The Sky Is Yours

It is officially a heatwave in Melbourne, and in Adelaide, it has become the hottest period in 100 years.

The heat is keeping people at home and away from the Emergency Department, but many walk in with heat related complications as well.

I stepped out into the warm night, after my second last shift in this ED, and there was the saving grace of a gentle breeze blowing around.

I walked into the car, and did what I have not done in my 3 years of having this car - I lowered the car window and stuck my hand out throughout the whole trip home.

My right hand sits outside the window, accelerating towards the wind at sixty kilometres an hour. The wind is like velvet sand, dispersing through the sieve which are my fingers. The streets are empty as it is the witching hour. For the moment the world is mine, and I am free.

Everytime I stop at a traffic light, my fingers tingle delightfully, ants crawling through my windkissed hand.

I look at my hand outside the car window, the grass a green-yellow blur as I drive by, and I told myself that there would be many long trips this year, in cloudless sunshiny days, where my hands would flow with the winds of a different place.

Chinese New Year: Melbourne Style

Once a year during the Chinese New Year, the Chinese community of Melbourne congregate on one particular night in the Chinese dominant suburb of Box Hill. There are more Chins here than a Hong Kong phone book. Literally.

I went to visit this festival for the first time ('to get in touch with my roots' as one friend who was also there put it) in my time here in Melbourne. It was... a uniquely... unneccessary experience. Seriously, there were stalls here that had absolutely nothing to do with Chinese New Year (ie. the Liberal party stall, the Commonwealth Bank and Westbank stalls - [are you saying all Chinese people love to save money? Oh wait a minute... you're absolutely right!] - and the carnival. What does a carnival have to do with Chinese New Year?

I mean I'm not sure that there are people in China who celebrate New Year by riding on funrides ('housexy' was the name of the ride. There were five year olds riding on 'housexy'. I kid you not.) or winning stuffed toys by playing impossible to win rigged games.

Having said that however, there were some half decent food stalls there. We managed to get good old yok kon (beef jerky) which is always a Chinese New Year favourite, and there were stalls selling sugar cane drinks (the ones where fresh sugar cane is pushed through this mangling machine which always makes you want to put your hand in it) and coconut juice as well.

And there was a pirated DVD stall! It was like a Malaysian pasar malam all over again! It was this quadrangle - Chinese movies to one side, TVB series to another, anime on one more side, and - wait for it - porn on one side. There were salespeople manning each side, so I'm not sure why they chose the girl instead of the seedy guy to man the porn side. What totally confused me, however, was when a girl brazenly dragged her obviously uneasy boyfriend to dig through the stacks of lewd DVDs on offer. Let's just say it left me feeling conflicted.

All in all, it was a really interesting experience - it was literally a Yellow River of Chinese people jostling each other in this one unifiedblob, not unlike my Hong Kong experience - I really had no idea how people actually stopped to buy any food from the stalls!

Happy Year of the Ox to all of you, especially to my little sister who will be 24 this year! Oink! I mean Moo! I mean, what noise does an Ox make again?

Thank You For The Music

"Eh, how come ah, most of the music that you listen to is so sad one ah?" she asked.

Random Memories: Eight Years Old

He opens the cardboard box, and it is a treasure chest of music cassettes. His untrained eye could only marvel at the variety of the music there, turning each cassette in turn. There were names on the covers he was vaguely familiar with- Frank Sinatra, The Beatles - and those that weren't too familiar to him - Paul Mauriat, James Galway.

He brings all the newfound treasures to the not-so-branded radio that sat in their living room. One by one he feeds the maxell tapes into the belly of the hungry radio, rewarding each meal with music that permeated the living room. There were some that he took an instant liking to, and others which made him lose interest and turn off the music within seconds.

The box was a gift from a church member who himself would turn blind one day. He owned a music store, and it was given as an gift of encouragement to this boy's father who had recently lost his ability to walk.

The music brought a new sense of hope in the family.

He remembers sitting in the living room, sprawled out on the couch reading in the fluorescent light of the living room, his father sitting just a reach away in his wheelchair, doing his accounts for his clients.

The strains of the flute from a new favourite, James Galway, filled the air between them. There was this shared harmony between father and son - both hearts moving in time to the haunting lilt of the flute - which needed no words to express.

Random Memories: Ten Years Old

He is sitting in the back of the car, happy to be going up to Penang again. The music for the rides on these trips were so important - last year they had learnt The Beatles tape almost by heart

Ah, look at all the lonely people!
He's a real nowhere man, sitting in his nowhere land, thinking all his nowhere plans for nobody
I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me

They were singing the songs word for word by the end of the trip, having heard the cassette for the eighth time running.

