Posts tagged "bestof"

My Singapore List

Food is extremely subjective, and in Singapore it's a national pastime and passion. The following lists are based on my tastes. Other people may disagree, and you may want to do further research based on your own dietary preferences.

If you're from Singapore, resist the urge to tell me I missed your faves: I'm prioritizing picks that I think tourists will find more accessible. I don't expect anyone to travel to my corner of the woods to find the best of something.

(Or, get this list in one single Google Maps list)

1. Laksa: Sungei Road Laksa, Janggut Laksa, Wei Yi Laksa (my absolute fave laksa but the lines are.. long. I waited 60-90 min the last few times I went, and they sell out before noon. definitely one of the most 'local' and 'old school' of the bunch. This is the laksa I grew up eating), 928 Yishun Laksa
2. Chicken rice: 'what's the best chicken rice' is an explosive question in Singapore. Here are my my picks: Tian Tian (Bourdain's recommendation and has a line to show for it), Ah Tai (similar to Tian Tian, with a less long line, in the same building), Sin Kee (my fave Cantonese style chicken), Tong Kee (my fave roasted style chicken rice), Feng Ji
3. Chwee kueh: a Teochew breakfast delicacy made of steamed rice cakes (different from idlis, they are more.. glutinous and starchy) served with a delightful turnip / chillies relish. I like mine at Bedok Chwee Kueh @ Chinatown Complex, Jian Bo Shui Kueh, Pek Kio Chwee Kueh. This is one of the more unique foods that I can't really get many other places
4. Congee / porridge. Many, many styles of congee in Singapore. I like Zhen Zhen, Weng Kiang Kee, Ah Chiang, Imperial Treasure
5. Nasi lemak (sometimes halal, sometimes not, depending on the stall you go to): Nasi Lemak Ayam Taliwang, Uptown (for Malaysian style nasi lemak, which I love), Dickson Nasi Lemak (take-away only), Mama Lemak, Pak Mandor, Owen Road Nasi Lemak
6. Har jeong gai (fermented shrimp paste coated batter) and other distinct styles of fried chicken wings: Ah Tan Wings, Eng Kee, Ban Leong Wah Hoe, No 5 Emerald Hill (go here if you want booze in a bar in a hidden away spot behind busy Orchard Road, with gorgeous old world architecture. The wings are great. The drinks are middling (just have a bottled beer or something), there are better bars in Singapore but it's a unique spot for chicken wings, bottled beer and beautiful historic architecture
7. A large 'zichar' meal. If you're familiar with the 'dai pai dong' in Hong Kong, zichar is the Singapore equivalent. I always like Kok Sen, JB Ah Meng (hot take: skip the chilli crabs that tourist blogs / videos tell you to go to, and come here instead. Get the white pepper crab, 'san lou' beehoon. It's cheaper and better), Wok Master, Maddie's Kitchen (where I always eat if I'm in the Orchard area), Zhenyi for vegetarian option. Every residential neighborhood will have its own good zichar but I think this list of spots will give you a good introduction to it
8. Soy sauce chicken (hot take: skip the 'cheapest Michelin meal in the world' (very middling after their Michelin star expansion) and go to a better stall, Ma Li Ya chicken or Fragrant Soy Sauce chicken
9. Indian rojak (rojak means 'mixed'. Kind of like a salad, but most things are fried and very tasty): Siraj, Habib's, Haji Johan
10. Fishball noodles or minced pork noodles (very similar: dry noodles with soup on the side. Fishball noodles come with... fishballs. Minced pork noodles come with.. minced pork. Sometimes the lines are blurred): Soon Wah, Hock Lee, Ah Ter, Ah Huat Minced Meat Noodles, Liang Seng
11. Char siu and other Chinese rotisserie: Roast Paradise, 88 Hong Kong, Fook Kin), Foong Kee
12. Curry debal and other Eurasian food: Quentin's
13. Henghwa food: Ming Chung, Xing Hua Family Restaurant (there's a chain called Pu Tian that you'll see in malls all over, it is pretty decent if you've never had this food, but these spots are better). Heng Hwa / Xing Hua food is food from Fujian, but coastal, and therefore a lot of seafood. I really like it and think it's one of the more unique cuisines you can get here
14. Lor mee: Keng Heng Whampoa Lor Mee, 86 卤面 Lor Mee, Feng Zhen Lor Mee
15. Braised duck rice and duck noodles or goose rice and noodles: Jin Ji, Tong Kee, Chuan Kee, Sean Kee
16. Prawn noodles: River South Hoe Nam,Don Don Prawn Noodles, 545 Whampoa Prawn Noodles
17. Yong tau foo: Xiu Ji, Yong Xiang
18. Hainanese curry rice: Beo Crescent Curry Rice, Loo's Hainanese Curry Rice
19. Mee rebus (halal): Afandi Hawa
20. Mee soto (halal): HJ Waliti HJ Mazuki
21. Mamak food especially mee goreng: Hajjah Jamillah Rajmohamed Muslim Food, Hassbawa, Kassim Stall
22. Singapore-style Hokkien mee. Different from KL Hokkien mee. Singapore Hokkien mee is 'white' and not 'black'. also uses copious amounts of pork lard, but it's more 'broth'-based rather than 'dried' (although it isn't a soup). Hard to describe, but I love this stuff: Blue Star, Hong Heng, You Fu, Prince of Hokkien Mee
23. Wanton Noodles: Ji Ji, Bei-Ing, Wei Min, Eng's, Ah Wing's
24. Roti prata (halal): Prata Saga Sambal Berlada, Mr & Mrs Moghan, Sin Ming Roti Prata, any of the Springleaf Prata restaurants (various branches)
25. Nasi Padang / Minang (halal): Putra Minang, Minang House, Pu3
26. Vegan-friendly Hakka Thunder Tea rice: Hakka Thunder Tea Rice at Margaret Drive, Queen Street Thunder Tea Rice, The Thunder Tea Story, Traditional Hakka Rice
27. Kaya toast and coffee: Heap Seng Leong (order the butter coffee too!), Tong Ah, Chin Mee Chin, Ah Seng (Hai Nam), YY Kafei Dian. In a pinch, Ya Kun and Killiney (all over the city) are good too but these places are more old school.
28. Dimsum, like everything else, has 'street' and 'fancy' version and it's here where I truly believe that splurging for dimsum is a better experience than the 'street' version (usually made a factories. Have you seen how much work it takes to make dimsum?! Also we have some really good dimsum spots). My pick for dimsum is Peach Blossoms (call, make a booking for lunch; I believe it's on par with some of the best dimsum in HK) and Ji Xian
29. Bebek goreng: if you can't make it to East Javan in Indonesia, bring East Java to you. Fried duck with lots of spices is a Surabaya / Madura specialty and one of my favorite dishes anywhere in the world. Thankfully, we have good ones in Singapore too (we also have a large Indonesian population) and my favorite is Pak Ndut.
30. Really good coffee: even though I live in the land of Sightglass and Four Barrel coffee, Tiong Hoe (and coffee shops in Indonesia) is probably the coffee I miss the most

If the list is too overwhelming, literally go to any of these hawker centres and eat anything you find interesting. If there's a line, join it. Anything called 'market and food centre' is a hawker centre with an attached wet market (no wildlife. Just good fresh produce, fish, meat. Generally pretty clean).

1. Old Airport Road Food Centre (breakfast, lunch and dinner, especially good for dinner)
2. Maxwell Food Centre (breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper)
3. Pek Kio market (breakfast, early lunch. Many stalls here are Teochew in origin, run by very old folks, closes very early)
4. Haig Road (breakfast, lunch). Best option for halal food
5. Tekka Centre (breakfast, lunch and dinner). The main hawker centre in Little India. One of my faves. Lots of halal options and regional Indian, even Sri Lankan, options. Chinese food at the back. Get freshly made prata. idiyappam, appams, good prawn noodles, and lots more. Wet market at the back is spectacular and is a chef's dream. There's a stall that only sells banana leaves. Another that only sells eggs. Follow the sound of smooth jazz music in the wet market and find yourself at Chia's, an excellent vegetable shop that chefs shop at
6. Chinatown Complex (breakfast, lunch, dinner). I always say that this single building has more great Chinese food than San Francisco has Chinese restaurants. There are different versions of it, and it's massive. Come in the mornings for excellent mostly Chinese breakfasts. Try one of the last remaining handmade 'sachima' shops. Late night, claypot rice, craft beer. If you love seafood, very good, very affordable seafood in this section of this hawker centre in the evenings. Too many to name, but there are dozens like this clustered together around this stall.
7. Bedok 85 (good for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. One of the most famous eating spots in the east of the city)
8. Bukit Merah View (breakfast)
9. East Coast Lagoon (good for supper, and 'on the way to and from the airport' meals as it's very close to the airport). Nice outdoor hawker centre that is probably the hawker centre to go to if you want a jovial, outdoor exotic hawker centre feel, especially if you've never been to one. Most of the stalls are quite good
10. Tiong Bahru market (good for breakfast and lunch). Very popular foodie-ish hawker centre.

1. New Fut Kai for veg versions of things like laksa and other 'Chinese Singaporean' foods
2. Whole Earth for a delightful veg version of Singaporean / Chinese / Thai / Malaysian food
3. VeganBurg: Veganburg started right here! I love the vegan chilli crab burger
4. Herbivore: really good Japanese veg food especially for veg yakitori
5. Almost all Indian places in Little India will have vegetarian options, but especially Murugan Idli and Mavalli Tiffin Room and Gokul and Kailash Parbat

There's more I want to post on this topic, especially the great regional Indian, regional Chinese and other foods you can get in Singapore, but this is a good starter list just for food somewhat unique to Singapore (and Malaysia).

Wives and Lives

Some thoughts on being a gaysian immigrant to California

Two weeks ago, I helped to plan and organize a Lunar New Year dinner for 120 queer and trans Asian people. It's a tradition that has been around for as long as I've been alive: the annual APIQWTC Banquet.

Despite its mouthful of a name (much easier if you read it as API CUTESY Banquet), it was an event that left me feeling extremely raw and emotional at the end of it.

I could not identify why exactly.

Could it be that these events—large format Chinese dinners I've only experienced in the context of societal rejection—were usually events I hated, events that were milestones I can never have because I was gay in a country that had not fully accepted it? I was never going to have the large Chinese wedding dinner. Even if I think those are horrible, it would have been nice to have known that was open to me.

Or they'd be a celebration of some kind of matriarch or patriarch, the sort of thing where your same sex or trans partner was often excluded from, unless things were Very Serious and they had already graduated into the Don't Ask, Don't Tell territory. At some point, people get old and it becomes possible to welcome same sex partners into these events: when you're old enough that you're thoroughly de-sexualized, is my guess.

But there's more, beyond mere social acceptance and the idea that it's possible to have a good time, I keep coming around to the thought: if I had been to such an event, if I had known these people, when I was a teenager struggling with my feelings and my identity, my life would have been different. Visibility in the media is important, and I already didn't really have that back then; but visibility in the form of knowing that it's possible to grow old, screw up, fall in love, get divorced, have children, or not, organize community events and be an advocate, or not, all of that would have been powerful visual indicators to me that it's possible to have any kind of life. That you're going to have a life at all.

Instead, growing up mainly among an older generation that was largely forced into the closet—and I do have strong memories of going to gay bars for the first time as a teenager that had just come of age, and seeing police raids rounding up gay men for 'vice', more than once—where the only people I knew to be gay or queer for sure were the advocates who were willing to put themselves out there to fight for our rights, document our stories, to tell our homophobic society that we exist. Those people served a purpose and they fought bravely. But I did not always want to be an activist. Even though eventually, I guess I sort of did.

By simply refusing to pretend to be straight, at some point I found myself thrust into a position of hypervisiblity in the queer community in Singapore. I did not want to be that person. I simply wanted to write about the heartbreak I had endured as a teenager: I was just the queer equivalent of a teenager anywhere Live-Journaling her heartbreak. But by not changing the pronouns of the person who had apparently broken my heart, I became, I suppose, a queer activist.

I did not know any queer couples or families until I was well into my early 20s. Other than the women I dated, and let's be frank, we were a mess, with no template or model or idea of what any of this was going to become. Information about queer people came into Singapore like a trickle: there were the gender studies books at Borders bookstore, the 'are they or aren't they' gay-guessing games of trying to figure out which celebrities were queer women (hint: it was mostly Angelina Jolie, at that time), I didn't really know what it meant to be queer. And I think I was already an extremely well-connected teenager for my time. (For a time, I ran a queer DVD lending library; I'd distribute movies and documentaries to other queer teens in my high school and elsewhere.)

I did not know what it meant to be a queer adult.

I had no idea what it meant to be in a committed relationship. Or what it meant to not be in one. I didn't know what my life was going to be. It was all a big blank, other than 'I guess I will have to go live overseas some day'. Even though Singapore has, anecdotally, a fairly large queer population, information about queerness is still suppressed by the state. We are still not allowed to see, for example, a reality TV show of a gay couple having their house revamped. It would be against the rules: you simply can't portray queer people in a non-negative manner.

So when I found myself surrounded by a hundred dancing Asian queer aunties, and a few other peers and younger people, I was mad.

I was mad to not have been exposed to the idea that I too, can some day be a dancing Chinese auntie in my 60s, prancing about on stage singing Teresa Teng songs at a karaoke in Oakland. I was mad that I never got to see people like M and her partner, an older interracial East- and South Asian couple, like Sabrena and I: with their children babbling about in several languages, the way it might look for us if we decided to have children some day.

Most of all, I was mad to know that this life wasn't possible for me back home. Not by a long stretch. I hardly knew many queer people in my mid 20s, and I definitely did not know that hundreds of queer people above the age of 60 existed. Nor did I have the chance to meet them in a multi-generational setting, the way I did here.

At the event, I met many people who were also immigrants from Southeast Asia like me. The first decade was hard, they said. They had to figure out how to exist in the US, and it was also at a time when the US didn't even have the laws it now does for same sex marriage. Many of them wouldn't have been able to move here or stay on here even if they had American spouses: not until Edith Windsor did us all a favor and defeated the Defense of Marriage Act, and enabled same sex marriage and other rights at the federal level.

In that regard, I have it a touch easier. I came here for a high paid tech job, I came here when California is already one of the easiest places to live in the world for a queer person, and I was able to bring my spouse with me. But some days are harder than others. Like many of these aunties, I am dealing with my first decade blues: does it ever get better? Why did I give up my life of privileges and comforts in Singapore for.. America? Unlike many other immigrants, I did not come here for economic or material improvements. I came here for far more abstract things, like 'my rights', but also for very concrete things like, 'my wife and I need a third country that recognizes our marriage so that we can actually live together somewhere, anywhere.'

A few months ago, I saw this image again: it was an image of Singaporean and Malaysian queer elders in what is clearly San Francisco, in 1993. I reached out to a few of them in the photo to ask: what was your life like? What did you struggle with? What's your life like now? Many of them said the same thing: the first couple of years are very, very hard. Some days you wonder if you will ever truly feel at home here. But, they said, we now have wives and lives, and that's more than we could have expected of our lives in Singapore and Malaysia.

