I fall asleep to Indie Arie, and seven hours later these bizarre events occur:
An outdoor barbeque in Hong Kong -- memories from my adolescence.
This leads somehow to an immense music talent audition held in a raked concert hall, like Lang*, only the organ is in the center. There is a director and a haughty Chinese woman with a boring mid-length straight hairstyle who plays piano and doubts that anyone talented enough will walk through the door.
Enter Tommy*, bearing a guitar and I think probably a homemade burrito wrapped in foil. He is optimistic, almost naive in this setting. Three other equally country-ish boys join him and they play a simple but happy folk song. Somehow the youngest of the group (I suppose now they are brothers?) is asked about his specific talent -- suddenly there is a large audience. He is asked to play piano. He's never learnt piano. But he will give it a shot, despite the odds. Everyone waits, chattering. The casual chatter amongst the crowd starts to turn cacophonous, when there erupts from the piano "DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ... DUN-DUN-DUN-DUHHHH ...." I've known this since the beginning of the scene, but this is a warped version of the discovery of Amadeus Mozart.
Now we are being treated to a concert by the discovered genius in cosy outdoor amphitheatre. Everyone is clamoured around the kingly/teacher/authority figure, an old blond woman. We have an argument about immigration, the difference between foreign nationals and expatriate Americans coming from Hong Kong to the States. This, disrupting the concert. I am angry.
Again, four boys, friends. A Steve Weintraub-y* figure is in trouble with his girlfriend because he has attempted to hawk off videos of the two of them having sex in 69 different positions. Somehow the colors here are dark turquoise, blue, green. The girl is blond. She is upset, but misses him greatly.
Cut to scene of angry parents of said girl: pillow-talk. Big, Oafy, Bearded father--frankly, looking a little like Bernie Saffran*, bless his soul--is livid about the treatment of his daughter. Elegant brunette wife seems to be trying to calm him down -- "don't take it down, take it up" -- when, in a sick twist, it is evident that she is encouraging his lust for revenge -- "Take it up to the cupboard, where you can use the extension cord." (implication: for strangulation)
Cut back to turquoisey bluey dormy room. Big, Oafy, Bearded father has snuck in to lay in wait for Steve Weintraub-y figure, and decides to hide in the closet. Somehow, miraculously, he fits.
"Steve" is repentant only in as much as he misses the girl desperately. There is an odd joviality and pride in his manner -- it is understood that he sought to share their intimacy as a testament to their great, genuine, love, not as exploitation. They are both unabashedly proud of their sexual feats. (maybe this is coming from the plot of Salman Rushdie's Shalimar The Clown, which I just read?)
Cut to flashback scene of their first time. This is pretty hot. Somehow, I have more of the viewpoint of the man.
Cut back to dorm room. There is a list, and people are lining up, signing up. Turns out, "Steve" is actually signing people up by number to purchase each of the 69 positions he and blond girl achieved, but he is doing this as a declaration of his continued love for her. B.O.B.Dad is still in closet, somehow softening. This ends happily.
Now we are in a large theatre watching a Broadway show. I am seated with my immediate family -- Mom, Dad, Sue. We are in the first few rows. It is a show I suppose based on the previous, um, love story, since everyone's singing about sex. I am busy critiquing the theatrical elements in my head. There is a Nutcracker-winter-like scene where everyone enters in white, and a revolving white-polka-dot gobo is swirling. Next scene is the big musical number. Lead is blond girl, and her name, stage or real I don't know, is "Kelly Rorque". Chorus of teenagers/children. Everyone still in white. That girl from Oliver Steele's class who has a sweet face, and sandy hair in two Chinagirl buns is in the chorus, as is an unfamiliar, but specific-looking young Chinese boy. They are all singing Kylie Minogue's Locomotion, except that the lyrics of the verse are all rhymes about sex. It's a little disturbing, kind of like the diarhhea-song, but more so.
I wake up.
Notes:
*Lang Concert Hall, award-winning performance venue situated in Swarthmore College.
*Tommy: Caucasian Vassar-graduate who is dancing in the piece with Alice. Works for a hedge fund. Short buzzed hair, prominent nose with a sharp angle at the top but bulbous nostrils. Nice guy.
