I think I’ll follow this up with more adventures in the US.
A trip to Chicago, and it was a bad time for me. My relationship with codfish was just over, and although I hadn’t realised it that was the start of the problems. Also hadn’t realised why people seemed more hostile towards me during that period – it was because I was full of rage and it showed.
A few of us went to a bar (OK – it was Swensen’s – now you know) and we tried to order drinks. The waitress was some eastern European. We tried to order drinks. They asked me for an ID, and when I didn’t have any, she refused to serve me. I would normally have accepted it with equinamity but as said earlier, not in a good mood. Plus I was already in my mid 20s at that time, and somebody telling me I looked under 21 was really off putting. “I’ll have a water.” The waitress glared at me and I ended up starting an argument with her.
After that unhappy episode I also got annoyed at my friend who was hellbent on wanting to get drunk that evening. Eventually we just went to a convenience store, bought a whole lot of liquor to drink in our hotel, and then glugged it all down. I found I was able to hold my liquor better than the rest (and I was drinking less too) so 2 hours later I was the only one still able to function.
Still feeling in a bad mood, I proceeded to make a semi-pornographic movie where, with a large dose of black humour, I stimulated raping one of my friends. Shingot saw that video once and admitted to me that he found it “disturbing”.
I may have been half drunk while making that movie but what I found remarkable was that the person who shot it on digital video later on when to edit and splice the clips together - without my guidance. The fact that he was able to piece together a fairly lucid philosophical argument out of my drunken ramblings indicates that I couldn't have been very drunk at that time.
The plane trip back was not that much better. Thanks to not very good time management, we reached the plane barely seconds before we closed the door. Next to us there was this grouchy old lady with a little dog. We were mucking around with our luggage when we accidentally bumped into that lady with the luggage, and she started lashing out at us for making too much noise and whacking her. We just sat back and cringed at the fact that we were going to be stuck with her for the 2-3 hour flight.
But she got her just desserts in the end. When the airplane took off, it literally scared the shit out of the dog, and she was pretty red faced much of the trip, asking the stewardess for more kitchen towels to clean up her mess. On one hand there was the grim satisfaction but on the other hand there was this terrible stench.
Chicago is really not that bad. I know I’m telling you a lot of the grouchy parts of the trip, but it’s a nice city. Yes, if you’ve read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” you’d know that it was a horrible place to live in 100 years ago. Yes, when Al Capone was controlling the city in the 1930s it was completely crap. Yes, there was 1968 and all that, but I’m sure you all have parents who will tell you that Singapore was not always such a liveable place, at least for 10-20 years after the end of the war.
Guess I hadn’t grown up that much at that point. I was only starting to grow up. I travelled with my sister around that time, and earlier this year I travelled around with my sister again, more than 5 years later. She says I’m much more relaxed around angmohs this time around. Yes, I’m calmer with people these days.
Saturday, 25 October 2008
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Blue Gold
There was a time when I used an obscene amount of water. I used to do most of my studying in the bath. The hot bath is the closest thing to tropical weather in the wretched northeast of the US of A. Used to fill it up – 30/40 litres at one go, and soak in it for hours, or for as long as it took for me to finish 1 more chapter of abstract algebra. But there were mitigating factors. Water was free. The city didn’t charge for it, because I was living in a sparsely populated small town which was next to a lake larger than Singapore. It will never run out of water. So that was OK.
I would never do the same thing in a city like Singapore – it’s a waste of water. If I were to live in a more urban place but cold climate I will have to think of different ways to keep warm.
And that is why I disapprove of gourmet coffee joints which use the dipping well to dump their barang. Can you imagine keeping the tap on all day just so that you can look good in front of your customers? And there are so many Starbucks in the US. My sis and I walked down the main shopping road of Denver and we counted 8 different Starbucks. Imagine each one wasting as much water as that!
Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Spinelli’s all have this problem. So I’ll boycott them. This is bloody ridiculous – water is getting more expensive and rare all the time, and those guys need to waste it like that?
And Starbucks – they had this practice where they could go to a coffee joint, and offer the landlord a higher price than the coffee joint was paying. Then they’d get the landlord to kick out that coffee joint. That is how many coffee joints went out of business.
