Chinese Kara No Okay

Of my many plebian pleasures karaoke must surely rank among the most intense. On Sunday at Kaka’s house we bawled happily for hours. While his collection obviously couldn’t match a proper karaoke lounge’s for sheer quantity, I was happy enough with Downtown, a Sounds Of Silence duet with Shoop and a couple of lines of Yellow Bird attempting a really dodgy Carribbean accent.

Then we switched to Chinese and the fun really started. The list of Chinese songs I can claim even vague familiarity with is miniscule. In fact, the list of Chinese words I can claim vague familiarity with is almost as miniscule, and the fact that they use fan2 ti3 zi4 (old-style written Chinese, a million times more complicated) for karaoke lyrics doesn’t help either. But I let none of this stop me.

In secondary school there was a Chinese inter-class singing competition, and I got involved in my class item because the chosen song featured a violin interlude, which I was to be playing. In the process I got to know the song fairly well, and till today it retains its sentimental value for me (we won the competition). So I was ecstatic when Shoop found Zhi Ji on one of the laser discs, and we decided we’d sing it. My aforementioned difficulties with the Chinese language meant that most of my participation in the singing ended up like “xi huan ni de ren, drrrrmrmmrrrrrrraaargh CHENG KEN! hrrrrwrrruang de xiao RONG, mmmmmmrrrrrrgnnnnnnn EN!”

That was the song I knew best. Later we found Min Tian Wo Yao Jia Gai Ni Le (I’ll Be Marrying You Tomorrow), where my knowledge of the song ended at the very words Min Tian Wo Yao Jia Gai Ni Le, so I sang that line extra loudly to make up for my other inadequacies.

I love Chinese karaoke.

[Related question: Can anyone in the know tell me who sang Zhi Ji? I think it’s from the early 90s. I’m obviously hard-pressed to give any complete lyrical lines, but I think one, at the end of the chorus, is “dang wo yong you ni, wo de xin zai ye bu xia xue.”]

[Off the top of my head, here’s The Complete List of Chinese Songs Michelle Kind Of Knows, translated to the best of my abilities (in addition to those mentioned above):

  • Wo Shi Nian Qing De Wei Guo Jun (I Am A Young Soldier-Protector Of Our Nation!)
  • Jin Ye Ni Hui Bu Hui Lai? (Tonight Will You Come Or Not Come?)
  • Shi Shang Zhi You Ma Ma Hao (In The World There Is None So Good As Mummy)
  • Ai Xiang Shui (???)
  • Ai Bu Pa (???)
  • Nan Ren Bu Gai Rang Nu Ren Liu Lei (Men Shouldn’t Make Women Cry)
  • Something I can’t remember the Chinese name of, but I think it was called Cupid Love in English
  • Probably one or two Teresa Teng classics

That’s pretty much it.]

Last Week

Every last week of summer in Singapore always seems like I’m packing in an entire summer’s worth of everything in a few days of frenetic activity.

Everything I eat must be carefully considered – can I get the same in London? If so, what do I have to pay, and how easy is it to find? In light of this, Sunday’s excursion to Rice Table for their S$12.80 (£4.50ish) a la carte buffet was time and money well spent, even though their tauhu telor (tofu omelette, a lot nicer than it sounds) is nowhere as good as Kartini’s (in Parkway). Mum grilled some stingray tonight, but we might also go for the real roadside thing before I leave – eating it at your home dining table with placemats and a tablecloth just isn’t the same as eating it on the pavement of East Coast Road under the night sky.

The shopping imperative, too, becomes that much more acute. I’m not going to have access to so wide a range of various frivolities at so low a price for the next year, not to mention the fact that everything in Singapore fits me wonderfully, while in London I have to scrounge and beg for size 8’s and 6’s.

This last week, the mix has been right. I’ve fed my frivolity during the day, divided nights between family and friends, and indulged my food fetishes pretty much all the time. Late at night I Internet and read (finally finished Kavalier & Clay, now on Amsterdam). Met scholarship and UCL folk on Sunday (Happy birthday Kaka!), lunched poshly with my sister (Saint Pierre’s, lovely) and bubble tea’d with Pei Ee today. Tomorrow I meet the Orgers for Goldmember and mudpies. Wednesday will either involve clubbing with Fay, or packing (boo), hopefully both. And Thursday I fly.

Dramafest/Debate Finals/Scholarship Gathering/May

I’m really losing the battle to keep up with writing about everything I want to write about.

Raffles Junior College (I keep wanting to refer to this as RJ the way most of my peers do, but am aware that the world outside Singapore doesn’t converse in acronyms) Dramafest finals last Friday, the now annual pilgrimage (written about last year, and fundamentally the same in terms of group composition and general good feeling) to good food in Ghim Moh hawker centre, bad plays in LT1 and debauched supper in Holland Village. Tragically, the Hainanese chicken rice stall manned by the skinny balding moustachioed man seems to have closed down, but at least there was still Luan Qi Ba Zao (scroll down to NoBlogLove post#2). We suppered in Coffee Club, which was altogether too civilized a place for D’s (names initialized to protect the filthy) very excited shouts about Natalie Portman’s nipples. (Most quotes from the evening are unprintable at best, and potentially libellous at worst.)

