In Memory Of

Diana Cheung Sheen Tai, lady in red, d. 4 December 2018. Aunty Diana, Tai Por, Gou Tai Por. Reproduced below are mostly Jon’s memories of her, adapted by me from his eulogy for her.

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To some, Tai Por was a glamourous air stewardess with the new and impossibly expensive Malayan Airways. She would stay with the airline until it became Singapore Airlines, something she would talk about with quiet pride – she was one of the alumni, had been given shares in the company. When we celebrated her ninetieth birthday earlier this year (she was older than that, but after the Second World War, people lied about their ages so they could go back to school), she left instructions that after she passed away, she was to be dressed in an outfit she had tailored from cloth printed with the SIA logo. The cloth had the SIA logo printed in mustard yellow on a dark blue background, and had been given to her by a regular passenger; he was someone important in the company. She was also given a matching baby romper; it was similarly navy blue and had the SIA logo printed on it in mustard yellow. She gave it to Daniel for his first Christmas. It smelled of mothballs, and was in pristine condition even after what must have been decades. She never married and never had children. I washed the romper, and Daniel fought it off on his first wear. It was only when we celebrated her last birthday that we learnt how special that outfit was. I’ve now packed it away carefully for my brother and sister-in-law.

To mah-mah, my father-in-law’s mother, she was an aunt, and a companion for many years of their lives. They were together, in their teens, during the Second World War; together they became young women as the Malayan Emergency and communist struggles offered no respite from the instability of the years preceding them, and together they saw Singapore achieve independence. All that, and the death of mah-mah’s husband from what relatives later thought must have been internal injuries sustained from being beaten by the Kempeitai. Together, they grew old, Yee Por making a trio, in a house in Thomson where for years Jon and his family, and later me, then Daniel, then Andrew, ate countless meals and watched bad Sunday night TV.

To others, she was an active old lady, an inspiration to make the best of your golden years. She insisted on exercising at Thomson Community Centre, and later on a nearby park, every morning except for Sunday morning, at 6am. As children, when Jon and his second brother were sent for “holidays from parents” with mah-mah, Tai Por would take both of them to the community centre with her. She was active in church, and on the Sunday mornings that they stayed with mah-mah, she would take them to the Cantonese service at her church, where they understood very little of what was being said, but which practice still managed to play a part in instilling in Jon the discipline of going to church every Sunday possible, and wearing shoes to church, as a mark of respect for God. Later, when he travelled to the US for summer music school, when he went to India on exchange in university, she would check that he attended church regularly, and was reading his Bible and the Our Daily Bread which she gave him.

Tai Por drove a stick shift car well into her eighties. When she stopped driving, the traffic police sent her what she joked was a “thank-you” card. It was the same one we all got that year, for being demerit point free drivers, and I remember the chuckle we had at dinner when she whipped it out. You can’t get demerit points if you’re not driving. She played with Daniel and Andrew, sitting on her chair in the living room in the house in Thomson, rolling a ball for them to roll back to her. She and mah-mah propped one end of a board up against a stack of newspapers for them to send toy cars shooting down, watching over them and laughing at their delight, allowing me to watch whichever never-ending Taiwanese drama was being shown again on Channel 8 in fascinated horror.

She was quiet about the important things in life; it was through how Tai Por conducted herself that she taught others the most. She praised the Lord in everything. She loved Jon’s family more than she loved herself. She prayed without ceasing, and was stoic through life’s challenges. She never wasted anything – mou sai, mou sai, was a favourite saying of hers. She was humble, truthful, and a careful steward of whatever God had blessed her with. And towards the end of her life, she showed us what it meant to be ready to go, having absolute faith in God and where she was going after she passed on, ready to account.

There are many other stories about the life Tai Por lived and all she did for others that are not mine to tell. Some may never see the light of day and die with those who know – secret resentments, lost love, hurt and bitterness she bit her lip to keep from expressing, to keep the peace. She was human, after all. But her life was an example of the peace a life of faith in God can bring, how His faithfulness to His character as revealed to us in the Bible truly prevails and transforms.

Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

***

I always found it strange when I saw people posting on social media that they had run “in honour of” someone, or something. Save for a precious few who I could tell really meant it, for the most part, it either felt like people didn’t really know what it meant and they were just jumping on the bandwagon, or it was just a subtle form of humble-bragging (e.g. I ran this marathon in honour of my new pair of Nike shoes!) (okay, that’s an extreme example, but you get what I mean? (I hope.)).

Tai Por was admitted to the Assisi Hospice about 3-4 weeks out from Sunday’s half, having been in the community hospital from sometime towards the end of September. She had advanced lung cancer, but declined treatment, and still survived much longer than the doctors thought she would. I am ashamed to admit that when she was first moved to the hospice, I selfishly fretted about whether I would still be able to train properly for the half and whether our family holiday would go off without a hitch. I worried about how tired Jon was from work. I worried about whether I would be able to finish and handover whatever work I had to before we went. I worried, and fretted, and was anxious.

But the visits to Tai Por at the hospice were warm and cheerful; I may have worried and fretted and mentally made plans to give certain things up or have to make alternative arrangements, but I refused to let all that get in the way of enjoying those last few visits with the family. We celebrated Christmas early with chocolate cake and a tiny Christmas tree that fit on the table that could be rolled over her bed for her meals. The boys were always happy to see her, mah-mah and Yee Por, and she always told Jon God loves you. Before she got too weak to do so, she would try to sing her favourite song God Will Take Care of You with Jon and Joel. Somewhere along the way, it seems like it was so long ago now, I realised that she would have prayed that she would be a blessing to us all up to the very end – and so she was. She passed away the Tuesday before the half, when I was tapering, and was cremated on Friday, which meant I was able to legitimately take a day off work after having already taken the day off on Tuesday because I was sick.

(I know this makes me sound very callous and self-absorbed, but hear me out.)

I started thinking about what it would mean to be doing a race “in honour of” someone, because if there was anyone who deserved to be honoured, it was Tai Por. And I realised that to really honour someone or something, you had to approach whatever you were doing with the right attitude – it couldn’t be about you, it had to be about them. You couldn’t do whatever you had set out to do “in honour of” them with the ultimate aim, whether consciously or subconsciously, of being able to brag about what you achieved, or to better someone. You had to do it just because you had to, wanted to, make it all about remembering them. 