*Steve Weintraub: NYU kid I went out with a couple times. Graduate student in Art History, straight out of Oberlin undergrad. Snooze. Jewish, brunette, here: a goatee, petite features, bright blue eyes. Slender. My age, looks alternatingly intelligent & sexy or Twelve.
*Professor Bernie Saffran: Swarthmore's much beloved and be-missed Economics guru, who passed away earlier this year.
***
Much like my deeply-lined palms, which contain many a unexposed revelation, anyone out there was to decipher my crazy dream?
The interesting thing about writing out a dream is that your judgments about the characters and their motivations is entirely inside-out, and are as critical to the shaping of the narrative as the sequence of events that occur. Meaning, as the author of your dream, you are simulataneously 'inside' each of the players even though you don't feel like you control what they do or what happens to them. Like when the reconciliation between "Steve" and the Blond Girl I know is happening only by the dissipating anger of the hidden Father. You have eyes in all places.
The deja-vu in dreams is such an interesting feeling: "I've been here before, yet it's not quite the same." The locales are all distorted memories of places I've actually experienced, and of such variety. Like my wardrobe, on the occasion that I actually take inventory. Something from everywhere around the globe.
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Sunday, September 25, 2005
PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Gerard Mosterd
Angin & Kamu/Jij
@ Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
September 3rd, 2005, 8:30pm
Featuring Wendel Spier, Thao Nguyen, Loes Ruizeveld, Ederson Rodriguez Xavier, Ming Wei Poon
Choreography by Gerard Mosterd
____________________________________________________
A double header, this evening's presentation of Dutch-Indonesian choreographer Gerard Mosterd's identity crisis deals entirely with dualities and the indeterminacy of being in between.
First a solo, then a group work for "five dancers, five mosquito nets and a video beamer," both Angin and Kamu/Jij are dexterous demonstrations of how appropriate contemporary choreography can be to express and present ambiguities, grappling in the body, through space and symbol, the questions of what cannot yet be defined.
Yet this discovery is not in itself innovative. Mosterd's choreography on the whole carries an ambition that perhaps blinds itself to the nuances, thus the true sophistication, of the complex realities it is based upon.
Angin, performed by Singaporean, Amsterdam-based Ming Wei Poon, is described as "an autobiographical research on being blown in between two cultural backgrounds." It was the result of a collaboration between Mosterd and Japanese dancer Shintaro O-Ue, evidenced by the Butoh influence upon the opening scene.
Poon breathes heavily, shivers, and spasms as he falls into the window of light before him on an otherwise dark stage. Stepping back into the dark to regain control, this sequence repeats over and over, forward and across the space. In a somewhat facile representation of two worlds, the stage is divided by light into right and left halves which Poon oscillates between. Concluding his passage back and forth--being "blown in between"--the stage is lit more fully as a whole for another repetitive section of athletic, Graham-based modern sequencing which proves to be Poon's sole modus operandi.
Although satisfying in his technique, Poon lacks the emotional inspiration to express anything deeper about his situation or his character's cultural duality aside from the fact that it exists. The choreography furthermore fails to offer the dancer anything other than abstract movement that travels back and forth through the space, thereby rendering the piece nothing more than a thematic trope. What about being blown between? What about control? What about exclusion? What about isolation? The piece lacks specificity in its direction, and contrarily too little abandon in its movement.
Though with a similar formalism, a more discrete narrative emerges from Kamu/Jij. After a projected video-loop of a sensuous heterosexual partnering, the stage activity begins in indecision. Tilting silently in unison right and left, back and forth, the dancers act as a collective pendulum, counting down, it seems, until they break away and apart. Enigmatic vignettes ensue, cinematically 'cut' by black-outs between, depicting sex and romantic pursuit in a series of somewhat painfully pantomimed pas de deux. A trio of women become more frenetic as they weave through each other, in a complex spatial patterning that is one of the highlights of the piece. The five come together again, marking time. Two men enter as on a conveyor belt, improvising with snake-like body-rolls and spinal twists. The devastatingly entrancing Wendel Spier eats a rose. Finally, in an unclear development, all five dancers end up confined separately in hanging columns of mosquito net and, just as unclearly, fight their way out of the nets and flail, kicking and falling, to their spasmic end. Oh these 'post-modern' fashionistas, with their spiked hair and fuscia-painted eyelids -- they struggle to free themselves only to end in chaos!