Debate finals were on Saturday, where for the second year running I was the youngest and strangest-haired judge on the panel. I don’t think this adversely affected my ability to judge, given that I ended up comfortably in the middle of a majority decision, but it was something I was more than passingly aware of nonetheless. Having to travel to the other side of the island (stop laughing, people from big countries, it’s at least one and a half hours’ journey!) for a scholarship gathering afterwards was a bit of a bitch, but worth the trip in the end – I’m always pleasantly shocked by just how much I actually enjoy the company of these people. Working with them, if it happens, might actually be fun.

Monday’s romantic candlelight dinner with May at Chijmes started auspiciously with our agreed meeting point in the Mango store at Raffles City. Practical given that she was parking there, and also for the fact that if either of us was late, the other wouldn’t have to be bored while waiting. Impractical given that we ended up eating about two hours later than we’d originally planned on due to grappling with important shopping decisions, such as whether the unique colour of trousers was an acceptable tradeoff for their ass-ballooning potential.

I Demand Cheaper Decadence

Forget one party rule, the fragility of civil liberties and the ridiculous distortions of the law of defamation to silence political opposition, the greatest travesty I can point to in Singapore today is that I just paid S$6.84 (something like £2.50!) for a HALF pint of Guinness (at Dubliners, which was nice, but certainly not like any of the pubs I went into in Ireland, in that it was spankingly new and comfortably empty and no one was drunk). How is Singapore going to succeed in its drive to recruit foreign talent if it is unwilling to fulfil the most basic needs of the decadent West?

Debating Nostalgia

On Saturday I felt old and retrospectively stupid.

The semi-final debates were on the motion This House Believes That The IMF and World Bank Have Done More Harm Than Good. If I had had to take this on, when I was 17, with an hour to prepare, I would have curled up in a fetal position in the corner and cried for my mother. The teams I judged took it on bravely and far more competently than I would have done 5 years ago, and while I was able, in judge mode, to make many criticisms of their efforts, that really doesn’t detract from the fact that they’d have kicked my 17-year-old ass to Washington (is that where the IMF and WB headquarters are?) and back.

The seven-generational Raffles Debaters party (affectionately christened the Gangbang by Jolene) afterwards had the magnificent cacophony you would expect from an event where you put a lot of debaters in a room but don’t actually have rules of debating in place to control all of them. Party games included obscene charades where people had to act out stuff like Octopussy and Dr Strangelove (the guy doing this mimed wanking a very big dick, and someone guessed it just from that. Go figure), Polar Bear (too complicated to explain, but I am told all the young people play it these days) and Dance Dance Revolution.

As I said, old and retrospectively stupid. But in a good way.

Katong Convent Nostalgia

Another of those Real Life weekends, I’m afraid. I really must get my priorities in order.

The Katong Convent (my primary and secondary school) class reunion on Friday wasn’t as manic as others have been. Being unable to attend due to her being in Afghanistan volunteering, our form teacher was unable to offend the family at the next table by loudly recounting stories about her lesbian friends. Since Shoop wasn’t meeting her boyfriend afterwards, the class didn’t have the chance to charge headlong after her and hammer on the windows of the taxi demanding to meet him while she tried to explain, within, that she didn’t actually know any of these mad girls at all.

Debating and my other various pretensions draw me back to Rafflesian soil more often than to KC, but all the sappy reminiscing in the world would still be inadequate to convey what KC was, and still is to me. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about choices, and evaluating most of those I’ve made with the benefit of hindsight, I continue to be amazed at how few I regret, even the ones that were fairly risky at the time. I am glad I chose not to go into the Gifted stream (this would have meant leaving KC) or to a school higher up on the rankings. Both those forks in the road continued to generate their fair share of angst years after they’d been taken but these days I’ve been thinking Robert Frost was right.

Singapore Art Museum

I don’t know if I’d rate the Singapore Art Museum particularly highly if I were a foreigner, because it would be full of names I’d never heard of. Even visiting it as a Singaporean, most names apart from Chen Wen Hsi, Georgette Chen and Ng Eng Teng draw a blank with me. But I found myself enjoying the museum’s permanent collection more than the Rodin exhibition we’d primarily gone to see; perhaps I subconsciously prefer painting to sculpture, or modern over classical, or perhaps it was just the familiarity of paintings I’d seen before on previous visits to the museum – I don’t know. It’s three in the morning and stream-of-consciousness is about all I can manage.

I like this museum, always have. I like its retention of the simple beauty it must have had as a school, the spare elegance it still has as an art museum. Today the revelation hit me that my parents walked the same corridors I was walking down, in the days when it was St Joseph’s Institution and they were students there. They met and romanced here. It’s a beautiful place to be able to remember falling in love in, I think.

