House Visit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wah, got hair salon and spa room!”

“Did you see the car elevator?”

“Aiyah, Singapore oh-so got what!”

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

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

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

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

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

“$188 million!” Saffy shouted back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortune Selling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not even a pot plant?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

Class Action

Amanda says that if she ever had to go through her schooling again today, she would just, to quote her directly, “do things a whole lot different!”

“You mean ‘differently’, don’t you?” Saffy asked the other day. 

Amanda paused. “Do I?” she asked eventually, a question that led Saffy to later say privately, and not for the first time, that it’s an absolute scandal that Amanda was ever allowed to step foot into a classroom at Harvard, much less graduate from it.

Aside from that grammatical point, I told her, I said that I did see Amanda’s point.

Looking back, I remember long days and long nights that stretched literally into years of me just sitting at a desk. Just me with a pile of books in front of me, scribbling and reading. Reading and scribbling. Sitting back in the chair and sighing.

I sweated blood and tears getting to grips with calculus and valency tables. I struggled to memorise the capital city of Czechoslovakia and the speed at which a falling object dropped from a great height would hit terminal velocity. I went cross-eyed trying to understand the subjunctive in French while I barely understood how to conjugate the verbs.

Oh, I passed all my subjects eventually, but what good did any of it do me, I now wonder? Czechoslovakia doesn’t exist anymore, so what was the point of knowing the name of its capital? As a lawyer and later as a journalist writing about hotel rooms, I’ve never ever had to use algebra. Ever. Or calculate the density of water at 10 atmospheres of pressure. And I have literally never had to discuss with anyone the rainfall patterns of the Sahara in July. 

So, beyond learning how to read and write, and do basic maths, I don’t see how much of anything I ever studied in all those long years of primary school, high school and university was beneficial at all.

What I wish I had learnt in school was how to pick a lock and hotwire a car.

“Really?” Saffy asked when the subject of wasted education came up again the other day.

“Totally,” I said firmly. “I can’t tell you how many times in my life, I’ve locked my keys in the car. Of course, that was back in the day when you could manually click the lock from the inside and then shut the car door. But still…”

“And hotwiring the car?” Saffy asked.

I shrugged. “Oh that. I always thought that would be a cool trick to know. They do it so casually in the movies!”

“Well, if I had to do my schooling all over again,” Saffy said, “I would have learnt yoga instead of stupid netball. Eight years of netball and only because I liked the outfits! Being able to do a headstand like you can now would have been so much cooler than stomping so pointlessly up and down that court!”

I preened, pleased to be reminded that after years of fruitlessly slamming myself up against a wall, I am now able to wobble up to an unassisted headstand. Next on my bucket list is the handstand which, in terms of utility, is probably not very useful, but then again, neither was the ability to work out when and where two people would meet if they started out from opposite directions and moved towards one another at different speeds. 

At least a handstand has the advantage of being a great party trick. 

The other day, Sharyn’s mother-in-law fainted in the bathroom. To hear Sharyn tell it, there was a great deal of screaming. “My maid found her. She scream. My husband go in to see why she scream, and he saw his mudder on the floor, he start screaming. Den I go in and have to scream at him and my maid to stop screaming! Wah liau!” she sighed, shaking her head at the memory.

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “What happened then?”

Sharyn shrugged. “Like dat, lor! Must call ambulance! We all doh-no what to do! My husband say must put pillow under the head. My son says must lift her leg. My maid say must put Tiger Bum! My neighbour come in and say must turn my mudder-in-law on the side. We all like Doctor Quack. Lucky ambulance come so quick.”

The long and short of it is that Sharyn says she wishes comprehensive first aid was a mandatory subject in school. “What for learn about what year Raffles arrive in Singapore? Better you learn what to do if your mudder-in-law faint or have heart attack, right or not?”

Amanda says she wishes schools taught girls what to do when boys say they’ll call and then they don’t. Saffy says she’s practically got a PhD on that subject.

