Thursday, February 22, 2007

family rules

I did not wear red for Chinese New Year this year. At the in-laws' reunion dinner, nobody wore red. No pink in sight either. Lots of navy blue.

After the dinner noisynotes and I strolled over to the Marina Bay area. We waited for my parents who was supposed to be waiting for us in the room my brothers and I had booked for them. We would all have been in Bali if my father had been willing to fly. It took one of my brother's honed diplomat skills and at least twenty text messages before my father was persuaded to go for the two-night stay in the hotel. "It's for people who want to see fireworks," he said. "We'll have to eat at the hotel's restaurants. They're already sharpening their knives." (This sounds less sinister in Hokkien.)

With the MTV channel blasting away and some of us making snide comments about this and that pop singer, it felt just like home. My father was demonstrating the Atkins way of eating pineapple tarts. This was a good sign. One of my brothers pointed out that noisynotes looked tired. He had eyebags the size of his carry-on luggage. We decided to skip the fireworks that night.

The next day noisynotes and I visited the in-laws who, incidentally, checked themselves into another hotel in the Marina Bay area after we left. They had been doing this for over ten years, soon after father-in-law's premature death and relations soured with the extended family on his side.

We went home to prepare for a shabu-shabu lunch. We were hosting my parents and brothers for lunch. After lunch we went to the cinema at Marina Square and watched a Hong Kong movie about a police informant who had infiltrated a drug-trafficking group that was not called Wujiandao (Internal Affairs).

It was the first family outing to the cinema since 1980-something when we watched Police Academy 2. My mother wanted to be at the cinema 20 minutes before the screening time because she did not want to miss the trailers. We were the first ones in the cinema hall.

After the film my father said he was hungry so we went to the food court. Everyone ate something except for my father who had a coffee. This could have been a bad sign but it wasn't that day.

We knew that there would be a fireworks display in the Marina Bay at nine o'clock. 20 minutes before that, my parents started checking to see if everything was in place for the fireworks. They knew from the previous night's experience what to look out for. Were the police cars on the Benjamin Sheares bridge? Had the street lights in Marina South been switched off?

When the fireworks went off we were all in front of that window, looking out. They were beautiful, those fireworks.

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Wednesday, February 14, 2007

grown-up composition

In primary school I must have written at least five compositions under headings such as "An Eventful Day", "An Exciting Day", "An Unforgettable Day". Make that ten. The Chinese teacher had the same ideas as the English teacher.

I remember writing about a class excursion to the zoo, dressing up as one of Snow White's seven dwarfs, flying to Taiwan with my maternal grandmother to visit my relatives in Tainan, bringing three chicks home from school (it was a Science class in Primary 4 I think; we hatched them and drew the life-cycle chart in our jotter-books).

Those were a child's compositions. What happened today has shown me what an eventful, exciting, unforgettable day in grown-up terms can be. All except the last item are chronological:

1. My 98-year-old grandfather-in-law died of pneumonia at 6:47 a.m. He was the grandfather I never had.
2. When we got home from the hospital we found that Mr. Max, the Japanese Spitz, had chewed a portion of his back till it was sore and bloody.
3. When I got back from the vet's, there was a traffic police officer standing at our gate. He told me that he was here to impound noisynotes's car, because the road tax had expired.
4. I realized that noisynotes told me a white lie when he said that he had paid the road tax before he went on his three-week marketing tour around the world three weeks ago.
5. The car was towed away and noisynotes was given a red ticket that said the towing charge was $160.
6. noisynotes went to get the car back. He left the house at 11:30 a.m. He came back at 4 p.m. I decided not to tell him what I think about white lies; since I had taken compassionate leave, I thought I should be compassionate.
7. We went to the funeral parlor which my mother-in-law had chosen. It was in a light industry estate. Sorry, it was in what looked like a light industry estate. The same sort of buildings where you expect to find car mechanics.
8. I put in the final corrections to a short story and emailed it to a journal.
9. As expected, my stomach has keeled over to the stress and I have dutifully taken my diarrhea tablets.

And in true-blue aged form, I am begging to go to bed at 9 p.m., so that this day can end. It is time, R. I. P.

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Sunday, February 11, 2007

note to self (on a sleepless night after visiting at the hospital)

When old and dying I must not forget the faith
of the Son who did not know how near or far
the last breath would be, the cold clasp of death.

When old and dying I must not forget the hope
of the Man who suffered like any man, woman, child
in the private stronghold of the self, his pain his own.