I was also struck by the thought that this awareness of a personal history can only happen for me in this country. As far as England is concerned, I didn’t exist before 1999.

Afternoon Of Poetry And Music

Saturday was Rafflesian, the morning spent judging quarter-final debates, the afternoon at the Creative Writing Club’s annual Afternoon of Poetry and Music, which I’ve attended for the past seven years or so.

APM had its usual mixed bag of poetry – some I didn’t get or didn’t like, some that could have been good if their authors hadn’t delivered them so badly, some I wished I was a good enough poet to have written, many I knew I would never be a good enough poet to write. Poems by young strangers and old friends. Lee Tzu Pheng’s beautiful and elegiac Falling Into Timelessness, which I must find and read many times more. Alfian Sa’at’s Autobiography, from that second collection I haven’t read nearly as many times as One Fierce Hour and really should sit down with soon. Musical performances which gave me varying degrees of enjoyment depending on the novelty of their repertoire and the skill of the performers. Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba arranged for saxophone quartet, well worth watching. Ploddingly and badly played Pachelbel’s Canon, a real waste of time.

Crepes (quality good, quantity bad) at Raffles City (continuity unintended) with Terence, Yi-Sheng, Cheryl and Miss Ho. Wandering, talking, coffeeing later on, conversation that can’t really be alluded to because of the reasonably private nature of most of it, but I suppose the main point here is that I went home from the day happy and remembering why, according to the Myers-Briggs test, I am apparently an extrovert.

Food With Friends

So I finally decided to act like the social being anthropologists tell me I’m meant to be, and got a life.

Friday lunch with Vikram at a Chinese in what I think is now called H20 Zone, where our suspicions that we’d been given a tourist menu (photos accompanying every menu item) were confirmed when we peeked in another menu (which they told us was for “drinks”) and found it photoless and about $2 cheaper across the board. So we ordered our crispy baby squid (another ticked item on the summer food list) and sambal brinjal conspicuously from the photoless menu, and were charged accordingly.

Dinner with the Twins and their parents involved more ticking of the food list once they’d discovered a list existed and insisted on getting me satay and a baby coconut in addition to my chicken rice. We drifted and lounged and chatted around the Raffles Town Club pool, probably well-raisined by the time we got out to do girly things like hair masques and steam-rooms. There was the pleasant feeling of lives that had moved on and developed almost wholly independently of each other but which could still be described out of more than politeness (because we wanted to), and responded to out of more than avoiding awkwardness (because the connections that power conversation were still there). They still refer to me as “hoggie”, short for hedgehog, because I am apparently “prickly but cute.” I would have suggested just “cactus” instead myself, but suppose old friends are allowed to do things like tell me I’m cute without being killed with blunt objects.

Packrat Blues

I decided to make a start on tidying things in readiness for the move to a new family house. It’s only scheduled to take place after I’ve returned to England, but I thought I’d do what I could now to reduce the amount of my junk my family will have to pack up.

I started with the lowest compartment of the cupboard – relics from childhood – and had to conclude after going through it all that I am a packrat of the highest order; the combined effect of the dual considerations of sentimental value and but-it-might-come-in-handy-some-day is that the eraser collection (I’m not kidding) can’t be thrown away despite the fact that I would have to write out the Encyclopedia Britannica in pencil and then rub it all out again in order to actually use all of it, the Sea Monkey pamphlet can’t be thrown away even though those little ripoffs are long dead, and Strawberry Shortcake (unfortunately naked) also has to stay, because you don’t throw away Strawberry Shortcake.

But some things had to go, and so I made painful choices.

Thrown: Generic toy cars
Kept: A MicroMachines tune-up station cleverly disguised as a can of motor-oil. A small, rather pathetic Transformer-wannabe truck that in its robot form strangely resembled Duke Nukem. Five metal replicas of commercial airlines. My neighbour Roy and I used to combine our collections of planes and have plane beauty contests. We’d trundle the planes down the length of the “runway”, they’d do a turn at the end and get trundled back, and we’d score them out of ten. My Korean Air plane won many times because it was this lovely sky-blue.

Thrown: Balls of knitting yarn
Kept: Squares of knitting which I knitted every time I learnt a new stitch; a practice scarf rendered unusable by an inexplicable foray into stocking stitch three-quarters of the way through it. An unfinished square was still mounted on the knitting needles. I tried to continue it. I could remember how to knit, but not how to purl.

Thrown: Whoopie cushion, with deep regret – its rubber had melted and stuck to the box and it was a pale shadow of the fart maelstrom it once was. I loved that whoopie cushion. Sigh.
Kept: Fake bloodied bandage with nail, calculator that squirts water when you press the keys, sweet tin with leaping snakes when opened, rubber centipede, two snakes (one rubber, one plastic), replica revolver which shoots a flag saying “BANG!!!” when you press the trigger.