son of the soil

i get a tour of modern day barracks today as J1 enlists. it's a multi-building multi-story cheerful yellow-and-cream complex with more amenities than i expect. they show me the dormitories the vending machines the cook-house and their obstacle course. i find myself thinking, is it over yet? because really, i just need to know you have a paramount commitment to safety. how they will live is incidental to me.

book hunt

i visit the popular bookstore, singapore's homegrown answer to borders.

half the store sells stationery. half a wall and one table sell paperback fiction. another half a wall sells magazines. one shelf sells self-improvement books. the remainder of the store sells school assessment books guide books children's readers and other paraphernalia of the supplemental education industry.

people, i want to say. what are those kids going to read when they graduate from the main part of the store and hit the last wall? 

new demography 2

time was when passengers on the trains hid behind newspapers books or slumber. these days every man is a desert island huddled up with his earphones smartphone and iPad. plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

new demography

one week in singapore casts up new stereotypes. bus drivers and coffee shop assistants are p.r.c. chinese speaking impeccable mandarin and little else. the girls at the cold storage cashier and in shops are filipina. that helpful guide at the mrt station is foreign too. i miss the staunchly local middle aged men and women who previously populated all these places with their harshly accented ungrammatical endearingly familiar english malay mandarin and hokkien. the final domestic bastion must be the taxicab, whose driver continues to maintain his fierce opinions in unapologetic singlish.

pledged - a robbins (2004)

the blurb says, alexandra robbins rips into the secret, sordid underbelly of sororities. for a graduate, not of a sorority, but of an old school post-colonial university hall in the far east, this book is surreal. 

sororities have pledging. we had orientation.

they have hazing. we had ragging.

initiation. we even called it initiation too!
sorority songs. hall songs.

earning their letters. becoming a keviian.

administration crackdowns on hazing. and ragging.

booze and drugs. booze by the barrel.

elitism and exclusivity. hostelites as a breed apart.

intra-greek competition. inter-hall fights.

chapter meetings & events. hall meetings & events.

philanthropy chair. welfare secretary.

executive board. junior common room committee.

in the years since i have often wondered at the unthinking herd mentality that allows us to inflict unmentionable humiliations on each other, all in the name of cultivating an esprit de corp. pledged brings back too many bad memories of a deformed edifice upon which happily some better memories are built. 

sweet seventeen

J2 turns seventeen. i remember her in her hospital bed, spent from illness. i remember her first words then, after we fear the worst and no longer dare to hope, why are the curtains pink? she amazes me still with her unapologetic enthusiasm and her sunny eagerness to know more to experience more and to be more. she humbles me with the simplicity of her ideals and the richness of her love. you have been a comfort and an inspiration, i need to tell her. i thank my God each time i think of you.

sunday

my first english service in the home church in almost a decade, i think. it is a traditional methodist service with a full order of service opening and closing hymns recitation of the creed and the communion altar. the words of the liturgy wash over me and engage me in a way they did not. i am quietly swept along into faith that is bigger than my faith and into church that is larger than my church. there is a value to ritual and liturgy that one treasures better only after being broken a little. the words are plain shorn of adornment and painfully predictable. they adequately express all i could, and need, to say.

who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, or with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? 

-isaiah 40:12

diet sheet

favorites this trip:
xiao long bao from din tai fung
that meat floss bun from breadtalk
xiao long bao from din tai fung
the japanese bread from 7-eleven
xiao long bao from din tai fung

rabbit year

spending my first lunar new year back east in five years, and this is what i say. there is chinese culture, and there is a gagging overdose of popular chinese culture. i've got new year ditties streaming out my ears in crimson ribbons a primordial desire to avoid new year news on tv and an increasing revulsion for the tidal waves of humanity in their new year finery thronging every public nook and cranny. soon i am going to have to flee mandarin orange monsters.

internet withdrawal

my laptop is currently generally blanketed in electronic insulation interspersed with occasional patches of connectivity, like now.