pencil case

'I love you from the bottom of my pencil case...'

theives market

Kan-ni-na!

Me and Mister Sailor went to the sungei road thieves' market today. Here's what i read of it:

More than 30 years old and a fascinating glimpse into Singapore's underbelly. A huge jumble of goods, often sold by grizzled old Chinese "uncles" trying to make the odd 10 bucks from their old record players, battered woks and shirts they wore to a wedding in 1971. There's the occasional amazing find lurking in there somewhere, but even if you don't buy anything, it's an absorbing way to spend an hour or two.

And i found a humongous 'The Magic Faraway Tree' badge, with a big black tree and a splattery colourful background; a 'I'm A SENTOSA Kid' badge (green words on bright yellow background, HA), a beauty and the beast record, and an evil egyptian ring (green crystal on gold band). And i also found a fandi ahmad pencil box, with a striped sharpener enclosed. But i didn't buy it since it's waiting for a fandi ahmad fan to stumble upon it someday and feel like a child discovering something magnificent. And we found old medals, 9 years and under swimming competition at the PA swim club, interschool table-tennis. And bright red jewelled high heels, child-size. Ah Choo, let's go there someday and bargain in hokkien. Siu dua lah. (referring to gargantuan ah-peh rings) And help me choose old chinese records when i get a record player!

If this were ten years ago i might be the child in the story longing for a summer neighbourhood playmate, to sell lemonade with, to go to the swings with, to buy popsicles with, to cycle around the neighbourhood with, to play frisbee at the reservoir with, to run out after dinner with.

When my cousins were on holiday, they came over and we watched cinderella and painted our faces and played pirate and went to the swings. But now, my summer playmate is...my grandmother, we play a game of timing every night. I finish bathing, open the toilet door and she says what she has been waiting to say, 'open the window, let the air in' and i do it, and i quickly adjust the floor mat before she tells me to put it properly. If i do it before she can say it, i win.

Sharpened pencils.

armchair

Why, sit yourself down!


This is the armchair you have been waiting for all your life. Like something from a childhood dream though there never was such an armchair when you were tiny. Maybe all chairs felt big and plush and marvellous because you were small and it felt so fine to just lay back with pillows with your feet sticking out, reading a book after dinner with mummy's room lamp. All those adventures in enid blyton books and fizzy roald dahl stories and tiny facts about dinosaurs and colours. Now there are hard wooden chairs and cloth chairs but nothing warm and safe. This armchair has tiny goldy rusty studs and big arms for you to rest books on and if you lie back hard enough a foot rest pops out. If you fall asleep in it on friday the thirteenth you might wake up somewhere else. Buy this and guard it and one day you will be an old person sitting in it, it will be disgusting and mouldy but it will be the bestest chair in the whole wide world.

bazhang

I tried to wake up at 5 am to film my grandmother making bazhang. This year it occured to me to do that, like growing out of being a child eagerly awaiting, and knowing that this is something precious that might not happen many more times. Anyway, my grandmother's bazhang is my favourite food in the whole wide world. One year I had 7 in a day. When we were young, it was one of the most exciting things that happened only once a year. We'd run down in our pajamas and go into the outside kitchen of our old house (it's still on the same spot of land, but it's not old anymore) and sit at the sticky pseudo-wooden table, but not before wearing slippers because the floor would be oily with bazhang oil, and we would be presented with a bazhang that just came out of the giant tin pot cooking on the glowing charcoal. And when we split it with a fork, steam would flow out and up, and the smell is wonderful! It's a brown bazhang with rice, pork, mushrooms and a big fat chestnut. I remember one year in primary school where my grandfather was in the outside kitchen too, and he was dressed for work with his heavy golden pen and white shirt and black pants, and it was 7 plus am with glowing sunshine, my bazhang just split open, and I felt blissful. My grandmother is an expert at bazhang and it's very hard to make, you have to twist 2 banana leaves in a certain way, scoop and pat rice into it, meat, throw in a chestnut, finish it with rice, twist the leaves, and tie the whole thing to a hanging bunch or bazhangs. Then put it in the giant pot for 2 hours, then fish the bunch out by the strings. This year she made me vegetarian ones, with hae bee hiam (shrimp paste) and strangely they taste nearly like the meat ones. I hope when I'm 64 I'll still remember the taste of her bazhang and sit in my rocking chair looking at my grandchildren but feeling like a child again thinking of the sweet chestnuts and early morning darkness and her knobbly hands patting the rice into the leaves.

