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
                                   

The Visible

I see this church every morning on my way to work. I recently learnt that it is the oldest Roman Catholic church in Singapore. The columns have supports, like someone old and frail who needs props to help him or her stand up. The paint is faded.  There are noble aged trees in the compound. All these things draw me to this church, but the supports were what I noticed first when I started to use this route. Every morning, for some reason, my fixation with these crutches persists and I stare at them as I walk past.  

One day, after I had my lunch, I went inside the church and sat down at one of the pews. There were not many people there. Most of them looked like retirees. A handful were office workers; they wore neat office attire and brightly-coloured lanyards around their necks. I gazed at the long stems of the ceiling fans, the figure of Jesus on the cross. Two church workers were preparing the altar for the lunchtime mass.

Bells tolled. It was one o’clock. The service was at one thirty. I did not stay for mass.

This morning I had a thought. I am like this church with its aged, propped-up columns, its bandaged facade. I am run down in many ways and like this church, my run-downness is naked, on display.

 

 

Inside the church the lunchtime mass goes on every day no matter how small the attendance. Inside me, the Holy Spirit dwells, nourishing my soul, so that:

even when I am not happy, I am joyous;

even when I am hungry, my stomach is already filled;

even though I am on crutches, I walk and I run.

I hope that I have not let Him down. In the entries of these three weeks, this is what I have been trying to do. 

The Invisible (III)

What were the signs?   

This happened a few times in the three days between Boon’s death and cremation. On the screen of the mobile I could see that there was a new text message. But when I tapped on the text messages icon, there was no new message to be seen. Was he trying to send me a message?

On one of those evenings, also between the day of his death and cremation, I was going through the photo library on my laptop. I was looking at a photograph of Boon when the application hung. The picture was taken at a coffeeshop where we used to eat kaya toast and mee pok. He wore a baseball cap and the grin on his face was very cheeky. I wrote in my journal that day: “You are worried that I will forget you? Don’t worry, my dear. I won’t.”

On the day after the cremation, I woke up and made a mental list of the things I had to do. There were a lot of things to sort out: financial and legal matters; the matters at his workplace. I had run out of black clothes, so I put the laundry into the washing machine first thing in the morning. And at the back of my mind the whole morning was the reminder-to-self to hang the clothes out to dry before going out.

 

As usual, I crammed far too many things to do in the few hours of a morning and I had to rush to shower to get ready to go out. When I stepped out of the shower, I saw that the door of the washing machine was open. This had never happened before.

 

There was something on the floor beneath the opened door. It was the black checkered top that I wore to the cremation. Boon liked it especially. In fact I did not use to wear it very often until after he saw me in it once and said that I looked good in it. I wore it to the cremation for this reason. And there it was on the floor. I picked it up.

 

“You’re still here,” I said aloud. I hung the blouse and all the other clothes. I was smiling because when I returned to the flat after the cremation, when I walked inside, I felt like a swimmer in a sea that had suddenly lost its current. The air seemed vacant. And the emptiness made me dejected. I felt abandoned. 

“It takes time for the departed to leave. It’s like shutting down a computer,” said the priest, “You have to close all the different windows, one by one, and then you can shut down the system.”

I was sitting in Father Yin's office at the church. I had gone to see him because I wanted to hear from him his account of what happened when he went to the ICU to pray with Boon on October 12. Before that afternoon, Boon had not moved for close to two days. Whilst the priest was praying for him, holding his hand, Boon moved his head from side to side.

The priest told me what he could remember from that day. “I saw him and I could tell that it was not good. So I held his hand and I prayed for him. I prayed for repentance and for forgiveness. I prayed for him to have peace of mind.”

When the priest asked me why I needed to know all this, I said I was planning to write about the whole experience. I had seen some things. There had been signs at home.

“Hmm. I am not surprised. But are you worried? Do the signs frighten you?” the priest asked.

