Funny how I got a social life in Singapore. Twelve years ago, Christian and I were out every weekend, going dancing in Hollywood until the wee hours with our mutual friends from Hughes, most notably Herr Fischer. And while I have always had the inclination to be a hermit, and traveling doesn’t often change this trait, Christian had been working too much and hadn’t been out in a while either. So my last week in Singapore was close to a continual party.
First, Christian invited Switchu and me to a dinner with some SES colleagues who were in town. (SES is the Luxembourg company that runs all of Europe’s direct-to-home TV systems and was Hughes’ client, so that’s how Christian and I met.) It was an interesting meal of random Asian things of which I don’t remember the names, except for the chili crab. They went easy on me, so no tongues on fire, but definitely not a dish any normal person would order to make a good impression on colleagues. Needless to say, Christian pretty much needed a new shirt once the crab was all gone. But we were on a roll, so we further impressed these esteemed men by taking them to the prostitution district where the best durian is sold – that’s durian, not durex. Durian is supposed to be a fruit, but is rather a pale ochre form of silly putty or that neon green slime I remember the boys would try to goo us with in 4th grade. Anyway, it’s a blob under a prickly hard shell that has to be hammered open. And the smell – well, let’s just say there are signs in the subway stations and ferry terminals prohibiting durian from being brought on board: a big picture of the prickly thing with a red slash through it. But Christian insisted that the best durian was to be found in the prostitution district since neither was desired in the upscale neighborhoods. Says something about Christian’s neighborhood, with Happy De Spa and a durian stand across the street. Just to emphasize, I didn’t frequent either of them.
On Tuesday I found a little art shop run by a Canadian woman and went to two classes on art glass – how to make plates and bowls and such. It was a blast and a new interest for me. I was amazed at how simple it is and of course decided that my family would need to buy me a $700 kiln for my birthday. Well, mania does fade and my two fused glass masterpieces are called coasters by most people and are now proudly displayed on Ma’s coffee table.
The one benefit of the extreme humidity of Singapore, beside fewer wrinkles (on both clothes and faces) is the ability for gorgeous plants to grow in abundance. Very early Tuesday morning, about 10:30am, I toured the National Botanic Gardens, walking through the National Orchid Garden, alongside Swan Lake, and into the Ginger Garden, as well as finding random sculptures, lily ponds, bonsai trees, and a secluded walk through the rainforest and ferns. On the wide paths overlooking the gardens and lakes and vast lawn, groups of seniors were doing tai-chi while Caucasian women with ponytails and spandex were gossiping and power-walking. The morning routines of the serene and beautiful.
One rainy afternoon, Christian met me out at Sentosa after he finished work. As I waited for him under the cover of the Merlion in all its glory, I was entertained by a Japanese family taking pictures of their three kids. Christian had told me that for some reason which eludes the most educated of us, the Japanese dramatize their photos with huge fake smiles, action poses (I saw one girl jumping up in the air for her photo in front of Ayer’s Rock in Australia), and the two-fingered “Victory” sign. I thought Christian was exaggerating, as he likes to do, but almost fell off my butt into a puddle when I saw these Japanese kids doing this for the pictures the parents were taking. And they were very serious about it. So when C showed up drenched from his motorcycle sprint, we took some pictures of him in front of a happy colourful fountain – but we were both laughing so hard we could barely get any pictures. We walked across the swinging bridge to the island which is the Southern-most Point of Continental Southeast Asia. Now, this would confuse most people, but not the Singaporians. This means that from the tip of this island connected by a swinging bridge, one could ride his motorcycle all the way up to China. Well, “continental” has many meanings, but it had a good lookout onto the harbor as well as other small potential Southernmost Points of Continental Southeast Asia. Aside from the peculiarities of Singapore and its people and those who work for Christian, we talked about our five lives. Now this isn’t something I invented (don’t know that I ever invented anything, actually), but remembered as one of the exercises in The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. (Just as a sidenote, I’d recommend this book to anyone pursuing some sort of creative endeavour and feels a bit stuck or burnt-out, whether it’s art, music, writing, interviewing, investing, managing, or M&As. I tried to do it twice on my own and finally finished the 12-week “course” with a group of women in DC. I was the only artist – there was a dancer, a jeweler, a poet, a yoga instructor, and a financial advisor who’d been on Oprah. We met every other week for six weeks and shared the results of what we’d read and done per the book. Years later, living in Cannes and preparing to quit engineering to do my art full-time, I found my copy of The Artist’s Way with many of my answers and notes written in the margins. On one page, I stumbled across a desire to “paint in swirls of colour and take a year sabbatical to paint in Europe”. I’d call that an answered prayer!)
