Keeping Up Appearances

Amanda says she misses the good old days when you actually went out somewhere if y0u wanted to meet a guy.

            “It’s so clinical now,” she said recently over lunch at Lau Pa Sat. “You have Tinder and all you do is swipe.”

            “But you’ve been on quite a few nice dates from that,” Saffy said, as she succeeded in spearing a particularly slippery piece of cuttlefish in her rojak. “So it can’t be all that bad.”

            Amanda sighed. “Yes, we had some nice dinners and a couple of movies, but nothing ever came out of those dates. I mean, they look good on-screen, but when you actually meet up, there’s always something not quite right.”

            Sharyn looked up from her mee-pok. “Aiyah, where got perfect boyfriend, one? Confirm always got something wrong, one. My friend, Suzy, she marry that Derek. Wah, so good-looking. Wedding night, he sleep with bridesmaid. You see, lah!”

            Amanda drew in a breath. “You know, I’m not sure…”

“You look at my husband.” You could tell Sharyn was warming up to her theme. “I tell you, ah, if I see his picture on Tinder, I also swipe right, ah, I tell you!”

            Saffy frowned. “You mean you would swipe left, don’t you?”

            Sharyn hesitated. “Why? What happen if you swipe left?”

            “Left means you’re rejecting the guy, right means you like what you see.”

            Sharyn sighed. “Oh, issit? Yah, ok, if I see my husband picture on Tinder, I swipe left! Wah, you so on, hor?”

            “Lots of practice, Shazz. Lots of practice. You’re so lucky you’re married and don’t have to deal with this.”

            “Anyway,” Sharyn went on, her earnest eyes squinting into microscopic dots behind her thick Coke-bottle-thick spectacles. “What I am trying to say is that you all, ah, always pick boyfriend base on looks. How to find husband, liddat? I tell you, ah, the more good-looking they are, the more chao they are, ah!”

            “So you’re saying I should only consider ugly men?” Amanda said, arching a perfectly manicured eyebrow.

            Sharyn waved her hands. “Not say ugly lah! But if you always pick Chris Pine, of course, cannot, lah! If a man look like Chris Pine, he sure got all the girl chase after him, one. What for you try to compete with everyone? You want to pick the man got fewer girl chase, mah! Then confirm he so grateful you pick him, he love you long long time! By the way, this is oh-so how you buy a puppy!”           

            For days after, it’s been all Amanda can talk about.

            “It makes so much sense,” she told her friend Sarah at work. “This whole app thing conditions us to make snap judgments in seconds, based solely on the guy’s looks.” She paused, her eyes widened in shock. “Oh my God. Just think of all the potential fabulous husbands I’ve swiped left on!”

            “So, what,” Sarah asked, “you’re going to start all over again? See, this is why, the older I get, the more I’m beginning to see how sensible arranged marriages are!”

            Amanda was shocked. “Wait, what?”

            “No, really, think about it! My grandmother didn’t meet my grandfather till the wedding day! But she always said that he was the love of her life and a part of her died when he did.”

            Amanda, who has the memory of an elephant, said, “Didn’t your granny remarry a man fifteen years younger than her?”

            Sarah straightened up primly. “Well, she didn’t say every part of her died! But anyway, you must see the point. Back in the day, nobody married for love. That came after, as they got to know each other and accept each other, day by day. And I think apps like Tinder have given us all a warped perspective of that progression!”

            “Wah, that Sarah, so cheem, hor?” Sharyn said later.

            “I think I am going to delete my Tinder account,” Amanda said. “I’m just going to let you match-make me!”

            “Hah?” Sharyn’s eyes took on a hunted look. “Me?”

            “Yes. I think you and Sarah are both right. I’ve been doing this dating thing the wrong way. I’ve been judging guys just based on a photo when really, I should be getting to know the…uhm…the Yodas of this world! So, set me up, Sharyn. You have lots of single men in your family. Introduce me to some of them!”

            Sharyn immediately rang Saffy in a panic. “Ay, how are?”

            “This is what happens when you talk nonsense, Shazz! She likes Chris Pine. Why did you have to introduce her to Yoda?! My God, what if she ends up being your sister-in-law?”

