Comment on Sunday Times: Past Imperfect, Future Tense by melcly Dear Collin, This column touched me in a very personal way because it’s something that I know that I will have to contend with at some point or another. I’m still young (well, relatively), and babies aren’t anywhere on the planned horizon yet, but it looks increasingly likely that I’d be raising a child here in the US. I’m filled with both a sense of apprehension and optimism, the inner turmoil of raising a child here vs. there notwithstanding. I’m a Singaporean who pursued my university education in Boston, MA. I met an Korean American boy one summer early in my Freshmen year and four years later after graduating, we got married. He has been to Singapore about 6 times by now, loves his morning economical bee hoon and knows how and when to use the term “ah pui.” We now live in Boston where I pursue a career in cancer research, something that I couldn’t have done had I remained in Singapore. I say “couldn’t” because I was one of those late-bloomers who didn’t take studying seriously enough so by the time I was ready for a university education, I was left with the the choice of studying business or social sciences or humanities, something very general, subjects for the also-rans after all the medical and engieering posts were filled up with the top grade students. And no amount of passion in evolutionary biology could secure me a place to study science in the local universities - it isn’t a topic that was taught readily in secondary schools, it was something I had developed a keen interest in purely by reading the works of Charles Darwin himself, Richard Dawkins and other populist writers like Matt Ridley. Furthermore, something about the government’s strategy to make Singapore into a biomedical research hub (which resulted in the creation of Biopolis) didn’t seem all that right to me - I thought my career stood a better chance in a place where research and a research culture had been cultivated and established for a long time. I know Singaporeans like things good, cheap and fast, but not everything is like Maggi mee - you certainly cannot build a research enterprise out of nothing and expect it to be glitch-free. This opinion seems vindicated in recent times, especially with stories like that of Dr. Cai Mingjie (the Cab driver with a Stanford PhD), who was booted from an A*Star institution under very suspicious circumstances. The Hubby loves Singapore though, because he’s a jaded American who was thrilled at seeing an actual scenario where Government actually works - such a situation was only ever a hypothesis, discussed in political science classes. No American of his age can remember a time where his/her tax dollars actually seemed to be working for the people; I mean look at Boston - there are potholes in the roads everywhere! And what would take a quarter of the time for a Bangladeshi worker to do, would really take 5 full-time construction workers here in Boston to do. We have seriously discussed the merits of raising our children here versus there, and our conclusion is tantalizingly close to yours’ and your wife’s. Family is of course a big deal to me too - Singaporeans grow up with very tight-knit extended families who they get to see all the time. Americans on the other hand, are more fond of the “nuclear family” concept and when the kids reach college-age, they disperse all over the country and practically re-unite only once a year on Thanksgiving. While my child may never experience that pseudo-Kampong feeling of a large family, he/she would have the space to become more independent. Part of me champions the need for isolation from your parents’ at a certain age, because there comes a time when an individual needs to come to terms with his own thoughts and with who he is - it is, I believe, crucial to develop a certain maturity in the way one thinks, not to mention, a certain clarity of mind which is just more difficult to achieve being constantly under your parents’ roof (and noses). Anyway, thanks for writing this post and expressing so eloquently your hopes and fears for Yakuza Baby! I’ve wanted to write for a while, especially when I discovered your blog and read the essay “Paved with good intentions,” which was a startling revelation that made me realize that I wasn’t alone. I sought both strength and comfort in those words. Maybe sometime when you too aren’t busy with changing diapers any longer, we could all grab dinner in Brooklyn (read about your post on Lugar’s) or Dim Sum in Flushing; the Hubby works in New York City so either he’s here in Boston on weekends or I’m there. Meanwhile, take care and here’s wishing you and your wife much joy with your new bundle of joy (they grow up quickly don’t they)! Best, Mel Sunday Times: Losing The Battle of the Bottle The following was published in The Sunday Times on 6 September 2009 under the title ‘Trick or Teat’: Losing the Battle of the Bottle by Colin Goh I guess all parents expect to fight with their kids at some point. I just didn’t figure on entering into mortal combat with my daughter when she was just three months of age. And losing. “Oi! You think you’re David Beckham or what?” I cried, as Yakuza Baby kicked her bottle out of my hand onto the floor for the umpteenth time.  “Or maybe Mariah Carey,” I muttered as she then broke into a high-pitched yowl. With summer ending, the Wife has to go back to her university to teach, so I told her I’d stay home and bottlefeed the baby during the hours she’s away.  It should have been a piece of cake – after all, during the first 6 weeks after bringing Yakuza Baby home from the hospital, I bottlefed her during the wee hours of the morning, so the Wife could have at least a few hours of unbroken sleep. But for some bizarre reason, she was now vehemently rejecting all attempts to put anything other than Mummy’s nipple in her mouth – even though the bottle also contained breastmilk, often freshly-squeezed. “I think she’s just acquired a taste for my breast and now feels everything else is an inadequate substitute,” said the Wife. “Oh great,” I rolled my eyes. “A three month-old food critic. K.F. Seetoh, tepi sikit.” At first, when I’d stick the teat into her mouth, Yakuza Baby would make a face not dissimilar to the ones my ang moh friends would make whenever I’d feed them durian or century eggs for the first time.  Then she’d spit it out, and scream. Thereafter, if I so much as came within three feet of her with a bottle in my hand, she’d shriek like an extra from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “This website says it’s common,” the Wife said, showing me the forum page of La Leche League International (www.llli.org), North America’s leading breastfeeding support group. What an appropriate name, I thought. ‘Leche’ is Spanish for ‘milk’, but it also sounds awfully like the Malay word for ‘troublesome’. The general consensus amongst the forum posters was that the solution was finding a teat the baby would accept – and preferably have someone other than Mummy do the feeding, so that baby won’t smell the maternal goodness she’d much prefer.  The problem was that this “someone other” was invariably no one other than Daddy – which wasn’t much help in my case. I then checked with my daddy friends – but while I was cheered to note that I was far from alone in my experience, their response was pretty much the same: try out different teats till you get the right one. So the next day, I went a-teat hunting. (I couldn’t shake the image in my head of myself as Elmer Fudd, tiptoeing with a finger on my lips, saying, “Be vewwy, vewwy quiet, I’m hunting nippews!”) At the Babies R’ Us superstore, I bought one of every single bottle-and-teat combo available. “Amazing,” I told the Wife as I emptied my haul onto the coffee table. “So many companies claiming that their product most closely approximates the human breast! If only they’d told me back in school how much money one could make from studying boobies, my career path would have been entirely different.”  She gave me a look that would have curdled a pot of laksa at ten paces. Over the next few days, we experimented.  Each time, the Wife would duck out of the house, placing herself safely beyond Yakuza Baby’s olfactory radar, while I test-drove the different bottles. There was the one with a teat supposed to provide the mouthfeel of an actual nipple, another with mock areola, and the one which claimed it could mimic the suction and compression of actual breastfeeding. I tried nipples with faster flow, slower flow, specially-cut holes, rubber, silicone, everything. And failed every single time. Yakuza Baby reacted to each and every teat like someone discovering that her CPF had been invested with Bernie Madoff. So now I’m at my wit’s end, and have no choice but to ask you, my dear readers, if you have any suggestions or tips to share. Has your baby ever refused a bottle, and what did you do to remedy the situation? Please email me at: colingoh@yahoo.com, and I’ll try everything short of child abuse out and present the findings in my next column.  (Your identity will be kept confidential, not to worry.) Whoever provides me with a solution that works will have my undying gratitude. I wish I could give a more valuable prize, but I recently lost a lot of money on baby bottles. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Talk To Me, Baby The following was published in the Sunday Times on 23 August 2009: Talk to me, baby by Colin Goh We’ve been calling our daughter ‘Yakuza Baby’ (for latecomers to this column, she popped out during a Japanese gangster movie) for so long, I wouldn’t have been surprised if her first words were, “Mise mo nee yo, kono yarou?” (The Yakuza equivalent of “Kuah si mi?” or “Whatcha lookin’ at?”) So I was somewhat surprised when it turned out to be, “Hawr.” “Did Yakuza Baby just say ‘Hello’?” I asked the Wife, eyebrows raised. Hitherto, her communications had been limited to: crying; burping; smiling; cooing; an indignant “Weh!” when she wants attention; and a violent kicking of her left leg, which is her signal to us that she needs to poop or pee. (Figuring out what this motion meant has saved us a bundle in diapers.) “Hawr”, with a heavy ‘h’, was her first articulated utterance. I leaned over her bouncy chair and asked, “What was that again?” “Fah,” she replied, with a giggle. “Hawr.” “’Hawr’? Do you mean ‘Hello’?” “Hawr,” she repeated. “Glah grrgah hnnng.” (I may have gotten the spelling wrong.) “She responded!” I exclaimed to the Wife. “We’re having a conversation!” “Are you sure it’s not just gas or cooing?” the Wife furrowed her brow, incredulous. “No, this is the first time where there’s been a back and forth exchange, involving distinct sounds and deliberate repetition!” I turned back to Yakuza Baby. “Chope, are these random sounds you’re trying out, or are these actual words in, um, Bablish?” “Fnngah,” she answered, helpfully. Similar dialogues ensued several times a day over the next couple of weeks, each lasting around ten minutes or so. She was especially engaged whenever I spoke Bablish back to her, instead of English. Her eyes would light up and she’d smile and laugh, as if she’d found a fellow baby to chat with. I really wondered how the conversations got translated inside her head. Probably something like: Yakuza Baby: “Hawr!” (“Greetings, O He-Whose-Nipples-Produce-No-Milk! Have you perchance come to wipe my buttocks?” Me: “Gnaaaah.” (“I exist only to serve you, your highness.”) Yakuza Baby: “Mfoo!” (“Verily, make sure the wipes are warm, not like the last time!”) Frustratingly, each time we tried to record her babbling on video, she would fixate on the camera and either clam up or cry. “Maybe we have to negotiate a fee with her agent first,” I ventured as I turned to Yakuza Baby. “CAA or William Morris?” “Ek-ek-ah,” said Yakuza Baby, as if in affirmation. “You know,” I told the Wife one night after putting the babe to bed. “If Yakuza Baby is building an actual vocabulary, such as it is, maybe we should think about being more consistent in how we communicate with her.”  