Wives and lives. I have that too, but I also have had far less time than them in California. I still have one foot in the door; I am still not totally removed from existing in a space where I've had to hide myself, and my life. Even the most hyper-visible ways of being queer back home are just standard, everyday ways here.

One of them said, my wife is organizing this banquet, why don't you get involved? And so I did. I still don't have the answers, but I think I am starting to have the inkling of an idea.

I think it looks like dancing on stage at a Chinese restaurant singing a Teresa Teng song. I think it could be carrying an infant babbling in three languages. I think it might be nice to have the ability to work with younger Asian queer immigrants 25 years from now, who will hopefully have an easier time than all of us did. I think it could be fun. I think I have a life ahead of me of queer joy that I can celebrate.

I can be anyone I want to be. I did not always know that.

(Photo taken on a Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II, shot on Kodak 5222 film, self-developed in Rodinal 1+50 at ISO 800, and scanned on Plustek 8200i. For more film photography shenanigans, check out my film photo blog)

Life in Anxious HD

Before I came to this country I led a very different life.

My luggage was never unpacked. My passport was tethered to my body. My weeks often began with breakfasts in Yangon on Mondays and ended with drinks on Jakarta rooftop bars on Fridays. On weekends, I might retreat into a Balinese forest alone or return home.

Home was one of Asia’s most expensive cities. At least, it was where I paid rent and where I have the largest number of relations of all kinds. Home didn’t feel like home since I was never home for more than three days at a time, from the moment I graduated from college. I could never buy a gym membership anywhere. I simply didn’t know where I would... be.

My life here is quite different.

I have not left my neighborhood much in the past year. The longest trips I have taken have been occasional bicycle trips across the Golden Gate Bridge, where I sometimes like to cycle to my favorite bakery and then put my bike on a bus home (just say no to the hills of Sausalito). So many people are writing stories about how other countries are doing pandemics differently. This is mine, except I stayed on and am in it for the long haul, fully cognizant of all of the ‘benefits’ I am missing out on.

My friends are having brunch and cocktails back home and I know in my bones that would be me, if I was in Singapore right now, too. Because I am bougie like that and I know it.

But I am not at brunch. I am huddled at home, like I have, every night this year. My dog is asleep next to me, farting ceaselessly. I have canceled all holiday plans. We are not going anywhere.

During the work days, I work with a team of thirty something brilliant and kind individuals who, together, are trying to make a difference for the city we love during this difficult time. At nights, I put on an apron and trudge to an empty kitchen near my home to churn, literally, batch after batch of ice cream so that I can bring some joy to people in real time.

It feels like exactly where I need to be.

It wasn’t always an easy feeling, though. In conversations with therapists I have learned that the inability to make plans for the future, any future, is causing everyone all kinds of anxiety. For international folks like us with our lives strewn all over the world, it has been a special kind of logistical challenge. When will we ever see our families again? In all these countries?

Back in March just before shelter-in-place came upon us, we already knew the extent of the damage of this virus from news from Asian cities. We semi-seriously considered waiting out the pandemic in Singapore, where a good healthcare system and mollycoddling levels of government support seemed like a good idea. From rumblings from an assortment of compatriots I gathered that nonstop flights might end from San Francisco; that if we went home now, things will be safe; that you really don’t want to be stuck here in this country with its impossible healthcare system and not have any help figuring out something so unprecedented.

Occasionally, I dial in to Zoom conversations hosted for Singaporeans on the west coast. They always kick off these meetings by sharing latest stats. We marvel at the numbers. We laugh at the charts that are made showing how we have significantly less confidence in the American government’s handling of this pandemic compared to our own. We run through the numbers of how many of us have decided to weather it in Singapore or hunker down here in the Bay Area.

Somehow, those of us with not entirely clean cut Singaporean lives are hunkering down. Our partners cannot return with us. Our children cannot. I continue to be frustrated by the inability to plan for the future in any form. So I churn more ice cream.

If I were in Singapore, I would be at brunch. I would be checking in to all the locations I visit throughout the day with the app that every citizen has access to. I might be walking down a quiet residential street like my parents were when I called them a few days ago, and the biggest concern of my day might be that I paid too much ($5) for a bowl of fishball noodles.

But before I get to brunch, I would have to find my way to Los Angeles, the closest city where I can still get on a plane home. I would only be able to board the Singapore Airlines plane if I had my bright red passport, which I do, but that my wife does not. On entering the plane, probably in business class (as I would have upgraded with the miles I have studiously collected over the years), I would sink into the leather seat and feel relieved when I am given a copy of the Straits Times by a person who can pronounce my last name the way it is supposed to be pronounced (Tanh, not tan as in what the President does to get his famous orange color). I would sleep for the entirety of the sixteen hours, because I sleep like the dead in both economy and business class (and at the back of a boat or upper bunk of a train). I would land and I would hear the familiar sounds of Singlish, Malay and Hokkien at the precise moment the plane doors open onto the aerobridge.

Heat and Hokkien always hits me like a wave. I would scan my passport and then be whisked to a five star hotel where I would be strictly quarantined, before I can be released back into the world. Then, depending on the outcome of my tests, I would either be eating fishball noodles with my parents, or declared an ‘imported’ case by state media.

I will not be at brunch for a long, long time.

Instead, I have not cut my hair since January. My dog is so unused to being more than one foot from me that she now wanders to the bathroom if I am there for more than a minute. I am sequestered in my 300 square foot apartment that somehow has space for two humans, two animals, and all of our life’s possessions. My wife has bolted a fold down desk onto a wall. When either of us needs to use the bathroom, we flatten between the chair and the wall, sometimes without appropriate amounts of clothing (usually me). At various points of this pandemic, especially during the combination election and pandemic anxiety weeks, I plot and plan and figure out logistics. I carry bags of laundry to a laundromat at quiet hours, and wish I did research on how there are rarely any washers or dryers inside American apartments.

That is my way of dealing with anxiety. I figure out logistics. Which is an activity that is, in itself, anxiety-inducing. But never mind. I write to the immigration departments of various Caribbean countries. I research golden visas in Taiwan. I look at Estonia. I do all of this first for the animals, and then for us. All the countries that require any amount of animal quarantine are crossed from the world map that is in my mind. So no UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore or Hong Kong. Immigration departments write back and I promise to pay them some time after November 4, 2020. I never do.

I scan the news for information about 45’s latest immigration-busting moves. I realize, for the first time in a while, that we literally have nowhere else to go. I stay up until 7 in the morning to watch a needle tick in one direction or other in an election I cannot vote in. I dabble in more logistics, this time reading in other languages. Reading in my second and third languages will be less anxious, I tell myself, because I won’t understand all of it. It doesn’t work. I freak out again, just in other languages this time.

Seventeen days ago I woke up with needles pointing in not so bad places. I ghost Carribbean immigration officers. My love story with ‘Murica continues. Another tragedy strikes. America crosses 12 million cases; yet more than a million people are expected to fly this week for a holiday that celebrates genocidal activities. 95% of my state is on a 10pm curfew. My city, which has high levels of mask compliance and some levels of official responsibility, might join the rest of the state very soon. Life goes on. All I know is life will not need to be in the Carribbean.

The sun sets at 5pm and I turn on a ten thousand lumen lamp for several hours so I don’t get sad.

From time to time, my wife and I wonder: what will our life be like in Singapore, right now? We think of our beautiful apartment in the forest there. We think of our many brunches. We think of chicken rice. But mostly, we think of how we will not have a life in Singapore at all.

She wouldn’t be allowed in. Right now, because of the pandemic. But also always, because she won’t be allowed to be my wife.

In Small Rooms with Betawi Women

Not for the first time, I found myself in a tiny room on a hot day, the youngest among old women. Each with a different thing to say to me, also the only person not from around these parts.

You're so old now! And unmarried!

Your hair is too white! Eat more soy beans!

One woman rubbed my tattoos, making a screechy sound with her teeth, before announcing to all the other old women around her: these are real.

No judgement, no scorn – I was local enough to be in a place like that, but not local enough to be judged.

Can you bring me some white chocolate next time you come, girl? I had them once and only in your country (Singapore). I've never had them since. She rubbed my back some more.

At places like these old women collectively talk, soothe each other's tired or injured muscles, and together not give a damn about anything outside of those doors. At least for an hour.

I went often to places like these, my severe back pains often needing urgent attention from anything that would give them rest. In Jakarta, I am a frequent visitor to Haji Naim – a group of famed healers in the Betawi community. I figured that if it didn't work there was at least delicious soto Betawi to be had next door. Now that I come here so often, a massage almost always precedes a lovely bowl of soup and beef.

I've always been glad to have the ability and opportunity to bond with old women anywhere in the world – their wisdom and unlikely sorority is what I look forward to, whether in Yemen or India or Singapore. Here, the Betawi women took turns rubbing my tattoos, shrieking when they discovered (repeatedly) that they were real.

Most of my time in this city has been about discovering, for the first time, scenes that played such a large part in my youth. Hot afternoons with old Indonesian women. Dusk on the street with teenagers singing with their guitars. Children begging. Families living under bridges. The Indonesian movies that used to play so often in my tiny, hot Singaporean shoebox apartment, now alive in parts of the city.

And yet the other parts of it are real, too. Large gleaming buildings. New shiny things. Cocktails as expensive as Singapore's. Malls full of only imported things. My feet in both worlds: one in the village and one in Pacific Place. One in meetings with fancy people, another under the firm thumbing of extremely old women.

It's a difficult balance to keep up, but I enjoy each moment. White chocolate in Betawi houses; going home to my $5 room after a day out in $5 coffee houses. Improbable things and inevitable places. As I chug along at work and in life, I'm relieved to have the opportunity to make things work again.

When I Was Young

I'm seated now by the side of an old vending machine in Jakarta airport, with power sockets so dirty and old I had to think twice about plugging my cables in. Yet in all of Terminal 1, one of the oldest airport terminals in a country not known for modern aviation facilities, there was only this one socket free. Confined to my fate of temporarily sharing power with a giant Teh Botol (not Coke!) machine with no seat within range of my Macbook charger, I am, obviously, on the floor yet again.

Sitting on floors: a practice cultivated in many countries across the world. Sometimes involuntary, most of the time because my inner hippie wants me to. The difference between now and then — I am now at the kind of age where you would, if you did not know me, expect some kind of manners from me. Wear proper clothes, wear proper shoes. Sit on proper surfaces. I imagined I would too! That one day, I would finally learn how to be proper. How wrong I was on that, and many other fronts! I am happy to still-sitting-on-dirty-floors. No — I am overjoyed. Overjoyed to be still a chapalang, anyhow and anyhowly chapalang person.

So much has happened since the last real post of any substance here. Mid, early 2014 perhaps. I started a company. It still lives. I have teams, collaborators, all across my different endeavours. The foundation I started in 2012 is still alive, too. I am relieved and grateful for all of the opportunities thrown my way, all of the paths revealed and then some.

Why did I not write? I did not write, because life overwhelmed me and kept me away and sometimes light-headed. I did not write, because I forgot how to. It isn't like riding a bicycle — it's more of riding a unicycle where you know eventually you'll find your balance but only after falling flat on your face anyway, no matter how many times you've ridden one. In my pursuit of achievements, exceptional or otherwise, prizes, awards, Silicon Valley-style work yourself to the bone for some big undefined payoff (emotional or otherwise); I lost myself in the race. I lost myself, too, in the unclear idea of what it meant to be an adult.

An adult, I was told, lived in a proper house with a proper bed with a proper pillow (for all of the neck pains you're bound to have). I have neck pains, indeed, but realise I can do without all of the rest. I haven't sat on dirty airport floors for years. I haven't gone somewhere with nothing in my bag other than the clothes currently on me, in years. I haven't gone somewhere without a plan, without a place to stay, without any idea of what i was going to do. I don't know how else to live, and forcing myself into being the opposite of those things brought me further and further away from who I really was.

Maybe this year, after learning to like myself again, I'll finally get my groove back again. I'm proud to be an anyhowly person. I'm proud to extreme and spontaneous. I will no longer knead the image of who I truly am into the uninspiring ideas of what some people had wanted me to become. I don't want to achieve things for the sake of doing that — I want to learn to be alive, again. Let's see how we go on this journey, I'm excited but also shit-scared about it.

But as I once believed (when I was much younger) — if it doesn't scare me like hell, it probably isn't worth doing.

Tan Boon Chye

When I came home (to Singapore) a couple of days ago, I instructed the taxi driver to go to the Caltex station at East Coast. Most cabbies know this place, but he didn't. He's 74 years old, so he only knew this spot as "Tan Boon Chye & Co" (brain GPS never update firmware). Tan Boon Chye & Co was the 3rd Caltex station in Singapore, and that was its original name — in 1961.

Growing up in Singapore and spending most of my childhood (and teen-hood) around grandparents who spoke mostly Teochew (and more Malay than Mandarin, really), I'd always felt intimately connected to their brain GPS. If I was to tell them where I had spent all my time (and money — they can't believe anything costs more than 50 cents in Singapore), I'd have to cross-reference the 1940s street directory that exists only in our minds, among the people of a certain stripe.

If I went to the jazz club at SouthBridge (way back when there was a jazz club), I'd have to tell them I was in 大坡大马路 in Teochew, dua pou dua beh lou (or tua po tua beh lou depending on your romanization preference, or if you said it with a Hokkien inflection). If I had to change money for my travels, I'd have gone to "ang teng" reminiscent of the red lights that once lit up Collyer Quay from Johnston's lighthouse. My fave — instead of going to Cecil Street to work in the CBD, I've have gone to the "opium company", where opium dens once stood instead of buttoned up, stuffy suits. Because corporate life is a different kind of opiate of the masses. Years after the passing of the two people I'd spent so much time with, existing in a different language and setting, I find myself grasping at anything that lets me learn a little bit more about the lives of people I loved but did not know fully. In part because I never had the language of their lives in full — I could order food, talk to them, talk to old people, even give speeches in this language they bestowed on me, but I could never have had the tools to create legends for their maps, their history, their worlds filled with poverty, civil war and world war.

I'm learning as much of their language as I can. Instead of being merely conversational, wet market level conversant, I've started to learn how to write it, read it, romanize it, and exist in this other plane of my life I've always inhabited but never occupied.

The taxi driver took me to Tan Boon Chye. From the way he pronounced the Tan, the same one that is present in my own name (pretty much like a surprised sound effect), I switched to it for the rest of the ride.

"Where did you return from?"

I don't say Jakarta, as in 雅加达 (ya jia da).

I say I've just returned from 巴斜, pah sia, and he knew it. I wonder what destinations my grand dad saw at the port. 巴斜 (Jakarta), 金塔 (ghim tahp, Phnom Penh), or 坤甸 (khun diang, Pontianak)? Yet somehow he ended up here, the land of red lights and big horse carriage roads and small ones, so that when I go off into the world I feel I'm merely following the same sense of adventure (and need) from more than 80 years ago.