ah choo

Bon anniversaire, sorcière folle

Je ne sais pas si tu aimes les moles

Tu as vingt-et-un ans aujourd'hui

Vas sentir les fleurs de la nuit

et quand les fleurs t'enivrent follement

n'oublies pas de manger un bon-bon

appelles-moi quand tu vas accoucher

je peux te preter une bouche pour crier

et quand tu dors sur les fleurs bleus

sous les etoiles et la lune et le feu

j'espere que tu reves à l'amour

et tu respires comme une petite ours

cartwheel

Yahooooo!

If I never do real cartwheels at least I can cartwheel in my heart.

Guavas and strawberries!

floaty

"Ah, he is savage, then? I could see it myself. He glows with danger. Most people just shimmer...he looks like a lightning bolt. It's terribly fascinating."

-The Stars My Destination

The summer's just began, it's scorching hot out, and I need a job, to end these daydreamy days, and for money to go to Mongolia or Coney Island or somewhere where I can get that feeling again.

dust management

Housewife reports: HORMIGAS

I was possessed enough to clean my room this morning. It's a real energiser, after that I even tried cartwheels but was just a leap frog who can't fly. I stopped living in harmony with the ants and went to war with them today. Must've killed hundreds after finding three ant nests. One was in the metal hinge of the back of the wooden photo frame that held the photo of 6 young people dressed as old people under a mango tree; one was under a rattan container with about a hundred scattered items in it; one was, actually Is, inside the back of the at-least-20-year-old James Dean picture from my uncle. Oh and one also inside the about-17-year-old picture of me and my brother at the reservoir when we were a few years old, arms around each other, my hand holding his hand that is on my head. I look peaceful. For the pictures, I just scotch-taped the holes where the ants come out, hopefully they get trapped inside and die of starvation or lack of air. (Can you imagine the crazy labyrinth that might be inside?) The other ants who were crawling along the walls when their homes were sealed/destroyed felt lost and simply froze on the walls for some time not knowing where to go or what to do, along with a few other dead 'uns. It's difficult to reconcile a harmonious acceptance of the tiny wonderful ants with a sudden madness to kill 'em all. I must lie in bed and reflect upon my barbarious behaviour till the next time it takes over me again. And I didn't see no queen ant. I KNOW there is another nest, another route, between the hole in the back of my built-in cupboard (where i uhu-glued the hole but they bit through it anyway) and the darjeeling poster. Possibly another in the jewellery table, another in my cupboard (Auntie Samsyah the knower says that they crawl there and find hiding places), another under the bed. Enough! I found one in the hershey's hot chocolate packet that lucy gave me when i had bronchitis for me to drink when i got well but i forgot, and couldn't bring myself to pry it open for the tiny crawling struggling madness that might've been there. After that as I dusted the remains of tiny dots of cocoa powder off the acid green envelope she stuck it to the smell of chocolate danced in the still suburban air. But from all this I found things for the dollhouse- tiny pictures, cardboard, a plastic egg (this could be a...chair? toilet bowl?), a plastic basket from the lantern festival pig biscuit (a cocoon bed?) It's always mad cleaning your room because you are reminded of everything. All the artefacts from your life, sweet damnation. Damn cultural studies notes, big bird sharpener, panda bear eraser, wisdom teeth x-rays, percussion scores, badge that desiree made for me and where are my chops, the Ariel chop! And efforts at dust management in my room are futile. It is the most dusty antsy room in the house that I shall have to learn to live with the dust or go mad. Does dust have any nutritional value if you eat it? Because that would be the easiest way to get rid of it, just licking it off the tables. Mmm clean sweep. Now I feel all antsy inside and my grandmother stands here and says in chinese, "Jie2 ah, wo3 yun1 le4."

