learning to read and write

What is clear to me after 2 weeks of rather hectic work is that this is not how to live our short lives. The paycheck doesn't justify it. The interactions with more "(wannebe) upstairs" types certainly don't (oh, the minefields!). The work-writing threatens to destroy whatever non-work-writing I can do. But whatever protestant work ethic and misplaced sense of responsibility I have say to soldier on - for now; count it a blessing that my colleagues are at least unchanged in their generosity, yes, accept all situations as an opportunity to learn (the practical, the useless, the dark, the frustrating, the inspiring)...

But to protect the time with friends - and books.

J has been faring far better than me in this respect, having finished this book in a few days and labouring through designer Bruce Mau's Massive Change. Of the latter, he took this lesson, and I from him:

Been reading this book called Massive Change. Part of the book is about how changes in transportation and urban planning have led to advancements/downfalls in human development. To some extent, it is only when we know, hear, feel, realised and see something, only when something is visible to our senses. Only then, we will and can do something about it.

If life, we are told again and again that humankind has this natural tendency to take things for granted. But when we slow down and peer closer, then we realised that there are so much potential and possibilities, no matter how minute it is, lying around us.

Having less patience for designspeak, I had picked up American essayist Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking instead (paradoxically, because of the design of the book cover).

After the death of both her husband John Dunne (her daughter died 18 months later after a series of illnesses) Joan Didion writes her grief and loss; and her readings. In Didion's record, sometimes brutally clinical and sometimes unabashedly emotional, we read of her readings during this period - the books about grief (psychology books, CS Lewis' A Grief Observed etc), books about medicine, books about the body, books about hospital and surgical practices. We read, too, her vignettes of the past, associations, the workings of a mind struggling to reconcile gaps and voids with whatever knowledge books afford, whatever understanding words can construct.

Perhaps when such a mind is recorded by such a studied and skillful hand, the reader feels overwhelmed by how the personal can become so monumental - as if Didion's grief was a mourning for the last 40 years of history. Does this scale not feel a little embarrassing? overly-dramatised? or refreshingly honest?

I can't quite decide. Thankfully, there is no real need to.

Friends and books - they are great because the challenges they issue are (almost) always lovingly offered. Tolerant of ambiguity. With them, there is no need to count the cost or weigh the gain.

out of sight, out of mind

工喜發財，烘包兩個來！All images in this post by J

It seems apt that the annual budget debates is taking place in the midst of the Chinese New Year fortnight, what with the festival's associations with goodies and handouts. But the prime minister gave a CNY message on the family, to balance and reinforce instead his government's other favourite message - that the family is the "basic unit" of society. Hence if you do run into trouble, look not to the state as your first line of defence and assistance, look to your family.

Of course, the prime minister's own family can give him such assurance. His dad, wife, sister and brother... there is really no need to elaborate.

But things are not always as the prime minister would have it.



This CNY will be the first spent with Ma J confined mostly to her bed and all of J's siblings in various states of unspoken annoyance with each other. Still, a Reunion Dinner was a must. Hence, there being no healthy cook or resources for fancy dishes, it was decided that the dinner shall be conducted potluck style instead. And it shall start at 5pm, which is Ma J's new dinner time.

Being game always to try something new, us amps planned 2 dishes instead of 1 - necessitating an early Friday morning trip before work to the wet market at Mr Chiam's territory. And with so many old skool wet markets "upgraded" or replaced by new, cleaner "dry" ones, we decided to offer you this little detour to give 3 useful tips to all you young 'uns who decide to venture to your grandma/ma's fast disappearing world of slippery mosaic tiled floors and jostling housewives.


1. Prepare a shopping list: You are not your grandma/ma. Your brain's not trained to function so early in the morning.


2. Know your freshness scale: You are not your grandma/ma. The stallowner knows what you don't. So make sure you know all the signs for prawns that have been left frozen for the past 3 days and onions that will bring you tears.


3. Just pay more: Since you are not your grandma/ma, the stallowners don't recognise you and don't care to because they know you're not likely going to be a "regular". This means simply that you should be ready to pay more than your average neighbourhood Auntie



The lessons of this shopping trip aside, the Reunion Dinner showed us something about invisibility.

That evening, despite the earlier intention to start the dinner at 5pm, Ma J ate alone. Instead, her children fussed about cleaning the house. And when dinner for the rest of us started, Ma J was brought to sit in the dining room on her wheelchair. The chairs formed around the table in a tight circle - she was outside. Quietly she sat, her eyes half-closed. Then someone noticed, for she was returned to her bed shortly. There, she lay down alone and in silence as the other festivitiesin the living room warned up. No one could bear to look at her - and most did not.

A year ago, my brother E told us about Mr Kam, the invisible man. Then, we had imagined invisibility to be a power we wish we could command at will, but cannot have - not unless someone else chooses to be blind. But when the world does choose to be blind, invisibility becomes a curse we are powerless to shake off. In this way, not by her choice, Ma J has become an invisible woman.

This new year, instead of GongXiFaCai, perhaps J and I should say - Ma J, even if we cannot help you, we see and hear you.

some days are poetry

completed after time stolen from many late nights

But most days are prose.

