It’s 20 years later after the Tiananmen incident.
It’s interesting how things in Chinese history are called “incidents”, and named after the date where there were large uprisings. There was the May 4th movement in 1919, in Taiwan there was 28th Feb 1947, and in Beijing there was 4th June 1989.
We don’t call these things “revolutions”. Yes, there were genuine revolutions, like the 1911 revolution in China, actually that was it. The communist revolution in China never was, because what happened was Chiang and Mao fought, and Mao won, that was it. Chinese don’t consider their revolutions are big break from their past, Chinese history has been going on for so long that you cannot have something like a French Revolution in 1789, English Revolution in 1688, American Revolution in 1776, where these were events that symbolised a complete break from the past, and sent shock waves throughout the world.
To be sure, China is modernising and it is vastly different now from, say 221 BC when Qin Shihuang united the whole place. But things happened gradually. It’s a large place, and important things that take place take a long time to influence the rest of China, which is why China rarely has a clean break from the past. That being said, the 30 years from 1978 till now has been pretty dramatic even when you consider that you are comparing this with 4000 years of history.
We don’t call these “incidents” as anything else other than incidents. I think perhaps us Chinese have been around long enough to be very non-judgemental about things. Like when Henry Kissinger asked Zhou Enlai what he thought about the French Revolution, it was almost 200 years later and he still replied, “it’s still too early to tell”. Yes, the shockwaves from that incident in 1789 are still reverberating and the dust has not died down.
I suppose if the Communist party had lost power in 1989 you could call it a revolution. If the uprising does not become a revolution, it is still not a revolution.
The western interpretation of a revolution is something like this: First there is a tyrant who is making peoples’ lives miserable. Then people get together and overthrow the tyrant. After that a new regime is formed which is better in some vague way and which is a better representative of the people.
In particular, the French revolution was notable for an extremely radical point of view. This view is so common nowadays that it is easy to forget how radical it is, and how controversial it still is today: all men are equal.
This is a wonderful idea, but does it work? How does it work out in practice? Does it mean that everybody is given opportunities, but it’s inevitable that not everybody will end up the same? OK, you start a race, and then everybody’s at the same level. Then you end the race, and the best man wins. Sounds good. But this is life, this is not a race that has a beginning and an end. Does equality mean that at the end of every year, we confiscate everybody’s property so that everybody has the same amount of money again? What does equality and fairness mean?
Should all men be equal? We know the result of some social experiments that were performed in communist countries: all the educated and all the smart people, we forced them to do manual labour to understand what real life is all about. But did that make society a better place? Was there progress?
During Chinese New Year, my relatives would make "tang yuan" for everybody. (That's small dumplings filled up with crushed peanuts / sesame / sugar for those who don't know, and they are occasionally also called "ah ball ling"). They come in unequal sizes, and the "deeper meaning" behind all this is that you have to remember that not everybody's equal, and the small guy will inevitably have to give way to the big guy. Inequality in society is an accepted part of Chinese culture. It is ingrained in our society. When you meet a Chinese Emperor, you kowtow to him. When you meet the Queen of Britain, you stand up, and shake hands with her. (OK, this has probably only been true for the few hundred years following the Enlightenment).
So in China you have the very curious sight of a society which has always accepted some form of inequality, and suddenly it's run by a communist. Now in communist societies, everybody's supposed to be equal. But look at what happened: Party leaders became local deities, and Mao himself became the Chinese Emperor. To a smaller extent, Deng Xiaoping is also an emperor. It was hard for people to believe that he was the one who ordered the military action. You always want to believe that it was the prime minister (Li Peng) who was at fault for giving bad advice.
On one hand, we don't need some crazy utopianist ideals where everybody is equal all the time. Sometimes people are lucky, and sometimes they are unlucky, sometimes they are rich and sometimes not. So we tolerate some inequality in life. We only talk about inequality of opportunity, and we want the poor to have equal opportunity to succeed, and the rich to have equal opportunity to fail. But this is ridiculously hard to achieve in practice.
I think that when you call something an “incident” you don’t immediately want to associate it with a certain idea. The people who took part in Tiananmen were protesting against living conditions, probably against unemployment rates and the economy. I’m sure they all had their reasons and motivations, which had little in common with each other, other than a vague dissatisfaction with the government. The communist government made China a very equal society, so they could not have been protesting against inequality.
But they were protesting against living conditions. I suppose all revolutions are really about living conditions, even though on the surface they are all about political ideals. You won’t really complain that your leaders are dictatorial and undemocratic, until your stomach has to go hungry for long enough. Look at Singapore, look at a lot of governments who have been very oppressive, but have survived so long as they did their job. This is the true meaning of human nature. I believe that the real meaning of the French revolution has been missed. The peasants were revolting not because they were under a tyranny, but because the tyranny was screwing up their lives.
I suppose the revolution is something that is very much a part of the Enlightenment, or the Romantic spirit. The image of a mob rising up against their aristocratic oppressors and bringing forth a better and more equal society is a romantic one, not necessarily something that is found in other countries like Great Britain or Germany. Only in France will the aristocracy be so self indulgent and oblivious to the sentiment of the common people. Yet the French also have the talent for organisation that can transform the mob insurrection into something greater, something resembling a state. Only French people are so talkative that everybody, including the common man is philosophical enough to be excitedly chattering away about what Freedom means.
It is also the reason why French schoolchildren every morning have to sing a barbaric song about a mob wanting to rip the heads off a bunch of aristocrats.
Great revolutions have different symbols in different parts of the world. The Russian Revolution was largely seen as a tragedy, something that brought to power a brutal and despotic regime, whose first act was to unleash a great and destructive civil war upon a land that was already pretty fucked up to begin with.
The image of the Iranian revolution is forever associated with 50 Americans being held hostage in an embassy for 15 months, and an angry crowd of Muslim fundamentalists outside, baying for their blood. It is associated with the bloody war against Iraq, the rule of the Ayatollah, and the Fatwa issued against Salman Rushdie for “The Satanic Verses”.
