Category: singapore spaces

my parents brought me to their secret breakfast haunt at bussorah street two days in a row. it’s 7.30am. we pull up. the street is quiet and still in shadow, but the light glints gold off the masjid sultan domes. we pick up packets of nasi lemak. my mother peels the little fried fish and my dad mixes all the chili paste into the rice, which is unusually light for a typically indulgent dish. the proprietor makes the drinks out of a little corner of a french eatery with red walls and framed posters, and i’m sure the ice coffee i have is my new favourite. some days the weight of the world is on your shoulders, but on others, go ahead and exchange that for thirty minutes of better things. claim your right to early morning magic.

life brought me on another little adventure yesterday. got my sandals and ankles soaked by rain gushing down the slopes of Lock Road, but made it to the Mizuma Gallery in time to share a moment with some intense, photorealistic portraits by Hyung Koo Kang. i haven’t been trained to understand art as connoisseurs do, can’t decipher hidden clues and cheeky conversations embedded in histories and brushstrokes and angles, but there is always something universal, something visceral about a bare room and a haunting image.

the day was too golden to spend inside the lab, so wans and i snuck off to meet kenny for plain vanilla bakery cupcakes and the usual tea/dinner hybrid. i thought it would only take an hour at most, but by the power of wan lin’s trusty pink car, as well as our unyielding appetite for richer, sweeter afternoons, we ended up moving on to a bench in the pandan valley barbecue area with three forks and two slices of pie, pondering over the benefits of a graham cracker crust, and engaging in pie politics over who gets the last piece — a game i’m happy to play! later on, a golden retriever picks up slippers with his teeth and gives them to us as an invitation for a tug-of-war game, and wans and i go sun-chasing at the park i’ve never known of. a little boy shows me the shell he’s found by the breakwater and scampers off to find more. we walk on, and find clouds that look like hockey players, pest controllers and smoke.

not quite sure i know how to make sense of days like these. they are beautiful, no doubt, but they are also thick and heavy — with summer heat and the promises (or threats?) of the formless future. can we continue to devour life by the forkful when it doesn’t have a shape or name?

top panorama – west coast park; pies from windowsill pies at pandan valley

Friday felt like someone else’s life. Saturday was out-of-body. Sunday was a mess. It’s amazing how many things can happen in seven days, in between brunch, bouts of writing, going back to school and a country turning forty six.

Frank was in town, and I joined the Hong Kong friends in showing him around, feasting, walking and sweating, Singapore-style. We ended thursday night by weaving around the streets of geylang, lorong 16 and up. We were there for a huge beef hor fun supper but everyone was more intrigued by ladies in their heels and skirts pretending to text but always waiting and watching out of the corners of their eyes.

Friday evening was a blur of pocket squares, voices, candlelight, back rubs at the poskod.sg launch party, a real celebration of passion. I must have been buzzing with beer and excitement, because I remember increasingly less of it now, only that there were so many kind words that I felt humbled and even a little silly. It was only Sunday when I became besotted with Huzir’s poetry, and five nights later there we were, exchanging thanks and shaking hands. Sam and I retreat to the gallery and walk the corridors of the Goodman Arts Centre, and take the night in. It is a wonderful moment and I’m glad he is with me.

On Saturday we trekked all around Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam. Collectively, these visits felt like consecutive pages ripped straight out of a travel book, but even that can’t stop me from loving every street, smell and sound. The Chinese vegetable vendor on Campbell Lane taught us Tamil, the boys stared transfixed at threading at Rupini’s, and I breathed in the smell of the flower garlands.

We hit Kampong Glam just before the Muslim call to prayer and ended up falling asleep at a Cafe-slash-Chinese-Opera-House hybrid just a bit further down, the smell of Nasi Briyani from the street market still hovering over our shoulders. It made me smile to think of cultural ghettos being shared, C-M-I-O blending into CMIO. The next day, the Prime Minister spoke about stricter criteria for foreign professionals, and I absent-mindedly RSVPed  ‘Attending’ on Cook A Pot of Curry Day, without realising that the same-old human divides are just moving on to international lines, as we all grow old under the same dusty dawn.