Posts tagged "lifeandlove"

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)

Munduk

Munduk.

Two people, suspended between heartbreak and fury, met on Hong Kong Street after almost 2 years without each other.

Their hearts, recently broken by others, found each other agreeable — even safe.

They made a plan. The universe attempted to foil it. To no avail.

Through long public holidays, expensive flights, an expiring passport and the logistics of homes, broken and renewed, no unfortunate event stood in the way.

I stood behind the multitudes to wait for you: the many sweaty, smelly men waving flags awaiting their Chinese tourists. Me, in my shorts with holes, a top that's much too big and my hair that's floppy and flat after an hour on a motorbike to come to see you.

Even on arrival, the universe was determined to place one last obstacle before us: the long amble, actually scramble, along the railing, past the sweaty tour guides, into some tourists, around the ATMs, and then you, there in the flesh.

As with the start of new things, my pulse sped up mostly in not knowing how close I could be. It had just been a few days since I had been with you, and here I was furiously making plans to cancel all of my plans.

There's a curse on this island for couples who come here together, they say.

What they didn't say: come as a not-couple, leave as a couple, uncursed?

I hoped.

In the most improbable places, we found fireplaces and each other.

Before long, you would say, coming to Munduk to see me was one of the biggest gambles you had ever taken. Next to Bosnia.

In the first week we travelled many towns, lakes, forests and hills; sat in many cars and planes together, discovered how a plane aisle was much too jauh, so soon.

The odds were long, but our odds are good. And I don't even like Bali, not one bit. I love us in it.

I’m Over Here

Love and losing from somewhere else.

If you were to look into the ISD/STD phone booth in Park Street, when it was flooding in Kolkata one year, I was there. My heartbreak was metered: sixteen paisa per second. Whatever they were saying on the phone, I can’t remember. I just know it was raining and that the men were shouting very loudly outside on the street.

I was also there, in the little hut in Meghalaya, when you told me you cheated on me with my friend. My heartbreak was still 10 rupees per minute. What do you say to that? I’m sorry, I choose to chase my dreams even if it means being away from you for four months? I hope you liked it?

When I was still young and living at home I felt the sudden need to live with you. We made plans. We saw the house. We tried to pretend we were 17 and falling in love with each other again. I have the unfortunate luck to only be able to make money or anything of value five thousand miles away. Like some old Bollywood movie on loop, it happened again. Phone booth. Rain in an Indian city. Unsure if the person I loved was fading away, or if the phone line was. Whatever it was, it always cost 600 rupees.

I am always somewhere else and never here.

From Madras to Hong Kong, I sipped whiskies furiously, and sadly.

Today I sat in a car travelling through the mountains of Java, hurtling into the unknown. I was worried about the state of the global capital markets, and about my heart.

It’s been 11 years since Park Street. I now have a world of communication gadgets and connectivity devices in my pocket. Every sim card, every operator, every spectrum. But my heart is still where it’s always been: firmly on my sleeve. This time it was (almost) free, but it felt just as broken. I have never learned how to reconcile my life on the road with my heart. Turns out nobody likes it when you are away from home 300 days in a year. But I don’t know how else to live. The stock markets tanked, as did my heart.

The mountains of West Java were a welcome change. I’m happy to never have to step into a phone booth again. One day, just to mix things up, I’d like to be here, not there. But I don’t know where here is.

The Manual of Intimacy

First, meet a girl for the first time on the lawn in front of her house. Sit very closely by each other. Say hello, I'm a poet. What do you do?

When she replies, I'm an entrepreneur. But I also run a charity. Laugh, and give her whisky, the same one that you've been nursing.

She comes and she gives you a cigarette, and it makes you feel like she's looking out for you. But really, she's just gone into her house to meet your mutual friend to ask in all seriousness, so… does she like women… at all?

That friend laughed a little. And did not have an answer.

She went back out to the lawn to give you another cigarette. And a bourbon. Woodford Reserve. So good, so smooth, all 72% corn, 18% rye and 10% malt. There was 10% of her that paused and said, this is a very good idea. There was 18% of you that stopped for a second and thought, what is going on?

There was all 72% of the man sitting across from you, all love and all happiness and all he wants to marry you, now.

She went away. She came back. She went away again. You told her: you are worried about how much you like her. Because you are going to hurt her. She did not believe you. She said she did not care because this was just going to be fun, that she also wasn't ready for anything more.

You believed her.

You met her at a bar when she got home, right after she got off a plane. She waited two hours for you when you sent him off. She was happy to see you. She held your hand, and you said: hey, you're holding my hand. You brought her to the river and showed her your favourite spot. You tried to be chaste. She tried harder. She went away again.

When you saw each other again, it was the end. It was the start of the end of the beginning. But you already told her that.

As though telling someone that you're going to break their heart, makes it any better when you do. As if telling someone all the ways in which you are broken, cuts any less when you cut them.

And then when you have her completely under your spell. Tell her that you love her. Tell her that you care for her. But you care for him more.

You're sorry, you love her so much. But. You asked her, is there a but? After she said she loved you too? She said-pensively-no. But there really was one.

Come over one day and find her worried and afraid, at home, alone. Tell her that you haven't stopped thinking about her. Tell her that you love her. Tell her that you love her so much that when you sleep with him, you can't stop thinking about her.

Then go back to him and tell her, this isn't a competition, Adrianna.

To the Mountain

Going to the mountain.

In all of my 29 years, my grandparents had been such a big part of my life that I could have never conceived of a life without them. Like the 1128-episode TV serials they watched, Ah Gong and Ah Ma just went on and on.

In the background, their voices blended in with the voices of the Chinese TV stars I loved in the 1980s. In our tiny little flat where my parents, grandparents, brother and I lived, my grandparents and I drank tea, ate porridge, watched bad TV and forged a home together on stuffy Singapore afternoons so humid that the air wore thin. My parents were young parents; their parents even younger. My grandmother became a grandmother at the age of 44. She was also my defender, provider of tasty hot drinks, and full-time worrier: the act of not eating rice, at any time (even after lunch), was grounds to bring on DEFCON 1. No possibility of relenting until I had eaten another bowl of rice. This would repeat every hour.

I was the weird, silent, brooding grandchild, who said little and spent more time in my head than on the playground.

"I love you, ah girl," she said. "You are my little mouse. So soft, so quiet. I never know what's in that head."

What was in my head was any of the following things:

"I'm going to live in a hut on a farm and make cheese, Ah Ma!" (Much further than going to the moon, for a kid from a country with nowhere to go but the sea and large buildings)

"That sounds fun. Will you make me some?" Ah Ma smiled. She smiled kindly all the time, at everyone, but especially to her grandchildren.

"When I grow up I'm going to travel the world, Ah Ma!"

"That's nice, the world has many people for you to help."

She indulged my fantasies, and believed I could and would do all the things I said I would.

Everything my brother and I did, no matter how small or mundane, made her wide-eyed in wonder.

"Wow! You took a bus home successfully without getting kidnapped! Good job!"

"Wow! You managed to cook instant noodles without causing a fire! Amazing!"

"Wow! The both of you managed to go a week without arguing! Great job, kids!"

If you have kids, I hope you believe unconditionally in everything that they dream of. We do too little of that in spite of our modern accomplishments.

There are certain places where life seems to go on in the way one's forefathers have always lived. Singapore of the '80s was not one of them. My grandparents held different paperwork and nationalities in their lifetimes. My grandfather was a Chinese subject in Sun Yat-Sen's Republic, an illegal immigrant to then-Malaya where he may or may not have been a British subject. He was then, in the 1940s, a Japanese subject in occupied Malaya. With every decade he seemed to switch papers, though not by choice. In the late 1950s, a citizen of newly formed Malaysia, before finally arriving at the citizenship he would take to the grave: a Singaporean, finally, in 1965, at the dawn of the country's birth. Even as a child, I had a vague notion of this: the distance between my parents' lives and mine, was nothing compared to the one between theirs and their parents'.

My grandparents' world was, and still is, a black hole to me. Ah Gong did not like talking about his childhood in China: he did not appear to like it much. Ah Ma did not talk about her younger days in Malaya much; she did not appear to know that modern Singapore and Malaysia are now different countries. To her, home was Clementi, in the western parts of Singapore. Then there was her old home-in Johor, in another country. She just somehow needed a passport now to see her family. Theirs was a life of the tragedies of war, the chaos of a great fire, the unending struggle with poverty. The fear of unknown elements hiding out in dark corners: Ah Gong was attacked on the head with a cleaver once. He survived and did not seem to think much of it, for he never spoke of it. Their world was foreign to me.

To all who came to see me at the home I shared with my grandparents well into my early 20s, my grandparents were a constant presence. No one understood a word of what they were saying. They spoke a specific strain of Teochew with a perfect high pitch, in tones so song-like they seemed to have never left Swatow. If you had come to my house to work on a school project or to eat a meal, you would have only known of my Ah Ma as the kindly lady with a glint of generosity in her eyes, who often chattered at you in a language you had never heard.

I would have translated, "she asks if you would like Milo or coffee? If you'd like to have porridge? What about pork ribs? Noodles?"

It was as though I shared a secret language with my grandparents, the language of Chinese elves (so high-pitched, so strange, so song-like, most of my friends would say I sound like a fairy whenever I spoke to her). In our world, the one I inhabited whenever I spoke this language of elves and fairies with her, it was a world of love, kindness and happiness. I cannot be angry or upset at someone in Teochew, because the only people who spoke it to me taught me only the words of love.

Two weeks ago, my beloved Ah Ma left us after a long battle with dementia in which she degenerated and atrophied tremendously.

When I first learned of the concept of death as a child, I interviewed my family members about their thoughts on death. To my horror, Ah Gong said he hoped, wished, desperately, that Ah Ma would die first.

"How can you be so mean?" I poked his singlet-covered beer belly, before running into my room to cry secretly. The idea of my grandmother dying, even at 5 years old, even as a passing remark, was too much for me to bear. To me, grandma and grandpa just went on and on. They woke up every morning at the same time. They walked for the same amount of time at the same place every morning. They ordered the same food after the same walk. They took the same route home. They peppered their lives of sameness with jokes and tenderness.

When I stood in front of her coffin two weeks ago to say a few words about her, I, of course, broke down. Ah Gong, who once said he hoped she died before he did, had in fact been astute and well-prepared. She slipped away, never to return, after he died a few years ago. He made sure to prepare her funeral portrait, as one of the last things he would do for her.

My grandmother had few friends, I recalled, but she had a world of fans. People came from Malaysia to tell us how she had, as a teenager, refused to let her nephews and nieces go homeless. Despite having not very much, she found them a home. My dad spoke of how, as a child with her as a mother, he was acutely aware of how poor they were. Yet she would make it a point to feed the neighbours' 11 children because their mother had eloped and left home. She had a kind word for everybody, and kinder acts for anyone who needed it.

After gathering myself, I managed to squeak out a few things about her.

I used to be ashamed of my full name, I said. My grandparents gave it to me. It's the sort of name that's so full-on Teochew, so obviously old school, that once you saw it you would immediately know where my family came from.

You're a Teochew girl, aren't you. You sound like you never left the homeland-every time you ask me for fried shallots, I wonder why a little girl like you talks in such a funny, old school way.

That made me hate my name and my accent, but I no longer do.

I did not know my grandparents' names for most of my childhood, I said. I honestly thought their names were Tan Ah Gong and Tan Ah Ma.

Many of my peers in Singapore can barely communicate with their grandparents: the Speak Mandarin campaign coupled with the English-first policy made sure to eradicate any ability to speak the Chinese dialects. I was lucky to have had a window into the world, into my past, through the both of them.

I don't even need a map to know that Swatow's cemetaries were probably on mountains or hills. The language gives it away. The act of taking the body to its final resting place, be it a crematorium or a burial site, is known as chuk sua. Going to the mountain.

So to the mountain, we went. You're supposed to follow the hearse, dressed in white and black, and you're supposed to beat your chest and cry and weep loudly all the way to the mountain. But in super urban Singapore, all that we could do was to follow her for 50 metres to the edge of the carpark, before hopping into a bus to the crematorium.

After the fire.

When Ah Ma was 26 years old, there was a Great Fire near the house. She, along with tens of thousands of people, would run from their homes in search of safety on a hot, infernal afternoon. Ah Gong came scurrying back to the house from por doi to look for them, panicking when he found nothing but ashes. He thought his young bride unprepared and ill-equipped for the dangers of the world. Yet she had demonstrated uncharacteristic resourcefulness: she had been hiding in a temple with their children for hours, picking that place as it was one of the few landmarks left standing after the fire.

After. All that was left of her was a box of bones and ash. We took turns moving her bone fragments into an urn. Parts of her bone fragments had the pigmentation of the various medicines administered to her late in life; they were frail and brittle, just as she had been.

We put her on her shelf. We stared helplessly at her marble engraving. We vacillated between the loving, silly moments with our adorable nieces, and the hopeless sadness that filled us.

My grandma lived 80 years of her life in poverty and in fear. Her hope and her love overcame all of it. All I can hope for is for all of us who have received her unconditional love to carry her with us in the rest of our lives.

That our hearts are large enough to carry the world, because she showed us how.

Two Pairs of Pants

I've been selling and hustling for much of my young life. I've learned loads from each part of it, no matter how small or insignificant it may have been at the time. I sold cable car tickets. iPod cases. DVDs. Button badges. Most things, really. In hindsight, they've come together to define what I do today. It's amusing to think of it, really.

Bookmarks

In my teenage years, I spent most of my vacation months hanging out in the Central Business District. Each day, I would sell (under the 34 deg C sun and extreme Singapore humidity) various items, ostensibly for a charitable organization that worked with destitute elderly people in Singapore.

I was 15. It seemed like a great way to spend my days{, and I made them between $10 000 and $15 000 a day, selling bookmarks to disgruntled bankers and lawyers (I was very good at it). Years later, we found out that the founder bought fast cars with the cash, which is why I now have a bullet point in my own charitable organization (we send girls to school in India)-"we travel by bus, train and economy class, and the only people who get paid are the people who work on the field".

Lessons learned: it was the first time I learned to sell the hell out of anything, and if you stand in the heat and sweat long enough (12 hours), eventually people will buy stuff from you.

Button Badges

With my brother Adrian Tan's help, I designed and made button badges. We ordered a button badge machine from eBay. We had different themes (his was punk music), I specialized in ironic and weird businessy/political/tech buttons.

People in Kansas seemed to like my buttons. A lot.

Lessons learned: there is great value in making. I wish I did more of that, and I will be trying to do more of it. Making something with your hands was the best experience ever for a kid of 15, and eBay at the time was revolutionary. It opened up a world of global commerce to me.

Etsy before Etsy

Whenever we went on family vacations, I would convince my parents to loan me a small sum ($100?) so that I could buy a bunch of 'craft' items from Bali, Bangkok etc.

I sold them on eBay for ungodly amounts of money because I would write beautiful copy about "handmade" and "artisan". In 2000. I truly believed it at the time.

I still have some of those photo frames, notebooks and paintings in my parents' house. When I discovered at the tender age of 16 that all of this stuff was mass produced, I felt I could not see them anymore.

Lessons Learned: having a product that people want is basic, but having a product people want and can easily access, is essential. eBay and PayPal opened that window, but good old copywriting was the secret sauce, and it continues to be for me in most of my businesses.

DVDs

At 17, I came to terms with the fact that I am indisputably queer. I did not panic. I did not freak out too much. I was not bullied. But I also had no idea what it meant to be a queer adult: I did not know any such people, and I did not see them on TV or in movies. It was 2002. I ran a "DVD ring" which distributed queer video content (not pornography!) to other teens who wanted to see people like us on screen. There was no Tumblr. The idea that queer people existed on screen was something that saved my life.

The movies were horrible, and I don't believe that queer movies have improved since. It was something I needed to do at the time.

Lessons learned: I cannot do the things that I don't love. I don't love queer movies, and I don't love incremental tech that aims to solve first world or Silicon Valley problems.

iPod skins and cases

In the first year of college (2004), I imported iPod skins and cases. I was loads cheaper than anything available on the market-I seemed to know what people wanted, and built the connections to make that happen.

Emboldened by my marginal success as a 19 year old, I wrote to Waterfield Bags telling them I would like to be their sole Singapore distributor. I had no capital, of course. They wrote back with a very encouraging note and walked me through the process of what I should have if I wanted to do that. I of course, could not garner the resources. But it was the first time that someone had ever spoken to me like an adult. As a young Singaporean kid at the time, most of my life experiences (outside of the home, which was a very progressive environment for me in every way) had been about the things I could never ever do because I am a kid and I am a girl and not rich. 10 years on, just a year ago, I would get on a motorbike and travel a distance to a tiny office in a Jakarta suburb, to bug somebody to give me the rights to sell rather hard to get. He would say yes, and it would become the basis of all of the work I am doing today.

Lessons learned: Don't pre-judge yourself. You are not weak, inferior, poor, or incapable because someone of where you come from or what you are. Action, like the act of reaching out and saying I will do this, does.

Macs

In 2004, I started selling Macs at one of the Apple retailers, and did so well I was featured in Cult of Mac and Scoble's blog, which brought me a certain degree of international / tech 'fame'. There are many people I know, still talk to, or have met, especially in the US and in Europe, because of these early international tech links. In many ways, every aspect of my adult life has changed because of the years I put in selling computers and iPods. That I run around doing crazy businesses, Steve Jobs 2005 Stanford commencement speech. Learning to sell the shit out of anything, standing on my feet for 8 hours a day. And I mean anything.

