Why West Is Best
(or Take That, Easties)

Today I discovered that one of the stalls in Bukit Timah Market sells two of my all-time favourite things in the same bowl: chin chow and canned fruit cocktail! It's $1.60, and the auntie gave me about twice as much fruit cocktail you would expect from the average dessert stall.

But that's not the best part. As I waited for her to scoop up the chin chow and twice-as-much fruit cocktail into a bowl, I noticed that she had a large plastic container filled to the brim with pandan leaves, tied together in neat bunches with rubber bands, which I couldn't help commenting on.

After telling me that she used it to flavour the sugar syrup, I gave her a You-Go-Auntie! clenched fist and told her that I would come back and buy soya milk and chin chow and the chin chow fruit cocktail dessert from her, because so many hawkers nowadays use fake pandan. All in impeccable Mandarin, of course. Cough, cough.

The stall is called All Natural No Preservative No Gypsum Fresh Soya Milk Drink Everyday For Good Health. It's located at the end of the row of stalls facing the carpark, you can see it when you come up the stairs.

I had a Very Exciting time just now! I was at the Giordano sale in Taka debating whether to buy a quite cool, quite ups and expensive looking stripey polo tee for Jon when Abi SMSed to tell me that the cast of The Little Nyonya was going to be at Suntec City at 3 p.m.! I was meeting Cherissa at 2:30 and she didn't want to go to Suntec, so after talking to her for an hour I actually spent 70 cents on an MRT ride to City Hall, and whilst walking Very Quickly towards Suntec I bumped into Abi who went all the way back there with me, Kindly bringing me to the stage where the cast was STILL gathered!

So Exciting!!!

Pity Qi Yuwu appeared to be filming in China. Really, he only looks nice in period get-up and it would have been nice to see him in person with pseudo Brycleemed hair.

There are some very blurred pictures on Abi's camera, we couldn't get past the masses still there, some 2 hours after they'd made their first appearance.

I also bought the polo tee for Jon. It was $26.40, and I told him he now had a cool stripey polo, how cool right - sadly, he's but one of many Singaporean males who own it.

I've joined the ranks of Heartlandom. Hooray!

A Rabbit Story For The New Year

(Yes, it's the NIU year, but I seem to have a fondness for rabbits at this point in time so rabbits it is!)

Once upon a time, there was a girl rabbit who used to think she was a bit chubby. She started running a lot, and sometimes wondered when she would finally stop running such insane amounts. However, she met a boy rabbit just about two years ago, and after they went running together twice - yes, not hopping - they fell in love and the girl rabbit finally knew she why she'd started running: so they'd be able to run together.

The boy rabbit has since stopped running such insane amounts because he has an injury from too much hopping around earlier, and the girl rabbit has decided that due to the rising amount of pollution on the roads she would rather repeat a silly motion on the family cross-trainer rather than hit the roads, most of the time.

Still, they love each other very much, and have promised each other that they will have some jolly good insane runs before they start work later this year.

They are moving on to the next stage of their lives together in RabbitLand, where one party of rabbits rules over all, although there has been an attempt at opposition to the rule of this particular group of rabbits.

The point of this story, really, is that the girl rabbit thinks she has changed a lot and has begun to realise, for real, the true meaning of the Love is a choice cliche. And even though it's very, very hard to choose sometimes, she knows which choice will make her happy in time to come, even if it's currently the More Painful Choice.

With that, the girl rabbit bids everyone to tune in to:

The Beginning

The End.

Happy NIU Year everyone! Yalan's getting sick of the pun, but I really like it. Of course I do. It's lame but appropriate, what's there not to like?

Time Of Your Life

Guess you know something's changed when one of your mother's main gripes about the current 9 o'clock show about a group of heartlanders is that It's not very realistic. She says that everytime Wang Yuqing's kind and good-natured but rather hapless husband character says Suan le, suan le (forget it, forget it) to Very Important Matters, she wants to strangle him - and this, apparently, is what most women Would Do. Chen Liping's wife character usually accepts it without much fuss. Even if his siblings on the show are Blatanly Taking Advantage of their good natures.

Contrast this to her reaction to The Little Nyonya's ending: Too realistic lah. I can't remember the show fondly.

Embarrassingly enough, I've been feeling that it was rather a waste, and I do have some feelings of regret, that Chen Xi and Yueniang didn't get married after all.

I filled a page in my journal with things about myself when I was thirteen, and I boldly wrote What I Am, What I'll Always Be across the top. Some of my top music choices were Green Day's Time Of Your Life and most of Sugar Ray's 14:59 album. Travis, Third Eye Blind - that kind of song, you know?

