tell me about it

In an Internet cafe on Khao San now…it’s been raining mice and cockroaches (not quite that heavy, just an intermittent annoying drizzle) and the night markets have taken a beating.  Sadly for me.  Rest assured I have been doing my utmost best to help Bangkok’s economy along.  I’ve been going nuts along Khao San, Suan Lum, Platinum Mall, Pratunam…it’s incredibly fun.

K I’ve gotta rush back to hotel to my bored roommate :P

Oh and HADY!! YAY HADY THE NEW SINGAPORE IDOL YEY!

Here I am for the first time at the Budget Terminal.  I could go into a whole long rant about Names and how some names are inexplicably redundant and just plain stupid but that would be a waste of time because there’s nothing I can do about it except, really, rant about how some names are inexplicably redundant and just plain stupid, like The Budget Terminal, I mean couldn’t you have picked a more imaginative and creative name that isn’t reminiscent of calling a store The $1.99 Shop – oh wait, someone DID name their shop that, well there’s a reason why it’s closed down now and oh, I’m ranting after all.  I’ll stop now before my English teachers get fits over my run-on sentences.

This place reminds me of a very ulu shopping center.  It’s quiet and empty and it’s got a handful of shops surrounding a central bank of food stalls like O’Brien’s and Killiney Kopitiam.  But it serves its purpose and for the price of a $115 return ticket to Bangkok, I’m not complaining.

The most interesting thing about the Budget Terminal is the passport gantry.  It’s all self-automated now, and you slide your passport into the slot, wait for it to register then cross one gate.  You’re then trapped between two gates as you roll the pad of your thumb over a glass sensor.  The machine verifies your thumbprint and you’re through.

Right, I’m off to visit the Budget Toilets.  Keep praying for me and I’ll update from BKK.  No more shopping requests!  I feel like I’m shopping more for other people than for myself already.  Hurhur.

Thanks to my beloved cousin who lent me his camera, and to Kang who almost did.

The devastating thing is reading it, completely understanding the feelings behind what they’re saying, then shaking your head at how idealistic and romantic they are.

While I would not be as crazy to go do law (sorry, law people) and be a nutcase lawyer working 80 hours a week, you still do need to work to earn money to keep your family alive.

I can’t sit at home all day and think about whether I want to hop or skip or have a baby “just because”, if I don’t have the means to provide my child with a good life; I can’t waffle and live off my parents because I’m living a Dream.

Indeed – in your dreams.

Of course I support working in the Arts; what I’m saying is, a job as an actor is still a job. You still need bread and butter (or a ricebowl, where we come from). Get a job drawing cartoons. Selling tickets at the theatre. Designing “Prevent Dengue” leaflets. Whatever. But don’t be a bum. That’s not living a Dream. That’s dreaming.

The following essay was written for Singaporeans Exposed: Navigating the Ins and Outs of Globalisation (published to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of the Singapore International Foundation, 2001, Landmark Books)

How living in New York has illuminated for us the difference between the Singaporean Dream and the Singaporean Plan

By Colin Goh & Joyceln Woo Yen Yen

Former lawyer turned writer/cartoonist Colin Goh and educator Joyceln Woo are married and have been living in New York for the past three years.

COLIN & JOYCELN: We fell in love and in June 1998, we got married – true Singaporean style. The studio photography, the clothes, church, the dinner and the hundred of guests that we had never met before. What happened to us after that was not so typically Singaporean. Here are our stories.

JOYCELN: As a child, I could never sleep the night before the first day of school. The night before my first day of teaching was no different. I didn’t know what to expect but I knew that I was going to help kids learn, be the best teacher, and make a difference.

At my first staff meeting, the principal screened an image familiar to all new schoolteachers – the Prism. Like a magical crystal ball, the Prism told many things. It could predict how well students entering secondary school with 4 subjects at PSLE would do for the ‘O’ levels. With the Prism, we
could evaluate each student’s potential grade in literature based on his/her PSLE grades and then tell if our school had “added value” to the child’s education.

Looking into the Prism, the principal announced that while she was concerned about the various aspects of development – Intellectual, Aesthetic, Moral, and Physical – “This year, our school will focus on the Intellectual.” By this, she meant that as teachers, we should all ensure that we stretched the potential of the students so that they performed “better than expected” at the ‘O’ levels. I noticed in the subsequent years that we never decided to focus on any other aspect of development. There was never an Aesthetic, Moral or Physical year.

The conversations in the staff room educated me considerably about the concerns of teachers.

“Oh, I heard you bought the new condo in Bukit Batok, that’s a good investment…”

“So which piano school are you sending your child to now?”

