|
|
2006-09-16 - 2:21 a.m. 1: The Loneliness of Scholarship Girl She’s back for the holidays. The year before she didn’t have any money to come home and thus stayed at her cousin’s place, as the wintry days spelt out her homesickness in icicle letters on bare trees. But now she’s home, and she finds herself spending a lot of time in the kitchen. If the abstract notion of ‘roots’ required material forms, she would name three objects: bamboo poles, the aluminium toilet door (which she used to inadvertently bang with the end of a broom handle as she scoured the titles with Vim) and their long-serving rice-cooker with its tartan design. Inspecting her sister’s books, she is pleased that the latter’s academic progress is on track. In good time, she hopes that her sister will also qualify for an overseas scholarship. That will mean two scholars in their family, which will go a long way towards redressing the fact that of all her siblings, her mother was the only one who had failed to produce a son. She doesn’t tell her sister much about her overseas stint. There are emails, of course, but they’re mostly inquiries: is mother taking her medication; I hear times are bad for taxi drivers so how is father coping; did you receive that article on mind-mapping that I forwarded you in my last email? There isn’t much to tell anyway, since most of her time is spent studying in her room. On the question of identity, she believes one should not define it from one’s presence at parties, society meetings, or hostel functions. She knows others might view her as an oddity—bespectacled, her fists retracted into the depths of her sweater sleeves, stirring coffee alone at the pantry and gazing absently at the common noticeboard. With a wry smile she wonders if the others will start speculating which of the notices reflects herself best. The ‘Book Club gathering to discuss Marx and Engels’? The ‘Essay-writing Competition on Feminist Responses to Abortion?’ The ‘Petition against the Deportation of Asylum-seekers?’ And then, a sign catches her eye—hovering, directly at where her forehead is, reflected in the glass, like a hippie headband—‘Keep the Pantry Tidy’. It’s a mystery to her why fellow Singaporeans would tell her that one of the advantages of an overseas education is the opportunity to ‘find themselves’. For her, the reverse applies: she has to engage in a daily combat against losing the sense of who she is. Sometimes she wishes that she had gone to America, instead of London—then she could have imbibed the former’s Protestant work ethic, use it to petrify her own Confucianist temperament, and come back with an iron spine. Already an introvert (as elucidated by a Myers-Briggs personality test), she finds herself in retreat from her alien environment, peopled by welfare cheats, pot-smoking liberals and that fraternity of self-declared victims which include homosexuals and ‘people of colour’. At her graduation, she gained a degree and lost her best friend. The latter, you must understand, had broken her bond. She ended up becoming a journalist in the main paper, where she would belittle opposition parties, support the war on Iraq, and bemoan the apathy of Singaporeans, the last with the full knowledge that continuous brandishing of a label will finally cause it to stick. She will be famous among interns for editorial policies which defend the practice of ‘self-censorship’ as ‘responsible journalism’. She never deals with issues like human rights or social equity in her columns, preferring instead to instruct the citizenry on tenets such as ‘evolution, not revolution’ and ‘no free lunch’. Of all her convictions, the one that is dearest to her is the fact that she lives in a truly meritocratic country. For did she not come from the humblest of origins, a HDB girl with Chinese-speaking parents whose sister inherited her pinafores? She sees those who have fallen by the wayside as too lazy or too idealistic. She sincerely believes that the system is impeccable; alas human beings are not. That this makes it an inhuman system will not register at all in her brusque and unyielding adulation of ‘realpolitik’. At the peak of her career, she will opt to write for a column at the lifestyle section of the paper. As the weeks go by, she finds herself writing pieces increasingly confessional in nature. In her final column, she actually allows herself to be vulnerable: she is now 38, and the right man has yet to come into her life. She reflects back on her college days, on brief smiles exchanged along the corridor, that rejected invitation to a cruise, the diminishing of expectations over the years, the unnecessary fatigue experienced when one is bracketed into a condition of waiting, where salvation is external, and beyond immediate control. Her mailbox was flooded by sympathetic responses: apparently she was not the only career woman in the country whose biological clock was bothering her with its insomniac ticking. That one email by a man who saw in her column a plea for a proposal never came. Nor did she expect it to. Disgusted, she was struck by how she had abused her column as a kind of covert personal ad. It made her feel dirty. Again, something else will fail to register; that all these years, she had been using her columns to court the affections of politicians. ‘Single Chinese female, conservative, not open to experimentation, values security and stability, but certainly adventurous enough to put her name down for any defamation suits.’ Anyone who would call this journalistic whoring would receive a lawyer’s letter, defending the chastity of the second-oldest spinster in the newsroom. For the second time in her life she would feel the need to retreat, and this she does, back to her political desk, where her pen could be put to nobler causes than husband-baiting. She had written splendid editorials against the dangers of idealism, and truly love is the most dangerous of them all. 2: The Charmed Life of Elite Boy He’s sexy and he knows it. He secretes the scent of privilege: a car for his 18th birthday, an immunity aura when he was in the army (his uncle is a colonel with the Singapore Armed Forces) and an invitation to the annual debutante ball (which he skipped, despite his parents’ pleas, because he believed he hadn’t fully developed the ironic stance required to dismiss photographs of himself in the Singapore Tatler). It’s a scent, though, that he wouldn’t allow to overpower those around him. Just a whiff, and he moves on. He knows that on the question of wealth, one generates awe easier through mysterious, not vulgar means. He’s been in monoethnic (Chinese, of course, what others are there?) schools most of his life, but balks at the suggestion that this actually makes him oblivious to the ‘lives and struggles’ of those of other races. He’ll protest, but not through rhetoric (what lives?) or emotion (what struggles?), but by a cool reference to facts. He sincerely believes this ‘rational, dispassionate’ approach to conflict is the best way, because nobody has told him that it takes a good actor to manipulate emotions, but just about anybody can distort facts. So he’ll point out that he has Indian and Malay friends. Even if the former are mostly blue-blooded Brahmins, and the latter live in Opera Estate. In his free time, he swims, although it annoys him when guests appear unannounced at the front gate while he’s doing laps in his trunks. Clubbing on weekends means hanging out with his usual posse: Robin of the rugby jersey with the upturned collar, Shaz who was recently let off on a drunk-driving charge, and Damien, who once told him, grinning from one pointy ear to another, “you might think going home with chicks from the clubs is more fun because the more experienced they are, the more you can do. But I’d rather take home those from my church, because the less experienced they are, the more there is you can undo”. All his dogs, and there are three, are pedigrees. His father’s set of golf clubs is entrusted to him, instead of his two older brothers (when the old man goes on business trips), and this for him is a source of triumph. The one indoor activity he’d claim to is chess, which he considers more a childish than adult pursuit, on account of learning it from his father when he was six. When he was four, he broke an antique vase and blamed the maid. His conscience was hardly shaken by that affair, even retrospectively, since there is always circumstance to point a finger at. He didn’t ask to grow up in a house filled with antique vases. Nor for that matter, one with a weak-willed, haunted-eyed domestic helper who hardly spoke and barely stirred dust as she shuffled among the shadows. He was asked by a classmate once what he considered the one thing no human being can take from another. His answer was: birthright. The classmate insisted the correct answer was: dignity. And his reply: “Your dignity comes from your birthright.” In a month’s time he’ll be leaving for the States to study. He’s busy packing the sweaters his aunts have bought for him, and he’s just had an argument with his mother about bringing along boxes of birds’ nest, claiming that he doesn’t want ‘everyone there to think I’ve just come from China!’ He’s looking forward to all kinds of experiences he can make while in a foreign country; chief on his list are snowboarding and a clandestine visit to a strip-joint. He's not going to change the world, and he knows it. He's better than that. He's not going to let your world change the world he lives in. There's old money pumping in his veins, and there's a silver patina in his mouth. He's not going to change that, as long as it's within his power. And it always will be. Always.
|