The image of the Mexican revolution is associated with Zorro, the peasant on horseback, draped with bullet belts and sombreros, Indian war cries and pistols fired in the air.
The image of the revolutions that ended the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe are no less arresting. A shipyard worker leading a union against the government. The Berlin wall being knocked down. 300000 Czechs marching down the town square.
I suppose there is something in western culture which romanticises the revolution, in spite of how many revolutions have gone wrong. The Russian revolution is now understood to be a tragedy of vast proportions. Soldiers marching into Phnom Penh in 1975 were not a harbinger of better things to come. The Iranian revolution in 1979 benefitted only a few people. The Chinese revolution in 1911 was the beginning of some of the most chaotic times in Chinese history (although Chinese history is so old that nothing is truly new).
Images form the narrative of the revolution, and our emotions are galvanised by the act. We want to believe that tomorrow will be better. We want to believe that things will always get better. We want to believe that everything will be swept aside in one good session of cleansing. We want to believe that everything is achievable in a short period of time.
When the revolution is over and done with, what has been accomplished? Sometimes the promise of a better life is met, and often not. While writing a play I borrowed the image of a man confronting a tank because I understood the dramatic effect. But what is life really like?
Look at what’s taken place in China – that is a real revolution. This does not excuse the thousands who died in Tiananmen, but it does make the Tiananmen incident look less like a “revolution” and more like an “incident”. People always overestimate what can be done in 1 year, and underestimate what can be done in 10 years. If we disregard the communist connotations for the moment, what has happened in China is that there were a few 5 year plans (or 5 year programs, because a lot of things were done on the fly) If you want to compare what’s been done in China to what’s been done in much of Eastern Europe, the change is very dramatic, and there is a favourable comparison. It’s almost as though Tiananmen was the fake revolution that had to be put down so that the real revolution could take place.
Saturday, 25 July 2009
Saturday, 18 July 2009
School days
We’ve had some good times together. We often talk about that class we had back in Sec 1 and 2, even though we have been in each other’s class on other occasions. That was one memorable class, and an extremely difficult class to control. We were 1O, as in we got the 15th letter of the alphabet. To the best of my knowledge, we were the only class to use that letter. Ostensibly the reason was it was confusing to use letters that look like numbers (even though the letter “I” was used time and again). Another possible reason was that there was never a need to use that letter again. But we liked to think that it’s also because the teachers never ever wanted to deal with a class like mine ever again.
I’ll never forget the science teacher telling us all, at the end of sec 2, that they were going to break up our class, and either it was a good thing, that they didn’t have to deal with us anymore, or it was a bad thing that “the cancer would spread”.
There were no real reasons why we had so many problems. Academically, while we didn’t have any top performers (that was the first year in school I wasn’t a top student) we were the only class where everybody got promoted. But we were also the only class with no prefects, and we were isolated there, at the end of the hallway, so it wasn’t easy to police us. In the end, we just wanted to have fun, bully the teachers, bully each other, and we didn’t give a shit about the rules. We were the crazy gang.
I only regret that my 2 years in that class coincided with a personal crisis. Those were not the happiest years of my life, but those guys made it better.
There were people who were usually very serious about their studies, but they played hard too. There was this guy who was known as a rather repressed mugger. But during those 2 years we saw his crazy side when he started telling everybody that he idolized Hitler, and he made plenty of Nazi salutes. He was also very good at shooting rubber bands.
There was this guy who was well known as the hamsap guy in my class. He used to call the English teacher over (at that time she was in her early 20s and vaguely sexy) and ask her questions about stuff. He just liked to see her bend over. There was one time when that teacher was bending over some other guy’s homework, and somebody actually shot a rubber band at her ass. I think you start to appreciate the audacity of some of our folks.
There was some teachers who screwed us, and other teachers, we screwed. I think basically most relationships we had with our teachers were like that. That English teacher was one of our victims. There was one time when we reduced her to tears in class, and she had to run out of class because somebody (Mr Hamsap) made a comment. I can’t remember what that comment was but it was in the spirit of “this comment is so stupid, I can’t believe that I’m teaching this class. I can’t take it anymore.” We had to send Hamsap outside to go apologise to her.
Then there was this time when she suddenly had to run out of class, into the female toilet (conveniently located next door) because she had menstrual cramps. We were all sniggering at this. We had to call in the teacher from the neighbouring class to take care of her.
There were many pranks, like how we locked a classmate in the toilet for fun. There was somebody in my class I didn’t like, call him Mr prickly, and I set up his desk inside the toilet. Somebody took his Shakespeare, and threw it into the urinal, and I had to go buy him a new copy. Of course one would hesitate to do this to him now because he is a commando LTC.
Another encounter I had with Mr prickly ended up a little more happily for me. We got into an altercation. He started aiming kung fu kicks at me. This was half hostile, half playful and we both knew that. But during one kung fu kick, he slipped, and ended up having his face slammed onto the leg of a desk. He lost half his front tooth, and he never hesitates to remind me, almost 20 years later, how I was the one who took out half his front tooth.
David Bowie has got a lazy eye, much like one of the VPs in the company I work for, and that lazy eye was the result of a school fight. I wonder what the guy who gave him that eye thinks about it now.
This other time when we were asked to draw a sketch of a hand in art class. My classmate drew a severed hand, with all the veins sticking out. Everybody was passing that sketch around and laughing their heads off. My art teacher, who had always talked a lot about creativity, was forced to excuse this infraction.
There were people who played squash in class, and invariably before the class started the whole blackboard was covered in squash ball dots. There was a soccer game in the void deck outside that I hardly joined in, but usually watched.
There was this practice of making paper mache on the ceiling. We took toilet paper, wet it, and flung it against the ceiling. It was hilarious. The level head was incredulous that he had to get people to scrape toilet paper off the ceiling. I heard that he once threw wet toilet paper into the ventilator fan of the toilet, and in the process ended up jamming the fan so badly that it shorted.
