Postcards from Hong Kong (via Singapore) #006

Peel Street, Hong Kong

So, technically I’m not in Hong Kong. I’m back in Singapore for Chinese New Year and will be hanging out here on and around the equator for the next few weeks. And then it’s back to Hong Kong again.

In some ways I miss Hong Kong already. I miss the coolness of temperature, although I’ve been told that that will disappear in the Summer months. I also miss the ease of walking to most of the places I frequent – here in Singapore I usually drive or get driven (it’s good to be a girl).

On the other hand, it’s good to be back and having the time and leisure to meet up with friends over the course of a month instead of trying to squeeze them all into the space of a week. It’s also Chinese New Year! All the yummiest foods and snacks, the tacky decorations and clanging muzak, new clothes and new shoes, seeing relatives I don’t see at any other time of the year… LOVE IT!

I’m still trying to get my head into the holiday mood seeing as I’ve got 5 more weeks of non-work to endure (ahem). I’ve been telling folks that I want to go to surf school, and it’s way up there on my agenda on the MUST-DO list. I’ve done research and everything! But before that, it’s chilling and diving in Ko Tao, Thailand with Ninja Jones and the HK trainee crew. It’s going to be awesome.

singapore’s a great place to be on holiday.

all i do is sleep till a disgusting hour (usually lunchtime), go shopping or have long leisurely lunches at various places, wander around in a heat-induced semi-consciousness till sundown, have dinner at delicious dining places with delectable dates, and then stay up watching cable television till 3 or 4 in the morning.

i’ve also come to quite a few conclusions (all on my own!):

1) it’s not worth it trying to become a singapore-qualified lawyer –
dipSing + pupillage + plc = too much time ;

2) some people don’t deserve my attention –
unappreciativeness + lack of effort + idiocy = waste of my time ;

3) i must seriously stop ordering red bull mixers as a fallback position.

will be back in good ‘ol blighty on saturday. yippeeboohooray?

i’m ready to leave.

i woke up the other day with that thought in my head. i didn’t know why, it must have been my sub-conscious telling me what i’m only consciously discovering several days later.

it’s time to get on with it, time to begin the next phase of my life.

the problems here (and there), they’ll remain unresolved and probably will for a long time more. but then again, i’ve lived with them for a long time now, so there’s no real rush to force a solution when there are other much more important things to deal with.

like housing, work and my future.

i feel like i’ve done what i can, and there’s not much more i can do without giving it up completely. so, right now i’m perfecting my handover procedure and everything will be complete.

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

你那天讲对了 －－ 有时辛福比快乐重要。

从今我会用心寻找辛福，若辛福能与快乐合濒那当然最完美。
若之内没你，我就也得接受这一切只是上天安排的一场长绵游戏。

但她也说得对啊 －－ 快乐不也是一种辛福？

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-

i’ve been listening to the clash and the cure and wubai.

they remind me of london times. of winter, of sitting in living rooms, of snow. with different people, at different times.

and reading through the blog archives of S, i feel guilty for having been such a bitch. and yet, where does one begin to apologize for disappearing without any explanations? [obviously this is going to need a lot more substantiation, but i will do that another time. in another post]

singapore makes me nostalgic. there are too many memories, good and bad, of past lives and past loves and old old times when nothing mattered. but it also makes me think a lot harder about the future.

london, at the moment, just seems like a parallel universe away.

oh god.

as much as i can deal with bureaucratic bullshit, form filling is definitely not my forte. especially when the forms are in a stupid format and doesn’t transfer very well from a pc to a mac to a pc again.

and, gov-bots are scary.

it’s been hectic.

there have been days sitting in ‘meetings’ and visiting sites and wondering why i ever agreed to help. but there have also been other days of sitting around and reading and writing (although much fewer). and other evenings of catching up and chatting about all the inconsequential and yet all-important things. karaoke and drum n bass too.

i still sleep till noon, which doesn’t help the jetlag much, but i don’t really have to be up anyway. the food’s good, although some have been disappointments. the mythology of singaporean food probably grew into a over-sized totally delicious monster in my head, either that or my friends are failing in their duties to bring me to the best places.