            “Aiyoh!”

Money Squawks

Saffy is firmly of the view that people who say money can’t buy you happiness are either really rich to start off with and therefore can afford to say stupid things like that, or they just haven’t really thought about the subject properly.

            “Or they don’t know where to shop,” Amanda added recently, as she sat amidst a pile of shopping bags from some secret Club 21 sale that you get invited to only if you’ve spent a gazillion dollars with them over the past two days. She glowed with the kind of radiance you normally associate with an SK-II commercial.

            Saffy gazed with deep dissatisfaction at the incontrovertible evidence of Amanda’s happiness – shoes in every hue of glossy patent leather, shoulder bags with brass clasps, little mini-dresses, and cute chunks of costume jewellery. There was even a gorgeous charcoal grey rain jacket, so beautifully cut you just knew it must never, ever, under any circumstances, get wet.

            As Saffy later moaned to me, it must be nice to live in Amanda’s world where you can just walk into any shop at the Hilton, and walk right back out with anything in it, and not even think of the cost.

            “Well, I’m not sure that’s totally correct,” I said. “Those Bulgari necklaces cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

            Saffy remained unconvinced. “If she sold all her assets and cashed in all her CPF, she’d be able to get one!” Her bosom trembled.

            After working out the rough maths, I conceded the possibility of the purchase, but said I had to wonder why anyone would do such a thing. Amanda would, I said, be reduced to busking in the Orchard Road underpass while wearing a six-figure emerald necklace. “What would be the point?” I asked.

            “The point,” Saffy sighed, “is that even if I were to do the same thing, I’d be lucky if I could pay for the COE on a second-hand nine-year-old Volkswagon Beetle!”

            The subject of her parlous finances consumes Saffy’s waking moments. The other day, she called me at work to say she’d just gone through her bank accounts and investments. “And guess what?” Her morose tone floated down the telephone line like a mother’s grief that her very expensively educated ACS son has decided to become a hip-hop dancer. “It turns out I can live comfortably without working for the rest of my life…”

            I was thrilled. “That’s amazing, Saff!”

            “…so long as I die on Thursday!”

            “Oh.”

            Later that night at dinner in the noisy basement food court of the Ion, Amanda’s reaction to news of Saffy’s financial future was a frown. “Wait a minute, didn’t The Specky Blonde say that recently on Instagram?”

            To her credit, Saffy barely paused. “And who do you think she stole that from?”

            At the other end of the table came a voice like huge rocks tumbling down a mountain. “Girl, don’t you know that money can’t buy you happiness?” Barney Chen said.

            “That is so not true!” Amanda said.

            “Lemme tell you something.” Barney leaned in, his already absurdly engorged biceps bulging with the effort. “I’ve dated millionaires and I’ve dated writers. They all have the same insecurities. ‘Does this belt make me look fat?’ I swear, one of these days, I’m going to roll my eyes so hard, I’ll go blind.”

            Amanda blinked. “Wait! That’s from The Specky Blonde, too! People are using her memes in actual conversations? What, is that a thing now?”

            “I first said that back in 2013. She stole it from me,” Barney told Amanda. “My point is that just because you’re rich or you’re poor doesn’t mean squat. If you’re a mess to start off with, you’ll still be a mess whether you’re wearing Gucci or G2000!”

            Sharyn looked up from her beef noodles, her glasses fogged over from the steam. “Yah, but better to be rich mess than poor mess, right?”

            Saffy’s bosom inflated. “That’s my point, exactly! Thank you, Shazz!” Sharyn waved her hand and went back to slurping up her noodles.

            “I really do blame my parents,” Saffy went on. “They were so liberal. They said nothing when I told them I was studying arts at uni. I could do anything I wanted as long as I was happy, they said. If they’d been proper tiger mothers and forced me to study law, I wouldn’t be poor now!”

            “I hate the law!” Amanda pouted. “It’s so stifling!”

            Sharyn looked up again. “But you’re rich! Liddat still can complain! Haiz!”

            Saffy says Sharyn should be on Instagram.