Then there was the time when we stole somebody’s wallet, and then turned off the ceiling fan. We then tried to toss the wallet onto the ceiling fan, and there would be laughter as we turned on the fan and watch that wallet get flung in some random direction.
Of course, our horsing around didn’t get confined to the classroom. We had a classmate, a rich guy, and he kindly consented to have a barbeque held at his house. Little did he know that at the end of the evening we would have to pick Mr Prickly out of his garden pond.
There were minor infractions. Our practice of “zapping” people was carried on from primary school. To “zap” somebody would be to hit him in the balls. Not too hard, of course – we knew the limits.
There was the gay guy in our class who wore tight pants and colourful underwear that we could see because everybody was wearing white shorts. Usually Mr gay would be subject to a lynching, where people held him down by all fours, and everybody would tickle him for half an hour. It was during one of these sessions, invariably loud and rowdy, that the sec 2 head would come in and bark out, “who is the class monitor?” Dishevelled, Mr gay would raise his hand. Of course the monitor could say he was not in a position to do anything.
It was standard practice to take off somebody’s shoe and throw it around for fun. But once it happened, and the teacher caught us. This was the English teacher who screwed with us, not the other way around. She asked us to hand over the shoe, which we did. She then took that shoe, and threw it out from the 3rd floor onto the assembly square. We let out a gasp of horror as it happened. We were only allowed to get the shoe back at the end of the period.
Another time, our class faced the assembly square, and the class monitor and myself were in class, either tidying up the place or running some errand. At that time, everybody was gathered down stairs for flag lowering ceremony. (This was the last year that my school had both morning and afternoon sessions). We were on the verandah outside our classroom, in full view of the rest of the school, when, to our horror, the bell rang. We were caught outside. When the national anthem was being sung, we decided to inch our way back into the class. Unfortunately we were spotted (duh what were we thinking?) and we got into trouble.
I would like to think that I was partially responsible for this. I usually start out the class each year establishing myself as the class clown, and I did the same that year, even though that was the one class where I could not claim to be the class clown – all of us were class clowns. I like to think that I was one of the first people who gave them the idea that it was fun to be rowdy and crazy. I cannot be responsible for how it caught on like fire. That class really had “class spirit”. The teachers in my school always encouraged some form of tribal identity with the school, with the class. But I’m sure they would not have been entirely happy that it turned out like this.
In our lives, we make decisions. Conventionally, we think that students should be well behaved, prim and proper. I didn’t think that it was that way. I didn’t think that we were breaking rules. Rather I felt that we made our own rules, and we stuck to them. I usually go by this principle: can I brag about this in a few years’ time? Should I look back and think that I should have done this differently? I had little regrets about how our class behaved. We didn’t hurt anyone. Everybody had fun, even mr Gay, who later became a good friend of mine.
Conversely, would I have lived with myself if I had followed all the rules in school, and become a teacher’s pet? No. I think that smart teachers have to realize this, you can’t enforce too much discipline because it’s counter productive. Students of that age have this psychological need, that they have to be a bit of a rebel. The smart teachers realize that there is a level where you can compromise, where the student gets to be happy seeing himself as a rebel, and at the same time he’s not harming anybody, and he needs to keep it at this level.
I’ll never forget the science teacher telling us all, at the end of sec 2, that they were going to break up our class, and either it was a good thing, that they didn’t have to deal with us anymore, or it was a bad thing that “the cancer would spread”.
There were no real reasons why we had so many problems. Academically, while we didn’t have any top performers (that was the first year in school I wasn’t a top student) we were the only class where everybody got promoted. But we were also the only class with no prefects, and we were isolated there, at the end of the hallway, so it wasn’t easy to police us. In the end, we just wanted to have fun, bully the teachers, bully each other, and we didn’t give a shit about the rules. We were the crazy gang.
I only regret that my 2 years in that class coincided with a personal crisis. Those were not the happiest years of my life, but those guys made it better.
There were people who were usually very serious about their studies, but they played hard too. There was this guy who was known as a rather repressed mugger. But during those 2 years we saw his crazy side when he started telling everybody that he idolized Hitler, and he made plenty of Nazi salutes. He was also very good at shooting rubber bands.
There was this guy who was well known as the hamsap guy in my class. He used to call the English teacher over (at that time she was in her early 20s and vaguely sexy) and ask her questions about stuff. He just liked to see her bend over. There was one time when that teacher was bending over some other guy’s homework, and somebody actually shot a rubber band at her ass. I think you start to appreciate the audacity of some of our folks.
There was some teachers who screwed us, and other teachers, we screwed. I think basically most relationships we had with our teachers were like that. That English teacher was one of our victims. There was one time when we reduced her to tears in class, and she had to run out of class because somebody (Mr Hamsap) made a comment. I can’t remember what that comment was but it was in the spirit of “this comment is so stupid, I can’t believe that I’m teaching this class. I can’t take it anymore.” We had to send Hamsap outside to go apologise to her.
Then there was this time when she suddenly had to run out of class, into the female toilet (conveniently located next door) because she had menstrual cramps. We were all sniggering at this. We had to call in the teacher from the neighbouring class to take care of her.
There were many pranks, like how we locked a classmate in the toilet for fun. There was somebody in my class I didn’t like, call him Mr prickly, and I set up his desk inside the toilet. Somebody took his Shakespeare, and threw it into the urinal, and I had to go buy him a new copy. Of course one would hesitate to do this to him now because he is a commando LTC.
Another encounter I had with Mr prickly ended up a little more happily for me. We got into an altercation. He started aiming kung fu kicks at me. This was half hostile, half playful and we both knew that. But during one kung fu kick, he slipped, and ended up having his face slammed onto the leg of a desk. He lost half his front tooth, and he never hesitates to remind me, almost 20 years later, how I was the one who took out half his front tooth.
David Bowie has got a lazy eye, much like one of the VPs in the company I work for, and that lazy eye was the result of a school fight. I wonder what the guy who gave him that eye thinks about it now.
This other time when we were asked to draw a sketch of a hand in art class. My classmate drew a severed hand, with all the veins sticking out. Everybody was passing that sketch around and laughing their heads off. My art teacher, who had always talked a lot about creativity, was forced to excuse this infraction.
