flights

I watched two excellent films yesterday – Infernal Affairs and Hero. Infernal Affairs was a hugely successful Hong Kong thriller a couple of years ago that has spawned two or three sequels. Martin Scorcese is currently directing a US remake-in-progress, under the working title The Departed, which is due in 2006 and will apparently star Leo DiCaprio and Matt Damon. Ouch.

Anyway, the plot follows what is essentially a chess match between a Hong Kong police detective unit and a group of triad gangsters. Early on, each side learns there’s a mole in their midst, and the rest of the film follows their respective efforts to discover the identitity of the traitor.

Tony Leung, who plays the police infiltrator of the triads, has been deep undercover for ten years, and only the leader of his investigative unit knows his true identity. He’s half mad and half strung out from years of acting the gangster. He’s been harassed by the police so much he hardly remembers he’s still part of the force.

Andy Lau plays the mole inside the police unit, and the film sets up an interesting dynamic between him and his fiancee, who’s writing a novel about a man with multiple personalities. She becomes stuck when her protagonist can no longer tell whether he’s a “bad guy or a good guy.”

Jet Li’s Hero is the highly stylised story of four would-be assassins who plot to kill the king of Qin – the most powerful warlord in pre-unified China. It’s gorgeously filmed – each mini-episode in a different color – with epic swordplay and special effects befitting the legendary quality of the tale it’s based on. Tony Leung stars again, this time as the assassin, Broken Sword, who has a kind of epiphany as a result of his calligraphic study. He decides the king must not die, and he’s willing to do anything to stop even his beloved friends from going through with their plot.

A month ago, my mom packed up all her worldly possessions and headed west. After several decades in the Philadelphia area, she’s migrated to Silver City, New Mexico. In her own words, here’s the tale of her road trip…

Luke and I had a great trip together coming out. Luke knows the way well; he’s traveled Route 40 about four times in the last two years. We pulled out of my driveway at about 4 pm on Saturday afternoon 11/6, made our Trader Joe’s stop to get our road snacks (especially turkey jerkey) and then headed for the turnpike.
Continue reading ‘my mother the road warrior’ »

Doh! Today I went to buy extra memory sticks for my camera, so I can take lots of pictures when I head north to Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia later this month. I paid S$120 or something like that for a 256MB “Memory Stick Pro”, only to find out that my camera doesn’t accept the “Pro” version. I guess my camera is an amateur. Anyway, I had bargained the woman down, and I paid cash. I have no receipt, and I doubt I could even find her shop again anyway.

So, Anyone want a memory stick? Very cheap lah! I give you good price.

I left Thavy a voicemail on Thursday night, not knowing she’s in Japan until next week. By coincidence, her friend Shelly called me Friday to see if I wanted to meet her at New Asia.

Although I’d heard good things about it, I hadn’t been there before. It’s part of the equinox complex and located 70 storeys above the street, in the Swissôtel Stamford, so you get a birdseye view of the Raffles Hotel and nice views of the city in general. We also got to watch a brief but dramatic lightning storm, which was gorgeous after a few drinks. The scenery inside was alright too – a young, beautiful crowd. The place was pretty packed by ten o’clock, which is very early by Singapore standards. The crowd had good energy, the sound was top notch, and we hung around til 1:00 or so.

We finished the night a few hours later at Insomnia, where the usual house band was belting out the usual covers.

I set an alarm clock here every day. My morning hasn’t been dictated by an alarm clock since I was a schoolboy. Someone – I’m guessing the previous occupant of my apartment – set the alarm for 6:45 and tuned the radio to something called Power 98. 6:45 is when I need to get up in the morning, and I was willing to give Power 98 a shot, so I didn’t change a thing.

Now, I want to say something about radio in Singapore. I’ll admit that I haven’t done an exhaustive survey of the dial, but if the standard-issue pop music playing in ubiquitous malls and taxicabs and that which blares from my clock radio are any indication, I can only conclude that the concept of genre is apparently meaningless here. I might wake up to Dido or Poison, the Beach Boys or Metallica. When I step into a cab, I might hear something as obscure as the Scissor Sisters, which could be followed by anything from Michael Jackson to Weird Al lampooning Michael Jackson. At least it gets me out of bed in the morning.

In the Straits Times today, there was an unusual amount of attention paid to the US, and an unusual amount of it was unusually unflattering.

The Singaporeans seem to be fans of the US for the most part, and as if to press the point, the Straits Times often features a sort of G.I. Joe rah rah shot of US soldiers in action. In fact, if anyone in Singapore is embarassed about the US, Bush, etc., it’s the American ex-pats themselves. It’s worth noting, for example, that I only met Thavy when she intervened on my behalf a couple weeks ago at Insomnia, to tell a very drunk Bush-hating Sri Lankan fellow to piss off. Anyway, a number of op-ed pieces in Today’s review section scratched a bit of the shine off the ol’ USA.

One piece noted that during the recent Asean summit, the US was surprisingly absent as a topic of conversation. When the US came up at all, it was in a pretty unflattering light. There were mentions of Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto environmental protocol, for example, as well as his failures with respect to the Muslim world.