Life has gotten kinda boring because I have boycotted cinemas for raising their prices. (And anyway films in cinemas are getting from bad to worse. I don’t know why distributors cannot get decent pictures in here anymore.) Now I am boycotting gourmet coffee joints as well. I could also boycott western food joints for using too much meat in their food. There’s nothing else I can do other than to go lim kopi at a coffee shop.
(After this article was written, Starbucks and Spinelli’s have changed their dipper well system. Fair enough, boycott over. Boycott still applies to Coffee Bean).
I would never do the same thing in a city like Singapore – it’s a waste of water. If I were to live in a more urban place but cold climate I will have to think of different ways to keep warm.
And that is why I disapprove of gourmet coffee joints which use the dipping well to dump their barang. Can you imagine keeping the tap on all day just so that you can look good in front of your customers? And there are so many Starbucks in the US. My sis and I walked down the main shopping road of Denver and we counted 8 different Starbucks. Imagine each one wasting as much water as that!
Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Spinelli’s all have this problem. So I’ll boycott them. This is bloody ridiculous – water is getting more expensive and rare all the time, and those guys need to waste it like that?
And Starbucks – they had this practice where they could go to a coffee joint, and offer the landlord a higher price than the coffee joint was paying. Then they’d get the landlord to kick out that coffee joint. That is how many coffee joints went out of business.
Life has gotten kinda boring because I have boycotted cinemas for raising their prices. (And anyway films in cinemas are getting from bad to worse. I don’t know why distributors cannot get decent pictures in here anymore.) Now I am boycotting gourmet coffee joints as well. I could also boycott western food joints for using too much meat in their food. There’s nothing else I can do other than to go lim kopi at a coffee shop.
(After this article was written, Starbucks and Spinelli’s have changed their dipper well system. Fair enough, boycott over. Boycott still applies to Coffee Bean).
Sunday, 12 October 2008
Climb every Mountain
Climb every mountain, search high and low
Follow every by way, every path you know
Climb every mountain, ford every stream
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream
A dream that will need, all the love you can give
Everyday of your life, for as long as you live
A Capricorn song if every there was one. This song comes from "The Sound of Music", which is also the last musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein would write together. The lyricist Hammerstein died soon after.
I woke up from disturbing dreams about being back in one of the toughest army camps I've ever been to. I wouldn't say that it's as tough as being in the commandos, or even the guards, but I still remember the words of a lieutenant who barked out at us: "this is the tarmac. It is sacred ground. Nobody walks on the tarmac!"
Everything was bigger. The missiles were heavier, the missile launchers are larger. The control equipment is heavier. It was designed for big burly angmohs in mind. It was almost like being in the engineers. Probably the training was tougher because the sergeant in charge was a sadistic asshole who didn't want to brief us properly and preferred for us to screw up time and again until we one day magically learnt our lesson. It didn't happen.
I injured myself and I was eventually deployed to a nicer place where the missiles were smaller, and the equipment was more manageable. But that is another story for another time.
But I had disturbing dreams about being back in that camp, about missiles being twice as heavy, people running twice as fast. The airplanes are everywhere! I was just carrying them over to the launcher as fast as they were being fired off, with all the flak flying around me.
Then you got to go back to what that dream was all about. It was the weekend again, so it's marathon preparation time. I had this troublesome right ankle, and it usually gave me hell after 15 km, but yesterday I managed to run an extra 5 km. It would be almost noon by the time I'm finished with the 20km, and I also promised myself that I would run another 10 km at night because you can push yourself a little further when you split up your runs.
It didn't happen. I guess I was tired and feeling crappy. All I need was a signal to get me to stop running. It was a drizzle when I went to the park last night, and I said, forget about it, and ate a chocolate sundae instead. I couldn't wait until after the rain because I wanted to catch England vs Kazakhstan. Not bad when you can play like shit and still win 5-1.