So my five lives are to be a truck driver (the 18-wheeler kind), a hip-hop dancer, professional surfer, creative director of a Fortune 500 company, and a university professor of literature. Christian wanted to do extreme sports and be a CEO, and though I actually forgot what else – he kept changing his mind – we both agreed that we didn’t want to do any charity work. Contribute money, yes, but trying to help people, which inevitably requires them to change, is exhausting. He’d done this in Thailand after he’d been caught in the Christmas tsunami several years ago. He had stayed over a year to help Thai fishermen rebuild their boats and villages and also teach some entrepreneurial concepts, but they didn’t take. I’d spent many years volunteering at a battered women’s shelter in Santa Monica. Abusive relationships follow the same cycle as addictions and abusing substances, and in watching many women return with their children to an abusive home thinking it would be different this time, my heart was just broken. I guess helping people is a lot like being an artist or other creative type: you do it whether you want to or not on any given day; you paint or write or sing 9 bad paintings, writings, or ballads to get one good one; you help 9 people who decide not to change to help one who does turn his or her life around.
But Christian and I laugh too much to get serious for long – he’s a good antidote to me. That evening we met up with Wei Ching, a friend from the ex-pat dancing evenings, and her Tunisian roommate Chadha and other Tunisian friends. So we <surprise!> ended up at a Moroccan restaurant where we had to pull the outside tables under the eaves when the rain tried to gobble up our tagine dinners. Around the corner was an Egyptian coffee place, the big attraction being shisha. Shisha is basically a communal smoking thing, but the smoke is filtered in water, and the tobacco is usually flavored something fruity. So our Tunisian experts ordered an apple shisha and began passing around the inhaler. It wasn’t my thing particularly, and Christian and I got into a smoke-ring contest. But with it being a Wednesday night, it was silly to go home too soon just to get up for work in a few hours (me excluded – although I did have my second glass class the next day), so we stuffed into two taxis and headed for Bollywood! Seriously! See the pictures! It was this night club with the feel of a “gentlemen’s club”. Indian girls – some ordinary, a few really beautiful – were dressed like belly dancers and dancing to the latest Bollywood hits. I actually loved the music – definitely something to dance to – but didn’t much like the competition. The guys got up and danced, of course, and watching this whole scene, I found it to be a tiny place of silliness and complete insulation from all the worries of the world.
Now I think I mentioned before that the major pastime and tourist attraction of Singapore is shopping. Orchard Road is the place to be and to be spending. I’d spied a Borders bookstore on one of my taxi rides and was quite excited to go since I was facing several 10+ hour plane trips and was dead out of books. So I got to buy books I actually wanted to read instead of feeling obligated to go through all the compulsive buys already filling my bookshelves at home. In 1898 Tolstoy wrote “What is Art?”, and though I found it, my heart wasn’t there. Amy Tan’s books caught my eye. I’d read the Joy Luck Club something like 8 or 10 years ago and gave it to my Ma with passages underlined of things I wanted to tell her but couldn’t. Nearby was Paul Theroux’s series of travel-writing books like Riding the Iron Rooster and Dark Star Safari, many of which I’ve been wanting for years to read, but I wasn’t in the mood for dark Africa or the Orient Express, so I hooked around the shelves to the adjacent section. I looked for authors with a series of books and found Fitzgerald but couldn’t remember which ones I’d already read other than Gatsby. Further down was a series of novels by a guy named Graham Greene – never heard of him, but his books were set in interesting parts of the world, so I settled on The Heart of the Matter. Next I came across The Kite Runner. I loved both the book and the movie, and while the movie left out the whole immigration issue, the colours of the kites and culture, and later lack thereof, were beautiful. I’ve been wanting to read Khaled Hosseini’s subsequent book 1000 Splendid Suns but thought Ma already had a copy and I was too cheap to buy my own. Nearby was Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. The title sounded vaguely familiar (amazingly enough, no books in Singapore have Oprah’s seal of approval – I wonder how they know what to read?), and I read on the back that he’d also authored Remains of the Day, which became one of those famous Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson romantic-era movies. With the somewhat mystery novel set in both London and Shanghai, I added it to Heart of the Matter. While my left brain was telling me two books would suffice, both to read and to carry, my right brain was in Candyland. Further down the shelves was Barbara Kingsolver. I’ve read most of her novels and loved them, as have my friends Paula and James in France, so I frequently export my read volumes to them. However, as I was in the mood for literature from the far corners of the world, I finally grabbed Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude to console me during my upcoming 100 hours of Solitude.