Of course, I very quickly realised how unworthy I was of running on Sunday “in honour of” Tai Por, and so I decided to honour her memory in some other way (well, this post). I was thankful that my prayers and what I believed to be Tai Por’s prayer to be a blessing to the end of her life were answered, and I was assured again that God cares about my silly, trivial little worries. I ran on Sunday with all that in mind, and – that was that. My previous post on Instagram sums it up in a nutshell. Also, I actually knew all along that I was never going to PR on Sunday – it was foolishness to think it was possible, eight weeks after my goal race for 2018 and a mere seven weeks on a totally new method of training.

***

On re-reading my previous post on What I Think About When I Think About Running, it dawned on me that I hadn’t answered my question of why I continued training so hard. Maybe it’s that I couldn’t answer it at that point, because the answer was quite painful to admit to myself.

2018 was the year I was really humbled by running – I realised that I had been relying on what was probably more beginner’s luck than anything, and from 2013 to boot, to try to PR (2015 and 2017 don’t really count because hormones, and children younger than they are now). I didn’t, or maybe I just couldn’t, until the boys were a bit older, admit that I would need to commit a lot more time and emotion to it if I wanted to improve further. Like I said before, I don’t think I can give a super amount of time and emotion to running even now because I’m not prepared to make the sacrifice of getting a live-in helper. But I think I can afford to give it a bit more time and emotion now, and I’m already excited for 2019.

So that’s why I have stuck with running, I think. Because it has humbled me, and I believe will continue to keep me humble – there are so many things I thought I knew but actually don’t because I haven’t actually put them in practice – and a little humility never hurt anyone. I’m glad for it, and hope it will translate to how I approach other parts of my life. I’ll say it again, God really knows the best way to teach each of us His lessons for us.

Blessed Christmas. 

What I Think About When I Think About Running

(Deviating from my usual practice of giving posts titles gleaned from the EDM pop songs that accompany most of my training, and paying homage instead to Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, because this post is really about what I thought about when I thought about running these past few months. Try saying that quickly a few times.)

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An aside: I don’t really expect most of the people I am connected to on social media to read, much less remember most of what I share here. If you clicked through to read this, thank you. TL;DR: Running helps one to think, and is good for one’s health. Make time to run.

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That being said, I still write and I still share because, despite my STILL being in the employ of the G@hmen four years after I decided to start blogging somewhat regularly again, some part of me still has a vague idea that maybe one day, sooner than I think, I will retire (that’s what it is, isn’t it? RETIREMENT) to take care of the boys. Putting writing out there, even if it’s “self-published”, isn’t easy. The older I get, the more judgmental I feel people can be behind their screens, and the more I sometimes fear I’m saying too much. But if I do retire in the next three to four years, I foresee I will need the mental stimulus of blogging regularly, probably about running and motherhood in Singapore, joining the 23093429871 other blogs about the same thing that are already out there demanding attention. So I continue to write, because I want what I write to be worth reading, for that time. Even if that time never comes, even if it ends up being only I who think that what I write is worth reading, there is value in writing for its own sake. I’ve always been nosey (aren’t we all?), and liked to read about other people's mundane lives, so it seems natural that I would write about my own. I know there are others like that out there; this is for you as much as it is for me. 

***

After my various epiphanies following Hospital Ship last year (you can read about them here), I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to run any races this year after TransLantau, which was really just a fun run and turned out to be a rare “date”. Husband was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to resist, though, and he was right.

I signed up for Great Eastern (again), found a training plan online that I figured I could finally follow through (this was Kara Goucher’s Project 1:59 plan for Strava. It’s not bad! I’ll leave a brief review below), and set to work getting myself to Slow. Down. and properly build my aerobic base before starting the plan. 

I’d realised the hard way (plantar trouble, mostly), last year, that I’d tried to do much, too soon after having Andrew – and although it was fun blogging about the training for the Income Eco Run, and I’m thankful for all I came to learn about myself last year through two training cycles, I’ve finally come to accept that I am just not one of those women (you know, those who bounce back scarily quickly after having a child, or two, or three, and are running their households with aplomb and effortlessly setting PRs with every race they do post-partum. Those). I’ve never really thought I was a particularly spectacular runner, but I thought I could do it, you know? Looking back, I don’t even know what gave me the idea that I could train at the paces I was training at. The fact that I had, at that point, been running for over a decade? But so what? I’d not run much during either of my pregnancies, and had gotten pregnant again just after Daniel turned a year old, right after I ran Great Eastern in 2015 (2:08. I’ve allowed this race to get to me, haven’t I?). I’d been through two bouts of labour, wasn’t sleeping nearly enough, was constantly worrying about my figure and the baby weight, was back at work and also managing the household… you get the drift. It wasn’t always that way though.    

***

I started running towards the end of JC, after seeing seniors who came back to visit having gained quite a bit of weight, even those who had been in a sports CCA. I was terrified of the same happening to me – I was never fat, but the year I turned 18, I got a bit chubby, and it was something my parents would comment on. They weren’t being mean, or body-shaming me or anything – they just commented, in the way parents do, and I think I can safely say they weren’t the reason for what followed after I first started running.

So there I was, a little chubbier than I used to be – I was somewhat scrawny in secondary school, and could eat tons without a second thought for my weight. Genetics definitely had a part to play, but on hindsight, I realised that it was also my walking to and from school almost every day from the time I was about 8 to the year I graduated from MGS that had helped me stay so trim before I entered junior college (whereupon I got a lift to school from a neighbour, and took the bus home). MGS sits at the top of the longish hill that is Blackmore Drive (named for the school’s founder), and I had to cross an overhead bridge twice a day in addition to walking up that hill.

The total journey from my front door to the school gate was probably just about a kilometre or so, but I was often late for school and usually had to brisk walk, sometimes almost jog, to make it before the second bell. Even then, in Secondary Two, my conduct was “Fair” because of my late-coming, and my form teacher commented that I needed to be punctual for school. Isn’t this always the case when you stay nearby?

In addition to that, Singapore has never been known for having cool and dry weather, even before global warming became such a huge deal, so I would usually make the same journey back under the hot sun, aided sometimes by a Crunchie or Time Out bar, or my favourite, Myojo Tom Yum instant noodles, from what used to be a Mobil but is now an Esso station.  Two of the aunties from my secondary school days are still cashiering there, if you can believe it, and they’ve met the boys when I take them there to buy chocolate milk as a post-Gong Gong-Popo-house-playground drink. One of them remembers me.

