A history in physical activity

I was having a run at McRitchie the other day, and it occurred to me that I had started the long and slow physical decline that would continue for the rest of my life. It’s hardly edifying to know that everything’s downhill from now on. So I thought I’d think back to all the times when I pushed my body to physical exertions.

There was very little of it before I was 12. I knew that my father jogged a few times every week, and I used to marvel at him for doing so. But keeping fit was something that was quite foreign to me, and I thought that it involved a strength of will that I didn’t have.

There was this one incident, though, I was 8 and occasionally, we went to East Coast Park to cycle. During those days, it was a nice place, and the largest park in Singapore. (This was before it got over-commercialised, and before it got taken over by the homeless.) We were all curious about the milestones, so one day I rode the bicycle all the way to 0, which was probably around Tanjong Rhu. I could see the city skyline from there. (minus OUB centre, minus UOB centre, and a lot of other buildings that weren’t yet built). At that time, I didn’t know that Tanjong Rhu was going to feature again in this tale.

I wasn’t ever a sportsman. I was, and still am, physically clumsy. My sister was better at sports. She played softball for her primary school, and was a frenemy of a certain person called JK who will appear in this story again. When she was 12, she actually embarked on a school tour to Malaysia. It was something more adventurous than anything that I had experienced up to that point. My father was a farmer in his teens, and in adulthood he still had a pretty impressive set of biceps. In contrast, for myself, up till I was 12, my physical activity was limited to police and thieves during recess.

OK, there was swimming. I was a fast swimmer when I was 8, and I won a few medals at the local club. But that was as far as it went. I think I didn’t continue to become competitive, although it was always a form of exercise.

When I was 13, that was when my father decided to teach me how to do some long distance running. There were a few times when I didn’t manage to last the distance. I would start off fast, but there was no consideration about how long I could last. It took me a few times to get it right. And even though I did participate in the annual cross country runs with everybody else, it was probably not until I was 16 that I became comfortable with running on that McRitchie track.

What I do remember is the scout camps. When I was 14, I joined the scouts. It wasn’t my intention to join the scouts. But they made it a rule that everybody had to either join a sport or a uniformed group. In other words, something that is physically strenuous. Because my mother had been a girl guide, she thought that I should join scouts. The people who joined scouts were those who couldn't cut it in sports. You didn't join a sports ECA unless you had talent.

They told us that the scout camps were going to be tough. In fact they were a lot like military camps. And I didn’t really have the physical preparation for it. The first one took place in a school near Yio Chu Kang road. There were plenty of runs, plenty of push-ups. I don’t remember doing much scouting at all. And there was this run, I’ll never forget. We had to carry 5kg bags and run. I was dying. I remember having to cook our own meals using kerosene stoves, and making a complete hash of it. I remember that soft drinks were banned, so we just drank a lot of water. I found a bag of sugar, though, and I often stole spoonfuls from it. Disgusting, I know, but still…

I remembered, though, that this was around the time when my sister was having her back operation. She had scoliosis, and one of her shoulder blades jutted out like a camel. This may or may not have had something to do with how one of her legs was longer than the other. But that operation spelt the end of her being a sportsman. No more softball, no more squash, and no more running, except on dirt tracks (concrete’s too hard.) And she was lucky not to be in the 5% of cases in these operations where the people ended up as quadriplegics.

So as tough as that 3-4 day camp was for me, I thought about my sister who had it much harder. And I suppose the camp came to an end for me. I couldn’t get out soon enough.

Later that year, I went on an orienteering trip. We were supposed to run to 3 or 4 checkpoints, over a distance of around 10K. My legs gave out at the end, and I experienced such serious cramps for the first time: later on I was told that not only did I have to replenish myself with water, but also with salt. That was a good piece of knowledge to have.

There were other camps. There was a camp where we had to run all the way from the campfire of a sister school to East Coast Park, carrying 5 kg as well. We were dying as well. Just as well they let us off easy once we had gone to the beach. I remember running past the McDonald’s near the National stadium, thinking that it’s a nice place to hang out at night. I remember that I had just listened to David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” for the first time a few weeks earlier, and I was playing it to myself as the sun rose (I have an inbuilt walkman).

I actually recall the scout camp at the end of that year the most vividly, but that was no longer an introduction to physical fatigue.

A large portion of what physical training was about was preparation for national service. So much than when national service was over, I was thinking, “well what was all that fuss about?”

In the build up to national service, the main thing was to concentrate on passing the fitness test, so that I would not have to go in 6 weeks early, and so that I would actually have a vacation in between my “A” levels and the national service. I don’t remember much, but the pull ups were a main thing. The other station was the sit and reach, and because I didn’t have the flexibility, I actually grew my fingernails by 1 cm to make the cut.

The details of my national service are remarkably hazy. I think, once I’m past the age of 25, I can no longer look back on any part of my life with reliable clarity. First was the punishing basic military training. It was not as punishing as what it was 10 years before I went in, but it’s nowhere as soft as it was 10 years after. It was a mid period of a gradual softening.

I will most probably remember the mental stress of adjusting to life with people from vastly different backgrounds from my own. But the physical bit was punishing too: getting up early in the morning, going to bed late at night. No napping. The weather was always hot. The physical training was always tough but what made it even tougher was that your muscles were all aching at the end of the day, and you would still have to strain them even further.

There were the big 3 things we had to complete in order to pass basic military training, over an above the military stuff: the rifle range, the physical training and the standard obstacle course. I had height, which was a great advantage for the standard obstacle course, but I don’t know why I was one of the fastest in my platoon, in spite of not being particularly strong or a particularly good runner. I suppose I was pretty handy with the monkey bars, or I knew how to pace myself, or I was just good at running with a standard battle order.

There was the 24 km route march. It wasn’t particularly tough, and very few people dropped out. I admired the Muslims who had to endure that through Ramadan, but as I was to find out later on, exerting yourself on an empty stomach isn’t particularly tough.

It’s true that I was physically exerted during my national service. But it was never like what it is during my first scout camp, where I was – let’s say – a virgin to physical punishment. It was just a load getting heavier and heavier, but it was not traumatic.

The 3-4 weeks I had with an air defence unit were even tougher. It was a totally crappy system which was completely user- unfriendly. Deploying it involved moving a lot of heavy equipment around within 10 minutes. We did the drill over and over again, and there was a lot of sadistic punishment. Mercifully a horrendous but not quite horrendous injury ended my stay over there.

