Saturday, July 28, 2012

One Saturday Morning

I went to Ang Mo Kio on a Saturday morning and found a clown sitting by the post boxes in the void deck. He had a baby sparrow feather in his woolly winter hat, curly salt-and-pepper hair, and a thousand-colourful-mirrors shirt complemented with a wacky black-and-white-smileys tie. On his feet he wore black Crocs and from his bag out stuck a pair of cheap plastic clubs wrapped in aluminum foil (from NTUC?). What are you doing? I asked. I'm waiting, he said. And then he whistled Tian Mi Mi, ending vibrato style. That was nice, I said. You're welcome, he said. Is the aluminum foil from NTUC? I asked. No, he replied, it's from Sheng Siong; they have an offer on aluminum foil every second tuesday of the fifth month of the zodiac year of the rabbit. Oh yes, I recalled, my grandmother once told me that.I invited him for tea at the kopitiam but he said, I only drink kopi-o or teh-o. Me and those like me  are lactose-intolerant. Oh, I thought, this is the most important thing I learnt this weekend. When I went back to work on Monday, I decided to be lactose-intolerant too so that I could be more like him and those like him. After 33 days, my boss fired me for non-conforming behavior.My gynaecologist gave me some good advice so I went to Mongolia and became the first vegetable farmer there. All my smiling meat-eater neighbours came to buy my kang kong and sweet potato leaves and learnt from me. I made sambal kang kong and became the richest vegetable farmer in Mongolia. One day, I was sitting in my ger tent knitting a turquoise scarf when I heard someone whistling Tian Mi Mi outside. It was a hot day and the infinite grasses looked thirsty. I parted the cream-coloured cloth and there stood the clown from the Ang Mo Kio void deck. He looked exactly the same but carried a huge lemon-yellow backpack that looked like it could have made 500 glasses of lemonade that hot day. What are you doing? I asked. I'm waiting, he said. For what? I asked. I think I'm ready to start a life here with the infinite grasses and the blooming clouds, he said. Okay, I said, we can do this together. Okay, he said. We went in and chomped on celery slathered with American peanut butter dotted with Chinese raisins. It started to drizzle outside. We smiled at one another and I shared with him the secret of growing kang kong in Mongolian weather.


Saturday, July 14, 2012

friday the thirteenth two thousand and two

I am 25. If I don't live to a hundred, more than a quarter of my life has passed. I have morphed from a brat who loved sitting in an armchair after dinner reading storybooks; to an awkward teenager who adored the beatles, read up about 'hippies', and was an encyclopedia of oldies; to a human clown with a secret, floating on a cloud, pierced intermittently by acid rain, faithfully drinking liquid chlorophyll every morning before a fruit blend. Gee, maybe soon it will be time for a voyage to the moon. Did you know it wasn't real? The publicity, the facts, the people sitting in front of their TV screens believing in magic. This shows that magic doesn't quite take place like that because people in power are almost always bad; that real magic is not an old-time magician with his trickery props, his heavily-eye-lined red-lipped classic beauty and his jangly alibaba pants, slicing her in two, nor is it in smoky potions or elusive alchemy because we cannot touch what has passed for too long (though I can touch the sixties because it wasn't far too long ago), but real magic is in asking people if they want to come to the moon with you, warm thin thosai on a rainy day served by a waiter whose shirt has lost its button at the belly, holding the hand of someone you love and not thinking exhaustively about Other Things, a bird drinking nectar from magenta flowers after a drizzle, the clouds moving slowly across the sky. If you ask me what all these moments add up to, I don't quite know right now. But if you trust in the moment and let it be (whether you are being interrogated by your boss -who is boss?- or whether you cannot get up in the morning, anything that creates bile in your pink belly that once had nothing in it, nothing but breastmilk, now it is full of shit) you might find that everything is lighter, and you can breathe easier. And then some things don't matter so much anymore. And the things that matter, you work hard to keep and improve. Voltaire said, choose to be happy. I suppose the reply from the dark is yes, Yes. That was the word that took John to Yoko, or Yoko to John. (though now, he is in the sky and Lucy -Yoko- is down in new york city living in an apartment overlooking his mosaic memorial) I saw this written on the table of someone in office who sits near the pantry:

After the final no comes a yes. And on that yes the future of the world hangs.