Well it's Sunday afternoon now and I still haven't done the extra 10km now, but I'll do it after I put this entry up. I'm sure that my body will protest tomorrow but when you got to do that marathon you got to be up to the challenge. My jogging partner is usually a better runner than me but he said, "I'm not doing this again next year. This is crazy. The amount of preparation, the amount of work you're going to put into it..." Yes, me too. I'm just going to show up in December, collect that fucking medal, and then fuck off. Then I can tell other people that I lived the dream.
Whenever you dream you dream, don't forget the other part of the dream - the one that involves the shit work being done.
Follow every by way, every path you know
Climb every mountain, ford every stream
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream
A dream that will need, all the love you can give
Everyday of your life, for as long as you live
A Capricorn song if every there was one. This song comes from "The Sound of Music", which is also the last musical that Rodgers and Hammerstein would write together. The lyricist Hammerstein died soon after.
I woke up from disturbing dreams about being back in one of the toughest army camps I've ever been to. I wouldn't say that it's as tough as being in the commandos, or even the guards, but I still remember the words of a lieutenant who barked out at us: "this is the tarmac. It is sacred ground. Nobody walks on the tarmac!"
Everything was bigger. The missiles were heavier, the missile launchers are larger. The control equipment is heavier. It was designed for big burly angmohs in mind. It was almost like being in the engineers. Probably the training was tougher because the sergeant in charge was a sadistic asshole who didn't want to brief us properly and preferred for us to screw up time and again until we one day magically learnt our lesson. It didn't happen.
I injured myself and I was eventually deployed to a nicer place where the missiles were smaller, and the equipment was more manageable. But that is another story for another time.
But I had disturbing dreams about being back in that camp, about missiles being twice as heavy, people running twice as fast. The airplanes are everywhere! I was just carrying them over to the launcher as fast as they were being fired off, with all the flak flying around me.
Then you got to go back to what that dream was all about. It was the weekend again, so it's marathon preparation time. I had this troublesome right ankle, and it usually gave me hell after 15 km, but yesterday I managed to run an extra 5 km. It would be almost noon by the time I'm finished with the 20km, and I also promised myself that I would run another 10 km at night because you can push yourself a little further when you split up your runs.
It didn't happen. I guess I was tired and feeling crappy. All I need was a signal to get me to stop running. It was a drizzle when I went to the park last night, and I said, forget about it, and ate a chocolate sundae instead. I couldn't wait until after the rain because I wanted to catch England vs Kazakhstan. Not bad when you can play like shit and still win 5-1.
Well it's Sunday afternoon now and I still haven't done the extra 10km now, but I'll do it after I put this entry up. I'm sure that my body will protest tomorrow but when you got to do that marathon you got to be up to the challenge. My jogging partner is usually a better runner than me but he said, "I'm not doing this again next year. This is crazy. The amount of preparation, the amount of work you're going to put into it..." Yes, me too. I'm just going to show up in December, collect that fucking medal, and then fuck off. Then I can tell other people that I lived the dream.
Whenever you dream you dream, don't forget the other part of the dream - the one that involves the shit work being done.
Thursday, 9 October 2008
3 Annoying ppl
There have been a few people who have irritated me a lot over the last few years. The 3 that I am going to talk about today happen to be women. I don’t know if that’s a little too much of a coincidence. I guess guys know how to be furtive. They’re masters at it. They understand the male ego much much better than women do, even if they’re usually desensitised to everything else. I used to tell a woman friend, guys are generally less sensitive than women, except in one respect: the male ego. Guys are less likely to tread on another guy’s ego by accident, or if they do, they will usually sense it immediately. Women can be more insensitive about it.
Marie Antoinette. Yes, we have gratuitous picture of Kirsten Dunst here. I really like Kirsten Dunst and I think she’s sexy, even though a lot of people feel otherwise. She’s got this figure halfway between skinny and womanly, so she can gain a few pounds and she’ll still look really well rounded. OK, distractions aside, Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution and will always be seen as a figure of aristocratic excess. She is not one of the 3 who irk me - she's not alive today, unlike those 3 I'm going to talk about. I don't know if it's misogynist to say that it's often women who are blithely oblivious when they say things that are extremely offensive. I guess people naturally give you more of the benefit of the doubt and even want to suck up to you when you're a women. I guess also that people want to "protect" you from the evils of the world. So what happens when a particular woman is herself an evil of the world?