Again, there is nothing new about Mosterd's concept. Then again, there is nothing new about an East-West cultural conflict. His book-ending revisit to the video-loop after the collapse of the staged world -- this time, with confusing added images of Javanese text -- further irritates in its adherence to rulebook choreography and its conflation of cultural specificities to iconic mores. West is abstract, (post-)modern, fabricated. East is ancient, tribal, authentic. Get a grip -- Clifford Geertz we are not.
Yet somewhere along this hour-long journey I felt something, and in this lies Mosterd's strengths: his patient use of time and periodicity, and his success in establishing place through consistency over time.
The world of Kamu/Jij is one of suspense, if not suspended animation. The disconnectedness of the scenes, and the disconnectedness of the movement vocabulary itself -- for the most part a staccato, stop-start gestural sequencing -- are well-suited to the theme of duality.
It results in the dancers appearing as programmed automatons -- I hesitate to say, 'dolls' -- which degrade or 'short-circuit' as they are wrenched between two worlds, two moralities, by indecision or conflict; they appear as to suffer an electromagnetic malfunction between like poles. Not only is the rapid point-to-point sequencing fascinating to watch, but as its awkwardness develops over time from otherworldly to lingua franca, we too sense that we have been trapped within the theatre in the confines of this limbo of in between. We feel a similar, and familiar wrenching -- that of confusion and unknowing.
Thus Kamu/Jij feels very much a continuation of the concept behind Angin, whereby the "subject of double moral" it seeks to deal with through the lens of public intimacy plays out rather as an inevitability of cross-cultural dualism.
Perhaps Mosterd would benefit from a further developed sound score to carry, rather than mire, the dancers through to a true climax, or find a way to intersperse the Javanese text -- in sound or in image -- throughout the piece so as to make that element relevant and meaningful. With movers so talented, and a structure so promising, the choreography needs only to battle through its own indecision in order to arrive as raw, as elegant, as truly contradictory as it wants to be.
@ Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Center,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
September 3rd, 2005, 8:30pm
Featuring Wendel Spier, Thao Nguyen, Loes Ruizeveld, Ederson Rodriguez Xavier, Ming Wei Poon
Choreography by Gerard Mosterd
____________________________________________________
A double header, this evening's presentation of Dutch-Indonesian choreographer Gerard Mosterd's identity crisis deals entirely with dualities and the indeterminacy of being in between.
First a solo, then a group work for "five dancers, five mosquito nets and a video beamer," both Angin and Kamu/Jij are dexterous demonstrations of how appropriate contemporary choreography can be to express and present ambiguities, grappling in the body, through space and symbol, the questions of what cannot yet be defined.
Yet this discovery is not in itself innovative. Mosterd's choreography on the whole carries an ambition that perhaps blinds itself to the nuances, thus the true sophistication, of the complex realities it is based upon.
Angin, performed by Singaporean, Amsterdam-based Ming Wei Poon, is described as "an autobiographical research on being blown in between two cultural backgrounds." It was the result of a collaboration between Mosterd and Japanese dancer Shintaro O-Ue, evidenced by the Butoh influence upon the opening scene.
Poon breathes heavily, shivers, and spasms as he falls into the window of light before him on an otherwise dark stage. Stepping back into the dark to regain control, this sequence repeats over and over, forward and across the space. In a somewhat facile representation of two worlds, the stage is divided by light into right and left halves which Poon oscillates between. Concluding his passage back and forth--being "blown in between"--the stage is lit more fully as a whole for another repetitive section of athletic, Graham-based modern sequencing which proves to be Poon's sole modus operandi.
Although satisfying in his technique, Poon lacks the emotional inspiration to express anything deeper about his situation or his character's cultural duality aside from the fact that it exists. The choreography furthermore fails to offer the dancer anything other than abstract movement that travels back and forth through the space, thereby rendering the piece nothing more than a thematic trope. What about being blown between? What about control? What about exclusion? What about isolation? The piece lacks specificity in its direction, and contrarily too little abandon in its movement.