Mahabandoola

At the hotel I had the receptionist scribble the name of my lunch spot in Burmese. Lunch that day was to be outside my sphere of Yangon familiarity: I had never been there, but I had been told by some locals that I must have a typical Burmese lunch at Aung Thu Kha.

So to Aung Thu Kha I went.

After gesticulating at each other for a while, my taxi driver stared at the piece of paper, looked up at my face and laughed: you speak Mandarin, don't you?

I speak Mandarin, don't I? I think I do.

I have always been perturbed at how people seem to be able to deduce secrets about me just by peering at my face. This happens at alarming frequency whenever I travel. Some days, I'm told I must be Burmese of Chinese origin. Other days, I'm Thai. In northeast India I am accepted by all of their tribes; my linguistic inability explained away for me by what must be my probable fluency in some another tribal language. Yet in China, the country of my grandparents' birth and heritage, I am too Southeast Asian. Too dark. Too English-speaking. I am the colour of the sun beating the earth, and China is a distant, lost memory a long way away from the sun.

So yes, I speak Mandarin. The ability to converse in it has followed me throughout the world, sometimes paying handsomely with access few other languages can offer.

He asks the inevitable. "How do you find Myanmar?"

Like everyone else who has asked that before me, before I have a chance to reply he gripes, "It must be terrible for you. It's terrible. All of it."

"I love the city and its people - surely all signs point to improvement!"

"Yes. Improvement also leads to traffic jams," honking angrily as a car tried to cut our place in a jam in a tiny residential lane.

In our brief conversation I learned he was the grandson of Yunnanese immigrants, economic refugees in their time. In the thirties, Rangoon was the shining light of Asia. Its opulent hotels filled with important people. Its white-only clubs invented cocktails such as the Pegu Club. The Yunnanese of China's deep south fled south to seek their fortune. Some have done exceedingly well; they have assimilated, in a way, taking on Burmese names and speaking Burmese fluently on top of their Chinese identities, preserved and left the way it was when they left in the thirties.

I wanted to know what languages they spoke at home, what they ate. He indulged me.

"My parents made us speak Mandarin at home when we were kids. If we slipped into Burmese, we got fined. They were born here, but they wanted us to stay connected to our Chinese identities as well. Oh, and Burmese food is way too oily," he shook his head as he dropped me off. "Let me know if you want Yunnanese or Dai food when you're back in town. It's better."

When 1962 happened, among the many atrocities that ensued: Chinese schools closed. Burmese citizens not from the Barma ethnic group were banned from attending certain institutions of higher learning. Just like that the lights went out in Asia's leading metropolis, and stayed off for a very long time.

In 2014, some of those lights have come back on. And with them, traffic jams. The unpaven road outside a bank near my hotel was, two days later, a pavement. For some, it's a clear sign Burma is going to be the gold rush of the east of this century: five star hotels' bars and Chinatown noodle stalls are similarly filled with businessmen from mainland China seeking fortune and glory.

"Perhaps I'll buy factory equipment from back home and ship it here," an enthusiastic new arrival announced loudly at a Cantonese-run noodle stall on the streets of Chinatown, rattling off his entire business plan in Mandarin while the other customers looked on uninterested.

Maung Maung, a middle-aged Cantonese-Burmese man jumped up with an oversized Chinese phone and pulled out a floor plan. They looked at it intently. Maung Maung went back to his noodles, slurping. (Maung Maung of just a few moments ago: "My Chinese name, lady, is Jin Bo. Jin for GOLD!")

"We'll make plans. See what help you need. I can help," Maung Maung told the newcomer.

"Do you have my phone number? I still don't remember what it is," the young mainlander said in a way that sounded like a plea for help. He'd either just gotten here or still hadn't shaken off his "overwhelmed by Burma" look.

"Of course I do," Maung Maung laughed as he perked up. "I sold it to you."

Before & After The Fire

1961.

Rain falling on zinc roofs. Neighbours having sex

Hoping they won't be suay again. They have no money.

The news coming from the sole television set. Children peeping for a glimpse of world affairs. Condensed milk cans

filled with coffee. Ah Ba will have to go to the office.

The office is also a shed. He carries sacks to and fro sheds

All day. Sometimes all night too. Last week someone tried to chop him in the head. He doesn't care. A bowl of porridge a day makes Ah Ba strong. Insulates him from the world. Protects him from things such as emotions. And cleavers.

If there had been rain yesterday, everything could have been saved. There was no rain. Now there is no television set. No neighbours. No sex. No house. Ah Ma ran everywhere with his two youngest children. They were at the provision shop looking at candy they could not afford. When it happened they ran into temple. Stayed there. Crouched in a corner. Waiting. Shaking. It did not rain. The firemen worked all day. Ah Ba ran from the office shed but he could not find them. He almost cried, but, porridge.

He found them in the temple. Waiting. Shaking. Crouching. Ah Ba held his children tight. But he never found the words.

A Drinkable History of My Family

The following piece is an original piece written specially for Ceriph #3, published by Math Paper Press. It's on sale at my favourite bookstore, BooksActually, and also at Kinokuniya..

Fish Sauce

We are Teochew, people of the coast.

Fish sauce, more than hot food, opera, more than even yam paste desserts - is what defines us as a people. It is what we live for, what fuels us; there is no life without it. We live for the very hot, and the very salty.

My grandfather was a sturdy, if a little tiny, Teochew man who was much shorter than his wife. Like many patriarchs of his generation, if he even had a name, you would have never known. You simply thought of him as ah gong. On his birthdays when we sang birthday songs to him we did so in Mandarin, Teochew, and then in English. Every time we got to his name we were usually stumped. He did not like us saying his name anyway - it sounded too much like "turtle", he said - so we clapped, said "happy birthday ah gong tee hee hee", laughed at the incongruence, and stuffed our faces with cake.

Ah gong introduced me to fish sauce. He must have. We were close for a Chinese grandparent-grandchild duo of the eighties - we played Chinese chess, and snakes and ladders, in near silence most afternoons - but he was at his most animated when we ate porridge with preserved vegetables and steamed fish. Which was every afternoon.

If you hold your chopsticks that way you are going to move very far from home.

Kopi-C Siew Dai

Utter silence punctuated by occasional outbursts of snark. That hum of snarky silence dominated our lives, or at least mine. On hot Singapore afternoons in our tiny three-room flat, I never noticed the silence. Those damned SBC afternoon dramas masked the silence. The plod of Grandma's food processor distracted me from the silence. The jingle of the Raymond Weil sponsored news programmes were so loud I could not hear the silence. But the snark always jumped straight through the roof.

Next to fish sauce, we liked coffee most. It was any kind of caffeine really, but coffee was king. More than that, it was the promise of a decently made local coffee, the sock kopi, with two fingers' worth with condensed milk and a very loud kopitiam server shouting in Hokkien, that we liked best. Those damned Hokkien people can't talk softly.

We went to the kopitiam together in the mornings, on the mornings when I could wake up anyway. Ah gong liked routine, so much so that I have never seen him in anything other than a singlet and a pair of blue bermudas and brown, serious grandpa sandals. He had a wardrobe full of the same thing for different ages. He could dress you up exactly like him if you asked him to. This routine man's routine began before daybreak at the seaside.

He would walk by the seaside, smirking at the taichi parade, not understanding why anybody would submit themselves to the torture of wearing red shirts with white pants. He would walk by the streamers of the Chinese dance contingent fielded by the neighbourhood's grannies, not understanding why anybody would wave little pieces of cloth around to awful music at 7 in the morning.

He would understand, or at least try to, why the kopitiam could never get his order right ("because Ah Zoh got fired from his job and Ah Orh, who was hired to replace him, is a little slow in the brain"). He could fathom everything he needed to know in a second, but he could never understand why his coffee was never-quite-right everywhere he went.

Lou Swa Ga Hai

When the people of the coast speak of our motherland, we do not say China. We do not say we are zhong guo ren - when we speak of the zhong guo ren we are speaking of those people who look like us but who are really from someplace else. We say we are the people of the Tang Dynasty, we say we are the people from the coast. In our language there is no way of saying we are anything else. Even today we say our "home", this home most of us have never been to, is in the mountain, by the sea.

The zhong guo ren eat rice and vegetables. We eat real porridge, unlike the Cantonese who break their rice grains and pretend to make soup. If a single rice grain breaks we throw all our porridge away, and start again.

There is more water in our porridge than there is grain, but not too much. The grains should clump together, but not too much. The porridge should, like us, be of the mountain and of the sea. A bowl of porridge must physically resemble a mountain in a sea, swa ga hai. Mountain and sea.

If the Cantonese, who believe themselves to be the masters of Chinese cuisine, have perfected the roast, we are the kings of the braise.

A bowl of our porridge might taste of nothing unless you are one of us. If you were one of us, our gaginang, you would know how to eat it - with the amount of fish sauce, with a dozen side dishes. With a salted egg and with a big bowl of braised pork and eggs.

Eating the rest of the meal is simple, anyone can get that.

Every time ah gong ate his Teochew porridge, which was everyday at lunch, he would pour a large amount of braise sauce into his porridge, making it become the colour of dark earth.

Lou, ga swa ka hai. Braise, and seas and mountains, he would say.

Without a comma, and with one small shift in intonation, eating this meal with him everyday was about raising, not braising, seas and mountains each time he spoke at length with me.

Ah gong may have been a man of few words but we drank the sea and ate the mountains together everyday.

Bubble Tea

At the hospital he was in some pain. Not a lot, but you could tell no matter how naturally stoic he tried to remain, he was not going to make it. I had to go to see him from Europe, made it just barely in time, and I like to think he waited for me. Or for something.

In the year since I moved out of the country I had been back only for Chinese New Year, and I had missed his last moments where he had been confined in a wheelchair. He could no longer go on daily walks, nor could he go to the toilet unassisted, but he kept his mind steely by asking everyone endless questions about their lives. He kept his wits about by observing our neighbours and their daily lives from his vantage point, his wheelchair.

The telephone was not made for people like my ah gong. Skype was an invention he could tolerate a little better, and only for the joy of watching someone on the other side of the world appear on the screen. The moment your image was formed he was no longer interested in speaking in sentences to you. That whole year all we ever spoke about was about burqahs and bak chor mee. I was in the Middle East that whole year and he was convinced I led a bak chor mee – less existence inside a burqah. Which was only half true (the pork, not the fashion sense).

For someone like ah gong who led a relatively difficult life and who was not really a part of the modern world with all its trappings and assumptions, he did not get to - nor did he want to - experience anymore than what he already had, which was adoption, migration, war, poverty and distance.

He had few cravings other than for Teochew porridge and preserved olive leaves, steamed fish and fish sauce.

When we were by his side, teary, he could not speak much by that point. He had no teary goodbyes or pent-up messages for anyone. He had no epiphanies but silence.

But he asked for his daughter.

When she, crying as only she could, sidled up to him he gathered his breath and whispered, "Bring me bubble tea. Apparently it's delicious."

We searched everywhere for bubble tea, we really did, but did not search fast enough. He could not wait.

And then Michael Jackson died the next day and the whole world forgot about the man who had never had bubble tea.

Sometimes I wish could have been there when he finally gave up on life and on bubble tea. He would have ranted, in Teochew, that tea isn't meant to be this milky, and what the hell are these bloody balls?

There Is Always Chicken Curry at Funerals

Last Rites

Living in Singapore is not easy, one can quickly see. Could it be that we tire quickly from our programming — the PSLE, the Os, the As, the university, the serving the nation, the feeding your family and all these things? Or is it that we pack the rush hour morning and evening trains daily, increasingly unable to recognize our neighbours or the languages they speak?

If you thought the living was uneasy, just you wait and see.

Being dead in Singapore doesn’t seem particularly different.

As if being alive and drawing air here didn’t already call for us to live packed closely together in high-rise public housing, since we lack “space” in the corporeal sense, not two hours after you’re gone your family members will be making plans to pack you into spiritual equivalent of the flats you’ve lived in all your life, as I found out last week.

– “Ah Gong will be living in Block 206 ok? Any objections?”

– “What level?”

– “Level 6.” (No lifts or floors with lift landings here, I’m afraid.)

– “Unit 281.”

And on and on it goes, debating the merits and the cons of the block (C, D, or A?), level and unit, direction it faces (“sea- or ‘mountain’- facing?”), until somebody, i.e me, goes, “Explain to me what the difference is between Ah Gong ‘living’ there and in another block, level or unit?”

– “$200. The uncle say ah, if you want to choose the unit, must pay.”

Turns out it wasn’t just $200 that made all the difference. The Chinese/ atheist/ Buddhist/ Taoist dead (categories which tended to overlap with each other) got the lower floor. The Christians — who tended to be Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian — were upstairs. Upstairs seemed to get a bit more air, a bit more sunlight, and didn’t heat up too much at mid-day, unlike at the other blocks I’d been to. Not that it mattered to Ah Gong. Ah Gong survived poverty and hunger in his childhood in China, a cleaver-attack on his head in mid-life, and a smart alec grand-child in his late years… he’d adapt.

– “Sorry, if you want to put him in a Christian block, you need to show a baptism certificate for him or for an immediate family member.” Unbelievable — racial/religious quotas… for the dead? Turns out the Christian lots are in such high demand, like our schools, that everyone, even non-Christians, wanted to be there.

Keeping your urn in a randomly assigned spot: no extra charge

Wanting your urn to be in a specific spot: $200

Pre-booking your urn spot next to your loved one: $1500, depending on religion, site, and race

– “Better not to pre-book lah! Sekali here also kena enbloc then how?”

– “Then die lor. Oh budden die orreadi hor.”

It read like there was a statutory board (with an appropriate death-related acronym) administering this thing.

The funeral director was a man named Fred who, like all and sundry who call our sunny shores ‘home’ these days, was foreign talent. He worked long hours, spoke perfect English, left the Chinese dialects to the middle-aged Chinese men he hired, and unlike these middle-aged Chinese men, seemed to genuinely care.

He, and everyone involved in this, was so efficient that within 3 hours of Ah Gong’s passing at the hospital, he was returned to us at home — embalmed, coffin-ed, dressed, ready to go. Ready to lie down for a few days while people sat around pretending to look at him, eating peanuts, collecting money. Even the cartons of Yeo’s packet drinks, in winter melon, chrysanthemum and lemon barley flavours, had been bought.

Because our estate is currently in the throes of HIP (Home Improvement Programme), having recently undergone HUP (Home Upgrading Programme), there was no space at our void deck for the wake. So at 10 am, all of us lined up at the opposite block, uniformly dressed in our funeral whites. The tentage had been up for hours, the chairs and tables had been put out, as had their corresponding plastic sheets and peanuts.

Some dramatic music sounded from the back of the hearse, out of its improvised 2.1 system (speaker+flower+coffin).