Through my time walking the fertile grounds of Mac stores selling thousands of dollars of hardware a day, often to the extent of forgetting to eat, I developed a loyal clientele of high net worth individuals to whom I became their personal technician. That put me through 4 years of relentless backpacking throughout and after college. I encrypted emails for mining tycoons. I backed up data (there was no 'cloud' back then!), retrieved data from corrupted hard disks, ran around with bootable flash disks with installable OSes and data retrieval utilities in my wallet. I had a FireWire cable in my pocket most of the time. I took apart hardware, put it together, and somehow never had enough screwdrivers. They paid me well for it, and they taught me about charging for what clients should think I am worth, rather than what I thought I was worth, which at the time was, not very much. I got to see every single Southeast Asian market extensively, traveling on $200 for a month (how did I do that?), learning to stretch my dollar. Being a part of the Jobesian / Apple meteoric rise and return in that period changed everything about my professional and personal trajectories.

Lessons Learned: hustle hard, and do it well; people in general will not take advantage of you. "How much will it cost for the 7 hours you just spent taking stuff apart for me and saving my data?" "Maybe $100?" (Remember, I was 19…) They would laugh and say, here you go. And hand me $1000. It taught me that when I am in a position to reward a young hustler, either financially or in terms of opportunities given, I most definitely will to pay it forward.

When I was in the middle of all of that, people constantly asked: why? What good does it do? Why are you travelling around India or Indonesia for weeks and months and living like a hobo, instead of taking multiple prestigious bank internships?

Somehow, I had the weird feeling that it would all make sense. It has only just started to (and it's not like I did shabbily in the time before). I quite simply chose a different path, not because I had so much conviction and talent, but because to me those paths were the only ones open to me.

I'm so excited to see what the next 10 years will bring. I've spent the last 6 months living in Jakarta, building Wobe and getting to learn every single day about the wonderful place that is Indonesia. What I have now, which I did not have before in my formative entrepreneurial years making buttons and selling DVDs, is a team of hugely amazing, talented, and most importantly, good people, who I have the privilege to lead. Teams are everything.

I've come to see that these insane plans of mine did not come out from a vacuum. I did not just sit in an office one day and decide, "I should get into (insert generic type of) business". They came from sitting in a 36 hour bus rides talking to people in languages I don't understand (Turkish and Arabic, for example), building and making all kinds of crazy products with all types of crazy people (I once built a website for a West African airline, but they never flew because their leader was deposed to Burkina Faso).

They came from being told several times a day that I could not have something because I am a girl, a foreigner, or just plain unlucky. A train, a bus, a business opportunity, but having to figure it out anyway because sometimes… you just have to.

One morning in 2010 I got out of a train from Aleppo, and found myself in Gaziantep, a border town between Syria and Turkey. The problem, as I soon found, was that I had no euros or Turkish lira. I did not have any money except worthless Syrian money. There was no ATM at the train station. I was, in short, screwed. Experiences like that have been far more difficult than anything hard about the hard in "it's so hard to do business in Asia".

(I managed to barter a ride to the next city.. I think I traded a Turkish kid some notes and coins 'from the Far East' so that he would buy me a $1 bus ticket!)

Experiences shape you. My formative entrepreneurship taught me about payments, exchange rates, marketing, making, selling and most importantly, customer service.

The time I had to sleep on the dust outside Trichy airport (long story), when the auto-rickshaw I was driving around South India broke down on an unlit hill. The many times on the road in which I've had to deftly worm my way out of extreme sexual harassment. All of those experiences are starting to make sense to me now.

I probably spent less on all of that over the past decade than I did on getting a degree. As a child, the stuffy classrooms in Singapore that I sat in and the theoretical problems I worked on, may have formed the foundation for many other things. I learned about hard work, and I also learned about dogged persistence there. But if you told me that all of my childhood dreams, inside those classrooms, looking out into the world and dreaming of a life on the road, doing things in the world, outside of a four-walled environment, that all of it would come true and that reality would be even better, I would not have believed you.

Thank you to all the crazy ones who believed in me enough, some of you even enough to come along on the ride with me. I pack snacks and biscuits, and two pairs of pants.

To the Young Queer Nerds

Dear (your name here),

Imagine for a second that the year is 2000.

Holding hands with your girlfriend in public is either an act of defiance or shame.

The world is years away from The L Word: nobody knows yet that it sucks, that lesbian life does not have to be "like that". (Bette Porter is bad for you; Jenny is worse.) No one has ever met a married queer couple. The idea did not exist. You're supposed to aspire to cohabitation, no kids, and two sets of power suits. But you don't.

You are never going to meet the woman of your dreams at the smoking section of the weekly queer party. Definitely not on the dance floor. They can't hear a single word you're saying, and they don't care. They don't care that you've found your major and the internship of your dreams. They won't even remember your name after they've fucked you (badly).

But it's not 2000, and no one really cares who you hold hands with anymore. Kinda. Sorta. We've made a ton of progress-there are now women married to each other! And you know them, because they write about it on Facebook! Ha!-yet for all the progress in the world, the music never improves at these parties. One day, maybe in 2040, we will have driverless cars and queer clubs which play jazz. I'm putting all my money on the driverless cars.

I just want to tell you that it's ok if you're badly dressed, somewhat awkward, and a bag of nerves. That your nerdy hair cut is OK, too. The makeup you don't have-you can always YouTube it later. Or not. Someone out there likes badly dressed nerdy girls who don't know how to put on makeup. They'll even listen to you talk about linguistics or Burmese history or app development, too. You'll meet her.

It's ok to screw up. It's ok to be messy. Nobody expects you to "grow up" any faster than you should. Your friends who are so 'sorted out'? They're all pretending.

That older woman you love is going to break your heart.

You're going to let her. Often.

That's okay, too. We learn.

Drink good whisky. Toss the vodka orange shit. If you have to drink rum and coke, make sure it's good rum. One day you'll learn that drinking is fun only when it tastes good, and you might even learn to stop just before you are no longer in control of your body, or your thoughts. Two is a good place to start taking stock. Zero if you are driving.

If the booze makes you want to call or text your ex / the love of your life (who doesn't feel the same way anymore, or ever), give your phone to your friends and tell them to never give it back to you until two hours after a sausage McMuffin.

It's okay to use an alias until you're comfortable that the girl you're talking to isn't an axe murderer. With girls, that can take anything from two minutes to never.

Don't stay over unless you want to see her again. Or unless she lives near a cool breakfast place, and it opens early.

One night stands are boring. But if you have to, and there are seasons for that kind of thing, you need to be ok with learning to ask and to answer uncomfortable but important questions. It's the right thing to do.

Avoid hyphenated relationships you're not really involved in, like the bubonic plague. They're worse than that. For example, avoid dating your ex-girlfriend's ex-girlfriend. Also avoid accidents: do not sleep with your ex-ex girlfriend's on-off girlfriend. Hyphens are trouble. There are hot, single women out there. You just have to look outside your phone book. No hyphens. No exceptions.

Eventually, you'll learn to identify the toxic ones before they even come close to you, and your heart won't be needlessly broken anymore.

Is there a type you're drawn to? Do they break your heart? Maybe it's the hapless artist whose broken spirit you want to save. You need to let her know she's not going to set your life on fire, just for the heck of it, ever again. Perhaps it's the stoic, powerful women in your life who don't appreciate your struggle for parity. It's ok-you're going to be more powerful than them someday. Without stoicism.

They're going to make you think that it's your fault. It's your fault that you're a slut. It's your fault that there's a string of broken hearts. Sometimes, it is your fault. Own up to them when you can. It might take years before you are sorry enough for everybody. But you tried. And no one cares.

Quite often, you will meet women who want you to travel halfway around the world to prove that you are really into them. They don't mean it. Don't go, unless you have other things to do there. Or unless you have a fire for her which isn't just in your loins.

If she wants to marry him, and still see you on the side, leave.

The world tells you it gets better. It does, and then it doesn't.

People-and this can be family, insurance companies, government bodies-are not going to take your love seriously. Especially if you are a woman who loves another woman. If you are feminine enough, nobody will like your 'rejection' of masculinity. If you are not, nobody will like your 'attempt' to threaten theirs, a threat which you've made just by merely existing. If you are a woman who loves a woman who was not born one, it's going to be that much harder for you. You will not be invisible for much longer.

Your family is much more resilient and loving than you imagine.

Love them back.

Be young. Be queer. Be the nerd that you are. When you get older, it's the algorithms that will get you laid.

A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a bit of both, really.

I'm not one for the mumbo-jumbo of the Myers-Briggs test, but I suppose it was striking that when I did it before my startup I rated very strongly as INFP, and yet now I'm very much on the ENTJ spectrum. It appears that having to do shit in a prompt, aggressive way does bring out very different approaches.

So, startups are hard. You already know that.

In my case, every attempt to think that through inevitably ends up being a little self-pitying.

How and why did I decide that leaving my family, and puppy, coming to a foreign place, to work on some problems involving the silos of payments, mobile, commerce and gender equity, was the best life and career decision of all?

Yet… I wouldn't have it any other way.

Yes, I know the rates of failure are high, in any startup. Not to mention one with foreign laws, language, culture, and way of life/business.

Yes, I know that there's only so much hustle can bring you. There's also the regulations and expectations of archaic industries and economies in certain countries.

But man, it's exhilarating. If shit hits the fan and nothing goes the way we intend despite the best laid plans of man (and woman), then at the least we can say that I now have very specific knowledge and connections in some fairly obscure Asian markets.

It was a brutal week.

I lost a kid in the community my foundation does a lot of work in. She was 14. She had dreams. She was vivacious. Perhaps, her undoing, in an unforgiving climate.

I lost a key team member. To the same brew of inexperience and lack of discipline and foresight. But team before product, and it's never going to be easy.

Also, some huge gains. Solved some massive business obstacles. Created some solid partnerships. Brought in many valuable individuals to build the team. Net-net, a good week, if a little brutal.

There's shit to do and a world of problems to solve. A glut of solutions we can create and design, and hopefully do so beautifully, with elegance, sensitivity and impact.

In late 2012 as I stood on a similar crossroad contemplating major life decisions, mostly relating to the geography and type of work I wanted to surround myself with, I found tremendous opportunities, but I also found my heart had already decided.

My 30s are to be spent in my backyard. In Asia. In the emerging markets of Asia. Doing as much insane and crazy shit as I can possibly throw at it. I feel honoured to even have a single shot at it.

I am.

It was the best of times, and the worst of times. Ask me again some weeks from now. Months. Years.

I think I will say that there's nothing else I would rather do, and nowhere else I would rather be, than here in the heart of Java, toiling for a dream.

All In

I turn 29 in a couple of months. T-W-E-N-T-Y-N-I-NE. This is doubly a shock because in my head I feel forever young, partly as a function of always having been the youngest person in every single circle I have run in, from friends to career to everything else really. I started blogging when I was 15 — nearly 15 years ago! — at a time when Tripod.com was a hosting provider, content management systems transmitted your passwords in plain text, and leaving a message on a ShoutBox was a valid way of engaging on the Internet.

That young life and everything that encompassed feels as faraway as the era in which I packed 30 Compact Discs to school in a metallic CD holder, and my music skipped — as I skipped — on the way to school through the deserted carpark of my housing estate at six in the morning, every morning. My peers are entrepreneurs and CEOs (being a high-flying lot), my friends are married and/or engaged, my contemporaries have published books, plural, and I show up in magazines occasionally as the Older Role Model For Younger Women. Wow, that's old.

All of that just means it's great fun. It's more fun when you're of age. At least that's how it's been for me. When it seemed dire — sometime around the final year of university, panicking, wondering: what do I do with my life? — when it seemed as though all that life had in store was some dead end office job and an indeterminate life (growing up gay in 1990s Singapore: hard), it's been hard to really envision the sort of life I wanted to carve out for myself. For the most part it was even difficult to articulate what that life would be. At almost-29, having seen a bit of the world, having that much more clarity, I have to say Fuck Yeah, It's Great. Anything is better than the black holes and the black spots that so terrify you when the alternatives aren't immediately obvious.

A hundred and seven weeks ago I left this city (KL) in a mad haste. I didn't know how to ship a puppy three hundred and seventy kilometres back to the city I was born and bred in. I didn't know how to step away from that comfortable but middling life I had built for myself over a couple of years. I didn't know how it was going to be. I'd set up a company at the tender age of twenty three, in an industry I knew nothing about. I learned more in those years than in all my years of education put together; I grew to love the hustle. That hustle was addictive, but I didn't know measure, and I didn't know the upper limits of my ambition and my ability. I got very, very ill. In a way, I had to lose it all in order to be a better person along the way.

I've now carved out a life for myself in the city I grew up in. The city I rebelled against and hated with every inch of my being (it was a much different place, then). It has been surprisingly good for me. Chalk it down to the stability of home and a rock-solid support network I'm lucky to have back here; to the incredible opportunities I get from being here; there's hardly a week which passes without the ability to reinvent myself in any of three or more amazing ways.

A decade ago I was a wimpy teenager with nothing but a half-baked sense of the general direction I wanted to move towards. The hardest part, it felt at the time, was to learn how to leapfrog the various handicaps I felt I had then: the curse of being female, gay, and opinionated. These days all of those things feel like strengths.

In the decade since, I've relentlessly pursued every single one of my goals in life and in love. It hasn't been an easy journey, but at least I can say this: I failed, I stumbled, I felt I could not recover from some of those setbacks; I bounced back, even if it took a very long time in some of them. I've managed to create a life for myself across continents which appears charmed and easy and privileged and opportunistic to some, but which I've worked really hard for.

A few months ago while having a bit of an existential crisis, I'd written in my (paper) journal: I'm ambitious and a perfectionist in my career, so why not in happiness? That's what drives me at the end of it all: the seemingly elusive happiness, defined by you and you alone. It was clear I could never be happy pushing paper behind a desk, so I ran from it. It was evident I could pretend to be happy in the sort of middling arrangement in which I had all of the trappings of comfort but none of the excitement of an inspirational love, so I had to learn to be happy on my own before I could hazard such risks again. I've spent the past hundred and seven weeks figuring stuff out, which is perhaps as self-indulgent as it comes, but I learned I just wasn't ready. You grow up a ton when you have bills and thousands of dollars in taxes to pay for your youthful mistakes.

This is what I do differently now:

1. Write clear, concise emails. I wish I knew it earlier, but learning to ask for things clearly and briefly is a life skill.
2. Talk about money without feeling weird. I don't know about you, but I used to find it difficult to talk about money. Expected compensation, ballpark estimates, money you will render for a good or a service — maybe girls aren't really brought up to be OK asking for what you think you're worth? I don't know. But ever since learning to do this, things get done faster, and more importantly expectations are met — or not — in a more efficient manner.
3. Say no. I believe it's a trait of many a person's younger life that saying no is just the most difficult thing you can do, next to talking about money, often together. A month ago I was at the cusp of a huge career development: I had three major opportunities, each better than the other. At the end of it I realized (a) you already know what the best option is, if you trust your gut (b) but that takes time and experience to learn to trust. I said no to the first two opportunities, and I'm happier for it.
4. Having to prove yourself is bullshit. There's a difference between establishing credibility and having to again and again prove your worth — and that's true in business and in love. With age I've also become more comfortable with the big idea of Who I Am and What I Stand for, and it's (related to the previous point) been easier to move towards what you really want as a result. For example, social media contests for popularity in order to Win Something — that's all bullshit. You have better ways to expend your time and energy.
5. Pay It Forward. Your mileage may vary, but I truly believe that paying it forward is one of the best things you can do. I run an NGO, organize community events for causes I Give A Shit About, and mentor some younger gay and trans kids because: why wouldn't you? It's so much more fulfilling that way. You get back in spades what you give, and not solely in the monetary sense.
6. Give A Shit, Or Don't. This part was hard to figure out. I've had some arguments and lost some friends over this. My version of it: in general, I try to be a nice person, and perhaps succeed at it. But I feel I've come to that point in my life where I'm aware of the limitations — of myself, more than anything else. And when I don't feel like it, or when someone or something has a negative impact on my happiness or that of a loved one's, not giving a shit is the only way I know how to deal with it these days. Anything else — the awkward pretense? the song and dance of adolescent and young adult social niceties? Fuck that. My only rule is if a person or organization or thing has a nett positive effect on the things I care most about — that's great. Life's way too short for people who tire you out and worse still, people who subtract from the world.
7. Sleep More. I'm late to the party, but I'm a new convert to the Sleep Is Really Important school of thought. It's related to aging, but damn, it's magic. Not sleeping, however, is toxic. No matter for what ends.
8. Do What You Love. I'm not a fan of this pithy statement. It's almost too slick. But there's some truth to it. What I prefer, though, is a combination of that with Change What You Don't. I love a lot of things — aviation, gin, India, travel, and so much more — but I'm not about to run out and eke out a living out of every single one of them. What helps me keep balance (and sanity) is the other part. What bothers me so much that I cannot sit idly by? For now, it's girls' education in India. Xenophobia in Singapore. In a couple of years it might be religious fundamentalism in Singapore. Or something else which will surprise me.
9. Learn Something New. It wasn't always so, but of late I've had a strict personal rule. That I should learn something I don't know anything about, whenever it feels like I'm stagnating. Last year, it was diving. And swimming. This month, it's classical guitar and gardening.
10. Know Thyself. Then Adjust Accordingly. As I previously mentioned, I set up my own company at age twenty three knowing fuck-all about tech and business. I now know how important it is to have strict accounting and paper-filing standards. When I was ill in KL it felt like the sort of health-related traffic red light which made me stop to take stock of my life, health and my abilities. I have always known I'm not temperamentally suited to conventional employment, yet I did not feel ready enough — financially or mentally, since I was for a long time at that point in my life where I could not even remember passwords or how to populate spreadsheets, so I could not.

Lastly, this: Jump On The Train When It Pulls Into The Station. In my industry there are various ways to convey this. One of it is, when the rocketship arrives, get on and don't ask which seat you're on. The other one is, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water? In that respect, I've just had my metaphorical train pull up into the station. So I'm going all in.