Though with a similar formalism, a more discrete narrative emerges from Kamu/Jij. After a projected video-loop of a sensuous heterosexual partnering, the stage activity begins in indecision. Tilting silently in unison right and left, back and forth, the dancers act as a collective pendulum, counting down, it seems, until they break away and apart. Enigmatic vignettes ensue, cinematically 'cut' by black-outs between, depicting sex and romantic pursuit in a series of somewhat painfully pantomimed pas de deux. A trio of women become more frenetic as they weave through each other, in a complex spatial patterning that is one of the highlights of the piece. The five come together again, marking time. Two men enter as on a conveyor belt, improvising with snake-like body-rolls and spinal twists. The devastatingly entrancing Wendel Spier eats a rose. Finally, in an unclear development, all five dancers end up confined separately in hanging columns of mosquito net and, just as unclearly, fight their way out of the nets and flail, kicking and falling, to their spasmic end. Oh these 'post-modern' fashionistas, with their spiked hair and fuscia-painted eyelids -- they struggle to free themselves only to end in chaos!
Again, there is nothing new about Mosterd's concept. Then again, there is nothing new about an East-West cultural conflict. His book-ending revisit to the video-loop after the collapse of the staged world -- this time, with confusing added images of Javanese text -- further irritates in its adherence to rulebook choreography and its conflation of cultural specificities to iconic mores. West is abstract, (post-)modern, fabricated. East is ancient, tribal, authentic. Get a grip -- Clifford Geertz we are not.
Yet somewhere along this hour-long journey I felt something, and in this lies Mosterd's strengths: his patient use of time and periodicity, and his success in establishing place through consistency over time.
The world of Kamu/Jij is one of suspense, if not suspended animation. The disconnectedness of the scenes, and the disconnectedness of the movement vocabulary itself -- for the most part a staccato, stop-start gestural sequencing -- are well-suited to the theme of duality.
It results in the dancers appearing as programmed automatons -- I hesitate to say, 'dolls' -- which degrade or 'short-circuit' as they are wrenched between two worlds, two moralities, by indecision or conflict; they appear as to suffer an electromagnetic malfunction between like poles. Not only is the rapid point-to-point sequencing fascinating to watch, but as its awkwardness develops over time from otherworldly to lingua franca, we too sense that we have been trapped within the theatre in the confines of this limbo of in between. We feel a similar, and familiar wrenching -- that of confusion and unknowing.
Thus Kamu/Jij feels very much a continuation of the concept behind Angin, whereby the "subject of double moral" it seeks to deal with through the lens of public intimacy plays out rather as an inevitability of cross-cultural dualism.
Perhaps Mosterd would benefit from a further developed sound score to carry, rather than mire, the dancers through to a true climax, or find a way to intersperse the Javanese text -- in sound or in image -- throughout the piece so as to make that element relevant and meaningful. With movers so talented, and a structure so promising, the choreography needs only to battle through its own indecision in order to arrive as raw, as elegant, as truly contradictory as it wants to be.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Peptalk and politicking
Don't let anyone -- especially yourself -- ever tell you that your so-called passion may just be a colossal waste of time.
If they said it anyway --
Don't listen.
No matter what the statistics are -- and the incidence of failure is rated high in this field -- you are never a statistic to yourself and to the people that love you. And sometimes it's not even a case of needing to look around you to see who's at the front of the queue, or to feel better about yourself by glancing at those behind, and then calculate your odds. Sometimes, probably more often than conventionally thought, you just have to wait your turn. Pay attention, move forward with the line, cut if the opportunity avails. Most importantly -- check yourself before you even leave home. Don't get turned away after waiting because you forgot something crucial, like your passport for a flight, or your sense of play for a creative project.
It's been said, and with reason: one should pay more heed to one's own advice.
I hadn't been in a rehearsal for such a long time, until Monday. That's not an excuse, that's just self-exposition. It's also a directive. Rehearsal is not class. I have to learn to create without constant self-judgement and without guidance. No matter how fun the improvisation is, no matter if you haven't really found what you're looking for yet, by the time the choreographer says "set it" you've got to deliver the goods!
I like Alice. And again, for the second time, when I typed her name I mistakenly wrote "Alive". A flattering mistake to make, I reckon. Alice alive! She is my choreographer.