Sometime after I graduated from JC, I started eating less and running more. I didn’t set out to do it deliberately – I got a part-time job as a waitress, along with a choir coaching gig and helping out at a before and after school care centre, and being so busy helped me conveniently “forget” that I was hungry.

Some days, after a slice of plain toast in the morning before a run, I wouldn’t eat anything until lunch. Then, I would have caifan, “one meat two veg shao3 fan4”, do whatever I was signed up for in the afternoon, have a da4 pao1 for dinner, and spend the next 5 to 6 hours on my feet, waiting tables. I drank everything without sugar – strong, creosote coloured tea (just like Cormoran Strike!), tau huay zhui, chin chow.

Other days, I would pack just a wholemeal sandwich with tuna and cheese (canned tuna, packed in water), and eat only that for lunch, followed by caifan at dinner (I am a creature of habit). I didn’t eat ice cream for almost a year (I know, sounds incredible), and measured everything I ate in terms of input and output – I never weighed my food, but in my mind I assigned everything I ate an arbitrary time for which I had to run. Savoury food meant less time running than, say, a slice of chocolate cake. I talked about what I had eaten all the time, worrying that it would go straight to fat; my mother lost her cool one day and said to me, Why do you keep talking about that slice of cheesecake you ate yesterday? I lost about 6 kg in 7 months, and considering I had been about 52 kg towards the end of JC, the doctor I saw at the mandatory pre-university check-up declared it an unhealthy loss of weight and told me to watch it.

I was in a state of perpetual hangriness, but the hunger felt strangely cleansing. At 18 going on 19, it’s also a lot easier to power through the side effects of a negative calorie intake. However, I digress. This is not a post about disordered eating and a warped body image (if one can even call what I experienced a “disorder”) – it’s about running.

I thought of all those things as I ran Too Many rounds around the tracks at the two polytechnics closest to my home (Ngee Ann) and workplace (Singapore), as I completed, by sheer force of will, runs that felt like a sluggish swim through humid air. They crowded out my silent prayers on the treadmill (I was usually praying I wouldn’t shoot off it and that the cleaning uncle would keep his mop away from my treadmill!!!!), and occupied my subconscious through runs where the heat from the sun continued beating down mercilessly despite it being evening time, mocking my attempt to keep to the recommended paces. Familiar voices, flashes of images from those years –

Back then, even though running was one of the primary means by which I chose to control my weight, I never really cared about how far, or how fast I was running. Sure, I wore a stopwatch and estimated in my head how long a particular route was (I found out much later that those routes up and down Dunearn Road were shorter than I had imagined), but my pace per kilometre and my weekly mileage didn’t matter in relation to how long I had spent on my feet, or how sweaty I was at the end.

I also know, now, that more sweat doesn’t equal more calories burnt, but it just made me feel good about myself back then (alright, I said it wasn’t my parents’ comments that affected me – so what did was probably my break-up with my JC boyfriend. I’ve alluded to it often enough, and it was traumatic in the way peculiar to romantic relationships between people in their late-teens who think they know a lot more about life and love than they really do. To this day, despite having a good friend with the same name, something inside me gives an involuntary shudder when there’s a character in a book named after him. One of Thomas’s friends has the name – happy guessing! Please do not message me your guesses, there will be no prizes for guessing. There goes the involuntary shudder).

When I first started running longer distances, I found the idea that people would pay to do something they could do for free with a decent pair of running shoes strangely abhorrent, and vowed that I would not spend more money than necessary on running attire or pay to run a race unless it was a marathon. (Yes, I was into reverse snobbery even back then.)

I had a couple of cheap sports bras (these were sufficient as I was and remain quite flat-chested), and wore the dark blue FBTs I had owned since I was 11 and were still in good enough shape to protect my modesty. I had a decent pair of Asics shoes. A couple of ratty old t-shirts unearthed from the depths of my cupboard, mostly from when I was in primary school, completed my usual running outfits. The few on heavy rotation included a Langkawi souvenir tee I probably owned from the time I was around 10 years old, and my Primary 5 outdoor adventure camp tee – the theme was “Strength In Unity”, and it featured a drawing of three (?) large, smiling ants, two pushing and one pulling an appropriately sized wheelbarrow up a small hill. Perched on the wheelbarrow was an apple about the same height as the ants, which had a hole from which the smiling head of a worm peered out. There were speech bubbles issuing from the ants’ mouths, and they were saying “One, two, twee, pu!” (you can message me if you remember this, and the reason this design said to have been chosen – do you remember? How catty girls can be, even at 11). Whenever I went for a long run, I would wear the sleeveless cotton shirt from the choir camp when I was in Secondary 1. I can’t remember what its theme was, but I remember that a cat was part of the design, and the front bore a yellow circle over the heart, which was meant to represent a full moon. I wore it out completely, those early years of running.  

I also remember that I used to go running with my father, about a 3 km loop through the surrounding neighbourhoods, and after every run he would give me a high-five and thank God that his knees had supported him through one more (he still runs now, but more slowly).

I finally ran the Singapore Marathon in December 2006, back when running was taking off here but was still not a very cool thing to do, long before amateur runners were indoctrinated by the Church of #instarunners and the GPS Watch, and didn’t have as many means of self-flagellation other than the actual training they were doing.

That year, the Straits Times ran a very rudimentary training plan (it didn’t have paces, if I recall correctly, just recommended distances), and during the lead-up, there was an article by Rohit Brijnath about weird things people who run marathons do – I will never forget that he wrote that people who run marathons eat gel, whereas normal people use gel on their hair. Something like that. My mother read bits of that article out to me, and he has from then on been known in my head as Rohit Brinjal. (I am not being racist. I would have been equally annoyed had a journalist of any other race written something so juvenile in the country’s “leading” English newspaper. Energy gel did taste horrible back then, though. I distinctly remember that only “chocolate” flavoured ones were readily available, and the citrus flavoured ones were more Mama than Meyer lemon in taste.)  

I finished in just under 5 hours. Running a marathon is something I do not at this point in time care to repeat, nor do I wish to better my time. I ran the Singapore Marathon again in 2007 and 2011 with times nearer six hours, but it didn’t faze me one bit.

