13 July

Our magic 3 hour forest walk <*:-)

wah lau eh

A part of the photo department- the man in the middle is a legend to me, and the guy behind got his foot sprained while chasing a famous actor on one of those mad squeezing assignments, and there's Judith, the photo technician and spyer on all goings-on. With this job, I understood for real for the first time what it really meant- the joy and pain of work. It really is an incredible job, making art of real life and meeting all kinds of people and going to all sorts of places and situations. I can't quite grasp how to explain it, but it will always be to me in some way and in some reality the best job in the world.

and now, Pulau Pinang. We stayed on Lorong Love the first night in a backpacker's hostel (Old Penang Guesthouse, an old shophouse), our roommates were a taiwanese mother and daughter who rented a motorbike and went around to kampungs and fishing villages themselves! She (the former) wore a skimpy red silk nightie to sleep and walked very loudly on the wooden floor in the corridor, i think it's because she couldn't read english and there were Walk Silently signs.


Famous Keng Swee/Keng Kwee Street chendol, or what Carol calls Violent Chendol, because of the psychotic violent way the auntie scoops and mixes the ingredients while apparently giving her competitor directly across the narrow street an evil glare.

A beautiful temple where we prayed and spent the lovely evening sitting and watching the people go by. Some would go by on their motorbikes or cars, slow down near the temple and then raise their hands in prayer before continuing on. A few slowed down just to gawk at us japanese schoolgirls.


Caretaker of the temple, good friends of the economic analyst we met there who kept asking us what we think of LKY.

Ho Auction room (on the left)

On our last day we decided to look for the famous nyonya kueh (that Carol's mother might have seen on a pck show that went there) and so we dilligently read the map and made it, but nearly missed it because the road sign of Jalan Mesjid was so old and invisible.

Hardworking sweating uncle cutting up hundreds of kuehs for a large order.

His wife, father and auntie inside hard at work rolling dough for the curry puffs. They were wonderfully nice and gave it to us for free in the end.

HAHAHA. Spotted at the heritage walk where there were many old shophouses. They screamed and shielded their faces while holding on to their sandwiches and lunchboxes. The uncle said he sends them to and from school everyday.

Johnny reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince while we gallivant outside.

The women in the sea are arabic women clothed from top to toe. They got soaked and all seemed to be having a super fun time.

Alan, the taxi driver we found on the first day and with whom we went to quite a few places! His dream is to backpack in Europe with his friend who can speak English (he can't), but he is saving up first.

Air Itam village, a wonderful place to be.

The super famous Asam Laksa stall in Air Itam that Carol ate from when she was little, and we found it. Hello Uncle!

Her Asam Laksa. What a legend.

My best-ever penang hokkien mee from across the road, and I persuaded the Uncle to let me carry it over (to the Asam Laksa on the opposite side) and he agreed and cleaned his Jacob tray for the deed.

A girl who was wandering around the Penang Hill railway.

The strenuous walk (for older people) down from Kek Lok Si Temple. I tried to say that the walk is quite taxing, but I think she couldn't hear me well and said, 'oh thank you!'

On the 15-hour rickety train ride home. The food is cooked in the dining car, and we had sandwiches, fried rice, beehoon and I had milo four times that day. The cook was bored and showed us magic tricks before a hairdresser from Ipoh joined in.

I love Pulau Pinang.

jiggy polkas

Seven more days to playtime, and in between, the return of more old friends. It's building up inside of me like a pot of warm honey. Skate-scootering around chinatown, bukit timah hill, tree tops trail, more Kali, curling up with books at home, blue hair, sleepy chinese tea sessions, penang, and night safari with my cousins are just some of the promises of summer.

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?

on the lane where i live, there is a grand tree that sheds pink flowers once in a long while

Did elves and fairies come out to play when no one was looking?

a magic forest walk

On the way to finding a shady spot for Kali outdoor training at Fort Canning Park, taken with a cheap old family film camera we got about ten years ago

Old friends, old friends. Sat on their park bench like bookends.

(Art Garfunkel recorded old people in various locations in New York and Los Angeles over a period of several months. These voices were taken from those tapes.)