She lives up to the nickname. She has bright hazel eyes and a fauxhawk of wavy black that reveals some gray roots, salt-n-pepper. This chick is older than I remember. Then again, I only met her once in January where she took down my info after liking the way I warmed up for an audition. Does she notice that I've gotten a wee bit better, technically? Can she forgive that I'm a nutcase the instant I feel pressure to "set" a combination? Or is this just the three weeks off on family-duty, Peranakan food, and post-travel exhaustion? Why is it that I always get choreo-block trying to make phrases of my own (leading to mild frustration, the quiet, but intrusive question of What am I doing?!, and the pep talk above)?
The process has been fun and challenging, though thankfully not over my head. THe other dancers appear young, like me, but well-seasoned, and good. Alice's style of movement is totally compelling -- she has an acute awareness of the follow-through from initiation point to the rest of the body, resulting in awkward (I refrain from the too-often employed "idiosyncratic") but logical ripples, spirals, risky weight transfers. The jazzarina in her enjoys the occasional high leg, the hip hop in her gives her the stop-start "lock" control mechanism that adds subtle detail, thus, fullness to her phrasing. It is very satisfying movement. We have another three days this week of this workshop, then we'll meet weekly until the January production.
Because this is a blog, because the rise of the blogosphere is so lauded as the new media for democracy, because it's by nature discursive, I feel obliged to halt the "soft" stuff and get into a good session of Katrina politicking.
(a) who's not angry ... GET angry!
(b) my primary issue is with general incompetence, over racial prejudice -- I really feel the current administration is more clueless and arrestingly bureaucratic than it is vindictive. J'accuse: negligence and shameful idiocy, Your Honor. Bad leader! Bad puppy!
(c) for populist fun, visit http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2678975 to hear Kanye West use a live aid-appeal for his own agenda, or follow the link there to see the eager masses 'welcome' Dick Cheney to New Orleans. Think: Eddie Murphy being greeted on a dark street in Coming to America. Their responses are not too dissimilar.
(d) let's make it clear what policy responses we should hope for in response to Katrina, the hurricane itself:
(1) Save the marshlands of the Southern Gulf that act as buffer to the inland cities (and as an ecological treasure);
(2) Reduce carbon emissions to reduce global warming = reinstate Kyoto, quit pandering to the automobile industry, hell, revamp your entire energy policy;
Adding in Katrina, the emergency relief disaster:
(3) Fix FEMA!
(4) Get out of Iraq.
.....
A friend of mine here, a dancer, lost her step-grandfather to Katrina. She is five foot two and a powerhouse -- moves like her joints are made of jelly and her legs are made of steel and her heart is full of love and fire. He, her step-grandfather, was in the hospital at the time, on check-up for his Alzheimer's. Apparently when the hurricane hit New Orleans, the hospital lost electricity, had little food, and had to ration their water to three ounces per patient per day. For six days.
Six.
.....
Return to point (a), please.
If they said it anyway --
Don't listen.
No matter what the statistics are -- and the incidence of failure is rated high in this field -- you are never a statistic to yourself and to the people that love you. And sometimes it's not even a case of needing to look around you to see who's at the front of the queue, or to feel better about yourself by glancing at those behind, and then calculate your odds. Sometimes, probably more often than conventionally thought, you just have to wait your turn. Pay attention, move forward with the line, cut if the opportunity avails. Most importantly -- check yourself before you even leave home. Don't get turned away after waiting because you forgot something crucial, like your passport for a flight, or your sense of play for a creative project.
It's been said, and with reason: one should pay more heed to one's own advice.
I hadn't been in a rehearsal for such a long time, until Monday. That's not an excuse, that's just self-exposition. It's also a directive. Rehearsal is not class. I have to learn to create without constant self-judgement and without guidance. No matter how fun the improvisation is, no matter if you haven't really found what you're looking for yet, by the time the choreographer says "set it" you've got to deliver the goods!
I like Alice. And again, for the second time, when I typed her name I mistakenly wrote "Alive". A flattering mistake to make, I reckon. Alice alive! She is my choreographer.
