sticky memories

i. my brother fell from the sofa (how that warranted a hospital stay, i never understood) when we were jumping up and down as we usually did during the theme song of Power Rangers on a saturday morning. i remember my father being very angry, but he stayed with my brother and took lots of photographs. and in the photo, that's us presumably enjoying the hospital television.
ii. grandmother's 56th birthday, with excited fat little tots who are now taller than me. we must have had hundreds of birthday photos taken at that same spot.

looking at old slides are like making a discovery everytime you hold each piece of plastic up to the light. it kind of feels like you are sitting in a little classroom in a plastic primary school chair and someone is projecting these slides onto the screen in front, with the clacking sound of the slides changing themselves, and your life appears in three-second intervals, enough time to notice someone's silly smile, someone's haircut, and for a knotted feeling to pulsate inside. slide film apparently has higher contrast and resolution, so it really is like a burst of colour to see a memory of the past in miniscule form. i wonder if the photos will look different against glowy yellow late-afternoon light, instead of the noon sun?

i look forward to this morning every year

In our old house, which sat on the same spot, the kitchen wasn't white and modern, twas old with beige tiles and rattan blinds you could pull down to block out the sun rays. The kitchen would be most oily the morning my grandmother made bazhang, with oil from the just-cooked bazhangs dripping on the floor and we would rush there in our pajamas to eat a steaming hot bazhang. It goes wonderfully with tea or milo. My grandfather would be all ready for work with his gold watch, eating too. It was marvellously exciting. Each bazhang has rice, mushrooms, pork, and a big chestnut, cooked in a steaming pot for one and a half hours. But since I stopped eating pork, my grandmother has made hay-bee-hiam and chicken ones for me. It is very hard to make this! Takes a lot of skillful finger twisting, and my grandmother learnt this from her mother and mother-in-law. Once when I was young, I ate seven in a day, for all meals. My whole family loves it. And here it is, though it's in a different but same place, this time round.

deranged grandmother who started at 1am as she couldn't sleep

choosing good leaves is an important step.

the hardest step, wrapping up the bazhang

these are a few of my favourite things

plus home lunch cooked by my grandmother today: porridge, with some kind of juicy chinese vegetable (sometimes she has spicy sweet potato leaves picked by her friends from the reservoir, who grow it in a plantation they have), chicken wrapped with herbs and cooked for hours, fried fish with thin ginger slices from which she keeps trying to pick out big chunks of meat for my brother and I, and warm barley water with rock honey sugar. with such a blissful lunch i was ready to conquer anything.

Alcohol swabs

Highly effective in disinfecting keyboards, mouse-s, light switches, handphones and aircon remote controls. The amount of dirt that comes out is startling, the feeling after wiping is...taut. But they wipe the colours off some kinds of stickers (sandylion?) so the originally-yellow star that is above Dumbledore on my room's light switch is now twinkling silver. Disinfecting is HIGHLY SATISFYING, please try it. Think of the germs on your phone, from touching train handlebars, bus buttons, pedestrian crossing buttons, oil from food, and all this times the number of days you haven't wiped it, and then typed a message before having a cookie. Yikes.

In the past few weeks, two Singaporean uncles have said that I am 'definitely from China', two girls have exclaimed that I look very Japanese/Korean and a kopitiam drinks seller from China said he thought I was from Japan/Korea. I just want to be from Roald Dahl land, where life is fizzy, madness occurs and dreams come true.

One of the worst things I have had to do on the job, where I hardly pee (and you all know my bladder tolerance), was having to pee in a kopitiam toilet which was wet and there was no hook for my heavy bag, so I had to squat over the wet seat with my approximately 7kg backpack, with pants rolled up so they wouldn't touch the floor. My legs nearly cramped and all I could think of was, All this for a bloody pee. But that day, I met an 80 year old man and his wife who met decades ago at his school sports day (he was the star runner), an amazing father who does triathlons for and with his son, who was born with a rare genetic disorder, and a hatmaker whose one room flat was chock-full of heaps of things and smelt lovely.

Forty-eight more days, to blue nails, blue hair, stormy mornings, summer afternoons. In other words, The Glorious Holidays.

La maison où j'ai grandi - Françoise Hardy

Quand je me tourne vers mes souvenirs,
je revois la maison où j'ai grandi.
Il me revient des tas de choses:
je vois des roses dans un jardin.
Là où vivaient des arbres, maintenant
la ville est là,
et la maison, les fleurs que j'aimais tant,
n'existent plus.

Ils savaient rire, tous mes amis,
ils savaient si bien partager mes jeux,
mais tout doit finir pourtant dans la vie,
et j'ai dû partir, les larmes aux yeux.
Mes amis me demandaient: "Pourquoi pleurer?"
et "Couvrir le monde vaut mieux que rester.
Tu trouveras toutes les choses qu'ici
on ne voit pas,
toute une ville qui s'endort la nuit
dans la lumière."

Quand j'ai quitté ce coin de mon enfance,
je savais déjà que j'y laissais mon cœur.
Tous mes amis, oui, enviaient ma chance,
mais moi, je pense encore à leur bonheur.
à l'insouciance qui les faisait rire,
et il me semble que je m'entends leur dire:
"Je reviendrai un jour, un beau matin
parmi vos rires,
oui, je prendrai un jour le premier train du souvenir."

La temps a passé et me revoilà
cherchant en vain la maison que j'aimais.
Où sont les pierres et où sont les roses,
toutes les choses auxquelles je tenais?
D'elles et de mes amis plus une trace,
d'autres gens, d'autres maisons ont volé leurs places.
Là où vivaient des arbres, maintenant
la ville est là,
et la maison , où est-elle, la maison où j'ai grandi?

Je ne sais pas où est ma maison,
la maison où j'ai grandi.
Où est ma maison?
Qui sait où est ma maison?
Ma maison, où est ma maison?
Qui sait où est ma maison?