The article made reference to George Soros’s book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, which argued that “American efforts to be the ultimate global superpower will not only be unsuccessful but will make America and the world infinitely more unstable.”

The Times piece went on to talk about how the only superpower that seemed to matter to the Asean summitteers was China. The notion that China will surpass the US as the world’s premier superpower is certainly not a new one, but with the US dollar sliding almost as quickly as Bush’s popularity, China could take the lead much sooner than most Americans would like to believe.

Another piece today, entitled “An Asian Wishlist for Washington”, focused heavily on a call to the US to reach out to the Muslims of Asia, where Islam, the author states…

“is different from Islam in the Middle East. In South-east Asia, Islam has always been practised in a more tolerant manner. The US therefore has a better chance of winning the hearts and minds of the Muslims in South-east Asia than in any other region of the world. The best way for the US to engage the 250 million Muslims in South-east Asia is through the framework of democracy and rule of law.”

I’m sure few Americans are aware that Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world.

There were a whole host of other issues on the wishlist, including laments about recent tightening of visa policy in the US, the China-Taiwan situation, and the democratisation of Myanmar.

The third and final piece was a general call for the US to more actively and cooperatively engage the Asean nations.

It will be interesting to see how far in the wrong direction Bush’s isolationist, America-first policy takes the US in the next four years.

You hear people talk about the concept of an identity crisis. Every once in a while I have what you might call a geography crisis. I’ll be staring out the window of my speeding taxi at a row of palm trees, or I’ll pause to reflect while waiting in a queue for Yong Tao Foo at a hawker center, and I’ll suddenly have a sort of mild panic attack. Holy crap, I’ll suddenly think, I’m in Singapore.

Tracy shared one of those moments with me in the back of a taxi this evening. She was staring out the window and thinking, “look at that cute asian girl”, and then it occurred to her that everyone she was seeing was asian, that in fact, we are in Asia. It reminded me of an old joke: What do they call Chinese food in China?… They call it “food”.

Nearly everyone in Singapore speaks more than one language. Many speak three or four. The “official national” language is Malay, but there are three other “official” languages: Chinese, English and Tamil.

The Straits Times (the local English daily) of late has published a series of articles about the bilingual education system – specifically, the teaching of English and Chinese. From what I gather, the two languages are taught concurrently from the very beginning of a child’s schooling, and some recent proposals are recommending a new system wherein children would establish a firm foundation in one language before learning the other(s).

Singapore has its own brand of English. It’s commonly called Singlish. The first characteristic of Singlish that I noticed here is the tendency to follow phrases with “lah” or “ah”, as a kind of emphasis or expectation of agreement (the same way we might end a phrase with with “eh” or “you know?”). In Singlish, plurals and past tenses are optional (“top-up card sell out already lah”), and questions are often phrased as sentences followed by “is it?” (“sold out, is it?”). Pronunciations in general are shorter and sharper than they are in American, Australian or “proper” UK English, with little differentiation between long and short vowels.

I really enjoy the way Singlish sounds actually, and my goal is to be able to speak like a local before I leave this island.

From the CIA World Factbook

Land Area: Slightly more than 3.5 times the size of Washington D.C.
Arable Land: 1.64%
Permanent Crops: 0

Population: 4.3 million, 0.96 male(s)/female
Ethnic Groups: Chinese 76.7%, Malay 14%, Indian 7.9%, other 1.4%
Languages: Malay (national). Chinese, English and Tamil (official)
Literacy: 92.5%
Government: parliamentary republic
Voting Age: 21; universal and compulsory

Land-line Phones: 1,896,100
Mobile Phones: 3,521,800

Labor Force:
manufacturing 18%, construction 6%, transportation and communication 11%, financial, business, and other services 49%, other 16% (2003)

Imports: $121.6 billion
Exports: $142.4 billion

Currency: Singapore Dollars (SGD)
Exchange Rate: 1 USD to 1.65 SGD

I’ve missed a couple days of posts because I came down with my first cold since I’ve been here.

Thavy and Shelly called Wednesday night to see if I wanted to go for dinner. I’d already eaten, but I agreed to meet them for a beer or two. After dinner, they dragged me into a taxi, and we went to a bar called Carnegie’s. A lot of ex-pats hang out there, and apparently its gimmick, if you will, is that the female customers are encouraged to dance on the bar. That pretty much describes the scene there, except for the big rastafarian dude who joined the dancing ladies.

We left around midnight and headed to Bar None, a decent club in the basement of the Marriott. There we met up with Thavy and Shelly’s friend Isabelle, who is engaged to a manager there. Anywya, a few hours, songs and gin and sodas later, I managed to stagger into a taxi.

I woke up on my couch – with a sore throat and the sniffles – about ten minutes before I had to leave for work, took a quick shower and grabbed another half hour of shut-eye in the taxi to our office at Airline House.

Not really a typical Wednesday night for me. No wonder I’m sick.