She lives up to the nickname. She has bright hazel eyes and a fauxhawk of wavy black that reveals some gray roots, salt-n-pepper. This chick is older than I remember. Then again, I only met her once in January where she took down my info after liking the way I warmed up for an audition. Does she notice that I've gotten a wee bit better, technically? Can she forgive that I'm a nutcase the instant I feel pressure to "set" a combination? Or is this just the three weeks off on family-duty, Peranakan food, and post-travel exhaustion? Why is it that I always get choreo-block trying to make phrases of my own (leading to mild frustration, the quiet, but intrusive question of What am I doing?!, and the pep talk above)?
The process has been fun and challenging, though thankfully not over my head. THe other dancers appear young, like me, but well-seasoned, and good. Alice's style of movement is totally compelling -- she has an acute awareness of the follow-through from initiation point to the rest of the body, resulting in awkward (I refrain from the too-often employed "idiosyncratic") but logical ripples, spirals, risky weight transfers. The jazzarina in her enjoys the occasional high leg, the hip hop in her gives her the stop-start "lock" control mechanism that adds subtle detail, thus, fullness to her phrasing. It is very satisfying movement. We have another three days this week of this workshop, then we'll meet weekly until the January production.
Because this is a blog, because the rise of the blogosphere is so lauded as the new media for democracy, because it's by nature discursive, I feel obliged to halt the "soft" stuff and get into a good session of Katrina politicking.
(a) who's not angry ... GET angry!
(b) my primary issue is with general incompetence, over racial prejudice -- I really feel the current administration is more clueless and arrestingly bureaucratic than it is vindictive. J'accuse: negligence and shameful idiocy, Your Honor. Bad leader! Bad puppy!
(c) for populist fun, visit http://www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2678975 to hear Kanye West use a live aid-appeal for his own agenda, or follow the link there to see the eager masses 'welcome' Dick Cheney to New Orleans. Think: Eddie Murphy being greeted on a dark street in Coming to America. Their responses are not too dissimilar.
(d) let's make it clear what policy responses we should hope for in response to Katrina, the hurricane itself:
(1) Save the marshlands of the Southern Gulf that act as buffer to the inland cities (and as an ecological treasure);
(2) Reduce carbon emissions to reduce global warming = reinstate Kyoto, quit pandering to the automobile industry, hell, revamp your entire energy policy;
Adding in Katrina, the emergency relief disaster:
(3) Fix FEMA!
(4) Get out of Iraq.
.....
A friend of mine here, a dancer, lost her step-grandfather to Katrina. She is five foot two and a powerhouse -- moves like her joints are made of jelly and her legs are made of steel and her heart is full of love and fire. He, her step-grandfather, was in the hospital at the time, on check-up for his Alzheimer's. Apparently when the hurricane hit New Orleans, the hospital lost electricity, had little food, and had to ration their water to three ounces per patient per day. For six days.
Six.
.....
Return to point (a), please.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
A season for dying
September 6, 2005, 8:59am: SINGAPORE
Mum and Dad have just left this morning for London, where they will rent a car and drive down to Hove, near Brighton, joining my father’s four remaining siblings to bid farewell to the eldest of the flock. Lee Soo Bee, at age 71, has passed from earthly mezzo-soprano glory to godly glory, and as they mourn I celebrate a life so fully and adamantly lived.
It is the season for dying.
Or isn’t it always?
149 perish in an airplane crash in Medan. Thousands to tragic completion in the Southern Gulf. My grandfather, at last, at age 102.
This is what I see in the eyes of the grieving: the strain of self-control, redness, soreness, weeping capillaries which shed blood in order to not shed tears—-the internal negotiation of memory, guilt, propriety, and presence. Let the first to convulse be the nearest to the deceased, and the rest shall follow.
I hug Daddy in the swimming pool where we are trying to get him on a regimen to lose 30 pounds in three months. His cardiologist says he is on the borderline of having artery blockage. We’ve only completed six laps when Mum comes over with the news about Soo Bee, 13 years my father’s senior. My father is not an emotional man, but I see again the reddening corneal struggle that signals a growing and multilayered realization of loss, history, and of one’s own mortality. The struggle too is in placing the tenderness of the first above the fear of the last. Perhaps it is the middle, then, that mediates, the calmness of remembrance that is the still eye of the storm.
