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2006-09-16 - 2:14 a.m. 1) To lose face: meaning, to experience shame. But it is a shame wedded to the loss of something: the front maintained in the company of others. To lose face would thus mean a regression to a state of nudity. There is something raw, and perhaps even obscene that lies underneath the already-unconcealed face. Hence, the social sign of shame is that of a person covering the face. And what about the physiological sign? The blush, which is when the arteries dilate and flood the dermis with blood, when the viscera (that which is raw, which is obscene) is brought closer to the surface. 2) In a witty play by Chinese Singaporean playwright Han Lao-da, called ‘Face—An Impromptu’, a passenger 'loses his face' in a taxi and later tries to retrieve it. But he is on a mistaken quest. The face that is lost is lost forever. It is not the search for the face he is after, but the search for that moment when it was first lost. Incidentally, the face is not only a hostage of irretrievable time, but also that of the retrievable memory of attendant witnesses. It is impossible to lose one's face when alone. The idea of losing face becomes more unendurable when some kind of gain by the other party (for even if there are many witnesses, they are in actuality a single party) is entertained: a sense of amusement, or superiority… 3) In Malay, the idea of losing face is found in that phrase jatuh air muka, or 'the shedding of water from the face'. The Malay face is amphibious—it needs, constantly, a sheen of moisture to accommodate its repertoire of various social masks. The face bereft of this liquidity is paralysed into shame—like the spasm of a plot of earth cracking, exposing its geological seams, under the sun. 4) 'I wanted to kill myself,' goes the lament of one who has lost his face. He wishes to 'be swallowed up by the earth', to 'shrivel up and die'. To be rescued from shame, one desires oblivion. To lose one's face, which is the mark of presence, is to desire absence. The body follows, with weariness, with faithfulness, the descent of the face down the lonely tunnels of nonexistence. 5) At the MRT station, a train slides into view, and a woman rises from her bench towards it. But the cabins are empty—the train is not taking on any passengers. The woman notices that she has been the only one who had distractedly walked up to the platform’s edge. As the train starts moving again after its capricious pause, we see the reflection of the woman's face in the train's glass windows. Layer by layer, as the train starts accelerating, the woman's face is stripped off. Within a few seconds, the train has vanished, and so has the woman's face. But we who were standing on the platform could only see the back of her head. 6) Let me describe to you the scene at the Lost and Found Counter for Lost Faces. People queue up to make their claims. Nobody speaks to one another in the queue. Most of the time, their faces (if one could call that countenance which remained between their ears a face) are downcast, gazing at fingernails, a hand-twisted hem of a blouse, shoes. When one of them reaches the counter, he or she will look up, and the counter personnel will show him or her a catalogue of faces. Without fail, the person will be harangued by the one manning the counter, with remarks like ‘How can you be so careless as to lose it in the first place?’ and ‘Don’t you realise how important your face is?’ The claimant starts to fidget, some blush with distinction, he or she loses face a second time, which is to say that it had not really been lost the first round. The claimant departs, and rejoins the back of the queue. 7) Is it quite possible that after losing one’s face one can replace it with another? Perhaps, and furthermore, the premise that we possess that single, absolute face is fatalistic, not to mention logically untenable (for then how can we keep on losing our face, at various times?) As a matter of fact, we can propose the act of losing face as one of moulting: a layer, hyperkeratinised from its adoption of various facades, is sloughed off. The underlying layer, pink and fresh as the skin under a peeled scab, is the pupa of the new face. Losing face is thus a process not terminal, but cyclical. 8) It should be noted, though, that this kind of facial changing-of-the-guards requires time. Thus the face that appears immediately after the loss of its predecessor is transitional. The humiliated person may laugh (along with his or her witnesses), but it is a laughter wrestling with a grimace. A look of nonchalance has a five-o’clock shadow of nervousness. A seemingly-spontaneous whistle has a bassline of regret. 9) A man and a woman, in an MRT train, facing the exit door. When the train arrives at the station, they realise they are waiting at the wrong door; the doors that open are on the opposite side of the cabin. They start smiling, painfully aware that they have been watched, even mocked. But this simultaneous loss of face redeems them; what they lose in social composure, they gain in the exquisite, harmonic sound of their faces hitting the ground in synchrony. Their shy smiles at each other are actually the gesture of scooping up the fallen faces—which are indistinguishable—and inspecting them. He says: “I believe this is yours.” 10) Adam and Eve’s love story (and there is one) began only after their expulsion from the Garden. On their journey to earth, both of them hid their faces in their hands. It was Adam who first asked Eve to uncover her face, to which Eve replied that she could not, because she believed her face was on fire. And then Adam said, “If you show me your face, I will show you mine.” And under the unfamiliar sky of their new world, he fulfilled his promise.
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