I mean I want to see

“Never rush the simmering stew, nor over-stir the subtle sauce. And take dancing lessons: someday, somewhere, when you least expect it, you may get the urge to trip the light fantastic.”

- Rohinton Mistry, in Writing Life, a collection of pieces by 50 authors, 45 of them Canadian, on the nature of writing and being a writer.

Fiddling with my reading list to get the indents just so (yawn, I know, the pitfalls of being a sub-editor is that you get obsessed with all these details); I want to make the book section much more rambling than it is now. Now the organising structure’s up I just need the content.

Am glad I invested some money and time into this site — it’s serving its functions of (a) archival and (b) keeping in touch with you lot. And it’ll continue be of use when I go into research and teaching, I think. Next: to learn how to footnote using HTML.

Been back at the stock exchange two nights a week taking classes, the instructor’s very interesting with wide-ranging interests, he was telling us of Islamic banking and how the Quran starts with the golden calf from Moses, how the Abrahamic faiths were known as the people of the book and could intermarry freely. Am learning more about valuation on the side, and learning to look at annual reports.

Also running around the estate at a very slow pace at night and in the morning I’ve been trying out the strenuous “modified” pilates poses that the teacher has started introducing. Some of them are terribly undignified when done by yours truly (can’t straighten legs properly, goes red in the face while making circles with legs etc) but they do feel good. On top of that I’ve heaps of calligraphy homework and then there’s going out with people — tried this granita recipe and it’s really yummy! Life’s good.

“The discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of the human race than the discovery of a star.”

- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

I’ve put up some of my favourite recipes here — lotus root chips, simple soups, tofu dishes, shellfish pasta. Stock up the larder!

Also, a new poem up, was walking by a cascade of water down a wall in the financial district and thought of this Larkin gem.

There’s that sensitive and sensible side that has to be nurtured so that it doesn’t become trampled by the other more unsatisfactory aspects of who I am — that hard as nails attitude, the mind like an adding machine, the competitiveness and the pride and the impatience and the touchiness, the selfish line of thinking, the ability to be sly, a mean streak that has to be leashed tightly and subdued.

The IN*P and the ENTJ — to some extent we all have our double-images, our public and private selves, but there are cases when the split between the two can widen into such an abyss that an intolerable strain is put on the psyche. The challenge is integrating the two as we grow.

I do drone on and on, don’t I? As I ramble through the pastures of Internet-induced introspection. *Yawn*

And it’s struck me that I’ve not been unhappy with my life for a long time now. Grey and exhausted and questioning and volatile and restless sometimes, but not unhappy. That’s good!

Image © Richard Benjamin

Un pays qui a deux belles saisons, la saison sèche et la saison des pluies.

The way a place seeps into your bones, your muscles, how you know the sunshine at the times of the day when you leave the house, the distance to the bus-station, the road along the shophouses with orchids and jasmines and chrysanthemums in pale purple and yellow buckets past the shop with the clocks, the old man selling durians as you step out from the underpass, the bakery with the too-yellow-looking butter cakes, the raintrees over the basketball court with the cats basking on the stairs.

In another place: my university of the sun and the books — who can resist a city named providence? meeting street, thayer street, angell street, waterman. Manning, George, Benevolent, Young Orchard. sitting on the steps under the old lamp-posts and the magnolia trees with a sandwich from meeting street cafe after a lecture in sayles, laughing with the rest of the philosophy class on the grass under the large — what were they called? — sheltering trees in summer, the frosted trees i could see outside the window near my carrel in the Rock, walking up and down the hill to get to town — for graduation the speaker said “大学建在山上，可以使她一代又一代年轻的学子们站得高、看得远”。(”I am delighted to find myself in Providence, this beautiful city, and on its eastern hilltop is the home to the beautiful Hippie-dweeb University. From this hilltop, Nerdy University year after year encourages outstanding students to stand tall and to look far beyond the hilltop they have called home.”)

In another place: a warm shower and stepping out onto Iffley, down past the roundabout and the bridge and the botanical gardens and out onto High, past the shop with the pens and the toys and then the cafe and agnes b, walking to the right, past the place where you wait for the bus to london, turning into the camera, on the way home it’s down the winding road at Queens under golden lights. walking to st ants, the shophouses down walton, going into the chinese faculty library to borrow swordfighting novels, sitting with people i love around tables in pubs in our rooms laughing and drunk on happiness and fellowship, walking me back past the kebab vans and the cell inscription and the gargoyles and the beautiful tower while the bells ring the hour.

Traced — in Root Shock Mindy Thompson Fullilove writes:

“This mourning is not simply a matter of the mind, but also of the body. The experience of a place is encoded in our muscles and our bones: the sunshine on the longest day of summer, the distance to the corner store, the location of the tree with the best horse chestnuts. We moved across these distances in the joy of community, in the net of kindness. These distances exist no longer. In the summer, in winter, our bodies remind us of those places no longer there to satisfy our wants and pleasures.”

But these memories now leave me stronger, happier, more interested in the world. Winter is over, my lovelies.

Isn’t it odd, the intellectual inheritance of former colonial subjects? I know I’m all mixed-up, a veritable mutt.