***

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think very much about training – proper training, with speed work and tempo runs – until after Andrew was born. The year we conceived Daniel, I didn’t do very much that was different from the years before, except that there was a period of time I became one of those people who woke up at 4am on Saturdays to run around MacRitchie and Upper Peirce, and later in the year, I started a habit of running to work on Fridays. I’ve written before about how that was one of my favourite things to do when I was still working in the CBD, and I still think of it with some wistfulness now. I think it was those runs (which I did not measure, except by time) together with my doing more spin classes and yoga, which led to me achieving a sub-2 in two of the three half-marathons I did that year (2013). The only one I didn’t sub-2 in was, you guessed it, the Great Eastern Women’s Run. This blog tells me I ran about a 2:06 that year.

I have written in some length about my feelings about motherhood and the role running played in that, so I won’t repeat those things in this post (and this is getting to be really long), but, as you know, I was desperate to cling on to some part of my irresponsible, child-free self, and running seemed to be the only tangible thing there was. There was a whole gamut of other emotions involved too, of course, but that was probably what it came down to at the very core of the matter.

But I’d gotten over that, and during this training cycle, looking at all the sacrifices I had to make to get in the mileage and strength training, I had to ask myself why I continued to try so hard, despite knowing that I didn’t have any inborn talent for this sport, that I would probably never be anything but a mediocre runner, maybe slightly above the Singaporean female average at best. I knew it wasn’t even that I was competitive – well on some level, I was and always will be about running, but it’s not the kind of competitive fire that would drive me to make the kind of sacrifices that kind of competitive fire would demand. And it’s not that I’m afraid to try, really. Anecdotal evidence has shown that hard work, just showing up and getting the workouts done, goes some way to make up for a lack of inborn talent.   

The boys drive me nuts, I yell at them almost every single day (they laugh, and I’m convinced the neighbours think I am en route to insanity) and I often dread pick-up. But I wouldn’t risk any of the bonds we’ve forged by Husband and I being forced to be their primary caregivers the majority of the time, just so I can get better at running. I know us, we’re the sort of parents who would abdicate a large chunk of their parental responsibilities to paid help if it was there. And I’ve always wanted to have a home and husband to take care of, a kitchen where I ruled the roost. Maybe this sounds a lot like I cannot let go, and maybe I am deluded for saying that I don’t think that that’s what it is – but really, I think this is, quite simply, just how I want to live my life, and I have to face the reality that I don’t have very much more, whether in terms of time or emotion, to give to running.

I was freaking out at the start of taper week, thinking of how much I had put in and how afraid I was that it was all going to be for naught. Then, on Tuesday, I sat in my car in the office carpark, wanting to drive right back home and go back to bed because I was emotionally so exhausted, but I thought of how I had a taper run at lunch, and that thought got me out of the car and to my desk. On Wednesday, I decided to put on some Christian music in the evening on the way to get Them, and what a balm it was to my fretful mind. How long it had been, since I had last sung of His love and faithfulness.

After that, through the last workout, through dinner the night before and when I was lining up to deposit my bag; through that one hour the storm raged while we waited for news of whether the race would go on, I was calmer than I had ever thought I would be in those very circumstances. Something told me I wouldn’t sub-2, simply because my body wasn’t ready to handle it. And that was okay.

***

I wanted to leave a review of the Project 1:59 plan because Google actually threw this up as a searched for phrase. To borrow from someone else who reviewed it, I thought it was good that there was a simulation of the different range of paces one could expect to experience during the actual half-marathon (n seconds faster or slower than target race pace), and I felt the recommended training paces were quite manageable for someone who’s been running consistently for a while. There are minimally three runs a week, which leaves a day of rest and three days of cross-training, if you so desire. The not so good thing for people trying to self-coach is that the plan leaves you to adjust the total weekly mileage according to what you’re used to, which could lead to both under-training or over-training.

Which is why I finally decided that I wanted to properly invest in running, and signed up for Coached, which is a heart-rate based training programme. It’s pretty affordable, and suits my needs at this current stage of my life. Plus, frankly, I am really looking forward to finally running the easy runs truly “easy”, even if that means having to walk-jog. I don’t know why it feels like such a relief to finally have “permission” to take it truly easy, versus when I was training by myself. Stopping to walk, even when I was hitting the wall, made me feel like I had failed the workout somehow. The best thing about the programme is that it’s entirely time-based (and heart rate, of course), which is also a relief. It feels right for me to be hearkening back to how it was when I first started.

In light of that, I also registered for the half-marathon in December with YL, although I swore to myself some years ago that I would never sign-up for any of the race categories at the Singapore Marathon again because there were just too many people. It’s apparently improved greatly though, more space and everything, because we are, after all, making a bid to be a World Marathon Major – but we’ll see. Don’t worry, I don’t think my blog post following that race will be as long as this one (don’t bet on it).    

Broken Arrows

I turned 32 last weekend. 

Childcare was closed on Friday for Teacher’s Day, so I took the boys by the bus and MRT to the National Gallery, followed by the National Library, and then we stopped at Star Vista on the way home. Don’t ask me why I took them so far on public transport and stayed out for so long. (The answer, you and I both know, is probably naiveté.) The boys appeared to enjoy the outing, despite the fact that the MRT ride from Bugis back to Buona Vista was rather trying – I had to carry Daniel all the way, while Andrew tried his level best to push the braked stroller around a moderately crowded train. Naps were not had by anyone when we got home, and I ended up in tears at dinnertime because Daniel would not stop throwing a tantrum, and I felt like I had failed him in some way. 

On Saturday, I finally ran a sub-55 10k, but because I was slightly sick and really drained from the previous day’s shenanigans, the effort wore me out more than it should have and I got more upset than I would have at the fact that Husband hadn’t bought me anything, and I still had to do dishes and laundry and clean up poo poo. I wound up indulging in feeling sorry for myself, even during the awesome K-BBQ we had with my brother on Saturday night; I cheered up only after lunch on Sunday, having spent the morning at home baking a 6-inch chocolate cake and reading Norwegian Wood instead of going to church. My mood improved even more after I had a nap, after which we had a lovely dinner at one of our favourite Japanese restaurants – the waitress brought us a scoop of green tea ice cream, on the house, after Husband told her it was my birthday. We also finished all of the cake (mini cakes FTW. What took me so long?). 

Would I have had it any other way? If given a choice, probably, except for the 10k timing and dinner on Sunday. 