Voices of Old People, from the album Bookends.

Man 1: I got little in this world. I give honesty without regret. One hundred dollars for that picture. I remember taking a picture with...

Woman 1: Ooh! Let me show you. Let me show you our picture. This was me and my husband when we were first married.

Woman 2: I always slept on one side, left room for my husband.

Woman 1: And that's me when we were sixteen.

Woman 2: But this, this, this, this is not the case. I still do it. I still lay on the half of the bed. (pause) We used to sneak in...

Man 2: Still haven't seen the doctor I was seein'; there's been blood for the last, eh, forty-eight hours, and I can't get up the mucus for the last, eh, two, three months... oh yes, and I maintain, I maintain strongly, to this minute, I don't think it's an ordinary cold.

Woman 3: God forgive me, but an old person without money is pathetic.

Woman 4: Children, and mothers, that's the way we have it. A mother-- they are--

Woman 5: 'Cause mothers do too much.

Woman 4: That is mother's life, to live for your child. (pause) Yes, my dear.

Man 3: I couldn't get younger. I have to be an old man. That's all. Well...

Woman 6: Are you happy here, honey? Are you happy living with us?

Man 3: So anytime I walk with Lou and... that's all.

Woman 6: Mr. Singer? Are you happy living with us here?

Woman 7: But we don't do that, dear.

Woman 6: But are you happy?

Woman 7: If you mean, if, if you could say, yes, and I thought, and I was so happy, and everybody, "What is this? What is it?"

Woman 8: It just is, beautiful. Like, just a room. Your own room, in your own home.



Can you imagine us years from today,
sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange to be seventy.

'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'

-The White Queen, Alice Through the Looking-Glass

You know how you listen to your favourite music and singers for so long and it becomes less special than it once was, and then one day you find yourself rediscovering them again? I can't count how many times i've rediscovered the beatles. The Anthology is one big heavy book in my bedside drawer, for sleepless nights, just in case, and they will be there. But mostly to read before sleeping. Beatles dreams. Tee hee.

Today I was supposed to meet Elfie for dinner, and was walking to meet him, and dreaming of fish and chips for dinner, and before that I had told him that we might have to cancel if news crops up at the last moment and I have to go take photos- and happen it did. I went to a convention hall where people and followers of an Indian woman were seated and listening to her. It was the closest thing to a hippie convention that I've been to. I spoke to an Irish woman who is following the Indian woman around on her travels. She (the irish woman with silvery and gray hair and specs that magnified her blue eyes) wore a soft white sari and her breath smelt of the sweetest herbs. Or was it her hair which was close to her breath?

I'm off tomorrow and looking forward to the morning sunshine, slow breakfast, repairing my watch, collecting photos developed from film (a few which might've been exposed and ruined because I opened the compartment), my sister's birthday, Kali class. There's nothing like the shen2 mi4 gan3 (as the shop auntie says) of using film to take photos and waiting for it to be developed, especially after I take hundreds of shots a day at work. Nothing beats taking one precious shot and waiting to see the photograph on a summer afternoon.

13 hearts autumn

Life at the New Job has been challenging. And everyday I find myself somewhere absurd, like outside a factory in an industrial estate as it is raining, or all alone at some part of the turf club, or at a super ulu country club literally at the end of Singapore, or with someone I've seen on television growing up, calling me ke ai because I asked him to do kicks for the photoshoot. I LIKE THIS ABSURDITY. My heavy backpack sometimes cuts off circulation to my arms, now I know what NS boys feel like on long marches.

p

Little things that make me happy:

My father helping me carry my bag from the car to the house

My uncle doing the same <:-)

My grandmother steaming broccoli for me. Smells like farts but has pure natural sweetness.

Having dinner with my family at the end of the work day

Snuggling in bed to read a bedtime story

p

They (cousins, sister, grandmother, auntie) went for Disney on Ice today. I called Little Gingercat up about it, and she said the little mermaid segment wasn't much though my sister said they did tell the story of Ariel and sing songs. But here's what Gingercat said: "they just...ski about and make some noise and then happily ever after."

sea blanket

Have a magical Friday the 13th <*:-)