There was not much else that was really significant about my military training. Those 3-4 weeks were the worst of the lot. There was still some training in the school of infantry specialists to come, which I didn’t really enjoy. Especially one night where we were supposed to dig a trench in the middle of the night. But by that time it was mainly mental fatigue, it was about getting thoroughly sick and tired of the military life.

I also ended up back in air defence. Since there was so much emphasis on arm power, we did pull ups every morning. My maximum was 14 pull ups. Then after I left the army it quickly declined to 6. And now I’m fighting to make it stay at 4, or else I don’t pass my physical tests.

When I finished the 2 years and 4 months, it felt funny. Ever since I entered the scouts, there was this subtext – get yourself fit, otherwise you will suffer in national service. Almost everything had been geared up towards being able to manage national service. But all those years of preparation only really matters during your first 3 months of national service. After that, your body adapts, and you will cope, no matter what. (And if you don’t cope, you just get a long term injury and subsequently get rewarded with clerk work.)

After that was college. One of the things I wish I found out early in my college life, and not only halfway through the 3rd year, was that you just had to exercise 2-3 times a week. Otherwise, depression takes hold of you and housework doesn’t get done and homework doesn’t get done.

During the 2nd year, though, I fell in love. There was this week, I just wanted to go running every day. I did push ups at night. Maybe I just got that taste of endorphins and I just wanted more more more. But it didn’t amount to a steady regime yet. This “thou shalt exercise once or twice a week” was a commandment that I have stuck to for the last 10 years, although during the last year, it has faltered more than a few times.

For 5 years, a group of people in my office got together for basketball games. They didn't always start off as basketball games, there was a lot of soccer in the beginning. One of the players was my sister's old friend JK, who turned up as Sniper's friend's wife. I didn't have strength, and I didn't have skill. I was a fringe player at the best. But I knew how to read a game, and all those last minute blocks and crucial interventions did have their impact on a game. I figured that it was the last time I would ever have the opportunity to play ball. Basketball eventually won out over football when the numbers of that gang dwindled to the point that there were only 6 of us left.

For some reason I never bothered to play ball when I was in secondary school - probably couldn't get past my awkwardness. But it was good that I had the opportunity. Although that didn't stop me from deciding one day I had enough of Sniper sniping at me. I left that gang for good. I don't know how long they carried on after that. I thought that Sniper was too fussy about who was in that gang, otherwise there were a lot of people who were willing to join that bunch.

3 of the people in that gang were the Real Madrid of 3 on 3 basketball. They won every title in the club for 3 years in a row.

2-3 years ago, I made a go for the half marathon. There were a few people in my office who had done the marathon. Some did it 20 years ago, some did it recently, some did it many times, some did it only once. I didn't think the marathon was for me, so I did the half marathon. Later on, after succeeding, I began to seriously think about the full marathon, especially on the urging of my jogging partner. I promised myself that I would do it once: no more and no less.

The fact is, you can carry on running for an indefinitely long time as long as you don't get injured. After 30 km, your body runs out of fuel, but if you know how to properly replenish yourself, and if you can condition your body properly, you can keep on going after that. And you can keep on training for as long as you can so long as you don't get injured.

But in both the year of my half marathon, and my full marathon, I did get injured. 4 weeks before the half marathon, I got a very deep gash in my knee. And I missed 2 weeks of training. I still managed to go all the way. For the full marathon, I found out, to my horror, that I got injured quite often if I were to run for more than 20 km. I switched away from the McRitchie gravel track to the pavement of the streets, and that helped.

Anyway I've blogged all about this before, shortly after I finished that marathon. I suppose this would be the greatest and the last big bout of physical activity in my life. In a way it was full circle: my legs gave way around the 27-28km mark, at Tanjong Rhu where more than 20 years earlier, I had done my first long distance event by cycling 8km on a little boy's bike.

I think, after that, my physical fitness would go downhill. I think it already started going downhill while I was training for the marathon. I noticed that it was more tiring keeping late nights. There was a spring in my step that I ran the half marathon with, that was no longer there by the time I progressed to my full marathon.

I think back on talking to an old colleague of mine. He told me that he played a lot of football in his youth. I couldn't picture it. I suppose I have to always remind myself: all these physical feats you did as a young man will one day disappear.

Libraries

I don’t know how many of you out there know that where there used to be a big public square in front of Toa Payoh Library, there used to be a huge fountain. Fountains used to be the rage in Singapore. There used to be one in most hotel lobbies, the National Theatre had one. Sentosa had their “dancing fountains”. McRitchie reservoir had one. I think people did the sensible thing in the end and found out that most outdoor fountains are so difficult to maintain that it wasn’t worth it. They found out that in our tropical climate everything eventually got clogged up with algae.

Anyway, we were living in Toa Payoh around that time, so we went to the Toa Payoh branch library. My first few visits were before anything got computerised. Everything was done by hand. You had 4 library cards, each in the shape of a pocket. There was a pocket in the inside of the book. When you checked out a book, the librarian would take 2 small indexed cards, both stamped with the same number. One would go into the book, and you had to keep it with the book. The other one would go into your library card. There was also another card that came with the book, indicating the title, and it would also go into your library card. Those cards would be stored on a shelf, according to the number of those index cards. In the cover of the book, opposite from the pocket, there would be a sheet of paper where the librarian would stamp the due date. The index card also got stamped.

When you went back to the library to return the book, the librarian would take the index cards, and then go back to rummage for your library cards. If and when they found it, they gave you back the library card. If there was a fine, you paid it.
Needless to say, this system was very slow, and on weekends, it was not uncommon to see the queue snaking halfway to the fountain. The queues were the only way into the library, so the place was a little like a supermarket. I don’t know how they dealt with shoplifters at that point in time. Anyway this is why the library had a wide lobby entering it.

This was a rather quaint system, and I thought that this was the way it had always been since eternity. But the library was only 10 years old at that point in time. And anyway, a new system was around the corner.

The new system was a little faster: it was implemented around 20 years ago. All books had bar codes pasted on the inside, and books were checked out with laser pens. You still had librarians stamping the due dates on the date sheets of paper.

