This is My Story

Well you know that MPH at Raffles City is going to close down for a while so that they can build a secret tunnel to the Assplanade MRT station. So they are having a crosing down sale. Plenty of books for cheap, so I went down to hoot. It isn’t like warehouse sales, where there are plenty of cheap books, but it’s all shit they don’t want.

I got a few books that I could only find elsewhere at full price. But that’s not the main point about this blog post. It’s that… who else should I find in the store but Kassandra Kong.

Now not all of you will know who K Kong is but late last year there was a book by this Singaporean author who caught my eye. “This is My Story”. Now for a book, that was a dumbfuck title if there ever was one. All books are “my story”. Which book isn’t? To be sure, there are other books which have similar titles. Like Antony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. Or there are great novels which are semi-autobiographical, like “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Dream of Red Mansions”. But it’s easier to forgive them because they are talking about an entire milieu, an entire social setting.

So this is meant to be nothing more than an autobiography. An autobiography written at the ripe old age of 22. My story. And what is my story? I fell in love with a bad boy, I went through 2 abortions because of him, and he fucked my sis as well. How dumb is that? Do you want to walk through the rest of your life carrying a sign saying “I am stupid”? No? Then why would you want to write a book like that? 2 abortions! How does that old saying go? Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. She thinks that her sister doesn’t want to talk to her anymore because she’s pissed off. I think it’s about the shame of having a dumb sis. If my sister were like that, I’d… actually… OK, never mind.

To be sure, there were other books written by women who complained about their sister sleeping with their boyfriends. One of them was “Hillary and Jackie”, which was actually made into a movie. Now that was scandalous. I think some people thought that the book was written in bad faith.

So she was sitting there, twiddling her thumbs and waiting for people to come, like a teaching assistant at office hours during the first week of class. There were some agents, taking photographs. I don’t think people wanted to go up to her. She wasn’t bad looking. If I were her boyfriend I would be some kind of sex maniac too. But she was being shunned. Very conspicuously, I might add, considering how crowded that place was on Friday night, and I could see her scanning the room with that shit eating grin on her face.

I was thinking to myself, “Jesus Christ has a well-earned reputation as being a great guy because only people like him are thick skinned enough to talk to people like you.” Lepers and prostitutes, that sort of stuff, you know.

Ever since I picked up that book (did you see that book? It has her looking very glum on the cover, all curled up and staring at her feet, like those mediacorp drama series actresses who go to the shower to wash up after being violated) – I had a good mind to talk some sense into her and tell her that while it was no big deal, all the stuff that went on in that book, it was extremely stupid to write it in a book and publish it for the whole world to read. Unless it has great literary value – which I doubt, from what I can see on her personal web page. You just don’t go announce yourself like that to the world. You don’t write your autobiography at the grand age of 22. Just ask Vanilla Ice. Why are you writing a book? Are you trying to tell people something they didn’t already know? Some men are jerks. Wow, what an earth shattering discovery.

No big deal if you’re 70, and you just like to tell a saucy tale about the good old days when half the population was after your ass. No big deal if you’ve achieved greater things in life, like, say Tori Amos, then you can go and tell the whole world you were raped and people will still think of you, primarily as a good singer-songwriter, to be loved and respected for something more than what’s between your legs. No big deal if you’re Francoise Sagan, you write “Bonjour Tristesse” and you become a literary sensation at the grand old age of 18. But you need to be talented for that.

I just couldn’t bear to go up there and tell her. I don’t know why. I would have preferred there to be people going up to talk to her, and maybe I would offer a dissenting viewpoint. But I think that mine is actually not a dissenting viewpoint, it is the majority opinion. I look at the forums that come up when you google her name, and they find her creepy. Fellars, this is very Singaporean logic. But I do not want to be the one who has to tell her that she has screwed up, if that’s what everybody thinks. I do not want to be the only one going up to say hi to her. I don’t want to be the creepy pervert to tell her that I open her book up to the page where he does that to her, and then I smell the paper that it’s printed on.

Ultimately, though, I realised that all those objections that I made towards her book, taken one by one, do not really form a solid case for arguing that writing that book was stupid. In the end it was just a question of taste. Something like that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And this is a mouth, remember, which is mostly immune to foul odours. It’s very hard to explain to someone why it’s OK to read “Memoirs of a Geisha” and not “Memoirs of a Prostitute”. (Actually I read part of that (geisha) book some time ago. What I find extremely creepy about that book is that it’s written by an ang moh man. If I were writing that book I would be jacking off half of the time.)

OK, a digression. Somebody actually compared this expose to Bonny Hicks. But I think that Bonny Hicks was just being very frank about what the life of models was about. And moreover I don’t think most of it was as sordid as this. I still got her book lying around somewhere. No I don’t jerk off to Bonny Hicks because it’s bad luck to masturbate over dead women. My Bonny lies over the ocean… my Bonny lies over the sea…

I convinced myself that the excuse for inaction is this: she’s dumb. And since she’s that dumb to be writing and promoting stuff like that, it’s futile to try to knock some sense into her, since the only direction you can knock her is up. But most importantly of all, I am a virgin. And I don’t think that virgins should be lecturing people about whether or not they should write about their sexual adventures.