We lined up to welcome Ah Gong home. Except that in this homecoming version, he wasn’t breathing. And he was in a shirt and tie, which convinced me something had REALLY gone wrong this time.

The shit hit the fan several times, but he always came home in his white singlet — the only thing he bothered to wear, in all the 24 years I’ve known him. He only wore a suit once in his life: at his wedding, or rather, when his wedding portrait was taken. Even at my brother’s wedding he compromised only slightly by wearing some kind of short-sleeved shirt over his singlet (unbuttoned so his Flying Goose brand singlet was unmistakable). I never thought I’d see him in a tie.

I never thought I’d see him dead.

I never thought that behind the white tents of the void deck, the ones I’ve walked past often in all my years living in a HDB flat, would lie someone I knew, someone I loved.

I never thought I’d be, three days later after the fact, walking glumly and sullenly through the carpark not because I hadn’t done my homework and didn’t want to go to school, but because my uncle was carrying a large photo of the man I’ve come home (and left home) greeting every single day of my life: ah gong ah ma wa tyng lai leoh! That we’d walk lock-step to the hearse, that I would find myself making a mental note to remember to tell my children to pick a non-peak hour when I “chuk sua” — the impatient Singaporean drivers would really annoy me even when I’m dead, honking the way they do in trying to overtake a coffin while people are crying behind it.

It only seemed right to share with the world what the recently deceased were known for. In writing his eulogy, I hopped about with a notepad and a pen tucked above my ear, asking all my cousins: “what did Ah Gong always say to you?”

Da Jie said, “si sua ta!” (“Anyhow say!”)

Er jie said, “sark suk!” (“Silly!”)

My brother, his favourite grand-child, said, “Dua cha.” (“Big blockhead”.. which was his nickname)

To my other cousins who spoke Mandarin instead of Teochew, he took great pains to translate his terms of affection. “Ben ben!” (“Stupid stupid!” in Mandarin) “You mei you mai liu lian?” (“Did you buy durian?”)

So I wrote him a eulogy and I got to say si sua ta, sark suk, dua cha and liu lian all at the same time.

I stood before the crowd and I introduced myself. I cried instantly.

I tried to say my Teochew name for the first time in my life (vastly different from my English name and my Mandarin name), but I could not: Ah Gong had sabo-ed me, again! The only time I ever heard my name being said in Teochew was when he talked about having named me. He always said it in a way which rhymed with the hour. jit tiang, nor tiang, sa tiang! So I stood there and introduced myself as li- ‘hour’. People in the audience laughed loudly and my uncle, who reminds me most of Ah Gong, called out: and your name is also two o’clock and three o’clock! And si- tiang too!

Ah Gong, ni you pian wo! His eulogy was delivered, not entirely flawlessly, in Teochew by me and in English by my brother. I wrote an essay in Teochew called “Torchlights and Alarm Clocks”. I talked about how it’s going to be weird not having him tie pink ribbons to my backpacks so I can see them come out of the baggage carousel, how he’d write my Chinese name on everything I owned, even the cool ones; my brother and I both said growing up with him was about having a torchlight shone on your face at 3 am every night, just so he knew we were there. I cried a lot. I laughed a lot. He was a silly, funny man and he made us all laugh. We said in heaven he’s cursing all day on sweet potatoes (his only bad words were Teochew vulgarities about stuffing your mouth with a sweet potato, and something about your mother’s eggs). I think in heaven Ah Gong is back in his singlet, shaking his leg like the China-man he is, with Bruno his favourite dog. And his alarm clocks are going off all at the same time, and his torchlights never need their batteries replaced.

ah gong wa tyng lai, lv zu kee loh.

I never got to say goodbye.

I miss you so damn much.

Ah Gong and I

Let’s just say I don’t do death.

I’ve never had to deal with it, never thought about it, possibly because I never had a pet, and never had family or friends who’d passed on or contracted anything major. People lived, in my family, and lived quite long.

Especially my grandma and grandpa, who seemed to just go on and on. If that’s a skewed perspective of old age that might be because I have seen them go on everyday from the moment I was born: they have lived with us forever.

Ah Gong was always in the next room. He never laughed; he sniggered, he chuckled slyly, he was grumpy as hell — in the most endearing way possible. He was a traditional Chinese man — born in China in 1930, adopted then brought to Malaysia, saw his adopted father beaten to death by Japanese soldiers during the war — who, for most intents and purposes, kept his feelings (and thoughts) to himself, avoiding actions or words of affection like the plague, but was the sort of man you warmed to anyway.

I like to think he waited for me long enough, given how well-timed the whole incident was — he only fell drastically sick when I was due to return, and I at least managed a week or so with him, despite his sedate state, despite how he was barely there at all. I had expected my trip to the Middle East and London this last time to be like any other — I’d be back, he’d pretend he barely cared, but he’d get quite quickly to the only way he seems to know how to show any love: verbal-sparring with me in our secret language, Teochew.

Instead, I got back this time and found the house strangely empty. No Ah Gong pottering about finding things to amuse himself, no Ah Gong waking me up with 8 alarm clocks and 1 mobile phone call, no Ah Gong to play hide and seek with when it came to the subject of how cigarettes mysteriously appear in my bag all the time, in increasingly strange (or secret) compartments or methods of concealment. He always found them, he always out-talked me, he was always right, he figured out stuff quicker than I could think, and he laughed and smirked because he liked being right much more than the fact that I was doing what I shouldn’t. In his last days Ah Gong sat mostly on his wheelchair, his mind still sharp and observant, and his temperament still endearingly grumpy.

But life and love doesn’t go on and on, I’ve come to find the hard way, and as he lies there I can imagine him saying: every single time you go abroad you buy me a clock, and the one time you haven’t I’ve really gone.

In Mandarin to “gift a clock” can also mean to send someone off at their funeral. It’s thus taboo to give your elders time-keeping devices of any sort. But we had a special relationship based on the two great loves of his life: torchlights and alarm clocks. He never said I love you, or I care about you, but when he did, he gave you a torch. Or two.

And All The Roads That Lead You There Were Winding

I came to the Middle East to do just one thing: see a part of the world that I felt I needed to learn more about. Its language was alien, but familiar – many Malay and Hindi words have roots in Arabic. Its customs and food strange, but not dissimilar – much of the Indian subcontinent that I love and call home was influenced, for the better and the worse, by centuries of Mughal rule. Dubai and Singapore had many things in common, and then not at all.

My months through the region are coming to an end. As I travelled through Dubai I fell hard for the United Arab Emirates, but not for its most famous, brashest city. I loved Abu Dhabi and I loved Al Ain. I loved the weekend drives into the desert, and camping trips to Oman. I discovered the lengths people will go to for bootleg alcohol, when liquor licenses and hotel drinking start to dry up (driving to Ajman to get bootleg supplies etc).

And as I embarked on my quest to see the real middle east, after giving up on Dubai – I was in for a treat. Yemen, bombs and all, shook me; it was like nothing I had seen before. Then my ambitious overland journey, beginning with Beirut. That’s now drawing to an end.

The last month or so that i’ve been properly on the road, I’ve navigated my way around Lebanon through Syria through Turkey, without once knowing how to drive a car. I’ve met ridiculously awesome people. I’ve had countless cups of tea with strangers. I’ve seen some sights.

And the sights I’ve seen, I’m amazed by the opportunity – and good luck I’ve had in seeing some of these wonders. From a castle built by one man, still alive, in Beiteddine, to the phenomenal Kraks des Chevaliers in Syria (the embodiment of all childhood castle jousting fantasies, says Theroux, and he’s right – again). The ancient cities of Damascus and Sana’a. The friends I’ve made all through Beirut, Damascus, Palmyra, Aleppo, Antalya, Cappadocia and Istanbul.

The long bus rides. I left Damascus last week and 36 hours later arrived in Antalya, but not before being stranded in Adana with too many Syrian pounds but no Turkish lira – and no money changer or warm clothes in the freezing cold of an eastern Turkish morning.

Done with my last bus ride (12 hours from Goreme to Istanbul), I now sleepwalk through Taksim Square at 7 in the morning, pleased to be back to one of my favourite cities in the world. One that makes me thankful for the beautiful people I call my friends, who last shared this city with me

But journeys never end, only their chapters do. It strikes me now that for all my complaints and grievances about the middle east, this region is truly special and needs to be seen to be understood. And I’m glad I had the chance to see it while I could.

If I could do it again, I would do a few weeks in Iran. But that will have to wait.

For now, long Turkish bus rides and what’s left of my Istanbul days – one filled with lots of ‘midye dolma’, wet hamburgers, fish sandwiches, Bosphorous views and raki when the sun goes down, I’m sure.

Then London. Then moving into my new pad in Kuala Lumpur. Then a new chapter in life, love, and adulthood. I think I have airtickets booked or planned for every month from now through January, though, so the adventure doesn’t end – it’ll be the last of the middle east and Europe for some time, but more awaits.

Time to finish breakfast, put on my heavy backpack, and walk the last 1km to my hostel. It shall be the last hostel in awhile – I’m not giving up backpacking, I’m just… Upgrading. Life, travel, trading in my hobo life for the chance of getting to own things beyond my baggage allowance for the first time in a while.

I’m happy.

The Country Codes My Girlfriend And I Have Known

Some people do long distance relationships. Most don’t.

Some can’t spare the time or the effort. Others can’t be bothered. Some refuse because they think of the potential heartbreak the distance will cause: the time difference will compound the distance, the new social environment will open up possibilities that exclude you, or worse, what if they cheat — as we’re told they will, since that’s happened to all our friends who’ve tried?

Or in the words of male friends, in characteristic male bluntness: “What do you mean you need to travel hundreds of kilometres just to fuck?”

(Some people are worth it.)

Not too long ago the idea of having to travel any distance for anybody was a foreign concept, having secretly ruled out relationships with dates who professed to live in the wrong parts of my island, one that’s 42 kilometres long. Too far north? Too far east? Too far northeast? East, at all? No go.

One year on. I surprised myself, but I’ve been seriously dating somebody and have the phone bills to show for it. And it’s incredible.

My girlfriend and I possibly run through more country codes in a month than some people do in years. We’ve practiced to high art the art of putting the other person (and/or ourselves) into various modes of transportation on various continents. For over a year I’ve had a weekly ritual of rushing to get into buses, almost missing them each time, and missing several on different occasions. Or I’m sitting in my balcony tapping my foot awaiting the arrival of a small car after a long drive. More frequently, I’m counting the trees on the North-South Highway and predicting which billboard will come next in each state. Her entry in the address book on my phone has the four latest phone numbers from the most recent countries she’s in. I have in my head, a running list of the best international calling cards and how many minutes each one buys me to the country she’s in that week; my Jajah.com account perpetually refills itself . Our friends have stopped trying to keep up with where we are and turn to our blogs, Facebook and Twitter for hints. Between us, we… need a shared Google Calendar to keep track of our activities.

One thing I didn’t count on was dating someone who sleeps as deeply as I do, seeing as that this was an impossible feat and that my girlfriend strives to exceed my expectations in every imaginable way. This means we find ourselves springing out of bed at 5 am in Borneo one week, late as hell for our boat ride into the dense interiors, and two weeks later we’re jumping out of bed in a fancy room by Trafalgar Square, about to miss a flight to Barcelona. She’s the only person I’ve met who can dress and get ready faster than I can when we’re desperately trying to catch yet another mode of transportation, which is no small feat either. Before I’m out of bed I’m sliding into my clothes, putting on my watch, combing my hair. This woman beats me by two whole minutes. (Being a woman with a woman also means you can use toilets together at the same time, anywhere in the world.)

As recently as six years ago I was sneaking out of my house to go on dates. This past year made sneaking out of my country for lunch or dinner, or both, a fairly regular occurrence. I’d be having dinner with friends and then getting into buses to travel a few hundred kilometres northwards, then heading back the next morning to make it in time to get a book deal signed. The coming year might see that upgraded to the enterprise of sneaking out of continents. Not that we haven’t had any practice: I’ve put her into planes in random Spanish airports so she can fly back to London to fly back to Southeast Asia. Just last week I travelled 400 kilometres to drink a milkshake and a bottle of wine, took off for Jakarta that evening, and from a couch in Jakarta watched a live feed of her packing her life’s belongings to get ready to move to London — the next morning. I’m now packing my bags for my Middle Eastern adventure, and something about the idea of going on dates in any of the exotic locations in between us is rather enticing, particularly the one starting +90.

It all began with +65, and the hot, balmy night in my city. We were strangers with impossible situations, yet hardly a month later in +60 you were mine. Every other week since that one, somewhere between +65 and +60 i find myself wishing: if only half the state of Johor would disappear you would be so much closer to me. One week I’m punching +27 to call you in Stellenbosch, and the next you’re telling me silly jokes about St Francis from a +55 number from your hotel room in Porto Alegre. With a surprise 6 hours with you in Singapore since it’s supposedly partway between Brazil and South Africa, and since you do seem to like popping into my city to surprise me.

I squatted by toilets each night in +88 to talk to you on Skype, when trying to win your trust, continued the next week from +62, but it was the country codes I didn’t have to dial that did it for us. Not needing to dial a prefix means you are here. Not needing a country code means you are next to me. The country codes I haven’t had to dial made, and shaped, us; they were those times we were finally alone, those times we were going somewhere together, those times I was waiting for yet another delayed flight and you were by my side. It was those magical times in various parts of +66, in deserted islands or in bustling cities, between +66 and +60 in a cabin on a 15 hour ride, that we found each other’s place and pace in our lives. Other times, intoxicated with too much tuak, asleep with half the village in our bilik: you were always next to me, on that tilam in**+6083**. Then of course, cycling adventures in +34, after +33, +44.

To put things into perspective the 10 000 kilometres between us means we you are only 20 times further from me than you usually are, and soon that will half to merely 5000. I can’t talk to you without shouting into a computer or pressing a million calling card digits followed by # followed by country code#city code#yournumber#, and you’re not here for dinner 95% of the time. Why this works, I think, is because the 5% of the time in which we are having dinner, in which there are no country codes needed, no matter where in the world dinner or conversation is for that particular date, we are a hundred and twenty percent about the big things. What life brings, what careers we build, the places we will travel to, and the future; our place, in all of this, the things we will do and places we will go together. Why this works is we actually end up doing these things, and going to these places, even when we least expect it. In the other 95% of the time I sometimes potter to my telephone forgetting I’ve run out of phone credit to call you at your latest prefix, but know anyway it doesn’t matter where we are or what you’re doing at that exact moment in time. Because when it’s time to get into planes it’s to come home to you.

Because this works, with or without a country code, and it’s one of those improbable things and combinations you never think of but that work out to be the best idea. Like chocolate and potato chips, peanut butter and ice cream, you and me. Us, the world, and all these possibilities.

Peanut Butter, This What?

postcard from Banten

I never learn.

If there are two items you must not forget when travelling, they are your universal travel adapter and your watch.