The libraries I frequented (or the ones that my parents drove me to) were Bukit Merah, Queenstown and Toa Payoh. A rather eclectic mix. But for some funny reason these are also the libraries that I frequent as well. Those libraries are the oldest ones in Singapore, and they are in the oldest housing estates. It’s very strange to have a Queenstown library in the middle of such a decaying estate, but it used to be the future of Singapore – it was Singapore’s first satellite town. And anyway, the whole place is surrounded by HDB flats, so it had a hinterland.

I wasn’t much for books in those days. I remember borrowing a lot of books – if they were kiddy books it was possible to read them before the 3 weeks were up. Otherwise it was just difficult. I didn’t have an inclination to sit down and read. Years later I found that I had ADHD and I think this was why I never got into the reading habit as a child.

There were some books that really caught my attention. When I was in primary school, and we had to do a big project, I saw a book called “Polyhedron Models”. I borrowed it, I got it zapped, and then I based my year end project based on the models in that book. It was a hit with the teachers.

Catalogs in those days – we used to have catalog cards, but I was too young to use them. Drawers and drawers and drawers of names of books, arranged in alphabetical order. It must have been a ridiculously arduous task to go locating your books during those days. Especially if you didn’t know the concept of binary search. Later on, they printed the catalogs on microfiche. You had those crazy microfiche readers, like some anachronistic crazy thing on the set of the film “Brazil”.
The libraries were in a state of decay when I went to study overseas. I remember being frustrated, as a teenager, that there were never any good books that you could find in the library. The super book shops had just opened – MPH at Stamford Road, and later on Borders at Wheellock. They had the really interesting books. Libraries were crap.

In those days I indulged myself mostly in music. Music was to be an obsession for me for around 10 years. Then 10 years ago, my obsession with books took over. To be sure, around that time, I started listening to jazz music and started losing touch with contemporary music. I was still a music lover, but in hindsight, that was the last major discovery for me, music wise.

I started thinking that music was an unhealthy obsession. During my 10 year obsession with music I was spending half of my pocket money on music. I saved almost nothing. Anything that wasn’t for my stomach was for music. I spent much of my free time scanning through CD spines in Tower or HMV.

During the next 10 years, though, my obsession was with books. My craze started in college, where I was introduced to a lot of fields of knowledge for the first time. For the first time, I was forced to read great amounts of books, and not just what your teachers photocopied for you in class. Well guys, it was during those days that I REALLY learnt how to read properly. That I REALLY mastered the English language. My GP was the subject that spoilt my perfect A record at the “A” levels. So in a way I was exaggeratedly making up for it.

It was truly unfortunate that I only cultivated a reading habit when I went to the university. If I had gone to university knowing exactly what I wanted to study, I might have made more of it.

Libraries in great universities are like temples. The prestige of the university is in some ways connected to the quality of their libraries. The libraries you found there were incredible. You had volumes upon volumes of the densest prose / academic language you could imagine. It was incredible that there was so much human knowledge lying around (but that most of it was obscure). There were literally millions of books scattered in more than 20 libraries. It seemed that almost every department had a library. (But for some reason the engineering library wasn’t very big – I don’t know why. Maybe engineers don’t really care that much for knowledge.) A physics library, a maths library, a music library, a biology library, a business school library, a law library. There were 2 main libraries. One of them were a few storeys up and a few stories underground. I heard that it was built to be strong enough to withstand a nuclear attack.

America is a place where a lot of good things comes to those who don’t really need it. I think a lot of people just kept giving gifts to unis because they were the best. But then again, I’m sure that the rest of the world needs to have such excellent libraries where you can go and find anything you want.

The libraries are not locked up like the NUS ones. Anybody who’s willing to get into my university town has access. But who wants to make the long trip there anyway?

It was a good place for studying – something I didn’t realise until 1 year in. The study room was open until 2. I heard from somebody who graduated after me that they opened the room all night just before exams.

It was great fun, sometimes, to just go to a random part of the library and look at the books. There would be books about all kinds of topics. Child psychology, sociology, anthropology of obscure tribes.

I think the crucial difference between youth and older people is how willing they are to learn. When I was there I behaved like a young man in several (but not all) aspects. I didn’t think there was limits. Economics, Government, Sociology – I wanted it all. Like the drunken man in the U2 song, I was trying to throw my arms around the world.

Later on, I think I should have been more careful. Somebody once said that your books are like your friends, and you should choose your friends carefully. There is an incredible amount of useless knowledge in my head, and ultimately you do have to make everything tie in together. I think what I learnt was that knowledge is like building material, and just because you have plenty of building material, it doesn’t mean that you have an architectural masterpiece.

I used to think that older people were not as open to learning as younger people because they thought they knew it all, were arrogant, were unwilling to change their minds. To a small extent this is true. But there are more important reasons for their declining ability to absorb new ideas. Like the loss of grey matter. Or having to contextualise new information in the light of what they already know. Or simply that their brain is crammed to choking point. So you do have to pick and choose, and figure out what it is you really want to know.

Some people wonder what’s the best form of learning: is it learning for practical purposes? Like you gain knowledge because you want to accomplish something? Or should it be something purer? Knowledge for the sake of love of knowledge, which is closer to what I had? When I was young, I thought that it was the latter. But now that I’m older, I’m starting to understand that it is hazardous to have a lot of knowledge about things, but you don’t put a lot of that knowledge in context. It’s like computer science: every piece of data in your memory must be tagged so that you know where it belongs. Once it becomes untagged, or bereft of context, it is literally garbage.

There was never enough time to do reading for leisure when I was there, so it was a hobby I took up with a vengeance when I got back. I was a dilettante about a lot of things at the point where I graduated. I needed to flesh out my knowledge. I had opened my mind to several fields of knowledge and I was curious to know what others felt about the issues that my professors dealt with. It was equally enlightening to have second opinions about a lot of things. Moral of the story: you can trust a lot of professors to open your heads, and give you a map of what the main issues in a field of study are. But you can never trust them to be objective, and neither should you trust them to have the last word.

There was a time when I just bought a lot of books from warehouse sales. I enjoyed the notion of having a lot of leisure time, and just spending it absorbing knowledge. Or maybe I just enjoyed the college lifestyle and I wanted to extend it a little longer.