Tall Tales

So, the other night, we were watching reruns of Game of Thrones and there’s a scene in the throne room with Queen Cersei and her hulking mountain of a bodyguard. And this being Game of Thrones, his name is literally Mountain – which is helpful because there are so many hard pronounce names in the show, it’s such a relief when a character gets one that’s a simple, easy to remember.

“Gosh, I’d forgotten how tall he is!” Saffy said, while stuffing her face with popcorn.

“The Mountain?” Amanda asked, currently curled up under a light shawl in the armchair. 

“He’s enormous! How tall do you think he is?”

Amanda pulled out her phone and tapped. There was a pause. “His name is Hafthor Julius Björnsson. He’s…uhm…186 kilos and he’s six feet nine!”

Saffy sat up, and hit pause on the remote control.

“Wait, what? 186 kilos? And six feet what?”

Amanda’s eyes flicked back to her phone. “Six feet nine.”

For days, it’s all the girls have been able to talk about. 

“Six feet nine!” Saffy told Sharyn. “The guy is literally twice your height, Shazz. If you stood next to him, you’d come up to his navel!”

Behind her Coke bottle thick spectacles, Sharyn’s eyes bulged. “Wah!”

“I know! I wonder what meal times with him must be like?”

“He’d probably have to eat ten roast chickens or something,” Amanda said. “I read that he eats six to eight times a day!”

Sharyn sucked in her breath. “Hah? Sicktime a day?!”

“Well, you don’t get to be that size by eating carrot sticks, Sharyn,” Saffy pointed out.

“Wah liau. Then when he go toilet and do number two, how? Must flush tree time, I think!”

The girls fell about and shrieked. Later that evening, Saffy was still cackling at the idea of The Mountain sitting on the loo and doing a dump. “That Sharyn kills me. The things she says!”

Amanda lifted her lovely face to the ceiling and stared into the corner. “But you know…I have to wonder…what…” She trailed off and turned pink. 

Saffy glanced at me, her eyes flicking back to Amanda. “What?”

Amanda hesitated. “Well, you know…He’s so…big. Do you think…do you think everything is in, uhm, in proportion? You know? Down there?”

Comprehension finally dawned on Saffy’s face. Her bosom inflated. “My God, you know, I never even thought of that! Well…I guess he must be. And he’s an ang moh as well!”

Two of Saffy’s ex-boyfriends have been American and Swedish, and to hear her tell it, if they were a statistical sample, Western men are tremendously gifted. Which is also why, apparently, the relationships never lasted very long. “Oh, the whole thing was impossible!” she told her friend Suzanne after she broke up with Matt, the Citbank trader from Dallas. “I literally cannot walk straight the next day! And let’s not even talk about the state of my jaw!” she added with a pout.

Suzanne had been bug-eyed. “Really? Like…how impossible are we talking about?”

Saffy didn’t hesitate. “Like that you tiao you just had with your soy bean drink! Only twice as big!”

And as Amanda now pointed out, Matt had been six foot two and played quarter back in college football. “Imagine someone who is six foot nine!”

“He’d be packing a mutant cucumber!” Saffy said firmly, shaking her head at the violence and damage that could be inflicted by a vegetable that size on a petite five feet seven girl like herself. 

A few days later, at a party, Amanda’s friend Anna brought along her new German boyfriend. I wasn’t there, but apparently, the guy is literally six foot nine, the same height as the Mountain.

“He’s huge!” Amanda reported later. “I got such a neck-strain looking up at him that I finally had to ask him to please sit down. And even then, I still had to look up!”

Saffy frowned. “But Anna is, what, like five feet five!”

“She literally comes up to his navel,” Amanda said. “I don’t know how that relationship is ever going to work!”

“Has she, uhm…” Saffy coughed gently. “You know, tried the salad bar…”

“That was the first thing that crossed my mind” Amanda said. “But there were so many people at the party, I didn’t get a chance to ask! But really, how could she? It would just be anatomically impossible! Oh, speaking of, Anna did say that Johann can only travel in business class and even that is super cramped. He literally can’t fit into an economy seat!”