There were people who played squash in class, and invariably before the class started the whole blackboard was covered in squash ball dots. There was a soccer game in the void deck outside that I hardly joined in, but usually watched.
There was this practice of making paper mache on the ceiling. We took toilet paper, wet it, and flung it against the ceiling. It was hilarious. The level head was incredulous that he had to get people to scrape toilet paper off the ceiling. I heard that he once threw wet toilet paper into the ventilator fan of the toilet, and in the process ended up jamming the fan so badly that it shorted.
Then there was the time when we stole somebody’s wallet, and then turned off the ceiling fan. We then tried to toss the wallet onto the ceiling fan, and there would be laughter as we turned on the fan and watch that wallet get flung in some random direction.
Of course, our horsing around didn’t get confined to the classroom. We had a classmate, a rich guy, and he kindly consented to have a barbeque held at his house. Little did he know that at the end of the evening we would have to pick Mr Prickly out of his garden pond.
There were minor infractions. Our practice of “zapping” people was carried on from primary school. To “zap” somebody would be to hit him in the balls. Not too hard, of course – we knew the limits.
There was the gay guy in our class who wore tight pants and colourful underwear that we could see because everybody was wearing white shorts. Usually Mr gay would be subject to a lynching, where people held him down by all fours, and everybody would tickle him for half an hour. It was during one of these sessions, invariably loud and rowdy, that the sec 2 head would come in and bark out, “who is the class monitor?” Dishevelled, Mr gay would raise his hand. Of course the monitor could say he was not in a position to do anything.
It was standard practice to take off somebody’s shoe and throw it around for fun. But once it happened, and the teacher caught us. This was the English teacher who screwed with us, not the other way around. She asked us to hand over the shoe, which we did. She then took that shoe, and threw it out from the 3rd floor onto the assembly square. We let out a gasp of horror as it happened. We were only allowed to get the shoe back at the end of the period.
Another time, our class faced the assembly square, and the class monitor and myself were in class, either tidying up the place or running some errand. At that time, everybody was gathered down stairs for flag lowering ceremony. (This was the last year that my school had both morning and afternoon sessions). We were on the verandah outside our classroom, in full view of the rest of the school, when, to our horror, the bell rang. We were caught outside. When the national anthem was being sung, we decided to inch our way back into the class. Unfortunately we were spotted (duh what were we thinking?) and we got into trouble.
I would like to think that I was partially responsible for this. I usually start out the class each year establishing myself as the class clown, and I did the same that year, even though that was the one class where I could not claim to be the class clown – all of us were class clowns. I like to think that I was one of the first people who gave them the idea that it was fun to be rowdy and crazy. I cannot be responsible for how it caught on like fire. That class really had “class spirit”. The teachers in my school always encouraged some form of tribal identity with the school, with the class. But I’m sure they would not have been entirely happy that it turned out like this.
In our lives, we make decisions. Conventionally, we think that students should be well behaved, prim and proper. I didn’t think that it was that way. I didn’t think that we were breaking rules. Rather I felt that we made our own rules, and we stuck to them. I usually go by this principle: can I brag about this in a few years’ time? Should I look back and think that I should have done this differently? I had little regrets about how our class behaved. We didn’t hurt anyone. Everybody had fun, even mr Gay, who later became a good friend of mine.
Conversely, would I have lived with myself if I had followed all the rules in school, and become a teacher’s pet? No. I think that smart teachers have to realize this, you can’t enforce too much discipline because it’s counter productive. Students of that age have this psychological need, that they have to be a bit of a rebel. The smart teachers realize that there is a level where you can compromise, where the student gets to be happy seeing himself as a rebel, and at the same time he’s not harming anybody, and he needs to keep it at this level.
Saturday, 11 July 2009
Asparagus
Met a friend of mine. We went to watch the champion’s league final live at 3 in the morning at the kopitiam. We talked a little, we were college friends. His family was average, which means that when compared to other kids in his school he was poor. He finished his degree in 2 years. He did all summers and was taking up to 6 courses per term. I suppose that college in the US is very expensive if you are really paying your way.
He was always a very scrawny person, I’ll be surprised if he weighs more than 50 kg. But he turned out to be one of the most enterprising people amongst us. He found work in the US immediately after graduation, and worked a number of years, eventually leading a team of engineers. He was not very pretentious and I liked his down to earth attitude (even though my attitude is not always down to earth). Of course you must say that your own attitude is not always down to earth; if you say “I’m the most down to earth person I know”, it is not a down to earth attitude.
Later on, he joined a friend to work in China where he was earning big bucks as a business partner. He bought fancy cars for himself, an SUV and a Maserati, and we were all thinking, wtf is he up to?
I think he knew how to enjoy life in China. He didn’t shy away from nightspots. He took up smoking at one point. I asked him what it was like. He said, you feel good for around 5 minutes, around the duration of the cigarette. But in the end you have problems, your throat gets irritable, there are some breathing problems, and you smell bad. He never got addicted to cigarettes.
He showed me a picture of a good looking girl in a life vest. It was a financial advisor. She said that she wanted to sell him stuff. He was just leading her on, and she sometimes accompanied him to wakeboarding. “There was this time when she was calling me up twice every day near the end of the month because she just had to meet her sales quota. I just kept on saying no because I never believed in buying insurance. But we still keep in touch. She has since been retrenched.”
(Well when I think about wakeboarding these days I somehow associate it with marital infidelity, I don’t know why.)
He then told me about the stuff that goes on in pubs. Girls, even those that are really hot, crowd around you, asking for you to buy a drink. Some poor fresh faced guy gets parted with his money, and eventually the girl doesn’t even speak to him again. The girls just want the guys with money, hopefully they snag a rich guy, and live like a tai tai for the rest of their lives. They’re not the over-educated type. The guys, they just want a bit of fun, and maybe they get a one night stand. Mostly they just leave with empty pockets. But the girls - the sensible guys would understand that you don’t treat them that seriously.
