ethnic existentialism

Yesterday I received a blood red invite to Chandran and Amy's wedding, and realised, to my renewed horror that the dress code was 'oriental'. 'Renewed horror' because I was told it before, and expressed my gasps then, and re expressed them yeseterday. This is more than a 'I don't have anything to wear' crisis. I think this implies that I possibly can't really conceive of myself as Chinese.

Come to think of it, I've never worn anything explicitly Oriental in my life. I know young kids normally dress up in those tiny qipaos or the ma gua thingy during Chinese New Year, but I never did (and was never inclined to). Even my most 'Oriental' experience, namely the esteemed River Valley High School, spawning ground of colourless conformists, involved me wearing a Red Cross reminiscent uniform, that isn't Chinese in any way either.

So what does being Chinese mean, if I don't wear Chinese clothes, ever, don't speak the language (very often), don't possess much (or any) of the so-called 'Asian values', and don't practice any of the traditional Chinese rituals (except for Chinese New Year, for obvious mercenary reasons)? Is it purely an ascribed heritage as a result of patrilineal ascriptive ethnicity? Why does anyone need to have an ethnic group anyway, if just to establish difference?

Yeah alright there's all the "You need to know your roots" thing. But then again, everyone is rooted in the Earth - thus the supposedly derogatory but (i think) vaguely endearing terms of 'kantang' and 'banan' to describe the 'white inside yellow outside' people like me and possibly many other people ignoring this dislocation of identity.

barbershopped (a close shave)

I thought this blog was on hiatus because of exams but I thought today was too memorable to let it slip by unannounced,

For the first time ever in all the exam-slogging years of my sorry student life, I arrived 1 minute before the expected commencement time of the exam. This one sentence entails the 15 minutes of waiting for the bus which passed me by because it was overflowing with people, the 30 minutes of mentally willing a plodding bus to get a move on and endless waiting for traffic lights to turn green (multiple times before the bus inched along). In short, it was a traumatic experience.

Strangely enough, although I had 9 am lectures in the past, this has never happened. (Maybe because I was always late.) Murphy's law really does apply - whatever bad can happen will happen. But in a big-picture sense, I was thinking more about why it happened (i.e. coded messages from God wrapped in worrying circumstances on earth). To shake me out of slumberland - maybe - my heart was tripping at the speed of a pneumatic drill. To give me a sense of urgency about this whole exam business - maybe - I needed to go to the toilet but refrained because I figured I would never finish my paper.

I don't understand my flippancy towards all this, as well as my over speculation (again). Maybe it's that anomic time of the year where you want to do everything but can do nothing (because of exams).

To reform the control freak, provide situations beyond his/her control. That must be it.

(Yucks. I am thinking in writing. Only one day of exams and look what it's done!)

rolling along

So I'm finally twenty, after seeing everyone else get there before I did, and it's nothing great, especially if you've to study for exams. Some things never change. Other things do, like my very happening block.

Two doors away, an Indian man aged 79 died. Blue chairs line the already narrow corridor, and everytime you walk past, 5 pairs of eyes follow you, and you try not to stare back; instead you sneak a glance into the house, and notice the body wrapped in a white shroud, an altar-looking thingy at the body's head. You feel a bit sad, because everyone is talking among themselves at the table, and the body is ignored, largely.

(Although it isn't very large. Somehow people look smaller in death.)

He used to walk with his cane up and down the corridor. I would see him when I was rushing for school, or coming back at night. He never spoke, only smiled, and even that was rare. Most of the time he would be standing in the corridor staring out at the next block, and I wondered what was there to look at.

(Maybe he was just bleeding time away, waiting for the last hour to kill.)

I didn't see the funeral - am not that voyeuristic - but I heard a weird sound, made by a trombone I think. It sounded like a honking elephant. And it went on for quite a while, while I stared blankly at my "Culturally Competent Practice" social work notes. But it did have a sort of village feel to the thing. I could visualise the elephants. I think it's a much better sounding funeral than maybe the Chinese ones. Those are a bit raucous.