In a month and a bit, I get to pick up where I left off and call this past 107 weeks officially over. It wasn't possible without a lot of hustling, but here I finally am. I'm starting a new company which combines the two things I Give A Shit most about, tech and female empowerment in Asia. I have a great team, enlightened investors, and nothing to prove this time but to see how far technology can improve lives (tech solutionism? perhaps.) in that part of the world I care the most about. We get started — first in Jakarta, then in Yangon, which also brings me back to how everything comes full circles and all the dots connect if you let it, that I spent the better part of my youth aimlessly wandering around these parts finding things to do. When things happen, you grab them by the bloody balls.

None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the incredible people in my life, especially my family. They keep me grounded, in all of the best ways. My dad, because he's never once flinched at being the rock of my life; my circle of best friends, because they never let me get too arrogant or too hurt, all at once. Mostly, because I have a home to come back to, in the literal and the figurative sense.

I'm excited to embark on the next phase of my life with the sum of every single goddamn part, and so much more.

What I Learned

Two years ago I found out I have an autoimmune disease. I will always have it. It changed everything about my life from what I do for money to where I live. It prompted a reinvention of myself which was at turns painful, but ultimately necessary. This is what I learned.

1. Never forego sleep. "You'll sleep more over the weekend" is bullshit. Not sleeping is bullshit. There is no amount of money in the world anymore that can make me sleep less, even if I grumble about it: I'm convinced sleep is the single most important thing I will never, ever give up again.

2. Make your own destiny. The single best thing I have done in my 20s was to grab every damn opportunity that came my way. And there were plenty. Even if people can't see the method in the madness, every little thing adds up. I truly believe that.

3. Be nice to your family. At least for me, they've been the foundation upon which I've been able to build a life. Through illness and in health.

4. Home is home. There are many reasons to not want to live in Singapore, but returning here to build my adult life here in my late 20s was the best decision. There are a ton of opportunities and we are in the centre of exciting things, at least for what I do in tech and business.

5. Surround yourself with smart people who care about people. I've been lucky to have some of the smartest people in the world in my direct orbit. I've learned an immeasurable amount from them. It's the only way to be better. If they're douchebags, nothing you learn can ever be of use.

6. If you need anything, just ask. There's a longish essay in this that I need to write sometime. If you don't know anything, ask as well. Only good things can ever come out of asking.

7. Don't date people who want to hold you back. Or down. Ever.

8. Do date someone who inspires you to get up every morning and change the world. Who won't laugh when you say that. Who will ask you what part of the world you would like to change today, and how she can help.

9. Milestones are a sham. You're expected to check certain boxes by a certain time: degree, first job, first apartment, blah blah. It's not that they're not important, but following someone else's timetable for your life is the biggest lie we've all been told.

10. Corporate conferences are never worth any amount of money you are asked to pay. Ever. If there is a giant billboard and a roomful of suits, go to the bar and do some real work instead.

Don't Lugi Be Happy

In peninsular Southeast Asia there is a word of Malay origin, bastardized by Chinese pronunciation that perhaps best describes the prevalent mindset of the middle class in everything from career to politics: lugi.

More than the losing of face and the losing of status, our collective great fear is the fear of losing out. What of? Anything and everything. A recent history of imperialism, colonialism, authoritarianism and other forms of oppression have perhaps conditioned our brains into a state of perpetual loss. And need for perpetual validation.

Our toddlers go for a dozen classes, academic and non-academic, before they even learn to independently put on their pants. Other people's kids may win, you see.

It is not enough to get a perfect score at the "O" Levels, scoring a total of 6 points (the fewer the better, 6 being the lowest); to qualify for the top three schools one must have enough point deductions from higher second language, sports and activities, and alumni affiliation, so you're really aiming for 0 points.

To what end, paper pushers and PowerPoint warriors?

The most successful people I know who have emerged from this Matrix ask a different set of questions.

They do not ask, "what can I lose by doing this?"

They ask, "what can I gain?" Then proceed to minimize the risks through calculated steps and methodologies.

They do not ask, "how can this help me be seen to be more successful by my peers?"

They ask, "how does this help me learn, build, make a life I want for myself, help others, and can it also afford the life that I want such that my peers can see economic success attained through healthy, self-deterministic ways?"

They do not understand the politics of lugi and perhaps it is because some of us do not understand fear; every challenge is a learning curve to be conquered.

Of course this is a privilege of a certain socio-economic class, perhaps an indulgence, but for anyone of an aspirational mindset the fear of losing out is the biggest death knell you can sound. It's not a competition, but even if it was you'd better be competing because you love it, not because you're trapped in a race whose rules you don't understand and whose finish line offers an indeterminate prize you'll figure out later. Life's too short to be afraid.

Rebuilding

1. Almost exactly two years ago I was, too, on a flight to India.
   
   Only then I did not know exactly how drastic a turn my life would take on when I returned.

2. More and more of my friends are getting diagnosed with diseases similar to mine. Autoimmune diseases are the new black.
   
   Across all of these experiences the one we've all had has been the extreme upheaval in all of our emotional lives.

3. Sometimes I wonder if the person who made those decisions at the time was me, or the severely impaired bodily part that's wreaked havoc in my head and my heart.
   
   Even if the conclusions are the same in the end, I would still like to know that I had some control. But I did not.

4. There is nothing I hate more than feeling like my self-determinism, even if it doesn't really exist, has been impinged upon.
   
   Even if the other person making decisions for me was just a temporarily damaged version of myself.

5. I've spent almost two years rebuilding my life.
   
   I've subjected it to some pretty extreme versions of what it could have been and can be, and now I've chosen the version I like best.
   
   I like this one.

6. This one:
   
   This one is happy and confident, pushing 30.
   
   This one is writing more, and better.
   
   This one has had a handful of career highlights and is working harder to create the sorts of situations and opportunities that will define the next decade; it's within grasp.
   
   This one has an incredible support system in Singapore, Malaysia, India and all around the world and feels like the luckiest person in the world to experience such love.
   
   This one has a loving family. A beautiful dog. A lovely house in a magical part of the city that she loves more and more. A slew of projects taking shape.
   
   This one is learning to finish what she's started.

7. I've struggled to articulate what I feel whenever I return to the city I once lived in.
   
   It is a living museum of my loves and losses.
   
   It is a diptych where one side is the city that I once knew and the other is the one I no longer do.
   
   Time has stopped for me in that city. But I am learning to love it again after.

8. The city that is a living museum of love and loss merely preserves them so I can learn to love again.
   
   The streets I walked in in them will never be the same.
   
   Just as it should be possible to hold two opposing positions at once so as to form a better informed opinion, so too should it be possible to hold multiple feelings simultaneously so that we can love better.
   
   For now I pick: terrifying, amazing.
   
   Life's too short for compromises. I'm too fond of jumping off boats then learning to swim, anyway.

Why I'm Hosting Culture Kitchen

This is a project which has been on my mind for some time now. We've been planning it for a while. A part of this is a response to a worrying trend of anti-foreigner sentiment (c.f. the responses to a drive to raise funds for victims of last year's Downtown Line accident: here and here).

The other part — which I believe to be more important — is the need for us as a nation and as a society to come around to the idea that we are not alone in this. Immigration is a touchy issue everywhere. How we choose to deal with this now will be something which has repercussions in the future. Evidently there are many schools of thought on this.

Personally, I believe the day people stop wanting to come here to live or work will be the day we should worry. That would only happen when we become verifiably a land with no opportunities whatsoever, which cannot afford our people, and our guests and newcomers, a better life.

When I was in university, my closest friends were in the Indian/ Nepali/ Pakistani (i.e. desi) contingent. Homesick, they sought out food which reminded them of home. Usman Restaurant at 238 Serangoon Road, near Mustafa/Desker Road, was one such place. It opened late, and most nights we would walk there from school or from the SMU hostel to tuck into comforting, always hot naan, roti, dal fry, haleem and other delicious Pakistani/North Indian dishes.

Anil, my university buddy from Kathmandu, and I were big fans: pretty soon, we got to that point of patronage where we had our own tab, and the workers and owner of the restaurant were on our speed dial and Facebook. We made friends.

When I went abroad for about five years, every time I returned I had to come back here. I started bringing other people there: my parents, other family members, family friends. One incident which stood out for me was in how I had brought a younger friend from China to Usman. She had barely eaten Indian food in her life, and now she was in Singapore, about to start at another local university. I saw her go from trepidation (from not knowing anything about the food nor what to order), to familiarity. It turned out that while I was away, she would return religiously with other friends from China, and also from Singapore, and she would order the food that I had ordered for her because she loved it. Eventually she began to have friends from India, too, and this was something that she now had in common with them: she really loved the cheese naan and the chicken kadai there.

Something struck me, and has stayed there ever since. When I read about Conflict Kitchen, something clicked. I realized we could synthesize — and borrow — some of the food and art as dialogue aspects, and localize it for our own context.

There were plenty of challenges. What came up often was: how do you know you're not already preaching to the choir? The bleeding heart liberal wing, the English-speaking, the people like us, already believe in migrant rights and all of those things. What good would it do to tell these people again about diversity and inclusivity, when they already believe in them too?

The second challenge was place. We wanted to do it in a public place, and Little India was top on my list. But this is Singapore, and there are a thousand permits… so that was off the table.

Eventually we came up with a first Culture Kitchen which is, I think, simple in its objectives and easy to understand. The main premise is, quite simply, come have dinner with our migrant workers. We sold out tickets in two and a half days. We went to Little India last Sunday, and distributed free dinner invitations. (Singaporeans/expats/residents pay $5.)

Dinner invitations for migrant workers.

The response was enthusiastic, and we were fully subscribed. I am delighted to announce that we have an pretty balanced mix of Singaporeans/expats/residents and migrant workers.

What's the objective?

I'm doing this because I'd like to help facilitate more of those moments. Moments like when a Singaporean-Chinese and a Nepali student like myself and Anil, are able to make great, lasting friendships with people from various parts of Pakistan who have chosen to make this place their home, and with each other. Moments like when the mainland Chinese friend is able to glean a closer understanding of a completely foreign culture, only by way of her time here in Singapore. All of us have just this in common: we live here. Some of us, like me, were born and brought up here. Others come for a short while for study or work. Others will do that and choose to make this place home, when the time comes. I don't think we need to split any hairs over who is a ‘true blue Singaporean' and who isn't: I truly believe that.

Bangladeshi workers in Little India signing up to Culture Kitchen.

I may be idealistic in that respect. Some of the undercurrents of Singapore politics disappoints me greatly. I believe that we can be welcoming of foreigners, and I also believe that we should be able to have mature political dialogue over our immigration policies. It doesn't have to be a zero sum game. A few days ago I posted that I disliked the term, "Singapore for Singaporeans". I think that if you were to replace either term with any other race, nationality, religion — it would be unacceptable. It is, to me, fascist, loaded, designed to exclude. This is not the Singapore I want. Immediately I received a torrent of online feedback, wanting to know if I would be happier with being a second class citizen in my own country. Again, this is not a zero sum game.

What would be detrimental is if we were to continue tolerating the racist and xenophobic sentiments and never call them out for fear of being termed a traitor (or an SPG, as I have been called many times in this context). What is already detrimental is agitations of the vocal minority which wants to see no foreigners here at all, or only the ‘right kinds' of foreigners. What is already detrimental is the unfortunate lack of gumption in the political establishment, which seems too bothered by the vocal minority, in dealing with the push back not by doubling down on better policy, but by apparently taking an iron-fisted approach. Closing the doors every time someone stages a protest is not the way forward.

What is the way forward? I don't have a specific answer.

I can, however, build communities and movements. This is one of the things I know I can do well, and I want to lend my technological and organisational skills to building a movement which will stand up for a Singapore which includes. The Singapore we want to see. While I will continue to call out the xenophobes every time they emerge from the hills, I will also spend twice as much time on helping to create a counter movement which is positive in nature. I don't have an ROI, I don't have an end goal, I just want to bring people together.

The first Culture Kitchen will feature biryani. You will realize from the name itself that the event is titled Biryani/Beriani, for good reason. One dish, many stories, many geographical and cultural interpretations. But still a tasty dish which everybody can get behind. There will be dum biryani from Pakistan, and there will be Malay-style chicken briyani. All of it is halal. There will be peas pulao, for the vegetarians among us. I'm not sure what can happen over biryani, but I think if I don't try, I'll never know.

So let's rock up on Sunday, keep calm and eat a ton of biryani, and make new friends. Thanks for the overwhelming support.

74 Weeks Later

1. Once or twice in your life, something, or someone, gets under your skin and stays there. Most of the time it's because you have let them. It does not need to be tragic; it can even be, at times, up-lifting. All of the time it changes your life in some big, unalterable way. Then you learn to deal.
   
   Seventy four weeks ago (I only know this because Instagram tells me so) I made a decision about how I wanted to live the next twenty years of my life, and I'm learning everyday that breaking up costs more, the older you get.
   
   ecause at 22, you don't really know what kind of life you want for yourself. The best you can do is learn from what you run away from.

2. Running away used to be my only currency for dealing. These days I over-compensate. Twelve months ago I was in Helsinki going on San Francisco, running away from life and lost love.
   
   I met a girl at a bar after a BDSM street party, and she robbed me.
   
   Only in San Francisco.

3. I was in court today.
   
   Say what you will about the system and its shortcomings, but nowhere else in the world do you get an efficient, fast-moving court system which settles commercial matters: after office hours. So the GDP won't take a hit, I suppose.
   
   74 weeks ago, in running away I also ran away from the filing of company papers.
   
   So I now owe the Singapore government $$$.

4. Some older, wiser people have this to say:

• fuck it
• date widely
• have as much fun as you can
• fuck everything, really.

I'm coming around to the point of view that they are right.

5. Life is funny and always, always takes me on these amazing, unexpected journeys.

Over and Over

1. Some days ago, a boy I used to date as a wee teenager (yes, a boy!) reached out to me on Facebook. It's funny where we are now: he's now a hotshot international banker, I'm now an international vagrant (I don't really know how else to describe myself), instead of the awkward, school-uniformed boy and girl we once were. I found this episode especially funny because (1) I used to date boys! Which amuses me (2) exactly 14 years have passed since we used to 'go out'; we were 14 when we started going out. These days I am more acutely aware of how much older I am getting, and the fact that Class 95 now plays the songs I grew up with when they play "the classics" doesn't make it any better. In a couple of days we'll probably meet for steak and wine with some mutual friends. He's found some photos of us, circa 1999, and thinks it will be funny to laugh at our younger, hotter selves.
   It will.

2. Everyone's getting married. Well, not everyone, but lots of people are. In a couple of weeks my best friend D will walk down the aisle with a really lovely boy, and I will try not to burst out of the tiny green dress I am supposed to wear. The one I still haven't bought. Everything changes, but nothing does — she's still more mature, more put together, more likely to worry about her friend who has been all over the place since we met as adolescents. I've read a lot about what 'growing up' is supposed to mean — the only consistent point everyone's made is, the older you get the less of a flying fuck you give, and you just have your key group of friends who stick by you no matter what.
   At the time of writing, D's just texted to slightly threaten emphasize the urgent need for me to do something about my hair so that it isn't in my face in all of her wedding photos, which I actually think was a scenario we must have discussed ten years ago. "YOUR HAIR AH." My hair.
   My hair does get in the way.

3. I just downloaded one of those time machine apps which scour your social media networks to show you what you were up to a year, two years, three years ago. It tells me I was staring at a giant fake swan in Hungary, with these Hungarian and Czech developers. We were building something in a house by a lake. We may have gotten a slight case of cabin fever. We went swimming, paddling, and we found a giant swan which was also a boat. We christened her Gloria.
   

The exact circumstances which got me to this very moment are meandering, long-winded ones. It began in south India, in an autorickshaw, and then to Kuala Lumpur, Bombay, and then to hospitals in Singapore, then to northern Europe, then to KL, Singapore, and then finally to Zamárdi and to this swan we called Gloria.
They were fun times. They taught me that never again should I allow myself to be photographed in a half-wet t-shirt, anywhere in the world.

4. I am acutely aware of just how much change there's been in my life in the past 70+ weeks. I've switched entire cities and countries. I haven't been able to keep myself grounded, in the physical and mental and personal and professional sense. Beyond the appearances of someone who's 'got it figured out', I'm really grappling with the basic questions I never did have to answer before. Where do I want to live? What do I want to achieve? How should I get there?
   For the most part, I am 'home' now. The home that I left was the city I was born and brought up in; the home that I came home to late last year, is the one I prefer. It is also the city I now pay rent in. Last week I went up onstage at FORK4 and gave a little talk about my side projects. I met all these incredible people doing great projects, like Dream Syntax, State of Buildings, Another Beautiful Story, and more. A few days later, I went to Pizza X II, the second instalment of a back alley artisan party, with great food and drinks (Spit roast! Karelian pastries! Artisan rum and new growth wines!) and some of the best people in this island.
   Then there's stuff like this, and this. It matters a great deal to me to be amongst a people that want to do things. Make something better. It keeps me going.
   At times I wonder if I made a mistake when I made the call to stay, but most of the time I am surer than ever that I made the right decision to come home. Because I just haven't been home for a while and I needed to be.

5. I'm writing. I'm dating. One of those is coming along better than the other. At least writing is free. When it comes to dating, and the occasionally terrible, mostly funny in hindsight moments I've had in that field, I am reminded of how one of the smartest people who ever lived once defined insanity to be doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Without going into too much detail: I am done with that.
   I am writing a whole lot more, trying to follow some kind of writerly routine. It is working.
   When I opened Reminders.app, an app I never use, I found the one Reminder I had on it: remember to tell doc about my memory loss problem. I never remembered to. Something about it captured how weird and heartbreaking that entire period of my life was. The fear of not knowing what was happening to my body or to my mind. The inability to control anything about where my life was going. The heartbreak of losing everything I had. Everything at once. The seeming insanity of having chosen to lose those things of my own accord, but nothing really was.
   Life got better, but it will never be the same again. I don't want it to, but I don't want to lose it all again, again. I don't think I will. That would be insane.

