Friday, December 28, 2007

balik kampung


Juraissic age HDB playground at Kim Keat - all images by J

My parents were born on this tropical island. But my father's father was from that most southern of southern China - the godforsaken island of Hainan; and my mother's was probably from Swatow. Pa J on the other hand was actually born in the Hokchia stronghold of Zhang Jian, and had travelled to the Nanyang by boat when he was a boy.

On our tiny city-state, the idea of a hometown may have little meaning. Ask a Singaporean "where were you born?", and the answer would probably just be "XYZ Hospital" instead of "XYZ Village/Town/City/Country". This would, of course, change with more new migrants.

Still, since we were both on leave from work, this morning J and I decided to put on our domestic tourist tags and go visit what comes closest to being our hometown - the neighbourhood of Bendemeer!

The walk from Toa Payoh to Bendemeer brought us through the flats of Kim Keat guarded by 2 dinosaurs (what was going through the minds of those Town Council folks who commissioned this?!), through the Shuang Lin Temple, across the Pan Island Expressway to the butterfly-filled fields beside Whampoa Estate, and across the Central Tunnel Expressway to the Towner Estate which is right beside the 4 decade old HDB estate of Bendemeer.



J's corridor playground + Sticker-style graffiti by disgruntled Bendemeer inhabitant

There's nothing romantic about this, just a fact of the smallness of our island that both J and I had actually lived in adjacent blocks of flats in Bendemeer when we were kids.

But I would be dishonest if I said I did not like being able to share with J memories of the same kindergarten, the playground just at the foot of our flats, the same market and food centre, the same provision shop, the same stationer's with its glass cabinets of colourful erasers and pencil sharpeners we would gaze at, the same Lao Fuzi comics by the barber/hairdresser, the same beautiful mosaic-tiled wall of the adults' United Overseas Bank...



surviving the times

But taking away these particular memories, our experiences were vastly different. I with my Grandma, and J with his family of 7 siblings. Admittedly, J seemed to have more varied and colourful relationships with the neighbourhood and its inhabitants and merchants.

It is also a fact of this island's life that the neighbourhood of your childhood memories will not stay unchanged through time. And perhaps a particular aesthetic of memory would evolve given all this. I don't mean a hazy, warm-fuzzy-feeling sort of nostalgia-influenced aesthetic. But a kind of aesthetic where materiality and time will lock arms, tightly.

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p/s Domestic Tourism food tips
If you are in Bendemeer, visit its market and food centre for yummy fried carrot cake (the black sauce kind) at stall 01-35 and the famously ungrammatical "Eat-May-Know" rojak. To get to Bendemeer, take the North-East line and drop off at Boon Keng Station.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

white

ampBoynGirls (安)
click for flickr view

About Christmas and gifts, I just overheard this on a news interview tonight - "帶一個感恩的心". Friends, hope you have a good Christmas and New Year holiday.

Monday, December 17, 2007

the walking man

Hard (硬)
image by J

The joys of walking are seldom fully experienced on this island. The reasons are many: it's the weather - that debilitating heat or the indecisive raining that is not quite a steady drizzle or a thunderstorm; the fast pace of life; the design of our pavements and streets; "there's nothing to see"... Or maybe, as in many cities, we reserve our walking for indoor, air-conditioned environments designed to visually entice and seduce at every step (no, not museums, but shopping malls).

But the nature-lover's trek, the scholarly stroll, the solitary romantic's ramble, the lovers' meander, or just a destination-driven march are all possible (and enjoyable) on our small, car-mad island.

When I was a student, I had spent my holidays walking around the city alone. Now, since we don't drive, J and I walk a fair bit everyday whenever we can give the bus or train a miss. 2 Saturdays ago, with J at the gym and the December morning air agreeing, I walked around half of Toa Payoh alone. It was a lovely walk. I thought about this book.

When I had first read the graphic novel The Walking Man by Jiro Taniguchi, I did not know what to make of it. Used to either manga's futuristic apocalyptic visions (Jiro Taniguchi had drawn one of these, Icaro with Moebius) or strangely moralistic fantasies, I was expecting with each frame or page of The Walking Man that there would be an odd twist in the tale. Perhaps this nameless man was a serial murderer or rapist. Perhaps he had just moved into a town with a dark past. Or perhaps he will have an affair with that woman he has just met in the park.

But as the book progressed in its slow, desultory pace, all there was was as the title promised - a man (middle-age, seemingly well-off and nerdy) and his random walks in a town he and his wife had just moved into,a slightly old town. He gets caught in the rain. His glasses are smashed when he passes a group of boys playing in a field. He has a chance encounter with a woman in an autumnal park. He meets a bird watcher. He spots a local bird in the next chapter. He finds a lipstick left behind by a group of giggly schoolgirls. So used is the typical reader to our own cityscape and TV dramas that we expect these chance encounters to each lead on to something sordid, dangerous - well, exciting. Yes, now that's reality, or rather, life!

So for its stubbornly idyllic and nostalgic ways, I guess this story is not unlike a fantasy. Yet The Walking Man is oddly about "real" life. Not just for its realistic renderings in each frame, but how Jiro Taniguchi manages to evoke the very sensory experiences (and more) - the sight, smell, thrill, touch, humour, wonder, curiosity, taste, even possibly temptation - of that nameless walking man through his story and images. These walks translate into every positive sense of being alive.