Of course there is every possibility that you’d find Miss Right among the many that you see - but it’s the same as the probability that you’d find her by bumping into her on the street.
Also his experience taking drugs in China : you just inhale the right amount, and then you let yourself free, you let the room spin around you, for a while you are
I was somewhat fascinated. I never thought that he would get hooked onto drugs. He was that sensible guy who would just go through the experience and learn, and then walk away.
We’re geeks, for goodness sake. Nobody else has a firmer grasp on logic than people like us. People from our tribe rule the world: Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Brin and Page. We’re unfuckable. What we say goes, so when we say we’re just trying this out to see what it’s like and then we’ll quit, it’s really like that.
Why did he ask to talk with me? I guess it was to catch up. I wish there was something that I could have told him - well I lead a really boring life. Too fucking boring for me to continue for much longer.
He had always been a little gloomy. In a way I was happy for him, even proud of him. I had vastly underestimated him, took his scrawniness for some kind of a weakness. There was something, in that bony frame of his, more resourceful that I could ever have imagined. But the feeling that I got was that he had searched further and wider than I ever did for something - and somehow still hasn’t found what he was looking for.
Of course I could have been more encouraging of him. I listened to him stone faced, but I usually do that when I don’t always know what to say. There was a tug of war between “well done!” and “what did you do that for?”
Usually when I drive home from the 24 hour kopitiam, the drive is fairly lonely. It was nice at first, I thought of it as gloomy splendour. After a while it just turned into a drag. So when we drove back to my place it was rather a bit of a drag.
I'm calling him asparagus because that was my nickname for him - he was that thin.
He was always a very scrawny person, I’ll be surprised if he weighs more than 50 kg. But he turned out to be one of the most enterprising people amongst us. He found work in the US immediately after graduation, and worked a number of years, eventually leading a team of engineers. He was not very pretentious and I liked his down to earth attitude (even though my attitude is not always down to earth). Of course you must say that your own attitude is not always down to earth; if you say “I’m the most down to earth person I know”, it is not a down to earth attitude.
Later on, he joined a friend to work in China where he was earning big bucks as a business partner. He bought fancy cars for himself, an SUV and a Maserati, and we were all thinking, wtf is he up to?
I think he knew how to enjoy life in China. He didn’t shy away from nightspots. He took up smoking at one point. I asked him what it was like. He said, you feel good for around 5 minutes, around the duration of the cigarette. But in the end you have problems, your throat gets irritable, there are some breathing problems, and you smell bad. He never got addicted to cigarettes.
He showed me a picture of a good looking girl in a life vest. It was a financial advisor. She said that she wanted to sell him stuff. He was just leading her on, and she sometimes accompanied him to wakeboarding. “There was this time when she was calling me up twice every day near the end of the month because she just had to meet her sales quota. I just kept on saying no because I never believed in buying insurance. But we still keep in touch. She has since been retrenched.”
(Well when I think about wakeboarding these days I somehow associate it with marital infidelity, I don’t know why.)
He then told me about the stuff that goes on in pubs. Girls, even those that are really hot, crowd around you, asking for you to buy a drink. Some poor fresh faced guy gets parted with his money, and eventually the girl doesn’t even speak to him again. The girls just want the guys with money, hopefully they snag a rich guy, and live like a tai tai for the rest of their lives. They’re not the over-educated type. The guys, they just want a bit of fun, and maybe they get a one night stand. Mostly they just leave with empty pockets. But the girls - the sensible guys would understand that you don’t treat them that seriously.
Of course there is every possibility that you’d find Miss Right among the many that you see - but it’s the same as the probability that you’d find her by bumping into her on the street.
Also his experience taking drugs in China : you just inhale the right amount, and then you let yourself free, you let the room spin around you, for a while you are
I was somewhat fascinated. I never thought that he would get hooked onto drugs. He was that sensible guy who would just go through the experience and learn, and then walk away.
We’re geeks, for goodness sake. Nobody else has a firmer grasp on logic than people like us. People from our tribe rule the world: Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Brin and Page. We’re unfuckable. What we say goes, so when we say we’re just trying this out to see what it’s like and then we’ll quit, it’s really like that.
Why did he ask to talk with me? I guess it was to catch up. I wish there was something that I could have told him - well I lead a really boring life. Too fucking boring for me to continue for much longer.
He had always been a little gloomy. In a way I was happy for him, even proud of him. I had vastly underestimated him, took his scrawniness for some kind of a weakness. There was something, in that bony frame of his, more resourceful that I could ever have imagined. But the feeling that I got was that he had searched further and wider than I ever did for something - and somehow still hasn’t found what he was looking for.
Of course I could have been more encouraging of him. I listened to him stone faced, but I usually do that when I don’t always know what to say. There was a tug of war between “well done!” and “what did you do that for?”
Usually when I drive home from the 24 hour kopitiam, the drive is fairly lonely. It was nice at first, I thought of it as gloomy splendour. After a while it just turned into a drag. So when we drove back to my place it was rather a bit of a drag.
I'm calling him asparagus because that was my nickname for him - he was that thin.
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Kool Aid
A friend of mine recently attended a course and she wanted to spread the gospel to everyone. It’s not a religious course, even though parts of it sounds like being a born again Christian.
We had a long conversation. We were uni mates: friendships formed during those days can last a long time. I suppose you would have had to rely on each other. She confessed that she hadn’t thought very much about life up till that point other than being the “typical Singaporean”.
I suppose we got to talking. There were 2 years in my life that I would call the spiritual years, I would call them periods in my life when I achieved spiritual breakthroughs. We compared notes. I suppose it’s quite funny when you’re young, you think you have had a great spiritual breakthrough, and 10 years later you find yourself in a rut – again. But I digress.
In the end, I said, no no no. There was no way I would fork out $1K, even though it was going to change my life. But she managed to get me to attend an introductory session which was free.
The course is wonderfully unspecific. The premise is very simple: you are in a rut and you want to get out of it. This happens to all sorts of people, the best people. It helps you to look beyond yourself and tap into your blind spots.