The One About Having It All

Also available on Medium.

If you were to meet me on the streets of Singapore, you probably would not peg me for ‘gay’. Apparently, ‘gay woman’ or ‘lesbian’ has to be one or several of the following: short-haired, oddball, butch-like; a flaming dyke. You would expect me to show up in a flannel shirt and in Birkenstock sandals to business meetings. If I am aggressive in them, that’s because I’m an ‘angry lesbian’ who probably doesn’t get enough, and if I’m not, then it’s just such a terrible ‘waste’.

I am not angry. Not nearly enough. My hair reaches my shoulders, and a little more. I am as much of a dyke as you’ll ever meet, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. I may not be a princess — I don’t even know how to paint my nails — but I ‘pass’ for straight. Not because I try or want to, not because I have anything to hide, but because I don’t know how else to style my hair, and this is the only way I’ve ever known to look.

You see, I am a 27 year old lesbian who has always been amused by how much that means to other people, instead of to myself. Classmates and teachers wanted to know, and said so in hushed whispers: “they must be dating.” (I would never assume two large people were dating just because they were both large and walking next to each other, so I do not understand this popular train of thought.)

Men with inquiring minds want to know, always: have I tried a man? If not, perhaps they could help me make an informed decision? Even the Social Development Unit has stopped sending me letters and brochures urging the benefits of marriage and procreation. I am, as you may say, not in a ‘phase’. (I did have a ‘straight phase’ though, but that fad did not last.) In eight years, I may be able to purchase a HDB flat of my own.

In about ten years of gay-ness, I’ve had a two serious relationships, the last which came as close to ‘settling down’ and ‘divorce’ as I may ever get. I have no trouble finding interesting lesbian and bisexual women to go out with in this city, or anywhere else I may be; in Singapore, I have rarely — perhaps never — experienced forthright discrimination in the physical way. But more on that later.

I am out to everybody, and I’d be surprised if anybody really cared (except for the religious). It has never stood in the way of career, money, social standing, power; it is irrelevant to most other parts of my life, but it informs my decisions. I no longer have any religious or conservative friends, for example; I don’t need them in my life. We would fundamentally disagree on everything anyway, from politics to Palestine to Republicans and Democrats and reproductive rights, and my gayness would have nothing to do with their bigotry. My sexual identity is as irrelevant to me as my race (Chinese) and nationality (Singaporean), or the fact that I have a head of rapidly graying hair (hereditary). All of those things are the parts which make up the sum of who I am, but on their own are insignificant — to me.

But I also know my Singaporean lesbian existence is not representative: I am a 27 year old lesbian with opportunities which have exceeded many of my peers’, straight or gay or otherwise. I have the luxury of travelling most of the time on business and leisure. I have the privilege of living on my own in this city — it’s difficult to lead an active dating life while living at home with your parents, like unmarried Singaporeans like us are supposed to do. I have a great day job, an active social life, no kids, no debt; I don’t even have to answer the regular Chinese New Year questions anymore. I have never worked in a place, or with people who cared about the fact that I am an out gay woman. In short, I can do pretty much whatever the hell I want.

Whether or not I can have it all is quite a different thing.

Some people have the rather odd idea that all gay people — men and women — are promiscuous, that we shag like rabbits, that we want nothing more than to get into each other’s pants, and anyone will do.

The lesbian cliché which comes a lot closer to the truth goes something like this: we meet in bookstores / poetry readings / book clubs. On our second date, we move in; we proceed to have a monogamous relationship for the rest of our lives, sometimes resulting in offspring, all the time resulting in cats (and dogs).

The reason why there isn’t, and will never be a lesbian Grindr is you’d have to change all the fields to ‘Looking for: long walks on the beach, someone to adopt a cat with. Available tonight in Pasir Ris — I have a toothbrush, let’s talk about our feelings.’

Singapore is a great city for young lesbians like me. There is a large dating scene, at least three lesbian parties a week, there is even the space to live a ‘normal’ life together, perhaps for a while; perhaps after a dramatic reduction of expectations. Because this is where it stops. Once you’re done with the partying, where do you go here? The only life that is known to me to be possible is a life of co-habitation with two dogs and a cat and perhaps a non-legally binding commitment ceremony with your best friends. If you’re really lucky, your parents might come too.

For some, that’s more than enough. The journey of finding someone special is difficult enough, not just for gay people, but for everybody with a pulse.

For others — that never will be enough. We have lost so many of our own, among them our brightest and best, to other cities and countries, and we’ll probably never get them back. When the time came for them to settle down, the idea that the place we call home wants us for nothing more than our pink dollars, perhaps even for our contribution to the fertility rate (with limits), but will not recognize our love, is more than they can bear.

So what I can have, and continue to have, is my young professional’s yuppie lifestyle with dates in amazing restaurants and bars; I can go to these parties, sometimes meet interesting women; I can continue to function as an economically active member of this society, pay my taxes on time and give money to my parents; I can go to Chinese New Year dinners without having to answer to anyone about my marriage plans (they don’t want to know).

I can certainly walk from Raffles Place MRT to Tanjong Pagar without anybody stopping to make a value judgment that I must be lesbian, and therefore something else as well.

What I cannot do, is I cannot walk the same distance with a beautiful woman on my arm, without someone else wanting to know about this terrible waste of a woman, for a woman to be with a woman, and I cannot know for certain that if I were to meet with an accident on this same walk, the beautiful woman who may be my life partner will have any more of a say in my medical and legal future, than any stranger who helps me at the scene or at a hospital.

What I can’t have, therefore, is immaterial. It’s not about the HDB flats I can or cannot buy. It’s that as a lesbian woman in this society, I have to automatically assume that all of the following are bonuses, not expectations: having my love recognized for the purposes of property, tax and inheritance; attending a partner’s family functions without unnecessary outcry and suspicion; knowing that if I were to be in a medical emergency, my life partner would be legally allowed to make decisions on my behalf. In other words, to even hope for my future life partner to be perceived as anything other than a complete stranger, is going to have to be taken on other people’s good faith. As outsiders, that’s all we have to go on: the goodwill of other people. The readiness of other people to stop thinking of us as criminals, sexual deviants and perverts. If I hold hands with a woman I love, I am rubbing it in conservative Singapore’s face and being too declarative about my sexual orientation; if I walk side by side with one, the man who catcalls and makes lewd comments at us bordering on sexual harassment, is just, after all, being a man and entitled to his opinions about my body and hers.

For someone who generally feels like there is nothing in the world I cannot do, all I can do is to keep on doing what I do best — live my life as best as I know how, be kind to old people and animals, donate to charity sometimes, avoid premature death — and dream about the day I hope to see in my lifetime: when our lovers will be as our equals, and our love as deserving.

Love, Singapore

I wrote a small piece for Elle Singapore (Sept 2013) about what it's like to be lesbian in Singapore. Available on the newsstands now, page 147.

Mention to someone in passing that you're lesbian and one or all of the following are bound to happen: intrigue ("tell me more"), surprise ("You don't look it!"), curiosity ("how exactly does it work?"); very often too, the burning question — how do I meet women who are, and they always fumble here, "similarly inclined"?

I always want to say — the same way you meet your boy- and girlfriends, husbands and wives. "We" meet in school, at work, at business events, we sometimes also experiment with online dating (like everyone else), or meet through friends and relations. We meet when we play sports. We meet at religious institutions, support groups, at school camps, we meet at dinner parties or we are introduced by well-meaning friends. Other times, coincidence intervenes: you see each other for the first time, somewhere, and you just know.

All of the above answers are true, and this causes great frustration to those who were hoping to hear about lesbian dating rituals from an alternate universe, far removed from their own. They also can't seem to fathom that you can, quite simply, "just know" (or make a very educated guess). The only secret here is there are many of us.

For gay women, the stereotype of promiscuity and endless partying is as far from lesbian dating realities as it gets.

Sure, I go to the lesbian parties once in a while (there are at least two per week), mostly just for a night out without needing to come up against potential male harassment. When I tell people about lesbian parties they also seem to expect hot women having orgies in the door way. Like everyone else's parties, some parties are fun, others are not. Some people are hot, others are not. There are no orgies. There are just people dancing with each other, chatting up each other, people spectacularly failing at all of the above.

Women seeking out the great loves of their lives across the dance-floor. Never quite finding it. Not too different from any party, really.

What really happens is this: lesbians are the first to want to nest, and be with each other forever and ever. That's why you almost never meet eligible lesbians at a lesbian party — before you can even put on your party clothes, they've already found partners and are at home with their girlfriends, throwing dinner parties, decorating their dog's socks, watching Grey's Anatomy together for the third time and still weeping hopelessly.

Being a single twenty-something of any orientation is hard enough —everyone's getting married, the good ones have been taken, what the hell are you going to do?

Being a single lesbian in your mid-20s in Singapore adds another layer of complexity. Do you move out? Tell your family before or after you've "found someone"? Where will you live, if not in Holland Village or Tiong Bahru, now that rent is so crazy? When will I meet someone who loves Battlestar Galactica? Or get to date someone in this country who hasn't already dated someone else I know (proximity, not promiscuity)?

So many questions, too little time. I am a busy world-travelling young professional who spends most of my time up in the air, and finding someone has been quite low on my list of things to do (other things on it: attain world domination or cult leader status. Buy dog food). So you can imagine how well my dating life is going.

Just the other day I met the first woman to pique my interest in a long time, the traditional way — through a friend. It wasn't expected, it just happened, and like every other kind of date that exists in the universe, straight, gay or otherwise — I don't know yet, I don't want to rush it, I have all these burning questions, I don't know if she likes me, I don't know anything at all.

But if I am really a lesbian cliché after all, by the time you read this she would have moved in, adopted my dog, and I would have faded away from public memory, never to be seen again on Thursdays or Saturdays, for something resembling a century and a half.

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 Weekend Getaway

As many of you will know by now, I have spent a substantial part of the past decade travelling through India. I still feel like I'm barely done with scratching the surface. There's just so much to see in that vast, amazing country that I call my second home.

For some time now I've wanted to go to Coorg.

Coorg, also known as Kodagu, is a hill area in the state of Karnataka, in the Western Ghats. Its people are known as Kodavas (not Coorgis!) and all I knew about the place was that it had coffee, beautiful people, and pork curry. All that was sufficient to inspire me to plan a trip there.

From Chennai, I took a quick overnight train to Mysore Junction (book early, book ahead — this route is headed towards Bangalore, and therefore sells out early), but you can also take a bus. At Mysore Junction, I arranged for a car to pick me up for breakfast and to my resort of choice.

An acquaintance from Mysore highly recommended Travelparkz, and he was right: they were a very reliable car and driver service, and it was good value. I hired them for a pickup from Mysore Junction railway station to the resort in Coorg that I was headed to; and for a drop-off from the resort to Bangalore city a couple of days later. I highly recommend these guys, though it's best to reach them via phone. They speak English.

I had heard about The Tamara from friends in Bangalore, so I decided I would give it a shot. It's a very new place and it gets most things right. My only complaint is it didn't have as much pork as I would have liked.

You can wander about the grounds of The Tamara on your own, or sign up for one of their daily walks with their on-site naturalist. I did none of the above as I was too busy resting after a long week at work in India!

Highly recommended. I will be returning to Coorg shortly, although I may want to check out Victory Home next, since I've just met these guys in Bangalore.

Damn I love this country.

The path to my cottage

Happy feet

All rights reserved, The Tamara Coorg

It Was All New

I have a tattoo on my lower back. It was given to me by the grandson of a tribal village chief. I grimaced for hours on the floor as he used the primitive tools and ingredients that had tattooed his Iban people for centuries, on me, a girl from a big city.

I'd always wanted a tattoo, but didn't know what; this one crept up on me. Like the girl I was there with (we had a crazy idea: we would visit and live with an Iban community in a longhouse and celebrate Hari Gawai with them), I wasn't expecting any of this. The girl, the tattoo, or that I would have such a story to tell many years after the fact. I chose a bunch of tribal motifs from an album and told him to make it up. I got lucky: I like my tattoo very much, even if it is what some people would call a tramp stamp. I'm proud of it. There's a story to tell each time anyone asks about it.

The girl is no more in my life but the tattoo remains, defiantly representing all of the new beginnings I will embrace in life. Tomorrow, I start a new life and more and more I feel as though the year of grieving and floating, which so profoundly altered my path and direction in life as well as my livelihood and future plans, is finally about to draw to a conclusive close.

I am finally ready for another tattoo. This time, I know exactly where it should be, what it should say and what it should look like. I would not have known this without the pain of my first tattoo. It will be a beautiful Sanskrit verse from the Bhagavad Gita and I intend to have it inscribed on my upper left shoulder. This time, I will harbour no plans or illusions about the permanence of anything other than that of the Sanskrit verse on my shoulder; this time, I will learn to love without needing to know the world.

Five of Each

Five Places I Visited and Loved in the Past 12 Months

1. Helsinki
2. Copenhagen
3. San Francisco
4. New York City
5. Stockholm

Five Things I Learned in the Past 3 Months

1. Diving
2. Swimming
3. Git
4. Ruby
5. Still looking for the fifth big thing. For now it looks like it's going to be Fightshape

Note: I could swim, but badly. I took up Shaw Method swim lessons to dramatically improve my technique and confidence.

Five Things I Bought Recently

1. A 27" Korean IPS monitor (A Yamakasi Catleap Multi)
2. Steelcase Leap
3. A Sony NEX-5 with 16mm lens
4. Xbox 360 with Kinect and many amazing games (Assassin's Creed! Borderlands 2! Dishonored! Wow)
5. Das Keyboard

Five Challenges I Will Soon Tackle

1. Advanced diving course with many specialties
2. A job
3. A hopeful transformation into a real programmer
4. A massive overhaul/redesign/ renovation of my room in Singapore. It needs to look less like a place that 12 year old me once lived in.
5. Another tattoo

And at some point, a haircut, too. And a piece of fiction.

Oh shit.

Left & Leaving

in hindsight

Some songs I cannot hear again. Some songs make me think of you. Not of you in the general sense one does of missing one another. Not even in the way one thinks of losing a loved one or saying goodbye.

Worse? Far worse? The songs of dread. The songs of the silence between us gnawing ever more loudly until we could no longer ignore it. The songs that dig deep into your soul and gives it a little twist with every word and chord.

Did you not hear it die? It fell with a little thud.

In your car. In the rain. In the house. In the routine. Your impatience. Leaping out at me from behind the telephone.

Everybody is a different person with different people. It would be a lie to say otherwise.

With you I was young and hot-headed. A boat without a plan. I was perfectly happy to let you captain it. But we never knew where or how to dock.

Sweet Disposition.

I was a person without a home in those lost days. A wanderer without a country. From bus to plane to taxi to your car. To a home which was never ours. And an us I'm growing increasingly unclear of. Is this a dream? Or is this reality?

Seven Wells.

1825 days. Half of them spent on planes. Half of them ten thousand miles apart. If not literally, then as some impenetrable chasm I never learned to cross.

I hate those songs.

You wanted to know how it came so easily to me. How I moved on. I did not. Did you know of all those nights I drank myself to imbecilic stupor to write poetry in languages I don't speak? It looks like I walked away from our life with scarcely a moment's thought. But it was a burden I could not bear.

The thought of loving forever a woman who did not want to marry me. The idea that I had to banish all hope for a family. That, when I left you, tethering on the edge of madness, you loved me tremendously but not enough, seemed to be what you were saying. My hopes. My dreams. It was all you. It was madness that made me circumnavigate the globe to win your heart. And it was madness that made me travel the world to lose it. We never wanted to be the people who stayed together from not having a good reason to leave. Better now than at 35, or something like it. In the end I could not bear the thought of not being enough.

I can never go back to that city and not feel quite desperately breathless again. Not for a long time at least. Waiters who want to know why I've disappeared. Friends who I haven't and won't see. That city, at the start, was all you and all us and all our secret nooks and our very own places and special people and our house and our dog. That city then grew into a nightmare that was all broken dreams as they fell apart and things that could never be and places I could not find and things I could never be. I tried to hide it and blamed your taxi drivers and horrible traffic and the pollution and the inbred circles and the wanky artists but in the end it was all us, falling to pieces and me doing the only thing I knew how to which was run very far away from responsibilities and rent because like I said I was a different person then.

The good thing about falling to pieces and putting yourself back again is you do it so many times you get faster at it, if you remember how. I ran as far away from that city as I could and hurried to build a new life for myself, it was selfish of me to. I ran and I ran and I buried myself in a dozen women's pillows and I walked home from their darkened kitchens like a zombie every morning mortified that my life as I knew it had ceased to exist and that I had swung a fairly giant axe in its direction.

I never want to have to run again from the woman I love. I never want to turn the other way in silence biting my tongue letting an argument fester until we no longer speak. I never want to hide who I love or have to be hidden.

The seventh well can't be found.