At the same time, libraries had become better in Singapore. They upgraded the system, and more importantly there was this new policy that put plenty of books in the libraries. There were 2 mega bookstores in Singapore, which put a lot of the latest books in the attention of the public.

It became a habit for me: go to the bookstores and see which books catch your fancy. Photograph them with your handphone. Later on, find them, either through the library, or cheap book sales. There were books that would turn up in a warehouse sale a few years down the road. There was no hurry to get the books.

Obviously I was also buying books at a faster rate than I could read them, and soon enough, my bookshelf was full. Worse still, I tended to prioritise reading library books over my own books. The rationale is that books have a shelf life of around 5 years on a public library shelf. If you don’t read them, they’re gone. Thrown to the library sale. Whereas the books on your shelf will always be there. In the end, the books that I had at home gathering dust would just pile up. New books would come in, and old but unread books would go out through ebay. It was getting idiotic.

Well, very recently I have imposed a ban on myself going to the library and starting on new books. I would be reading books that I already owned. In fact, it was harder breaking out of my habit of reading new books than I had anticipated. It used to be a great way for me to while time away while pretending to do something useful with my life. But it’s starting to interfere with the things I really want to do with my life.

Like I said: I had 10 years of being obsessed about music and another 10 years of being obsessed about books. It’s time for me to get on to the next big craze.

World Cup Year

This is world cup year again. I had earlier blogged about how interesting things happen to me every 7 years. That’s true, every 7 years, I go through a big change on the inside. (Well, not big anymore, because old people don’t go through big changes the way that young people do, but nevertheless – significant ones.) But what is true is that every 4 years, I go through big changes on the outside. Well, so far, until 2002. According to this schedule, I should have gone through a big change in 2006. I didn’t, or if I had, I must have been unaware of it. Or maybe nothing happens when the 7 year schedule and 4 year schedules clash.

I’ve entered or left schools in 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998 and 2002. I’ve had to adjust to new circumstances in all these years. I don’t know if things are going to change this year. I don’t have anything lined up. I don’t foresee anything happening. Next year, though, could be very different.

I've also noticed an interesting pattern: how happy I was during those 4 years seems to be somewhat correlated to how few times the current holder won the World Cup. Thus, 1998-2002 were good years for me, when France, first time winners were holding the world cup. 1994-1998 not so good, Brazil had won it for the 4th time. 1986-1990, pretty good years, Argentina won it for the 2nd time. 2002-2006, Brazil had won it for the 5th time - go figure.

Therefore, even though I think that Brazil plays wonderful football, and always have a lot of talented players, I hope they don't win. I'll be rooting for teams that have not won it before (Spain, Holland, Ivory Coast, Portugal), or at least, only once (England. France? You're having a laugh.). At the worst, I'll root for Argentina (3rd time). No Brazils, Italies or Germanies. Please.

In 2002, when I started work, they gave my block of apartments a fresh coat of paint. I saw it as meaning that my life was about to be changed. Now, they’re painting the thing again. It’s a sign, I tell you, it’s a sign.

But these 2 omens of change are fraught with complications: first, there was the big squabble over world cup rights, and for a long time it seemed as though the World Cup would not be broadcast in Singapore. Also, there was a huge squabble over the painting of my block of flats because the colour was ugly. In fact there was no colour because everything was going to be white, like some bloody Mediterranean village, or a certain elite school in Singapore. Now they softened it with grey, it looks a little more palatable, even though I liked the old colour scheme better.

Topography

Jogged from the main road to Upper Peirce Reservoir. There's a bit of trepidation about running around now that I found that I have bunions. But I think I can still afford 1 run every week, or every 2 weeks, so long as it's less than 10 km. I used to be very familiar with McRitchie Reservoir Park, since it was one of my main training grounds when I was training for the marathon. I think that one of the great experiences of a marathon is the amount of running that you do to prepare for it, you get to run through a lot of Singapore and see it from the view of the street. OK, it's HDBs, HDBs, HDBs but it's still Singapore right?

Anyway I went to Upper Peirce Reservoir park, and it was not a bad place. The park would be closed at 7:30 pm because they don't have lighting in there, 7:30 is when it gets dark in Singapore. So I didn't linger around long, but there was this huge dam that they built to form Upper Peirce Reservoir, and separate it from Lower Peirce, which was on a lower altitude, maybe 20 metres down. It's not a bad place. The road in was 3.5 km, I measured it using Google maps, so I thought, a run in and a run out would be the ideal length. But I might not try it again because it's a road for cars and probably a little dangerous since the road is full of bends and the driver might not see you.

Well it's a shame that McRitchie is the only reservoir among the central catchment reservoirs that has a track all around it. I suppose you have to keep the forest away from getting messed up by humans. But that would mean that McRitchie is unique. But even then, the northern part of McRitchie's jogging track doesn't for the most part reach the shore. Why is that?

What people don't really know is that McRitchie is also sometimes a training ground. Other than my weekly jogs and the marathon preparation, the thing that reminds me of McRitchie is an exercise they taught us at sergeant school. How to find your way through a jungle. They called it topography. They gave you a map and a compass, and expected you to make your way through a number of checkpoints. Great fun, unless you failed.

First, we had to learn how to walk in a straight line, and if we didn't, how much we drifted to the left or the right. This is important because if you drift too much you end up walking in great circles and wondering why you get nowhere. We learnt other stuff, like how to read maps for geographical features.

Our training ground was in the jungle between Lower Peirce and McRitchie. Naturally we were instructed to stay away from the jogging tracks. We were also told that the north shore of McRitchie had crocodiles and we had to keep away from the water. It was a little surreal to be in army uniform, and carrying a rifle, in a place that was so vaguely familiar, but this was not the first or the last time I had a feeling like that. It would get even worse when I had to wear an army uniform into an office building but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Some of the ramifications of being in army uniforms and carrying rifles in a place so closed to civilisation were rammed home when they told us a story of some people who got lost, found themselves near Upper Bukit Timah Road, and ended up walking into a petrol station and buying drinks. I think the station staff didn't think they were going to be robbed, but those guys were awarded confinements after the instructors decided to go easy on them and not to charge them.

We were given a signal set per tag team. We quickly found the first 3 checkpoints, but we got stuck at one of the check points. Some people claimed to have found it, but many of them were stuck. I could see a lot of my course mates around that area, cursing and swearing.