One day Switchu and I were out and popped into an air-conditioned 7-11 for some water to drink. On the way out, I spied the last copy of The Economist with Obama on the cover. I was almost willing to pay the S$12 but then saw it was already 10 days old. So with rare boldness (“balls” I guess you’d call it if I were a guy), I pointed this out to the clerk and asked if I could have it. For free. The Wizard of Oz she consulted in the back room vetoed it but allowed her to give me a free copy of Time magazine, which I thought was kind, but on second glance saw that it was the “Life & Style” edition. Since when do I want to make reservations on the secluded island where Nicole Kidman found nirvana during respites of filming Australia? But I read the dumb thing anyway. Several movers & shakers of the creative type were interviewed about how they travel. The cast included the marketing exec for Louis Vuitton, a 5-star hotel architect, some blond tennis star, and Diane von Furstenberg. The questions included what they pack, what they eat, how they adjust to jet lag, and favorite airports to shop at. The reason I mention all this, however, is that one thing made a huge impression on me. Almost each one said one of their “never-leave-home-without” items is a sketchbook, accompanied by pens or pencils or whatnot. If these gadzillionaires who live on a plane in first class most of their lives and buy haute couture in international airports can’t be without their sketchbooks, well, maybe I should have one, too.
So Thursday, on the way to glass class, I detoured to the Japanese mall at Clarke’s Quay and found a bookstore. Interesting titles, but the best was a huge selection of sketchbooks and coloured pens for cheap. So that made me happy, as I was on my way to being a gadzillionaire living on a plane in first class and buying haute couture in international airports. Alongside dreaming of my future, a vente iced Americano supplemented my happiness. (I’ll plead the 5th regarding whether there was a green, round logo of a mermaid on the cup.) Additionally, I was amazed to have found Old El Paso in the Japanese market, so I was on my way home to prepare fajitas for Christian. We invited Wei Ching and Chadha and decided to have a fajita picnic in the Botanic Gardens under fragrant plumeria trees, though they all disagreed with me and said they were some sort of tree used to cast spells, but I’m sure they were plumeria. Under the spell of the plumeria and Old El Paso, we righteously decided we needed to go out again – after all, it was Thursday night! We found a bar at Clarke’s that had advertised some sort of free vodka drink to the ladies, but we ended up each paying S$14 – Christian for a beer and us girls for some frou-frou drink with an umbrella. Not sure how “free” translated to S$14 in Singlish, but understandable considering the decibels vomiting from the horrible band belting out one-hit-wonders wearing too little silver lamé and fishnet (stockings, shirts, whatever…) It was one of those bars with big sofas and semi-private nooks and velvet that might be considered trendy – except that there were only about 12 people in the place. We grabbed a little table surrounded by a funky sofa and plush chairs and ended up laughing so hard that we were lucky to be seated on sofas since we were all falling-down hysterical. I’m trying to remember what was so funny, other than the gyrations of the band members, but I think Chadha started it. She would give us an emotion or situation, and we would have to express it, wordlessly, but with the ever-present Japanese photo “victory” sign… It’s hysterical just remembering it…
Friday, Christian and Wei Ching took me out for dinner at a happy ritzy place on the water of the harbor. It was even more happy after two glasses of champagne. We then hopped to a bar that overlooked the Shopping on Orchard Road. There were cabaña-type lounge beds along one side of the bar, so us girls ditched the guys, claimed one of the cabañas, and ordered margaritas. Christian joined us, then a Panamanian friend Carlos. I’ve never laughed so hard or this much since the last time I saw Christian, about 7 years ago. (Well, OK, maybe since last night, but you understand.) I laughed so hard I had to lie down on the sofa, yet again. After all my eye makeup was gone and my lipstick left on a few margarita glasses, a huge group of us ex-pats went back for more to Insomnia for another dance party until 4am. After all, I had to get to bed early to prepare for my 10-hour flight to Auckland the next day.
No comments:
Post a Comment