

            After eating normally all week, Saffy strategically commenced her two 600 calorie days on the weekend. By Sunday, she had turned into a raving lunatic whose hand has just been chewed off by a dog with gangrene and rabies.

“I am starving!” she screamed at Nigella Lawson on TV.

“Sip more water,” I advised from the safe distance of my bedroom door. Saffy stared at me with hungry malevolence. I sent a text to Amanda who, at that very moment, was enjoying a diet-free day with a Sunday brunch of Eggs Benedict: “It’s been nice knowing you.”