Topography was also the one time that I got acquainted with the jungle. Much of the time we were walking around in trails, rather than right in the middle of the trees themselves. We were also given parangs, and if we couldn't find a track, we just bashed our way through. (I know that this sort of behaviour is very unbecoming of visitors to a nature reserve, but jungle training is jungle training.) I remember seeing all kinds of weird plants everywhere. Never bumped into a Rafflesia, thank goodness. There were times when I got my army uniform entangled into a bush of thorns. My army boots still show the scars from the time when I tried to extricate myself from the thorny undergrowth.

In the end, because I couldn't find that last checkpoint, we were all made to go for a second round. The second round was easy, we just had to find 2 checkpoints. I found the first 1 in 5 minutes, and the second one half an hour later.

What I could not forget about this experience was the night topo, which was mercifully called off after 2 hours. Walking in a rainforest at night is extremely creepy, whether or not you are allowed to use light. All that wandering around in the dark, and it's really too dark to see. This is not Singapore city where light pollution is everywhere. And even if this was not some neighbouring country where the jungle was so dark that you could not see your own outstretched hand, it was tremendously bewildering. I didn't see how they thought we could find anything in a place like this. Imagine having to fight a war in conditions like this. No wonder Vietnam was such a scary experience.

A few years later I read "Heart of Darkness" and I understood that it was a similar terrain that I had been through in my jungle training.

Another thing I could not forget was when one of my course mates lost the handset of his signal set. We were doing a topography exercise when my course mate panicked and realised that his handset was missing. We had to go back to the jungle to find it. They arranged buses to fetch us between our camp in Jurong to McRitchie for around 2 days to go look for the handset, and we were told that we weren't booking out until we had found the handset. On Saturday afternoon, it started to rain, and I will always remember those times, wandering around a jungle, not for training, but to make up for another person's mistake. Eventually our platoon commander announced that it was found.

When I related this incident 1 year later, a friend asked me if it wasn't the case that the platoon commander was the one who stole the handset in the first place, and set us up, in order to punish the whole company for allowing his handset to be burglarised. Knowing what I knew about the platoon commander, I wouldn't put that past him.

California 2008

Things had become strained a little during our visit to Yosemite national park. The previous day, we ate some junk food and my sister even had some onion rings. But as the day wore on, she got grumpier and grumpier. Yosemite was a beautiful place, but it’s a little bit crowded for a national park. Can you imagine any park in Singapore where you have to spend a few hours in a traffic jam because the cars on the thoroughfares are crawling? Probably this was the summer break, and a lot of people were visiting. It would be easy to spot our car: it was the only one with a North Carolina car plate. Aside from us, the furthest away car plate was Texas.

We saw great marvels: snow capped mountains, winding rivers, great waterfalls and giant sequoia trees. Even the charred remains of a forest fire. Earlier on, she had been in a good enough mood to take a very scenic shot with the remains of a squirrel killed by a car in the foreground. But by the time we visited the sequoia trees in the afternoon I had to bite my teeth as she lashed out at me at letting her do all the driving. It turned out that she had fallen sick, and had the flu. Well it was dumb of me not to notice, but she never mentioned it to me either. Women are like that, they expect you to know everything.

It was just as well I had let her do all the driving up till then, because from then on until the end of the journey, I was behind the wheel. We took a long and winding road out of Yosemite, and because I was driving the car so slowly, I often found myself at the head of an increasingly long convoy. Those roads are 1 lane in each direction, but there are places, like a bus bay, where they allow you to drive off the road, and allow those people behind you to pass first. It’s the opposite of overtaking. We drove through the rustic parts of California for ages before we came to the main highway.

We stopped at a fast food joint for dinner (where else?) Then we continued on our way. It was dark and scary. Throughout the trip, we tried to drive only during daylight, but this was the last day, so we’d thought we would keep on driving until we reached the Bay area. This is not Singapore where every highway has street lights. And even so, there were enough cars on the highway to make you nervous. I was going at more than 100 kmh, which was the standard speed everybody was going at. Luckily I was fully awake: if I had thought I would fall asleep, I would have stopped and pulled over. Finally, at a convenience store not more than half an hour from the destination, I pulled over and handed the wheel back to my sister, who would navigate the car into the Bay Area, the way a pilot guides a ship into harbour.

One enduring regret about the road trip: we never took a picture of the interior of the car as it was carrying all of my sister’s stuff, as the back seat was packed just short of obstructing the rear view mirror. We took hundreds of photos during that trip, including quite a few shots of what my sister’s car looked from the outside, but no interior shots.

It was 10 or 11 when we reached the house. She was subletting it from another immigrant couple. We had a room that was on the exterior of the house. (People who live in tropical climates may not care for this, but rooms on the exterior of the house are the coldest.) There was no heating, and I had not been prepared for how cold summer nights are in California. The temperatures can drop to below 10 celsius.
This was my second time in California. I had gone to California 2 weeks earlier to hook up with my parents, who had attended my sister’s graduation, and who were going home. Then my sister and I would fly back to North Carolina, then drive the car over to Cali.

We spent the next few days shopping for various things. We went to WalMart, the great retailer of the 00s. It was packed with people and (probably) illegal immigrant workers. Incredibly, no matter how packed it is, everything was laid out immaculately, nothing was out of place. In contrast, we went to Sears, the great retailer of the 70s. It was almost a ghost town, and even though it was quiet, a lot of people were queuing up at the counter because the incompetent cashier didn't have a clue about what she was doing, even though she looked like she had been there for 20 years. She asked us if we wanted to apply for a Sears card in order to get 20% off our purchase. Then we said, OK, is it alright if we are not residents? She said that it's OK. Then later on after the system refused to accept our forms, she said, "how come you didn't tell me you weren't residents?" We couldn't get angry because we were laughing so hard at the moronicity of the cashier.

My aunt was ordering nail polish, and she wanted to find certain colours. We spent a lot of time hunting around for her nail polish but we just couldn't find it. It was funny to be buying nail polish for people who were on the wrong side of 50.

One morning, I took the train down to San Francisco. It was weird sitting in an MRT thingy (they called it BART) that was built in the 70s, and is really empty. You will never see an empty MRT station. I went into San Francisco, and got a complimentary copy of the San Francisco chronicle - senator Barack Obama had just won the biggest election fight of his life and secured the Democratic Party nomination ahead of Hillary Clinton (in comparison, it was not that difficult to beat John McCain, and we knew that.)