I'm sorry you loved me I'm sorry you wasted five years I'm sorry you gave up so much I'm sorry I hate KL I'm sorry I'm not a private person at all I'm sorry I moved on so quickly I'm sorry I loved you too damn much I'm sorry my disease made me an emotional basket case I'm sorry I never learned to stop crying I'm sorry you hate crying I'm sorry I wanted my girlfriend to also want me as much as I wanted her I'm sorry I don't know how to be older and better I'm sorry I wish I'd done a little better

63Random

63 random things from the past 3 months (inspired by Michael Ruby's "Fleeting Memories")

1. Arriving in Budapest knowing absolutely nothing about Hungary
2. Drinking palinka for the first time, feeling the flush
3. The Hungarian energy drinks I drank while wearing funny hats
4. Walking with team Photogotchi along the Halászbástya, feeling a little like Ezio Auditore da Firenze
5. The boys who were carrying giant swans and crocodile paddle boats onto Lake Balaton
6. Sitting in the yard of old times
7. Leaving Hungary thinking fröccs is the best idea in the world
8. Arriving in frosty Helsinki once again
9. The cute studio in Apila
10. That Finnish rapper in a Tiki bar
11. Being miserable, cold and desperately wanting you
12. More palinka, Timo's flat, tiny spaces and uncrossable chasms
13. Red-heads in the rain
14. Remembering that karaoke in northern Europe is pretty damn weird
15. Mushroom-picking, mushroom-cooking
16. Cycling on a Jopo through the rain
17. Beautiful Finnish brunches on Sunday mornings
18. A lot of fish
19. Tactical Nuclear Penguin
20. American Airlines, truly a terrible way to fly
21. Arriving in America for the first time
22. Pacific Heights. Not having change for the bus to Market Street.
23. Speaking badly in Cantonese.
24. Father of my future children showing me a iBaby monitor in the Apple Store
25. Brilliant people all over San Francisco.
26. Being chased up a flight of stairs by a bouncer in the Castro for not having an ID.
27. Losing my ID. And my credit cards. And my iPhone. In a bar. In the Tenderloin.
28. Being stupid.
29. Being on a work call with Sydney while sitting next to a painting called The Chronological Wall of Dicks and Cunts. Ah, San Francisco.
30. Staff at the Singapore consulate giving me cup noodles and soya bean milk from their personal stashes.
31. Buying a bright yellow Fuji Finest on my second day in San Francisco.
32. Toning my ass, cycling uphill everywhere
33. Excellent vegetarian Japanese food in Valencia followed by a free meditation class down the road.
34. Folsom Street Fair. Many things cannot be unseen, once seen.
35. Ethiopian with Jiten and Family.
36. Family of four sitting in a hipster coffeeshop in San Jose, each with a parrot on their heads.
37. Watching The Nationals vs the Phillies at the Nats Stadium.
38. You never forget your first Shake Shack.
39. America is so great because you can order beer and hot dogs online, and expect to have them arrive at your seat in a baseball stadium in three minutes.
40. One day I will understand more of this great nation, the same one that invented SPAM and Chicken in a Biskit. These inventions speak more about a national character than any other great invention.
41. Rolling my eyes at groupies of ‘famous tech people'.
42. Walking to the Lincoln Memorial, wishing I had seen it earlier because all I see now in that statue is Abraham Lincoln (Vampire Killer)
43. Eating fish tacos with Jason Scott Jones, who knows more about Brooklyn than anybody else
44. Having the cashier ask me why I want to pay US$12 for a can of tuna. Not having a good answer other than ‘it's very good tuna. Spanish.'
45. My crazy/beautiful Crown Heights pad.
46. Being in love with New York, like they all said I would.
47. Talking to my aunt at JFK for longer than we have ever spoken to each other, all our lives.
48. My 27th birthday party in Crown Heights.
49. The Met Museum with Michael Ruby and Dave Gurien.
50. Leaving New York, loving New York.
51. New York to Budapest via London, Budapest to Singapore via Doha, 12 hours apart
52. Those miserable long layovers in Doha.
53. Wanton mee
54. Having everything fall into place the moment I got home
55. The first day Cookie got home
56. Cooking a delicious spare ribs pasta
57. IKEA, burgers, Thai supermarkets and Mustafa
58. Finally getting my diving license
59. Doing the Gangnam Style at 10m underwater
60. The corner store in Tioman
61. Thinking that learning to dive in the middle of the monsoon was probably not too clever
62. Floating upwards uncontrollably before learning to trust my own buoyancy
63. I am finally ready, maybe.

Boomerang

National Day came and went. I haven't written any of those essays I promised to. Sheepish. I will write them, I just need a little bit more time.

I did, however, contribute a piece to the Straits Times after PM Lee's National Day Rally speech, which I streamed from a house by the lake in… Hungary. I know, I'm still waiting for my life this year to get less random. I don't think that's going to happen.

If you're interested, you can read it here: link (opens a jpg image).

Speaking of random, and Hungary, I am currently hiding out in a secret location there.

What am I doing?

Huddling in a house with a team of talented designers and developers, and we are building an ambitious app in a little over two and a half weeks. It's called Photogotchi and it will be available in mid-September. Yet another example of how the little dots connect for me over and over again, one of the contestants on the autorickshaw rally that I went on a few years ago runs this amazing program where he sends a group of people from all over the world to go to a location in Hungary and live, work and eat together for three weeks, and basically live and breathe tech for that period. You learn a lot: how to work in a group, how to work non-stop fuelled by Hungarian energy drinks (burn, baby, burn..!), how to play hard and even cook for your team and do your laundry like your life depended on it (my current dilemma every couple of days). Most importantly you get to be a part of a motivated team that breathes code, design and ships product — every aspect of it. I'm getting a lot out of this, and if you're interested you should definitely apply next year to the App Campus program. It helps that Hungary is as amazing as I thought it would be.

When I'm done here, I move on to Finland. Yep, Finland yet again, even if it was only six months ago that I was there. I'm in love with that country, its people, and I've made so many wonderful friends that I just had to go again just because I was going to be on the same continent! Finnair, my new favourite airline, takes me there for an affordable price.

When I'm finished with Finland (if I ever do), I'll move on to San Francisco, where I'll get to see new friends and old, visit companies I deeply admire, and learn as much as I can from the best brains in my industry. Then I'll head to Washington DC to see a very dear friend who currently works at the embassy there. Then it'll be my birthday, and it'll happen in New York City. This sounds cheesy but I feel like I have been waiting my whole life to finally make it there (just like the song), and I have an incredible schedule lined up already, mostly comprising of meeting people who have inspired me, having a superb 27th birthday party surrounded by some dear friends, going to classes, and doing new things.

If it isn't already obvious, I am on a mission. I have to sort out myself, reconfigure my life and priorities, and two weeks into my travels and challenges I am already halfway there: I'm closing off bits of a past best left behind, bravely — some say foolhardily — navigating new, unseen waters. I'm in a different headspace from the one I was in six months, a year ago.

Even though it looks like, and God knows it felt like, I was wading in a cloud of randomness for the past six months, my method to this madness has been simple: figure shit out, get stuff done. Fix what wasn't working, improve my skills.

What I did (God help me if I sound like a pop self-help type now) was easy enough for anybody to do. The main tenets: Ask. Do. Give.

It amazes me how far one can get just by asking. It opens doors you previously didn't know existed. When I made some of the very big decisions I had to make, on business, love and others, I was temporarily frozen by the fear — what happens next? I didn't know. The fear was crippling. But eventually I came to see that if I didn't let fear cripple me in so many other aspects of my life, I certainly wasn't going to let it win in the most important areas, the ones that affected me directly. I made decisions, some of which I'm not particularly proud or happy to have made, but that were necessary — to me — with less collateral damage now than if I make them years from now. I didn't know what was going to happen, in terms of work, money, life. But I've come to think that maybe I really am one of the luckiest people ever — everything fell into place, and got going, pretty much with a life of its own in which I was a mere spectator who occasionally hit a ‘yes' or ‘no' or ‘let's move on' button. None of that would have happened if I hadn't developed the shameless ability to ask. The right people at the right places. What's the worst that could happen? A no? So I did, and I'm all the better for it.

I actively identified a few key areas in my life that needed to be fixed, and tried to find inspiration on how to go about fixing them.

I knew that I had boundless energy when it came to starting things up, but not when it came to completing things — to running the race through to the end. The tedium and minutiae of everyday life bored the hell out of me. So I learned to delegate, and I learned to separate the important from the less so.

I knew that I had no trouble making a lot of money, but plenty of trouble understanding the flow of money, so I went to a handful of trusted older acquaintances and friends and basically said to them: here I am, this is where I am at, this is the situation, this is where I want to be in 5 years, 10 years — in your shoes. Teach me what to do with money in beneficial ways, and not only to myself. One day I'll write a ridiculous self-help finance book on this process.

I knew that I had no shortage of ideas, all of which excited me and made me jump out of bed — but I needed to make them show for something. That tied in with how I previously and historically always ran out of steam and had no ability to see things through to their full potential. I threw a couple of things at it to try to fix it — mostly through consistency and coffee-fuelled attempts at hard work — but seen through the perspective of what I need to achieve within the next year, there are always creative ways to fix any problems, and in the next few months I will be able to hold actual things in my hands and say: I made this, and I finished it.

Doing stuff has never been difficult for me. I'm the crazy friend who gets sent these emails saying "I have this great idea. What should I do?" And my only answer is: do it. Or if I can afford to, let me help you. This quarter, whatever stars are aligned (if you believe in that hufflepuff), they're certainly all pointing at how I'm learning to pick my battles and to keep doing stuff, but only the stuff that really matters in the end. Steve Jobs' famous line to Sculley rings true in my mind at every milestone: do I want to sell sugared water? Or do the important stuff? In some truly funny ways I think I'd let my grip on reality cripple my ability to see the big picture. Being bogged down by the small stuff, the details — I stopped being able to dream. Of course the dreamer in me now at 27 versus the one at 17 is a very different one: I already know the small stuff and I won't sweat it. But I don't ignore them or wish them away. So now, I do, with the tempered mania of a recovering hyperthyroid patient on metaphoric and literal energy drinks (but properly medicated, don't worry, mum) — banging away at my keyboard, and the world, and all these things I am going to do in it.

This is the point where I say with an Austrian bodybuilder's accent, I think — I am back. Bitches.

A theme that has persisted in my mind recently is that of how I need to give back. To my community. To the people who made me. My family, my country, my adopted country (India). I have launched or am launching initiatives in all of these. These are battles that are worth it. One project is Culture Kitchen, a food and art project that aims to connect Singapore to the rest of the world through delicious food and intriguing, sometimes edible art. Is Singapore becoming more xenophobic? Maybe. Is there any justification for it? Never. It becomes xenophobia when it stops being about the policies, and when it starts being about the people — anybody. The guy in the train speaking in a foreign language you don't understand. The waitress who doesn't speak the correct language. But how can we undo this? I don't know. What I do know is that I think saying "you are xenophobic", even when truly well-deserved, already splits the people in camps. In its own ironic way, that also puts people into defensive modes — us versus them, all over again. We must always, always call out xenophobia and never tolerate it. But we must also stem its growth with a light touch. Just as how I will always call out homophobia when I see it, whether it is directed at me or not, on a personal level when I meet somebody from a background that hasn't given him or her any opportunities to meet real gay people, I would rather give him a chance and be the living example of the gay person he could never hate, than flat out deny him the ability to re-evaluate his opinion. I also have the kumbayah belief — hope? pipe dream? — that Singaporeans, and our electorate, are by and large rational beings who are averse to extremism on either side of the spectrum. Yes, there is some danger that we are following the global trend of slipping towards unfounded nationalism based on birth and race. But I think we can avoid that by starting to have open, honest conversations. Do I think Culture Kitchen will be able to fix anything? I wouldn't dare be so self-important. I think my job is done not when I change the mind of somebody who is already anti-immigration and/or xenophobic (is there a difference?), but it is when it inspires other citizen-led projects, and when it plants the seed in the mind of just one person — hey, I never knew that about this country. We actually have these things in common. Let me find out more.

In addition to Culture Kitchen I will also have a host of other small mini-projects at ThisIs.sg, which is currently not ready but the basics are there: small island, big heart. Quirky projects celebrating the Singapore spirit.. As a young Singaporean who has chosen a somewhat different path, I am always asked by even younger Singaporeans, "how did you do this?" Since I know so many other kindred spirits who are doing likewise, in their own fields, across a spectrum of various industries and activities, I thought I would collect them all in one place and have them answer such questions in a publicly accessible database. It is my hope that with these, others will see that it's actually not that scary, not that hard, to follow their dreams, to do stuff, to start first by figuring out what matters to them. God knows I could have done with something like that myself when I was younger and clueless.

So. Giving back. There are tons of other initiatives that we've dreamed up, and that we're laying the groundwork on, but for now there's all of this. And then some. I wish I started an active giving process much earlier, but here we are.

In between all these projects, shuttling back and forth between various countries, and other things, I haven't had very much time to sort out the homefront. My dog is now in Singapore, and will be out of quarantine soon. When she does get out and come home to live with me in my family home, I think it will be my first real shot at real life this year.

It's been a crazy year but at least you can't call it uninteresting in the slightest way.

Just yesterday I tweeted as a monster, designed a game, went to float on a crocodile boat in lake Balaton, and came back to the house to help set up an NGO.

Perhaps the biggest discovery this year may be that I possibly and probably have an attention deficit disorder too?

Thank you, mad world, for giving me all the shots I have. I am having a ball of a time. And I have to go away to figure out where I'm going to live. I said that to a friend, two decades older, and she simply laughed and said "that's so Millennial of you." I'm glad I'm a Millennial (even ChannelNewsAsia thinks so) — it's damn confusing, but it's a damn awesome time to be doing all these things with the world as your oyster, baked, fried or freshly shucked.

Departing Thoughts

1. I must watch too many scifi movies. I'd rarely been convinced of the malleability of time, but these days I measure out everything in two-week units. Time seems to race ahead of me. It always has, now more than before.

2. When I say these days, I don't mean it facetiously. Yes, I turn just 27 in a couple of months, but I feel old, cranky and grumpy most of the time, especially around younger people. This must be what growing old feels like at first, not with a bang but with a grumpy whimper.

3. I must tell my endocrinologist about my worsening memory loss problems. If only I didn't keep forgetting. I will set it as a Reminder in my iPhone, and tell it to alert me when I enter the hospital. I must also set another one to remind me of the same thing as I'm leaving the hospital, because… I really worry that I'm losing my mind.

4. Walking away is hard. One would think you'd get used to it, after having done it so many times, but it doesn't get any easier. It sounds base, but it's when you pack up an apartment with all your physical possessions into many, many boxes and bags, and load them into the back of a car at 5am, that seems to be when reality bores into your thick, numb skull. I'll remember next time.

5. Life has taken on an interesting turn. I've had to scale back on life and ambition in some ways, because I literally cannot remember things, and physically cannot do some of those things. I've undoubtedly become a new convert to the "quality of life" school of thought when it comes to work. That part I'm scaling up on.
   Some new favourite lifehacks: putting my phone on Airplane mode and not turning it on until I get to work, not checking email until I get to work, bringing a book to read in the bus so I spend more time reading books than email, reading and buying more physical books than ebooks, doing things differently (like buying an orange notebook instead of a black one), making it a point to take the women of my family out to lunch every Monday, among other things. All of it sounds trivial now that I write it down, but I'm also at that point in my life where I favour incremental, trivial changes over the huge coming-at-you-with-a-mack-truck changes I used to favour (mostly of the "I'm leaving the country for an indefinite period!" variety)…

6. I've started making some tentative steps back into the world of meeting and dating interesting people. There have been many interesting people. But. c.f. point #2: I'm just older and grumpier these days, so you can imagine how that's going.
   Also, I have transformed into a crazy dog lady whose primary concern in life for the next 110 days is to spend as much time with her quarantined dog as she possibly can. I feel about as attractive as anybody who smells of dog kennels most of the time can be.

7. Singapore has been really good to me since I came home. In some ways it feels like I never really left. I'm surrounded by incredible people in my industry who inspire me and others; I'm around people who really do walk the talk. It may or may not be naive optimism inspired by my homecoming, but I am so excited by what I see around me now in Singapore. My calendar of projects and events has filled up at a good pace. At this point, I have a just nice amount on my plate. It helps.

8. The hardest part about breaking up with anybody is walking away from the memories of what you once wanted to accomplish together. I may feel like I'm losing my mind and my memory, but this isn't one of those that I've lost.

If only it were.

The Places We'll Go

Five years ago, I said: "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."

Plenty has changed, these five years, but at least this part remains familiar: "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." Then, I was referring to the heady, exciting days of a student who had the chance to criss-cross across the hill tribes of northeast India and investigate the ailments of rural Bangladeshis suffering from leprosy, TB and lymphatic filiarisis. I got to go on the amazing adventure of my life, never really expecting it to end. It hasn't.

Much has changed, but adventure has never left me.

The last five months have been tumultuous. It was the sort of chaos that was ultimately a blip in the universe (though still a large one), and not, thankfully, the sort that led to destruction and the end of the world as I knew it.

In a few days I will make that trip to Kuala Lumpur for the last time. It will be awkward. On it, I will return to the apartment I've had for two years, but haven't lived in for the last five months, and I will assemble everything that I own in that city and that country, and pack it into several boxes. I last packed all the things I owned in the universe into several boxes under far happier circumstances. This time I pack a dog into the car, too.

I don't regret a moment. Life has dealt me a pretty good lot, and I have milked it for what it's worth. So from Singapore to Dubai and the Middle East to London to Kuala Lumpur I now find myself surprisingly, but not that much, in Singapore. I left a Singapore I didn't like very much, and returned to a Singapore I absolutely love (there's an essay in that somewhere). You can't come home again, but you can definitely make it home again, for the first time.

The single life is interesting, but difficult, in equal parts. I haven't dated in such a long time, I really don't have it in me anymore.

The life with hyperthyroid is worse.

I can't remember shit. I quite literally feel like I've lost a major chunk of my former cognitive abilities. It sucks.

How am I dealing with all of this? I'm… dealing. If you know me in real life, you probably can't tell. I've worked very hard to keep it invisible. My heart rate still goes nuts. I drop a ton of weight or I put it back and I drop it again. I am manic and then I am exhausted. I am utterly intolerant to heat, even in an air-conditioned room I am hot. I don't need any medical diagnosis here (I am actively under the care of the medical professionals here, no worries). I just wish I could get my memory back. I've gone from one of those people with super memories to one of those who has to scribble down everything. I don't remember people I've just met (this has never happened before), I don't remember even meeting them, most of the time. It's amazing I can even work at all.