Wee Shu Min. I think a lot of ink has been spilt over this. One part of me feels great and says “orbigood” over and over again at the pummelling that she’s getting. Another part of me says, “please stop being stupid. You are giving scholars a really really bad name.” I think one bad thing about “meritocracy” is that it completely desensitises people to the fact that life is unfair.
People with the right means can get their kids into the right school, and the peer pressure alone will automatically make their kids into better students. They’ll naturally have better ECA records, better grades. Of course much of what they achieve as students is down to natural ability. The fact that I have 4 As and 2 distinctions at the “A” level is partly down to my innate genius. But I know deep down that if I hadn’t been pushed I could have gotten 2 Cs instead, and that makes you barely able to get into NUS. It’s this extra lift which allows the student to be in an environment where all he needs to do is to focus on his schoolwork, the crucial thing that determines whether he’ll make it to that elite level of performance, or whether he’ll just be a little better than average: and as we all know, there are almost no rewards for being just better than average.
The worst aspect of this is that her father, the MP Wee Siew Kim went out to defend his daughter. So there is nothing wrong with what she wrote? Implicitly they know that there is a threat to the system which favours them. People knows that not everybody is getting served but nobody wants to rock the boat. Martin Luther King said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. I could flip that phrase around and say “Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere”, and for Wee Siew Kim to even admit that there is a flaw in what his daughter wrote would show that there is a flaw in the system that made him what he is today. It is so much easier to say, “there’s nothing wrong with the system. It doesn’t need fixing” than to say, “we’ve had a fairly equal society for a long time but that’s not going to last. I don’t have the answers now but I’m trying”.
Mathilde Chua. One of the directors involved in the TT Durai / NKF incident. Did she have to go to jail? I don’t think she got sentenced. The image that struck me was that she was smiling defiantly as she walked in and out of the Supreme Court, as though through sheer force of will she could make people believe that everything was alright, it was a simple misunderstanding that could be resolved. (More about this fucked up attitude later.) Now you could keep that contemptuous attitude and pretend that you’re contrite. I will still give you marks for trying. This is obviously an “I’ve done nothing wrong” smile.
Lee Bee Wah. This recent debacle - what can you say? Only in Singapore can somebody so politically tone deaf get elected into Parliament. Yes, it was unfortunate that the “Singapore” men’s table tennis team gets short shrift. And it is possible that in spite of our success at the Olympics the team was fractured by a lack of cohesive spirit. But to conduct a massacre of your people right after Singapore ended a 48 year wait for an Olympic medal? That is completely ridiculous.
And just when you thought she was done shooting herself in the foot, she put the icing on the cake when a reporter asked her why she did this. These are puzzling decisions that can nevertheless be made more clear when the reasons behind them are explained. She probably elaborated a little but said something shockingly insensitive that the reporter picked up upon: “it’s time to move on”.
Now usually this is a phrase that is muttered by victims who want to forgive people for their crimes. Almost never by a person who did something extremely offensive in other peoples’ eyes. I’m quite sure that more than a few eyes bulged when they saw this comment. It’s time to move on! I slap you in the face once, you ask me what for, and I say “it’s time to move on”. It’s the equivalent of saying, “it’s not for you to ask such stupid questions like that. When I say the team manager has to go, he has to go. I don’t have to answer to you. Not your fucking business anyway.”
Well I already despise the practice of getting our politicians to head sports associations. Ho Peng Kee and Mah Bow Tan get involved with Singapore soccer, and to me it just looks like other people are doing the sweating on the field, and they are there soaking up the glory. I’m sure that there’s more to it than that, what with the organisational stuff: not easy to put your political career on the line and depend on results on the field. But usually it’s the MP in charge who gets some of the glory, and the sports team gets the blame if things go wrong. And my gut reaction to them is akin to those parents of child stars who get the reflected glory when things go well.