Walked around San Francisco. It is part of the Wild West, but it has enough history in it to be more than 100 years old. It had the biggest Chinatown of any city in the USA, and it also has a name that's not directly translated from English. There were a lot of old piers that were converted into nice swanky places (think about Collyer Quay).

Took a while to get used to the bus system (you pay $1.50 to get on, but after that, for the next few hours, you get as many free transfers as you want.) It was really hilly as well. The trams were more than 100 years old, even if they were retro-fitted. It was a nice place, even though I inevitably ended up hanging around the bookstores too much. There was this bookstore that was famous for being a counterculture hangout.

I visited the first headquarters of the United Nations. It looked freaky, with great big statues which ended up invariably being apologists for imperialism. Outside, there was a bad neighbourhood. A Chinese tramp and a caucasian tramp were fighting, and the Chinese tramp won. I shouldn't be proud of this but I was rooting for the Chinese tramp.

I also visited Ghiradelli's chocolate centre. Nice coffee and stuff, waterfront stuff. Didn't have time for Alcatraz.

The next day I visited Stanford. School had ended and there was hardly anybody around. I have been biased, or perhaps it was because a lot of my formative years had been spent in my own alma mater, or perhaps the best looking colleges are in secluded areas where nobody wants to go. I still thought that my college was the best looking one around.

But walking around the campus - which I'm told is one of the biggest campuses around, - I have mixed emotions. I had expanded my intellectual range greatly during those years, but I hadn't thought enough about how that fit into the great scheme of things. I hadn't thought enough about what were the truly important things in life. And studying in a great American university in many ways didn't teach you the right things.

In some ways, California was the image of paradise. LA is fond of boasting that it’s a place where you have 300 days of sunshine a year. Skies are more often than not blue, and the weather is supposedly perfect. It’s a place which boasts some of the best cuisine in the world, and grows some of the best produce in the USA. It’s the golden state, where the living is good. It’s the California of the hippie era, but also the California of the Internet era, the capital of cyberspace. My sister drove to a weekend market, where there were a lot of nice cafes and bistros. Food from every ethnicity and culture, and it was fine food. I think it's also true that California is an agricultural paradise, where you grow some of the finest food in the world.

But it was also here that my sister, for the next year, would endure her infamous first year as a surgical intern. She would work for 80 hour weeks (on average; she sometimes got 90 or 100). Her sublandlords would give her trouble because they didn't always like her using the kitchen. (Luckily she moved out after 1 year). It was awfully strange. But maybe it looks like that for migrants working in Singapore - on one hand this is a place which looks 10 times better than anything you can get back home, and on the other hand, you could end up plenty miserable in a place like this.

When it was time for me to go home, we set off early, and thank heavens for that. Because after almost 1 hour of driving, I found out that I had left behind the boxes of chocolates I had bought for my colleagues. My sister actually turned back and got it, and we had 1 more hour talking to each other about the future.

After that, it was time to go.

I've been to America once, when it was the greatest superpower in the world. But now when I left, it was a superpower in decline. But it has been in decline before, in the 70s and the early 90s, so who really knows?

Caped Crusaders

This is so cool. Guess who I saw the other day? The nice guy who wrote this letter to me. But I didn't say hi because he probably didn't know me, and even if he did, I don't want him to know that in spite of all the effort he took in writing that letter to me, I have just decided not to go ahead writing.

Since there is nothing much to write about I will indulge in another bout of nostalgia. The other day, I was in a bookshop and I saw this famous Singaporean playwright. He was a buddy of my old form teacher who was a director in a theatre group of which he was the playwright. That reminded me of my favourite play (among those I wrote) – “Caped Crusaders”.

This happened one day when I was half as old as I am right now. I was submitting an entry for a playwriting competition, and the winners would be staged as school plays. I thought that I was going to put an entry in, but for the longest time I couldn’t think about what to write. Suddenly, 2 weeks before the deadline, inspiration struck. I was a serial procrastinator, as you guys know. I only started writing the thing 2 days before hand and I had to plead for an extension of 1 day while I wrote the thing through the night even as I attended school during the day. After 2 hectic nights, I finished it. I knew what the punchline was going to be, and I wrote the easy parts (ie the climax of the story) first. The more difficult parts, which dealt with the set up and the character development, I just had to tikam it. Towards the end, it became more and more forced. I just had to will myself towards the finish line, like I did in my marathon 10+ years later.

I dashed to school on a Saturday morning, and dumped it into the teacher’s mailbox. (Anyway, you might know that I’m typing this at the same desk which used to house that computer that I typed the play on. So some things don’t change very much.)

I don’t think I will put the play online. Some people might recognize the title of the play and my identity will be outed. Unlikely but you never know. And there is no need to: there is precisely 1 aspect of the play that I was proud of, and that was the plot. And it was after writing this play that I told myself, fundamentally, the most important aspect will always be plot. If you have a good plot, everything will take care of itself. So here is the plot:

A few boys live in a kampong. One day, a developer comes and tells them that he will tear down their kampong and build a condo over it. They decide to stage a fightback. They conduct a series of childish pranks on the developer, but at the same time, they have a friend who’s a journalist, and the newspaper coverage turns their fight against the developer into a cause celebre, and a media sensation. They become known as superheroes. A Tiananmen style face-off develops, and many people rally to their cause. The kampong leader starts to let fame and fortune go to his head. They stage a faux hunger strike, but allows the kids to nibble a few titbits here and there. All in the name of more media coverage. Impatient to get the project going, the developers send in their bulldozers. Worried that the developers will uncover their stash of canned food, some of the kampong kids throw themselves in front of the bulldozer, and get run over and killed by accident. It is a sad ending and the main leaders of the kampong fall out over the incident.

It’s a good plot. In fact, I think that it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever told. I got the initial idea looking at a spiral staircase in my school. Then that spiral staircase became a treehouse, and it became a hangout place for a few kids. When I conceived this idea, it was very similar to the “Bridge to Terabithia”, which I watched a few years ago, and saw the similarity to what I was driving at in that play. Basically the first strand of the plot I had was: paradise lost.