But of course, whether I could have had it any other way is another story.  

***

At some point in the past few months, I stopped being able to see the funny side of things where the boys were concerned (which explains the dearth of posts – I just couldn’t write, although I wanted to). I mean, there were moments, like when we first read the Three Little Pigs and Andrew went around knocking on all manner of random things, yelling “Chin, chin, CHIN!” followed by “I’LL HAH! An’ PAH! An’… DOWN!”, but many of such sweet and funny happenings were ultimately overshadowed by the horribleness of the Wednesday Weepies. Wednesday is usually the first day of the week the boys go to childcare; Mondays and Tuesdays they spend with grandparents. 

For weeks on end, Daniel invariably threw a tantrum on Wednesday morning about going to school, and when he finally let up, maybe about half-an-hour to forty-five minutes of weeping and utterly nonsensical raging later, I would be emotionally spent, and arrive at my desk after dropping them off capable of doing nothing more than drinking hot tea and staring into space. It took me at least one day to mentally recover. Nothing worked to stave off the Wednesday Weepies. Putting him to bed earlier, less TV the night before, more TV the night before, spanking, wielding the cane, reasoning, sending him to stand in the corner, me bursting into frustrated tears myself, telling him he didn’t have to go to school, offering to send him to a grandparent for the day (but I WANT to go to school! Ok, then let’s go. I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL!), me “throwing a tantrum” right back at him (he burst into even noisier tears at this), extra reassurance and hugs that I would be there to pick him up as soon as I could… 

In the end, one recent Wednesday, he simply woke up smiling and asked to go to school “a special way”. We go to childcare by this “special way” most days now; I have to make a detour of about 7 minutes on some narrow roads, but it’s worth it.

  

***

The Wednesday before my birthday, I had a meeting that started at 4.30pm and stretched later than I thought it would. Ideally, to reach childcare in good time, I have to leave by 6.15pm at the very latest. Traffic isn’t the most predictable during rush hour. I excused myself at 6.25pm and sped all the way to The Grandstand, and after I parked at the only available lot, which was the furthest away from the relevant entrance, I picked up the container with Daniel’s leftover breakfast cornflakes without thinking, only realising after I had sprinted about halfway across the carpark that it was probably a huge mistake. There weren’t any for Andrew. 

As I drove home that day, Daniel smugly satisfied after having managed to quickly cram the cornflakes into his mouth in large handfuls without giving any to Andrew, Andrew squalling as a consequence of my feeble and ultimately futile attempt to get Daniel to share the cornflakes with him, I looked out the front window of the car at the glorious sunset and thought about my role as a mother, and a wife. I’ve come quite a way, I think, from resenting being the one who has to rush off from work and take leave when the boys need a caregiver and grandparents are unavailable, to accepting that that’s just how it’s going to be because of the choices I have made, and how I want to live my life. 

Much has been said in the past two years or so about the emotional load mothers and women have to carry in the home, about unequal treatment at the workplace. I’ve read all the articles, believe me, and these may be unpopular views, but I have concluded that:

(1) Employers are fully entitled to favour men (although they should also favour women who have chosen to give their careers priority). I don’t blame them, really. Who wants an employee who can’t stay later than official working hours, whose emotions are subject to the capricious whims of young children? 

(2) God made women and men different, and a male would not be able to handle the emotional load half as well. Not many men have the emotional capacity after the s**t they go through at work. Often though, they do try, and maybe that should be enough, or we should learn to accept that that is literally all they can give, and therefore, it is enough.  

We ate leftovers for dinner that night, watched some Dinotrux, WhatsApp video-called Jon, read about four books, and went to bed. 

***

I do not in any way think that my trials are unique (though it sometimes seems that everyone else’s kids are sooooo well-behaved on social media, like, real life!), and while I am weary and sometimes fear that I am raising anti-social hooligans, it is through these trials that my love for my little family grows; I love the boys more than I ever thought I would. Daniel is at that stage where he’s all skinny arms and legs and questions, like a long bean that won’t stop talking. Andrew, in contrast, is for want of a better description, a solid little “Cute Fat”. I’m also proud of Jon and all that he has achieved at work, and happy, the genuinely contented kind of happy, that I have been able to play a part in providing a stable and secure home base for him to come back to. 

And that ends the story of whether I could have had things any other way on my 32nd birthday. I guess we all know the answer to that.  

Why Are You My Clarity?

It was mid-September 2017, and I didn’t expect anything the afternoon I turned on the TV to, I think it was Episode 11, of Hospital Ship. I knew at the time that it was Ha Ji Won’s (HJW) first new drama in about 2 years; since she’s my favourite K-actress, I had a vague interest in watching it. I had absolutely no idea who the actor playing the male lead, Kang Ming Hyuk (KMH) was, although I had heard of CNBlue (he’s the drummer, and I am NOT THAT OLD).

While it may seem from social media that I am an avid pursuer of K-dramas, most of the TV in the house has for a long while featured animated characters, usually talking animals or vehicles, and annoyingly positive messages about helpfulness and being kind to others – I’m sure I’ve complained about it enough of late. I’m lucky if I can keep my eyes open after the kids are asleep and I’ve finished putting the kitchen to rights to catch an episode and a half of Queer Eye, so you can imagine that committing 2 hours a week over four months or so to a drama is well-nigh impossible.

So there I was, thinking to myself that I would just watch Hospital Ship whenever I was ironing or it happened to be showing when I had a moment or two to spare, never mind if I ended up catching only about 20% of it. There have been precious few K-dramas, in the years that I have watched them, which have captured my attention, much less my heart, and in the past few years, I have been forced to be more selective than usual. 20% is still better than nothing.

Hospital Ship turned out to be only the second drama, after Secret Garden (funnily enough, another HJW drama, the viewing of which was instrumental to my finally working up the courage to leave private practice), to totally capture both my attention and heart. I was hooked from that first episode I watched: I caught up on all the episodes I’d missed as soon as I could, revived my Soompi forums account so I could join in discussions about it as the latest episodes aired. I followed live recaps (that’s when people, some with a knowledge of the Korean language, watch the drama as it airs on Korean television (sometimes illegally) and provide text updates about what’s going on) on Wednesdays and Thursdays, then streamed the week’s episodes once they were subbed in English (definitely illegally) a few days later. Jon tells people that he had to take his dirty laundry with him on his business trips during that period, and get his laundry done at the hotel he was staying at. (He was only sort of joking. Who ask you travel so much?)