I keep forgetting either one but that is seldom a problem. Forgetting just a travel adapter means you can tell time with the other essential item, the watch; forgetting the watch but having the adapter means you can tell the time with your mobile phone, iPod, or computer.

I had neither this time.

And so it was that I woke up on Thursday morning with a jolt. I had a flight and it was one I could not miss: I had a dinner appointment in another country. Not having a travel adapter meant my phone was dead for days and I therefore couldn’t inform my dinner date of any changes in the plan; the only alternative then was to make it for dinner. Not knowing what time it was I leaped out of a sofa in downtown Jakarta and sped into the bathroom, having stripped fully and redressed entirely in the 5 steps it took to get there, swept all my toiletries off the bathroom counter, administering the contents of these toiletries on my face and mouth before they got into the bag, relieved myself concurrently, and was out of the house (also having checked three times that I didn’t leave any thing behind, which would be disastrous: I don’t have the key into this apartment) exactly four minutes since I woke up with a jolt.

Downstairs at the foyer I cut the line and jumped into a taxi still worried I might miss my flight. It was 11 am.

On checking my flight ticket I realized I was, for the first time, grossly early for a 2.55 pm flight. At least that gave me enough time to get through the predictably unpredictable Jakarta traffic.

By 11.45 am I was at Soekarno-Hatta airport. If you’ve ever been there you know how that airport does not in any way resemble the airport of the capital city of the fourth most populous country in the world. The way it’s built it looks like someone took a bunch of the dullest looking Lego bricks and lined it up in a row. At each break between a set of bricks someone else started labelling them: International, terminal A, B. Domestic, terminal C, D. You can only enter the airport if you have a boarding pass and a passport, everyone else had to clamber up some steps to the Waving Gallery. The only thing you can do at the terminal is check in. The international terminal is too crowded; it makes you sprint from place to place looking for where you’re supposed to be, before going through another hurdle (to pay fiskal, 1 million rupiah for Indonesians, 100 000 rupiah for everyone else), then getting into the grotesquely long passport control lines. The domestic terminal is far more sedate and cuts to the chase. You enter the terminal; look at the screen; the check in rows are 5 feet in front of you. You check in your bags, then walk 100m to pay fiskal (30 000 rupiah, domestic). Then you get on the plane. I have seen airports in small tribal town India that work and look better. Guwahati airport in Assam, for example, is light years more advanced.

But never mind all that because Soekarno-Hatta airport has a Krispy Kreme outlet — outside, as all the shops are.

While attempting to check in early I notice my flight had been delayed to 4.15 pm. I take to delays with a certain degree of nonchalance that only experience with budget airlines and Indian trains can afford. I sit at a restaurant eating overpriced soto babat, and only because A&W Indonesia doesn’t have curly fries, and talk to strangers. One man sitting next to me with an Eee PC tells me he is Vietnamese American and is travelling the world; he’d quit his job, but as a world class backgammon player… plays backgammon online and makes more money from that than some investment bankers I know. We both have not showered in many hours and as solo travellers, need each other: to watch our things when we go to the toilet to wash our faces.

When it was time to check in for my flight at the new timing, I roll my trolley all the way back to the domestic terminal. The screen has been saying “retimed: 4.15 pm” all this while. Announcements are impossible to hear in this airport, if they exist at all. While trying to check in I find out my flight… berangkat! Departed. At the old time. It wasn’t delayed after all. Although the screen still said my flight is leaving at 4.15 pm.

So I’d missed it and was put on the next flight to my destination… at 6.40 am the next morning. I was running out of Indonesian currency, and money changers don’t really exist in this airport (or they do, but in the most inconvenient place possible — at a location which necessitated me taking a shuttle bus there); I was getting cranky. I decided to stay in the village nearest to the airport rather than brave traffic back into Jakarta, preferring village life to hanging out at Soekarno-Hatta even though I knew my new friend the backgammon champion was going to be playing backgammon online at the airport until 10 am the next day. Every minute there was depressing.

Someone booked me a decent hotel in that village, and they also came to pick me up. When I arrived in Banten I felt nothing. No panic, no horror, just one question: what am I going to do until 4.30 am tomorrow? (Remember, not having travel adapter = no laptop and mobile phone.)

The hotel was decent enough. I’m used to hotels of all stripes. My accommodation preferences sway two ways: either extreme luxury of the private retreat sort, or bottom of the barrel. I mostly dislike everything in-between and would rather stay at a place scraping the bottom of a barrel than yet another soulless hotel. The bottom of the Banten barrel, this Sri Permata place, wasn’t too bad. I mean, I have stayed in leprosy mission guesthouses in Bangladesh, longhouses hours away from cellular coverage in Borneo, and box-sized rooms in Calcutta. And enjoyed them all.

It’s the sort of place where everything on TV is in a language you don’t understand.

In my case, everything on TV was in a language I understood in fits and starts. My grasp of Malay/Indonesian is shaky, not having done it in school, and with the sentence structures of a two year old and the vocabulary of a three year old, it’s frustrating to understand bits and nothing else. Though my dedicated efforts in reading signboards in Malaysia mean my abilities in this language are slowly improving (Me: “What’s_faedah_?!”, on an insurance signboard. Her: “Say it again! Hahaha!” Me: “Frown!”) it still counts for nothing. If anything at all I feel like an idiot. Watching TV affirmed this. I understood one in ten words.

So an Indonesian comedy program, which I’m sure was very funny to the native audience, sounded to me like this:

“Where!”

“Here!”

“There!”

“Who!”

“Mosquito”

(Audience: “Hahahaha!”)

Me: “There are many mosquitoes in this room alright.” (in my head, and in English /switches off TV) Though to my credit, I did understand that they’d written in a product placement for Hak Hak Bento prawn tempura: they’d erected an entire shopfront on the set and were discussing how delicious prawn tempura was. Not entirely useful linguistic skills, then.

By which time it was 5.50pm and every channel on TV was a call to prayer for buka puasa(break fast). I wandered out into the village in search of food.

Since I had 11 hours to kill in this place I picked a warung at the brightest spot in town — Cafe Rindu, right outside Indomaret, Indonesia’s answer to 7-Eleven. In a town like this, 24h convenience stores did not exist. They closed at 10pm. I had 4 hours to go in the bright lights of this warung.

Reading Indonesian menus are never too harrowing. Being from where I am I understand 98% of menus in Indonesia and have probably eaten most of it. It seemed like a day for_roti panggang_ (toast), but so many options! Coklat! Keju! Strawberry! Selai kacang! It didn’t seem like a night for chocolate, cheese or strawberry. But just what was the last option?

I puff up my chest slightly and furrow my brow.

“Kak. Errrr… selai kacang. Ini apa?”

If anyone ever asked me that in English I would react the same way 18 year old Yati did. Stumble, laugh, giggle, and not know what to say.

“Peanut butter. This what?” What is the world? Why is the sky blue? Why does my Indonesian suck? Why am I so hungry? What is life? Why are we here? How does one answer that?

Yati pondered the deepest existential question posed to anyone since The Answer is 42. What is peanut butter, indeed?

She made me some, and I understood. I understood the secrets of the world, and why we are here. To eat peanut butter toast at a warung in a random, faceless small town in Java. To do all that while attempting to talk to people in a language I don’t entirely understand or speak.

When it was all over she asked me to be her friend. In Indonesian, of course. (“What? Huh? What did you say? Speak slowly? I is from Singapur. me speak Bahasa Indonesia a little bit a little bit.”)

I wanted to ask her to leave me her address so I could send her a postcard.

“Please give me your maklumat.”

Blank stare.

(Maklumat = information)

“Sorry, please give me your alumat.”

Another blank stare and a giggle. I vow to stop trying to speak Indonesian if I get it wrong again.

(Alumat = doesn’t mean anything)

“PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR ALAMAT.”

Yati clapped her hands, giggled, actually shrieked and did a little jiggle. And wrote excitedly on my writing pad. In English. Name = Yati. Age = 18. Address = xxxxx, Banten, Indonesia.

I’m not used to girls behaving like that towards me at all, certainly not used to tudung-wearing girls in Java (or anywhere else) being so excited about me.

I wish I could tell her peanut butter is the world, but knowing my shit Indonesian it would probably come out as “in the world, peanut butter is”. Or “peanut butter, in the world”.

It was time to leave. And I had her alamat, and all the maklumat I needed. Now to tidur, and balik ke Singapur. Langsung!

A few Malay/Indonesian language elves died in the process of writing this entry.

(Incidentally, for years my mother thought I was dating a Javanese girl named Yati. And chose to call her Yeti. How that’s anywhere close to Z’s real name is a mystery to all of us. My mother was also fond of boasting to her friends that Yeti was the colour of _kopi susu_and like hitam manis — milk coffee, and black and sweet, which I guess ties into the whole abominable snowman idea — so I guess irrelevant Indonesian skills are something I inherited.)

Chasing the Monsoon

Where I dig through my archives and repost the stuff I like. This is from 2007.

Ask me again a year, three, or five from now and all I will remember is driving up, around, up, around, up, around, in the swirling clouds as the rain lashed at my windows and I feared for my life, balanced so daintily in this tin can navigating itself on the hairpin road. This being Meghalaya, where everyone loves their rock ‘n’ roll, Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” blasted from this tin can while I said a little prayer.

The purpose for this journey? To spend the tail end of my summer living out the monsoon in the world’s wettest (inhabited) place. If London gets close to 600mm of annual rainfall, where I was hitting up racked up 12000mm consistently, also the holder of two world records: highest monthly rainfall, highest yearly rainfall.

Ask me again a year, three, or five from now and I will still tell you the same thing: I’m not sure why I do the things that I do. Except that I was chasing the monsoon, that year and it just so happened I was paid for it.

We’d gone from my beloved Calcutta hurriedly, up to Darjeeling. I was eager to revisit that hill station with such a huge chunk of my heart before the rains shroud my beloved Kanchenjunga in the monsoon mist. I remember walking, walking for no particular purpose, just as it’d been the last time. Even in leaving, I remember driving, driving for no particular purpose. We drove down the winding mountain roads, stopping in Garidhura for a chai. In Garidhura a toothless man grinned at us, saying he’d been an English teacher for decades but hasn’t had much practice in a while. We only had time for a chai and a chai’s worth of conversation; then we continued driving, driving very fast, driving around bends, past tea plantations, past army barracks. Rapidly descending in circles but what the air took in altitude, it gave back in the freshness of tea plantations and the lingering scent of Darjeeling, my sweet, strong, Darjeeling without sugar.

But to chase the monsoon across to the west coast and down south — there was a quick intermission of the scorching Indian summer in the plains, by the Ganges and in the desert. Before long the three weeks of enforced vegetarianism had passed, and so had the worst of scorching Indian summer nights, there we were in Bombay. Expecting the monsoon to lash at Bombay as it had the past year, we quickly took off to catch a bit of the beach before the sea devoured it. Palolem, Goa. The monsoon had caught up with us. It didn’t rain but it poured for more than 15 hours a day — a few died in a neighbouring state, while they began to dismantle everything on the beach slowly. We were one of the last huts standing, still reluctant to leave, even though the monsoon had taken our electricity and internet and phone lines, and the sea crashed at our doorstep every night. A man stood in a raincoat knocking at my door at 10pm, saying he loved me and can you please come to Palolem in December. I broke poor Jailesh’s heart without him being ever able to understand why. We packed up the next morning, waited for the rain to subside before braving the journey out of Palolem and into Canacona. Even within the comforts of my air-conditioned sleeper bus to Bangalore, water went drip drip drip on my face, and unlike more natural elements, a broken air-conditioner right above me is more predictable than I’d like.

Ask me again in a year, or three, or five, and I don’t think I’d be able to explain how I got myself to Bangladesh just one month after suffering from a faulty air-conditioning unit somewhere between Goa and Karnataka. Dhaka, Sirajganj, Syedpur, Rangpur, Bogra. What I really want to know is why in the year of 2006, every restaurant costing more than a hundred Taka had simultaneously decided to call themselves “Armani Restaurant”. No matter what anybody tells you, remember that Armani Restaurant in Dhaka, and Armani Restaurant in the Hotel Anik (Residential) Sirajganj, and the Armani Restaurant on the national highway to Syedpur, and the Armani Restaurant in Rangpur, are all uniformly bad. Even if an organization hands you an open tab for food and drink and rest, steer clear of the Armani restaurants that every man and his brother-in-law’s-cousin-in-law-owns.

I missed the monsoon in Bangladesh that year, but certainly had plenty of flood victims to interview. One week I was sitting in an upazilla health complex between a man and his last toe (severe, untreated multi bacillary leprosy), the next week I found my monsoon in a mad taxi ride from Shillong to Cherrapunjee. Pulling closer and closer into where I was going to stay the night, strange romantic signs painted on the rocks before me began to appear. I will hold your hand in the rain, one went. I remember thinking: great, if only I had a hand to hold out here, and could do so without being blown away to Sylhet by this rain. Sohra, Cherra, Churra, Cherrapunjee. Sohra charmed me out of my raincoat, amusing itself with my feeble attempts at their language. I think it rained in Cherrapunjee every time the worst Khasi speaker in the world said ai sha dut laitilli, called someone khong, asked her for doh terkhong, and said kyublei.

But it didn’t rain quite as much as I needed it to. The morning I left Sohra, as I sped from Shillong to Guwahati to Calcutta and Bangkok, I think it began to pour, and I’m never going to be able to eloquently describe what it’s like living in a Victorian governor’s house suspended between one thunderstorm and another, the precise moment before the rain begins, how the clash of light dances across my front door and across my fireplace. How your conception of the basics: as basic as love, and what you feel about rain, can be changed by experiencing the wondrous rain in the monsoon in the world’s rainiest place.

Sudder Street

Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This is from 2007.

At the stroke of eight each morning, I awoke. All my days in India have always had purpose, and it was especially purposeful in Calcutta, my crazy, lovely, chaotic, I hate you I love you Calcutta. This was a luxurious hole in the wall, 400 rupee a night room — a fortune. One could live on 400 rupees (S$13, US$9) for two days, but we blew it on a room with two beds, 24 hour hot water and electricity, items of much greater fortune. My purpose that morning was to get my eyebrows threaded in the neighbourhood beauty salon (oddly enough run by fourth generation Chinese immigrants who look like they could be my aunts, but speak only Bengali and Hindi now), queue up at the Bangladeshi High Commission for my visa, and zip over to Apple and Canon’s little hole in the wall offices to have our equipment returned.

I opened my door and closed it immediately, an act which had come to become a signal to The Boy. All over the subcontinent, establishments of all shapes and sizes from the 400 rupee “luxury” of Sudder Street (like the one we were in), to 15000 rupees a night Park/ Taj/ Oberoi hotel rooms, The Boy, one of the several members of the entourage which you will deal with each day (The Boy, the bearer, the sweeper, the caretaker) is one of those inevitable legacies which outlasted the British Empire. The memsahib this time was not a colonial wife or daughter, but a scruffy yellow woman always dressed in tie-dye pants and a shirt which said “Om”. The moment the signal came, the boy would come to my door, and bring me a tray of coffee and tea, on the house. The boy in question here was about 25 (much younger than the Boy in Planter’s Club, Darjeeling, who was about 90).