Right now, we spoke to her in whatever took our fancy: Singlish, Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin and of course, the high-pitched sing-song “Aw, is iddle-widdle li’ul baby comfy-poos?”-style of baby talk. Often all in the same conversation. “Can you not be so Singaporean?” the Wife shot back. “She’s, what, two months old! What’s your hurry? You want to teach her the Queen’s English so that she can address the UN General Assembly by five? Please, lah! Now it’s more important to just enjoy the time with her, and for her to pick that up. She’ll learn in her own good time!” Still, I wondered what would happen if I raised the bar on our exchanges a little.  The next morning, I sat opposite Yakuza Baby and went, in perfect BBC tones, “So… where do you see yourself in five years?” She gave me a quizzical look, but said nothing. “Do you have any complaints about the amenities in this facility that you wish to surface to the management?” Still nothing. “Do you believe there can be peace in the Middle East?” Not a peep. “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” At this point, she simultaneously spat up milk and pooped in her diaper. I guess the experiment was productive, but all it produced was a mess. “Maybe that was a little contrived,” I conceded, as I cleaned Yakuza Baby up. “But don’t you think we should nevertheless start communicating with her like an adult, in standard English?” “The only thing you’re communicating,” said the Wife, rolling her eyes, “is that you’re a wan…” “Yah, yah, whatever,” I growled quickly, even though I knew she was right. At this point, Yakuza Baby chimed in with a throaty “Hawr!” “Did I ask for your opinion?” I made a face, but realised that nothing I could say, in any adult language, could match that single syllable for eloquence or sheer delightfulness. “Blorp,” I said to Yakuza Baby as I nuzzled her belly, and she concurred. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: A Modest Proposal for Singapore Teens The following was published in the Sunday Times on 9 August 2009: A Modest Proposal for Singapore Teens by Colin Goh Since this is scheduled to run on National Day, I thought I’d write on something of national significance – you know, for a change.  And last week, when I opened my letterbox and saw the Baby Bonus application forms that my family back in Singapore had mailed me, I knew my topic had to be our country’s perennial baby deficit. To wit, I’ve been noting over the years how the Gahmen keeps anguishing over the following issues: (1) that Singaporeans just aren’t having enough kids despite years of exhortations and financial incentives; (2) that too many of us are marrying late because we’re waiting for some mythical perfect spouse; and somewhat contradictorily, (3) how more and more teens are having sex. Early one morning at 3 a.m., while changing Yakuza Baby’s diaper, it suddenly hit me: the solution to all 3 issues is (brace yourself) ENCOURAGE TEENAGE PREGNANCY. Chope. Before you start writing irate letters to the Forum page, hear me out. I’m not suggesting some free-for-all shagathon. I think that the social taboos and ee-yur factor aside, teen pregnancy can be managed. I mean, we’re Singapore; social engineering is what we do. Because deep down, don’t you think it’s ridiculous that we need babies so badly, but are hung up on some arbitrarily-decided age and a social convention like marriage? As long as our babies have people who care for their welfare and progress, does it matter that their procreators didn’t sumpah over a piece of paper at Fort Canning? Let me explain how I see it working: (1) Encourage youngsters to have babies between 16-20.  Why not? Their raging hormones make them less than picky about partners, and they’re comparatively eng, with no careers to establish. And don’t give me that ‘but they must study’ nonsense.  We all know they already spend half their time trying to pak-tor (or worse, downloading porn), so we might as well channel it into more productive activities.  Anyway, your ancestors probably had you at this age, and what, you’re going to criticise Great Grandma? (2) Kids between 16-20 will have parents who are roughly between the ages of 32-50, i.e. people who are still healthy, relatively stable in their career, and can therefore spare some time to help take care of the baby.  They might even have grandparents around, so potentially, the child-rearing burden can be shared between three generations. (3) Young mums get paid to take care of their babies full-time for 2 years following their birth, at salaries comparable to full-time national servicemen.  Consider it ‘MS’ (Maternity Service). This would also ameliorate the resentment some men feel about their female peers getting the jump on them career-wise. (4) Young dads continue to serve NS, which they’ll now do so much more willingly. I’m guessing here, but I think most guys would rather run and touch the occasional faraway tree than have to change diapers at 3 am every morning. And they’ll be given more bookout leave to visit Mummy and Baby too. (6) Once both parents complete their MS/NS, they get a free university education. Why not? For some reason, we’re obsessed with wanting our graduates in particular to have kids, so why not just make those who have kids graduates? (7) By the time teen parents graduate and enter the job market, their child would be ready for pre-school or even primary school, which will free them to concentrate more on their careers. (8) Give teen parents, as well as their own parents, the usual tax breaks, financial incentives and statutorily-mandated extra leave each year, to help everyone shoulder the burden of the baby. (9) What if teen mum and teen dad decide, post-baby, that, oops, they’re really not that into each other?  Not that big a deal, since the grandparents and great-grandparents are around to give, frankly, more mature support.  And what’s new about divorced or absentee parents anyway? You can’t shield kids from every unpleasantness in life.  Better for mummy and daddy to be freed to make more babies for the country. (10) For any unfortunate unwanted kids, the appropriately-acronymed Ministry of Manpower (MOM) can set up CDCs (Child Deposit Centres) to pair them up with willing foster families or just bring ‘em up themselves.  We’re already called a ‘nanny state’ by some, why not turn it into an accolade? But when I told the Wife about my brilliant initiative, she just patted my cheek and said, “Okay, so if your daughter gets knocked up in secondary school, I’ll tell her Daddy thinks you’re being patriotic?”  That kind of stumped me. Then she added, “Clearly you’ve too much time to think.  Better take over the 5 a.m. bottle-feeding shift too.” I guess Mummy knows best. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Feeling The Heat Over a Hot Babe The following was published in the Sunday Times on 26 July 2009: Feeling the heat over a hot babe by Colin Goh Corrigenda: In my last column, I described how my Mother-in-Law had advised the Wife to avoid eating yams during the postnatal confinement period, because “people say sekali the baby’s down there will be itchy.” According to my Mother-in-Law, however, I misheard her: in fact, it is the mother’s down there that will allegedly be afflicted. She wishes me to correct this immediately, lest “people” think she has been dispensing erroneous advice. Yam-lovin’ mummies, you’ve been warned! If I were ever to have a superhero name, I’d be Kancheongspider-Man. Because, as I’m learning, dealing with a newborn baby is an enterprise fraught with anxiety. With every little thing you do, you hear a tiny imp whispering in your ear, “You’re doing it wrong. You’re going to ruin this child forever. You’re going to make her (pick any one of the following or feel free to substitute a catastrophe of your own choosing): cross-eyed/bow-legged/botak/stay back one year in kindergarten/ineligible to get into an Ivy League university.” I’ve been feeling especially uneasy of late, which I think has something to do with all these mainland Chinese women staring daggers at the Wife and me as we trundle Yakuza Baby about. “Look at that one over there,” I murmured to the Wife. “If she could, she’d hiss at us.” “Hiss neh’mine,” replied the Wife. “Wait she spits at us, then we habis. Walk faster.” Nothing makes you feel less Chinese than living amongst real Made-in-China Chinese, and boy, are we feeling it here where we’re currently based, in the New York suburb of Flushing, the largest Chinatown on America’s East Coast. And it’s all over the issue of baby bundling. At first, we were mystified by all the dirty looks and clucking of tongues. But it all became clear one sweltering summer day, when we took Yakuza Baby to the neonatologist for a routine checkup.  En route, we encountered yet another Chinese lady scowling at us. “You can’t dress your baby like that!” she barked at us in Mandarin. “Like what?” I was puzzled. As the temperature was a muggy, Singapore-style 31 degrees Celsius, we’d dressed her in a light cotton shirt-and-pants combo with a frilly bonnet to shield her from the sun. “Your baby will be cold!” she said. “It’s so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk!” I retorted. “Babies are different!” she insisted, and raised her own baby for us to see.  Well, you couldn’t actually see the child at first, because he was hidden behind a mound of clothes. He had a heavy woolen knit hat pulled over his eyes, and wore a fleece baby bunting outfit under which was another full bodysuit.  He looked like he was auditioning for one of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expeditions to Antarctica.  “Dress your baby warmer!” she scolded us as she huffed off with her Eskimo child, who was as stiff as a board. “Can she be right?” I asked the Wife, panic in my eyes. “Are we child abusers, exposing Yakuza Baby to the risk of catching frostbite in summer?” Now that we’d been enlightened, it was true that practically every Chinese child we saw on the street was bundled up like mini-Michelin Men, even as their parents mopped their own sopping brows. The same couldn’t be said for the babies of other ethnicities, however. “It’s a Chinese thing,” said the neonatologist, a Caucasian lady who did her best to keep from rolling her eyes when we consulted her. “My husband’s Chinese and his mom’s always bugging me to wrap my kid up.  Even when he’s sweating!  Did anyone tell you you shouldn’t shower for a month? Or eat ginger constantly? They’re obsessed about cold!” “I think there’s a deep cultural memory amongst many Chinese people of living in the harsh countryside, where freezing was a real concern,” she posited. “When a trip to the bathhouse in winter was to risk freezing, and eating heaps of spicy ginger was the cheapest way to keep warm.” The doctor assured me that babies do just fine in air-conditioned places. “Your daughter spent five weeks in the neonatal ICU, which was at a constant 18 degrees Celsius. As long as you don’t place her in the full blast of the A.C., she’ll be dandy.” I was relieved. Quite apart from being acquitted of baby neglect, I couldn’t help but think: my daughter wouldn’t really be a Singaporean baby if she couldn’t tahan a little air-con! As for dealing with the ire of our mainland cousins, well… we’ll just have to give them the old cold shoulder. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Confounded by Confinement The following was published in The Sunday Times on 12 July 2009: Confounded by confinement by Colin Goh I must confess my surprise at the amount of mail my recent pieces about the arrival of my daughter have garnered.  Are my accounts of grappling with a baby touching some kind of chord? Or do people just like knowing that I’m suffering? Either way, I’m grateful for the advice many of you seem to want to share with me. Certain recommendations, however, instead of providing solutions, have raised even more questions – mainly about the confinement period. “Don’t allow the Wife to drink any water during her confinement,” a few of you wrote. “She should only drink red date tea.” “And make sure she doesn’t wash her hair either,” others added.  (To which the Wife responded, “Ee-yur.”) I’m always tickled that Chinese Singaporeans refer to the month immediately following childbirth as “confinement”. The actual Mandarin term for this period is zhuo yue, which literally means “sit for a month”, - essentially all the new mother is encouraged to do. As I soon learned, it’s an interval marked by many arcane rules. “Don’t walk about so much,” ordered the Mother-in-Law, when she arrived in New York to administer the Wife’s confinement. “People say your womb will drop out.” Unbelievably, there were even more peculiar injunctions to come. “Don’t eat durian while breastfeeding,” she continued. “People say the child will have a smelly head.”  Oh-kay, I could vaguely understand that one. But the next was, “Don’t eat hae koh (the shrimp paste used in rojak), people say the baby will have a scaly head.” “Scaly head?!” I spluttered. “And who are all these people saying this?” “People, lah,” she replied, albeit now with the tiniest quaver of hesitation in her voice, which she quickly paved over with another prohibition. “And don’t eat yam. People say sekali the baby’s down there will be itchy.” As Wikipedia was glaringly silent on the effects of foodstuffs on heads and more subjacent parts of the infant anatomy, I decided to consult the Wife’s obstetrician/gynaecologist. “Just do what she says,” replied the OB-GYN (as they’re referred to in the US), who is Taiwanese. “My mother told me not to cry so much after I gave birth because it would ruin my eyesight, and good Western-trained doctor that I am, I didn’t believe her.  I went from 20/20 vision to these super-thick glasses.” But scaly head? “Just because she can’t produce a Lancet article and the results of triple-blind clinical trials doesn’t mean her statements are false – only that empirical studies haven’t been conducted yet,” she said, adding, “Want to see scaly heads?” before whipping out photos of babies with seborrhoeic dermatitis.  My turn to go “Ee-yur.” “Don’t sweat the details and just appreciate the good intentions,” she continued. “It’s a good thing for mothers to rest as much as possible after childbirth, and to watch their diet since it does affect the breastmilk. Anyway, what’s it cost to lay off durians or whatever for a few months?” Damn, there goes my new durian rojak oh nee recipe, I thought. “I guess these beliefs stem from some experience, even if they’re not scientifically evaluated,” I said to the Wife (who insisted on washing her hair right after labour, and wild horses couldn’t stop her from doing it, and she’s doing just fine thankyouverymuch). “Maybe some women in rural China went back to toil in the fields immediately after giving birth, and injured their uteruses. Or maybe Chinese babies are sensitive to shellfish, even when cooked and mashed. I just wonder if other cultures have similarly weird beliefs.” I learned the answer two weeks later, when a nurse dropped by to check on Yakuza Baby. (New York State monitors premature babies till the age of 3, to catch any developmental problems early.) “Chile doin’ jes’ fahn,” said the nurse in her Caribbean accent, after running Yakuza Baby through some exercises. But the routines clearly got the child excited, because she began hiccupping. “Lick your finger and draw a cross on the baby’s forehead,” commanded the nurse. “What?” I looked at her incredulously. “Do it, mahn!” she said, and I obeyed. And to my utter surprise, it worked. “Won’t find dat in no medical textbook,” she giggled. “But my mother in Trinidad always swore by it.  First time I seen it in action, though.” It was also the last time it worked. Maybe Yakuza Baby was just so stunned by my bizarre action that she stopped. Still, it reminded me to be less dismissive of these ancient prescriptions – you just never know. Besides, I’m still Singaporean and kiasuism’s in my DNA. After all, I wouldn’t want anyone’s womb to drop out. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Multitasking Tips for Zombie Daddy The following was published in the Sunday Times on 28 June 2009: Multitasking Tips for Zombie Daddy by Colin Goh Last column, I described how I felt the routine of changing, feeding and soothing my newborn daughter in the wee hours of every morning was zombifying my brain. I then asked readers to send me any tips they might have for multitasking, to make my nightly grind more productive. I received a good number of suggestions, but mostly a barrage of criticism along the lines of: Why on earth would you even want to multitask, you churlish, self-centred dolt?! You should be happy to focus all your attention on this lovely human being! To which I can only throw up my hands and say: guilty as charged. I guess I got all kan cheong after reading in Wired magazine about a fellow named Ethan Nicholas who’s now making pots of money from an iPhone app he wrote while taking care of his infant son – cradling him with one hand, and coding with the other. Talk about ‘spoil market’! The first multitasking suggestion I got came from a reader who told me she was able to read while feeding her baby, by turning the pages with her toes. I tried this out, and have the paper cuts on my feet to prove it. In a similar vein, another reader shared with me how, by some judicious positioning of the baby’s head in the crook of his arm, and holding the bottle tilted backwards like a violin, he could feed his baby using only one hand, while freeing the other to Twitter or use the TV remote. When the Wife saw me attempting to try this with Yakuza Baby, she threatened me with Jon and Kate-style proceedings. “But one of my readers can do it!” I protested. “Maybe he trained in some Chinese acrobatic troupe and can also spin plates from poles balanced on his nipples!” she barked. “Are you also going to try that, Mr. Unable-to-Assemble-An-Ikea-Bookcase-Without-A-First-Aid-Kit-On-Standby?” Point taken. The next suggestion was submitted in one form or another by at least eight different readers: Use the opportunity to reflect, and think seriously about how you want to bring up your child, and maybe (softly) share your thoughts with her. I tried this, and it yielded very interesting results. Interesting as in disturbing. After much reflection, I decided I wanted to give my little Yakuza Baby the same kind of loving, supportive upbringing I had, but that hopefully, she’d turn out completely different from me. “If you get it into your head that you can have a career in the arts,” I shared (softly) with her, “you might find yourself one fine night holding your own baby and wondering not only how come you aren’t writing lucrative iPhone apps, but also how come you can’t afford an iPhone.”  I also began wondering what kind of boyfriend she’ll grow up to have and all the various ways I might intimidate him. In the end, this well-intentioned exercise made me realize that it really isn’t a question of whether I will mess up my child, but how.  I recalled the wise words of the British poet Philip Larkin, who wrote: “They [four-letter word that is unprintable in a family newspaper] you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.” Probably the most practical suggestion came from several readers who told me: buy a sling or strappy baby carrier to free your hands, lah! The Wife did buy a sling, but unfortunately chose one made of warm fleece, which makes it useful for the winter months here in New York, but sheer torture for a half-man/half-polar bear like me, especially now during summer.  When I put it on, I immediately started sweating, and the sling became a sauna for Yakuza Baby.  A generous friend did send us a strappy carrier, which was a lot more comfortable, and also less ah soh-looking (an important consideration for daddies). Unfortunately, my tiny, premature daughter hasn’t yet hit the minimum recommended weight to use it, but it’s a matter of weeks. So I’m optimistic my travails will soon be ameliorated. My favourite suggestion of all, however, came from Matthew Sng, who forwarded me a piece on Dr. Anthony Atala, an expert in regenerative medicine who made headlines in 2006 when he successfully grew human bladders in his lab, and is now trying to bio-engineer other organs. “Grow another arm!” was Matthew’s cheery accompanying message. To me, growing extra limbs presents the ultimate solution to preventing my life from degenerating into a zombie movie. Sure, it’ll transform it into a mutant movie instead, but in my book, that’s progress. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Zombie Daddy Wants to Pick Your Brains The following was published in the Sunday Times on 14 June 2009: Zombie Daddy Wants to Pick Your Brains by Colin Goh First things first: thank you for the deluge of emails in response to my last column, about my struggles with the contents of my newborn daughter’s diaper.  I was heartened to hear so many of you confirm that the traditional ‘shee-shee’ potty training technique works. I was particularly amused to receive emails from several Teochew readers bemoaning the aural similarity between the Teochew word for sleep (‘ngh’) and the, um, pre-pooping grunt.  I guess we Teochews know something about diapers – after all, that ancient bit of doggerel, ‘Teochew nang, ka-chng ang-ang’ (‘Teochew people, their buttocks are red’), must have come from somewhere. A good number of you also sent ‘so what’s fatherhood like outside of diaper-changing?’ queries. To which I can say, my experience is like something out of the movies. Specifically, zombie movies. I’m no stranger to burning the midnight oil; all my previous jobs have entailed extended periods of working for days without sleep. But even though I was warned by friends with kids to prepare for sleep deprivation, I hadn’t anticipated the distinct strain of brain-deadness that comes with baby-care, with your consciousness randomly weaving in and out of your head as you robotically repeat a set of purely reflexive responses: Baby cry. Stumble to crib. Pick her up. Shamble to changing station. Unwrap diaper. Wince. Wipe. Change diaper. Warm milk. Fend off baby’s attempts to bite my nipple.  