I didn’t realise it then, and it sounds awfully lame and juvenile to say it (still, it must be said, because it is a crucial part of the background to all this), but on the day I caught up on all the Hospital Ship episodes I’d missed before Episode 11, I started falling in love with the pairing of HJW and KMH. HJW kicked ass as Eun Jae, of course, but there was, to me, an undoubtable, undefinable something about her and KMH’s Hyeon. I missed watching and commenting on Hyeon and Eun Jae’s first kiss when it aired; when I got round to watching the episode (14), I thought the kiss was Absolutely Beautiful. The behind the scenes (BTS) takes of the scene, when they were released, gave me such feels that I had to tell myself not to be pervy and rewatch the video more than once. Those in the Soompi Hospital Ship thread had by then moved on to discussing Why there was a kiss so early in the drama. Most were in favour of the (rather far-fetched) theory that the producers and scriptwriter were testing waters because the pairing had generally not been very well-received (K-drama land can be a cruel, cruel place), and they wanted to see if the audience would be receptive to Hyeon and Eun Jae’s romance*.

*For the record, I disagree with this theory. I think the kiss was written in so early for no other reason than that it just was. Also, due to some new advertising rules (though I’m not certain about this), each episode of a K-drama on the free-to-air channels in Korea is now half-an-hour long. Each week, four episodes are shown, two episodes per night, so nothing about the format really changes.

And just like that, I was on my way to being on the MinWon ship, despite what netizens were saying about the age gap (HJW is older than KMH by exactly 13 years), KMH’s relative lack of acting skills (not for want of trying and diligence though, I’ll give him that) and, above all, despite feeling that I was really Too Old For This S**t. I mean, come on, check out the definition of shipping here. Really? I had also been on and off the Hyun Bin-HJW ship post Secret Garden, and while I didn’t care either way after a while because there wasn’t anything much to link them together after that drama, and I hadn’t found the kiss everyone was so enamoured by (the one set to You Are My Spring in the last episode) anything to shout about, I had done my fair share of following a Tieba thread in MANDARIN, no less, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into the world of shipping again (read: Too Old For This S**t).

***

Looking back, all this rather bizarre behaviour (if I do say so myself) could have been due to the fact that I was entering drafting hell when I fortuitously tuned in to Hospital Ship that Saturday. By the time the drama ended, I was deep in its depths.

I’ve always thought that having been in private practice, even though it was only  for two years, had given me an extremely high threshold for nonsense. Telling myself that it could be worse, I could still be subject to billing targets and have to do BD, has over the years helped me get through many a Super Sian moment at work. I’d also like to think that I am a fairly optimistic and undemanding person when it comes to my job. Let me have the flexibility to be there for my family, go to the gym at lunch, and I will be happy doing almost anything, sai kang included, that you ask me to do.  

But this particular bunch of clients left me completely and utterly defeated. The kind of defeat that came from attending a meeting where I had to force myself not to cry, and be civil and grown-up and mature even though Andrew had HFMD (again, at the time) and I’d kept Daniel home from childcare in case he infected his class. And I’d begged my also very tired mother to come and look after them for a couple of hours so I could attend the said meeting – whereat I soon realised that no one had bothered to give a single ounce of consideration as to whether the (much-needed) overhaul of the lengthy documents they requested a legal review of, which overhaul I had done for them, should be adopted. It’s not appropriate for me to say here why they didn’t do so, but a suitable euphemism would be “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”**

**That being said, I feel like I need to say that this is not, by any stretch, an accurate representation of the attitude of public servants. A good majority of the people I have worked with these past 5 years care about they are doing, and value legal input they have asked for, to the benefit of their cases and projects. Unfortunately, as 1 Corinthians 5:6 says, “A little leaven leavens the whole lump.”

That was just one incident in a string of incidents that eventually led to my disillusionment with The System (being vague on purpose). I have as of now more or less learnt to live with it (part of that process involved me bursting into tears during a HTHT with my boss, how embarrassing), but it was in retrospect clear to me that Hospital Ship came into my life at a point in time when I really needed it. It kept me sane, being as it was a reminder that there are, after all, things in life as predictably comforting as there being a new K-drama every time one ends. Things like God, love, and that God’s faithfulness means he knows exactly what each of us needs to clear any emotional blockages we may have, no matter if we feel that whatever that is is “awfully lame and juvenile”. Yes, I also just used the phrase “emotional blockage”. For “…God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:27)

I guess I just happen to respond to K-dramas starring HJW.

***

Hospital Ship ended in early November 2017, at which point I was still somewhat in denial that I was shipping HJW with KMH, and that perhaps what I had seen onscreen was them, not Hyeon and Eun Jae, falling for each other in real life (this is not a totally far-fetched thought to have – as I have said, KMH is not a very good actor, but he was excellent in all the Hospital Ship romantic scenes).

I had rooted for Hyeon and Eun Jae throughout the drama (as if there was ever any doubt they were going to end up together!!!), but I figured that they were just going to be my OTP (One True Pair) for as long as the drama was on air, and I was going to have to get over them after it ended. As much as some of the commenters on the Soompi Hospital Ship thread seemed inclined to ship HJW with KMH, we were by and large a bit doubtful about the ship ever sailing given their real life age gap. But one of them, with some encouragement, ended up starting a Soompi #0628couple thread for them, and I joined in wholeheartedly because she was such a sweet and earnest person, and most of the other people who joined the thread were pretty nice to talk to. Jon takes the car once a week, and I remember climbing to the upper deck of the bus, totally worn out and rather depressed, slumping in a seat near the stairs and posting long, emo posts in the thread on the way home. I was also spurred by various clues which I shall not detail in this post because if you are a shipper, you will already know what they are and perhaps have them all laid out somewhere in chronological order (I’m not saying whether I have one of those chronologies. Ha ha ha), and if you aren’t a shipper, you wouldn’t care. AND if you are a good friend in real life, I would have forced some on you for analysis, whether you liked it or not.