“No,” I said. “I believe that these things cannot have happened without God’s sanction. They are either from God or God has allowed them to happen. I say this because I have drawn closer to God because of these things.”

“For a young person who had big plans to die so suddenly, the death comes as a shock.”

Yes, Boon had big plans. He had bought a beautiful apartment with a rooftop garden in the east and he was planning to move in in December, in time for Christmas. He had asked me to move in with him.

“Isn’t he already in heaven?” I asked. “Isn’t he with God? Why are there these signs?”

I took the priest’s advice and prayed for Boon and myself. I prayed for acceptance, I prayed for peace. I prayed for us to love God above all things.

 

What I know now is that death is not a point in time. It is not a moment. Death takes place over a period of time. For the chronically ill, the period of dying is drawn out. For the person who dies suddenly, death also does not occur only at the point when the body fails. It takes time for the soul to be reconciled to its new state. Like his mother and me, like his friends, his family, Boon’s soul had to come to terms with Boon’s death.

I was part of this process. And I thank God for the privilege. Though it was heartrending, I will still say that it was a privilege to witness his soul’s struggle to be alive and his reluctance to leave this world; it was a blessing to be guided to pray for him to look towards heaven. And what a privilege to pray for his soul to be reconciled to God's plan! To pray for Boon to set aside wholeheartedly and gladly all his cares and concerns for the earthly realm, all the ties that still clung to him, and to prepare himself for his journey home.

“We can no longer be together. You are gone; I am still here. But we are together in God. In the biggest scheme of things, the best possible thing has happened. That is all that matters. It really is.”

(to be continued)

The Unknowable

On the bus to work about a week ago, I was thinking about what I had written about the cloud of witnesses in the book of Hebrews and suddenly I recalled my experience of a cloud in an exhibition.

In 2007 I went to Antony Gormley’s solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. There was an installation work called Blind Light. It was a huge glass cube placed in the centre of one of the galleries. On one of the walls beside the installation, there were photographs of foggy scenes, landscapes swathed in mist. Some of these were taken in woods, in the hills, in mountain areas; some of them were of houses with gardens, or anonymous-looking roads and garden sheds.

The viewer can enter the glass cube, as large as two conjoined living rooms of a HDB 3-room flat, through a narrow doorway. The walls of the cube are made of glass, but the viewers outside cannot see the people inside. There were small nozzles inside the cube that filled it with mist. The cube was also drenched in a brilliant white light.

Entering the cube, I was immediately seized by fear and the desire to make an about turn and quickly get out. I could not see anything, not even my hand held out in front of me until I brought it right up to my face, close enough to touch my nose. In fact, I did exit the cube after taking about seven or eight steps inside. I walked along its perimeter, putting my palm on to the glass at one point when I saw someone else’s hand on the other side. I followed this person’s hand for a bit and after that I went to look at the photographs on the wall. I was buying time, trying to work out if I really needed to go back inside the cube.

Eventually I did go back inside. I walked very slowly. When I was deep inside, I stretched out my arms. I did not touch anything. I remember thinking, this is like being inside a cloud. Later on I read a scholar’s description of it in one of the essays in the catalogue as a “captured cloud”. Inside the cube I could hear some talking, one or two nervous laughs, but mostly, there was silence. The air felt very moist. All the time I was worried that I would walk into someone or that someone would walk into me. Even though I knew the ground was level, I could not help but worry that I might trip and twist my ankle.

Is this what it is like to be disembodied? I wondered. Is this what it feels like to be in heaven? To be in a place that contains other persons, to be bound together in a place but to not see their individual faces and bodies? To be in this place that is filled with so much light that one cannot see?

In an interview in the catalogue Gormley says that for him the most important thing about the work is suggested by the title: “the idea that light itself can be the opposite of illuminating.” He was also interested in undermining assumptions of a room or architecture as being the “location of security and certainty”, that it is “supposed to protect you from the weather, from darkness, from uncertainty.” He created a room that was filled with light, a room with solid glass walls, but it would provide an experience of disorientation, an experience of “losing the bonds of certainty about where or who we are.”