As a veteran, one occupies your own space in the ecosystem of Sudder Street. Or perhaps an ecosystem forms around you. I had been to Sudder Street four times in two years, and was slowly settling. Before long I graduated from the fearful Oriental who scuttled away when approached by drug pushers, semi-giggling and blushing, to the old India hand who had the entourage of neighbours to meet and greet. There was the Spanish group, who huddled together eating omelettes. They all looked bronzed and supremely attractive. The French-speaking always occupied the same table at the Blue Sky. The Americans and the Britons were buried in their Lonely Planet India, a tome thicker than the Mormon Bible and in a sickening shade of blue, perhaps as homage to the pop-art kitsch Krishna on its cover. Everyone, regardless of where we came from originally, said “namaste” when greeting each other, “dhanyabad” in gratitude, subconsciously complementing these with that Indian head wiggle and punctuating our sentences with “accha” and “baba”. Everyone was either a volunteer at the Mother Teresa home, or was travelling for a year, or both.

A man walked up and down Sudder Street every afternoon and night, with a bag full of wooden flutes, looking so comical that you could make a Bengali arthouse movie (pop trivia: Bombay’s Hindi-language Bollywood is crass, commercial and popular; Calcutta’s Bengali movies are arthouse, obscure, and difficult but beautiful) starring him, the Piped Piper of Sudder Street. He would be leading a pack of backpackers and volunteers, playing his own wooden flute to classical Bengali songs. He was friends with the fruit seller, the man who stood outside the phone booth with a push cart hawking the best of Bengal. The fruit seller’s sister was a homeless 21 year old woman-child with a beautiful baby, and when we met we couldn’t stop talking. Each time I planned to meet friends at the Lindsay Hotel’s rooftop restaurant for dinner, I had to leave my room 2 hours earlier, because I inevitably ended up in her living room — on the sidewalk where she lived with her baby, just opposite the Blue Sky cafe. Tomorrow, she will sneak into a train on unreserved class with her baby, to go home to her parents for the festivities. If a train conductor catches her, she might give him half of her money — 10 rupees (S$0.35, US$0.22), but either way standing all the way to the station at her village.

After speaking to her, I might nip across into Blue Sky for a quick apple juice. The boys from Sikkim, Assam and Darjeeling who had to travel to Calcutta to sit for examinations or go through job interviews would hurry up to greet me in Sikkimese, Assamese, Nepali, Khasi, just because I was the only person in the room with the same skin colour. Embarrassed “Oh I thought you were from Sikkim/ Assam/ Darjeeling/ Meghalaya/ Mizoram/ Manipur” comments would be exchanged, then I might sit down with my apple juice to read all the Indian English newspapers available. The Occasional Orientals might drop by, sit at the next table, and gossip enthusiastically in that loud voice we love to speak in when we think nobody understands our language. I just keep very quiet, eavesdropping, wanting to hear what they might say of a place I hold dear to my heart, in a language only three people in the whole street understood. They’re usually terrified of Calcutta, terrified of India, and for a good reason — most people are. The world would be better off without hacks like us contributing further to its literature of chaos and its teeming humanity, so I won’t go into that; but if you love this place, you can be sure you’re very, very much in love.

I’m not sure why I keep returning to Calcutta — in writing, and in person. Is it because it’s my first Indian city, and that I had spent a month living there in Narendrapur, a little hamlet in its suburbs, showering with hot water the cook had heated over a cooking cauldron, eating rice cooked in mustard oil with my fingers and drinking tea in alleys with no street lights for miles? That wherever I may be, College Street still cheers me up, and the Indian Coffee House still amazes me every time? That their beautiful, poetic language is what I’d heard someone I loved once speak daily for two years, and its food was what I discovered and fell for, the same time I fell for and discovered a great love? That many nights were spent here in cheap hotel rooms, with Bob Dylan and the Arcade Fire for company, writing, and writing, writing some more and editing our photographs for print? I may never know.

I opened my door and closed it — but no Boy came to my room with a tray of coffee or tea. I walked a distance to get to my neighbourhood Bengali restaurant, but its cardamom tea, its katti kebab, its Kolkata briyani, was a sham. I’d come so far to see you, and you welcome me with acid rain, endless electricity shut downs, and drug pushers on my beloved Sudder Street. Like the great love I can’t explain — so I can’t explain you away. All I know is how here, more than any place else in the world, more than even my home in Singapore, is where I have loved, and loved, and fallen out of love, but like a reliable lover Calcutta never fails to cheer me up, even long after I’ve gone.

A Bus and Chai Story

Reposting stuff I like from my archives. This is from 2006.

Rajasthan, at the peak of summer. There are no tourists around for miles, except the two of us. For a good reason too. Tell any Indian you were in Rajasthan in May, and he is bound to exclaim, “Vhat? It’s… hot!” And when an Indian says it’s hot, believe me, it’s hot. I believed them. I just didn’t care. Some people like it hot. Rajasthani “hot” means 48 degrees Celsius, or 120 degrees Fahrenheit. I went because nobody being around meant I got 75% off hotel rates, at whatever hotel I wanted to be in. I can’t help it — I’m Asian. The name of this region, Marwar, came from the Sanskrit root word, “Maruwat”. “Maru” means ‘desert’, while “Maruwat” roughly translates to ‘region of death’.

By this time I had a way around the Indian public transportation system, in any city and town I chanced to be in. I also knew this far out in the desert, air-conditioned Rajasthani state buses were non-existent. Besides, proper travellers took non-airconditioned buses everywhere, didn’t they? We were proper travellers. But even the Third World has its own sub-divisions. Where we were, was moderately more difficult than some other parts of the Third World we’d been in.

As our bus ticket was written entirely in Hindi, my nascent grasp of the language had not yet developed from “attempts at letter identification” to “actually useful application of language”, so with no knowledge of my bus other than where it was going (Jodhpur) and the time it was to be expected (6.45am), I had to depend on my auto driver to take me to it. He took us to the side of an empty road which seemed to stretch into the desert as far as the eyes could see.

We stood by the side of the road for what seemed like hours. We flagged down each bus which came by — none of them were marked in English, nor had as much as an indicator of where they were going. Jodhpur? We asked, hopefully, each time. After countless cups of tea and nimki for breakfast (there was a little dhaba near where we were waiting), someone frantically screamed at us: “Jodhpur! Jodhpur!” Together with what was probably “you’re going to have to sit among those chickens if you don’t scramble up fast enough!” We got up, and got a seat each, miraculously, at the back of the bus. The only acceptable time for bus travel in Rajasthan in the summer is between 5am and 7am, and you’d better pray that you get to your destination before it starts the daily heatwave by noon. At 10am, we were well on our way, and happy about it. Perhaps complacently so.

The bus stopped by a dhaba for a break, or so I thought. I dipped out to go to the toilet (or the hole in the ground), toilet roll in hand. Toilet rolls are bound to cause stares here; they are believed to be unsanitary compared to the far superior system of water. My embrace of the country had not yet translated to a full embrace of its toilet habits, I still needed my toilet paper. On the way back to the bus I saw fit to order myself two cups of tea, special (costing more at 2 rupees instead of 1; where 1 INR=US$0.02). As the chai-wallah pushed the two cups of tea into my hands, I saw the bus which was supposed to take me to Jodhpur — and it was leaving. Leaving with my partner, my luggage, my passport and my money. I was there with my two cups of tea, and 10 rupees in my pocket, thinking for a split second that if I didn’t catch this bus I might be stuck out there on a Rajasthani highway dhaba with no mobile phone and no identification papers. I ran — I sprinted as fast as a girl with two cups of chai in her hands could sprint. My partner’s attempts to stop the bus was futile, all she could do was shout “stop! stop!” from her seat at the back of the bus. The bus was so packed that even if she managed to make her way to the driver, I might have been married to a Rajput already.

My travels have assured me of the certainty of determinism, a higher being, and my place in the world as someone whose every step is, quite literally, an act of faith, guided by the divine. Because I actually managed to catch the bus, and when I got on I was relieved I had my two cups of chai intact. Now at the front of the impossibly packed bus, I faced the arduous task of getting my chai through the bus, led by the sole vision of myself sitting by my window, looking at the desert and sipping a cup of tea. As I made my way through the bus, people made way reluctantly for me, all the while shouting to each other in Hindi and Rajasthani: look out! Mad china-woman has tea that can kill! And indeed my tea could kill — I had two of them, and they were, in line with our geographic position at that point in time, the Rajasthani kind of hot. The Rajasthani kind of hot tea which threatened to scald anyone who was in my way, and also burned my hands as I held them.

I made it to the back of the bus, two cups of chai intact, after 5 minutes of mad chai-balancing kungfu. When I got there, Z seemed capable of snapping my head off at that moment.

All I could do was smile with relief: “Chai, baby?”

Before she could strangle me, the bus jolted while avoiding a truck, and I spilled tea all over her shirt.

Portraits Unphotographable

Whether it’s a long-haul transatlantic flight or a regional short hop, or even just a trip out on a local bus, the process of meeting and eventually talking to strangers, can lead one to use quick heuristics in sizing them up. Perhaps it’s our automatic mechanism to do so in order to pass the time, while travelling and moving, or that in the restricted space of train carriages, cars and buses, the lack of activity means we entertain ourselves by making up stories about other people, knowing we will never meet them again after you shared space and shared experience has passed. The woman across looking down — maybe she’s broken up with her boyfriend, lost her job, or is having a bad week, you begin. Before long you find yourself elaborating stories about these people, in your head, and these random strangers: soon you start to believe the girl in the school uniform at 11 am, when she should, by all accounts, be in school, is a truant. The inconsistency that is her presence in a school uniform, in public place which is not a school or school-related venue, leads you to draw upon what you already know, what you’re already familiar with, the joy of truancy. It develops further; she becomes a truant perhaps because she has problems at home, or maybe she’s just come from a doctor and found out she was pregnant, and perhaps the person who made her pregnant is a junkie and soon you ponder upon the incongruence of her presence at a place unrelated to what she is supposed to be. Then you catch yourself thinking this whole enterprise going on in your head is ridiculous.

I first noticed *Neha Sahoo* on the platform of Yesvantpur station before we boarded the Bangalore-Guwahati Express. It seemed straight out of a movie, especially a Bollywood one, or one not unlike a typical Asian afternoon soap opera — it was a typical teary goodbye scenario, with the couple glancing nervously at the clock every once in a while, looking frantic as the scheduled departure of the locomotive became eminent. I felt like a voyeur, watching them and imagining stories for them, yet I cannot help it and have no noble excuse to vindicate myself: I write. I eavesdrop. I peek in. I make up things while negotiating the line between fact and fiction, never succeeding. Like all seasoned Indian train travellers, Neha Sahoo and I both head to the man at the platform selling snacks — we know we’ll need it, while we sit on board our berths, waiting for the latecomers to settle in, waiting for our tickets to be checked, waiting to begin. Train travel is precisely like that, tentative and genuine. Tentative while we sit there waiting for something beyond our control, something as much physically larger than us as a train, to decide our fate, our punctuality in our next city, and our sleeping habits for the next two days; as genuine as Neha Sahoo pulling all her life’s belongings on board, while I silently fight with her for space under our berths, chaining my backpack tightly under seat 33. If farewells at airports are already as piercing as only those of us who have experienced them will know, farewells at train stations are in another league of pain altogether. Airport farewells have an element of closure; no matter how much we would like to dispute it, you can lose sight of what you’ve just left behind quite easily, if you let yourself. Train farewells, through the fact that you are connected by a railway line, most probably still within national borders, tosses heartbreak through geographical distance up into the air, making things uncertain though they shouldn’t. The emotions felt by this young woman and her lover were already piercing and intense, even to a casual observer such as myself.

At least with airport farewells there is no chance to see the person you love inside the vehicle which will spirit her away, waving her goodbyes, with all her life’s belongings contained in three trunks you helped to pack. Hidden in my upper berth in seat 35, I was a lone female traveller about to cover 2000 kilometres with only 1 rupee chai, a neighbour who will spend the next 36 hours sobbing and talking on the phone (chalking up huge inter-state roaming phone bill), and my Hindi language books for company. I watched Neha Sahoo’s still unnamed lover watch the Bangalore-Guwahati Express carry her away from the Bangalore in which they had spent 2 happy years together, to the Kolkata which will be her home from now. And in a selfish moment, decided all my farewells from then on had to be neatly and cleanly incised.

36 hours later, we pulled into Howrah station. I helped Neha Sahoo pull her three cases out onto the platform, hired her a porter, lifted my backpack onto my shoulder and walked off quickly without one. This was it, this is how it ends for us all — me, headed to Sudder Street for the third time, a career and a life on the subcontinent to be discovered; Neha, bound for Salt Lake district, for a new job in a new city, just to be close to her sick parents six hours away in Orissa.

Half an hour later our paths crossed again — the big yellow Ambassador taxi I had bargained down to 50 rupees to take me to my two dollar room, stopped in the traffic while crossing the Hooghly. I had come to Kolkata once in the winter, once in the summer, and here I was waking up with the city in the monsoon. I shut my eyes and let the lightly acidic Kolkata rain fall onto my cheeks through the window, which was predictably jammed. Always happy to be in Kolkata, my body adjusted itself to the city, the distinct aroma of Kolkata others find to be a stink, my linguistic brain adjusting to the switch in languages from Kannada to Bengali, trying to realign myself geographically from Karnataka to Bengal, from South India to the East. I saw her in another taxi, a few glimpses away, stuck in traffic while crossing the Hooghly too. The rain fell upon her cheeks through the predictably jammed window of her big yellow Ambassador taxi, though she did not notice: she was gazing out into the river, or what was visible of it. This was me, happy to be away from the city which had my comforts, my lover, my defining moments, in the monsoon on a famous bridge in an infamous city, seeing myself, my own recent pain in the beautiful Orissan lady I had spent 36 hours sleeping across from; a beautiful Orissan lady just two years older than myself. As our taxis diverged and mine sped into Sudder Street, backpacker central, and hers left for Salt Lake, upper middle class district, it also took her deep into a city which her heart will never be in because she left it back in Bangalore, on platform number five, at 6.15pm precisely.

Amar Shonar Bangla

Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one’s from August 2006, when I'd spent some time in both sides of Bengal.