I was asked by my cousins to speak on behalf of the grandchildren at the second night of O-pa’s wake. The podium was not opened as it was on the previous night to unplanned eulogies, however, and we had to be satisfied with the ritual and characteristic restraint of a Methodist service. I was maddened by the impersonality of this farewell. Yet I was also overwhelmed by the intensity of our collective emotion as a family, and so maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t called to the occasion. I think O-pa himself would probably have preferred it this way, as he was a man of staunch discipline and rigid, though loving, religion.
Here is what I might have said:
I am the seventh of my O-pa’s nine grandchildren. The first of his great-grand-children will be born in the next sixth months. He was 79 years old when I was born.
For us to know him so late in his life meant that we knew him as both legend and living. We knew that he was a teacher, principal, and father that commanded great respect. He was authoritative not only by his liberal use of the cane, but by demonstration of his own life that was led by disciplined commitment to God and family. He used to run a mile a day. He wouldn’t allow anyone to miss the nightly family meal. He would literally call every church in Singapore, searching, if one of the grandchildren in his custody didn’t come home right after Sunday service (sorry, O-pa!).
Yet to me, the greatest legacy he leaves is of his love. He was always a man of moderation, which made his excesses all the more meaningful. The unrelenting persistence of his courtship of my grandmother, for example, resulting in a 64-year-marriage. His sending away of his pregnant wife to the safety of Indonesia at the onset of the Second World War. The extravagant purchase of bridal jewelry for the wedding of his only daughter, my mother. The purchasing of his first family home under my grandmother’s name – a fact she did not know until she had to sign to sell it years later.
I relish all these stories as relics of a past that I, being born in modern Singapore, cannot touch. But there are more recent examples of his colonial mannerisms and humor that gave me a sense of him as a historical figure in real time. I recall the time he once described to me an upset of the stomach as, “a revolution in my tummy,” or how he would sometimes pronounce the end of his meal by clinking his spoon rapidly against his glass—-a schoolmaster even in the home. And he still had his standards of appropriate behaviour in his later years, for the raucousness of the family’s post-meal banter would often cause him to throw up his hands in displeasure, shaking his head declaring, “Enough! Enough!”
This was the O-pa I loved—-a living monument to history, integrity, and devotion. Yes, O-pa was ...monumental (at just over five feet). I thank him for living so long, for enduring the suffering of old age and the indignity of infirmity, because in doing so he grounded us in a sense of identity tied to ourselves as family and to our country that no government program, no textbook can give. For his life of faith I am always grateful.
O-ma turns 87 today. Usually jocular and casual, O-ma looks genuinely touched as my mother surprises her last night to wish her a happy birthday. She has, as my mother later notes, “begun to feel it.” She took little time to move her bed back into the master bedroom, where O-pa and his nurse used to stay, and to hire painters to redo the apartment. But now, in the dim desk lamp glow of the 13th evening after his passing, O-ma looks needy. I wish I could stay longer. I’ve always wished I could stay longer, while I continued to stay away. She still keeps a landscape photograph I sent her in 1998 on her dresser. She is staring at it meditatively when we walk into her room. It’s way past dinner – she’s already taken out her teeth. A sarong is wrapped tightly around her waist and loose button down shirt. I will visit her today for lunch, which I know makes her happy because I like listening to her talk, and I always finish my plate. She will complain about the misery of her diet, as her kidneys can’t sustain the intake of oils and fats of regular Singapore fare, and her diabetes won’t allow her much more than a few pieces of fruit for dessert. But her eyes will squint mischievously when she will steal something from my serving, and we will laugh and argue over her philosophies about love and other maladies.
I can’t wait to come home. Can she?
Mum and Dad have just left this morning for London, where they will rent a car and drive down to Hove, near Brighton, joining my father’s four remaining siblings to bid farewell to the eldest of the flock. Lee Soo Bee, at age 71, has passed from earthly mezzo-soprano glory to godly glory, and as they mourn I celebrate a life so fully and adamantly lived.
It is the season for dying.
Or isn’t it always?
149 perish in an airplane crash in Medan. Thousands to tragic completion in the Southern Gulf. My grandfather, at last, at age 102.
This is what I see in the eyes of the grieving: the strain of self-control, redness, soreness, weeping capillaries which shed blood in order to not shed tears—-the internal negotiation of memory, guilt, propriety, and presence. Let the first to convulse be the nearest to the deceased, and the rest shall follow.
