Make a list

Make a list of the good things encountered yesterday,
and start to feel better.

A post-it note from a student passed on to me
like a love letter from a secret admirer

One of the activities:
Draw this image in 'Ars Poetica':
'For love
leaning grasses and two stars above the sea'
One of the boys made it into a space invasion scene,
which made me laugh.
Another boy made the grasses look like shark teeth,
how very wrong for the poem, but
a good tonic for me, sorry, Archibald MacLeish.

A quiet student at the back drew a moon and a star.
I had never considered that before,
so good to be taught something
when I was being paid to teach.

My drawing was of a steep slope that led to deep sea,
Two distant stars.
The grasses, a chaos of weeds.

Another favourite phrase: 'the night-entangled tree'
I asked them to imagine
horribly tangled hair, or a mess so bad that you might say to your friends:
'I am entangled! And then you lose your friends
because no one talks like that in real life.'

The laughter of young people is a very good thing
especially between 3 and 5 pm (they start school at 7 am),
when they could be home or playing soccer
but there they were with me at 'How to spend time with a poem.'

Playing a video clip of Auden's poem 'Funeral Blues'
and hearing the hush in the room of these 15-year-olds.
Their teacher telling me earlier on how much she likes 'Here Comes The Sun':
I needed to be reminded, especially yesterday,
that a gift from God years ago continues to be a gift,
I had forgotten and needed to be reminded;
such things should never be taken for granted.

Playing a clip of Cyril Wong reading
Telling the students this is a dear friend
my favourite Singapore poet
who deserves to be watched in person
I said, and also, he is very very very very naughty.
This much was clear from the second poem in the clip.
I read aloud his poem about his mother's steps to sanity.
If this poem were a colour, what would it be?
A student said grey, which was how I felt it to be too.
But grey not as a mist but as the cutting and healing that
only poetry can make
at the same time.

[After the class I was on the train
when a student from another context
sent me a photo of something her teacher had written
about 'Innocence', also a gift story,
where a Maths teacher, thoroughly fictitious,
appeared in my handwritten draft,
a voice of someone who had been abandoned,
so innocent, so muddled, so clear-headed and unbitter.]

(Image: kxngyuu]

Mum, Mah Mah, Ah Zor

According to my mum, I was a fussy baby. Being the first grandchild on her side of the family, the first baby to land in the household of fiery, straight-talking Changs, I was certainly fussed over. 



My great-grandmother and grandmother: the two women from whom I learnt the mysterious love of kin. They adored me, asking for nothing in return. It was my mother who suffered the weight of expectations. 
















Here I am probably three years old, leaning on mum's back as she washed clothes in the side yard of the house on Meyer Road she had married into. She hated household chores, something I have inherited from her. She told me and my brothers that we must never step over books. She wasn’t much of a reader and yet she chose to name me after a heroine in a Taiwanese romance novel.

She said that she dreamt of a baby with a thick mop of hair before giving birth to me. It was a baby in a poster she used to stare at. I don’t think my hair is thick, but that image of my mother, whom I got to know as someone who had been rudely awakened from dreamland, is one that I like very much. 

She is a tough mother, as tough as she is tender and unschooled in the ways of the world. Just two days ago we bickered during a Grab car ride home. The driver would have heard us. Telling each other off and then grudgingly making up, each giving way to the other using the most indirect words and furtive gestures of mother-daughter love.  I am blessed by the incomprehensible love, oftentimes spiky, sometimes as soft as petals, of these fierce Chang women.

[The above is an edited version of a post on Instagram.]

Dear Boon

 [At Clarke Quay with Boon and his friends on his birthday on 11.11.11]

Once again October has arrived, and this year, like the past seven years, I had thought of going away as if being away from Singapore would make a difference.