As for firing coaches who have just won something, I remember when Real Madrid fired Vincente Del Bosque right after he won a Champions League and League double. The message: “you’re fat and balding and not in line with the image that we want. We have Figo, Ronaldo, Zidane, Raul, Beckham, Roberto Carlos, we’re going to win Champions League every year anyway.” The retribution for that hubris was that a galaxy full of stars would have an empty trophy cabinet for the next few years. I think this is just.
To me it is a crime against the sacred order of things. I think about Oedipus killing his father (not knowing that it was his father), and being the original “bad motherfucker”. A crime so heinous that it begot the practice of stabbing your eyes out so that you don’t have to watch. I think about Voldemort killing a unicorn and drinking its blood for nourishment. And I believe that Barisan National is paying the price for its sin against Anwar.
If you wanted to give Lee Bee Wah the benefit of the doubt, maybe she thought that she had to do something about the fractious team spirit. But there could be some megalomania in here: one silver medal is not good enough. We must not be complacent. I am the anointed one to push you to greater heights. Now even the manner of the apology (front page Straits Times) is megalomanic. And still they don’t have the guts to sack her. Still she is smiling, and she has probably smiled her way out of trouble before. Still deep in her heart she has done nothing wrong and has probably done the right thing but overlooked taking care of the sensitivities of the well meaning but ignorant populace. Still, as long as her godfathers are still smiling on her, the will of the people “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world”. As for obtaining the reasons behind the sacking, wait long long.
As for the Ang Mo Kio GRC (members include Lee Bee Wah, Wee Siew Kim and PM Lee), in the last elections they got only 60% of the vote. While that will be seen as a landslide in some places (more specifically Anwar Ibrahim’s recent election) it was astoundingly mediocre. On one side you had a head of state. On the other side, the WP youth team. And people were predicting a margin of 70%.
But I guess you got geniuses like Wee Siew Kim and Lee Bee Wah on your team, that could explain it. And our good PM who likes his Mee Siam “mai hum”.
Marie Antoinette. Yes, we have gratuitous picture of Kirsten Dunst here. I really like Kirsten Dunst and I think she’s sexy, even though a lot of people feel otherwise. She’s got this figure halfway between skinny and womanly, so she can gain a few pounds and she’ll still look really well rounded. OK, distractions aside, Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution and will always be seen as a figure of aristocratic excess. She is not one of the 3 who irk me - she's not alive today, unlike those 3 I'm going to talk about. I don't know if it's misogynist to say that it's often women who are blithely oblivious when they say things that are extremely offensive. I guess people naturally give you more of the benefit of the doubt and even want to suck up to you when you're a women. I guess also that people want to "protect" you from the evils of the world. So what happens when a particular woman is herself an evil of the world?
Wee Shu Min. I think a lot of ink has been spilt over this. One part of me feels great and says “orbigood” over and over again at the pummelling that she’s getting. Another part of me says, “please stop being stupid. You are giving scholars a really really bad name.” I think one bad thing about “meritocracy” is that it completely desensitises people to the fact that life is unfair.
People with the right means can get their kids into the right school, and the peer pressure alone will automatically make their kids into better students. They’ll naturally have better ECA records, better grades. Of course much of what they achieve as students is down to natural ability. The fact that I have 4 As and 2 distinctions at the “A” level is partly down to my innate genius. But I know deep down that if I hadn’t been pushed I could have gotten 2 Cs instead, and that makes you barely able to get into NUS. It’s this extra lift which allows the student to be in an environment where all he needs to do is to focus on his schoolwork, the crucial thing that determines whether he’ll make it to that elite level of performance, or whether he’ll just be a little better than average: and as we all know, there are almost no rewards for being just better than average.
The worst aspect of this is that her father, the MP Wee Siew Kim went out to defend his daughter. So there is nothing wrong with what she wrote? Implicitly they know that there is a threat to the system which favours them. People knows that not everybody is getting served but nobody wants to rock the boat. Martin Luther King said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. I could flip that phrase around and say “Justice anywhere is a threat to injustice everywhere”, and for Wee Siew Kim to even admit that there is a flaw in what his daughter wrote would show that there is a flaw in the system that made him what he is today. It is so much easier to say, “there’s nothing wrong with the system. It doesn’t need fixing” than to say, “we’ve had a fairly equal society for a long time but that’s not going to last. I don’t have the answers now but I’m trying”.