“Do you want to go buy diamonds with us, we are going to buy diamonds this afternoon.”

In my naïveté, this came as a shock. Why weren’t teachers talking about helping students learn or improving instruction?

And when they WERE talking about improving instruction, it was invariably:

“So what questions do you think will come out for this year’s ‘O’ levels?”

“Yes! Yes! I spotted the right questions!”

“You have to make sure your students write 5 ‘compositions’ and do 5 ‘comprehensions’ this semester.”

And when questions were asked, the answer was inevitably “Can’t change. That’s what the principal wants to see.”

(more…)

I be flying off in a few hours and I am EXCITED!

Thanks all of you who messaged me with sweet bye-bye messages…

I’ll try and blog from Bangkok. Still have no digital camera because it’s getting too complicated to borrow one :/ so I may not have good photos of tanks. Sob.

Be back Thursday, y’all.

In case you’re wondering: I am still going to Bangkok.

No, I’m not suicidal.  I’ve been monitoring the situation there and things seem to be settling down into a peaceful coup.

“The calm before the storm,” Bin tells me ominously.

I’m not being flippant about my life or anything, so don’t worry.  So far from reports and live blog coverages of the coup, things are just simmering a bit.  No bloodshed (yet?) and I’m hoping that things will continue to cool down.

I’ve paid for the unrefundable hotel and flight tickets so by gum I’m going to Thailand.  If I have to spend my entire time there reading and writing and watching TV in the hotel room, I’ll do it.  I’m not that loaded to waste money that way!

I would like to ask a favor though.  Does anyone have a digital camera I can borrow?  If things are relaxed enough for me to trawl through the streets, and it does appear that I will be able to, then I’d love to bring home some interesting pictures.  Isn’t every day I can live through a coup, and what more being in the country at the time.

My camera has gone AWOL.

Sob.

The slim Portuguese man at table 47 gazes rapturously up at me. “Señorita, muy bonita,” he says, starry-eyed. I smile back at him. “Gracias,” I reply, and his eyes widen.

“¡Habla español!” his Spanish friend exclaims.

“Si, un poquito.”

They beam at me, and I mentally thank my Spanish tutor for drilling us in the basic phrases, which is just about all I can still remember.

“¿Como se llamas?”

“Juan,” the Spanish one says.

“Me llamo Beth. Hola.” I look over at the Portuguese. He’s just staring at me with this strange look in his eyes and I start getting a bit uncomfortable.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask, and he shakes his head admiringly.

“Because you are so beautiful,” he says earnestly. My eyebrows go up and I’m not sure what to say to him, so I just laugh a little bit.

The Spaniard turns to me. “¿Donde aprendio usted español?”

“En universidad,” I reply. He keeps shooting questions at me but he speaks Spanish much too fast and I shake my head.

“No se, lo siento.”

“I like you very much,” the Portuguese tells me when I return to serve them another round of drinks. I look at him helplessly then turn to the Spaniard.

“Your friend keeps staring at me!” I complain jokingly. He shrugs, smiling, and shoots off a string of Spanish words – the only two I recognize are “trabaja” and “cuantos”. I take a shot in the dark.

“I finish work at one,” I say, and it turns out to be the right aswer.

“After that you go home?” they ask in Spanish.

“Si, yo vivo en mi universidad.”

By this time I’m getting a little uncomfortable with the intense gaze of the Portuguese guy, so I make my excuses and trot off to do other things. Still, every time I walk near his table, he turns away from conversation with his friend to watch me. Once, our eyes meet, and he blows me a kiss. I shake my head and laugh.

Finally they get up to leave, and the Portuguese guy grabs my hand.

“I am going now,” he tells me. We do the whole cheek-to-cheek air kissing thing, and they both give my hand a quick squeeze.

“Buenos noches,” I say. “Hasta mañana.”

“Hasta mañana,” they reply, and the Portuguese guy beams at me.

“Muy bonita,” he says again softly before they walk off in the direction I point them in to get a cab.

I can’t help but smile a bit to myself as I clear their glasses from the table. Maybe I’m a softy, but unlike most of my gorgeous and confident colleagues, I don’t get these sort of compliments from perfect strangers often; and sometimes after a bad day, things like this can really cheer you up.

Thaksin’s been ousted in a military coup and a state of emergency has been declared.

Crap.

Night curfews have been set.

Double crap.

The baht is falling like Rapunzel from her tower and her prince in love.

That’s one minor silver lining.

Please please let this all blow over by the weekend :(

“Sir, your food and drink cost $xx,” Kelly says.

The guy nods and takes out his wallet.