October 15, 2012, was when you died. Last Sunday I returned to our coffeeshop for yong tau foo. It wasn't a planned visit. Y and I were at church in the morning. It is customary for us to have brunch after service. My plan for Sunday was to attend a T.R.E. class with Y in the afternoon (an exercise we jokingly called 'non-yoga', a new-age thing that she would be wary of experiencing on her own, which was partly why I said okay when she'd asked me a few weeks ago). After the class I would have early dinner before heading over to my uncle's wake. I'd learnt on Sunday morning that he had passed away in the night. Yong tau foo at Tiong Bahru wasn't part of my plan for Sunday at all. Yet as we walked out of ARPC, it was what came to mind.

The bus stop across from ARPC was where we would take the bus. The bus app said that the bus would come in 7 minutes. Next to the bus stop was a house with orchids for sale. We went inside through the side gate over a drain, and walked down shady rows, hemmed in on both sides by hanging orchids and orchids on racks. I told Y that I love especially the green and white ones. I had forgotten, but it comes back to me now. I'd bought orchids after you died. In the weekends after your funeral I'd returned to Mandai and after visiting your niche I would go to a nursery. The first time there was a worker who'd asked me if he could help me.

'My boyfriend is dead,' I had said. 'He died recently.'

'Very sad,' the worker had said.

Why had I told him? I look back now and see that I was an unravelled thing.

At Tiong Bahru I asked Y about her yong tau foo order. What size would she like?

'$4,' she said.

'Their prices have gone up,' I replied. 'No more $4.'

She'd been re-reading this blog recently and she had remembered a previous post where I'd written about me being $4 and you being $5 to the uncle who took our kopi and teh orders.

That mention of $4 should have reminded me of you. You came to my mind briefly, a flutter of wings by a passing nondescript insect. I confess: my thoughts were on someone else. He calls himself a carpenter when he's that and many other things. I think you would have gotten on.

Y and I laughed and chatted about lots of things as we ate. We didn't talk about you or about the man on my mind. She understood that I needed to be distracted, as well as I understood her need for distraction. This is how blessed we are, she and I. How God has given us each other, given us our bond and our channel of nonsense, salty silent tears, our continuing chatter about James, our practical stoic natures.

There was hanging TV screen across from our table. From time to time I looked at it. An image of three men in a row came on. It'd been filmed in the coffee shop. They had bowls of yong tau foo in front of them. I watched and then it hit me. It was you. The one on the left. He had your body shape, your receding hairline, your forehead. The bright green tee he wore -- you had a tee in that colour.

It wasn't you. It was an actor in a commercial. But it was uncanny, how much he resembled you in the way he threw his head back to laugh. His shoulders had that tautness about them, sturdy shoulders with tension and strength in them. The way he leaned forward. It was you.

'Doesn't he look like Boon?' I said to Yvonne. 'The guy in green.'

She studied the screen. 'Not really,' she said. 'That guy is fat.'

'He really looks like him,' I insisted.

We watched the TV for a few minutes in silence.

'He looks so happy,' I said.

'Yah.'

Later on when we were on a bus to Orchard, I told her that she had just taken part in a remembrance exercise with me. I can't remember what she said, but both of us were smiling and thinking of you that day.

***

At my uncle's wake I saw my uncle in his casket. He looked peaceful, more peaceful than when last Thursday when I'd seen him at NUH.

I hugged my aunt, my strong aunt who looked like a piece of paper. Then I sat down with my cousin whom I'd not spoken to in years. We talked about her father. I told her how something I'd never told anyone else before. When I was little I'd wished he was my dad.

She was very surprised.

'I'm sorry I didn't visit him earlier.'

'He would have known. He wouldn't have minded,' she said.

And Boon, you know why I'm telling you this, right? Because that's the thing we'd forgotten when were together. There were things we'd let slip because we were wound up in our individual mortal mental coils, and we forgot that we are persons who need to step out of ourselves for the persons around us who need us.

'I will miss him. But I'm so glad we got to say everything we needed to say to him,' Sharon said.

That's something I learnt when you died. And this is why I wrote today.

Wei x