Your situation that you find yourself in is entirely the result of you putting yourself in a context and, through habit, you find yourself trapped in it. The course probably aims to break through all these habits that hinder your personal development, and help you achieve your “break through”.
There were a few eyebrow raising turns of phrase. One of them was: “we are not trying to affect change. Change is difficult. What we are aiming for is transformation.” Yeh? What’s the difference? Suppose they were different. Suppose you were going to be able to transform yourself, but your external circumstances did not change. Then what’s the bloody point?
There were some concepts like “enrolling”. I suppose that had something to do with the Buddhist concept of living in the moment, and not letting thoughts of the future of the past affect you. There were others like “making a declaration”, where you just had to announce the change you were making to the world, and that was one of the steps.
Before the talk began I said loudly, “is this where we sign up for the 12 step program?” But people either didn’t get the AA allusion or they didn’t think it was funny.
There were people who gave testimony: a “graduate” is somebody who went through the course. There was one, a woman nearing 40 who was quite successful in her career and justifiably so: but her workaholic lifestyle had cost her a marriage. So she resolved to lead her life with more grace. She very self-consciously admitted that she liked to talk a lot.
There was this Malay guy who was always told by his father that he wouldn’t amount to anything, and was always second best to his elder brother. He felt that he got more self esteem for himself by getting over his shyness and getting some people to introduce himself to the course.
There was an Indian lady who was stuck in her entry level job for quite some time, but later on took the initiative and made her long overdue step up.
Then there was my friend. She thought that she was doing fine, and keeping within the analytical aspects of her job without being able to make that switch over to the operational part. Although I wish she had not mentioned the fact that she had attended prestigious universities. People should never mention that until you get to know the other person better. She should also not have said stuff like “I didn’t really know about it but I had been going through life with a paper bag over my head.”
It was a fairly developed set-up, with offices all over the world (although mainly in the English speaking world. There was even one in Kenya.)
The course always begins on a Friday, and it’s 3 consecutive days of starting at 9 in the morning and ending at 11 at night. Then you go back to your own life on Monday, you have 2 days to start changing the rest of your life, and you go back on Tuesday night to report and reassess.
Well 3 full days is pretty damn intense. At first I rationalised it away as being a more intense form of training, where you need that intensity in order to break down your mental resistance, and enable you to really change your life.
There was the brochure, which doesn’t say very much. The website is actually more informative. The cover of the brochure says, “Of course, everyone wants an extraordinary life. The question is, what does it take to have an extraordinary life every single day?”
Wow. Sounds like it’s as painful as having a permanent erection. I don’t want an extraordinary life. Spiritual experiences may lead to people trying a lot of interesting things to get out of their rut. But they also lead to some personal upheaval, and after everything is settled and done with, they want a nice quiet life for a while.
At the end of the day, I pulled that excuse on her, that I didn’t want to part with $1000. They don’t call it “course fees”. They call it “tuition”. I suppose, if you call it tuition, like you call uni education, then that sorda justifies it being expensive like uni tuition.
I thought there was something to this training. I thought that it’s possible to be ambitious enough to change – sorry – transform yourself and go out and do something that you never thought was possible. I suppose I want to achieve something like that. But I don’t want to go splash out on a course, when I can just go and do it myself. Yes, not much has happened since I declared that I was going to quit being a bookworm 1 week ago, but it’s still early.
Out of curiosity, though, I followed up and started looking up landmark education on the internet. I was a little surprised to find that people had charged that it was a cult, although that question was playing in my head.
Turns out that Landmark education is a continuation of what was called “est”. This was a school which conducted self-improvement courses in the 1970s. During the 70s, new age philosophies and weird cults were quite fashionable.
Some people criticised est for being very exploitative of their students. What happens is that you sign up for a 3 day seminar, and you find that your life is getting better. Then everything’s good. After that, they start getting you involved in recruitment activities, like they involved my friend, and suddenly you find yourself working for them for free.
I never really had very much patience for “self improvement” courses. Even the more mainstream ones, like Anthony Robbins. I thought that a lot of them just played on your low self esteem. They gave you a placebo to make you feel better: sometimes the placebo really is the cure, but sometimes it ends up screwing up your life instead, or at best, it doesn’t do anything.
My mother used to listen to these self-improvement tapes a lot. I got very irritated by them, but I couldn’t say anything: I was just a kid. Some of the things they said were very wise and useful. A lot of it was just psychobabble, mumbo jumbo. They appeal to your vanity by telling you that inside that ugly veneer of yourself there is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. When I see a beautiful woman something in my trousers is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. Otherwise I don’t believe in that shit.
In part I didn’t believe it because I didn’t see it as having positive effects on my mother. On one hand I grew up with my father telling me stories of his childhood, especially the part where he was schooling, having a heavy ECA workload, working part time, disciplining his siblings (grandmother was not at home), and fending off loansharks (that’s the reason why grandmother was not at home). OK, I had stories like that. So why do I need the mumbo jumbo psychobabble to inspire me?
Do you know what true beauty is? True beauty is not the “I take some collagen pills every day and my skin is shiny” beauty. To me it is “I spend 4 hours in the gym every day and suddenly I have the perfect ass”. That is true beauty for you.
Nevertheless I attended a seminar. It was a “superteen” seminar conducted by some Ernest Wong guy. I was only 11, and was the second youngest guy there. (My sister was the youngest.)
OK, some of the stuff there that they taught was useful. Like how it was important to approach the task with the right mental attitude, and if you tried to karate chop a block while thinking “I love you” it wouldn’t work. (For me it was not about being too tender with the board, but being completely grossed out by the thought – yes, numbernine has been grossed out before.)
There were the mind maps, which were later used in Tony Buzan’s stuff. OK, it was alright for cramming, but my style of learning things is always that I had a very in-depth understanding of what I was supposed to learn. I was only 11, but my intellectual snobbery was already there. I sniffed at that stuff.