Oui, c'est l'histoire triste de la poussière, des fourmis, et moi.

summer vacation

The Grand Summer Vacation
(you paint the walls red and I'll polkadot them white)













Le Machine à Ecrit que moi et Le Thong ont peint pour le 21eme anniversaire de Sunshower. I hope the waves and light clouds don't make her too pensive while clacking away on it. We also spent too much time making a decoy present of army pants, with careful stitches, and painted Japanese words EAT SHIT and DROP DEAD and Arabic words PEACE BE UPON YOU and CAIRO. Yo-ho-ho!











Vase-painting for my auntie on a sunny afternoon. My favourite part is adding the yellow of the daisies.

I wiped my dollhouse yesterday and it was insanely dirty, filled with cobwebs. The eerie sad cobwebby era is over, now it will be filled with happy curtains and furniture, maybe even a bathtub if i find a tin can and attach legs. Mail me a tiny picture sometime and I'll hang it up. But how do you find little people for a dollhouse?

If I had my own house I'd invite my friends and we'd paint the walls, flowers in the toilet, lion in the living room, dragonflies in the balcony! And for now it's grand -and very lucky- when you get to spend the days like this.

pink tootsie

it was an itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polkadot bikini

desiree and i spotted this one delirious night some part of clementi after we popped in and out of an ah soh shop with shiny hanging handbags. this car belongs in a summer suburbia movie where there are cat-eye glasses, popcorn, honey, teenagers hanky-panking in the back of the car, and then maybe a big fight at the end of it all.

this one is often parked at the row of shops near my house. electric blue. i think the uncle from the paint shop owns it, he looks like a kind but grumpy walrus who looks at me wearily everytime i ignorantly ask him about paint. isn't a blooming beauty.

HITLER'S CAR. i saw it once, parked at the lane where i stay, then again on chinese new year. It is shiny black, with a german flag stuck to the side which probably billows silly in the wind when the car moves, and had labels about vintage volkswagons and a german phrase (maybe i imagined this), and inside there are red leather seats, a cream plastic steering wheel with a big velvet rose on the right, and in the centre of the wheel is a golden greek face. maybe in the glove compartment is hitler's girlfriend's lipstick, like in the movie rat race. upon seeing this car, female admirers should grab a handkerchief and wave and wail and wait for hitler to appear then seduce him for a ride. i peeked in, the owner is a clement tan or timothy tan. i spotted him later as i was spying from my big window and he wore black sunglasses, old looking jeans and a big checkered shirt. he sat on an old metal swing in my neighbour's house, the one with 2 pairs of twins. one of the boys from the older pair shouted 'HELLO KO KO!!!!!!' at me when i cycled past that day.

If I ever get one, I'll call her dixie-lou, or call him tom paul. He/she would be turquoise, with a nice horn, bad aircon, cloth seats, boopy-sounding horn, musky smell. When i was young i watched a channel 8 show where Cassandra See talked about her big pink messy space wagon and i thought it was the coolest thing ever. If i have 5 children we'd all paint our big car.

Awesome cars I saw:
1. On the way to school along mandai. a typical old greyish van, except they had stenciled words on the back, band names, randomly everywhere. ACDC, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath. I sped forward to find the company name or anything, but on one side I found neatly, in the middle, a lightning bolt, and 'If you are about to rock and roll, we salute you'.