Shortly after the special episodes of Hospital Ship (those are episodes where they interview the cast about their favourite scenes, and show some more BTS cuts), I got to talking to V, one of the shippers from the Soompi threads, first on Instagram DM and eventually on WhatsApp. Despite our being in different time zones (the my afternoon is your wee hours of the morning kind) and our 12-year age gap (less than HJW and KMH! But Jon has not let me hear the end of it), she put up with my long, rambly messages when I was confused about what I was feeling, and was the first person I told when I finally emerged from the fog and realised that I was well and truly on the MinWon ship and I wasn’t getting off anytime soon, even if, like so many other K-drama ships, we were eventually going to be left with a dearth of clues and be made to rewatch BTS cuts and shipper-made videos on YouTube.

I had fallen in love with them, and was fairly certain, then, that I had witnessed them falling in love for real.

***

“Falling in love” is a feeling I never thought I would forget, but eventually and inevitably did. After all, the last time I had that feeling was 11 years ago. That’s not to say that I’ve fallen out of love over the years – if anything, I’m certain I love Jon more than I did when we first started dating. Still, there is something very special about the feelings in those initial stages of getting to know a boyfriend/ girlfriend/ potential spouse (if you were infected by the I Kissed Dating Goodbye and Not Even a Hint bugs, you should know that you must date with the intention of marriage or NOT AT ALL), and while those feelings can’t and shouldn’t last – I can’t imagine living in such tormented rapture – there is something about their ephremality that sharpens their poignancy, and they are not any less wonderful for it. Back in early 2007, I think those feelings lasted about two weeks, tops. I distinctly remember journaling about it at the time, asking myself how long they would last, recognising that they couldn’t last forever, indeed I didn’t want them to, and at the same time determined to enjoy them while they were there. 

I remember when exactly it was that I started having the feelings I just described: Jon and I were sitting at arms’ length (really!) on a bench at the top of the hill near what I must now refer to as “my parents’ house”. I was wearing a brown jersey dress with sequins on the neckline that I had bought from the now defunct Flowers in the Attic at The Heeren (I assure you the dress looked nicer than my description), and I think Jon was wearing his Guiness T-shirt (which he still has!) and jeans. It was all very sweet and lovely and innocently passionate and so proper, quite unlike my experiences in other relationships.***

***The moral of that story is listen to your mother, time will prove that she knows best about these things. Although maybe some of those things are best experienced first-hand. 

It was nice to feel like I was “falling in love” again, to be reminded of how new it made the world feel. As Eun Jae said, the sky was bluer, the trees and grass greener – it was like living in brilliant, saturated technicolour, the beauty of even the most mundane things enhanced manifold.^

^I am aware that days with no rain and no cloud cover in Singapore can also lead to this effect.

Sometime in December, when HJW was on her Manhunt promotion tour, she gave an interview to a Hong Kong magazine. She was asked about the feelings she drew on when she acted out the different love scenes in Manhunt and Hospital Ship (at least, I that’s what I understood from the Chinese translation of the Korean). She replied that she still did not understand love fully (对爱还是一知半解 was the Chinese translation), but rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb watermelon. I cannot remember exactly what it was she said about the feelings she drew on, for I was flummoxed by the first part of her answer. If I believed she had finally fallen in love for real, how could she say she did not understand love fully?

I couldn’t sleep properly the night the translation of that interview was posted on an Instagram fan account, thinking about it.

When I woke up the next morning, though, I realised that you can

look at love from both sides, now

from up and down, and still somehow

it’s love’s illusions [you’ll recall]

[you] really don’t know love, at all

I played the song a few times while I was, surprise surprise, ironing that morning – it was the morning of Jon’s brother’s church wedding, and later in the day, when we were in our car, parked on a hill (near our house this time), the boys fast asleep in the backseat, I was telling Jon about these things and my feeling flummoxed and all the time thinking how much lamer can I get but surprisingly, he just said yes, he agreed, we will never fully understand love. Not in our time on earth, anyway.

He asked if I remembered that when we were talking about whether to try for the baby that was Daniel, he’d told me to consider whether I really wanted to have children, because if I didn’t, then if anything happened to him because of the tumour, I could remarry more easily. I told him, truthfully, that I didn’t remember that at all; the only thing I remembered about that discussion was that I had really wanted to have a child because if he really died, then I would at least have a child to 做纪念, be a remembrance.

Love is, fundamentally, merely a series of choices. We cannot know what choices we will have to make before we have to make them, and will thus never fully understand love. Each choice we make brings us a new understanding of love; when we choose the people we want to spend the rest of our lives with, we are pledging that the choices we will make for them in the years to come will be choices that bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, and endure all things, that we may be part of the many who have gone before us who have demonstrated that love never fails.

We then talked a bit about how the tumour had affected our lives. It’s something we don’t actually talk about very much, whether to each other or to other people; for me, one of the reasons is that given how everything turned out, I don’t think that we could necessarily be said to have endured a lot of hardship and I don’t like feeling that I am playing the C-word card. Not that people generally mean to do so, you know, but I have always said that Life Must Go On, and have tried my best to live that way. It’s not that it wasn’t horrible at the time – and I now have a morbid fear of medical check-ups, both mine and Jon’s, so much so that he has stopped telling me when his are until after they happen, otherwise I’d worry about it non-stop in the days leading up to it – but we were very, very blessed. I have not forgotten the kindnesses of the people around us, and all the coincidences that could only have been arranged by God.

We agreed that the discovery of the tumour, and what followed, had actually taken away something from each of us; later, he lost more of himself to work, and I lost more of myself to Motherhood. To avoid making this just another trite statement about “losing oneself”, I thought about what that really meant, and for the purposes of this post, I would define “losing oneself” as the state a person is in when they have yet to accept that whatever their loss, great or small, there has been a gain. Maybe the gain is less than the loss, maybe it’s greater, but it’s still a gain, a step towards maturity, and as a Christian, I would say sanctification.

Jon lost the youthful entitlement to take his health for granted, which entitlement had enabled him to whole-heartedly follow wherever the ambition that drives young men in their careers leads them without much of a second thought. I lost sleep, the figure I had before I had children, the ability to go for my favourite instructors’ classes at the gym after work, the freedom to work late and work weekends. It doesn’t sound like much, I know, and in fact it seems instinctive that those sorts of things are to be the first to go, when push comes to shove. Our lives, the foundations of our selves, are made up of the most facile things. Yet how intensely we yearn for them when we must give them up, how hard it is to accept that we had to.