Of course at thirteen I thought I'd be into Emo-Alternative-I-Understand-So-Much-About-Life-and-It's-Reflected-In-My-Music-kind of music, forever.

Guess something's changed, because my current favourite song is a Chinese song about a decomposing backpack (that's a literal translation) trying to masquerade as a love song. I love using its chorus to give my lungs a good airing at random intervals.

Do I Really Want To Be a Lawyer (I Can't Tell)?
Back in Year 2, as I finished each of my internships, I remember telling Jon things like, Oh I can really see myself doing this next time - with respect to corporate work, which I cannot even imagine doing now, or working in the Legal Service, which I think is still an option. Then there was the time I thought I'd much rather be a teacher.

And he'd just tell me to tell him about my next career move whenever I figured out what it would be. Two weeks, a month, whenever. But somehow, I don't think not being a lawyer really struck me as something I could do. Attending MGS, having parents who are graduates - I'm not saying there aren't those who buck the trend. But after MGS there only seemed to be one thing to do, and that was go to JC. I remember vaguely considering going to Poly, but that wasn't really an option. And after getting the most stellar results of my entire schooling life for the A levels, applying to do a professional degree was almost a given. I so did want to get into Law.

Here I am in my last semester at NUS, and at the risk of sounding like terribly ungrateful, I'm beginning to wonder whether I really want to be a lawyer, given that the things I like doing best currently include watching cooking shows on TV, ironing clothes, running and taking long walks with Jon. Ice-cream is optional.

Given, also, that I've only ever really felt 'lawyer-ish' twice in my law school career, and I'm not even sure that feeling could be considered one of 'lawyer-ish'. Once was in Year 1, when we had to do the Library Quiz for Legal Writing. It required us to search the library for random cases and articles and their citations, then fill in the blanks. It wasn't exactly what you'd call mentally challenging, but I can still remember the musty smell of old books as I stood precariously on one of those roller things to pull a volume of cases off a high shelf; the brown, fragile pages, looking at the names of people and companies which existed almost two hundred years ago. Sneezing a little because those volumes were dusty, smiling to myself because some considerate senior had circled in the index, in pencil, the case I was searching for. They don't vary the quiz questions much from year to year, it's too much trouble, especially when there are 15 sets of questions to lessen incidences of collaboration.

I was all alone in an obscure corner of the library, surrounded by tomes which weren't ancient but contained ancient material. I'd felt thrilled to be in the midst of history - and I was continuing the Great Common Law Tradition.

The second time was just last semester, when MCW was telling us about Peter Birks and his dedication to the Law of Restitution, how he worked all the way until the day he died, with a thermos of hot cocoa and a flannel tartan blanket draped across his knees, dreary English weather at Cambridge (or was it Oxford?) included. Well, that part may have been some romanticism on her (and my) part, but you get the idea. Of course, his last, unfinished work was one in which he seriously doubted the veracity of his earlier theories - but no matter. She also furnished anecdotes about various professors and academics who disagreed with each others' theories acting like small boys whenever they met.

Nevermind that all that was tantamount to name-dropping, which annoys me, no matter that I also find it faintly amusing. Again, I was enthralled - I was a part of the Great Common Law Tradition! I was going to be a lawyer!

Exclamation marks aside, I really did feel that way. Let's see how it looks without the exclamation marks:

I was a part of the Great Common Law Tradition. I was going to be a lawyer, and continue that Tradition.

I was proud to be a part of it.

It was a nice feeling. I was excited about learning, and thus excited about school, even though other aspects of last semester were nothing short of awful.

I don't know what happened. I'm definitely thankful that I have a job when I graduate, but something's changed.

I look around at my peers, and I think it's safe to say that a fair number of us applied to Law - and Medicine, and Dentistry, wherever - because it was The Thing To Do. We graduated from certain JCs, we got however many A's we did, and here we are today. I don't think many of us even knew what we wanted from life when we applied for university. Sure, we made up a whole lot of stuff that sounded good in scholarship applications, interviews and the like: I want to contribute to society, I want to make a difference to the world. That kind of schmuck, phrased in a myriad of ways, depending on the type of person you were and the course you were applying for. I still remember how Bryan memorised trends in the local medical scene before his Medicine interview.

Perhaps our ideals and desires for a better Singapore, a better world, are still unchanged, and maybe they've intensified. And what's changed is that we've come to realise that at 19, getting a certain number of A's meant that the world was at your feet, and it made you think that it was; brinking graduation, we realise that that kind of thinking was the true essence of schmuck after all.