Mathilde Chua. One of the directors involved in the TT Durai / NKF incident. Did she have to go to jail? I don’t think she got sentenced. The image that struck me was that she was smiling defiantly as she walked in and out of the Supreme Court, as though through sheer force of will she could make people believe that everything was alright, it was a simple misunderstanding that could be resolved. (More about this fucked up attitude later.) Now you could keep that contemptuous attitude and pretend that you’re contrite. I will still give you marks for trying. This is obviously an “I’ve done nothing wrong” smile.
Lee Bee Wah. This recent debacle - what can you say? Only in Singapore can somebody so politically tone deaf get elected into Parliament. Yes, it was unfortunate that the “Singapore” men’s table tennis team gets short shrift. And it is possible that in spite of our success at the Olympics the team was fractured by a lack of cohesive spirit. But to conduct a massacre of your people right after Singapore ended a 48 year wait for an Olympic medal? That is completely ridiculous.
And just when you thought she was done shooting herself in the foot, she put the icing on the cake when a reporter asked her why she did this. These are puzzling decisions that can nevertheless be made more clear when the reasons behind them are explained. She probably elaborated a little but said something shockingly insensitive that the reporter picked up upon: “it’s time to move on”.
Now usually this is a phrase that is muttered by victims who want to forgive people for their crimes. Almost never by a person who did something extremely offensive in other peoples’ eyes. I’m quite sure that more than a few eyes bulged when they saw this comment. It’s time to move on! I slap you in the face once, you ask me what for, and I say “it’s time to move on”. It’s the equivalent of saying, “it’s not for you to ask such stupid questions like that. When I say the team manager has to go, he has to go. I don’t have to answer to you. Not your fucking business anyway.”
Well I already despise the practice of getting our politicians to head sports associations. Ho Peng Kee and Mah Bow Tan get involved with Singapore soccer, and to me it just looks like other people are doing the sweating on the field, and they are there soaking up the glory. I’m sure that there’s more to it than that, what with the organisational stuff: not easy to put your political career on the line and depend on results on the field. But usually it’s the MP in charge who gets some of the glory, and the sports team gets the blame if things go wrong. And my gut reaction to them is akin to those parents of child stars who get the reflected glory when things go well.
As for firing coaches who have just won something, I remember when Real Madrid fired Vincente Del Bosque right after he won a Champions League and League double. The message: “you’re fat and balding and not in line with the image that we want. We have Figo, Ronaldo, Zidane, Raul, Beckham, Roberto Carlos, we’re going to win Champions League every year anyway.” The retribution for that hubris was that a galaxy full of stars would have an empty trophy cabinet for the next few years. I think this is just.
To me it is a crime against the sacred order of things. I think about Oedipus killing his father (not knowing that it was his father), and being the original “bad motherfucker”. A crime so heinous that it begot the practice of stabbing your eyes out so that you don’t have to watch. I think about Voldemort killing a unicorn and drinking its blood for nourishment. And I believe that Barisan National is paying the price for its sin against Anwar.
If you wanted to give Lee Bee Wah the benefit of the doubt, maybe she thought that she had to do something about the fractious team spirit. But there could be some megalomania in here: one silver medal is not good enough. We must not be complacent. I am the anointed one to push you to greater heights. Now even the manner of the apology (front page Straits Times) is megalomanic. And still they don’t have the guts to sack her. Still she is smiling, and she has probably smiled her way out of trouble before. Still deep in her heart she has done nothing wrong and has probably done the right thing but overlooked taking care of the sensitivities of the well meaning but ignorant populace. Still, as long as her godfathers are still smiling on her, the will of the people “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this world”. As for obtaining the reasons behind the sacking, wait long long.
As for the Ang Mo Kio GRC (members include Lee Bee Wah, Wee Siew Kim and PM Lee), in the last elections they got only 60% of the vote. While that will be seen as a landslide in some places (more specifically Anwar Ibrahim’s recent election) it was astoundingly mediocre. On one side you had a head of state. On the other side, the WP youth team. And people were predicting a margin of 70%.
