new land

Until my early thirties, and apart from eight years in England, I had lived only in the eastern parts of this island.  Then came a string of places - Upper Bukit Timah, Holland Village, Toa Payoh - all perfectly fine in their own ways. But I pined for the east and not recognising this, mistook my fickleness to new habitats for a chronic case of wanderlust.

I have moved back to the east now and I cannot even begin to say how this feels, how it feels to walk, drive, cycle through neighbourhoods that I have known since I was big enough to squat in a trishaw and accompany my grandmother and nanny to the Haig Road pasar.

Recent experience suggests though that I may have space in my heart for a new love.

Unexpectedly, over the last two weekends, I have come to know a new land - not new in the sense that I had not known it before, but new in that I am knowing it now in remarkable new ways. In this brief period of time, it has already become rather dear to me.

Tiong Bahru - meaning "the middle of the new"?  Were you named thus when the walk-up apartment blocks that are now your most recognisable architecture were first built in the sixties? They were very much part of the new back then, embodiment of our youthful and newly postcolonial nation, these striking white buildings in the middle of a new city.

Walking on the pathways between blocks or in the corridors at dusk or on a Saturday late morning, looking up at balconies and peering through windows or glancing up the stairway to rest the eye on old fashioned metal door grilles - there is sometimes the smell of cooking from a kitchen, sometimes there is the sound of a pop song from a radio programme or the hum of voices from a television set. The names of roads not yet familiar and the weaving of alleys not yet inscribed into my mind - can you hear it in my voice?  The pleasure, the delight, as I look, listen, and learn more about this new land - pure and intoxicating.

Perhaps because it is bestowed at this age -- when the spinning happiness and lightness of youthful infatuation have become as tired and revisitable as old tourist sites where nothing new can be added (except perhaps the softening of edges by the nostalgic misty eyes of a retrospective gaze) -- perhaps this is why my ardour for this new land gives me the feeling of having been returned to youth sans its heady, wild and reckless caprices and compulsions.

In his excellent book The Tao is Silent the witty and wise Raymond M. Smullyan writes: "freedom is doing what one likes; Zen is liking what one does." This leads me to see something which I shall commit myself to acknowledging by putting it here, in this public space, in words that shall outlast my flesh and bones and breath:

my approach towards novelty now (at two years shy of forty) compared to what it was from childhood up to age 35 seems to be guided by a Zen-like principle of liking what I do and not so much doing what I like.

This is a good place to be at. There is only so much time left; one really cannot afford to be squandering any more of it.

a grapefruit and a pomelo

The pomelo says to the grapefruit:
"You are the prettiest shade of pink,
exceeding even the raspberry and the dragonfruit.
Sharp yet unjaded,
you speak your mind with forthright ease,
handling each word with care."

The grapefruit says to the pomelo:
"Your nature,
well-hidden behind walls of toughened skin,
can be uncovered in segments.
When teased from the shell,
an architecture of bits, each one fiercely singular,
comes into the light
as sweet, sweet juice."

to continue

An sms exchange with my friend F a few evenings ago after I received news of my promotion -

Me: I've been promoted and my unit made autonomous.

F: Congrats! Now you will never finish your book.

Me: I don't think I can do anything but to continue.

F: Then better sleep early and wake up early to write!

[It was 11.05 at night.]

Me: Continue living I mean.

*

                                                

F has said before that he has low expectations of people. It would seem, though, that he has rather high expectations of me as a writer.

In an interview the pianist Mitsuko Uchida said: "There is no perfection. One works and if one is lucky, one discovers something every day. At a certain time one must have the courage to stop, and that's that."

Her statement is what I would say too, about how one might continue being a writer without renouncing all the other aspects that constitute one's sense of a full encompassing life.

Mitsuko Uchida also said: "If there is a heaven - I'm not a Christian - and if I arrive at the gate and they ask me what I am, all I will say is, 'Musician.'"

This immediately brought to mind something similar that J, a dear friend and former comrade-in-arms, used to pronounce firmly, her voice strong and steady, her beautiful big eyes serious, bright, wide: "I was born a composer. I live as a composer. When I am dead, I want to be remembered as a composer."

We were a jovial coterie, all of us practitioners and teachers in the arts - visual arts, music, theatre, literature - and J's earnest declaration (which she reiterated a number of times over three years) was something we admired but also poked fun at mercilessly to her face.

Yet today, when I ask myself what my profession at the gate of heaven is going to be, two words come to mind: "Reader. Writer."

And what I have come to understand is that for the second to emerge and to continue, to be buoyant, the first must always be like a furiously flowing river.

  

trunch

Words are disappearing from the Oxford Concise Dictionary every year, I read in an article in the International Herald Tribune today. Words like growlery.