For me, it was about innocence lost. I was growing into an adult, but still very unwilling to let go of my childhood. I probably was quite resentful about not having a gang to hang out with when I was a kid and wrote this to compensate for it. Yes, it was one of those classic deprived childhood stories.

But there are more dimensions to this dichotomy. It’s not only that adulthood encroaches and you’re willing against it, you’re yearning to fight back. It’s also a more innocent, rustic kampong existence that’s being lost to the more sophisticated, modern lifestyle represented by the condo development.

The second strand of the plot was similar to Ziggy Stardust, an invention of David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust was a character, and he started a band. Became very popular, and a darling of the media. Until the fame got to his head, and he imploded, the media rounded on him and destroyed him. He got destroyed by his excesses. This was the ultimate hubris-nemesis thing in Greek plays.

The third strand of the plot was the story of Tiananmen square, the heroism / martyrdom of the young people who were ultimately no match for the PLA. Obviously my first instinct is to be on the side of the students. This was a David vs Goliath struggle. The bulldozer running people down was – you know how this relates to Tiananmen, I don’t have to tell you.

The fourth strand of the plot was Chee Soon Juan. He staged a hunger strike in the early 90s, in case anybody remembers. I was thinking to myself, what’s this for? I don’t understand. It was martyrdom. It was dying for nothing. I remember a chance remark by my grandmother: “maybe he’s hiding all the food somewhere and cheating”. We wouldn’t know. But we didn’t have a good impression of Chee Soon Juan.

In the end, the killing of the kampong kids reflected my ambivalence about the whole thing. It was a bit like saying, “come on, who are we trying to kid? This is not a fairy tale, things that were going to happen were always going to happen.” And I didn’t want to seem overly critical of the government, and that’s why I made the kampong leader to be an anti-hero in the end.

The killing of an innocent child in the end was also a feature of “Bridge to Terabithia”. Was it justified? As a form of moral justice, you could say that the kampong leader was punished because he overreached himself. But that was in spite of his heroism in leading the kampong resistance?

As a form of poetic justice, you could say that the death of the child resonated with the death of the kampong. It compounded the tragedy and it was a clear message that the kampong could not be saved in any case. Going back to my equating the kampong with the innocence of childhood, having somebody die is something that irretrievably cuts you off from the past. And in a tragedy, if something is presented to you as being a thing of beauty, it will probably die soon. Some of the more perceptive viewers of the play would have seen it coming.

So when I thought of the plot, I was excited, because basically some of my favourite stories were in there. Some of my favourite themes were in there. Best of all was the surprise ending: at the beginning, I set the audience expectations that this was going to be a comedy, a kind of a farce. Then I put in the part about them being a David vs Goliath struggle, and made them succeed, improbably, against the odds. Before I punched them in the stomach with the tragedy at the end. Yes, you have to manipulate your audience’s emotions a little. I may have been young, but I was already cynical enough to realise that. But in another way that play reflects my approach to life: make everything look like a comedy at first, before you reveal your true intentions.

My play was selected to get performed as a school play. Victory was sweet for me, but I half expected to win. I thought, in any case I will attend this performance. Either my play will be performed I have to attend it, or there will be 3 plays that are better than that, in which case I definitely want to see what the fuss is all about.

Victory was sweet because my parents were complaining about why I was spending all this time on an ECA when I could have studied for my exams. I’ll tell you: I knew very well that I would rather have had this play written than to get 1 more A1 for my exams. I was very clear about that. Another bone I had to pick was with my English teacher who was a real prickly character, and who told me that I was a “Maths genius”. I wanted to show her that I was a genius, period.

One of the judges was one of the more prominent local playwrights, and he stayed on as a consultant for the drama production. (In fact what prompted this blog entry was that I saw him one day walking through a bookstore. Not that I would have said hi, he wouldn't have recognised me.) My cast and crew were, unfortunately, not happy with the play at all. They couldn’t see it from my point of view. I thought they sympathised more with the condo developers. But later on I felt that there was probably a more cynical reason: my play was a little anti-government. People were probably thinking that maybe their careers would be evaporating before their eyes. There was definitely a conflict with their values. I wrote to the consultant for help, and to my surprise he wrote me a long letter.

Now that I think about it, I can guess why he wrote that letter. I had attended the Creative Arts Program, which was an outreach program run by the arts community, you had some people who were interested in various forms of art, and they would attend talks, and be in some environment which immersed them in the performing arts. At the end, some of them would be assigned a mentor, and they would hopefully get a leg up to develop their talents. Well I attended that program didn’t get assigned a mentor and maybe they realised their mistake the second time around. I was a little sore about that but truthfully the stuff I submitted to them for consideration was really not very up to scratch. That must have been the reason, rather than that the play was something special, as I had initially assumed.

Writing that play was – let’s be a little corny – it was my defining moment. It typified a few things I wanted.
1. It was one of the rare occasions that I got something done through will and persistence. (But frankly, I wish that I had been a bit more persistent, because I never got around to polishing up that play to be much better than its original form.)
2. I defied my parents and I won. Well I didn’t exactly become a top student for my “O” levels but I ended up getting into the school of my choice, which is really what counts. So in a way their fears that it would affect my studies proved unfounded.
3. It was a nice “up yours” to my English teacher. Well writing a play is like talking, and being able to analyse a play with essays is like listening. I probably am a better talker than a listener.
4. It started my playwriting career, and probably achieved one of my life goals. I was sneaky about it to keep it quiet until it was my time to step onto the big stage. (But I was too sneaky about it. By the time the play was staged – and it was staged by my juniors – my cohort had already left the school. Therefore not many people knew about my play.)

I suppose a lot of it is a reflection of the person that I am.

(500) Days of Summer

Just watched (500) Days of Summer. I hadn't dropped by the company clubhouse's VCD collection for a long time and when I did I was amused to find that there were only 3 VCDs that I really wanted to watch. I suppose they haven't been making a lot of acquisitions lately.

A real boon for VCDs would be if all of them came with subtitles. The picture quality is so so only but OK. The worst is the muffled sound and you can't really hear the dialogue, so you sorda have to guess what's going on. Well luckily this one has subtitles! Yay!

Anyway (500) Days of Summer is a great movie. No, actually it is merely an excellent one, but what makes it special is that it really reminded me of my own experiences. Seasoned readers of my blog should know who I'm talking about (and in case it's not absolutely clear, no, it's not about Teapot).