There was the year of the Greek songbird, Nana Moskouri

Goodbye Papa, it's hard to die, when all the birds are singing in the sky
Try to remember the kind of September, when grass was green, and the grain was yellow
I believe in angels, something good in everything I see, I believe in angels, when I know the time is right for me

and of ABBA, of course

If you change your mind, I'm the first in line
Voulez vous, ah ha! take it merrily, ah ha! Now is all we have, ah ha! Nothing promised, no regrets
Super trooper, lights are gonna find me, but I won't be blue

The three children would sit in the back of the car, their juvenile voices joining John, Paul, George and Ringo or Bjorn, Benny, Agnetha and Anny-Frid as tiny backup singers.

Random Memories: Fourteen Years Old

He is in secondary school, in the afternoon session, and the routine was, go to school from 1 to 6.45 pm, come home and have dinner, then sleep until about ten or eleven at night, and then wake up to do homework until about two or three in the morning.

It was eerie past the midnight hour. His Dad would retire to bed, as would the rest of the family, and the silence was only punctuated by the buzz of the fluorescent light in the background, and the slow rhythmic creak of the ceiling fan.

He would try to drown the silence by switching on the radio quietly. Sometimes he would play the tapes and have Frank Sinatra help him try to work out a mathematical sum or paint a mountain scenery. And then there were other times when he would switch the tiny knob from TAPE to FM, and listen to the English stations at night.

One night, while trying to figure out Malaysian geography, he heard the music that he would listen to for a long time. The DJ was taking time to introduce a new artiste every night, playing several songs from the particular artiste, and that night he learnt the name of his new love. Basia.

Random Memories: Love

He remembers attributing songs to certain crushes in his life, growing up.

He remembers the girl on the bus, with her silky brown skin. He would sing Bryan Adams' Everything I Do, I Do It For You quietly across the unbridgable distance that was the front and the back seat of the bus.

He remembers his biggest crush in college. And Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You was ringing through his mind everytime she walked by.

He's still saving his love songs and lullabies.

Random Memories: Eighteen Years Old

He was going to go off to Singapore to study, the one in his class that had made it good. He was reluctant to leave, as all his friends, his life, were all here in his tanahair.

They met him individually to say their goodbyes. One good friend from the year above him gave him a farewell letter, which made him smile despite his sadness. "GOOF DUCK!" it said in a deliberately dirty and dyslexic way of wishing him all the best. Along with the letter came a cassette, and the letter insisted that he listened to the first song.

It was Visions of a Sunset by Shawn Stockman, and the song built up to a climax which pulled at his heartstrings, the crescendo of violins explaining what he could not. Where words had failed, music stepped in and embraced him.

-------------------------------------------

"Eh, how come ah, most of the music that you listen to is so sad one ah?" she asked.

Because it has been his constant companion - his soothing balm on the open wounds inflicted by life, it is his mental photographs to memories past; it is how he falls in love.

Ode to Tai Pak

My eldest uncle on my father's side, my tai pak, I was told, passed away on Thursday night after losing his battle with lung cancer which had spread to his voicebox. I am told that he was struggling on Thursday, when my Tai Mo asked him if he wanted his children by his side, and he whispered Yes. So in the final moments, he was surrounded by his loving family, and he finally left in peace.

I remember my tai pak with much fondness. All my uncles were actually very well behaved, come to think of it. But my tai pak was a bit of dreamer, not unlike my eldest brother.

By day he would run his hardware shop which he had been running for years - and I remember loving to walk into the ordered chaos that was his shop. There would be wires curled up into coils hanging from the ceiling, screws of all shapes and sizes in the drawers, tins of paint everywhere, and he even had a key duplicating machine as well!

Naturally, he was very good with his hands, and paid careful attention to detail, his scrutinising eyes squinting in focus behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

Whenever he had free time, tai pak would love to read in his shop, but his main interest which kept him busy for a few years was his desire to romanise the Mandarin language. I remember he tried to teach it to us one evening, and it wasn't half bad - he basically broke down the Mandarin language into its syllables, writing it out in English, and then just adding a dash or a dot to each character to indicate which of the four intonations they should sound like.

Of course, the advent of hanyu pinyin basically rendered my uncle's years of work/hobby meaningless overnight, and I never really asked him how he dealt with it. He seemed to not let it bother him, I suspect, as he had other distractions (ie. his grandchildren).