Feel sense of paternal self-worth eroding as she expresses her clear disappointment that, tsk, it’s the bottle dude, not the booby lady. Feed her. Burp her. Wipe up spit-up. Change diaper again. Sing and rock her to sleep. Wonder how come I know the full lyrics to so few songs. Wonder if it’ll give her some future neurosis if I keep singing her ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd. Wonder how come I still know the words to ‘Semoga Bahagia’ from primary school, but still have no idea what they mean. Swaddle. Replace in crib (if she allows me). Sterilize bottles for next feeding. Rinse. Repeat. Do not pass ‘Go’. Do not collect $200. My zombified mood is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I volunteered for the night shift. You need to get proper sleep, I told the Wife, because you have to be healthy and produce all that milky makan for the baby. So I’ll handle all feedings and changings between 11 pm and 6 am, no problem. Why, it’ll be just like my old swinging batang days again! Except it’s not. Wiping bottoms bears very little resemblance to eating prata with friends, even when done at the same hours of the night. The fact is, there’s something surreal about the dead of night.  The place you only think you know takes on strange aspects. Every night at 3 a.m., as I feed Yakuza Baby, I peer through my window and observe the nightlife: the Chinese restaurant workers returning from work, cigarettes invariably dangling from their lips; the garbage collectors; a drunken Korean businessman stumbling home after a bulgogi-and-soju nightcap at the nearby 24-hour barbeque joint; the neighbour’s daughter sneaking out to meet her boyfriend; stray cats sniffing around my garbage can; and even once, a pair of feuding raccoons.  I’ve lived here in this neighbourhood in Queens in New York for over two years now, but it’s like seeing a whole new place nearly every night. But anthropologically interesting though staring out the window can often be, National Geographic it’s not, and I wonder: there must be something more productive I can do at the same time as I feed Yakuza Baby, before my brain really rots and I become an actual member of the living dead. I can’t really read or work, because all the lights are kept too low. Besides, those require a free hand, something also crucial for watching TV.  Because you absolutely need the ability to change channels with late late night American TV, when the weird shows and even weirder commercials come out. (My latest addiction is a borderline creepy Korean reality show called ‘Tracking Your Ex-Boyfriend’, which is basically an exercise in stalking. But because it has subtitles, I can watch it with the sound off and thus not rouse the baby.) So since you folks were so kind as to share your tips for dealing with poop, perhaps you can tell me: do you have any suggestions (preferably based on real parental experience) for how one might multitask with a baby in one arm, and a bottle in another? Email me at: colingoh@yahoo.com. This zombie daddy needs your brains! Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Poop Patrol The following was published in the Sunday Times on 31 May 2009: Sunday Times 31 May 2009 Poop Patrol by Colin Goh For those of you who’ve ever felt that your life is just an endless stream of crap, well, you’re not alone.  Because that’s exactly how I’m finding the fatherhood experience. Literally. Sure, I’ve read the books, and heard my friends’ war stories, but none of it truly prepared me for the sheer, unrelenting monotony of diaper duty. “Ooh, lookee,” I’d say to the Wife at 3 am, unswaddling our baby daughter on the changing pad. “Yakuza Baby has left her Daddy another little present, all gift wrapped. I wonder what’s inside this time? Something nice? An iPhone, maybe? An Amazon gift voucher? Hmmm… no, it’s just another pile of poop.” Story of my life, really. It’s gotten to the point that when someone recently asked me what I do for a living, I replied, “Nightsoil carrier.” (A facetious answer, yes, but it elicits about the same level of blankness as when I say, “multimedia production”.) I’m not generally squeamish about poop.  When I was a schoolkid, every morning before heading to school, my duty was to prowl around the house hunting for whatever my dogs had ejected the previous night, and scoop it up using a horribly deformed trowel I’d made during a Workshop/Technical metalwork project. (I failed the project, but the trowel went on to find a most suitable purpose.) I attribute my generally positive outlook on life to this experience, because when your morning begins with poop, the rest of the day just seems so much more pleasant. But with my dogs, I only had to clear crap once a day.  And one bleary-eyed morning last week, it dawned on me that for the next few years, I was going to be wiping bottoms every few hours. My life, as it were, flashed before my eyes as a conveyor belt of soiled diapers, stretching to the horizon and beyond. That freaked me out – and so when I was at the library, a certain title jumped out at me: “The Diaper-Free Baby”.  Basically, there’s a growing movement here in the US, particularly among the granola-eating, sandal-wearing crowd, to train babies and toddlers to signal to their parents when they need to go to the toilet, and then once safely over a bowl, relieve themselves on cue.  The aim is to save money spent on diapers, not to mention the environment. Critics in the US scoff at this as a mere fad, saying that parents have to spend much more time and effort monitoring their kids for when they have to go, than just tossing a diaper in the trash. Reading the book, however, I was more surprised at the statistic that most American kids wear diapers till they are 3 years old or more.  And I was stunned to learn that the diaper-free technique being advocated was one that probably every child in Singapore, if not all of Asia, has undergone. The technique is roughly like this: you start watching your baby and learning her signals for when she needs to go. Once you pick ‘em up, you hold your baby over the potty or toilet, and go ‘shee-shee’ when she needs to pee, and ‘ngh-ngh’ when she needs to poo. Basically, over time, babies learn to associate the sounds with the urges, and gradually, the ability to control the release of their waste. Sound familiar? The Wife and I confirmed this with our respective mothers, both of whom said they had employed the method, and stopped using diapers on us after only a few months.  They were incredulous that this age-old technique was news to Americans. It led me to think that the critics of the procedure must have been paid plants of the diaper industry: 3 years’ worth of diapers, plus associated products like odor-suppressing bins and bags, wet wipes, diaper rash creams, etc., amounts to a steaming pile of revenue. So we’ve decided to try the method out when Yakuza Baby attains greater motor control. If it worked for our mums, why not for us too? It can’t hurt. But there is one point of disagreement between the Wife and I over its execution, and it is a fundamental one. “In my family, it wasn’t ‘shee-shee’,” said the Wife. “It was ‘sss-sss’.” “Well, we can’t go ‘ngh-ngh’ for pooping with my family,” I responded. “’Ngh’ in Teochew means ‘sleep’, not ‘poop’. It will confuse the poor child.” And so on. We still haven’t come to an agreement on the terminology, so if you all have any suggestions, email them to me at colingoh@yahoo.com.  I generally receive a lot of crap at that address as it is, so messages specifically about crap would be considered progress. Share on Facebook Comment on Sunday Times: Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Yakuza by ATigerInTheKitchen CONGRATS!!!! So happy for you…glad everything worked out and hope to catch up with you guys sometime soon. Cheryl + Mike Sunday Times: Past Imperfect, Future Tense The following was published in The Sunday Times on 17 May 2009: Sunday Times 17 May 2009 Past Imperfect, Future Tense by Colin Goh in New York “I think I’m going to be a useless parent,” I told the Wife last week. “Is that a supposition or a statement of intent?” she replied, eyebrows knit with alarm. “I warn you, ah: don’t think you can siam changing diapers.” “Premonition, lah,” I sighed. We were sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit spending time with Yakuza Baby (so nicknamed because, as explained in the last column, she came into the world while we were watching a Japanese gangster movie). My sense of foreboding arose after it struck me how different our daughter’s life would be from either the Wife’s or mine. I know all kids grow up in ways their parents can never fully anticipate - I doubt my dad ever foresaw his son forging a career consisting of long stretches spent accessing a parallel universe through a keyboard and screen – but what lies ahead for Yakuza Baby seemed especially opaque to me. Living in New York, we can never share our past and heritage with her in any truly tangible way.  Sure, we could tell her about it, and show her photos, or maybe she’d get to see some of it during visits, but it wouldn’t really be the same. Part of it would be not having old friends or family nearby.  Getting to wave to Ah Kong and Ah Ma via webcam just can’t compensate for actually having grandparents around.  As it is, thanks to the H1N1 virus, my poor parents have had to postpone their visit to see the grandchild they’d been demanding for years until… well, until I guess all the pigs in Mexico have completed their course of Tamiflu, whenever that might be. And while the Wife’s mother did manage to make it here before the outbreak broke (she came to implement the Wife’s traditional Chinese postpartum ‘confinement’ treatment, or, as I like to call it, the ‘All-Ginger-All-The-Time Diet Plan’), the porcine pandemic also affected her ability to spend time with the baby. Halfway through her visit, the hospital banned anyone other than parents from visiting the babies, especially because the school that is the locus for New York’s outbreak is only a mile away. We had to beg the administrator to tolong-tolong let her see her granddaughter for five minutes the day before her flight home to Singapore. “So ko lian,” the Mother-in-Law lamented as she held Yakuza Baby’s teeny hand. “Donno when she can get to taste my ter tor tng (pig stomach soup)!” And I guess that’s kind of why I suspect I’ll be a useless dad. Whatever life experience I can impart to my daughter would never have the heft of reality. To her, our life in Singapore would always have a hand-me-down, fairy-tale quality about it. Really? Your country, like, banned chewing gum and smacks people on their ass and stuff? And you used to, like, write for a “newspaper”? What’s that, Dad? Is that like a blog? Duuuude! She might eventually taste, and even like, ter tor tng, but probably only in a ‘Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman’ kind of way. But at the same time I was lamenting the loss of the past, I was also getting a glimpse of Yakuza Baby’s future.  I knew that growing up in New York, she would be more patched in to globalizing forces than anywhere else in the world.  