But I guess you got geniuses like Wee Siew Kim and Lee Bee Wah on your team, that could explain it. And our good PM who likes his Mee Siam “mai hum”.
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Adventures in the US - Spring 08
Yes, I have not blogged about my USA adventures since my return. One of the reasons is that I thought that I would quit blogging, which is a fairly good one. But now I am working at an extremely laid back and comfortable pace of one per week, and I see that our friend Shingot has gone to Colorado like I have.
As most of you know, security at the airports has gotten a little bit more hellish ever since 911. They have some stunts like asking everybody to remove their shoes for inspection. Queues for people waiting to board airlines have backed up like a choked sewer.
If you are lucky you will bump into some customs officer with a sense of humour. The person asked for my passport and ticket, which I had in a money belt tucked in my pants. When I reached for it, he said, “no no no, there’s no need to take it all off too.” So that was the more OK encounters.
The not so OK encounters were at the customs check in counter. It was tense because I was smuggling some food in for my sis but of course he didn’t know that. Kept on peppering me with questions, like what I was doing, who I was visiting, and what my sister was doing. He asked me “Are you going to San Francisco?” I stifled the urge to say “no, and neither am I going to wear flowers in my hair.” Giving me suspicious looks and all that, and in the end a look of exasperation, like “I give up, I haven’t gotten you today but I’ll get you one day.”
I was entirely thumbprinted, of course. All aliens are, regardless of their criminal records. I remember visiting New York City and the Ellis island, seeing all the crap that all the immigrants had to go through before they were allowed into the country. Americans had a funny relationship with the Chinese, of course. On one hand they fought a world war as allies against the hated enemy, the Japs. On the other hand they treated the German POWs better than the Chinese immigrants that they turned away at the doorstep. If the US had given the Chinese a fraction of the help that they gave the Europeans, they wouldn’t have to suffer so much. More importantly the US wouldn’t have had to deal with Mao Zedong.
One incident about the US customs took place when I was enquiring about a student visa application on my sister’s behalf. This was 4 years ago, and the US had become more paranoid about aliens, and required that she apply for a visa on an embassy outside of US soil. So I called up the embassy and asked how this could be done. Halfway during the telephone conversation I muttered something about how those guys have nothing better to do than to force my sister to buy a plane ticket all the way to Singapore for that. Then he said, “Well you could try to do it in Singapore where it’s nice, clean and spacious, or you could do it in Jakarta where everywhere’s crowded and dirty, tempers are flying and you might not get it because the office might suddenly decide to close early.”
I wish I had thought of something to blast him back with because that comment made me very angry. It was not so much that it was impolite, but he was twisting the thrust of the argument. Nobody would have to go to anybody’s embassy if you didn't make that stupid rule that people have to get out of your country. Of course the idea is that it saves you the problem of having to deport people if their visas reapplications are not successful but this is a lot like "we're assholes and we're big and strong and can afford it and fuck you if you don't like it".
The other thing that happened was in a domestic flight. They got people to board in different tranches, which makes sense because it’s orderly: people seating at the back go in first, people in the front or in the aisles go in last. My sister went in first, I went in last. I saw that my sister had not stowed her bag in the overhead compartments, and I asked her why. Then she pointed at some motherfucking ang moh on the other side, and said, “he told me to shove off and he planted his luggage there instead.” Well being the good big brother I was, I was wondering if I should grab his bag out of the bin and plonk it on his lap and tell him to fuck off. And he was looking at me kinda worried maybe because he probably hadn’t counted on there being a big brother as tall (but not as fat) as he was. (I’m tall for an Asian but average for an angmoh.)
My options were: chew him out in public? But there were angmohs everywhere, so that was a bit risky. Eventually I thought, wait till we disembark, and we’re walking out at the other airport, then I trip him, make him fall on his face, and laugh at him.
Later on, the plane was taking quite some time to queue up for the runway. I noticed him trying to look out our window to check out the queue, so I helpfully went over and closed the window on him.