2. At a carpark in Ang Mo Kio. An old van, with lots and lots of words stenciled everywhere but what i saw first was, in Red, 'THE BLOODY SHIT HUB'. The rest of the words, everywhere, in black, were funny things like 'why got women in men toilet?!' and 'the sweet smell of the toilet' and toilet jokes about flushing and shit. It was a toilet repair company, and i've got the number, ARRRR.

3. Along PIE tuas. One of those big vehicles that didn't have anything attached to it at that time. Usually at the back of the driver's compartment section there might be, in big silver letters, the vehicle brand. But this one had, in gloriously shiny silver letters, 'SHIT U'. And near it, diagonal, red and in some funny font, 'cute la'.

Yoddles crocodiles and pee.

indian goddess

I think they did kill that tree after all.

fresh black grass

My hands are shaking
From carrying this torch
From carrying this torch for you

The end of the fizzy hair adventures
It went from electric blue to light blue to blue-grey, then to inky rich blue, punk blue, dragon purple-blue, magic purple, sweet purple-pink, taffy pink, light pink, to light pink with purple-white and condensed-milk-yellow strands. I cut it all off and now it's fresh black grass. Fresh black grass on a rainy day is marvellous to touch and marvellous to feel. Also, I bought a Belle chop for elysia which leaked pink ink from a grumpy hag who doesn't let people test it and a pack of 56 glow in the dark dinosaur wall stickers which turned out to be 7 dinosaurs and 56-7 stars = 49 stars smaller than a thumbnail. Ants are crawling all over my walls and suddenly I feel like I could be standing at the door of our motel room at Martha's, on a rainy day when we get sent back from work because the go-kart tracks are wet and squeeging them won't help and we're all wet and soggy in our electric blue shirts that have The Great Escape stitched small and white into the left breast and big khaki pants and Desiree is watching The Biggest Loser in the room and I open the door to see that there are people riding the red and yellow Boomerang and screaming their heads off in the white sky in the cold summer rain. Oh please cut my hair again in a bathtub, at least I still have my red raincoat though you threw away your green one dear witch.

P.s. Adding footnotes in microsoft word is AMAZING

rainy day women

There is a tree I always notice while driving to and from school. It's between the Choa Chu Kang and Brickland exits and seeing it is always special, at 100km/h, speeding past. Most of the other trees are lush and green but this one is all bare, with its branches twistedly growing out, gnarly and twiggy and mad and gentle and sad. But then the past week I thought it was gone, there were empty spots along the middle section of trees and I thought they had cut off my favourite tree. But then I spotted it again, with less of its main branches left, like a good friend who had a haircut. There's another one, at the exit to the BKE (is that what its called), bare and all its branches and twigs are spreading out and form a hannukah candle kind of shape, all growing upwards. Driving to school and back, with johnny cash, the wind howling, fun foreign workers on the backs of lorries listening to music with pink towels on their heads, sheltering themselves with umbrellas, laughing, looking at me as i look at them. Construction workers with their boots and spades and hats and mud and hands are so cool.

ring of fire

I fell for you like a child
Oh, but the fire went wild

I wish to think of everything at once, remember everything and imagine everything: my grandfather, the beatles, my film script, dinner, my grandmother, what to paint next, james dean, what to write in a letter, french conjugaison, japanese characters, the clouds, the trees, my part for the percussion ensemble, fauvism, futurism, dada, songs, the beach, the cosmos, fairies and forests and circuses. But my mind just thinks of things like Itchy mosquito bite on my leg, or I should probably go pee in a few minutes. And you?

wet bendy needles

O I wish I had a river I could skate away on

It finally rained for a long time, in the night, and I missed it while sleeping. It's still raining now, like wet bendy needles or feathertips and I wish it would pour and storm sensationally. Something is wrong with my faithful 6-year-old speakers, so that The Mamas and The Papas sound like they are singing Creeque Alley in an empty room with no happy jangle of guitars. And the horse clip clops of God Only Knows are soft. At least the proclaimers still sound awesome.