Rest in peace, tai pak, in the knowledge that it was a life well led.

Bad (minton) to the Bone

We went to play badminton yesterday in the Melbourne University courts... I almost said "No" as I always do, but instead I said "Yes" a la Jim Carrey's Yes Man, and I am glad that I did. (This will be a year, hopefully, of me saying Yes to a few more things!)

I haven't seen a badminton rac(k/qu)et in years. I remember the very first racket that I ever coveted - the very expensive RM 39.90 Yonex Blacken SP - the sleek black frame and the soft slender grip made it a stylish object of mass destruction in the right hands. (In my hands, it was a stylish mosquito swatter).

And so, there we were, on the courts, our rusty limbs ready to do battle. I was teamed up with a girl who I later found out used to play badminton for her school, and my brother teamed up with his girlfriend. I thought that it was written in the cards that we would have an easy win, but was I ever wrong! My brother still has the vitality of a ten year old, and his girlfriend was a full-on badminton hustler, playing bad shots that turned out to be placed exactly where she intended them to be!

It wasn't that bad... we lost the first two matches, no thanks to me, setting up my brother for the easy smashes (He paid me to do so. Okay, so I'm just a bad player.) The third and final set was a nail biter, going down to deuce at 13-13 (we played it old school) and we finally managed to eke out a win at 18-17, which was really close! (thanks mostly to my badminton partner's prowess!)

All in all, I just realised that playing badminton was just like cycling... you never really forget how to. And although I hadn't touched a racket in years, I'm proud to say that I am as bad now as I was back then.

Take that, Datuk Lee Chong Wei.

Slumdog Millionaire

What are the elements of an award-winning movie?
A. Love
B. Story
C. Cast
D. Dancing

Answer:
E. All of the Above

I got to watch slumdog millionaire the day it won the four awards at the Golden Globes for best film, best director, best screenplay and best music. It is definitely one of the better watches of the year, with India - the flawed star of the world stage now - depicted in all its poverty, corruption and decadence. And yet, in the midst of all this darkness and despair blossoms love, hope and one incredible story well told in this movie directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach, Sunshine).

Ironically, this movie has yet to be released in India, and the news world waits with bated breath to see the reaction of the world's second most populous nation depicted in all her ugliness, destitution and scars.

Go watch it, for a movie so good you leave the theatres affected.

Kids Do The Darndest Things

It has been a long, fulfilling, draining four days in the Emergency Department. I get to see some of the silly things kids do to themselves, worrying the heck out of their parents, when I am reminded of:

The Not-So-Amazing Adventures of SuperKhuen, Boy Wander, Aged Nine

There is one church camp up in Cameron Highlands that is forever burned into my memory. We were staying with the church at the Highlands' Christian Centre, a place with both dormitories and family rooms ideal for church camps.

One night, when everyone was having dinner in the dining hall, I had finished my dinner early, and ran off to the dormitories to do a bit of adventuring by myself.

The edifice stood before me, majestic - it was a triple decker bed towering about two metres, the top bed so close to the ceiling you could kick it.

My chubby little legs excitedly scaled the ladders to the topmost bunks, and I clambered onto the beds, the fluorescent lights just out of reach of my head. I bounced around the bed excitedly, extremely pleased with how well the adventure was going.

These beds, considering their height from the floor, were actually fairly dangerous ones - there were the nominal railings by the side, and these did not even run along the whole of the bed, but halfway, just enough to prevent the sleeping person from dying in his sleep. (I had a dream that I was falling, and then I woke up. Dead.)

My curiosity and foolhardiness told me to go to the edge of the bed and look down. And so I crept, half smiling in anticipation, and peered over the edge of the bed.

That's when Gravity suddenly grabbed me by my shoulders, hurtling me towards the concrete floor below.


[and so we have F=ma,

where F is the force

m is the mass of the fat kid

and a being the acceleration, in this case, gravity, g, which is a constant 9.81 ms-2.

We have F= 50kg x 9.81 ms-2 = 490.5 N = Very Ouch. ]


It was like I was the apple, and the floor was Isaac Newton. A cold, hard, unfeeling, Isaac Newton.

Luckily, my neck broke my fall.

Now don't get me wrong - I taught the cement floor a lesson as well. That will teach it to mess with an overweight nine year old kid.

Who am I kidding - I am surprised that I didn't black out completely. God knew I needed a thick skull when he made me in my mother's womb.

I somehow made my way out of the dormitory room, and the world was spinning in a beautiful merry-go-round. I walked out clumsily, punch drunk from my bout with the floor, and staggered across the gravel paths to my parents' room.