Nine in the morning, every morning — a chef in Sirajgonj district’s “only acceptable hotel”, the Hotel Anik (Residential), cooks me a breakfast of two parathas and two eggs. My decision to omit a dish of “vegetable” (pronounced “va-gee-tay-ble”) caused many eyebrows to be raised, when it was first heard, as if you could even hear cooks and waiters alike exclaiming in Bengali: “What? No vageetayble? Is she mad?” It’s one of those cultural idiosyncrasies, when it comes to food — waiters puzzle at how we can possibly eat roti or naan with only tandoori chicken (bread and tandoori, both considered dry), without a gravy, and leaving out any component of the rice-vegetable-dal holy trinity is considered absurd. Until we foreigners came along with our ketchup and eggs (sunny side up) inside parathas or rotis, rolled up, trying to form a pita wrap. Even India, so used as she is to hosting a wide, mostly eccentric array of foreigners for decades, still noticeably struggles to figure out her guests. The bashful new kid, Bangladesh, at 35 years of age, naturally has even more issues on that count. Especially out here in rural Sirajgonj.

I looked forward to Bangladesh with the earnestness of a long time lover of all things Bengal. Bengali culture, poetry, their towering figureheads — I worshipped people like Tagore, Satyajit Ray, Amartya Sen; almost melted and died of shock and ecstasy the first time I heard Tagore recite the Gitanjali at his Nobel Prize reception. I sat in the cars of my ex-boyfriends, as a teenager, often suspecting I liked the classical Bengali music which emanated from their fathers’ CD collections in the car, more than they did. As a familiar lover of Bangladesh’s cultural cousin, Calcutta, I felt the need to get on The Other Side of West Bengal.

I knew Calcutta’s accents, her dingy streets, and felt at home in her local tea shops where three cups of tea and three biscuits cost me only seven rupees every morning. I knew Calcutta’s history, her public infamy and private fame; I knew how she woke up and went to sleep. My SIM card was considered by the telco to be in its “home circle” whenever in West Bengal, be it Calcutta or Darjeeling, even in the states of Sikkim and even Assam; her street food comforted me, as easily as a cup of fresh misti doi did at the end of every meal. It is in Calcutta where I land, pick out the exact change for a prepaid taxi (Rs 210) then head for the hotel that is my home every time I’m there, change, freshen up, and go out and see friends. The staff at the Blue Sky Cafe whoop and rush up to shake my hand the moment I walk through the door, leaving the French volunteers’ pancakes to become cold. I wolf down a quick breakfast, then go to look for Sanju and her children, spending my next few hours sitting down on a pavement sharing a cup of tea with the family. Not entirely a scenario that is difficult to imagine, until you find out that Sanju is a beggar that lives outside my hotel, but who has never asked me for money. I connect with her for reasons I cannot explain, other than how she is 21, as young as I am, has two young children, and has the look of a fighting woman, the sort I look up to. If cities and countries are languages, Calcutta is the one I have learned well, the one where I have begun to imitate her inflections of speech and colloquial habits.

Dhaka was a shock, coming from Calcutta. Bangladeshi roads were smoother. The city even seemed cleaner. The air did not have as much pollution — an index I know from how the contents inside my nose at the end of every day were not as dark as they are in Calcutta. Everyone smiled, or stared. But there wasn’t time for Dhaka, we had to be shipped off to Sirajgonj, one of Bangladesh’s 64 administrative districts, two hours away. Sirajgonj was a dusty town not unlike the other dusty towns in developing Asia, the ones I spend so much time traipsing around. Only the very old or the very young could be found here; only the enterprises of family, and family business; no venues of extravagant leisure or recreation, no places for the young to mingle and socialize, for the opposite sex are not to mingle so freely. Cycle rickshaws happily stopped, even with passengers in tow, to stare indiscriminately at my foreign face — the passengers don’t mind, they want to stare too, a practice I attribute to how television channels in developing countries have not yet exposed their viewers to the Global Village.

It’s never easy to be a foreigner anywhere. To be a foreigner in a place with no tourist or business appeal, no culinary highlights or natural beauty, a place such as Sirajgonj, was simply to court attention with a capital A. For six nights we hid in the Hotel Anik, tired of stares, tired of the attention. It was to be in any village, trying to escape the mob by sliding off for a fag in a quiet corner, then looking up to find 200 or more people staring at you having a fag. Conditions did not improve even as we moved from one part of Sirajgonj to another, then through Bogra, Rangpur, Syedpur, Nilphamari. The same things happened with such uniformity: everywhere, people stared, hung around. One evening, after what seemed like our millionth village mob, done with work and done with shouting over 10 heads at a time trying to get answers from interviewees, my escape plan backfired dramatically. I had tried for a stealthy exit but before I could take my second step out of the village compounds about a hundred and fifty adults children had gathered to give me a memorable send off — children surrounded me, running alongside and behind me, whooping as I indulged them by letting my camera and camera flash go off in their general direction. Young disabled children hobbled around on their wooden twigs pretending to be walking aids, running much faster than I could have on two feet. My British colleague, still scarred by his country’s poor showing at the World Cup, decided that if the Union Jack could not be raised at Germany this year, he would at least try to make her name resound through the country of Bangladesh, and led the chorus of children in chanting “England, England”, even if they did not know what it meant. To them we must have appeared a duo of whacky looking characters out of a movie, who for no particular reason, decided to appear in their village to teach them a chant about England.

As “England, England” resounded through the village of Rudapur, I drifted away. My phone rang and a familiar voice I had loved said, “You’ve probably been to more parts of Bangladesh than I have babe, welcome home.” My head was bursting to say, “Oh? Apnar gram naam ki?” (What is the name of your village?) yet I had to remind myself I was here, sitting at 1.30 in the morning having a bowl of century egg porridge at Crystal Jade — a sign that I was “home”. Not long before that I was sitting on the terrace of the Hotel Anik, bottle of contraband Indian whisky in hand, and together we sang a song. “Sometimes… I look into your eyes, I swear I can see your soul…”

Sirajgonj, the district that loved to stare, left me alone for the first time, or so I thought. A family standing on the roof of the building across from me caught wind of two mad foreigners singing James and Radiohead anthems on their rooftops. It was that evening that I learned to wave madly before they did, and returned the stare for the first time.

Why I Am Still A Feminist

Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This is from 2006. It has also been republished in print in GASPP, A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose.

I am still a feminist because I am no longer ashamed of saying I am one. I have grown tired for apologizing for so many of the things I am: for being liberal, lesbian, anti-Bush and anti-war, a Christian that hates the fundamentalists. Anymore to apologize for, and I may have to apologize for being Chinese.

I was feminist before I was lesbian. I was feminist before I was liberal. I was feminist before I knew feminism had become synonymous with ‘bra burning’ and ‘aggressive’ (I like my bras too much, and I prefer to be passive-aggressive). I was feminist the moment I was acutely aware that being a girl meant there were many things I could not do, and so much more I was expected to.

The first feminist I knew was my father, who taught me I must never bow to the demands of any man, and must never let any man suppress my intellect or free will. He must have known I was a feminist from the time I was 4, when, I did not believe the distribution of potato chips was fair and equal, and demanded he demonstrate by bringing out actual weighing scales, that I had as much as my male brothers and cousins.

In primary school, I was an avid soccer player. About as good as the boys, the boys told me. I played every recess time and after school, every day. I was the midfielder with stamina, who was fast as well and was everywhere and anywhere on the pitch at all times. Good enough, that the boys thought nothing of inserting me into their ambitious tournament plans for the next few years: we were a team. I started the first match in the tournament with the brand new soccer boots I paid for myself. At half time, the referee — his name was Mr Azman — said I couldn’t play, ever again. Even though this was an informal tournament in school, with no rulebook or precedents, he said that’s just the way it is: no girls allowed.

By the time I was 18, I thought I already had a pretty good grip on the “girl” issue. During one class debate, a member of the opposition made a disparaging remark about how sometimes rape victims “were just asking for it”. Livid, I made a comment which led him to say: “Let’s go outside, I’ll show you how good it is to be raped.” This same person is on his way to becoming a lawyer, and I fear.

I’m turning 21 this year and while I don’t play soccer anymore, as a photographer I’m told “they want guys, because they look more like photographers”, as a Mac Evangelist in retail I’m told they “want to consult the guys”, even though I know as much. Guys still hit on my girlfriend in front of me because I evidently don’t count and I’m not the real thing; if I’m opinionated, I’m being either aggressive or emotional, and if I’m stoic, I’m heartless.

As a member of the majority race and male, you may not believe it when I say that sexism is alive and well, because you have never encountered it. You see female managers and female CEOs, females in positions above you, and you fear for your male superiority. What you don’t see is the sacrifice only women are made to make when they choose career, how they could be similarly qualified and similarly excellent or better leaders, yet climb slower and earn less, how if they are assertive they are aggressive female bosses, how if they are not then they are ineffectual leaders and submissive. What you don’t see is how she had to fight hard for most things that come easily to you.

As a member of the majority race and male, you sat next to me in school today at the library cafe, talking about how your girlfriend is not as loud as pornstars when you “fuck her”, wondering if that’s because “she doesn’t know how to express her pleasure”, then your friends all started talking about blowjobs and said in no unclear terms, that the world revolves around “your cocks”.

I will continue to be a feminist until the day my classmates are not seen as objects, whose pleasure is necessarily held up against porn industry ideals, until the day their pleasure is not dictated by the selfish dicks they date.

As a member of the majority race and male, you fathered one of my closest friends. When your daughter complained to you that she used to be touched inappropriately by your friend’s son, when your daughter discussed with you the topic of male infidelity, you laughed and said, “We’re men, we’re like that.”

I will continue to be a feminist until the day every father stands up for their daughter’s rights, the way my father does.

As a member of the majority race and male, everything you might be culpable for is “because she asked for it.” Can’t have children? She must be infertile. Want to use condoms? Only if she pays for it. She doesn’t seem to like sex with you? There must be something wrong with her. Pregnant? She sleeps around. Sex video spreads on the internet? It’s her morals. Lesbian? They haven’t met the right man, and you just might be the one.

I will continue to be a feminist until the day my friends’ fathers stop explaining away their affairs based upon what their wives supposedly lack.

So when you say, those feminists, in the same breath as those nazis, those communists, those crazy bra burning women, you need to know that the object of our hatred is never men — it is what some men do to us.

I will continue to be a feminist until the day my uncle in the flesh and blood stops being an asshole, and his immigrant wife is not afraid to divorce him and press charges.

I will continue to be a feminist until it is realized that while it is best for every child to have his mother and father, if the father is a dangerous man he has to be kept away from her beautiful young children before he does any permanent damage.

I will continue to be a feminist until it is realized the existence of many good men does not mean it is irrelevant to be a feminist. They are our fathers, our boyfriends and husbands, our sons. All it takes is just one man, that isn’t good, to destroy the lives of too many women around the world, and among us now.

This is why I will remain a feminist, I’m not apologetic for it, I won’t burn my bra, I don’t hate you, and no, you can’t watch either.

Other Mornings in Other Places

What I have noticed about being away, and still can’t shake off, is how mornings in each foreign place are so strikingly different from what one is used to; how different they are from each other — how foreign the word foreign sounds after a while. I like to believe it never hits you you are away until you wake up feeling displaced. Or that you haven’t really made a place your home until waking up comes so naturally and matter-of-factly there is nothing to it; until what was not your bed now feels like yours, and is even adorned with your peculiar smell.

It is brighter, earlier, in some places. Your mind races to make all the connections — back home, comparing, you might have been (1) preparing for school (2) relishing a particularly delicious dream (3) kissing your lover at the crack of dawn. And you think of how, back home, it is similarly bright only at seven. Exactly twenty minutes before flagraising.

Instead of being awoken by an alarm, Vanna’s motorcycle pulling into the front porch, does. He brings with him a motorcycle trailer to ferry us and all our bags to the bus terminal. There was no time to lose. We left Phnom Penh on our third morning, scarcely enough to have completed the tourist circuit in and around the capital — much less enough time to have stocked up on the US$9 cartons of Davidoff cigarettes. There was no time for contraband cigarettes for the Angkor Wat beckoned.

The Mekong Express ambled out of the city, and in the vicinity — as far as the eyes could see — mornings here, meant, baguettes; streets full of them. The more cynical among us say baguettes are only the good that French rule had left to Indochina. Well before noon we are midway there, when I notice for the first time on the road in Southeast and South Asia, that I have not given any thought to the condition of the road I am travelling on; either because the roads have improved, or I am used to them by this time. Instead, I happily recline ten degrees, smash into my neighbour’s lunch, and attempt to enjoy the on-board Khmer “comedy”.

My neighbour, a Khmer-Chinese man, laughs so hard at the ongoings onscreen, culminating into an already creaky seat rocking under his weight, when an effeminate man in the program is paired with a masculine woman. Then in a language I seemed to understand, he describes the hilarity of the situation to his wife, who is only marginally interested.

I shut my eyes and found myself at home in Indochina, somewhere between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap (though before Kompong Thom). Where my mother tongue, Teochew, is widely spoken and even overheard in buses, when other mornings in other places see the same middle-aged men finding humour in the same bad jokes.

I recline another ten degrees, this time smashing into my neighbour’s lap. Curling my thigh around hers, I begin to think: I want every morning to be like this.

Art and Lies, And

Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This one's from 2006.

1. There is this picture of us back when we were even younger; snapshot circa 2004. 3 years after the start of our life together. If pictures could tell a tale this was the tale of us on the page just after ‘happy together’, though there you were, still assuring, still composed, still my best friend. Any casual observer might have waved it off as yet another happy boy and girl in love, as it was for a time, but by this time I had already gone. Walked out of that door to build a new life for myself, and pieces for you to pick upon.

2. There is no picture of us, for you made me destroy them long ago. The digital equivalent of the primitive act of shredding, however, cannot possibly shred those which persist with no tangible traces. On that couch which wasn’t ours, in an apartment which wasn’t ours, in a time which never was ours, I had a smile which I don’t think could have ever been mine, and a lover who never was. Everyone’s a thief, so everything we had was stolen, though did you really have to take the heart, too? I watched you walk away, as you always do, with no tears but that scrap of paper in my pocket which read: I have always loved you. But.

3. There is a recent picture I have with her. The sort which makes people cringe and squeal and avert their eyes: oh that’s too sweet. I don’t think I’d ever looked so radiant, or been as photogenic — she does bring out the best of me, it’s true. I’m usually smirking in photographs, never very confident about how I look. Yet in a moment without inhibitions, in a country which didn’t inhibit us, I actually beamed. You could even see the little dance in my eyes. I haven’t had the bad luck to have to do any walking, yet, except on and on.

4. [..] but most pictures lie. The moment the shutter is released, so are such lies. Little ones and big ones; classmates you can’t stand wipe off the smiles for posterity and continue being pests. Words, however, are even more dangerous. There is no shutter to depress or release, only floodgates. No freeze frame, only continuously; everlasting and persisting long after the fact. Words just meander on and on like that, once released, there’s no undo, no file to destroy or photo paper to fade off. Margaret Atwood says the only truly honest writing is that which will never be read, not even by yourself — to be honest in writing would require the equivalent of writing with one’s left hand, correction fluid blotting out everything which has already been written, as you continue. Words, as we know, are fatal, which in turn rub off on the person who pens them, making her potentially fatal too. Art and Life may coexist, though if they also co-vary, correlate, and co-habitate then my god we are in trouble. Perhaps this is why, afraid of myself, I turn to other forms of art thinking they could perhaps be less dangerous in these hands, so I could feel as if I continue to operate heavy machinery though more forgivingly so. How was I to know that in a parallel life I could have such art director aspirations? I’m starting to believe I’m a movie. Which is potentially fatal.