I hug Daddy in the swimming pool where we are trying to get him on a regimen to lose 30 pounds in three months. His cardiologist says he is on the borderline of having artery blockage. We’ve only completed six laps when Mum comes over with the news about Soo Bee, 13 years my father’s senior. My father is not an emotional man, but I see again the reddening corneal struggle that signals a growing and multilayered realization of loss, history, and of one’s own mortality. The struggle too is in placing the tenderness of the first above the fear of the last. Perhaps it is the middle, then, that mediates, the calmness of remembrance that is the still eye of the storm.
I was asked by my cousins to speak on behalf of the grandchildren at the second night of O-pa’s wake. The podium was not opened as it was on the previous night to unplanned eulogies, however, and we had to be satisfied with the ritual and characteristic restraint of a Methodist service. I was maddened by the impersonality of this farewell. Yet I was also overwhelmed by the intensity of our collective emotion as a family, and so maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t called to the occasion. I think O-pa himself would probably have preferred it this way, as he was a man of staunch discipline and rigid, though loving, religion.
Here is what I might have said:
I am the seventh of my O-pa’s nine grandchildren. The first of his great-grand-children will be born in the next sixth months. He was 79 years old when I was born.
For us to know him so late in his life meant that we knew him as both legend and living. We knew that he was a teacher, principal, and father that commanded great respect. He was authoritative not only by his liberal use of the cane, but by demonstration of his own life that was led by disciplined commitment to God and family. He used to run a mile a day. He wouldn’t allow anyone to miss the nightly family meal. He would literally call every church in Singapore, searching, if one of the grandchildren in his custody didn’t come home right after Sunday service (sorry, O-pa!).
Yet to me, the greatest legacy he leaves is of his love. He was always a man of moderation, which made his excesses all the more meaningful. The unrelenting persistence of his courtship of my grandmother, for example, resulting in a 64-year-marriage. His sending away of his pregnant wife to the safety of Indonesia at the onset of the Second World War. The extravagant purchase of bridal jewelry for the wedding of his only daughter, my mother. The purchasing of his first family home under my grandmother’s name – a fact she did not know until she had to sign to sell it years later.
I relish all these stories as relics of a past that I, being born in modern Singapore, cannot touch. But there are more recent examples of his colonial mannerisms and humor that gave me a sense of him as a historical figure in real time. I recall the time he once described to me an upset of the stomach as, “a revolution in my tummy,” or how he would sometimes pronounce the end of his meal by clinking his spoon rapidly against his glass—-a schoolmaster even in the home. And he still had his standards of appropriate behaviour in his later years, for the raucousness of the family’s post-meal banter would often cause him to throw up his hands in displeasure, shaking his head declaring, “Enough! Enough!”
This was the O-pa I loved—-a living monument to history, integrity, and devotion. Yes, O-pa was ...monumental (at just over five feet). I thank him for living so long, for enduring the suffering of old age and the indignity of infirmity, because in doing so he grounded us in a sense of identity tied to ourselves as family and to our country that no government program, no textbook can give. For his life of faith I am always grateful.
O-ma turns 87 today. Usually jocular and casual, O-ma looks genuinely touched as my mother surprises her last night to wish her a happy birthday. She has, as my mother later notes, “begun to feel it.” She took little time to move her bed back into the master bedroom, where O-pa and his nurse used to stay, and to hire painters to redo the apartment. But now, in the dim desk lamp glow of the 13th evening after his passing, O-ma looks needy. I wish I could stay longer. I’ve always wished I could stay longer, while I continued to stay away. She still keeps a landscape photograph I sent her in 1998 on her dresser. She is staring at it meditatively when we walk into her room. It’s way past dinner – she’s already taken out her teeth. A sarong is wrapped tightly around her waist and loose button down shirt. I will visit her today for lunch, which I know makes her happy because I like listening to her talk, and I always finish my plate. She will complain about the misery of her diet, as her kidneys can’t sustain the intake of oils and fats of regular Singapore fare, and her diabetes won’t allow her much more than a few pieces of fruit for dessert. But her eyes will squint mischievously when she will steal something from my serving, and we will laugh and argue over her philosophies about love and other maladies.
I can’t wait to come home. Can she?
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