photography’s fallen off the radar. it’s just too hot to be standing around in the day trying to take photos of the things i see. i really want to photograph it all, but the heat! the humidity! i can’t balance a bag in one hand, an umbrella in the other, a bottle of water as well as a camera. it’s all too complicated.

it’s been a week and a half of history and the future.

ok guys, i’m back in singapore.

jetlagged.

over and out.

and by the way, happy national day

during my teens, my mom would never ever hesitate to criticise the way i dressed or the friends i made or the things i did. most of the time it was about the way i looked – she detested my wardrobe for its ‘immodesty’. being all spaghetti straps and skin-tight tops my mom saw it as signs of my imminent future as a streetwalker.

and she told me so. everytime i was about to step out of the house to go somewhere fun and exciting, while justifying her harsh criticism with this:

it’s only because i love you and i care about you that i tell you the truth. do you think anyone else cares?

and so that was my introduction to a new aspect of my traditional harsh-love upbringing. the previous examples being caning, scaring by threats of being given away to [monsters/bad men/foreigners], expressions of affection conditional upon exam results, etc.

anyway, my upbringing isn’t the point. the point is this:

while i may be highly critical about singapore, its people, its society, its government, its politics, its policies, my criticism doesn’t stem from a superiority complex or a hatred of the country. instead it stems from my love of a place i know could be much better that it already is.

the changes i hope for Singapore are not for the purposes of making it up to par with other countries. i don’t really care about how Singapore compares to the rest of the world. i care about making Singapore better for Singaporeans. if it happens that in that process, the adoption of methods and policies already used by other countries is necessary, then so be it – what matters is that the people of Singapore benefit from it.

i feel that way because i care about the future of singapore and care about the future of singaporeans, because i’m a singaporean. and i’m sure many people feel the same way that i do. it’s never been about ‘us vs them’, ‘you’re with us or against us, or ‘if you’re not PAP you must be in the opposition’.

i do it because i love singapore and want to be proud of singapore and want to be proud to be singaporean. it’s always going to be where i call home. it’s my place of birth, where my childhood memories lie, where my instinctive language was formed. it’s where my loyalties lie, where my grandparents are buried, where my family still is and most of my friends are. and because of that, i can see the faults more clearly, feel the mistakes with greater depths, empathise with those that have fallen by the wayside in this race to the top.

and if trying to better this place i love makes me seem like a dissident, at least i’m not apathetic.

happy birthday singapore, here’s to our brilliant future.

so tell me, what’s the point in having a card centre that shares its number with FOUR OTHER SERVICES..

and telling the cardholder to call collect when its a machine operated phone-in system.

and having the SAME NUMBER for local and overseas calls.

and having a website that tells you nothing. nothing about transaction limits, nothing about the card in question, nothing nothing nothing.

i am so going to change banks when i get back to singapore.

last night on the bus, 2 stops from my house, i thought ‘what if i never got off’.

i knew where it’d end up, but where will it end, really?

i’ve never sat on buses from one end to the other before, much less in london where they travel pretty faraways either way. although i do remember being on a feeder bus when i was in primary school, and taking it from the wrong end, and almost going a whole cycle around before getting to my stop.

i miss the feeder buses, with their dirty scratched windows and red vinyl/plastic/mock-leather seats, the shiny handbars rising out the sides of the seats, the mock-wood veneer. the grooved floors of the bus, the coin collecting machine, the feel of the afternoon sun heating up the bus, making schoolshirts stick.

they don’t exist anymore, do they? even the other type of buses that run only during peak hours and are orange and beige. they’re all gone now. everything’s air-conditioned and nice. clean and sanitised.

it’s the dirt and the grime and the unique way in which only that place can produce that out-dated, out-moded, not nice and shiny and new anymore junk and garbage that makes somewhere somewhere.

isn’t it ironic that singapore imports vintage things from places like bangkok and japan, when honestly, there is the same shit there as well? but then again, singapore IS a very ironic place.

one day all the colonial and pre-colonial buildings will be bulldozed, no more moulded archways and shuttered windows. and when that day comes, the government will probably try to buy the 5 or 6 malaccan streets from malaysia, install it somewhere in the outer reaches of the island and turn it into a theme park. for tourists.