IS TO read Victorian poetry and structuralist criticism and Beowulf and epics, essays on cities and theories on narrative and musings on memory, illuminated manuscripts and well-thumbed favourites, and for unthinking amusement, mysteries and romances and fantasy.
From Daily Candy
UNCONDITIONAL love, intensity, a wondering joy. 时光不再，还有那份真心吗？还能全力以赴吗? Do I still have that to give to the work? There are less than two years, and I have been inconsistent and scattered, and if I go on in this way I wouldn’t be any good.
Have thought long and hard about the alternatives, and I could be happy doing something else, and do those other careers well.
But I want to give it a shot. To read, to think, to write. To put things together. How many of us want to do this, and how many of us are truly good? It’s hard, solitary work, it’s fear that one’s not good enough — it’s politics, can be blood sport. 远方也许尽是坎坷路, 也许要孤孤单单走一程. I’m trying to be as clear-eyed about it as I can.
I dream of scholarship built not on a crude competitive ethic, not on arrogant elitism, but on a deep and genuine regard for different intellectual ends and approaches. There are those true educators who are warm-hearted and tough-minded to look up to. And I’m in, I’m all in.
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From the sub-editing trenches:
1. The respected leader, in his sixtieth decade, …
2. When you put xxx on a bike, screams doesn’t happen (from xz)
And I found this screamingly funny:
ACTUAL ANSWERS AND SPELLING IN A 6TH GRADE HISTORY TEST
1. Ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies and they all wrote in hydraulics. They lived in the Sarah Dessert. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere.
2. Moses led the Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. He died before he ever reached Canada.
3. Solomom had three hundred wives and seven hundred porcupines.
4. The Greeks were a highly sculptured people, and without them we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks also had myths. A myth is a female moth.
5. Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock. After his death, his career suffered a dramatic decline.
6. In the Olympic games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled biscuits, and threw the java.
7. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Dying, he gasped out: “Tee hee, Brutus.”
8. Joan of Arc was burnt to a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw.
9. Queen Elizabeth was the “Virgin Queen.” As a queen she was a success. When she exposed herself before her troops they all shouted “hurrah.”
10. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented removable type and the Bible. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes and started smoking. Sir Fransis Drake Circumsized the world with a 100-foot clipper.
11. The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespeare. He was born in the year 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He wrote tragedies, comedies, and hysterectomies, all in Islamic pentameter. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couple. Romeo’s last wish was to be laid by Juliet.
12. Writing at the same time as Shakespeare was Miguel Cervantes. He wrote Donkey Hote. The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained.
13. Delegates from the original 13 states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin discovered electricity by rubbing two cats backwards and declared, “A horse divided against itself cannot stand.” Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.
14. Abraham Lincoln became America’s greatest Precedent. Lincoln’s mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves by signing the Emasculation Proclamation. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. They believe the assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposingly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.
15. Johann Bach wrote a great many musical compositions and had a large number of children. In between he practiced on an old spinster which he kept up in his attic. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Bach was the most famous composer in the world and so was Handel. Handel was half German half Italian and half English. He was very large.
16. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.
- Radio 4’s dramatisation of The Waves, which does lend itself to reading aloud. Oh, how I do love Woolf. Dearest civil servants might like The Preposterous Files.
- Transparent chive and prawn dumplings, crispy rolls of seafood with mango, crabmeat guotie, scallop and XO dumplings and other yummy goodness at Summer Pavillion.
- To read: the old familiar college friend NAEL I. Starting over again. GRE id questions, here I come.
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life, and that is why we adore them. But life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
– Iris Murdoch
Life is not fact but poetry. It was by steady adherence to that truth that the waterways battle was so considerably won. To be able to say this, is for me the most important prize from all the victories gained. I now do not merely believe but know that a quality of the imagination is all that matters in life. I can proclaim it from the heart.
– Robert Aickman, The River Runs Uphill. (as quoted by Minzhi)
I’M A newspaper snob, and tend to look down on tabloids, thinking they’re simplistic and sensationalist and just so inelegant.
But it’s The New Paper, an afternoon tabloid, which made me miss reporting more than ever.
I was curious about people who lived in one-room flats, and searching through the archives I read columns and stories by writers from The New Paper. There was an anecdote about a woman who fed her three-year-old daughter two cans of Fanta Grape for dinner. Mentally-ill youngsters raping their siblings in cycles of abuse. A dark flat full of cardboard boxes and items scavenged from rubbish bins. People who live on $270 a month.
Chin Swee. King George’s Avenue. Geylang Bahru. Banda Street. Redhill Close. There are some 50,000 low-income families living in HDB rental flats, of which 20,000 — about 3 per cent of households — occupy the one-room category. Where the poorest of us live, and some fall through the holes in the community net. A world few of us can say we are familiar with.