We Singaporeans like to think we’re multi-cultural, but we don’t have a patch on New York. I counted at least ten different nationalities amongst the neonatal ICU nurses alone. In the course of Yakuza Baby’s stay, she was tended to by Russian, Irish, Thai, Filipino, Chinese, Dominican, Jamaican, African, Korean, Indian and regular Caucasian American nurses. And then there were the patients. I wonder what school for Yakuza Baby will be like. So while her sense of heritage might not be as complete as I’d like, on the other hand, her future is probably much more pregnant with possibility than I could have ever imagined. I guess it’s a trade-off I can live with, not that I really have a say in it. And maybe I’m being overly sentimental about Yakuza Baby not getting enough contact with Singapore anyway. With today’s global population flows, who knows? Case in point: the hospital staff member who came to take down Yakuza Baby’s details for her birth certificate introduced herself with “Hello, I’m Bee Leng…”  Bee Leng? I asked. With a Hokkien name like that, are you by any chance from… And she was! Nowadays, even when you can’t go home, home just might come your way anyway. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: I Give Up! The following was published in the Sunday Times on 3 May 2009: Normal 0 0 1 674 3842 32 7 4718 11.1282 0 0 0 Sunday Times 3 May 2009 I Give Up! by Colin Goh To cope with the new addition to our family, I’m having to make a few subtractions. Even without factoring in Yakuza Baby (as we’ve taken to calling our newborn daughter, since the Wife gave birth to her while we were in the middle of watching a Japanese gangster film), the economy, like some wrathful elder god, is demanding sacrifices, virgin or otherwise.  (More likely the latter, because I understand the former are in short supply these days.) “The bad economy has already caused two of our projects to be postponed till next year, and even the fees for my column kena potong as part of cost-cutting measures. Then there are lagi all these baby supplies! We need to cut back,” I told the Wife as I scrutinized my credit card statement. “What can we give up?” “Hope,” she replied, wittily, if not particularly helpfully. It is perhaps the coldest of comfort, but tempering my gloom is the knowledge that I am not alone in having to re-evaluate priorities. Last week, the Pew Research Center published the results of a survey on the effects of the current recession on Americans – and it showed that they were pruning, if not slashing, the list of household items they consider essential. I walked around our rented house here in New York to see if my feelings tallied with the new American zeitgeist. I paused by the microwave oven.  According to the Pew survey, only 47% of households polled considered it crucial – a precipitous 21 point drop since 2006. I certainly wouldn’t buy one now in these parlous times, but no sense in chucking out my old set. Anyway, I use it only rarely, mainly to heat up leftovers or disinfect sponges. I then considered the air-conditioner, which apparently fell 16 points on the necessity scale, but decided it die-die had to stay. To any true Singaporean, air-con approaches the status of a human right. I rubbed my chin as I contemplated the television set.  Astonishingly, here in the land of the boob tube, TVs were increasingly being seen as non-essential (a 12 point drop).  But this result had to be evaluated in the light of the findings that broadband connections and iPods actually went up in the necessity rankings. I guess hunching over a computer screen while brushing crumbs off the keyboard was becoming the dominant mode of watching stuff, supplanting slouching on a couch, remote in one hand, beer can in the other. So could I get rid of my set and cable TV package? Maybe. After all, I can find most of the shows I like online anyway. Once upon a time, I might have thought jettisoning the TV would lead to a corresponding rise in I.Q., but I can’t anymore.  If I’m replacing TV with the Internet, it just means that instead of watching crappy gameshows or whatever, I’m now watching videos of kittens jumping into cardboard boxes and the like. Hardly a step up. The Pew survey revealed mixed results concerning cellphones.  If you were younger, you tended to feel that cellphones were essential, while a landline was unnecessary; but most seniors felt exactly the reverse.  As someone right smack in the middle of the age continuum, my views were appropriately centrist – I’d be happy to dump both cell and landlines, and remain happily uncontactable till the end of my days. Unfortunately, I can’t, and so my phones must remain, their every ring and chirp a sneering rebuke. “How?” asked the Wife. “What have you decided to cut?” “Not much,” I replied sheepishly. “Three ‘no’s’ and one ‘maybe’… And I don’t think we can get rid of the car either.” (Unsurprisingly, this being America, the Pew survey showed the car retaining its spot as the family’s number one necessity, despite the recession and rollercoaster petrol prices.) “Ah, you just lack the stomach for sacrifice,” chuckled the Wife, patting my tummy.  I felt ashamed – surely there was something I could eschew, something that provided great comfort but wasn’t critical to survival, to prove I could endure deprivation. But what? The Mother-in-Law, visiting from Singapore to help supervise the Wife’s postpartum recovery, provided the answer, albeit unwittingly. “Today, I’m cooking ter kah or chor for you,” she said, referring to that classical Hokkien convalescent meal of pig’s trotters stewed in ginger and black vinegar. As the Wife made appreciative noises, I had a flash of inspiration. “No!” I cried. “Swine flu! Must cut down on pork!” The Wife stared daggers at me, but the Mother-in-Law, suitably kiasu, concurred. And there, I had made my sacrifice, proving that sometimes, you needn’t go the whole hog right away – you can start with just the feet. Share on Facebook Comment on Sunday Times: Dirty Differences by louist I guess that makes the Japanese the cleanest people on the planet, then! (Looks like I’d totally ignored the conclusion of your column.) Comment on Colin’s Bio by edwinkohyewsun Considering some in fo on how u and ur wife met? Comment on About Colin & Yen Yen by edwinkohyewsun Great to have excellent support to live an life of excellent art. Comment on Drawing to a Close by johnlui Hi Colin, John here, just sent you an email to the colinyenyen addy about an interview. Hope you see it can reply soon. Thanks in advance! Comment on Little Red Velvet Cake by mamamalone If you are in Singapore, you can get a mean Red Velvet Cake at Food for Thought Cafe, near Raffles Hotel. This is a really inexpensive funky little cafe with a good ethos. Try it! But be warned, it’s seriously addictive. Oh, and if you go traditional, there’s no need to use artificial colouring for the cake, use red beet! Comment on Colin’s Bio by cheoksky Hi Colin! I read The Buaya Handbook some 15 years ago as a teen and I loved it. I laughed early and often and it is one of the few books that has shaped my twisted sense of humour. Thank you for your imagination and jokes. Comment on Drawing to a Close by jonahsng Hi Colin, just wanted to say that I’ve grown up reading your comics, especially the Orchard Road series. I’ve owned all the books, read them until the pages frayed and the entire book fell apart, literally. Thank you :) Drawing to a Close Today, 30 June 2008, marks an ending of one of the most significant and prolonged phases of my life. Today, after 20 years, I finally stop cartooning for The New Paper. It was a complicated decision, the details of which I don’t have time to go into at length at the moment, but let’s say for the moment that it was bittersweet. Here is my final strip: Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Much Ado About How Much The following was published in the Sunday Times on 29 June 2008: Much ado about how much by Colin Goh We Singaporeans like to say that we greet each other with “Have you eaten?”, whether in Malay, Mandarin or Chinese dialects. It tells others what kind of people we are, namely, food lovers. But I have to say that in my personal experience, “have you eaten?” was a greeting my parents only exchanged with their peers or elders, and never with me. (Maybe it’s because I was a “fatty bom bom”, so people felt that the answer to that question was rather obvious.) Meanwhile, my generation must have appeared to outsiders like stereotyped Red Indians (i.e. “native Americans”) in an old-fashioned Western film, because we would always greet each other with a brusque “How?” The typical reply to that question, however, was unmistakably Singaporean: “Lai dat, lor.” I used to chalk this existentialist response up to mere humility – that we Singaporeans somehow felt it impolite to suggest that we might be happier than others in our company. So when I first moved to New York, I adapted my reply. When people would ask, “How’re you?”, I would answer “Surviving”, or at most, “Okay.” If people asked, “How’s it going?”, I’d say, “It’s going.” (To be honest, to this day, I have no idea what “it” is, and where “it” is supposed to be going.) After a while, it occurred to me that the impression I was giving people wasn’t one of modesty, but of grumpiness or depression. Because the New Yorkers I met would always reply, “Good!” or “Fine!” whenever you asked how they were, even if they were in the midst of wading through six feet of sewage. I guess both the Singaporean and American responses could be characterised as insincerity, but I was beginning to prefer the one that radiated positivity over the one which suggested I needed Prozac. Then a few months ago, I encountered a greeting that was extremely sincere, but not necessarily polite. I might have mentioned this in a column last year, when I wrote about moving to the town of Flushing in the borough of Queens, which is home to New York’s largest Chinese community. When the Wife and I first met our next door neighbour, a fellow from mainland China, his greeting wasn’t “How are you?” or even “Hello” or “Nihao”. Instead, his first words to us, said while jerking his chin in the direction of our house, were: “Duo shao qian (How much money)?” We were to encounter “duo shao qian” as a common salutation over and over again in the ensuing months. It was said in lieu of “good morning” by the cab driver who’d arrived at our place to drive us to the airport. It was the second question put to the Wife by her foot reflexologist, immediately after “where do you live?” Meanwhile, a Singaporean friend who also lives in Flushing reported how he was flying his model airplane in the park, when he was suddenly aware that a mainland Chinese gentleman was standing right next to him. The gent’s first words? You guessed it. “Duo shao qian?” “It’s crazy,” said our friend. “Just the other day, I saw a guy walking his dog, when a Chinese woman stopped him, pointed to the dog and asked, “duo shao qian?”, because she wanted to buy a similar breed for her kid.” No less than the New York Times corroborated our experiences, in an article last week about the city’s growing number of mainland Chinese tourists. According to Jane Soong, a guide who leads tours of Manhattan in Mandarin, Chinese tourists are often curious about the values of the real estate they see. Said Ms Soong, “They’ll ask, ‘How much would that building cost?’ And when I give them an estimate, sometimes they say, ‘That’s not so expensive.’ ” Some of our American friends think this inquisitiveness about monetary value is intrusive and gauche, but I’m more ambivalent. To me, it’s less offensive than those Singaporeans we occasionally meet at gatherings in New York, who invariably ask, “So back home, what district you live in?” or “what secondary school you went to?” Because when the Chinese ask “duo shao qian?”, it’s just gathering information to help them make a financial decision, and not to assess where you are in the social hierarchy. How we greet people can say a lot about who we are, but then, so can how we choose to interpret it. Being asked ‘how much’ all the time seems a bit too much, but when you think about it, it’s much ado about nothing. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Chicken and Duck Talking The following was published in the Sunday Times on 15 June 2008: Chicken and Duck Talking by Colin Goh One sweltering evening last week, the Wife and I were watching TV when the doorbell rang. Opening the door, we were surprised to see a short Hispanic man with craggy features that made him look like he’d been invented by Tolkien. It was Lou, our gardener. Well, not exactly our gardener, and technically not a gardener either. We’d rented a house that came with a garden, which Lou had been hired by our landlord to mow. After several months, however, our landlord decided we should take over paying for Lou’s services. The Wife and I thought this was fair. We’d been using the garden for backyard barbecuing, and also enjoying watching the wildlife passing through it daily: numerous cavorting squirrels, different species of birds, fireflies in the late summer, and a mangy old tomcat we’d nicknamed “Rapist”, as we’d once caught him in flagrante delicto with a very nervous-looking young tabby. So, we agreed. “Great! I’ll send Lou your way!” “said the landlord. But Lou didn’t show for several weeks, and we promptly forgot all about our new mowing obligation as we went home to Singapore for our annual trip. When we returned to New York, however, we got a pointed reminder: our yard was now overgrown, with weeds reaching up as high as my thigh. It had also become a KTV lounge for cats: every night, Rapist and friends would treat us to their rendition of the soundtrack to ‘881’. Not coincidentally, I suspect, Lou picked that time to reappear. “Buenuthardthhhh,” he said, and I looked at the Wife. We were suddenly reminded that negotiating with him wasn’t going to be so easy. Not because he was difficult – Lou was an amiable chap – but because he was completely incomprehensible. Firstly, he always spoke extremely fast, and secondly, his tongue was fatter than Jamie Oliver’s. Between the speed and the spit, one could only assume he was speaking Spanish. We’d once seen him arguing with the landlord, and it was a classic demonstration of the Cantonese idiom “gai tung aap gong”, meaning a chicken and duck trying vainly to communicate with each other. In fairness, we were probably as unintelligible to him, as he couldn’t speak English while our Spanish was limited to a few niceties - “cómo estás?” (how are you?), “muchas gracias” (thanks a lot) – and some salty invective stashed away for emergencies – “besame el culo, cabron!” (kiss my butt, you goat!). But Lou came prepared for the linguistic difficulties. “Vrrrm, vrrrm?” he mimed pushing a lawnmower. “Vrrrm, two weeks, cuanto?” I asked, raising one hand and rubbing my thumb against my fingers (the universal sign for “how much?”). “Nono, patellapattellapatellaquarthththth,” he said (or at least that’s what I heard), raising four fingers, followed by “hunnardollththth.” “I think he wants to mow four times a month for a hundred dollars,” said the Wife, flipping open a Spanish dictionary. “That’s a lot. It’s not a big garden,” I said, turning back to Lou, and re-raising two fingers. “No, no, dos! Uno mes, dos vrrrrm! Forty dollars, one month, two times?” He shook his head. “Nonono! Cortelthéthththpedquarthththth!” “That’s already more than the landlord pays you,” I said, which was the truth. The Wife and I had already agreed to give Lou a raise, as the summer promised to be punishingly hot. (That and the fact that on several occasions, Lou had referred to the landlord behind his back to us as “El Cheapo”.) “No dos, no,” Lou gesticulated, indicating the height of the grass by raising his hand to the level of his nipple. “Hierbapthththth, el gato patellapatellapthth!” To our alarm, he then adopted a crouching posture and started meowing, “Raaoww! Raaaow!” and next proceeded to wiggle his fingers around his backside. “Poot! Poot! Poot!” “I think he’s saying that if the grass grows too high, the cats treat it like a toilet,” whispered the Wife. I was just dumbstruck. “Uno mes, tres vrrrrm, fifty dollars?” the Wife raised three fingers, counter-offering a compromise. Lou paused, then smiled. “Hokay! You… friend! Amigo! Cortelthéthththped, todoththlothth thábadoththth, carécarécaré, feefty, friend!” “No El Cheapo?” I asked. Lou grinned, spreading his arms wide. “Nonono! Amigo!” We wrote a short note recording our understanding, got him to sign it, and we shook hands. The next day, our grass was back to normal, and the cats were gone. I couldn’t help but think: everyone keeps banging on about how we must all speak perfect English for international business, but Lou managed to secure improved terms from an ex-lawyer with qualifications in three jurisdictions without a word of it. Admittedly, he did so by impersonating a defecating cat. There’s got to be a message in there somewhere. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Wanted and Unwanted The following was published in the Sunday Times on 1 June 2008, with the mention of TalkingCock.com omitted: Wanted and Unwanted by Colin Goh The Wife and I zipped into Singapore last week for a very short business trip, and we were surprised to find that a little bit of New York had preceded us. The bit was a feature I always took note of whenever I had to mail something – a very common item in U.S. post offices, but completely alien to Singaporeans, at least until now. I’m talking about a ‘Wanted’ poster. Whenever I’d step into the post offices in New York, the Wanted posters tacked to the bulletin board would always pique my curiosity: a simple letter-sized sheet of paper, bearing a mugshot of the fugitive and sometimes a still from a security camera, together with brief details of his offence (“wire fraud”, “possession of child pornography”, “mailing an explosive device with intent to kill”) and a line or two of “miscellaneous information” such as “works as a butler at casinos” or “flight risk, known to travel to Europe, Israel and Caribbean Islands. Subject may have fled to another country. Please refer to INTERPOL.” They were snapshots of an exciting Hollywood blockbuster that was taking place for real, but which brushed against my mundane life only when I was buying stamps. Occasionally, when browsing them, I’d imagine myself as some FBI agent in a Kevlar jacket with a shoulder-holstered pistol, flipping down my aviator sunglasses and addressing my similarly macho team-mates with Tommy Lee Jones’ Oscar-winning schpiel in the 1993 movie, The Fugitive: “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles… Go get him.” So seeing the posters of Mas Selamat Kastari everywhere in Singapore was an eye opener. I mean, I knew that keeping a lookout for him was a national priority. I could gather that from how the ‘Escaped Terrorist Spotter’ cartoon I did for TalkingCock.com, featuring MSK in a variety of disguises, has already exceeded 80,000 downloads and even been picked up by the international newswires. But I really didn’t anticipate the ubiquity of his official ‘Wanted’ poster on the ground. They were everywhere. Tacked to the tree outside my parents’ place. Pasted in shopping centres. Pinned two to a board at Ghim Moh Hawker Centre in what I can only call “4D” configuration: one big, one small. While re-entering Singapore after a visit to Johor, I saw several displayed at the immigration checkpoint, perhaps on the off-chance that he’d escaped the country and now wanted to come back. We also didn’t expect to hear so many MSK jokes, but they were present in virtually every conversation we had. People were referring to him as “Mat Alamak” and “Masi Lemak”, and a friend told us that she’d met a child who’d renamed her lost hamster after Singapore’s most wanted man. His escape is clearly a grave national security crisis, but it had also, perhaps inevitably, become a cultural phenomenon. Was the ubiquity of his image somehow undermining the seriousness of looking for him? Things were put in perspective for me at, of all places, the National Library. I was there to do some research at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library on the 7th Floor, and the security guard was checking my bag. On his table was a little slanted plastic signboard. On its outer face was a series of rules for what could and could not be brought into the Library. On its inner face, visible only to the guard, was the mugshot of You-Know-Who. “Uncle,” I couldn’t help myself from asking. “Do you really think Mas Selamat is going to come to the Library to borrow books?” “Well, maybe he needs to check email and here got free internet,” the Wife chipped in. The guard’s previously serious face broke into a grin. “This is not just for the Library lah,” he replied. “It’s to help me remember even outside. Like that sure catch him, one.” “Well, if anyone can do it, it’s you, Uncle,” I smiled, giving him a thumbs up. “You’re very focused!” He nodded, switched back to his game face, then waved us in. From a publicity point of view, I guess the campaign is fulfilling its objective; awareness is awareness, no matter how it manifests. So I don’t think we should get our knickers in a twist over all the levity. In fact, it may actually be performing a valuable function: dampening any potential paranoia or panic. In other words, it’s good the campaign is giving us more than we’d wanted. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Feeling Singaporean in a Chinese Restaurant The following was published in the Sunday Times on 18 May 2008: Feeling Singaporean in a Chinese Restaurant by Colin Goh in New York Growing up in a half-Peranakan household that spoke mostly English and just as much Malay as Hokkien or Teochew, and being educated in a mission school (then) famed for churning out bananas, I never really pondered the fact of my Chinese ethnicity to any great extent. Sure, we observed the usual traditions, but mainly around the time of festivals. Being Chinese in Singapore for me was just like, oh, having a mole or something. It’s there. So what? I started to think much more about being Chinese after I moved to New York. But it wasn’t some fit of “Joy Luck Club” angst from suddenly finding myself in an ethnic minority or being inundated by the dominant Western culture.  Ironically, it began when I found myself being surrounded by other Chinese – “real” Chinese at that. A few months ago, the Wife and I moved to Flushing in New York’s borough of Queens (video gaming fans will know it as ‘Dukes’ in Grand Theft Auto IV), the biggest Chinatown on America’s East Coast. Here, many stores don’t bother with English signs; aunties and uncles share their phlegm freely with the general public; and at night, itinerant chuanr carts emerge on the sidewalks, just like in Beijing. But Flushing is also Chinese in a quintessentially New York way.  