I did not think about architecture whilst I was inside the cube. But I did think about losing my body, or to be more exact, losing my sense of where my body starts and where it ends. So much of what we know is determined by how we experience the world around us as sentient bodies. What is it like to be bereft of the body? How does the soul cope with its impending separation from the body when the body is dying? 

(to be continued)

Trust

The casket was opened. Boon’s mother, aunts, and cousins placed flowers inside. Lilies, white roses, gerbera, chrysanthemum.  “You look like Ophelia,” I whispered. It was a brief moment of silliness before the tears came again. 

Mourning is the saying of goodbye again and again, accompanied by denial of the death that occasions the saying of goodbye. With cremation, the body is sent away to be destroyed; also sent away and destroyed is the possibility of this denial. 

I went outside to where friends huddled around white plastic covered tables.  “Come and help us please,” I said.

As the casket was being prepared for the final journey to Mandai Crematorium, I could not bear to watch any more. I turned towards the doorway of the parlour and I was going to walk out when I came face to face with a kindly bespectacled auntie with a thick head of grey wiry permed hair. 

On the morning of that last day of the wake I noticed a group of elderly folk, mainly women, whom I had not seen before. I assumed they were distant kin. I had seen this auntie among the group. There was another auntie standing behind her, her hair was short and dark and she was of a slighter build. She too I had seen arriving with the group.

“You have a lot of heart,” the grey-haired auntie said in Hokkien, holding my hands, “Are you Hokkien or Teochew?”

“Hokkien,” I said. “I can speak Hokkien.”

Both of them looked at me with gentle smiles on their faces. The one with the shorter and darker hair stepped forward and took hold of my hands.

I cannot remember what she said but it was something along the lines of “take care” in Mandarin.

When I turned to my left, there was another auntie who seemed to be waiting to speak to me.  Earlier on I had seen her and an elderly man arrive with the group of aunties, trailing behind them.  I remember being curious about who they were, noticing that they did not speak to anyone.

This auntie also had short dark hair.  She clasped my hands firmly and I expected her to ask me if I was Hokkien or Teochew, to have pretty much the same sort of exchange I had just had with the other two elderly women. My attention was drifting away.  I was there but I was also beginning to be absent.  

The auntie looked deep into my eyes. I was surprised by the intensity of her gaze. Her eyes were soft and kind and bright. She held my hands and said: “Trust that what the Lord has done for you and Boon is the best thing for both of you. Trust in God’s plan for you and Boon.”

In her eyes I saw pure compassion and perfect understanding. I felt like a child who had fallen by the road and this auntie was a passerby who helped me up and took care of me, dressing and soothing my wound as if she were my mother. 

Listening to her, hearing the word “trust”, I was shaken out of my numbness and pulled back from despair. I was struck by the intensity and warmth in her concern for me. I was also astonished because she spoke in English. Her English was excellent; she enunciated all the consonants. And there was something else, something that I could not identify at that time.

A day later, I realized what it was. The auntie sounded just like me. She spoke in a voice that sounded like mine. Her choice of words, her sentences, her syntax and tone – her speech seemed uncannily similar to my own.  

She called him Boon. Not his Chinese name Junwen or his Cantonese name Zhun Mun like the other old ladies. It wasn't his full name Choon Boon that she used. She called him Boon, the name he identified most closely with. 

“Who is this woman?” I wondered on that awful day. A little way behind her I spied the uncle who was with her in the morning. He saw me looking over at him and he smiled, nodding ever so slightly. I did not see them again later on when we were at the columbarium, even though I thought I saw them trailing behind the hearse.

The incident melted away as the hours of that terrible day swept us along, and throughout the journey from the funeral parlour to the columbarium it seemed that I could barely keep myself together, wishing that all this was not happening, wishing that Boon was still alive.

Were they angels? I believe they were.

 (to be continued)