There was what music was suitable for listening when you are studying. The answer? Baroque music, like Handel or Bach. Maybe Mozart. Beethoven? Absolutely not. I don’t know about you guys, but even if there’s music playing in the background my mind will gravitate towards it. So I never listen to music while studying.
Was it all useful? I don’t know. Sometimes I was a good student, sometimes I was a mediocre student. When I was good, I survived largely on my talent for understanding things quickly. I don’t know if the mind mapping helped me much. Maybe my talent was precisely that my brain was good at organising facts, and everything found its proper place quickly.
Then, at the climax of the (rather expensive) 3 day course, there was this touchy feely session, where we get all precious and the instructor tells us to value ourselves a lot more. We are all champion sperm! (I’m not kidding, he said that.) Every ejaculation contains 25 million sperm and we are the winners of an incredibly difficult to win lottery. The fact that we are living today is a result of an incredible coincidence of conditions: water on earth. Low concentrations of CO2. Land and sea. Ozone layer. Etc etc etc. How could we not understand that life is precious, a miracle, nothing to be fucked around with?
Being the class clown that I was, I could not resist throwing in 1 or 2 snide remarks. I may not be the smartest person in all respects, but my nose can smell kool-aid from a mile away. I am famously resistant to being a cult member. If I were older and wiser, I would have just shut up. I would have rolled my eyes at this spectacular piece of buffoonery, and just laughed at it later. But I had to be the motherfucker who tells the emperor that he’s naked. At first, Ernest Wong ignored a few of my comments. But later on, he got worked up in such a rage that he ended up screaming into my face, and he told me to leave the room.
I was stunned, and too shocked, and then I burst into tears. Later on, he said to me, “you’re a smart kid, but you just weren’t getting it.” Soon after, I began to grasp that there was something hollow, showy about his act. I really really hate being emotionally manipulated. My verdict was that was a really polished, well executed act, but also a big waste of money.
Then there were letters written by my mother to me. To my great surprise, I read that she had always loved me in spite of everything. (It is always a surprise when a grouch tells you that she loves you.) I was touched, until my sister and I exchanged letters and found that, except for a few words, the letters were identical. Then we were touched that she was so fair minded as to treat the brother and the sister equally.
There is an expression in American English. In the 1970s (yes it’s that decade again) there was a cult, led by the Reverend Jim Jones. He managed to persuade 1000 of his followers to go to his camp in Guyana, and it was called Jonestown. At the end, he persuaded everybody to drink Kool-aid, which is like American ribena. Except that the Kool-aid had cyanide in it. Thereafter, “to drink the kool-aid” connotes some sort of susceptibility to being enrolled in some religious cult.
I’m not a kool aid drinker.
We had a long conversation. We were uni mates: friendships formed during those days can last a long time. I suppose you would have had to rely on each other. She confessed that she hadn’t thought very much about life up till that point other than being the “typical Singaporean”.
I suppose we got to talking. There were 2 years in my life that I would call the spiritual years, I would call them periods in my life when I achieved spiritual breakthroughs. We compared notes. I suppose it’s quite funny when you’re young, you think you have had a great spiritual breakthrough, and 10 years later you find yourself in a rut – again. But I digress.
In the end, I said, no no no. There was no way I would fork out $1K, even though it was going to change my life. But she managed to get me to attend an introductory session which was free.
The course is wonderfully unspecific. The premise is very simple: you are in a rut and you want to get out of it. This happens to all sorts of people, the best people. It helps you to look beyond yourself and tap into your blind spots.
Your situation that you find yourself in is entirely the result of you putting yourself in a context and, through habit, you find yourself trapped in it. The course probably aims to break through all these habits that hinder your personal development, and help you achieve your “break through”.
There were a few eyebrow raising turns of phrase. One of them was: “we are not trying to affect change. Change is difficult. What we are aiming for is transformation.” Yeh? What’s the difference? Suppose they were different. Suppose you were going to be able to transform yourself, but your external circumstances did not change. Then what’s the bloody point?
There were some concepts like “enrolling”. I suppose that had something to do with the Buddhist concept of living in the moment, and not letting thoughts of the future of the past affect you. There were others like “making a declaration”, where you just had to announce the change you were making to the world, and that was one of the steps.
Before the talk began I said loudly, “is this where we sign up for the 12 step program?” But people either didn’t get the AA allusion or they didn’t think it was funny.
There were people who gave testimony: a “graduate” is somebody who went through the course. There was one, a woman nearing 40 who was quite successful in her career and justifiably so: but her workaholic lifestyle had cost her a marriage. So she resolved to lead her life with more grace. She very self-consciously admitted that she liked to talk a lot.
There was this Malay guy who was always told by his father that he wouldn’t amount to anything, and was always second best to his elder brother. He felt that he got more self esteem for himself by getting over his shyness and getting some people to introduce himself to the course.
There was an Indian lady who was stuck in her entry level job for quite some time, but later on took the initiative and made her long overdue step up.
Then there was my friend. She thought that she was doing fine, and keeping within the analytical aspects of her job without being able to make that switch over to the operational part. Although I wish she had not mentioned the fact that she had attended prestigious universities. People should never mention that until you get to know the other person better. She should also not have said stuff like “I didn’t really know about it but I had been going through life with a paper bag over my head.”
It was a fairly developed set-up, with offices all over the world (although mainly in the English speaking world. There was even one in Kenya.)
The course always begins on a Friday, and it’s 3 consecutive days of starting at 9 in the morning and ending at 11 at night. Then you go back to your own life on Monday, you have 2 days to start changing the rest of your life, and you go back on Tuesday night to report and reassess.
Well 3 full days is pretty damn intense. At first I rationalised it away as being a more intense form of training, where you need that intensity in order to break down your mental resistance, and enable you to really change your life.
There was the brochure, which doesn’t say very much. The website is actually more informative. The cover of the brochure says, “Of course, everyone wants an extraordinary life. The question is, what does it take to have an extraordinary life every single day?”