In Singapore’s economic underclass, there are an estimated 116,300 families or 12.6 per cent of households here who earned below $1,000 a month. Social workers estimate that around 40 per cent of poor families are headed by a struggling single parent. In many cases, the father has left the family, is in jail or in drug rehabilitation. The lone parent holding the fort is often too busy working to make ends meet to look after the children properly.
Education is one way out, with the children doing well enough in schools so that they can improve their parents’ living conditions. But there are parents who have “tunnel vision”, don’t see beyond the here and now or the need for more education and even urge them to drop out and work to support the family. So what do we do?
I could not find detailed surveys or research on the demographics of one-room flats. There are anecdotes instead. In telling stories, New Paper does the best job of featuring the poorer, dysfunctional families. There are the strong slice-of-life stories which stand out among the sensational, the seamy and the sports section.
And such features were what shook me up. Reminded me of lessons reinforced while being a reporter — treat people equally, regardless of their wealth or status. Being pushed and feeling out of your element, but learning how to tell a story as it deserved to be told. If you don’t give journalism very much, you won’t get very much in return.
On the one hand there are these e-mails with hedge fund recruiters and thinking about re-contacting the old consulting interviewers and debating when to move or not, and on the other there’re these stories of Fanta Grape that touch me much more than bonuses and ways to get buckets of money.
One of my former supervisors used to go around the office asking: “So what did you do today to earn your pay?” If I dwelled upon pay there isn’t much reason to stay in reporting with a Singaporean paper. It’s not enough, you can’t compete there. Why should you care for your organisation, your daily work, when there are so many more opportunities outside?
Reading about a toddler’s dinner of soft drinks reminds me that there are other, more compelling reasons. The hours of journalism can be draining, the bosses joyless, the colleagues territorial, the newsroom oddly silent. But you can be resourceful enough when you know what resources you can draw upon.
And underpinning it all is the idea of service, of the responsibilities you bear because you’re lucky enough to be in a position to make changes, to speak. There are those who live for more than themselves, brim over with passionate convictions, and carry no airs about them. The late president Wee Kim Wee, for instance, who spoke of serving people first and foremost, without fear or favour. The deepest love is not built upon romantic notions of escape, but on passion, a common mission and sacrifices.
I’ve lost much of that conviction to serve, and have turned more calculative, more self-serving. How small.
(I was rereading my colleague’s feature on Malaysian Chinese women who came to Singapore, and I thought of this post from my old blog. Here it is:)
I’VE not told you folks the story about how my grandmother and grandfather met, have I? Well I do tell it to people at dinner parties and it’s always met with disbelief.
Well, my grandma was from the Hakka Chinese district of Meixian in Guangdong province, and decided to pack up and leave for Nanyang when she was 17 because she’d heard a lot about opportunities in South-east Asia and wanted escape and wanted adventure, didn’t want to be tied down in an arranged marriage, wanted to see more of the world, was restless and hungry. She was also from a relatively well-to-do family that owned land and faced purges from the Communists.
In those days women hardly had any education, so she couldn’t read and could barely write her name. So the skills she had were nothing glamourous — basically an ability to take hard physical labour — but she had a steel-plate determination within her. After arriving in Singapore she started to work in construction, laying roads and putting up buildings. At that time she didn’t know anybody here, and had to start from zero with the contacts from the villagers who’ve come here before.
She’d take up contract work up in Malaysia, and it was in Johor where she met my grandfather. She was washing her clothes by a stream underneath a guava tree. My grandfather happened to be up in the tree picking fruits, and he saw her — and yes — at first sight decided — that she was attractive and hit on her by dropping fruit on her. She just picked up the fruits and put them into the laundry basket thinking they just drop when they’re ripe, until my grandpa shouted at her teasingly from his perch. And there you have it, cue soundtrack music etc.
They’d go on to have several children and build a lovely large rambling house on Upper Bukit Timah Road, where I spent every weekend of my childhood with the dogs and the durian trees, playing with the balsam fruits that burst upon contact. Cycling in the courtyard where we would put up tables for birthdays and weddings and Chinese New Year celebrations, going out to walk along the railway tracks, putting swings on the trees and feeding the arowana and the goldfish.
I was one of the “favoured” grandchildren — it was obvious which grandkids my grandma liked, there’s a hierarchy! Kaixiang is the favourite, then there’s Lijuan, and I’m third. That meant having special Milo made for me and getting lemon Vicks sweets handouts. I remember looking at her hands as a child and thinking they could do anything, can’t they? Tie knots around the durians she sold to hold them, soothe a nervous dog, build roads, make Milo and mugs of Chinese tea, stroke a child on the head.