Maybe because work at the office seemed to have suddenly doubled, there's the occasion for reading poetry again. Poetry can find a small place in the head, stay there quietly until called for. For this reason, I like those "minor poets" best - folks whose work never seemed to have been caught up by the powerful forces of history and politics; they are admitted to the canon but not for being definitive. Doors are not made for them. They slip in when, by chance, a window opens.

I guess we are often caught sometimes by the spectacular and trascendent, and sometimes tempted by the mundane and quotidian.

Ah, the occasion for such reflection is this, or rather the year that has now passed. And as if some pattern should form, today Ma J gets admitted into hospital for the 4th time since her stroke. To be sure, nothing much has changed since I moved in with J. Probably because he has been living in the flat the past 5-6 years, and we had known each other 4 of those years. Yet there's been several changes variously in our lives: J left his marcomms job for his daydream in design, Ma J turns into someone even Pa J no longer recognises, and I got myself into more work...and a printmaking class that's been good fun so far.

And I am grateful for prose, and the expansive space it affords. Whether in pursuit of a narrative or meandering, as this, in random thought.

when you're 64

an angkor wat-looking place in Singapore! - All images in this post by J/TOHA

...how would you describe the country of your youth?

Saturday afternoon at a forum organised by The Tangent on student life and activities in the 1945-55, J and I heard Professor Koh Tai Ann from the English division of the Nanyang Technological University and (ex)journalist Mr Han Tan Juan do just that.

Held at the 16th floor of the new National Library Building, the 2 speakers spoke with their backs to an amazing panaromic view of the city- and as they spoke, one could almost imagine the buildings and landscape behind them shifting, the shoreline that moves further and further away from us.


Level 16, caught not listening to the speakers

Theirs were seemingly contrasting stories. Prof Koh would declare themselves as 2 worlds in 1 country. His was the personal, enlarged by the historical - though perhaps overwhelmed. And hers was also the personal, made to seem small by the historical - though perhaps advantaged to be on the winning side.

Though poor and living with her single mother, Prof Koh nonetheless had an "English" (read: colonial) education. An over-achiever who topped her class, wrote a stanza of her school song, won scholarships, her stories were an odd mix of self-deprecation and self-dramatisation. In that "English-educated" world, she learnt of birch trees and girl guide knots. Hers was a studious but also girlish childhood- and one, we are told, that was oblivious to the larger forces of history in the 50s. We did not hear of conflicts, emotional or historical. As colonials, I supposed you could choose to live a life a dedicated improvement.

Mr Han's, on the other hand, was all philosophy and ideals. He recounted his student activitst days in Zhong Zhen, culminating in the famous Hock Lee Bus riots and the student sit-ins. He described escaping the unbearable tear gas by jumping into the Zhong Zhen lake, and the various guises of political activity in the school.An impassioned storyteller, his was a story of conflict. His student activist days had continued into his later involvement with the Barisan Sosialis, leading to his detainment and the revoking of his citizenship in the 60s. Even till today, his story remains that of conflict - he ends his talk by appealing for the just and rightful claim of his story (and his compatriots) with that told by the "winners" (the current PAP government).

And though Prof Koh evaded the subject, she too was involved in student politics - in the 60s, she was vice-President of the University Democratic Socialist Club at the then University of Malaya. But that is another story, and a less glorious one - as one of the members of the audience (her peer at the opposing Socialist Club, the pro-Barisan Sosialis faction) reminded during the Q&A session.

[I can't do any justice to the many "sub-stories"(?) that were indirectly told that afternoon. If you are interested, you could pick up a transcript of the seminar, which The tangent usually publishes some months after their events (look for the journals at Kinokuniya's Chinese section).]



It was a coincidence that the next afternoon, J and I heard another such story.

We were with wheyface at the Arts House at Old Parliament to catch Ann Hui's 1997 documentary As Time Goes By, an intimate, slow-paced conversation not so much about the ex-colony's past, as it is about its future. Probably of the same generation as Prof Koh, Director Ann Hui gathered a handful of close friends who were also turning 50 (she is now 60) to talk about their days growing up in a country that would soon cease to be a colony.

Mr Han spoke of a past that was still striving to assert and legitimise its place on the present and future; Prof Koh of a past that was itself a curiosity to her present audience, though strangely, not too alien. Ann Hui and her friends (1 a "company strategist" and 1 a "reluctant politician/hero") spoke with humour and a rather youthful voice spoke too about the past, but perhaps they were speaking in 1997, there was a keen awareness about HK's future - and a sense of commitment still to that future, however uncertain, and the ideas and ideals of freedom, hope - and curiosity.

In the closing sequence about why she would still remain in HK post-1997, Ann Hui said that it was because she was still curious about the country - curious about the shape its future would take.

I think that's a pretty good reason to hang on.

Lizard poop

I wished there can be a more elegant title for this post or that there was more to this picture. But it is late, so. Lizard poop is impossible to clean. I mean, what do they eat? Glue?

Friends, all that I wish for you and I is a restful weekend. A time to think, reflect and wonder.