The last five months have felt like a massive blur. I feel like time and space has compressed for me. Or that I'm living in a time warp, splitting myself between two universes. One: pre-illness, pre-breakup, pre-everything. When life was, I thought, sorted. For the time being. The second one, the one I inhabit right now: plagued by a disease that doesn't threaten but bothers me, learning to find my feet again without the woman I love and the life and businesses we had. Breaking up gets more and more expensive as you get older.

I'm okay, I'm good, I'm pretty happy (seriously) — I was just telling someone that I thrive in change in ways that many people don't understand, but I do. Change works for me.

I should be more careful what I wish for, you know? Now there's so much of it I am still finding my feet, but I'm not sure how. That suits me fine for now.

It's just that I hate packing.

The Road Less Ridden

In my mother tongue we have a brilliant turn of phrase. Geh kiang. Separately, they mean fake clever. Together, it means some approximation of 'smart alec', but that's not quite good enough. It's hardly translatable at all. 'Smart alec' does not embody the degree of stupidity we are usually referring to when we say 'geh kiang'.

My mother will tell you I embody geh kiang, every bit of me.

I was especially geh kiang when I packed up my bags and bicycle, mostly under stressful circumstances, in order to take them somewhere.

Why did I bring a bicycle to northern Europe? I found myself wondering that all throughout my Nordic escapade. I wondered the loudest and grumbled the most when it was time to pack up my bags and my bicycle all over again. Five times. I know, I counted.

I packed up my bags and my bicycle when I had to move, when I had to get in a plane, when I had to jump into a train, when I had to do all of that entirely by public transport (cabs are totally out of the question in Europe!) and onto train platforms and then into trains.

It was difficult, to say the least. Lucky for me — and my sanity — my love for cycling, and the relative benefits of having one's own bicycle in a foreign place, far outshone the logistical barriers. I will probably do it again.

When you commit to having such a piece of equipment by your side of the entire duration of your trip, you're committing to a relationship that will be the primary relationship, one that will be far more important than the by-now boring concept of luggage. You have to look after it. Endure the glances. Fight for it at airport check-in desks. Hold it, dance with it, around the feet of heavily pregnant commuters and swerving around nervous people, trying your best not to jab anybody with your hulk of a piece of equipment.

So what happened? In a nutshell,

I broke my bike

Finnair treated my bike brilliantly. I flew them three times: to Helsinki, to Stockholm, back from Copenhagen. All three times my bicycle more than survived, and the entire experience was very easy. I highly recommend Finnair for their quick, no-nonsense flights to Europe from Singapore. Helsinki Airport is also my new favourite airport.

I, however, was very stupid. I tried to fix what I thought was a loose nut, myself. Being no bike mechanic, I promptly broke the weirdest little part I could break — the plastic doohickey in the stem of the folding post of my bike. Without it, my bicycle could not stay folded. Foldable bikes like mine haven't taken off in that part of the world at all. Even though the Finns speak amazing English, most people anywhere have never heard of a plastic doohickey. Not unless you are very familiar with foldable bikes of the Dahon make.

Somehow, I managed to find an excellent bicycle shop where its owner and mechanics were super helpful. Since it's not even a part that my bicycle's manufacturer offers for sale, it seemed pretty dire. Thankfully, a quick-thinking mechanics with extraordinary ability in plastics (he had a degree in plastics engineering) took a look at the broken plastic bits, and he made a brand new doohickey for me. That entire process took a week so I had to go to Tallinn without my bicycle, but I was relieved that I wouldn't be travelling around with an unridable piece of junk for the next 3 weeks. More glad that it got fixed. I got lucky.

I had to be rescued by Swedish police

Not something I care to repeat ever again, but.. what an experience.

I was cycling along the bike lanes from Kungsholmen to Stockholm Central, happily zipping along at 25km/h with an air of familiarity. I was starting to really get where things were in Stockholm, and I'd had some amazing city rides. Seems like Stockholm Central hates me for some inexplicable reason. The last time I was there in 2010, I got locked out of Stockholm Central for many hours while my luggage was locked in.

This time, I guess I missed the sign that said "IF YOU ARE A BICYCLE, GO LEFT! NOT STRAIGHT!"

I went straight.

I realised something was amiss when I started descending down a steep flyover. I saw many heavy vehicles. I saw that I had no way to filter right (they ride on the right) without being in the middle of oncoming, converging traffic from another steep flyover. I jumped out. I saw that I could not go back up, and that there was no way I could walk off that bridge (water, water, everywhere).

I jumped onto my bike and kept going.

At some point it dawned upon me in my puny little brain that if I went any further, I would be bus chow in the middle of the underwater tunnel that crossed islands into Södermalm. I got out.

I don't know what I was thinking — probably nothing — I remember I was extremely calm. I called a Swedish friend, who could not help; I texted the Swedish friend I was riding to meet and told her I'd be late, that I'd explain later when I saw her.

Mostly I just stood by the side of the road and looked pathetic, I think.

A Stockholm city police car came within ten minutes, bundled my bicycle and its stupid owner into the back of the car, and drove me to Stockholm Central. I figured motorists might have called in to tell them that an Asian tourist was dangerously obstructing the lives of motorists on the highway by looking pathetic and helpless.

(They did confirm that they received calls about me, which is why they came; I didn't care to ask what had been reported!)

Stockholm police's parting words to me: "you should take a photo and show it to your friends."

Damn malu.

I had to carry a ton of weight every step of the way

Let's just say travelling with a bicycle, no matter how light, is not for the faint of heart. I only moved all my bags and the bicycle when I moved to a new city or went to the train station or airport, but when I moved, I moved.

One of the last minute decisions before leaving for Helsinki was that I would bring a silly little trolley with me. The kind that aunties go to the wet market with: the flimsy, plastic ones that are given out free at computer fairs or promotions. I don't know how I managed without it. Although my Dahon D7HG is quite tiny when folded, and it was also in a soft bag, the overall package including the paddings, foam and bubble wrap made for an uncarry-able package. I also had my large backpack and camera backpack. Why didn't I just pack it in a Samsonite case? I've tried that many times, each time to devastating results. First, dismantling the bike is pretty easy. Getting it to fit isn't. Unlike most other 20″ Dahon bikes, the D7HG Vitesse that I have has a large rear fender. It is close to impossible to remove, and without removing it, the bicycle does not fit into any luggage. It also has a hub gear, which makes it difficult to remove the rear wheel. More importantly, because of the hub gear and the rear fender, I'm not able to confidently put it back. I decided to avoid that nightmare this time. mrbrown and Ryan helped me zhng a makeshift soft bag carry method. It served me well.

Eventually, I gave up on the lousy trolley and went to a trolley superstore in Stockholm (yes, there is such a thing!) and purchased an amazing, sturdy, well-made Swedish trolley.

Would I do it again? Yes, absolutely! That was my first time travelling with my bicycle. To be honest, I don't think I was ready for it. I'm lucky in that I didn't get flats, I didn't need to change tubes (though I brought them anyway), that I didn't need to remove my wheels or do any repairs of any sorts on my own (other than the plastic doohickey incident). I'm no bike mechanic. I'm a little stupid about those things, in fact. I will get better at it because I now know what and where are the gaps in my knowledge.

I had an amazing time on the bike.

The Nordic countries are light years ahead of us in terms of cycling as part of the urban landscape. It was such a joy to ride there, especially in Copenhagen. Real bike lanes, bike traffic lights, an entire culture and city where cycling was a real, and sometimes the only, way of life. It was liberating.

Before going, I was quite shaky on the roads. I did not like the idea of riding on the roads in Singapore as I was not confident enough to do it. Because I got so much mileage on the roads of Copenhagen (breezy sweat-free 40km days were typical), I learned many things about what I needed to know from them. I now ride on the roads of Singapore regularly, and don't find it particularly difficult, although there are some challenges to be mindful of (car-dooring, for example).

Since I got home to Singapore, there's been a lot of talk about how public transport has become absolutely terrible. I agree it has deteriorated substantially, but my own personal way of getting around that problem is to ride more and talk less. I would be quite happy to cycle-commute at least 40% of the time in Singapore. Next time I travel, I am taking the bike with me again. Anywhere. Everywhere.

Super Geh Kiang Me.

Wilderness TV

I can't say I've been away from my phone or Mac for more than 24 hours, not at any point in the last 10 years. I can't say I have at all. They feel like such natural extensions of my arm, they are almost artificial appendages themselves, not just of my body but also of my brain. I needed to switch off and I needed a drastic way to do it.

Which is the backstory behind why I found myself living in a hut like the above.

170 km and 2 hours northwest of Stockholm, lays a little town called Skinnskateberg. Its pronunciation eludes me, and still does; somewhere between a huin and a hun instead of skinn. I'll take whatever you throw me, Sweden, but your compound sounds and accents are something I'll never get (I've just learned how to pronounce Nässjö… Promptly forgot it too).

When some Stockholm friends wanted to know my weekend plans, I told them I was going to be in Skinnskateberg, only to find most of them had never heard of it. I'm pretty sure it wasn't my pronunciation too, because I showed it to them on the map.

I was only headed there because of one thing: my need to be one with nature, in a way I knew how.

Ever since I got sick, I've been struck with the overwhelming need to go be one with nature. I can't explain it, and I can't reject it. After rejecting nature all my life (damn the insects and sweatiness of the tropics), I now want to do it all: camp, start fires, cook in the open, fetch water from natural water sources, and whatever else my city slicker mind romanticised.

So off to Skinnskateberg I went. Why there, of all places, instead of the far north? My metrics for selecting this place were simple: I didn't want to freeze my bits off, didn't want to have to pack snow shoes, knew I couldn't pack a winter-ready tent or sleeping bag (can't justify the cost of one), and I needed to be close enough to the middle to travel south to Malmö afterwards.

Which left just one place: Kolarbyn, near Skinnskateberg.

I wanted to go to Kolarbyn because it promised no electricity, no running water, and a series of huts that resembled hobbit holes, to my untrained eye.

Of course they were just replicas of the huts that the charcoal-burners of the region once lived in, hundreds of years ago, first built to educate the modern crowd about the area's history after the industry died, then turned into the eco-lodge it now is.

Kolarbyn proudly advertises itself as "Sweden's most primitive hotel", and they'd be right.

I booked myself on a two night stay there. Though I freaked out a little when I was told I would be alone all throughout the three days, things quickly worked out when I found Roxanne, an ex-classmate now working in Stockholm, would join me on my unconventional Easter break.

I was enamoured by the romance of the whole set up, but I worried about the details: how would I do with starting fires? What would I eat? How would I chop wood? What water would I drink? How would I even get there? I wrote emails to Andreas, the owner of Kolarbyn, pleading Asian virginity in the Scandinavian outdoors, and asked him to please show me how to do everything once. His Swedish efficiency of language and character was a simple, reassuring "don't worry about anything."

As it turned out, Andreas himself is ex-Swedish military, almost like a more realistic Bear Grylls (arguably better looking too). I mean, the man teaches courses teaching people how to start fires without anything, how to forage, and survive in the cold wilderness — I could not ask for a better teacher. He had me starting fires successfully in something like 5 seconds. Which just does not happen with me, usually. With non-digital skills I usually have the mental and psychomotor facilities of a five year old child, possibly worse.

He showed me the stream, from which I would fetch water, in which I would wash my cooking utensils; at which I could optionally clean myself, an option I would decline as I did not want to go home in a freezer (not to be morbid, but I'm just learning to deal with the cold and I really need more time when it comes to being in a frigid and cold body of water).

The communal fireplace was where all the cooking would take place. Though I was alone on the first night (Roxanne was to join me the second morning), I was lucky that I had a Swedish couple for company. I could not have asked for a more Swedish experience: we shared cans of Sofiero, they fed me grilled choco-bananas, and one of them even worked with Roxette. I cooked a simple pasta with mushrooms and asparagus, and dinner I made myself has never tasted as wonderful. The wilderness helps you redefine everything, including food — slow food with slow sources of fuel is indefinitely slow, slower, slowest.

My little hobbit hole, all mine for the first night, was called Botvik. All the huts have old names — such as Olof. Mine, Botvik, sounded less of a hulk than Viking-sounding Olof, and more of a bumbling little Viking version of Baldrick, which suited me fine. The Swedish couple complained that the huts were smaller than they looked online. Since I was expecting, and hoping for, a hobbit hole, Botvik was my idea of a dream come true.

Sheepskin was laid out on each side, on which a warm, winter-ready sleeping bag would go. The fireplace was a small, but sturdy little box that would be my best friend for the next two nights. A large stone apparatus enveloped the fireplace, and I came to think of it as a convection oven for my warmth.

I was worried I would be cold, but I was far from cold. The fires I started, and nurtured in Botvik were enough to keep me plenty warm at night and to keep me returning to all through the day. I was especially happy to return to the warmth of my hut after a morning hike to the compost toilet, and after the temperatures sank at nightfall.

Can it be that we have a genetic disposition to watching fires, and to wanting to make them bigger? Asked another fellow camper the next night. We had no answer, Roxanne and I, for we were busy learning about snus and stuffing our faces with soup and pork, but I certainly think he has a point.

Having never come close to a fire, or a fireplace before — I mean I do come from that breed of urbanites for whom sparkles are not good sounds, and who feared fire — fire became my best friend. Not necessarily in a pyromaniac sort of way. Fire draws you, in an elusive but unforgiving way. You can't not look at it. You need it. Everyone can have it, but not everyone can build the right kind of fire. It sounds base and primal, but it made me think about what little our primitive ancestors had and how they made use of what they did have; fire really does change everything. Not having my phone or Mac around was totally okay, then; we joked that every time we go out camping we sit around fires watching wilderness tv.

It's a channel I'm starting to get used to, I think.

Four Hours Light

"Tallinn, Estonia 028 - Catedral Alexander Nevsky/ Alexander Nevsky Cathedral by Claudio.Ar, on Flickr"

Somewhere between lying in a hospital bed, travelling, and coming back to a hospital again, I decided: man, I really need to go away. I knew that my default go-to place was India. Until it wasn't.

Don't get me wrong, I still love India very much and it still holds a special place in my heart, as the one country that has given me much, but in 8 years of intensive India travel it is no longer "a destination I know nothing about" type of experience. India is a home I go back to, in grief and in celebration, and always will; I just needed to flirt briefly with other countries and climes, and so I will.

Tomorrow, I depart for Helsinki. After that, Tallinn, Stockholm, Skinnskatteberg, Malmö, Copenhagen. I know I said in my previous post that I needed to slow down, and learn to live again — this is exactly my idea of slowing down. It sounds mad, but I have a plan.

Ever since the hospital, I've stopped smoking and drinking, even casually. Even if not life-threatening, the episode convinced me that I wanted to do more with my life, where lifestyle was concerned — it also convinced me that I wanted to see more of the outdoors. I've been cycling, running, and cycling even more. I will bring my bicycle with me to the Nordic states (yes, I know I can rent bicycles there… but. I want my bicycle! Not somebody's else's!), and I will get to enjoy the onset of spring in some of the best cities in the world for bicycle commuting.

I don't know what to expect: I know so little about that part of the world. The only thing I know for certain is I will be cold. I've prepared for it, but I've never been in that type of cold until now, so I'm just going to have to make it up as I go. I'll be completely shut off from work for a while, which will be the first time in some years. I will be completely shut off from the world, and the world wide web, for a couple of days, too, which will be the first time… since I discovered the world wide web. Work-wise, I'm excited about that part of the world as it's the land of Spotify, Angry Birds, Minecraft — some of my favourite things in the world — along with awesome salmon and mesost, which I also love. I spent 3 all too brief days in Stockholm in 2010, and now I'm going to be back there, in the company of friends this time with the possibility of a superb dinner.

I can't wait.

The Years of Living at High Velocity

Or how I am not dealing with hyperthyroidism

Ever since I had a vague inkling of ambition, it's been go, go and go.

Occasionally go even further, at top speed. Once I learned to catch the wind, I wanted to fly. I was the weird kid who climbed and used my stroller as a skateboard, even before I could walk.

I don't really know how to live any differently.

In school, I had to run every single track and field event, jump, debate, represent my institution and country at whatever they wanted me to, learn to be house captain, juggle many loves, do more A level papers than I needed, work in a few jobs, travel the world. I was unstoppable, not from the overwhelming middle class Singaporean need for accomplishment, but from not knowing any better.

The simple truth: I don't know what to do with myself. If I do one less thing. I freak out. My mind wanders. I fidget, physically, but worse is the emotional fidgeting that comes inevitably when I do fewer things than I can. (Not emotional as in "I should date someone" but as in "OMG WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE". Just to clarify.)

The moment I was done with university, I pursued all those madcap adventures I'd dreamed of as a child. Without the restraints of geography and formal education, I shined.

I may not have travelled far, unlike some mileage-racking people I know, but I have returned to the cities I love, repeatedly. I have pushed my body through some extremities. And travelled in ways that I am told are not good for me, in the long run.

Borneo longhouse and then Barcelona, in 36 hours.

Beirut and then Istanbul, in two weeks, by land.

Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Pondicherry and 3000 kilometres of my beloved South India, in a rickety little tin can.

Dubai. Istanbul. London. Dubai. Chennai. Kuala Lumpur. Chennai. Dubai. London. Singapore. Dubai. Sana'a. Dubai. Singapore. Bangkok. Singapore. Dubai. Beirut. Damascus. Aleppo. Adana. Antalya. Goreme. Istanbul. Dubai. London. That was six months of my life in 2008-09.

At 23, you think you're invincible. The world is your oyster. There is nothing you can't do.

At 27, you're a little older now. Older and slower.

I was in Bombay two weeks ago, happy as usual to be there. I was going to go to Hong Kong, then go back to India again. I came home instead to Singapore, supposedly to catch my breath for a day before flying off to Kuala Lumpur, then Hong Kong, but found myself in hospital instead.

I didn't feel so invincible then.