(Growlery: place to growl in, private room, den.)

Why should this word be removed? I should like to know. It is surely a mark of civilisation that every home should have a growlery in it. Where are we going to do all our growling now? Growling deserves a dedicated space.

Of course, to offer a balanced view, the IHT article also said that new words are being birthed each day, words like woot and sexting. I like too much what their sounds suggest to look their meanings up.

Actually, anyone can have a hand at making new words.

Yesterday I was having a cooked breakfast in a charming cafe perched on the side of a hillock at four o'clock in the afternoon. The waiter had asked as I entered the place if I was after brunch or dessert. Brunch, I said. Later on, after we had placed our orders, I coined the word "trunch" - it was tea time, I had not yet had lunch, and my friend was eager to have his first meal of the day.

If only there was time to trunch every other day! Am I not reasonable?  It was a lovely lovely afternoon and afterwards the day just got better and better as the moon climbed higher and higher. With trunch to look forward to, the growlery would become a less needed space, and the word can be packed away in a box with tissue and mothballs together with breakfast, lunch, and supper.

Rashomoned

A party at a friend's apartment near Scotts Road to usher in the new year - it was December 2009.

Last night this event was called back to mind in the course of a conversation with the host, a friend who has stood by me and given me all kinds of support in the tumult of these recent five years.

Both her helpers had noted that my then husband, to be known henceforth as Hyena in this blog, gobbled down his food. "Not one, but two of them said this to me," said my friend.

"That was how he ate," I said. "He ate like that at home too."

"I didn't expect a commentary on dinner table etiquette from the helpers,"said my friend, "from both of them at that."

The image of my friend's helpers, two middle-aged women with worn hands, one from Indonesia, the other from Thailand, comparing notes on guests and table manners made me think of James Joyce's very long short story The Dead.  To be exact, I was thinking that it could be written up as a scene for a similar sort of story to Joyce's - a naturalistic depiction of a slice of Singaporean society at a party.

To be reminded of that evening, and to be told how Hyena and myself in relation to him were perceived and discussed by others not related to us can be described as a Rashomon moment. Different perspectives from different persons of the same event.

Then again, there is also the question of what could then be admitted versus that which is freely admitted to now. The different perspective that comes to light now was hitherto perhaps not so much unknown as unacknowledged.

To my friend, I said in a light tone, "Do you remember Leonard Bast from Howards End? He was invited to tea at the Schlegels after he returned Helen's umbrella - she left it behind at a Beethoven recital.  The Schlegels are these liberal upper middle class women who live in a townhouse, and have no financial worries. Leonard Bast was working class, someone who read the same books as they did, but came from a different world. He had never met or known people like the Schlegels before he was invited to Margaret and Helen's home."

Thinking back now, looking back at the relationships, observations recorded as if one were a camera and the inferences that followed did not lead to the most logical of choices. Emotional intelligence, perceptiveness and a strong analytic mind may not good judgment make. A certain casualness, or is it absence of caution, has also proven to be detrimental.

All this can fuel self-hating, or it can be channeled elsewhere to less harmful, less futile ends.

two cakes meet

Dear Black Forest Cake,

Thank you for treating me to lunch and telling me about your new pet fish.

I love hearing about pets. This year I have been the happy interlocutor of several tales about pets - a colleague's pet parrot (a sad story that deserves to be made into a short film); my brother YPL's friend's pet snake; a friend's ancient pet rabbits.

You say you spend a lot of time looking at the fish. You make sure they eat properly, you clean their tank, you buy new plants for them. Don't forget you promised me that you will let me watch you clean the tank one of these days.

"Do you scoop the fish out with a net and put them in a pail of fresh water?" I asked. You had done your research, you said. The tank is cleaned without the fish having to be moved. And you describe every stage of the process as if you were telling me the different philosophies of directing that exist.

We were meeting to celebrate the smooth delivery of our project, a children's picture book. It is the very first one you have authored, the second book in a series that still feels unreal to me even though the first one in the series celebrates its first birthday today.

I was also feeling grateful and celebratory because the two-week freeze of my fiction writing had finally begun to thaw two nights ago and yesterday morning the flow was back. So when you asked me how many projects I have going on, I could speak about all 3 of them without feeling the clutch of cold gnarled fingers around my heart.

I like what you said about the source of art. If the self is seen as the source, how small all art would be! I don't know about you, but it gives me great relief, to know that I am merely a transmitter, not the Generator.

Speaking of which, you might like "Generator 1st Floor" by Freelance Whales. It could be a good song to have on the next time you clean the tank.

Yours,
Orange Chiffon Cake