Last night a DJ saved my life

It’s a rare DJ that can transform an exhausted, ridiculously sleep-deprived Michelle in an overcrowded club full of Singaporeans into, well, a happy Michelle, so I guess DJ Jazzy Jeff (yes, Will’s friend in Fresh Prince of Bel-Air who kept going over to the house, annoying Mr Banks and getting physically thrown out) must be one of those DJs.

Before he came on, I was ready to kill. I was annoyed at overdressed people, yet annoyed at myself at the same time for giving in and dressing fractionally better than I would have for a London club (where you could walk in wearing a clown suit and the most anyone would say is “Love the baggy trousers, mate”). I was annoyed at the stupid level of crowding in Phuture, and at incredibly rude people who pushed past others way too violently, or literally just leaned on the people behind them to force them to give way. (Big Bald White Guy, this means you. You’re an asshole, and I just wish I’d elbowed you in your spine a lot harder than I did.)

In the crush of the crowds, I remembered how Russ always managed to protect me, dance behind me without ever hitting me, and look good dancing, all at the same time, and I remembered how far away Russ is now. I remembered Nick and Vish gangsta’ing it up on the empty dancefloor of a Glasgow student union bar, not caring how ridiculous they looked. I remembered trudging painfully up the Ramsay Hall stairs with Gareth in daylight, vowing futilely never to club again and knowing this scenario would repeat itself in the near and irresponsible future.

I felt constrained by the atmosphere of the club, very much a place where people go with people, and don’t tend to strike up random conversations with strangers, and again felt annoyed with myself at the same time for letting them affect me. Coincidentally, the only stranger who struck up a conversation with me the whole night was from England. Go figure. To be fair to the club, and my fellow Singaporeans, I was probably mostly just pissed off because it wasn’t London.

Then Jazzy Jeff came on, and all my acrimony melted away into happy flailing and perspiration. Great selection of material ranging from the obligatory to the obscure, pretty damn inspired treatment of well-known samples and recent hip-pop either through mixing or scratching, some moments of total weirdness like when he played Smells Like Teen Spirit, and always on the right side of the fine line between turntable mastery and turntable wankery. I must admit that his decision to tempt us with the intro of Sound Of Da Police but never actually give us the track frustrated me dreadfully, but maybe everyone else except me is tired of it.

I snapped back into perspective. I was with great company, friends no less dear to me than the ones I’ve left behind. I was witnessing one of the best live mix sets I’ve ever seen. I had a wonderful boyfriend to talk to on the phone when I got back later that night. In England I gained everything and lost nothing. I mustn’t forget to keep focusing on what I gained. I mustn’t forget that I have lost none of that just by having to be somewhere else for a few years.

Spice Daddy

We walked out for dinner to the Yin Yang Palace which serves rather wonderful Chinese restaurant-quality food at coffeeshop prices. We had steamed tilapia in spicy nonya sauce, chilli kangkong, ma po tofu (in lots of chilli oil) and herbal mutton soup. Additional small dishes of chilli also came with the food. The herbal mutton soup was the only non-spicy dish. My dad dunked his mutton in the chilli before eating it.

Home Sour Home

Recent silence is due to the severe illness of my laptop. It happens every summer when I come home – frequent freezing, blue screens of death, restarting itself (and I use Windows 98 so the Blaster worm doesn’t affect me), switching itself off, telling me “Operating system not found” when I try to start it again – and the problems magically disappear when I bring the laptop back to England. Except of course this time there’s no return to England in sight, so I think my baby is toast.

This is just great. Not only does Singapore reduce me to a miserable existence – constantly red eyes, nose won’t stop running, eczema reappears – it also targets one of the few things that makes life here bearable.

As you may have gathered, I am extremely grumpy right now.

One down, three to go

One down, three to go. Studying three topics for an exam where I had to answer three questions was probably not very clever, but let’s move on.

Life has been mildly more muesli, less Weetabix these past few days in that there have actually been enjoyable bits, and not everything has been dry, dull and turd-like.

I had four hours to kill between the exam and meeting people for dinner, and atavism took over – I went shopping. In the same way Gabrielle’s Greatest Hits is an inseparable part of the UK girlie shopping experience, market researchers here still seem to think tragic techno of the Forever Dance Anthems ’98! variety is what will get those halter-neck tops flying off the shelves. Other things have changed since I was last around. There’s nothing quite like a recession for improving quality of service – I was greeted and thanked in every shop, and it even seemed sincere. There’s also Dorothy Perkins here now, which I find difficult to understand given that it makes clothes for fat English frumps and Singaporean girls tend to be none of the above.

Dinner involved Luke, Vikram, Zakir, Luke’s friend whose name I shamefully can’t remember (it was Chinese) and parts of what must have been a scary mofo of a swordfish. I went home happy.

Today was one of those rare days where most things go right. I woke up early, got to NUS in time to meet classmates and prepare for a presentation, got a decent amount of study done, and didn’t fall asleep at all at any point. I met Terry, Yish, Yen, Don and Zak to smoke hookahs on Arab Street, and for another few blissful hours exams didn’t exist.

I won’t go into a long sentimental ramble about how special old friendships can feel when you realize you haven’t seen them for a while but you still feel comfortable, conversation still flows, and you’re having a great time, but I think these few days it has been exactly those inner sentimental ramblings, and the company that inspired them, that have pulled me somewhat out of the doldrums.

Excerpt: The Singapore Story: Memoirs Of Lee Kuan Yew

I may have had to wait four years to wrestle The Singapore Story: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew away from the rest of my family, but at least I’m finally reading it. It’s great. Here’s a passage:

“By his unpredictable and inconsistent twists and turns, Marshall had alienated not just myself and the Liberal Socialists, but his key Labour Front members. His wanting to restart the talks to save himself was too much for them. “You cannot eat your own vomit,” as one Liberal Socialist delegate put it in vivid Hokkien. Half an hour into the meeting, Marshall knew that if he tried to resume negotiations, he would have to do so on his own. He had overplayed his hand and was isolated.

That night, he went to a performance of Madam Butterfly with Lennox-Boyd and Lady Patricia Boyd, and then on to a Spanish restaurant to dine to the tune of guitars and the stamping feet of flamenco dancers. Meanwhile, I decided to stop him from staging a recovery. At a press conference that same evening at Malaya Hall, I made it clear that the PAP would have nothing to do with a reopening of the conference. I said it was a ‘final, desperate attempt to hang on to office, a sign of incredible political ineptitude’, and rounded it off with ‘Never in the history of colonial evolution has so much humbug been enacted in so short a time by so erratic a leadership.’ “

Clinging To Perspective

I’m back, vaguely unpacked, in the house my family moved to while I was away, sitting in my new room (the first time I’ve ever had a room to myself at home), typing this while my laptop receives broadband love vibes from the cable modem. We had barbecued stingray, chilli kangkong and crispy baby squid for dinner at my request. Recent events in my sister’s job have kept her working past 10 pm in the past few days, but she spent Sunday cleaning my room and preparing it for me to come home to. My mum is doing my laundry, and the “WELCOME HOME MICHY” banner they kept specially from last year is the first thing I see when I enter the room.

I can’t remember a more miserable 24 hours in my life than those I just went through, but I mustn’t forget that even in the gloom my blessings remain abundant.

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?