In the pictures on my wall, James Dean is always looking at me no matter which part of the room I am at, and Paul is always holding a teacup, looking out the train window, and in another he is at the piano, and Ringo poses in his polkadotted shirt. John is looking out from under an umbrella.

At percussion class yesterday we continued practicing for the little concert exam, and we played pieces related to weather. One is Hurricane (and I'm supposed to play the steel drums except we don't have them so I have to use this malay instrument of heavy golden bells like a mini royal xylophone) and there's the weather movement series, of which we're playing Spring Wind, a light and lovely piece with a jungle feel, and Storm Warning and Dance, an intriguing and rather mad piece. I never really could follow a conductor perfectly. But it's amazing. People standing in front of instruments, with someone leading them all. And out of nothing, they all enter a counting of beats and create a something that came from the mind of someone they've never met imagining how weather or a big happy green field on a summer's day would become music, and mutter '1, 2, 3, 4' under their breaths, and somehow enter this other world, all following nothing but this intangible counting of beats and try to play their loudest when the score reads 'ffff' like someone trying to type a bad word on a typewriter. And I hit a gigantic golden nipple of a gong. And then kiap the big mallet under my armpit like an auntie and grab my drumsticks so I can play the tomtom part coming up very uncoolly. And dainty girls' arms float up and down above the xylophone, marimba, with bouncing red and yellow yarn mallets, playing lovely sounds. Someone else scrapes a suspended cymbal. And I hit the middle of the gigantic golden nipple with all my might.

evening garden bliss

Do you want to hold johnny or sharkie?

My evening garden bliss is sitting in the mad coloured inflatable swimming pool with mr krabbs, spongebob, plankton, patrick and sandy, with the adults watching tv and eating fruits and chinese new year goodies inside the glowing living room, us outside splashing and shouting and eating ice cream and pretending. Except my grandmother thought leaving the pool on her grass overnight will kill it so she watered the plants and grass immediately. Does shining a torch on glow in the dark stars that aren't bright enough recharge them?

I can't wait for it to rain for days. O please come in the night tonight, howling and mad, till i awake and then fall back deep into sleep with dreams of jungles and smoke and hands and berries and then wake up suddenly in the morn with a deep sigh of madness.

During the christmas sleepover esmonde left his black toiletries bag here. I was following an ant trail from my dustbin with a torchlight when I found his bag under a small wooden table. And a whiff of Nomad soap and shampoo from crabtree and evelyn sent me to heaven. I saw a car bumper sticker that said 'HEAVEN. Don't miss it' with clouds. What does it mean?

I have decided to make peace with the unfathomable amount of ants in my room and feel like they are my friends inhabiting the same space as me, that they enjoy the deep blue and robin-egg blue of the walls like me, that they are happily and hardworkingly living their lives here and i should be happy for that. I simply cannot kill them anymore. Why is that?

And I'd like a pig as a pet! Fresh pink skin and GLORIOUS MUD and poo and grunts. This is like how I'd prefer an ugly chunky looking mashed up cookie or cake to a pretty prissy delicate one anytime. Does anyone else want a pig? We could make our pigs be friends and hang out with each other sometimes. Give them sunglasses and star tattoos and separate them everytime they are on the very verge of mating and then laugh about it. Evil taking over. NO, Olivia, don't worry, you can sleep with me as long as you don't release yer bowels in my grandmother's beautiful king-size bed but as you are a pig no one will blame you.

23rd february is a very special date and today my father got me a rugged blue and brown timberland backpack that will stay with me for years on all future adventures and travels.