Saffy says if that isn’t a metaphor for her love life in general, she doesn’t know what is. 

Retirement Benefits

Once, when she was a child, my sister said she wanted to travel the world like our parents.

I remember Mother smiling indulgently. “Oh, my dear. You have to grow up and go to school and study!” she said. “Then you have to become a doctor and work really hard and make lots of money. When you retire, then you can travel!”

It was just the sort of thing you can’t un-hear and it sticks in your mind and years later, it’s still a subject that comes up every so often during Michelle’s therapy sessions.

“My therapist says my inability to relax and let go can be traced to that conversation,” Michelle sighed recently on FaceTime. “She says it explains why I’m always pushing myself and feel so much guilt when I’m on holiday. I am not giving myself permission to enjoy my down-time because apparently I feel like I don’t deserve the moment.”

I stared at my phone. “What, so when you retire at 65, suddenly, you will get that permission and you’ll become less uptight about having fun?”

Michelle stiffened. “We don’t use the word ‘uptight’ in therapy!”

When I recounted the conversation to Amanda, she said it’s such a typical Asian parent thing to say to their kids. “My dad said the exact same thing to me that one time I was in university and I wanted to come home to Singapore for the holidays. He said I was so spoilt and that I should just stay put and study for the next semester’s courses.”

“Oh. My. God,” Saffy sighed. “My mother said the exact same thing, too! What, is there some guidebook out there that Asian parents read about what to say to their kids?”

“He said I would have plenty of time to travel when I retire!” Amanda went on. “Exactly what Jason’s mum said!”

Saffy’s bosom inflated. “You see, that’s the sort of thing that qualifies as fake news. If people said that sort of rubbish today, they’d be arrested!”

Apparently, Amanda told her father that if she waited till she was 65 to travel, she’d be lucky if she was able to lift her cabin luggage into the overhead compartment.

“You’d be lucky if you’re still alive at 65!” said Saffy, whose Uncle Max literally dropped dead on his 64^thbirthday while walking from his bed to the bathroom. To hear Saffy tell it, it was the sort of thing that made you want to cash in your CPF and blow it all on a first class round the world trip.

“I mean, he died on his birthday! I can’t even imagine it!” Saffy’s bosom inflated. “He woke up and thought to himself, ‘Happy birthday to me! I wonder what presents I’ve got waiting for me downstairs. But let me pee first’, and literally ten seconds later, he’s face-planted on the floor!”

“What a crappy birthday present,” Amanda said, shaking her head.

“Well, his wife said the upside is that he didn’t linger and suffer from some malignant disease that took years to finish him off,” Saffy said. She paused and gave the matter some thought. “She really is a glass half-full kind of person. It’s not the kind of thing I would ever have thought of.”

For Amanda, the moral of the story is, have fun now because you never know – tomorrow, you might be stuffed into a coffin.

“If you want to have an affair, have an affair!” she said airily to Sharyn who turned goggle eyes at her.

“Hah?”

“If you want to go on that cruise to Spain, go now!” Amanda went on. “Don’t wait till you’re retired. Your hips may have given out by then!”

Sharyn looked unconvinced. “Yah, but if I spend all my mah-ney now, and then when I’m ninety-tree and I’m still alive and by den, I got no more money, then how? Next week, my mudder turn ninety-nine and my fah-der is ninety-four, so proh-blee I oh-so got same gene!”

Amanda pursed her lips. “When you’re ninety-nine, there’s no way you would be able to travel, so, either way, you should travel now!”

Sharyn drew in a breath. “Yah hor! You are right. Should travel now. And if I spend all my money and I am still alive at ninety-nine, I come live with you, lah, Saffy!”

“I wouldn’t count on it, Shazz,” Saffy replied. “I’ve got no money now, so I can’t imagine where I’ll be living at ninety-nine. Maybe I’ll be living with you, Amanda!”

Saffy later said the look of panic on Amanda’s face was priceless.

It's Raining, Man...