I’m conscious of schooling myself in the mainstream of English literature, of European languages and thought, reading Western philosophy — and on the other hand I can get by with my Chinese, can read classical Chinese tolerably though there are huge gaps of history and vocabulary that I’ve to fill in — but there’s that whole other inheritance, isn’t there, of South-east Asian cultures, of where I grew up? Which has not been properly articulated, not even in the postcolonial courses I took back in university.

Of course I’ve an idealising tendency towards my golden European cities because I felt so at home there, they were like some sort of destination for my fanatic education pilgrimage — but I’ve begun to open my eyes. I’m not European. I’m not Beijing Chinese. I’m South-east Asian, and I’m not sure what that means for me.

This is such a wonderfully plural part of the world — you have most of the major religions intermingling within all sorts of boundaries drawn up by the Euro-colonialists, borrowed and adapted cultures from the two major Asian spheres of influence China and India. (One thing I love about Singapore — we’d the potential to be the equivalent of a tiny Balkans, but look, here we are, different races as friends, a system that lets Chinese-peasant-stock like me move around comfortably anywhere.)

But in South-east Asia we’ve a terrible inheritance of violence and rule by the sword, of corruption, of lack of freedom that we’re still dealing with, ghosts that we’ve yet to exorcise. There are episodes of history here that were so ugly that we can’t afford to forget. Even now the exploitation that goes on — sexual, environmental, financial — is enough to make anyone furious.

In the meantime, we’re slowly building a regional identity, which will be a long long road, but I do want to be part of that. You can’t deny our local setting, with all its complexities and tragedies; you serve by tending to specific needs in a specific place. So on my part, there’s so much to learn and to do.

*

Just as I was reading this on the tender heart, Anais says: “To me, it’s easy to be perspicacious, easy to be observant, easy to be “right.” It’s to love to trust to open one’s heart that’s difficult as hell. It’s easy to steel oneself against risk and vulnerability, but where’s the courage in doing that? The real tests of courage, methinks, are: how much do you allow yourself to care for the welfare of others? How gentle and tender do you permit your heart to be?”

Rushdie on kissing books.

Calligraphy © Hassan Massoudy

What’s happening in the Middle East now is extremely worrying. It’s the same old, same old, same old circle of violence. And what’s worse is that the rage and anguish seem set to carry over into the next generation, we’re nowhere close to a sustainable peace. I’ve been choosing photos for some items in the news, and it’s heartrending — blood-streaked faces in despair, women with their faces frozen in a rictus of pain and their hands raised up in questioning, men sitting beside bodies with their heads in their hands.

Iraq’s on the brink of civil war — Shi’ite against Sunni, faction against faction, people of the same blood and neighbours fighting one another — the assessment is bleak.

From the BBC report:

“An Iraqi man, Ahmed Muktar, told me a typical story of these times. His family fled sectarian violence in the suburb of Dora. But his brother-in-law returned to check on his house. He was kidnapped. The police, the hospitals, the morgues - none had any official record of the missing man. So his family went to the dumping ground for bodies on the edge of Dora. There they found him, amid a pile of 50 corpses, hands tied behind his back, shot in the head. They had to recover him while under constant automatic fire, the police and troops nearby too scared to help. Mr Muktar is an academic with the rather unlikely specialism in the minor Scottish poets. He is a civilised, gentle man, but - as a Shia - he says his family now rejoice in the deaths of Sunnis. All of this is why the coalition - quite at odds with the stated strategy - is about to massively reinforce Baghdad. ”

Then there’s Israel going on like a bull terrier/tank, with Lebanon the playing ground of Middle East interests, like Poland in Europe in the decades before.

We shut out the suffering because it can be unbearable and we’ve limited emotional reserves and resources. You can’t bear the screaming pain of the world in your head all the time. Still, awareness should strengthen our commitment to doing whatever we can for peace. You’d think we never ever learn from history, that we can never break the inheritance of pride and wrath, that we can never take to heart forgiveness.

Violence should never become commonplace and ordinary, and we can never turn our backs to those who are suffering. Those of us who pray can do so. There’re people like George Bell whom I greatly admire — we should carry on with their kind of spirit. And there’s hope, still. Look at Europe now, of the bombed cathedrals and the mega mayhem in the World Wars, of how it lost something precious, some quality of elegance and innocence, but picked itself back together again.

World War I was supposed to be the war to end wars. Then it was World War II. But war doesn’t end war. Global understanding ends war. Justice and equality and schools and hospitals end war. The peace corps, volunteers and all tracks of diplomacy end war. Good economics ends war.

Note to self:
- do some research on Mitterrand.
- go back to Milton

Life’s been sweet as a wine-dark cherry lately, what with thoughtful surprises on my desk at work and getting mail, having great conversations, going out and then just lounging at home reading a heap of good books and fiddling with spreadsheets and studying.

自己善待自己，甩掉不爽的心情 — 走着轻松，走的洒脱，过着简单生活也不错。

- French and Vietnamese and getting my Chinese accent perfect
- Learn that Hermes system of laying out pages at work
- Go get the ratios and information and learn more about tech analysis
- Gifts for various people
- Get new sunglasses after I broke my second pair in three weeks. Gargh.