When does it rain cold and when does it rain warm?

typewriters part 2

We wrote love poems in french class yesterday; tomorrow is the day for 'recitation with feeling'. Ah secret loves and desires.

typewriter tip tip tip

A is for Apple
























These are making me very excited

The Remington Portable up there was the one desiree found in the antique shop in glens falls and nearly bought for me for my birthday and when i finally saw it...it was like buttered peas and fresh flowers and strawberry tea in my blooming mind. I think I will get off my arse and do face painting and use the money to buy it. Bumblebee yellow keys melt my heart.

fly free duckies

Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there
With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair

Lucy Clementine, I am feeling strangely excited about lunch today, because we are having nice clean porridge with warm vegetables and carrots with fried egg and the day is bright and windy. The past few days, we've been having curry and rice and mee siam and prata and sweets and spring rolls and beehoon and chocolates and sugee and help i can't stop my hands from reaching out for another biscuit or nut. But I have been getting better at catching nuts in my mouth.

Adult relatives who come to my room usually stand at the doorway with their arms politely folded behind them, faced with napoleon dynamite and the beatles, they gaze with heads slightly tipped up and nod. And nod. And nod.

TIME FOR LUNCH -jumps up like tasmanian devil-

I ran down the stairs shouting 'PORRIDGE!!!!'

Mother: PORRIDGE?

It turned out we had to finish last night's copious amounts of mee siam and popiah. They had their NJC gathering last night here. For the past 2 decades and more, my parents' NJC friends have been meeting at one guy's house for on Christmas. But last christmas the tradition was broken, and now it's going to be at my house every chinese new year. My parents met in NJC. They were both in council. When their friends meet it's always a jolly time. I spoke to one of them in french about what my father was like then. Il ne change pas. Il est toujours pratique!

Enough with the lunch story, now onto my hair. O the whimsical topics in life. It was inky punk-blue and one morning I awoke to discover that it was mainly blue and purple on top, with a small patch of light purple (turning lavender) at my forehead, and a small patch of light robin-egg blue, with ocean blue across mixed with magic violet, with the sides blue-green with brown and black roots. Wondrous! It's protecting me with magic luck.

This evening if the weather is lovely I shall lounge in the inflatable swimming pool on the fresh garden grass, with my grandmother miles away in china and not able to see that my pool is killing her grass just by Being On It.

Fly free, duckies

love him in the noontime

Where are you going to I don't mind
If I live too long I'm afraid I'll die
So I will follow you wherever you go
If your offered hand is still open to me
Strangers on this road we are on
But we are not two we are one

Hello friends, and hello void! I feel like doing this again. What are all of you doing and what do you think of just before you fall asleep in bed? I wish we were more connected and lived facing the same forest and can play there everyday, make up plays and burn leaves.

The Darjeeling Limited made me sad at first but now it fills me with a tiny but hopeful pulsating excitement. The music from old indian movies are light, dreamy, pulsating, a little mystical, funny sometimes ("TYPEWRITER TIP TIP TIP TIP TIP TIP TIP").

The Super-Adventure of January (l'aventure super-fantastique de janvier)
Claire, Vivi and I went on the tree tops trail. It was peaceful with lovely green leaves protecting us overhead ('secret affinity with the trees') and I forgot any troubles. Being in nature is so wondrous and easy. We took turns kicking a lump of rock for a few kilometres. When we had a quarter of the way left, when we knew it was going to pour madly soon, my grandmother kept calling in panicked tones and asking me to take a cab home, but we had spent all that time...kicking the lump of pain! Finally we heard a ssshhh sound of the rustling of leaves, or rain chasing, and we ran. Claire first, vivi second and me last. It felt like we had plunged into a children's adventure storybook, twisted and exciting. The trees were all around us and the soil was littered with big elegant orange flowers. It rained so hard we were completely drenched, and ran with madness, I couldn't stop smiling (though also scared that we would die from lightning anytime) and we were all dripping water from our faces and everywhere. We also almost died when we decided to run across an open area with lightning and thunder very near then huddled under my red raincoat (oh yes, i had a raincoat in my bag all that while!) to call a cab and go to my house to dry off with milo and biscuits. YAHOO for this madness which saved me from another kind of madness.

I trust in the secret affinity with the trees.