Wow. Sounds like it’s as painful as having a permanent erection. I don’t want an extraordinary life. Spiritual experiences may lead to people trying a lot of interesting things to get out of their rut. But they also lead to some personal upheaval, and after everything is settled and done with, they want a nice quiet life for a while.
At the end of the day, I pulled that excuse on her, that I didn’t want to part with $1000. They don’t call it “course fees”. They call it “tuition”. I suppose, if you call it tuition, like you call uni education, then that sorda justifies it being expensive like uni tuition.
I thought there was something to this training. I thought that it’s possible to be ambitious enough to change – sorry – transform yourself and go out and do something that you never thought was possible. I suppose I want to achieve something like that. But I don’t want to go splash out on a course, when I can just go and do it myself. Yes, not much has happened since I declared that I was going to quit being a bookworm 1 week ago, but it’s still early.
Out of curiosity, though, I followed up and started looking up landmark education on the internet. I was a little surprised to find that people had charged that it was a cult, although that question was playing in my head.
Turns out that Landmark education is a continuation of what was called “est”. This was a school which conducted self-improvement courses in the 1970s. During the 70s, new age philosophies and weird cults were quite fashionable.
Some people criticised est for being very exploitative of their students. What happens is that you sign up for a 3 day seminar, and you find that your life is getting better. Then everything’s good. After that, they start getting you involved in recruitment activities, like they involved my friend, and suddenly you find yourself working for them for free.
I never really had very much patience for “self improvement” courses. Even the more mainstream ones, like Anthony Robbins. I thought that a lot of them just played on your low self esteem. They gave you a placebo to make you feel better: sometimes the placebo really is the cure, but sometimes it ends up screwing up your life instead, or at best, it doesn’t do anything.
My mother used to listen to these self-improvement tapes a lot. I got very irritated by them, but I couldn’t say anything: I was just a kid. Some of the things they said were very wise and useful. A lot of it was just psychobabble, mumbo jumbo. They appeal to your vanity by telling you that inside that ugly veneer of yourself there is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. When I see a beautiful woman something in my trousers is a wondrous work of nature just bursting to get out. Otherwise I don’t believe in that shit.
In part I didn’t believe it because I didn’t see it as having positive effects on my mother. On one hand I grew up with my father telling me stories of his childhood, especially the part where he was schooling, having a heavy ECA workload, working part time, disciplining his siblings (grandmother was not at home), and fending off loansharks (that’s the reason why grandmother was not at home). OK, I had stories like that. So why do I need the mumbo jumbo psychobabble to inspire me?
Do you know what true beauty is? True beauty is not the “I take some collagen pills every day and my skin is shiny” beauty. To me it is “I spend 4 hours in the gym every day and suddenly I have the perfect ass”. That is true beauty for you.
Nevertheless I attended a seminar. It was a “superteen” seminar conducted by some Ernest Wong guy. I was only 11, and was the second youngest guy there. (My sister was the youngest.)
OK, some of the stuff there that they taught was useful. Like how it was important to approach the task with the right mental attitude, and if you tried to karate chop a block while thinking “I love you” it wouldn’t work. (For me it was not about being too tender with the board, but being completely grossed out by the thought – yes, numbernine has been grossed out before.)
There were the mind maps, which were later used in Tony Buzan’s stuff. OK, it was alright for cramming, but my style of learning things is always that I had a very in-depth understanding of what I was supposed to learn. I was only 11, but my intellectual snobbery was already there. I sniffed at that stuff.
There was what music was suitable for listening when you are studying. The answer? Baroque music, like Handel or Bach. Maybe Mozart. Beethoven? Absolutely not. I don’t know about you guys, but even if there’s music playing in the background my mind will gravitate towards it. So I never listen to music while studying.
Was it all useful? I don’t know. Sometimes I was a good student, sometimes I was a mediocre student. When I was good, I survived largely on my talent for understanding things quickly. I don’t know if the mind mapping helped me much. Maybe my talent was precisely that my brain was good at organising facts, and everything found its proper place quickly.
Then, at the climax of the (rather expensive) 3 day course, there was this touchy feely session, where we get all precious and the instructor tells us to value ourselves a lot more. We are all champion sperm! (I’m not kidding, he said that.) Every ejaculation contains 25 million sperm and we are the winners of an incredibly difficult to win lottery. The fact that we are living today is a result of an incredible coincidence of conditions: water on earth. Low concentrations of CO2. Land and sea. Ozone layer. Etc etc etc. How could we not understand that life is precious, a miracle, nothing to be fucked around with?
Being the class clown that I was, I could not resist throwing in 1 or 2 snide remarks. I may not be the smartest person in all respects, but my nose can smell kool-aid from a mile away. I am famously resistant to being a cult member. If I were older and wiser, I would have just shut up. I would have rolled my eyes at this spectacular piece of buffoonery, and just laughed at it later. But I had to be the motherfucker who tells the emperor that he’s naked. At first, Ernest Wong ignored a few of my comments. But later on, he got worked up in such a rage that he ended up screaming into my face, and he told me to leave the room.
I was stunned, and too shocked, and then I burst into tears. Later on, he said to me, “you’re a smart kid, but you just weren’t getting it.” Soon after, I began to grasp that there was something hollow, showy about his act. I really really hate being emotionally manipulated. My verdict was that was a really polished, well executed act, but also a big waste of money.
Then there were letters written by my mother to me. To my great surprise, I read that she had always loved me in spite of everything. (It is always a surprise when a grouch tells you that she loves you.) I was touched, until my sister and I exchanged letters and found that, except for a few words, the letters were identical. Then we were touched that she was so fair minded as to treat the brother and the sister equally.
There is an expression in American English. In the 1970s (yes it’s that decade again) there was a cult, led by the Reverend Jim Jones. He managed to persuade 1000 of his followers to go to his camp in Guyana, and it was called Jonestown. At the end, he persuaded everybody to drink Kool-aid, which is like American ribena. Except that the Kool-aid had cyanide in it. Thereafter, “to drink the kool-aid” connotes some sort of susceptibility to being enrolled in some religious cult.
I’m not a kool aid drinker.
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