5. So in one movie there’s this scene with the three of you I love at a table, speaking with each other. I’m thinking my god let me out of here I can’t breathe. In another there’s a scene of a writer at her desk scribbling furiously in illegible longhand, haunted by the scrap of paper in her pocket; I have always… but. The camera pans, we’re at this cafe, more or less like one of the many other cafes we’ve had The Talk in. Bittersweet Comedy? you scribble. I want to reply: comedy only when there is an audience; bittersweet is quite enough for me. When people kiss in dark alleyways they are usually making promises. When we do, we break a thousand of them, including the ones we have been hanging on to for any semblance of survival.

6. I can understand why writers may be attracted to each other — it must be wonderful to be written about. I have never been written about, though I have always been writing about. Then I think of Hughes and Plath and.. feel a little better about it. Writers are also a dramatic bunch, and I can’t even handle my own.

7. As any good student of the social sciences might, I have fallen into the habit of diagramming and chart-drawing. Clearly labelled axes, arrows indicating strength and direction of relationships, establishing causal relations and so on. So in our chart of inclusionary and exclusionary love, i.e. Us and Them, we have 2 separate diagrams, each labelled family/ religion/ friends, other legitimate, Wanted Things like that. In one, the lines extend to touch every base, there exists the outward pull which initiates the relationship with Such Wanted Things; the area within which forming the total area of everything passionate like desire and sex and understanding, etc. In our chart, then, the axes are rarely ever touched; compared to the full circle/oval of the first, we have this malnourished figure which isn’t sure if it was a triangle or a skinny oval. Desire and sex, etc, The Things Wanted. Never once extending beyond its boundaries to touch the periphery of Everything Else and Ever After.

8. Everything Else, Those Things Wanted, Tomorrows and our yesterdays. Full Circle.

Incandescent

Reposting stuff from the past. This one from 2005.

There she is, your ex-lover, across the bar and incandescent. Gleaming as she always does, though perhaps now from that diamond ring perched so effortlessly off her slender fingers, which grip the cigarette tightly in other places. You steal a glance. You steal two. You kick yourself for it. When the words “ex” and “lover” come together, you think, they form such a funny word. The prefix usually suffices, “ex” has an air of such finality, such legitimacy, all these things we never were. “Lover”, while being the closest word you can dredge up, comes together with the first with layers upon layers of an intensity now forsaken, a sordid mystery to be recounted, a tinge of regret in some places and the embrace of the new in others.

Beer, whisky, Marlboro Lights. The usual. I used to find the way she held her cigarette, the way she flicked it every so often, incredibly alluring. Now that I’m years past legal I find myself unconsciously recreating her style. I stopped requesting for Exit Music, she admits, mostly because I was afraid Shirlyn might realize.. I keep asking for it. I stopped coming here for the same reason. When, to torture myself, I’d ask for it, and revel in how it was rendered so perfectly, so strangled: we hope.. that you choke.. so perfectly mirroring us. It’s so easy to fall into old habits, you say. A temporary wave of nostalgia. Do you remember how we snogged at the ATM in front of your house/ at the playground/ in the lift, what we were thinking then? We weren’t thinking then. It’s so easy to fall into old habits, I know.

Old lovers, I used to say, are like old wine. (In addition to getting better every year,) You store them away, achingly at first, always knowing it’s the best move. Out of sight but not as much out of mind as desired. At some indeterminate point in the future you take them out, admiringly. Whether or not you partake again… would merely be a matter of choice. And circumstance.

Side-stepping, arm to arm, swaying together across that grass patch. Being this drunk would have been a good excuse a few light years ago. You ask: how many girlfriends have you had? I count with my hands and feet.. yet somehow manage to truthfully say, well, two. I’m drunk and of unsound mind but sober up at the words, ring, flat, wedding. Like a hostage who loves her captor I begin to feel, for the first time, pleased you are the friend I’ve never had, the friend you should have always been. Even if ring and flat and man are everything I could never be.

Roundtable

Where I post stuff from the archives, the stuff I like. This is from 2005.

Do you remember how when we first met, I thought you were Adrienne? You were in blue jeans, and a black, backless top. I was in what I used to wear years ago, and still do. Haha I guess things change, years pass, we move on, but not our dressing. Well I’m a bit drunk now so pardon my bluntness. I think about you sometimes. I often wonder if you do. I mean, of course, fondly — you know. We used to be close. I still don’t know what to call it, but I miss that. The uncertainty. The testing of boundaries. That streets had no name. The desperate feeling of wanting what you can’t have, the intense guilt. God the guilt. How intimacy was so innocent, how we were young. Adrienne. You thought I was someone else, who had the same name, but different hair. On my rare night out tonight I was with people I hadn’t seen in years. Classmates. People I knew back when I still bothered to dress up, before this jungle and this inanity became my home. People I knew back when there was you. Us going out in school uniforms. Disappearing. Years ago. When longing was young, and we were even younger. When longing was never wrong.

Let it go, pal, let it go. It hurts like fuck, sure. We can’t ever see beyond our pain or our loss. [glaring sideways for a second, then corrects himself] I’ve been there before. Recently. When you love someone so much and want nothing more than her happiness, yet she thinks you can’t give her that anymore. How can you go on, knowing you can’t make her happy, and she won’t let you try — knowing every moment you hold her, she’s thinking of that goddamn woman — [tense, tearful] It used to be simple, you know. Boy, girl, happy photos and expensive dinners. Birthday surprises and Christmas presents. It was simpler when we were younger. But at twenty five I suppose we know by now this is transient, that things run their own course. At least they’re — she’s — happy now. [wistful, sideway glance] And that should make us happy too. She was the first woman I loved. Only, perhaps. I suppose I should be happy to be the only man she’s ever managed to love. It’ll be our turn to be happy. [Inshallah.]

Semi-imaginary dialogue involving several people who have never met each other, all speaking to me in a bad dream: I had a part dream, part nightmare; we were kissing in my room and our parents caught us. I need to know it didn’t mean nothing to you. I had a luscious dream which ended too early. We were kissing in my room and our boyfriends walked in. Did it? We lit types — so obsessed. With symbolism, coincidence, signs, literary devices. Pregnant pauses. So obsessed with tragedy, and obsessed with obsession. You’re in love with the idea of being in love with me. And I’m in love with the idea of you being in love with me. Another lifetime perhaps, another place. Am I just a friend to you? It stopped being simple, the moment we kissed. You don’t know what it means to be loyal. She was my friend, you know, God, the guilt. She even hugged me. Come to London. Come see me in San Francisco. (Don’t come to my wedding.) You’re loyal, and well, loyal. You’ve been different things to different people, in different dimensions and places. In another time and place when this longing is never wrong. See me there, won’t you? I’ll dream about it, and hope it doesn’t end earlier than it should. /dream Did I mean anything to you? becomes a cry in the dark, though it’s no longer clear now from whom.

Down Monivong on a motorbike with you we went around in circles, lost. Moving onto Sihanouk Blvd it was the same, everything here was the same, looked the same, in this strange place. In the Trasak Pham of memories we were happily washing away the day’s thoughts — of Tuol Sleng, of genocide, of despots who died untried, of the white trash along Sisowath and starving children they literally kick away over chianti and foie gras — the lights went off. The whole street of Trasak Pham liked stealing electricity from this house, as our host had so graciously warned. The water stopped too. At least the soap suds were off, and there was always the prospect of sleep. With the air conditioning gone too, between stale air and mosquitoes, we chose the former. You tossed about, sleepless, bothered, while I fell flat and slept. I remember sleepless nights with you well by now. That night you stayed up to wait for Guy’s bike to pull into the porch. Many months, nights, later (we have no luck with electricity) we braved mosquitoes, escaping to the veranda at four a.m., telling each other jokes to stay awake until sunrise. We set out thus far without a purpose, returning with some. From Changi to Klong Prao, Arab Street to Trasak Pham, riverside to Thansadet, they say the woman in whose sides you seek refuge and who makes you laugh at four in the morning, is the one to want. In the right time and place when longing is never wrong, and we’re not getting any younger. Where the streets are never nameless, even if a little obscured. (I keep wishing I could write a little better about you, but as you know by now, happiness does not lend itself well to engaging literature.)

Release

Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from 2005.

like the foreign worker who, having spent six days of every week, fifty one weeks of every year, building for a country that is not his, listening to languages that are not his, but whose greatest pleasure comes from talking every Sunday in his native tongue for hours to any relative and friend in Dhaka who will listen, to release his repressed Bengali at a dollar a minute, no matter the cost, who,

like the repressed lesbian kissing her first girl after a string of boyfriends, and is perfunctorily surprised to find she likes it much more, because girls don’t merely stick it in and slop around but take their time with her, and she knows now, from a kiss alone, that irrevocably, and uncontrollably, she has to be, the mystery ends here, no matter the cost, who,

like the seven year old in his first week of school, is afraid of teachers, people he calls monsters, as they are very big and scary and always demand to know if his shoes are white, if his nails are clean, if he’s brought his consent form, like it matters at all, and he finally manages the courage to raise his hand, to ask in a meek voice, if he can go to the toilet, there where he swears to never again take Ryan on in the challenge of drinking three cans of Coke at a go, no matter the cost, who,

like the wage slave on her night out after years in the office, is relieved to find the bar to be the same as when she last left it, in 2001, only that the prices of the drinks have risen proportionately to her income, so has the number of suitors (men and women) taken on an inverse relationship to it, and she realizes she is now 28, though last she checked it was 2001, and once in 2003, so after a few rounds of whisky she gets groovy, at the time of the night where whisky is now called ‘happy juice’, determined to have fun for a change, no matter the cost, who,

like me, is relieved to find release, release from the spell of old, from the bright lights and other excesses, from the daisy chain of ex lovers of ex lovers who are now each other’s new lovers, from the endless chain that swears they love you, truly, really, but not really at all, but now finds greatest pleasure in holding the hand of the one I said I loved yesterday, though I already meant it everyday before yesterday, in sitting here writing, as she sits here sketching, admiring her with the silliness of the first flush of love on my face, knowing that I am, in far too many ways, as a woman reborn, in a motion picture where I provide the words and she the pictures, set to the soundtrack that is ours, and ours alone, and I leave this dangling without a full stop because that’s just the way it is, no matter the cost

The Eight Ages of a Woman

Blast from the past: digging into my archives and republishing the stuff I like. This was originally from 2004, and reposted again in 2005. And again now.

1. It is the universal truth — before any woman, man, boy, or girl, is able to walk, first she must spend time crawling. And so it is here, as well as others, that first she learns the root and the nature of her passion and desire, isolates it, tames it well, calls it by its rightful name. But first, an awakening: coldness gripping her palm, fear and joy overcoming her heart, when she, after strings of boys (and strings of boys’ broken hearts), realizes with a rude shock, everything she had dreamt of for years, thought about in secret, put aside from shame, was here and now and right here, in the cubicle in the cinema in the fluorescent light, and there was nothing shameful about it.

2. First the prelude before the climax. Six boys and counting, there is no lack of suitors, there never was and still isn’t, but it just wasn’t the same, it wasn’t quite it, there was something missing. To be sure, they were all excellent specimens of their kind, and yet — to hold a man around his waist and wish his well-toned body softer and more tender, to kiss him and to imagine what it’s like to kiss a woman, feeling increasingly like an imposter the more we make out and the further this spirals: this is not the life I could be content with, this is not the life I could pretend to want.

3. I’m decidedly not gay, she says, before announcing this is why we cannot see each other anymore. Well — I’m not either! I chime in, badly wanting to keep her. Or am I? I couldn’t possibly, I thought, having had more men in my short years than some women ever will in their lifetimes. I, too, was prey to the misconception that sexual behaviour and orientation were necessarily one and the same, ignorant of the nuances of human interaction. All I knew then was that I wanted this woman more than anything else I had ever known, and that “gay” was the name other people had for us.

4. Going from whispered secrets in darkened stairwells to holding hands with women in the light of day, felt like one very long draw of breath, and even further leap of faith. It was to stare the unnamed persecutor in the eye and to say, I am not ashamed, it is to look gleefully at these men who want us both, and to say, you’re not invited, it was to leave a taxi stand in anger and resolve one night when the white men in front of us want to know where we’re headed (her place) and had the gall to ask if they could come along, it was to claim that very simple act people who don’t know take for granted, that is to hold the hands of a woman is not at all an easy task, no matter if she is the one you love, simply because you look like a woman.

5. Settling into the motions of the “R” (Relationship), another set of questions and conflicts arises. Please do not squeeze the toothpaste topdown, can you please lift up the toilet seat? Why? Whom among us pees standing up? Birthdays and anniversaries, breakups of friends and weddings of family; what CDs to leave by the hifi, which CDs to leave in the car. I’m not very much wiser off from when I started, but at least I know now to leave the toilet seat up even if nobody pees standing up, or, failing which, to turn over and go to sleep and to make breakfast in the morning.

6. And when it ends, girls cannot, unlike boys and girls, simply cease to be, mostly since close friends and lovers so often overlap in our world. Who takes what, which places you can never visit again, which CDs of yours and household appliances to leave behind in her possession, which to demand back. Yet why do they always remain the first people to run to when another affair fails, and why do they still care as much, all without illusion or pretense? If there was a word for “between friend and lover but never again but more than a friend nonetheless”, I would invent it here. I would be much poorer off without knowing this one group of people known as the gay girl ex. They’re the sweetest people in the world, but only when they’re not busy being malicious to each other, or dating each other.

7. Many nights I have stood here by this window in my kitchen, phone in hand, sobbing. Gazing into the distance, not quite sure what the person on the other line is saying anymore, but inserting appropriate “ums” and “yes, buts” at the right points. Last week, I found myself at the same spot, doing the same thing. But this time I was pretty sure, unlike other times, I would hate myself for doing what I tried to if you hadn’t stopped me, and this time I don’t know very much about the future, mine or yours, or ours, and don’t pretend to. But I do know I can’t bear the thought of not having you in my life, as difficult as it is, with or without.

8. (this is a story i do not have the means to write because i have not lived it yet, have no clue what it will be, don’t even dare to start on it. this is the part where i say it may be a blank canvas, yes, but at least i know from all these vignettes i’ve had the luck to witness and be part of, these snippets i’ve glimpsed into, it isn’t something to fear. drawing all these vignettes together, weaving them whole, not phenomenally different from what everyone else is doing: just putting the pieces of a puzzle together, finding the pieces which fit, except that in my world — it takes much more effort to hold the hands of the one you love, much more masochism to just keep swimmin’, much more courage to even begin to try to love.)