Eventually, though, my grand plans for revenge were foiled, because when we went out, we saw that his bag had the name of the same medical school that my sister went to, and that his speciality was the same as my sister’s. I’m not kidding. So I ran the risk of tripping over and laughing at somebody who could be a superior of my sister’s. So no revenge. What a bummer.
As most of you know, security at the airports has gotten a little bit more hellish ever since 911. They have some stunts like asking everybody to remove their shoes for inspection. Queues for people waiting to board airlines have backed up like a choked sewer.
If you are lucky you will bump into some customs officer with a sense of humour. The person asked for my passport and ticket, which I had in a money belt tucked in my pants. When I reached for it, he said, “no no no, there’s no need to take it all off too.” So that was the more OK encounters.
The not so OK encounters were at the customs check in counter. It was tense because I was smuggling some food in for my sis but of course he didn’t know that. Kept on peppering me with questions, like what I was doing, who I was visiting, and what my sister was doing. He asked me “Are you going to San Francisco?” I stifled the urge to say “no, and neither am I going to wear flowers in my hair.” Giving me suspicious looks and all that, and in the end a look of exasperation, like “I give up, I haven’t gotten you today but I’ll get you one day.”
I was entirely thumbprinted, of course. All aliens are, regardless of their criminal records. I remember visiting New York City and the Ellis island, seeing all the crap that all the immigrants had to go through before they were allowed into the country. Americans had a funny relationship with the Chinese, of course. On one hand they fought a world war as allies against the hated enemy, the Japs. On the other hand they treated the German POWs better than the Chinese immigrants that they turned away at the doorstep. If the US had given the Chinese a fraction of the help that they gave the Europeans, they wouldn’t have to suffer so much. More importantly the US wouldn’t have had to deal with Mao Zedong.
One incident about the US customs took place when I was enquiring about a student visa application on my sister’s behalf. This was 4 years ago, and the US had become more paranoid about aliens, and required that she apply for a visa on an embassy outside of US soil. So I called up the embassy and asked how this could be done. Halfway during the telephone conversation I muttered something about how those guys have nothing better to do than to force my sister to buy a plane ticket all the way to Singapore for that. Then he said, “Well you could try to do it in Singapore where it’s nice, clean and spacious, or you could do it in Jakarta where everywhere’s crowded and dirty, tempers are flying and you might not get it because the office might suddenly decide to close early.”
I wish I had thought of something to blast him back with because that comment made me very angry. It was not so much that it was impolite, but he was twisting the thrust of the argument. Nobody would have to go to anybody’s embassy if you didn't make that stupid rule that people have to get out of your country. Of course the idea is that it saves you the problem of having to deport people if their visas reapplications are not successful but this is a lot like "we're assholes and we're big and strong and can afford it and fuck you if you don't like it".
The other thing that happened was in a domestic flight. They got people to board in different tranches, which makes sense because it’s orderly: people seating at the back go in first, people in the front or in the aisles go in last. My sister went in first, I went in last. I saw that my sister had not stowed her bag in the overhead compartments, and I asked her why. Then she pointed at some motherfucking ang moh on the other side, and said, “he told me to shove off and he planted his luggage there instead.” Well being the good big brother I was, I was wondering if I should grab his bag out of the bin and plonk it on his lap and tell him to fuck off. And he was looking at me kinda worried maybe because he probably hadn’t counted on there being a big brother as tall (but not as fat) as he was. (I’m tall for an Asian but average for an angmoh.)
My options were: chew him out in public? But there were angmohs everywhere, so that was a bit risky. Eventually I thought, wait till we disembark, and we’re walking out at the other airport, then I trip him, make him fall on his face, and laugh at him.
Later on, the plane was taking quite some time to queue up for the runway. I noticed him trying to look out our window to check out the queue, so I helpfully went over and closed the window on him.
Eventually, though, my grand plans for revenge were foiled, because when we went out, we saw that his bag had the name of the same medical school that my sister went to, and that his speciality was the same as my sister’s. I’m not kidding. So I ran the risk of tripping over and laughing at somebody who could be a superior of my sister’s. So no revenge. What a bummer.
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