Popagandhi

and this is my preliminary draft. any resemblance to characters or situations dead or alive… is wholly intentional.

this novel will be about my family.

novels about dysfunctional families sell really well — see jonathan franzen’s “the corrections”, for example, in what seems like a thousand pages in a hefty tome about… well, families that don’t work, families that are spiralling out of control. to find how how to make families work again you’d have to skip past the fiction titles at borders and go to self-help, where for about thirty dollars you’ll find the secret to happiness in anything at all. maybe about families too. i always think crackpots write self-help books, and that one day i might write a self-help book called ‘how to win friends and influence people with your seven highly effective habits (by writing as many books about how to win friends, influence people and be highly effective, so write as as quickly as possible)’.

pardon my rambling.

this family works. most days. sometimes, like tonight, the cracks come through and it’s really quite ugly. this nuclear family that most people see, with the best dad in the world, a bumbling mother, a precocious daughter and a former rockstar brother that’ll one day be a pastor? that’s us. most days.

then enter the relatives.

in fact, i already started on my first line. maybe make this a short story first. i miss writing fiction. fiction is never entirely fiction, unless you write scifi, and even then the most memorable scifi books are only scifi in method and setting, but entirely humanistic and realistic in their emotional themes.

my first line?

“twenty years and two hundred thousand dollars. or two hundred thousand dollars over twenty years. however you want to put it, that’s all this comes down to.”

i’m on paragraph five. it just hit me that one day i could be a bestselling novelist. think about it: the first east asian novelist writing natively in english about the perennial theme that’s at once asian and at once not — families. and how they break down in our special little saving face oriental way. chinese new year: horrible uncles popping peanuts into their mouths at the mahjong table, their wives pretending to be interested in exchanging their childrens’ grades when really all they talk about behind hushed doors are whose husbands are cheating and with whom (answer: always a ‘yao jing’, evil spirit, from The Mainland). i was that weird kid who was never involved in this comparing game: i always won, so i was always excluded from this competition. i was that weird kid sitting in the corner of the room, nerdy with my 400 degree spectacles, reading a 800 page book. i always brought a book because by the time i got to page one hundred and something, it would be time to leave. and cousins who thought i never spoke much to them because i couldn’t understand their language. the truth: i understood them. i understood this smattering of hokkien curses and heartland mandarin and bad, bad english. i understood it all. i, quite simply, hated them.

all that never mattered. the tens of thousands of dollars they took from us stopped mattering when it hit a hundred thousand, i think. what mattered was how it split this family right down the middle, with just four of us on the right. and my mother, bless her soul, the ‘da jie’ of her cursed family, who always, always bore the brunt. who married my nerdy father because he was her ticket out of a cramped two-room flat in bukit ho swee road, one that was part time family, full time gambling den. she could never read a book because in mandarin, to study, to “du shu”, was the same as to “du shu”, with a minor inflection downwards in the latter phrase: to gamble, to lose, to lose in gambling. her duties: to cook and serve drinks to the people who came to gamble at my grandmother’s makeshift gambling centre. mahjong. poker. blackjack. “chap ji ki” (twelve sticks?). she came home one day from school to find the police had raided her house, her mother squatting, holding a mahjong table above her head: police baton to her ear.

my mum, excluded from most family events now that marrying a ’strange man’ who didn’t fit in, in their little scheme of things, has produced strange unrecognizable children who prefer education and books to the chinese gangs and a future in hawking “chap chai png”. and she’ll spend the next couple of decades trying to win the love of her mother in her old age. a too-clever brother who takes his turn swindling money out of every single person in this family, the same one who beat his wife, dangled his adorable three year old son out of a sixth floor window, ran away to sydney leaving his wife and young children to settle a debt they never knew about, who then turned around and said: you are the reason my wife left me!

so tonight, this man calls, and says my father set a geylang gangster debt-collector on him.

novels always have a plot twist, right?

this man, whose mere existence is enough to chase his own family away to shanghai for good without him, has orchestrated this entire setup. he’s had to sell his flat. he has nowhere to go. nobody wants to take him in. by being the victim, now then, maybe someone will give him a roof over his head when even the most peace-loving of hippie free-love advocates (i.e. me) believe there’s a special place in hell for him.

if i were to write a piece of fiction, the plot twist would be that this genteel, meek, rational, loving man i call my father actually, in this hypothetical fictional world, set a geylang gangster after the man who once held a kitchen chopper to my brother’s chest.

but this isn’t fiction, this is possibly stranger than fiction: my mother believes him and comes home screaming at me, saying ‘your father has done this horrible thing to send you to america! he spoils you!’

no matter.

what matters is that this novel already has a title, and a book cover i can already visualize, sitting on the shelves of borders around the world.

the title?

O $ P $

in big, spray painted letters.

Owe Money Pay Money. O $ P $. followed by the corresponding chinese characters: qian $ huan $.

you see that on walls of hdb flats, outside the flats of people who are heavily in debt. this being singapore, they get painted over quite quickly, but that doesn’t mean the person in there isn’t going to have a parang to his head while he’s walking home late at night.

i can see it already. international bestseller. heck it could even make the booker shortlist.

to paraphrase oscar wilde, who’s probably laughing in his grave: relatives are a tiresome bunch of people who don’t know how to live and don’t know when to die.

but for god’s sake i want my family that works — that works so well, most days — to be the only family i need to care about.