***
I'm doing a History module this semester, Struggle For Modern China, and the first lecture was last Thursday. Going back to the Kent Ridge campus was good, it felt great being lost in the crowd, being just one of thousands of Arts students. We're really missing out on campus life over at the top of Bukit Timah Campus Hill, and it's something I'm beginning to feel a little wistful about. I can't believe that back in Year 2 when we moved I didn't think I'd be missing out on much.

It's not that I'd have been any more involved in university activities than I am now. But there's just something about seeing so many people doing so many things - silly things, smart things, useful things, useless things. These are the people who will quietly contribute to society: administrative jobs, technical jobs, teaching - they'll have their fair share of gripes too, of course, but there's something about a quieter lifestyle that a professional life doesn't have. It's the something about the Kent Ridge Campus that the Bukit Timah Campus can never hope to achieve.

I don't think I'd have appreciated the differences as much if Law hadn't moved. Well, duh.

***
My mother has been working at the Lakeside Family Centre for the past year. It's worlds apart from Raffles Place, she says.

So far, her adventures include stealing fruit from some trees growing near the centre with her colleagues, their rationale being it'll be wasted anyway!. She's cooked this fruit down with sugar and made a chutney, all chunky fleshy bits of fruit with a sour, tangy aftertaste. She's also learnt the tasty joys of Shanghainese dried rice cakes, and has shared that joy with us.

Best of all, she cooks dinner, we watch TV together, and I think she's a lot happier than she ever was. I can see God working in her life too. That makes me very happy.

Do I really wanna be a lawyer,
Do I really wanna be a friend?
Do I really wanna be a lawyer
In a white Mercedes Benz?
Do I really wanna be the one,
To mess things up,
When things were going well?
Do I really wanna be a lawyer?
I can't tell.

That's a real song, Jon wrote it. We'll sing it for you some time.

Last Sunday
After church, the day before our last semester as law students started, Jon and I went to Sixth Avenue where he had bak chor mee soup, in view of reducing the size of Timmy the Tummy, and I had chicken briyani, because it's So Good.

We contemplated going to Guthrie House for Venezia gelato after that, but then we found out that 7-11 was having a $3 for 2 Choco-Vanilla Cornettos special. We bought those, and then, both of us eating Cornettos, he walked me home.

Support Local Television

I thought I'd be extremely dissatisfied after the last episode of The Little Nyonya yesterday, because Jeanette Aw's character, Yueniang, doesn't end up marrying Qi Yuwu's character, Chen Xi. And everyone knows that's one of the main points of Channel 8 dramas - to watch the good-looking, good people, live happily ever after. It gives one immense satisfaction, a temporary feeling that all is right in the world, a feeling which comes all too seldom in real life.

In fact, I had soundly dissed the angmoh Yueniang ended up marrying, Paul: not only did I find him ugly and slimy, he was ANGMOH, and one of the British who left Singapore to flounder, at that. When I read the synopsis a week or so ago, I was enraged and had already prepared a letter of complaint to MediaCorp in my head, something along the lines of "anti-climatic finish," and "your scriptwriter needs his or her head examined, what was he or she thinking, not letting them end up together?!"

But after watching the last episode, the second half of which was surprisingly unmelodramatic, I have to say I liked the ending after all, much more than if they had ended up together, because it was real. All the good people lived happily ever after, of course, but I think the credit goes mainly to Xiang Yun. She did a marvellous job portraying Yueniang in her later years. She was composed and elegant, with just the right touch of nostalgia, wistfulness and longing for her lost true love, coupled with the acceptance that that was just life, an acceptance borne of growing old gracefully. I thought about it as the theme song played, and you know, if Yueniang and Chen Xi were real characters, somehow I think they just wouldn't have been happy together in the long run, after everything that had passed between them.

Sure, they'd endured hardship together - those hours of pure melodramatic goodness where she fell into the well, they got kidnapped, he lay dying in hospital because he thought she married someone else, etc. - you get the point. Yet they were inherently different, and simply couldn't be.

That's Fate, as Yueniang said. The one you love may not be good for you, and the one you don't love may be the one who is.

I'm glad that some aspects of Channel 8 dramas will never change, like their cheesy stock phrases, for instance, even though in The Little Nyonya the perennial favourite love cannot be forced appeared in a slightly modified form. Also their re-using actors to play older versions of themselves. My last memories of the show were of the villain, Mr. Evilness Personified himself, playing his kind, good son.

I started laughing, continuing even as Felicia Chin's character appeared, looking dreamily out of the bus window at the sky and some swallows, reminiscing about the story Yueniang (Xiang Yun) had told her.

And those things, coupled with the fact that I slept soundly last night although I really shouldn't have, are perhaps a sign of how far I've come.