I was also reminded of another book Designing Design by Japanese graphic designer (Muji's CD) Kenya Hara that J had recently bought. Kenya Hara, in writing about the disorientation of too much media/information today, describes it as too little information. Our brain has too little, not too much stimulation. He compares our experiences today to having a multitude of post-it notes on the brain, but none stimulating our human brain in all its sensory possibilities of knowing and living. There's a diagram in his book where, to an outline of the human body, he sketches a diagram of the brain not just in the head, but brains located all over our bodies - in our hands, shoulders, feet, chest...

work / life (生活)
not at this pace lah! - image by J

During one of our many walks around the city on a hot, sticky weekend, J and I were determined to get to our next destination in the shortest time possible. But I thought perhaps all the speed walking is generating more heat. So I deliberately slowed my pace, and made sure that I felt my feet - from heel to toes - touch and lift off the pavement each and every step. I don't know about J, but I felt immediately calmer and cooler - anchored not to to heat from the cement, but a kind of solid ground...metaphysically speaking!

Alone, you get to tune in to your body/senses in the context of the world around you; with someone, there's another kind of living. Either way, walking is good. Yes, despite the punishing sun, the irritating indeterminate half-rain-half-drizzle, the rush for the next errand, our often unattractive patchwork cement sidewalks, and the lure of those comfortable, shopping mall corridors...

Thursday, December 13, 2007

remains

BadFoot (臭)
afterlife of a moldy towel by J

As part of the admission process for a study programme I've applied to, I was required to submit a sample of my undergraduate and postgraduate writing. As such, I spent an hour in my old room going through all 10 thick ring folders of notes and essays on literature that, 10 years ago, was still so precious I actually put it on a 3-month sea voyage from a northern island to our tropical one.

The folders are accompanied by 2 boxes of index cards, neatly documenting every article and book I had referred to and made notes from, the highlights now a sickly candy floss pink. Having found the 2 essays I needed, for a moment I contemplated trashing the whole lot. But only for a moment. Then I stashed the 2 boxes of index cards and 10 stacks of mildewed paper back into the cupboards, unsure if they would ever see light of day. Ah, sentimentalism - that's what remains of an education!

Sunday, December 2, 2007



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in the quiet of the night

This was meant to be a post about Michel Faber's extremely well-written and pleasurable novel The Crimson Petal and the White, but the Singapore Writers Festival, a biennial event sponsored by the National Arts Council hijacked the review.

I've never been entirely convinced of the need of a writers festival. People who write getting together to listen to other people who write talk instead - and talk among themselves. All this had seemed unnecessary. As if writing itself was not vanity enough, there should be voices declaring.

But I looked forward to this year's Writers Festival. Not for anything but the names of 3 writers I recognised and admire. There was Goh Poh Seng who would be coming back to Singapore from Canada after so many years away, now ill, to give the opening address. Chinese poet Bei Dao, whose poems I enjoy (despite the appalling translations). And Arthur Yap.

Last evening, wheyface and I attended the Arthur Yap reading. It took place in a room of some 6-7 of his paintings. And since he had passed away last year, there was the sense of a belated eulogy about the event. Folks who knew him personally or was related to him in the 3rd or 4th degree read his poems, or their own which were inspired by or dedicated to the man.

The event was interesting for the people who attended as audience or who read - poets (the dignified, the excitable, the mediocre) and wannabe poets, academics (always fun to watch, Nabokov's Pnins), students, old girls, young boys... Ah, you could mine the evening for stories (invented, inspired or observed) and emerge terribly rich, these barely concealed gems for the eternally kaypoh.

And of course, the poetry itself. Read aloud, they speak as much of the reader as the poet. Writer Christine SuChen LIm read sensitively and musically - making you wonder if her prose would be equally nuanced. Lee Tzu Pheng, Arthur's fellow academic and poet, read steadily, assuredly - but conscious too of Arthur Yap's often playful ironic turns.

in the quiet of the night
in the quiet of the night
when alert ears pulse
i can hear again the words,
the poet i was earlier reading:
he is the one person i understand fully.
i understand he is a poet
& i understand his poetry.
i even understand my own knowledge
of this privacy which is public literary study.

the words will move on more swiftly
than tomorrow will be now. & i will
know, in reading again,
i do not know him
or any other, or myself, or that any poetry
is the public transaction that it must be.
& it must be private ultimately.
(from Man Snake Apple - 1986)

romance
an old drawing, recycled here

All of his 4 collections of poems were dedicated to someone. His parents, his partner(?) Keith Watson, his brother Anthony and a Japanese friend Miyuki Nagaoka. Maybe the strength of his poems and his craft lie in this - their humanity - the relational, which extends easily to the relationship of poet-poem-reader in words.

in memory of) anthony
your coffin had no nails.
years i have lived with this nailed feeling,
every moment forgotten. & other moments,
larger remembrances, are also of you.
when all is said & not forgotten,
may it be known to me
& leave behind, not necessarily
even a need to understand
what you all along would know,
this long, long trail of quick, sharp sorrow.

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P/S Arthur Yap published 2 of his more recent poems in QLRS (click to read).