(Personal preference, no racist intent...More importantly, no intent to get Sedition Act-ed. )

Now the body has gone, the people are still milling around, taking up space in the corridor, a heap of shoes next to the door. (Literally a heap. You cannot distinguish any pairs.) Some guys stand around the steps and smoke.

There is a strange strained silence shrouding the level, and perhaps it is good to soak in the sobriety for a while before we are hit by the bright Christmas lights and the carols rocked beyond repair.

spark

Today the electricity was cut for 8 hours, because some contractors were doing electrical wiring for the whole block. Which meant using the laptop sparingly, no music, no microwave, no aircon, no hot water. It felt like a regression to a caveman existence. (That is, if you believe in cave people in the first place.) Then again, you don't know what you need until you don't have it, and when you don't have it, you realise that what you think you need are not really 'needs' at all.

Staying in a HDB flat is great. Apart from the occassional inconveniences like having no electricity, you hear people practicing the electric guitar and singing horribly from the next block, you get a guy screaming strings of Hokkien expletives that echo within a 3 block radius, at 3 am and 3 pm and other odd hours; sometimes you hear him rattling the gates and shouting some more and you know he's locked out again.

You get groups of ITE Malay boys sitting at the void deck playing poker and smoking. Sometimes you come back and find many motorbikes parked neatly around the blocks perimeter, motorbikes with the most neon colours with painted flames, which look like moving pieces of graffiti. (It's a compliment.)

Other times you see an area cordoned off with blue police tape, and white powder sprayed hastily over a dark brown patch.

You walk along the corridor, and get greeted by the combined chorus off three dogs barking in an emasculated fashion, either because they're too small to produce anything more than a peep, or because anything noisier will get the neighbours complaining.

Not everyday is this exciting though. Normally, you just get barked at, and hear someone in the next block practicing a piano piece to death. (death of the piece, sometimes also the death of you.)

pseudo scientese

The taps in my house have gone on strike. One spurts an occassional blub-ful of water, like a faulty Merlion. The other drips at varied speeds. Another doesn't function as a tap - no water comes out.

(How do you define a tap? By function or by appearance?)

I think the sorry tap condition is quite the mirror of how exams drain everything. Brain fluid en masse. It doesn't help that coffee is such a diuretic. It's actually the coffee's fault, but we should blame exams nonetheless, the way it's so much easier to blame the government for coming up with faulty policies than to admit failure on the individual's part.

(I think this is subconscious propaganda...)

Now everything has to be parenthesised because there is no one definition for anything, and there has to be a disclaimer for everything.

Tabula Rasa

Decided that the house was too quiet and claustrophobic for me to get any studying done so I landed in Guthrie House's Coffee Bean for the nth time this year. Having been there so often, with so many different people, sitting at a particular spot will inevitably bring back random memories which pop up during the blankness when my mind refuses to retain anymore information on the various definitions of gender, the various forms of patriarchy, the wage differentials between sexes etc.

Memories of the last study buddy, the last person I went there with who wasn't a study buddy; I remembered the kid who spilt a drink and cried, remembered the CD of boyband pop songs on endless replay (and is still on endless replay). I wouldn't call this nostalgia, more like doing a virus scan on my brain's hard drive. Weeding out the things best forgotten, and in doing so inevitably recalling what I thought I already forgot.

I think once again, my brain is taking pains to surprise/irritate/confound me. No wonder they say you are your own enemy.

Lost 101

The 101st post, and I've nothing in my life to show for how far I've progressed since the time I started blogging. Sure people have come and gone, but this feeling of stasis seems inescapable. Like an unfortunate rut filled with quicksand. By the time the exams pass I would have gone under.

So excessively drama.

The weekend was spent rotting at the new National Library because Act3Theatrics had a performance there and I helped with the manual labour, which is way less stressful than performing. Thankfully, because after (finally) finishing all my term papers, I hardly have enough brain cells left to crack an egg.

Sitting on the steps at the atrium and stoning/people watching is extremely therapeutic though hazardous because you attract a lot of attention, mostly unwanted and unwelcome. Somehow, being the recipient of other people's flirtatious behaviour (male and female alike) leaves me feeling extremely violated, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Bleargh.