When old and dying I must not forget the charity
of the One who lets me live under his sun
and brings me home to be with him in eternity.

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Thursday, February 08, 2007

what is a l. p.?

In the literature for beginners tutorial today a student asked, "What is a L. P.?" On the 23 young, trusting faces in the room, I noticed that more than a few were looking blank. I tried my best to describe the vinyl record, going on to talk about how you go about putting one on the player. I thought of someone I knew in the UK who owned at least a hundred records. Thinking back now, maybe I should have been more focussed in my attempt at filling in the blanks.

The reference to the cassette tape's forefather is in Arthur Yap's poem "in passing". It was one of the poems I had assigned for discussion. The poem mentions a mural at Changi Airport. Where is this mural? I asked. Nobody knew. That's probably because the mural has been removed and replaced with something more current, like the carpeting in the airport which, to me at least, always looks like it's just been replaced.

Incidentally, do you know that we are the only airport in the world that has carpeting all over (except for in the restrooms)? It's to reduce noise pollution from trolleys, apparently. We also have the best trolleys in the world. They're hardly ever squeaky. Which leads to the million dollar question: Why then do we need all that carpeting?

Actually, I have another million dollar question also inspired by the carpeting at Changi. Why does the carpet-purchasing-department invariable go for jarringly colourful patterns? What's wrong with sedate and dignified monocolour carpeting? Is the carpeting a visual and tactile exemplification of vibrancy in a multicultural society? Like I said, it's a million dollar question.

Back to "in passing". So much of the poem relies on the reader's sense of pride in Singapore's airport, one of the first signs that we'd truly "arrived" on the global stage when it opened in 1981. At that time it was the world's largest airport. Number One in the World! That was something I heard over and over again as a child and teenager. Also, don't forget, we were also Number One Port! Better than Amsterdam!

Two-thirds of the students in today's class were not yet born in 1981. So I had to tell them about the long circular water features that drizzled their circular shower in air-wells by the side of escalators inside what is now Terminal 1 of Changi International Airport. The sound of rain inside, is what I think impressed me at that time, although of course now I can't be sure if there was any sound at all or if the water could be heard above the piped-in muzak.

They had to listen to me do my grandmother act, "last time ah, there was . . . ". Only I was talking about stepless escalators, not the kacang puteh man or firecrackers. Correct me if I'm wrong, all you 1970's or 1960's babies out there, but wasn't Changi airport the first place in Singapore to have gently sloping escalators?

One of the students said that in Singapore a lot of things are in passing. I was tempted to talk about the National Library at Stamford Road, but we were running out of time.

Passing by, passing through, pass on before you pass out.

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Sunday, February 04, 2007

night walk #1

The moon was full tonight. Did you see it? "Luminous, weightless, transparent", it was almost a twin to the one in the sky over lovers in the Leonard Cohen song, perfectly covered by Madeleine Peyroux in her album with the same title, Half The Perfect World.

I was with a friend, walking from the new Esplanade to the old. Earlier on we were at a screening of the film Summer Snow that was part of the Ann Hui retrospective at the Arts House's Hong Kong Spotlight. The director was present and there was a Q and A session after the screening. Ann Hui said that she didn't know how to make big films like The Banquet and The Curse of the Golden Flower. She didn't say this but I was thinking, she can't be using small pejoratively; the divide between big and small is the difference between a Chekhov short story and Tolstoy's War and Peace.

(Not having seen either of the two aforementioned Chinese films, I must say my analogy is based entirely on gut feeling. Also, I confess: I have yet to finish War and Peace. Anna Karenina was the best thing I read in 2004, more than ten years after I first approached it and fled, like a fool, before the hundred-page mark. I am still waiting for the brilliant translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to work their magic on War and Peace. That's one reason for waiting.)

Of course Ann Hui said other thoughtful things. And those things lingered, not long until they slipped off the edges of the mind into the recesses of memory. I asked her why the soundtrack was composed by a Japanese and she responded with a vignette about a chance meeting with the then penniless Japanese composer in a fellow Hong Kong director's sitting room. It seemed to be a scene from one of her films.

Ann Hui's craft is in coaxing the small into filling the space of cinema just so; there is nothing forced, nothing affected. We did not talk about her, or the film we saw this evening, as we took the night for a short walk, from the truncated marina walkway up to the start of the Singapore River. There was a shared sense of comfort and contentment, of being at home. Tonight the small shall suffice; tonight the moon is full; tonight there are at least two on this island who can say, without a single pang, that there is good after all in the small.

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