“Okay, but I want a receipt.”

“Why do you need a receipt?” his friend cocks his head in curiosity.

The guy looks at Kelly, then back at his friend. “It’s a matter of integrity,” he says. “I don’t trust these people.”

These people. These people?! Who are these people? Waiters and waitresses? How dare he.

But he’s almost right – some people can’t be trusted, and I’m not talking about the wait staff. I go to the same table awhile later to deliver the lady’s Cosmo, and inform them that they have an outstanding payment.

“Sir, I believe there is a pint of Heineken that you haven’t yet paid for. May I collect the payment for both the beer and the Cosmo? That will be $27.80.”

The man looks at me straight in the eyes. “No, there’s nothing here we haven’t paid for.”

I meet his gaze evenly, my voice polite and calm. “I’m sorry sir, but I have a receipt for the pint of Heineken that’s in front of you, and it hasn’t been paid for.”

His friend starts looking a tad uncomfortable and nudges him. “Don’t like that lah,” he says. He looks up at me sheepishly. “Yeah, there’s one pint we haven’t paid for.”

The first guy smiles and waves him away. “I was only kidding lah. Here’s my credit card, run a tab.”

I incline my head and thank him and walk away, seething inside. Who’s the one without integrity, then? I know I can’t expect a tip from him and when he finally settles his bill, he doesn’t let me down.

But something else happens that cheers up my entire night. A regular tips me $70 on a credit bill! I’m floating. It’s the most I’ve ever been tipped on a single bill.

But it doesn’t end there.

Ten minutes later his friend comes up to me, holding up two soft toys that the deaf-mutes sell along the quay. “Ben bought these when he was drunk, and now he doesn’t know what to do with them. Do you have a sister or a niece whom you could give them to?”

I take them from the friend, and tell him, “We’ll find someone to give these to, sir. No worries.” He thanks me and goes back to his seat, but then Ben comes up and taps me on the shoulder.

“Are you going to give those to someone? My friend says you’re going to give it to your niece or someone, but I don’t believe him. You’re going to throw those away aren’t you?

“Not at all,” I reply. “Some of my colleagues have children, we’ll probably give these to them.”

“Really?” Ben asks me, looking crestfallen. “I just lost a $50 bet with him then. I bet him that you were going to throw them away.”

He looks at the dumbwaiter. “Tell me the truth, you’re just going to dump these inside and grind them up, aren’t you?”

I laugh. “That’s not the garbage disposal,” I tell him. “That’s the lift to the kitchen.”

He brightens up. “Okay, then do me a favor. Throw the soft toys in and slam the door when my friend is looking.”

“Sure,” I tease him, “only if you put that $50 into my tip jar.”

“You’re on.”

I raise my eyebrows. Okay, if he’s really going to tip me $50 for putting two soft toys into the dumbwaiter, I’m glad to play along. Back at his table, Ben gives me the thumbs up and his friend looks on, laughing in disbelief.

I stow the toys in the lift and slam the door exaggeratedly, just as Ben gets back with his wallet. He lifts it in the air and opens it, draws out one $50 note.

“One…” he says, then takes out another one. “Two!”

He folds them and pops them neatly into the jar. I try desperately to hide my manic grin as I see Kelly’s mouth drop open from the corner of my eye.

“And does that money go to needy children as well?” Ben jokes, and I’m more than happy to joke right back at him.

“Oh yes,” I nod solemnly. “Very needy students who need money to eat.”

“Needy children who are going to be partying at Zouk tomorrow with my $100?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“I’ll be right here serving drinks tomorrow,” I reply. He laughs and rejoins his friends, and I wave happily to them as they leave.

$170. That’s a new record for me. I jumped from $40 straight to $170. I don’t know how I’m going to beat that, but golly gee I hope I do!

Avast, you salty sea dog!  Yarr, it be a fine day for plunderin’ and pillagin’.  Aye, Jim lad, I did oversleep and miss my class, but I be ready to go for the later one.  That there buxom wench forgot to wake me up and both of us be groggy, only without the grog.

Har har harrrrrrrr, it be Talk Like A Pirate Day, so put on your hooks and peg legs, me hearties, for Polly, she be wanting a cracker.

Ahoy!

傑義 says:
I’m leaving for California next Monday evening
Will be gone for about 2 weeks

-jadeite[Absolut Desire]- says:
wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
bring back some cal-ee-for-nee-ahhh sunshineeeeeee
bring back arnie, i want to hang him on my wall
i’ll install a pull cord in his butt
and everytime i yank it, he’ll go “HASTA LA VISTA….BAYBEEEE.”