Every weekend, in front of the steps of the Flushing Library, young mainlanders sell Olympic ‘One China, One Dream’ t-shirts and shout, “Support China!” while right next to them is a stand operated by the Falun Gong, displaying gory pictures of alleged torture suffered by their devotees in the motherland. Meanwhile, across the road, a street vendor peddles suspiciously cheap branded handbags and iPod Nanos, just below the offices of the “Global Service Center for Qutting Chinese Communist Party, Inc”. (Whenever friends from Beijing visit us, they all can’t resist snapping photos of themselves making ‘V’ signs under its signboard.) My supermarket distributes free copies of the propagandist China Daily, the possibly just as propagandist Epoch Times and even the Manchu Monthly. The Chinese here come from all over China, not just the cosmopolitan cities, and the diaspora is also amply represented: there are Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Malaysians and even a smattering of us Singaporeans. Immersed in the sheer variety of Chinese-ness, one can’t help but ponder one’s position along the spectrum. I was forced to contemplate this recently when the Wife and I were trying out a new Northern Chinese restaurant, a small and cramped joint packed with all-Chinese diners. The manageress was trying to recommend the deep-fried songshu yu (“squirrel fish”), while we were nervously trying to figure out a polite way to inquire whether there was actually any squirrel in it. Just then a diner at another table piped up and asked, “Hey, anybody here knows a good travel agent?” Instantly, recommendations came from the other tables. The manageress added her two cents, “Better buy your ticket early, while the US dollar is low!” Everyone laughed. She didn’t stop there. “Better buy property too!” she continued. “Property prices in Flushing have tripled since 2000!” “I’ll wait for the dollar to drop some more,” moaned another diner. “It’s too expensive for me now.” “Ask your friends!” ventured a fellow from a table in the back. “They might cut you good deals.” This brought an immediate rebuke from yet another customer.  Dropping his chopsticks with a clatter, he barked, “No! Always buy from strangers, especially laowai, because you can negotiate without awkwardness!  If you buy from friends, it’ll cost you 20 percent more!” A low murmur of “you daoli, you daoli” (“that makes sense”) reverberated through the restaurant. Being there in that small room, conversing in differently-accented Mandarin, sharing insider knowledge for personal profit, labelling Westerners “laowai” (foreigners) even in a Western country… there was a cosy, conspiratorial air that made me feel a heightened sense of Chinese community – perhaps for the first time in my life. It was, however, short lived. When another diner said he was confused by the distinction in New York real estate between condominiums and co-operatives, the Wife decided to offer a brief explanation. I tried to simplify it further by saying, “Condos are easier to rent out, unlike co-ops, where you need permission from the board.” At this, the manageress smiled. “Not in Flushing. You just bribe the building superintendent. $1000, and no problem!” Everyone else guffawed, nodding away. I blinked, wondering why this possibility never even entered my mind. Then someone smiled pointedly at us, “You aren’t from China, are you?” “We’re Singaporean,” I replied, sheepishly. And I never felt more so. Share on Facebook Comment on CONTACT US by Prof Lai ahem….ehhh…ho say bo? long time no see liao…juz pop by to say…..*KUAH SIMI???* =P Sunday Times: A Comic Recollection The following was published in the Sunday Times on 4 May 2008: A Comic Recollection by Colin Goh Two weeks ago, I trudged across midtown Manhattan to meet some folks concerning a future project.  (Sorry, can’t reveal details yet.) Their designated meeting place was the Jacob Javits Convention Centre, which, in some ways, represents the convergence of two aspects of my life. The Javits was where, some years ago, I took the New York bar examinations to qualify as an attorney.  It was the hardest exam I ever took, not because it was intellectually challenging, but because it required memorizing several phone directories’ worth of material. For once in my life, I was grateful for Singaporean rote training, a fact emphasized by the candidate seated next to me, who moaned “Oh! My! God!” every few minutes. This time, however, the Javits was hosting the New York Comic Convention, which, though second in size to the one in San Diego, has the distinct advantage of being in the capital of the comic world: Gotham City itself. I grew up on American comics. My parents were very enlightened about what many dismissed as a corrupting influence on children; they felt that as long as I didn’t read comics exclusively, it was fine. More than any other form, comics taught me how to read, write, draw, and thanks to their depictions of different kinds of vernacular dialogue (compare, say, the Thing’s speech patterns with Thor’s), the ability to “code-switch”, something that many language teachers say is the preserve of an elite few.  Phooey, I say to them (or whatever the Hokkien equivalent of ‘phooey’ is). I learned it from possibly the most low-class artform of all. I really loved the darned things. And like all things you love, they can break your heart. In JC, I started a small comic shop, fueled by pure hubris: I hoped to share my beloved medium with others through judicious curation. But the vast majority of comics buyers at the time weren’t interested in reading:  they only wanted to buy multiple copies of special issues, slip them immediately into protective plastic bags, and then resell them for a profit. On shipment day, the store often felt dispiritingly like the floor of the stock exchange, except the traders had more pimples. Most of the really innovative work remained unsold, and unappreciated.  After closing the shop, I gave up collecting comics and read only the barest handful of titles.  Much of the content by then had become saturated with increasingly nihilistic superheroes and gimmicky storylines anyway.  It seems I wasn’t the only one to turn away from comics – by 1996, industry leader Marvel Comics had even gone bankrupt. But visiting the Con, I learned that the industry had turned a corner over the past few years. Better writers, artists and editors have regained control, and though superheroes still dominate, the content is much more diverse. There are works out there which rival any prose novel – Alison Bechdel’s literate and nuanced ‘Fun Home’ is the best thing I’ve read all year. Graphic novels (storylines contained within a single volume, as opposed to single issue ‘floppies’) are also a real growth area because they can access regular bookstores, who are devoting more space to them too. In 2007, they became a US$375 million market. But chope: if you’re thinking of jumping into comics hoping to make big bucks, here are some reality checks – part of the buzz about comics comes from being able to translate them into games, toys and movies, and cross-pollinating audiences. This usually only works with established characters. So unless you’ve created Spider-Man, moderate your expectations.  One of the most depressing things you can do in life is visit the Con’s artists’ alley, where legendary creators are willing to doodle for you for $10. Guess who doesn’t have contractual entitlements to merchandising and adaptation royalties? Also, although more profitable than in the past few years, readership is still generally depressed compared to, say, thirty years ago. But that’s the case for all periodicals, not just comics. People just aren’t reading as much as they used to. The industry is also afflicted by the same problems that the digital world poses to all other media, including piracy and speculative revenue models. Still, despite the challenges, it was nice to see my old passion evolving and widening. As the Cons are usually assemblies of male nerds, I was especially happy to see more women and girls attending. (I’m not counting those hired to walk around in Princess Leia bikinis to flog Star Wars merchandise.) But I was also glad one thing hadn’t changed at American comic conventions: I’m never the fattest guy in the room. Heng ah! Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Swearing? Who Gives a Bleep? The following was published in the Sunday Times on 20 April 2008: Swearing? Who Gives a Bleep? by Colin Goh By now, many of you must have seen that YouTube clip of a man’s cellphone recording of his altercation with a taxi driver.  Apparently, things were ignited when the cabbie, asked to move his vehicle, responded with the f-word. “The F Word” is also the title of one of several food-related TV shows that I follow religiously that star British chef Gordon Ramsay, who is famous not just for his cooking skills, but his ability to unleash creative expletive-laden invective. (Sample quote: “You moved like a [bleep] tortoise giving birth!”) And according to a much-circulated New York Times article last Wednesday, the culinary world resembles nothing so much as a US Marines barracks: a recent New Yorker magazine profile of New York’s hottest chef at the moment, David Chang, are littered with his profane utterances, while vulgarities are sprinkled like bacon bits on a salad in any given episode of the highly popular cooking competition ‘Top Chef’, not to mention anything involving Anthony Bourdain. I was a little surprised by the article – mainly because the bad language never really registered with me.  “We’ve been watching these shows for years!” I said to the Wife. “What the heck is wrong with me that I never really noticed the swearing?” “Who the heck cares?” replied the Wife, who, unlike me, actually used ‘heck’. I paused to ponder this.  I came from an all boys’ school, so cussing was never new to me, but I do remember being stunned on my first day of national service, when arriving at my assigned company, the duty corporal greeted me by substituting Hokkien obscenities whenever punctuation marks were called for. To this day, whenever I hear a military person speak of a strategy of ‘shock and awe’, I think back to that first day at Nee Soon Camp. But I wasn’t offended. In fact, this new benchmark of cursing amused me, and I actually began to archive profanity I found especially innovative. Naturally, the army was a treasure trove. I guess it’s only natural to be curious about anything that’s seen as taboo.  When learning any language, we always want to find out a few choice expletives. I remember when hosting a Japanese exchange student during secondary school, his first question to me was, “Colin-san, what is ‘[very inflammatory Hokkien expression concerning the anatomy of one’s maternal parent]’?” But I might have been particularly perverse during the interregnum between NS and university, when I dated a girl precisely because she swore like a fishwife, giving me personal insight into the persuasiveness of the venerable exhortation, “Talk dirty to me, baby.” The conversations during our dates often resembled the dialogue in a Quentin Tarantino movie, and my parents were certainly displeased when in their company, I’d inadvertently leak some of the vocabulary I’d absorbed. I’ve since stopped swearing so much, except for the occasional outburst, but I can’t say it’s because I suddenly re-acquired civility. I’m one of the few who doesn’t buy the notion that employing vulgarities are, as we Singaporeans say, ‘so L.C.’ (for ‘low class’). I know people from every economic strata who curse – from Geylang durian sellers to Wall Street CEOs. In fact, my salty ex and, as I also learned, my corporal, actually came from very ‘H.C.’ backgrounds and went on to graduate from top universities. I think for most people, it’s a phase we grow out of, largely because it gets boring after a while. Yes, yes, yes, swearing leaves an unpleasant impression, risks misunderstanding, is intellectually lazy, blah blah blah, but you know, it’s been around for eternity (it’s even in Shakespeare), and people should just shrug it off and deal with much more offensive uses of language – like incitement to hatred, or lying.  