           

           

           

Maid to Order

A few weeks ago, our cleaning lady Ah Chuan announced she had to go home to Malaysia for her mother’s funeral. The news was greeted with surprise, not least because we never imagined Ah Chuan to have a mother in the first place.

            “Hah?” Sharyn said. “What you mean?”

            “Well, we know she must have had a mother,” Saffy said, her bosom rising defensively, “but we just never really thought about it. Plus, Ah Luan must be at least 60, so how old must the mother be?”

            “Where got sick-tee? What year she born?”

            Saffy paused. “I don’t know. No, wait, she’s a dragon! That’s right, she said it’s why she’s a huge fan of Lee Hsien Loong!”

            “Year of dragon…year of dragon…” Sharyn stared hard at the ceiling as her mouth moved. “That mean she was born nineteen fee-tee-tree…No, cannot be, too old, must be nineteen sick-tee-fie, so she is…fee-tee two, lor! Fee-tee two, where got old?”

            Saffy stared at Sharyn. “How did you do all that in your head?”

            Sharyn’s face was the picture of innocence. “Very hard, meh?”

            That night at home, it was all Saffy could talk about. “She’s like a human Siri! It’s not enough that she must have memorized all the years of all the animals, but she can do four digit calculations in her head! How amazing is that?”

            Amanda sniffed. “Big deal! Ayeesha over at Club 21 can do discounts in her head on five digits! Now, that’s impressive!”

            “Wait, you buy clothes with five digit price tags?” Saffy asked, looking both affronted and envious.

            “My point is, I’d be more impressed if she can work out how we’re going to survive two weeks without Ah Chuan! Because let me tell you now that I’m not cleaning the toilet!”

            “This flat is filthy and she just came yesterday!” Saffy moaned, looking at our dining table with deep dissatisfaction.

            “How much longer can next door’s renovations take?” Amanda asked. “It’s been ages!”

            For the past few weeks, our neighbours have been doing major renovations involving a lot of hacking and drilling. The result is thick waves of dust seep into our flat and cover everything.

            “It’s like living in a desert!” Saffy told the contractor when she bumped into him one day. “Why is there so much dust?”

            The contractor lifted his eyes from Saffy’s formidable bosom and looked at her with a reassuring smile. “Sorry, lah, miss, but the owner want to change all the kitchen tile and put in new sink in bathroom, so must hack every-ting out! Bo-pian, lah!”

            Saffy opened her mouth to say something tart in reply, but as she later told us, her heart just wasn’t in it. “He’s got this massive cyst in the middle of his forehead and I was dying to tell him he should watch Dr Sandra Lee!”

            Meanwhile, the dust continues to accumulate each day, even though we keep all the doors and windows closed.

            “How is it getting in here?” Amanda complained last night as she wiped down our dining table. “Look at this! I just wiped this in the morning and the cloth is grey!”

            Saffy emerged from the bathroom where she’d spent the past half hour scrubbing the grouting in the shower stall, and the toilet bowl. “This is ridiculous! I cannot imagine Victoria Beckham has to clean her own toilet when the cleaning lady goes on holiday!”

            “Maybe David Beckham does it?” Amanda suggested.

            “I doubt it. He’s probably too busy getting another tattoo to be spraying Harpic into a toilet bowl!”

            By the time we finished scrubbing, wiping, moping and vacuuming, it was almost midnight. It had taken us three hours to clean the same space that Ah Chuan does in two and a half.

            “That’s not bad!” said Amanda. Our sense of accomplishment was soon punctured when Sharyn came over the next night with fried kway teow she’d da-powed from Old Airport Road.

            “Hah? The tree of you took tree hour to clean?”

Saffy puffed up. “That’s only half an hour more than it takes Ah Chuan!”

“Where got? Tree of you take tree hour…dat mean is total of nine hour, you know! Tree time tree, mah!”

            Amanda frowned as she stared into the distance. “Three times three…Wait, how…oh…”

            It took a few minutes of Sharyn patiently diagramming the maths on a piece of paper before Saffy got it.        “Nine hours? We wasted nine hours?” she moaned.

            The next day, Amanda booked a professional cleaning service for the rest of Ah Chuan’s leave. “Don’t tell Sharyn how much it costs,” she instructed.