Almost exactly five years after Jon’s first surgery, a K-drama led us to the realisation and acceptance that we had, in fact, gained a deeper understanding of love; a great, great gain, worth far more than the loss that brought it about, no matter if it was only a poor, meagre glimpse at the unfathomable depths of God’s love.  

***

My sailing on the MinWon ship was not always smooth. As V says, we got a lot more hints than many other ships, and I agree with that. For me, the rough parts were when I was emotionally involved in fan wars between shippers and a subset of KMH’s fans. A couple of days last year, I had to literally sit on my hands to keep from keyboard warrior-ing (I wonder how many people who are reading this secretly do it, though. It’s way too easy. Haha). I know, you’re thinking that I was probably about twice as old as the perpetrators of said fan wars, but V and I decided that there were a key few who were likely to be around my age. I just didn’t understand how anyone could be so petty, they made me so angry with their comments and actions. At the time I am writing this, there is one particularly tenacious girl who is still at it. The number of usernames she has come up with across social media platforms is quite something, despite moderators having banned her from the Soompi #0628couple thread a couple of times. She doesn’t seem to realise that her way of expressing herself gives her away immediately (she is clearly not a native English speaker).

We came to refer to that subset of KMH fans as the “Oppa-Is-Mine”, or OIM for short; V came up with it and the name is self-explanatory. HJW has her own version of such fans, of course, the “Eonni-Is-Mine” (EIM), who are somewhat similar to the OIM but are motivated by different things (as they are usually also straight females). Witnessing the fan wars, which were mostly between the OIM and MinWon shippers, was enough to give me an additional reason to want to stop at two children. If I have one more I risk it being a girl, and if she ever exhibits behaviour like the OIM and doesn’t show signs of growing out of it by the time she’s finishing secondary school, I know for sure I would not be able to deal. I’d be like (imagine Daniel and Andrew, their voices in perfect, eerily similarly pitched whininess): Why? Whhhyyy? Whhhhhhyyyyyyyy?^^

^^Which is not the way to deal with anything, that sort of thing especially. You would do a better job, I’m sure.

The good that came of my being on the ship has nevertheless far outweighed those rough moments, as evidenced by the section before this. Also –

I stopped killing myself trying to sub-2 at last year’s GEWR, and am strangely enough not sure, yet, that I want to give it a shot this year. ME! Who, just over a year ago, was hung-up and obsessed AF (pardon the French) about achieving this particular goal post children.

Clearance of the emotional blockage I referred to earlier meant that I finally had the emotional capacity to read and appreciate Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility, probably the first proper piece of literature I had read in a while. Potboilers and detective mysteries don’t count, you know that. Reading books that you know will really get to you isn’t a walk in the park.  

I finally took a break from Jon AND the kids, the first in more than three years, when I went to Manila by myself to watch the last of CNBlue’s Between Us concerts. The delightful feeling of irresponsibility when I went to the airport by myself at 2am to catch a 4am flight, leaving my children sleeping and blissfully unaware of my departure, is one I will cherish for a long while.

I agreed to go to Jakarta for a weekend with just Jon for his colleague’s wedding, when no number of impassioned pleas on his part had hitherto done anything to make me agree to take a short trip with him.  

Jakarta, December 2017

I made a number of Internet friends and met up with two of them in Bangkok when we all went for KMH’s fan meeting (it was in Korean with Thai translation, I was soooooo bored), and I still message V with astonishing regularity. Sometimes I am amazed by how many things we find to talk rubbish about. I was even complicit in Jon’s #YOLO and agreed to spend way too much money (because we booked everything so last minute) on our 2017 year-end family holiday to Taiwan.

And I also made one real-life friend at work, someone from another division, whose friendship has been a real blessing and was a source of brightness during an unusually dark period at work.^^^

^^^My being affected by Jonghyun’s suicide deserves a mention here, too. I wouldn’t have thought much of it if I hadn’t at the time been so into the K-scene. It was such a terrible waste of talent – I would have liked to have heard him sing Breathe ten years later. He struck me as a fragile soul who may have been better off writing and producing, away from the limelight. And yet he probably wouldn’t have lived his life any other way, and there wasn’t any other choice he was willing to make at the very end. It made me think about my take on suicide, as a Christian; to be honest, I don’t think I will ever have an answer that satisfies everyone, but I hope and pray that God had mercy on Jonghyun, on HJW’s brother, on Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, and all the other people, known only to their families and loved ones, who despaired of finding purpose in life, or saw no meaning in it any longer, and so decided to remove themselves from it.

***

As I am running out of steam (like that how to quit job and write full-time?), in this last section, I will proceed to paraphrase a bunch of people.  

I have no idea what the rest of 2018 will bring for the MinWon ship. Will we get an announcement of anything on 28 June? Does it really matter? My feelings about it have inevitably settled into a sort of demystification of an existing reality, much like my own real life love – I have readily accepted the beloved object in all its common reality, and simultaneously retained its sublime status. It is a love that is not painted with false colours any longer, as I have summoned the strength – or rather God has given me the strength – to translate the sublime vision into everyday practice (Slavoj Žižek, circa. 2004)#.

#I didn’t read Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, but it appears that Luca Guadagnino did, and quoted what I paraphrased in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Call Me By Your Name. I am acting yige cool only.

这一生志愿只要平凡快乐, 谁说这样不伟大呢? To wish, only, to lead an ordinary, happy life – who is to judge that as not being noble? (Mayday, circa. 2008, translation mine) 

But if HJW and KMH do one day announce their marriage, you know who will be unashamedly proclaiming it from the rooftops (ok, the modern day equivalent). Whatever OIM may (and will) say about their age-gap, whatever the EIM will have to say about KMH being a callow “idol”, the years have shown me that it is exceedingly difficult to find someone you truly love, that is, someone whom you would be more than willing to make the right choices for, someone you would keep on choosing for the rest of your life. If it was more than a fleeting fancy, if it really is true love, what right do any fans have to make such judgments? 

I know I said earlier I wouldn’t bore you with the clues we got (or I think we got), but it feels fitting to now leave you with one of them, because I know you are kaypoh like that, and perhaps like all highly delulu (that's shipper-speak for "delusional", by the way) persons, I need to share my delulu with others. Based on an informal straw poll of maybe the four friends whom I made to have a look at this, those who saw a blue and black dress have a better chance of seeing the reflection in the wine glass. 

Picture credits: On the left, @nainay1023, from @hajiwon1023

 On the right, @leejungshin91