I slept for six nights next to a dying woman, who expended her last breaths snoring like a champ. I figured if you were at that point, you can do whatever the hell you want. Preachers and Christian relatives came to proselytize by her bedside every evening. She grunted.

I had no preachers, but lots of balloons. (The person with the least-threatening disease had the most number of balloons. That didn't seem fair.)

I had lots of love.

I had everything I needed: food, water, medicine, medical attention, visitors, and potassium chloride, attached to my arm through a drip.

Life has a funny way of cutting you back down to size: I was diagnosed with hyperthyroid. My body, like my ambitions, was in overdrive, with so much metabolism that I lost 20kg at one point (not a good thing, btw); such that my hands shook, always involuntarily and sometimes violently; such that my heart raced and slowed and sputtered, often audibly.

No one could tell me what it was until I collapsed at dinner in Singapore, and my face went pale and my body cold, but my head burned at 40 degrees when I got to the hospital. Thereafter, I was force-fed medicine and put through a battery of tests for six days before I was released into the world again with stern orders to medicate and just chill the fuck out.

That didn't, and still doesn't, sit too well with me. I don't know what to do with myself. I'm frequently stumped by people who say they are bored, because I haven't known boredom in many years. The world is out there for the taking — and imma take it! But it was not meant to be, because my body said so.

In my hurry to be better and faster, I'd forgotten to stop — I'd forgotten about stopping at all.

I'd forgotten to spend time on the things that matter most: my health, my family, my friends.

I'd forgotten my body is a vessel that cannot keep up with all the desires of the mind, that needs to be well-kept and well-lubricated.

The hormonal imbalance caused by my hyperthyroidism put my life and what I cherished most about it in jeopardy. I swung, and still do, from sad to happy to neutral in a matter of minutes. I thought, and still do, of destroying everything I'd built up in years in fits of what felt like madness. I never thought it possible for a little butterfly shaped gland near my throat to wreak so much chaos in my life, but it has: my clothes don't fit, they literally fall off me; I went well below the weight I was at 10 years ago; I want to throw things one second and then I want to hug a kitten the next; I can be in the middle of a totally normal situation, such as sitting on a chair in my house, and then my heart starts racing, and slowing, when it pleases, almost as it wants to leap out of my body. If you ask me about the hormonal imbalance caused by hyperthyroidism, I'm very certain that it's on a scale of (old school birth control pill hormonal fallout + PMS + remembering all your sad memories) x 1000. On a good day, I potter about in a haze of drugs and sadness, and somehow manage to muster some of the old spunk left in me, and hold on to it like an unskillful amateur magician for however long I can keep it up. On bad days, I am utterly helpless, tiny things set me off, stupid things stress me out with no regard for proportion — I worry about small things now as though the apocalypse was just around the corner, when every rational bit of me that's left knows it's not, but my body and my mind just cannot compute it.

I miss that the most about pre-hyperthyroidism: my cool. I miss that my superpower of being unfazed by anything seems a world away from me now. I can deal with the months of diarrhea, weight loss, heart palpitations, hand tremors. I can deal with any of those physical things. But not being in full control of my mind is a scary place for me.

Talking to people who know what it's like helps (Thanks Lucian). Medicating regularly and sleeping more has helped, too. Physical symptoms and hormonal imbalance aside, I do not like that I (1) get loopy from time to time (2) have trouble concentrating (3) am significantly slower in terms of cognitive processes (4) forget things immediately (5) feel helpless about all of this.

There seems to be awfully little I can do except wait it out and hope for the best. In the grand scheme of things, I know this is one of those things that's going to be just another quirk, in a couple of months. I know I should be thankful it isn't anymore serious or life-threatening. It just gets in the way, you know? Especially when you are a small business owner like me, I need to be 150% there, 100% of the time. It seems to be my body's way of telling me to slow the fuck down and find a pace and time where I can do the things I want without destroying my body in the process. Health is wealth, etc, and all that mumbo jumbo (even if true, it still sounds funny saying it).

I've decided to chill out. To not let this disease take over my life, or my mind. To do things differently. To sleep before two in the morning, every night. To sleep at least six hours a day. To not subject myself to torturous travel schedules. To be aware of my limitations. This part is the hardest, but I will try.

I'm going to have to take a break from all of this — Singapore, Malaysia, work, empire-building, community-building, nation-building — so I can come back in a better shape to resume all of this, and more.

There's a world of opportunities out there, it sucks that I can't have all of them, right now, but I can at least pick my battles and be darn good at it too.

Goodbye, my crazy high velocity life. Hello, a better, healthier me.

Taj Mahal Foxtrot

A note from New Delhi

Taj Mahal Foxtrot, namesake of the book by the same name by naresh.fernandes

Another new year, another bad habit: I'm late, again.

Just a few days ago, I was sitting at the back of a Toyota Innova, stuffing my face with mithai and chips — not at the same time — thinking what a nice surprise it'd be for my readers, to finally post, and on New Year's Eve, too. I didn't make it. I got busy.

The landscape outside my window was of rural Rajasthan: familiar. Not as brutal as the Marwar I came up close to, the last time I was here, at the peak of summer. Not too long before that I had arrived in Rajasthan with my young traveller tie-dye pants, led by nothing other than the youthful desire to do something unexpected, terrible and difficult. Things are quite different now: I have a ‘job' to get back to. No doubt it's a business I own and run, but I still can't get away for as long as my college summer breaks allowed me to.

Everything feels different. Only India feels the same.

This winter made Rajasthan different from the last. It was much better, with its cool — almost too cool — air, dry spells. Not quite as cold as Delhi.

Hurtling through traffic, avoiding cows and camels, stopping occasionally for a ‘sulabh' break — BYOTP (Bring your own toilet paper), the Innova, the "metal cow" of the Indian road made its way through all places familiar and strange.

We made a makeshift cinema on the rooftop of the small bed & breakfast we were staying at, shivering in the cold under bundles of blankets, with a dazzling view of the Umaid Bhawan in the near horizon.

We drank copious amounts of lassi.

We ate, drank and made merry — with our hands, of course, for to eat with a fork and a spoon is just like making love through an interpreter.

We didn't break up at the Taj Mahal.

I'm in a different place now. A good place.

Not too long ago I was hopping around some parts of the world on a series of one way tickets, with nothing to hold me down to any place or any one. Just me, my backpack, my cameras, notepads, my lone self in a hostel room for one, on the lonely (but fun) road to self-discovery. That part of my life seems to be a distant past now. The places are the same but the package is different. I could not go away for a year now, not without looking back wistfully at some people, things and creatures.

The things that bind come when you least expect it.

They were the crazy thoughts that slip into your head when you meet someone for the first time — at a bar, or at least that's how it was for me. The furious back-and-forth binary exchanges through various electronic sources. A text. An email. A few stamps in your passport and many flight tickets later, and you're settled. Sort of. Settled as far as you can be. You go to a city, rent a house, set up a business, own a dog, and suddenly you're one of those people boring hippies to death about how you love Singapore because you can go jogging at three in the morning and feel safe. Suddenly you're one of those regular people who can go someplace breathtakingly beautiful like the Taj Mahal and feel nothing except annoyance at the incessant crowds, and you're not the sort of girl who goes to the Taj Mahal and breaks up with the person next to you anymore.

No one ever tells you it's going to get better in your twenties.

They don't. Okay, so you can drink Yakult everyday before lunch and after lunch, and nobody tells you you've gotta eat a vegetable. That's where it gets tricky. No one tells you anything — you're supposed to know. About everything. About salaries and savings. About weddings and funerals. About businesses and jobs. About children and insemination. About… everything. It's up to you. You can drink as much Yakult as you want, but if you lau sai, you take yourself to hospital and you pay for your own medical bills. You can go through life never eating a single vegetable if you don't feel like it, but when you're constipated… well, never mind.

You amble through life, finish college, and if you're lucky, acquire some sense of purpose — I like to think I was lucky in that department — and then you try to make yourself a success. Somewhere along the way, one of your friends is going to die in an accident, another one of your friends is going to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, and there's going to be absolutely nothing anyone can do when faced with sudden mortality: something most of us have not had to think about until now.

I'm not sad or anything like it. Quite the opposite. I love what I do (btw, it's a combination of writing, speaking, and separately of selling and making apps and running a small company that makes apps), I wake up every morning the master of my own time and location — which is something I established a long time ago as a bare minimum for any endeavour. I will be where I want to be, when I want to be. This has meant 800km trips up and down the North-South Highway every other week, crazy meetings packed in rapid succession, and some sort of invisible third arm growth that is my iPhone and high speed internet connection.

Some mornings, though, I wake up missing the part of me that's long gone. That part of me that used to write furiously, take good photos, chase stories, pursue any trail of human interest in my vicinity. I'm not complacent or anything: I've just lost it. Like not knowing how to play a piano again from neglect, despite banging on it for 10 years: I've just lost it. I've lost my need to go to places, see things, talk to people, take photographs, write stories. I've lost my wide-eyed curiosity and innocence — I've seen it all before, my brain tells me, and there are precious few things in the world that leap out at me the way everything once did. Absolutely none in the developed world, which doesn't interest me anthropologically or culturally in any way, and a dwindling number in the developing world. India. Yemen. Syria. Places like that — full of raw energy, waiting to be unearthed. And in India's case, ever-surprising and ever-ready, no matter how many times I go back there.

Then there's the writing. Not having had the discipline, time or desire to write as often or as much as I once did, the year or two of utter neglect is leaving me scrambling to pick up the pieces before I lose it forever. It's difficult to keep writing when you've been stuck, as so many writers before you have been, on that one debut novel you've been hacking away at for years. On the bright side, I am at a better place right now to write — and finish — that novel.

So the point of all this, I guess, is to figure out what's next? Lots.

There's that book to write. Like an awesome Chinese soup on slow boil, it can't be hurried. I'm just doing what I know best, although I should know better. But that's for me to figure out.

There's the business, which appears to be growing. I've had the good luck to work with great people, so I'm excited about what it's going to bring in 2012.

Then there's the travel. I've been lucky to be able to visit all these amazing places and to know a few of them quite intimately. There's plenty of travel scheduled for 2012, some work, some leisure, and I may finally be able to get to a few places I've dreamed of going since I was a little girl. Places that were difficult to get to.

On the home front, my resolve to spend more time with my family in Singapore appears to be going well. On the home front in KL, we're at a good place although there are some plans (on my part) to move back to Singapore at some point this year.

I don't know. For someone who hates planning, I've certainly planned too much. Always the big picture, the big goals at the end of the line; never the small details. Maybe it's time to think about the details, too.

Health-wise I'm in pretty good shape. I'd let myself go — so typical of a long-term relationship — but I think I'm back at a healthy weight, build and BMI. Never again. Although the rapid and massive weight loss means I need to shop for a wardrobe anew, it's a step in the right direction for 2012!

I won't bother with setting any resolutions since those so often disappoint. Let's just say I have my eyes on the prize… or prizes! Lots to do, lots to work towards — a combination of company work, personal work, and community work — and I can't wait to get started. Though I'm currently nursing a flu from the brutal Delhi winter smog, I can feel it in my bones that 2012 is going to be a year without precedence, one that will blow the last 5 out of the water (and I've had very, very good years recently)!

Also, I've been going back to India really, really often. That counts for something in the greater scheme of happiness. Happy new year, everybody.

#iamsingaporean

I am a Singaporean who lives in a series of hash tags. They are:

#iamchinese my race, my ethnicity, a language I speak, "mother tongue" classes I struggled with and the colour of my skin

#iamasian a vague identity I hold; ‘one of them' in the tribes of Northeast India and I am ‘one of us' when I am on the streets of peninsular Southeast Asia

#india my second home, a spiritual home that I frequent, whose cities I roam in, whose trains I love, whose air makes me homesick, whose people are my friends

#tech what I do for work and love

#iamsingaporean is the answer that's so obvious, it surprises me

I spent many years doubting my future as part of this nation, for good reason. I always wanted to leave. I left, but as I returned I found the city's transformation to my liking; its new citizens and residents as friends rather than threats; its 2011 elections a watershed that I took weeks off my life to play a part in. I am proud of my little country, whose red passport brings me places in a way that shows me how we ‘punch above our weight'. It is a home I can count on, a home whose rapid change I want to be a part of.

It has been an interesting journey: my circuitous journey upon graduation to the Middle East, to Europe, to India and Bangkok and KL, and back again by way of politics, tech and business. No doubt I will find myself living and working in other places in the world throughout the rest of my life, yet Singapore has never felt so much like home.

I can't yet put my finger on it, it feels like a tide has turned somewhere. Friends I accepted as lost to the charms of the big cities of the West are now homebound; people who never used to care about this place now sing a different tune. I have had the honour to have served my nation with a great many able, clever, talented young Singaporeans.

I think I may be homebound sooner than I thought — although I have already come home in more ways than one in the non-physical sense of the word.

So happy 46th, Singapore. People expect a mid-life crisis of us but I think the best years are ahead of us.

Crazy, Delicious Love

One of the projects that's been super fun to work on has been the birth of the Klang Valley's first homemade ice cream outfit, The Last Polka. M and E run the ice cream empire, I help out with the other bits, like the… tasting of the ice cream. And the copywriting.

What started as a crazy idea — bringing ice cream to KL from Singapore, in a bus, because we couldn't get it here — turned into opportunity. "Why don't we just do it ourselves?" I'm quite the pro at eating and at being strongly opinionated about what I put into my mouth, but the girls have much more of a culinary bent than I do. So I stick to writing about it.

Exactly one year on, we've managed to introduce the pleasures of homemade, "artisanal" ice cream to the Klang Valley. From the little home kitchen and tiny machine, to the ramped-up production now underway, the French-style, Asian-inspired gourmet ice cream idea has flourished from the idea it was, to the real brick-and-mortar business it now is. The ice cream now retails at three location: Marmalade at Bangsar Village II, Marmalade at Mont Kiara, and The Bee in Jalan Universiti (Petaling Jaya). The first scoop shop just opened a few days ago at Taylor's Lakeside campus.

The ice cream repertoire has expanded rapidly: we've now introduced Guinness, French Toast, Nutella and Horlicks to the Klang Valley, to great acclaim.

We were asked to collaborate with Time Out KL for a Valentine's Day special — an aphrodisiac flavour. We managed to create two. Until the end of February 2011, the special romantic combo of chocolate chilli and strawberry cream cheese can be had for just RM 45. Since cool indie ice cream kids love cool indie music kids, we're also collaborating with one of our favourite bands, Furniture. Their new album (preview here) "They Made Me Out of Dreams You've Forgotten", can be purchased together with the two tubs of ice cream for just RM 65 in all.

Order at our website (I know, we need a new one — I threw this together very quickly even before ice cream production began, and we've since outgrown it!), and get yourself some love.

Be Kind, Reboot

It's no secret I've lost interest in writing a blog — I'm not sure when that happened. It just did. Uni came and went. Life and love took me places. I got caught up in my projects, and soon the fun that blogging once was paled in comparison with real life.

I still wanted to keep this site around, but it went through something of an existential crisis, not knowing what it wanted to be. Before Twitter came about the dichotomy was easy to understand: offline, long form writing, was in magazines, newspapers, academic journals; everything else was here. It is now hard to write in the same intimate, personal way I once did. I hope I still can. I have good reasons to be less forthcoming. In any case, Twitter served instead as a fast and dirty way of getting all that other stuff posted. Life stopped being so dramatic. In turn, I had little to report.

For about a year after university ended, I had the time of my life because I learned I could spend all my time writing, taking pictures, riding in planes and buses, and get paid for it. I stopped living in Singapore full time in 2008 and went through Spain, UK, United Arab Emirates, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Oman, India, Thailand, Philippines, Germany, Sweden although I never really thought it was possible.

Some time beginning 2009, I began to exhibit signs of wanting to settle down. I began working on an aviation startup with a business partner, and although I have moved on to other things since, I learned a great deal from the scene, the experience, and the people I worked with. I'm now between Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and Bangkok, getting my two companies up and running. Business is picking up, and I will link to it once our new website is up, and I am still learning and making it up as I go along. One of the companies designs and develops on the web, and also publishes lifestyle publications; the other, just a day old, specializes in iOS development. We have had the luck to work with some great clients in our early days, and we continue to learn new things everyday. We have done some good work, there are cool things happening at the moment, there are iOS titles we will soon be publishing that I can't wait to tell you all about, and everything's new and exciting and shiny at the same time.

I still write, but when I put down my bags and signed on for a two year lease and for animals, I told myself that I will save what little time and focus I have left after all the other stuff I want to do, for writing that matters to me. Offline, I will resume writing for a number of good publications that I like, on topics that I give a damn about. I will post links here as they happen (there's a story slated for 12 February in the Indian paper, Mint). Online, I will save this space for the long form writing I want to do more of. Twitter and Tumblr will serve as the repository for the off-the-cuff ideas and thoughts that tend to become fragmented and scattered after a while.

I will be saving a whole section on this site for India, as it's probably about time. I don't think I will ever run out of things to say about India, even if I don't write about anything else. I intend to start writing more about my work as well. In previous incarnations, the mystery wasn't so much of one, as it was my complete and utter inability to get organized. Now that I've finally managed to define what I do, and to keep tabs on each aspect, I should be able to share them more thoroughly and frequently.

So why did I pull the plug on the old site? I haven't. The old site and all its archives are still available here. I felt I needed to reboot my online life to make a complete break from the old way I used to write, and the person I used to be. I don't know if this version is 100% different, or better, but I'd like to find out. I could no longer allow my 16 year old rants — no matter how eloquent or interesting I think they might be — to define my online self.

So we start afresh.