I had a run-in with a parked car, which stood in my drunken pathway to their room. The car alarm went off, exacerbating my already sore head, and so I valiantly kicked the protesting car. There were two Indian girls nearby, and they watched me in guarded surprise, wondering who had given this poor child some samsu.

I somehow managed to get to my parents' room, and finally collapsed onto the bed, the world only stopping to turn when I had my eyes closed.

Mercifully, there was someone in the dormitory where I had my skullbreaking fall, and he had reported the incident to the church elders. ("The poor concrete, who had done nothing to harm this boy, has just been assaulted by his head.")

They found me - my worried mum, and auntie JH, and uncle Gerald. My mum kept asking me if I was all right, and uncle Gerald swept me up in his arms, and carried me into his Volvo, and drove off into the night in search of a clinic.

The doctor examined me and told them I was going to be okay. They brought me back to the campsite, reassured now that there wasn't any additional risk of stupidity in an already fairly silly child.

The rest of the camp was vivid in my mind for other reasons - my parents' room won the inauspicious dirtiest room of the camp award (maybe because of my blood stains all over the place?) and I gave a card to Uncle Gerald, thanking him for bringing me to the doctor that night.

Poor Uncle Gerald ended up in a neck brace and an arm sling later. Apparently, after the adrenaline wears off, the consequences of carrying a child the size of a baby elephant will become apparent.

Oh well - months of neck and back pain for a badly drawn thank-you card = fair deal.

Last Christmas

So if you've noticed... I'm back! (Almost, sort of, kinda, maybe.)

I am writing to you from my new baby - a laptop that I got from the Boxing Day Sales right before work! I went in to only browse, but a few hours later (and one incredulous salesperson who joked that I had spent more time in the shop than him) I finally settled on this one.

Too bad I can't show you any pictures yet, as I'll need my brother to return from Malaysia with my Nokia handphone CD.

This laptop was actually sitting in my car for nine hours sunning itself, because I had to go straight to work from the shops! It survived the sunbathing experience however, and I'm finally online now after figuring out how to access the router that my previous housemate had so secretly encoded until even we couldn't get in!

It was a good Christmas this year - got to see the decorated houses on the Boulevard finally (more on this in another post when I can finally put up pictures!) and also had a good Christmas dinner with the church. And then my good friend Fi from Sydney came down to visit and we had a great time catching up.

And then I saw The One.

And then she left, never to be seen again.

-------------------------------------------

I could have met you in a sandbox,
I could have passed you on a sidewalk,
Could I have missed my chance,
And watched you walk away?"

John Mayer, Love Song For No One

Happy New Year 2009

I walk out from the Emergency Department, the guarded cheers of Happy New Year still in my ears from our makeshift celebrations in the department.

It is minutes into the New Year, and I walk out into the cool night air. There are fireworks going off in the distance somewhere, the dark night scribbled with transient bursts of neon light. I hear the strains of distinctly Middle Eastern music and the laughter of people far away, and the crickets in their New Year revelry nearby.

I get into the car and begin the forty minute journey home. There are isolated groups of people on the street who are obviously inebriated, and they swing their shirts over their heads in drunken cheer, screaming their greetings for a happy new year. A car passes and a girl sticks her head outside the car window, shouting ecstatically.

Some, like myself, honk in response, and smile. Most of my fellow drivers on the road that night were fairly subdued, however, and preferred a quiet polite drive on the roads.

I near home, and the best thing to me happens that night. A group of children, no more than six or eight year olds, were standing on a street corner on the rows of shops on Sydney Road. It is way past their bedtime, but tonight is not like any other night, and Mummy and Daddy insisted they stay up late.

They are trying to catch the eyes of the passing drivers, and they wave their tiny hands in the air. "Beep!" "Beep!" Their muffled cries come through my window, and I can see their pleading eyes. No one has obliged them so far, and I press long and hard on my car horn.

Their eyes and lips curl into unsurpressed joy, and they are jumping around screaming happily on the pavement, ecstatic to have influenced one more driver to join them in their celebrations. I am laughing a little to myself, surprised by their excitement.

I drive the car to a friend's place, and she has made dinner, long cold now, the other guests have left. I haven't seen her in two years, so there was much to catch up on. Old friends, new year. One of my better New Year's, I must admit.

Tomorrow the world will awake, with a hangover it will spend the entire day trying to shake off.

Happy New Year to all my readers, and here's to new experiences this year!