The premise of the plot is simple. Boy loves girl, girl doesn't really love boy, they part. They tell you the ending in the beginning so you already know that. Even the title tells you that they broke up in the end. So it's not the outcome, but the process, which is the point of the tale.

If you want to watch it, go ahead. It's good. The leads are likeable (this is very important in a romantic comedy. Zooey Deschanel is gorgeous, even though she's a little distant and cold as well. The guy, can't remember his name, has that constant tortured look on his face that you see on Bryan Robson every time he's reminded that he'll never be as good a manager as he was a player. What follows are spoilers.

All this is familiar: the guy falls for her, then denies that he's in love with her. All the same he's a pain in the ass to his friends who have to deal with some of his emotional baggage. The guys warn him about her. Is she attractive? Yes she is. The balance of power in the relationship is tilted towards her? Yes. Would they have made great friends, if you forget the love bit? Probably. The way they play acted as real lovers was familiar. Even the arguments they had - whether or not he could be called a "boyfriend" - are familiar. Even "Let's not put labels on anything" sounds very very familiar. Even the singing of Clash's "Train in Vain", which was something I listened to quite a few times when she left, is familiar.

There were a lot of good reviews for this movie, and evidently this was one that touched many hearts. There was even a centre spread on my paper that complained that this movie was overlooked by the Oscars. That's a bit of an exaggeration but it's true that romantic comedies get short shrift at the Oscars. There is a lot of this movie that is smart and funny and true, and when you take away that pretty indie-art flourishes and stylish touches, it still has a real heart underneath. The few that dissented complained that the movie does not say anything that's already been said before. While this might be true, all romantic comedies are done to death. Together with the action movie, this is one genre that has been over-saturated. Then again, to paraphrase Tolstoy, "All happy relationships are happy in the same way, but all unhappy relationships are unhappy in their own unique way." This was the justification for his writing yet another book about families. But it's a valid one.

The twist in the movie is how some of the nuances have changed. It was said at the beginning that the guy believed in a one true love, whereas the girl didn't. At the end, we'll see, the truth is somewhat different. Some people have criticised the movie for focusing exclusively on the guy's point of view, but as somebody's noted, Zooey's is a static character, somebody who doesn't change or grow throughout the movie. If there is any mystery to her, it's only because the guy is so smitten with her that he can't see clearly. Otherwise, by the end of the story, we can piece together what she's like.

From the guy's point of view, she was stringing him along all this time. She was using him for her ego, sending him mixed signals, alternating between pushing him away and pulling him back with some physical affection.

From the girl's perspective, it's simple: she likes him a lot, but mostly as a friend. As with all my best friends, I don't want him to leave, but I don't want him to be my boyfriend either. I'll wait for him to realise his mistakes. I don't have a problem with that, but she should not have been intimate with him. Maybe she wanted to convince herself that they could be lovers, since he believed in that so badly. Is she a cold robot, as he accused her of being? An equally valid argument could blame him for being too stubborn to read all the signals. She was presented as being somebody who loves her hair, but also loves how she could cut it off. Beautiful women get to pick and choose and they can seem awfully cold if and when they exercise this privilege.

So the twist is: even though she professes not to believe in true love, she's the one that gets married in the end. They even give a hint of this happening when they both attend a wedding and she catches the bride's bouquet. (In angmoh culture the person who catches the bouquet is the next to get married.) She believed in true love after all. She met THE ONE not long after she left the guy. It wasn't that she didn't believe in love: he was just not the right one for her. It was the central issue underlying everything that took place in the movie, and yet it had been glossed over time and again. Either way, he should have seen the light, and let her go.

A few scenes showed them dating ogether, and there were already some subtle hints that they weren't getting along: watch how many times he makes fun of her for choosing Ringo Starr as her favourite Beatle. Watch how he seems to be having a great time, and is seemingly nonchalent to the fact that she's not feeling the same way. And if women end up saying cruel things in the end, sometimes it's the only way the guy's going to take the hint and leave.

Therein lies one great disadvantage of being a chiobu. You attract the wrong company, the guys who think with their dicks. He really really enjoys your company, but he's also not thinking hard enough about whether you're compatible.

The events are presented non-linearly, and I was glad I was watching this on VCD, because I was then able to piece together the general gist of it all: the first hundred days were total bliss. 200-300 were when all the cracks started appearing. They met again between 400-500, although she neglected to tell him that she was already seeing somebody else and later got engaged. And it was at this, most bitter period that he had to put his life back together.

500 days is roughly 1.5 years, also approximately the span of my whole involvement with the girl in my version. But for me the first 100-200 days had quite a bit of chasing. But similarly, it was not until day 500 that I managed to pull myself together.

Towards the end, the show made for uncomfortable watching. The guy was practically a wreck. It probably wasn't so bad for me but it was still uncomfortable. Unfortunately or fortunately I was distracted by the travails of living in a foreign country. It took a long long time for the guy to recognise that he should let it go and cut loose. For me, I knew almost right from the start that this was going to be a short term relationship - I was only in it for experience points. But I got sucked in and carried away, and gradually believe that there could be a happy ending. This was not to be so and I had to revert to my original beliefs, although by that time, it was harder than I had imagined to let go.

Then there is the very obvious difference that our relationship was carried out in cyberspace rather than in real life. But the close reading of her words, the scanning of them, reading between the lines for anything hopeful - that transcends whether this is cyberspace or not.

It was a happy ending for the girl in the movie, but not in my case. In my case, the girl got married, but it wasn't a happy ending. And the girl in my case, intelligent though she is, never had as level a head as Zooey's character.

I thought about what it meant for him to be a greeting card writer. Was he supposed to be an expert at manufacturing illusions? Are greeting cards necessarily insincere? Or was he in love with a shiny cold surface, the same surface you see on a greeting card? Was their love meant to be as beautiful and colourful and ultimately disposable as a greeting card? Why does he switch back to architecture? Is this a sign that his next love will be more meaningful and lasting? LA is not the first place you would think of for great architecture, but this movie has done a great job showing the artier side of the city, as opposed to our stereotypical notions of it as a vast cultural wasteland.

He finds some chick in an interview, vying for his position. And he feels a spark, thinks that something could happen in a place like this. The girl's name is Autumn. Heh heh.