Two Hundred and Nine

A year in review

2009 was a year of many things: it was the year of change and death. More so it was the year of change because of death. Many famous people died that year; my grandfather, who was not famous, somehow also did the same. In April I called him from a phone booth in Beirut at US$2 a minute and had a 30-second conversation with him about minced pork noodles. In May I called him from London and had a 30-second conversation with him about minced pork noodles. In June they called me 3 hours after I landed in Kuala Lumpur from London, on the brink of my new life not far from home. 12 hours later I was sitting by his hospital bed, in a hospital 5 minutes from where I have lived all 24 years of my life, feeling like the last 24 hours of travel was about to change everything I knew about those very 24 years. By the middle of the month he was dead, and I didn’t get to see it. All I know is that 3 different people woke me up at 6 in the morning that morning and told me in 3 different languages that my ah gong was gone.

In Chinese familial taxonomy, the standing of every person in your family is relative and also language-dependent. Depending on your relationship to that person, and which linguistic branch is dominant in that side of the family, you call him or her a different thing. So your father’s mother is ah ma, your mother’s mother is gwa ma — if both sides of the family more or less speak the southern Min languages like Hokkien or Teochew, like we do. Your father’s younger sister is one thing, older sister is another; depending on their position among the siblings, and your own relationship to that person, each person is called something else. Like knowing whether tables, ties, or street lamps are feminine or masculine in French, everybody inherently knows this. But ah gong was only ah gong. To all of us.

I lived with this man and his wife almost every second of my existence. Then I grew up, travelled madly, lived abroad, and came home expecting not very much to change but instead everything did: no old Chinese man berating me about cigarettes and alchohol, no grumpy old man coming into my room at 3am every morning to check if I was alive, no funny old man who was a head and 3 foot sizes smaller than me telling me his slew of so bad they’re funny jokes that weren’t really jokes.

Then bloody 2009 took him away from me. We found out he was born on the same day as Michael Jackson. (Chinese lunar calendars and their ever-changing dates; we only found out when the date went up on his tomb.) A week after that, Michael Jackson died. Sometimes when I think about it, I think it was cosmically timed so that my ah gong could shine his torch at MJ’s face, laugh at his nose, and tell him that in Singapore we’ve immortalized him in a soya bean milk and grass jelly drink, after the ambiguous colour of his skin (and his famous song).

The rest of it in a nutshell, because they just don’t seem as important: I lived in the United Arab Emirates. I went to a camel market. Some camel trader offered 20 camels for my hand in marriage. I said no. I went to Yemen. Missed two bombs. Called my parents to tell them I was alive, and they said “okay, good”, because they were asleep and thought I sounded too happy for someone who’d just had a bomb scare. Happened to be in Pattaya and Bangkok at the precise moment the Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt April demonstrations erupted. Swatted flies with a tennis racket electric mosquito swatter while watching Thaksin on TV, with all his evil. Did my ultimate roadtrip: Beirut, Bekaa Valley, Damascus, Palmyra, Homs, Aleppo, Adana, Antalya, Goreme, Istanbul, London. Messed around in London for a while. Went home. Ah gong died. Mourned for a long time. My friends say India is my Prozac, so I went to Chennai, Fort Cochin, and Mumbai for a while to, well, “find myself”. Moved to KL. Settled. Got a dog. Started a business. Spent the new year with my love without having to spend a thousand dollars flying to see her.

2009 was good; but I can’t wait for this one to really kick off.

The Torino Express

Beirut

Downtown Beirut was swanky. Saifi Village was strange. I had to duck into a hair salon and get my hair cut by a gay man in Ashrafieh to avoid the guy following me on his scooter, and the other guy trying to sell me drugs. All I wanted was a steak. Walking around Beirut, glamorous, fashionable Beirut, the party capital of the gay Middle East, where everyone, straight, gay, and in-between, was artsy or beautiful or a bit of both, was mind-bending. Here was a United Nations tank, soldiers armed with rifles. Here was a pockmarked building, riddled with gunshot wounds, the architectural reflection of Beirut’s own wounded but eternal soul. In the fashionably frumpy quarter of Gemmayze, I joined the artsy young Beirut set for a night. Saturday nights in Gemmayze’s many hole-in-wall bars and clubs felt right; in early 2009, this was where Beirut’s heartbeat was to be found. Every couple of years, that changes, according to my friend Dana. Like many Lebanese, she left the country as a teenager because of the war. Never quite settling elsewhere, she joined the permanent Lebanese diaspora in Montreal and then in Dubai. I cannot imagine what it’s like to call such a beautiful, vulnerable strip of land “home”; it must be hard to juggle so many identities. “The New York Times Travel page just ran a story about how ‘Beirut is back’. Bars, clubs, it’s so hip now, yada yada,” I said. “Oh, please. Every five years or so the New York Times “rediscovers” that “Beirut is so different from the Middle East” and “and how we’re a party town,” she scoffed. “It’s a surprise only to them. Every five years or so somethings blows up, the shit hits the fan. Then we’re okay, and we make the New York Times again. And again.” Meanwhile, a gorgeous gay Lebanese man held hands under the table with his strikingly handsome French partner, while Dana ordered us more beer and whisky and expounded at length about how weird it is that Middle Eastern culture places so much importance on what’s been between her legs. I remembered what a foreign correspondent once said about this city being every old-school foreign correspondent’s dream: you could interview the Hezbollah at lunchtime and count on foie gras, wine and beautiful people showing at your parties after, on the other side of town. I love this place.

_

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And The Living is Easy

Weddings, funerals and fortune tellers depress me.

Weddings, I’ve been known to say, make me linger too long on the idea of happiness. Not that it’s ever been bleak on the romantic front. The wedding type of happy simply seems worlds apart from the love type of happy to me, but then I was the odd one out in too many ways. I was that strange little girl who distressed, not too silently, over the idea that any impending happiness had to come from a Prince Charming, a white dress, a ring, or a HDB flat. I squinted hard in the horizon and tried to see some kind of prince heading my way. I made mental concessions, I had to. “If this prince has long hair, a beautiful face, and soft hands to hold,” I often wondered aloud, “then I guess it’s okay.” Maybe that’s why I didn’t have too many friends in primary school. I like the idea of marriage. But weddings, and ceremonies or rituals of any sort that spell out the rules of what can’t be done more than what can, just depress me. Gay people usually feel we have to work twice as hard in everything: to excel at sports even though you’re a faggot, to make it at the workplace even though you’re a dyke, to be happy even though you’re a sad homosexual. And now I have to work twice as hard to fly somewhere else, book a vineyard, buy two dresses, find the right girl, and fly everyone there and know not everyone I love will be happy for me? I don’t know. I don’t know how that compares to cold jellyfish, PowerPoint slides, sharks’ fin, yum sengs and bad singing from the groom. Maybe happiness doesn’t need other people’s approving — or disapproving — looks.

Funerals are something else altogether. Losing a loved one is a terrible thing and, I’ve been told, doesn’t get any better with practice. There is nothing pleasant about a funeral. Grief and loss is the sum total of the pain of heartbreak and disappointment, magnified. They remind us of our own mortality, the things not yet done, the things we will never do. Aspirations, ambition, dashed dreams, lost loves, happiness, the abruptness of death, what little time you have left and what you still need to do. Death makes every obstacle in life seem ridiculously small in comparison. My grandfather died a few days before Michael Jackson. It destroyed me. My ex is getting married in three countries to the same person, just a few months after my niece was born and a few days after one of my good friends gave birth. It’s supposed to be revitalizing. I find this all chilling. Exciting, eventful, but some days I crave normalcy. Yet I’m finding, rather late into young adulthood, that everything we did in English Literature class — love, loss, death, other such milestones and the cycles of life — are not overwritten cliches. How Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in Stoppard’s version, spent all their lives trying to find out their destiny only to be ultimately disappointed; trapped within the wheels of pre-determination?

And those high priests of pre-determination, fortune tellers. They are to most people, beacons of light. For the less superstitious like myself, they disappoint me greatly even if they have only good things to say. That’s it? That’s life? That’s all love is about? How the hell do you know this anyway? I’ve been to quite a few from Singapore to Dhaka to Antalya and Istanbul, just out of curiosity, and I’ve come to the conclusion that maybe I just don’t want to know. Maybe all I want is to fumble my way through life attending as few funerals as I can. Travel even more. Give up smoking. Drink as much good wine and spirits as I can, not at the same time. Be a good person. Send my parents on nice vacations every now and then. Give my best in everything I do. Love bravely, truthfully, fiercely and without fear; not of anybody else, not of each other. Be loved in equal amounts. Have a long distance relationship only once, but make it count. Give to charity. Be kind to cats. Live in as many cities as I can. Turn 24 in three months time but not 10 000 kilometres away from the person I love, ever again.

Maybe even learn to be more optimistic about weddings if I expect to still have friends in my middle age. Or do a better job of pretending.

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.

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.

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.)

Excavation

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

Wherever I go, I am not allowed to forget – how perfectly crisp and displaced my unaccented English is. If there is an accent it is not one you can pin down. To my countrymen it betrays my independent school upbringing, a way of life, perhaps even my inclination towards the ways of the “West”. To all others it is a curious melting pot of diverse manners of speaking, testament to the absorption of diffuse cultures, if we are even able to say clearly what “culture” is, if we even had any control over these points of contact.

In a backpacker’s lodge in Australia one year, the football-mad nationalities gathered around the TV to watch the emotional Manchester United-Liverpool showdown, while the Americans sat in a corner unsure of what to watch out for on the telly. I realized, but not without some shock, that in the event I would ever watch my national team play (and so they did – at the Tiger Cup the next year, to surprise victory), the jersey I would be wearing would be the one on-screen. Red, too.

I said to a visitor once: the best thing about living in this place is the First World living at Second World prices. Everything else is a sort of win some, lose much situation. Our methodology in learning and teaching the Chinese language perhaps betrays far more than we are willing to let it – those characters, if we ever learn them at all, have become meaningless, we learn the broad strokes but not the fine print, we repeat to perfection the art of imitating a model essay under duress by our tuition teachers; those words are hieroglyphics at best, and the best that many of us can do is to attempt to create meaning from these hieroglyphs.

I am never allowed to forget my accent. In English, it is an accent which points not to precise geographic locations, but to imprecise states of mind and imagined affiliations. In the mother tongue, it is the lack of a passable accent that is grating to even my ears. Both have to do with displacement and unsettlement, and neither of them are exactly pleasant.

The district does not sleep tonight. Sonagachi is just waking up, but the streets are already lined with last night’s vomit, uncleared, and the air still reeks of the liquor from every night before for the past years, uncleared. Today’s girls have taken the place of yesterday’s, though, who have either moved on to be the mummy (the lucky ones), or given way to one venereal disease and unwanted childbirth too many.

It is easy to rage when reading about it miles away from the scene – the exploitation! The misery! The violence against women and children! The illegality of human trafficking!

Being here changes all that. The rage is still present but tempered with resignation; even understanding. Some of the girls look as young as 12 – mostly, they are; if not, then they are malnourished and hence look many years younger than their actual age. Most of them are not here by choice. The only people who get to choose are those who had “choice” taken from them in the first place: the ones who, now hundreds of miles away from their homes (in Bangladesh, Nepal, rural parts of India whose village names they never knew, cannot remember, or can never return to again from shame) – these people can choose to stay in, or ship out into the big cities of West Bengal and beyond, where they have no one, whose language they do not even natively speak.

Sonagachi is Kolkata’s red light district – it also happens to be Asia’s largest. Conservative estimates put the number of sex workers in this district alone to be at least 40 000. This number means nothing until you take a walk through it: girls as far as your eyes can see. Some of them reek of alcohol and substances; all of them look resigned.

It wasn’t the fist-clenching, heart-pumping moment I had expected.

Instead, I felt the – what shall I call it – sadness – permeate my body and grip my soul, as my eyes fell to meet their vacuous ones, woman to woman.

It was the moment I had been waiting for all my life, to invoke that trite turn of phrase.

I’d felt her inch closer to me, her arms against mine, as we tried to pretend to be interested in watching the movie, my palm against hers. We lasted about eight minutes. By the ninth, we were kissing breathlessly, bodies against each others’. She was my first as I was hers – it felt nothing like kissing the many boys we’d each had. I remember with precision all which I was thinking as I stepped into her darkened flat: how is it possible that I have only known this person’s last name for a week, and yet feel this.. impossibly close? After. I was lying stomach down, fiddling with my mobile to pretend to have something to do other than swoon.

“When you grow up,” she said. “You’re going to be really scary – impossibly brilliant and sexy. And I’m going to have to try so hard not to want you.”

I was grasping at straws vacillating between my rising enchantment and the crushing despair: that in two hours she had accomplished what it took my men months to, if ever at all – wrap me around like that. And she knew it.

I sat at the edge of the bed, as I would continue to for weeks after, watching her as the orange light fell upon her face, as I would for months after. Her hand in mine for never more than an hour each time. I remember thinking, my God, she’s so goddamn beautiful.

It has been a number of years, but I’m not sure I’m done growing up, or if I’ve even begun to.

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.)

X Weeks of Not Missing You

Reposting stuff from my archive. This one from 2003, when I was a wee child.

(so I still lie, to myself, more than to you.)

sketches for my sweetheart the drunk..

Hey. I don't think about you so much these days. I still do, of course – when my too-good memory starts acting up. Of course I do – it's not easy to forget anything for me. But especially not with us. The floating poem, unnumbered. "Whatever happens with us, your body will always haunt mine." I don't know what's going on with you now but I applaud you for the concerted effort to keep me out – you know exactly how I will obsess otherwise. I didn't take it too well at first but then I am 18 now and have learned the adult code of conduct in part, so it isn't so bad anymore. But I think you know how the story goes. Mine again, for a time at least, then not, then you will, then you won't..

I know it by heart – why can't we say goodbye conclusively?

(Because whatever happens with us, your body will always haunt mine, and I, yours… because there isn't any good enough.) I miss you alot. I don't know what you're doing now or how many men you're sleeping with. When dusk comes around and orange light sneaks into my house through its apertures I think a little of us, hair falling like water, orange light against our faces. So when it rains I think a little of us, lying on your bed wasting away a lazy Saturday afternoon. Of course you never forget these things. I used to stumble in wanting to translate our collective memory to the currency of living.

I don't anymore, I don't even want to try, knowing I will die in the process.

I own you and belong to you in a way no one else ever can. But then other people also own you in a way I never will come close to. I think you'd unsuccessfully attempted to articulate this before (using a bad analogy about skiing and injuries I think): you've never seen me at my worse. When I am ill, crippled, or injured. He has – taking me to clinics and driving me to hospitals, the like. With you and I – when we are together we are always at our best. The best foot forward, according to you. We never slip up because we don't see each other that much to begin with. When we do meet it's always the best performance, rendered to perfection in private rehearsals in our bedrooms, alone.

You own me and belong to me in a way no one else can: they have not, I presume, had you hold them in the way only two women can – lips locked on the one end and fingers primed for my pleasure at the other. They have not had me go at them in the same manner I do you, in the name of love (truly, I wouldn't be bothered to work half as hard otherwise); encouraged by your reaction to me. But then you also belong to everyone else in a way I could never own you in. I don't know what you're like when you're with your friends, what you're like with your men, what you're like when you're drunk (though I suspect I don't want to know..). As we speak you could be fucking some strange man now and even if you were doing it in part out of the desire to prove you're not that gay (not as gay as to want only me), what good does that do for me? I am still here, still a fuckwit, still thinking of you. We go running back to our easy men and easy sex, easy sex from easy men. Because what we want is too difficult – or maybe we want it precisely because it is unattainable (in this lifetime, in this country).

Baby, I'm just so tired. So tired of living up to your expectations of me, especially your demands for brilliance from me. So tired of playing the part of precocious talent being tormented by a mentor she hates and adores in equal parts. So tired of drawing you to me and tempting you with the carrot of having your history written out as you speak it, since I have proclaimed myself the scribe of The Great Affair. I don't think you'd have liked me as much, or kept coming back, if not for the reaction I have to you, and the words that this spawns.

I want to run away from you.

The more you are around and the older I get, the more of a mess we will get into, and you know that as well. You know as I get older and as the gap in our social circle thins out, as it becomes increasingly easier for us to see each other, you know somehow or other (we might not even will it to), we will be in a greater mess than anything that's ever happened. So I want to make that impossible. I want to runaway from you, from him, from this place. I want to see the both of you as little as I possibly can – you, because I probably will still love you years from now and will have to stop myself from wanting to shag you so much, so indiscriminately and illegitimately. From him because nobody has to live like this, this life I have subjected him to with my cruelty. For too long you have dominated my landscape. Nobody has to live like me.

I just turned eighteen; to have loved so much but come away with… this little. Only D. can empathise – we both chose the harder path because we were too proud to settle for all that comes easily. We scoff at these other teenaged couplings and mock them for their simplicity, at how heroically ordinary they are. In our pursuit of the extraordinary and the exceptional, we could lose our minds (and hearts, several times). People may not think much of our ‘affairs' but they fail to see our intensity. What our love(s) can culminate into, fail us most times but if and when they bear fruit, the results are so amazing in their gravity but overbearing in their weight.

All this, before the age of eighteen. The fruition into dust and ashes such as this.

I want to runaway someplace where the air smells colder and my nose will have a perpetual sniffle from. Where the sun kisses the land and the beach is not mud and stones masquerading as a seaside and I can have an engaging intellectual setting to call home for some years. Where I don't need to see or hear from you so much. Practise forgetting you completely. Have an inordinate number of men and women, perhaps fall in love with some intelligent, beautiful woman even (and not merely to spite you with). Not you because you will always break my heart, not him because I will always break his heart. After a lifetime of excess, I crave balance…

I should have loved a thunderbird instead. At least when spring comes they roar back again..

An Exercise of Faith

This was published in QLRS in Jan 2003.

I had weighed the burden of desire in my hands

but in yours you weighed reality between your fingers,

half serious even as we tried to kid ourselves

(and others) nothing else quite mattered.

I weigh now the desire of burden in my fingers

but in yours you now weigh illusion between your hands,

half kidding even as we deal with truth

ours as much as others’; nothing else but this matters now.