Even when my grandmother was 80 she had the best posture, standing and sitting ramrod straight. (Unfortunately, I can be quite the sloucher, hunched as I am over my books and computers.) She was quiet and didn’t speak much, very dignified and very calm, very kind too. (Erm these traits didn’t seem to pass down to me as well.) Her generosity of spirit was as clear as water.
She didn’t just make you feel loved and wanted, she made you feel special and just that bit daring. Having known poverty, she knew much about deprivation and had an amazing instinct for knowing when people have not had enough nice things said to them or done to them in their lives and went about finding the right things to do or say. Without too many deep words, she showed me the importance she placed on showing kindness to the people who are unsure, timid, those who have been damaged in some way –- not pitying them, but helping them bloom.
She died when I was 12 from liver failure.
I’ve always regretted bitterly how I couldn’t speak to my grandparents in dialect. Bitterly. I used to be able to speak both Hakka and Teochew but I lost it as we speak English and Mandarin mostly in school and at home, though my parents both use dialects when they’re with their siblings. It’s terrible to let the family stories wither as we can’t talk beyond “eat” and “sleep”.
So you have it, I’m here because of the brave decisions my grandparents made, who were not afraid to go to a new place and start with nothing to build their lives around their own choices. But their choices were limited due to a lack of education. And now here I am, incredibly lucky to have the opportunities I do, to be able to (after this bond is done) pursue my career anywhere I damn well please, pack up and travel when I want to, buy whatever frock and restaurant meal and book I like, date or not date, marry or not marry.
When this sort of independence has been hard fought for you can’t give it up easily. And with freedom and privilege also comes responsibility.
Can’t improve on how Jo puts it:
“As a young woman today, I have available to me infinitely more freedom, choice, and opportunity vis-a-vis education, career, politics, love, and sex than my grandmothers - or even my mother - would ever have imagined possible. Both my grandmothers grew up in rural Chinese villages, and neither completed their primary school educations. Both just barely escaped having their feet bound in turn-of-the-century China. Both had arranged marriages. Today, I’m pursuing an advanced degree halfway across the world at a top academic institution. I’ll be able to pursue my dream career anywhere in the world that I please. Not sure what that dream career is yet exactly, but I’m confident that whatever I end up choosing will provide intellectual stimulation, exciting adventures, and a comfortable living. I will be able to marry whomever I damn please - or not to marry at all, since economic security, love, and sex are no longer only to be found within the confines of marriage. So I shall not let anyone call me naive in thinking that times and cultural mores can change - that they have changed - and that feminism does make a difference.
I am so grateful for the foremothers and sisters before me who fought and struggled to make things so much easier for me and other young women today. The playing field still isn’t even, and the glass ceiling still exists. May I express my gratitude by doing everything that is within my limited, humble power to make things easier still for our daughters and granddaughters.”
SO I went biking again down the trails at Pulau Ubin.
With biking, as with life, I have a bit of the “so what” mentality. So what if you fall down while cycling? It’s just a bit of blood, some grit on your knees, get up and get on with it. So what if there’s a scholarship bond? It gave you your years abroad, so stop griping and get over it. So what if you’d been thrown off by unexpected events? Dust yourself off, learn what there is to be learnt, try again.
Don’t sit there wallowing in self-pity. Letting resentment accumulate is not healthy. You know how some people hit you with their bad vibes as soon as you walk into the room with their sapping conversation - whining, gossiping, fault-finding? Best to be avoided. I’m afraid I was like that for a bit. But you really have to get a grip, stop focusing on the negative, and move on. Fasten your thoughts on things that really matter.
Sure, I sometimes envy those earning buckets of money, more than what I’m getting as a journalist in a local paper. Sure, I wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed on in Europe.
But there really is so much going on in my life that I’m thankful for, and I have so many opportunities. I know bright friends from Singapore and Malaysia who had to turn down offers at Cambridge and Yale as they couldn’t get a scholarship. I know there are more deserving people than me who’d just been not as fortunate, or maybe not as lucky.
It’s a simple life at the moment, but I’ve my health, a loving family, a stellar education, a job I like, goals to work towards. No use being crippled by doubt or blinded by negativity or choking on comparisons.
So yes, make use of what you’ve been given to the best of your abilities, be resourceful, don’t develop a hand-out mentality, and don’t see anything as your right.
A: I never apologise. Sorry, but that’s just the way I am.
B: Don’t hurt yourself, that’s my job.
A: I will always be metaphorically there for you.
A: I’m thinking snowskin mooncake, no refrigeration, bacteria, breeding, exponential growth curve.
Choice quotations from recently edited stories:
1. “The girls knew each other before they were even born.”
2. “They seemed to form a single person who would seem incomplete even with just one member short.”