Saffy says that given the amount of time she spends these days staring up at the sky, she might as well take up meteorology as a second career. 

“You very free, lor,” her best friend Sharyn told her the other day when she walked into Saffy’s office and found her peering up through the tinted windows.

Saffy whipped around, frantically waving her hands. “Can you not say such things so loudly, please?”

Sharyn shrugged. “Yah, what. Every time I come in here, you never work, one! Got dat time, remember, you were sitting at your chair, going cross-eye! You say you were exercising your what, ah? Your pelvic muscle!”

“Ugh,” Saffy said, turning back to the window to stare up again. “You can blame Amanda for that. She was so into her Kegels, she made us all do it. Jason says he’s still doing them!”

Sharyn glided up next to Saffy and looked up. “So, what are you looking at?”

“Rain clouds!”

“Today where got rain? Is so hot!”

“I’m trying to train my internal barometer!”

Sharyn sighed. “Aiyoh.”

A few weeks ago, someone in Saffy’s yoga class gave her a book called ‘Inner Engineering’ by Sadhguru. “It’s quite life-changing!” Marissa said as she thrust the orange covered book into Saffy’s hands. 

Later that evening, Saffy says she wished she could give Sadhguru a make-over. “I think if he trimmed his beard a little, he’d be so much cooler!”

“The man rides a motorcycle all over India, Saff,” I said. “You can’t get any cooler than that!”

Saffy turned astonished eyes on me. “How do you know this?”

“I watch all his YouTube videos. I think he’s the coolest dude I’ve never met,” I told her. “He’s so smart and explains heavy metaphysical and spiritual stuff in simple language. My sister became a vegetarian after watching one of his videos!”

Which is how that evening in bed, Saffy found herself turning the first page. She could only get through two pages. “It’s so intense!” she reported the next day. “I loved that he started page one with a joke though!”

“Oh, Sadhguru is full of jokes,” I said in a way that seemed to indicate he and I were squash buddies. 

That night, Saffy read another two pages. And the following night, another two. Each morning, she would stumble into the lounge room, goggle-eyed. “My God, the things that man says! And how he says them! I seriously can’t wrap my brain around any of it! But I also can’t stop reading!”

During the day, she’d catch herself thinking about her relationship with other people, and situations. After one office meeting, Sharyn asked, “Ay, you sick, ah? The whole meeting, you smile and not say anything. Marcus from accounts WhatsApp me and say you very scary!”

Saffy blinked. “No, I was just thinking that none of this matters at all. All this angst is just a reflection of my externalities and has nothing to do with what’s going on inside.”

Sharyn stared. “Yah,” she said eventually. “Confirm, you sick.”

And then, one night, Saffy got to a passage in which Sadhguru said he has tuned his inner consciousness to such an elevated state, he is be able to tell if it will rain.

“Can you imagine?” she said the next morning at breakfast. “That’s just totally mind-blowing!”

Amanda was unimpressed. “There are weather apps for that kind of thing!”

“Yes, but still! That’s real skill!” Saffy’s eyes shone.

For a week now, she’s alternated between sitting with her eyes closed concentrating on tuning into her inner barometer and staring up at the sky for any sign of rain to check if the bright blazing blue sky above correlates with what she’s feeling. 

“So, how? Can feel rain or not?” Sharyn asked the other day. She’d just marched back to the office from Lau Pa Sat and had to disappear into the bathroom to mop up her sweat and dry herself off. 

Saffy pursed her lips. “I can’t feel anything!”

“Of course not, lah!” Sharyn sighed. “I no need read your book, I can confirm got no rain! These few day so hot, where got rain? If Sadhguru was here, he also tell you the same ting!”

Far from being discouraged, Saffy perseveres. Even when she announces that it won’t rain, and there’s a thunderstorm two hours later, she’s convinced she’s on her way to becoming a human barometer. 

“It’s just a matter of practice,” she told Amanda who told me privately that it’s a good thing Sadhguru never wrote a book on levitation. 

“Can you imagine?” she asked. 

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.”