a version of the good life

There was a photograph of a queue on the front page of the Chinese papers last Sunday. People were queuing for places at a talk by a professor from mainland China who is famous for her self-help manual based on Confucius's Analects. It's been on the bestseller charts of major bookshops in China for quite some time now.

Her name is Yu Dan and the book is called Yu Dan "Lun Yu" Xin De (Yu Dan's Thoughts On The Analects - please pardon the clumsy translation). She gave two talks last Saturday and they were both phenomenally popular (the talk at the auditorium in the newspaper's office building had to be telecast to two other rooms in the building because there were too many people and not enough seats for them).

Out of curiosity, I bought her book that evening and started reading it.

I can understand the appeal of the book. It unpacks the pithy teachings of Confucius for the reader in a clear and accessible style. There are interesting anecdotes and stories from other sources, and the variety plays a not insignificant role, I think, in the professor's success. She quotes from Tagore, the British press, and Japanese writers, to pad the kernels she's carefully unearthed from the Analects. And she succeeds in giving these ancient Chinese moral lessons a new life. Confucius is no longer a sage with wispy beard on a distant cloud.

I have always been curious about Confucius - 'always' dates from the time I studied at a secondary school which prided itself on its Confucianism. Incidentally, the discipline master was also the teacher in charge of Confucian studies. He was the most feared person in that school. I guess that's probably why I didn't choose Confucian studies as my subject for Religious Knowledge. I thought it was best to minimize contact time with the discipline master since his interests extended beyond disseminating Confucianism to disciplining skirts (over the knees please!), the heights of socks (long and nerdy please!), and hairstyles (no gel! fringe must be above the eyebrows!).

According to Professor Yu Dan, a true gentleman or lady should be measured in his or her attitude towards the world and its affairs. There should not be extremes, one should not be extremely for or against something; there should not be polarities, either-or's, between the thick and thin, the near and far, the remote and the related. Everything comes under the governance of dao yi, the ethical, righteous and lawful. Dao yi should be the standard and the principle behind all thoughts and actions.

The discipline master was probably too extreme, too passionate, for Confucius' liking. I say this with sincere empathy. I am myself a creature of passion and the idea of being measured about EVERYTHING depresses me. I guess I don't have what it takes to lead a good life according to Confucius.

what you know says what about you

You know you're born to teach when scolding young miscreants gives you a cardiovascular rush.

You know you love your dog when you let him kiss you on the mouth even though you saw him chewing leaves and goodness-knows-what-else from the backyard in the same mouth ten minutes earlier.

You know how you see yourself is quite different from the rest of the world when insurance salesmen say with wide open eyes, "You mean even after That operation you have so Little coverage?" and on the days they feel like being sages: "Better go for the health screening and get more coverage before Something happens Tomorrow."

You know you have a good chance of making it big in a different industry when you watch American Idol and Simon Cowell seems to say exactly what you think about all the contestants. Honest!

You know your life would not be the same without electricity when you walk into Best Denki or Parissilk and you see at least five things that could make your home a better place.

You know you have friends from your own age group when you always end up talking about health and saving up for retirement.

You know you care about your health when you make sure you eat all your favourite foods (which are coincidentally high in cholesterol) in the days between the day you do your health screening and the day you get the results.

You know there are things you don't know when you have to find out the correct spelling of cholesterol (cholestral? cholesteral? cholesterel?) from the health report.

What do you know about you and more importantly, are you friend enough to tell me? :-)

master chen's ducks

Fra Angelico's The Annunciation - a fresco in a monastery in Florence, heavenly city of the Renaissance, heralding the new magic of perceiving thick and solid objects represented on flat surfaces.

It's a well-known achievement. Since the Renaissance painters have been able to create the illusion of depth by adhering to the geometrical rules of perspective in their painting. The spectator can stand before such paintings and look in, beyond the painted surface, into another world, as fleshly populated and thickly architectural as ours.

On a recent visit to the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) I stood before a Chinese ink and colour painting of ducks by Chen Wen Hsi, a China-born artist who visited Singapore in 1949 and stayed on to paint, teach, and make it home until his death in 1991. The painting was one of the works at the artist's centennial exhibition at SAM until 8 April 2007.

There are four ducks, two swimming from the top and the other two from the right. Their necks are either craning toward the left or else they point their beaks in that direction. There are a few straggly grasses in the foreground across the width of the painting, suggesting a bank that overlaps into the space where the spectator stands. The ducks are paddling in water that is evoked across the paper without any visual clue to its depth except for the positioning of the ducks and the grasses. It is an emptiness in its absence of perspectival clues, in its flatness - as flat as the paper the artist's fingers pressed on; but also emptiness that fills out into meaning and content from the suggestion of webbed feet in the sparing dabs of colour beneath the rightmost duck's body.



Look, no horizon in sight! There extends a space like a hemisphere over the ducks, a space filled out from two arcs you might trace from joining the four edges of the picture diagonally. You might move in this space, hovering over the birds like a god or calling to them from the bank with feet planted on the ground. Or reach a hand inside, as I did, even with the poor substitute of the print in the catalogue.

Master Chen's ducks bob across the papery, watery surface. Do they look east or west? Probably both, following the master's lead.