In fact, I’m much more annoyed by disingenuous people who employ substitutes like ‘sugar’, and (I’m not making this up) ‘grasshole’. Am I out of touch with popular sentiment? Maybe, though I take some comfort from the fact that online commenters on the aforementioned YouTube clip seem to be heaping much less opprobrium on the foul-mouthed cabbie than on the clip’s recordist, for his hyperbolic comparison of being sworn at to a seizable offence under the assault provisions of the Penal Code. And do I wish people would curse less on my favourite TV shows? Yes, but mainly because their expletives get bleeped out, and I want to hear what they’re actually saying instead of whatever the networks have hired R2D2 to dub over. That’s my honest opinion. I swear. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: The Slippery Slope between Prodigy and Tragedy The following was published in the Sunday Times on 6 April 2007: The Slippery Slope between Prodigy and Tragedy by Colin Goh It’s terrible, but when I read about how Sufia Yusof, the mathematics prodigy who was admitted to Oxford at the age of 13, had been found prostituting herself in London, the first thing that popped into my head was an old BBC comedy sketch. It was from the radio show Knowing Me Knowing You, where the idiotic host Alan Partridge (played masterfully by Steve Coogan) was interviewing “Simon”, a child prodigy, who at 9, was Oxford’s youngest ever Fellow. Partridge set the tone for the entire programme when his first question to the prodigy’s father was, “When did you first realise that Simon was abnormal?” To which the father replied, “Gifted, you mean,” only for Partridge to concur, “Abnormally gifted.” I find Sufia Yusof’s story tragic, but I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. I had the same feeling some years ago when I attended the New York premiere of a documentary on perhaps Singapore’s most famous GEP student: Grace Quek, better known as Annabel Chong. For those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Chong, she rocketed to worldwide notoriety with The World’s Biggest Gang Bang, a pornographic video of her having non-stop consecutive sex with 251 men (later revealed to be actually “only” around 70). “Annabel” turned up for a post-screening Q&A session, which I thought she fielded deftly, and I was left with the impression of someone extremely smart, but so full of hurt and rage that she felt compelled to respond in an extreme way. Some have suggested that the entire exercise was a way to exorcise her trauma after being gang-raped while studying law in London, while she herself has said it was an artistic statement questioning the unfairness of lauding men as “studs” for having multiple sex partners, but not women. I guess – though while watching the documentary, I mostly remember thinking: how uniquely Singaporean of her not to be content just making porn, but trying to break a record while at it. I’m not suggesting in any way that the pressure of excelling academically automatically leads to risky sexual behaviour, but I do think that growing up in artificially-constructed circumstances can really screw you up. The Wife, an assistant professor in the field of education here in New York, says that quite a number of her fellow academics are increasingly ambivalent about ‘gifted’ programmes. While the goal of helping each child develop his or her own gifts at his or her own pace is laudable, often the kids are assessed on very artificially-drawn criteria, and set up with expectations that can never be realized when they eventually leave their hermetic existence and rejoin the real world. Also, the benefits of (1) exploring different possibilities rather than committing to one path at such an early age, and (2) mixing with people of diverse abilities and backgrounds, invariably receive short shrift whenever we talk about “giftedness”. What does it say about us that we aren’t as worried about creating elite, uncaring sociopaths as we are about Boy-Boy not being one up over our neighbour’s children? Here in the US, there’s definitely an industry devoted to stroking parents’ egos about how Junior is actually a genius, and playing on their status anxieties to sign up for expensive programmes to help him get a notional leg up over the riff-raff. It gets even more ridiculous when this competitiveness is taken to early childhood (Baby Einstein DVDs) and even pre-natal stages. (BabyPlus Womb Songs, anyone?) According to Alissa Quart’s book, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press, 2005), “Designating children as gifted, especially extremely gifted, and cultivating that giftedness may be not only a waste of money, but positively harmful. The overcultivated can develop self-esteem problems and performance anxiety.” She cites the case of Brandenn Bremmer, who entered college at 10, and then committed suicide at 14, after complaining of having “perfection” demanded of him. When the news of Sufia’s admission into Oxford first broke, I met a gentleman who said he wished his son could be just like her. “Isn’t it be great to have such a head start over your peers?” he asked me. I thought back to my hormone and alcohol-fueled undergraduate experience and said that for a 13 year old far away from home and mixing with much more mature people, it could be both terrifying, disorienting and lonely. Being great at sums doesn’t mean much then. What’s the hurry anyway? I asked him. Is it worth the psychological trauma just to get a few years’ seniority, which is ultimately meaningless in the working world? He didn’t seem to understand then. I wonder if he still wishes his child were like Sufia. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: It’s Easy to Be Sleazy The following was published in the Sunday Times on 23 March 2008: Sunday Times 23 March 2008 It’s Easy to be Sleazy by Colin Goh Sometimes the political coverage here in America’s newspapers can make FHM look like my old church bulletin. Just over the past few years, I’ve read, inter alia, about how New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey confessed to having a gay relationship with his security adviser; how Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested after allegedly soliciting sex by playing footsie with an undercover policeman in an airport toilet; how Republican Congressman Mark Foley sent kinky emails and IM messages to his teenage pages; and the latest bombshell: how New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had trysts with really expensive call girls. Then just a few days back, Spitzer’s replacement, David Paterson, confessed to “several” extra-marital affairs, and worse, McGreevey returned to the headlines with revelations that he, his now ex-wife, and his driver used to engage in “threesomes”. And hanging over all of them, the Buaya-in-Chief himself, former President Bill “I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman” Clinton. “Piang eh,” I said to the Wife. “I knew politicians played dirty, but this is ridiculous.” “What’s also ridiculous is how after the scandal is blown open,” she replied huffily, “they always have this press conference where they make their poor wives stand next to them to ‘show their support in this trying time for the family’ or donno what nonsense.” “You mean you wouldn’t stand next to me and support me at my press conference if I was discovered to have, I donno, an erotic cupcake habit?” I asked, hypothetically. (Very hypothetically.) “You mean you’d hold a press conference to admit you have an erotic cupcake habit?” she answered, her look of disgust shortly becoming one of suspicion. “Just… saying only, lah,” I smiled, not particularly convincingly judging by her reaction. (Note to self: better lie low about cupcakes over the next few weeks.) The Spitzer scandal has certainly set many tongues wagging, from op-ed columns to talk shows and the blogosphere, over a whole range of issues, including: whether men are just inherently horndogs; why should we care about personal indiscretions as long as they don’t prevent the guys from doing their job; how come the Europeans would have just shrugged all of this off; why their spouses should just dump them immediately; why their spouses should give them another chance; hypocrisy and hubris; yadda yadda yadda. But to me, what’s most puzzling about these scandals is why would such powerful, influential men (and they seem to be always men) with so much to lose, still indulge in such high-risk behaviour? I mean, is the urge to engage in such activities so overpowering that they can’t wait till they’re out of office? Or is it some form of death wish, a secret longing to bring the charade that is their life to an end? Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests that high-achieving men often snap under what he calls the ‘rank-link imbalance’ – they suddenly realize how lonely they’ve become, after having spent so many years clawing their way to power. This “boo-hoo-hoo, nobody understands the real me” epiphany is felt even more acutely when contrasted with their mighty public personae. And so they do dumb things to restore some level of intimacy. Why dumb things? Because in the process of climbing up the greasy pole of success, they’ve lost touch with ordinary people, and also notions of common sense. Maybe. But it could just be that high achievers are risk takers, and that attitude applies even to their social lives. Or maybe powerful men simply like being powerful, and nothing is ever enough to satisfy their need to dominate; having a secret double life is just possessing another level of power over others. And when I think about it: this sordid stuff isn’t confined to the high muckamucks either. I’m sure all of us know regular joes who’ve led secret existences too – those ‘entertaining-the-client’ trips to the KTV ‘launge’, late night porn-surfing, the second families in Bintan, secret photos of the maid, erotic cupcakes… (okay, maybe not that last one). And for the rest of us, maybe it’s not that we’re wired more correctly, it’s just that our fear of shame trumps our temptation. “I mean, how do you know I won’t be another Eliot Spitzer and you’ll kena stand next to me at some rostrum in the future?” I asked the Wife. “I know what you make as a writer, dear,” she patted my cheek and smiled consolingly. “You can’t afford call girls.” Heng ah! And maybe that’s what entitles us to heap scorn on leaders who fall below our own standards: we know how easy it is to be sleazy, so we put them in office and pay them the big bucks to be better than us. Share on Facebook Sunday Times: Finding My Own Voice The following was published in the Sunday Times on 9 March 2008: Sunday Times 9 March 2008 Finding My Own Voice by Colin Goh There’s an article from Salon.com that’s making the rounds, about whether Barack Obama’s baritone voice gives him an edge over Hillary Clinton, who has occasionally been dubbed “Shrillary”, especially when she gets excited. If that’s true, it’s depressing. Not that I prefer any particular candidate (Al Gore, come back!), but the notion that people can be swayed by delivery over content, and also that gender stereotyping is alive and well in the 21st century should make anyone groan. It’s also personally depressing for me to know that voice can be a determinant of one’s perception. This goes back to the very first time I received a telemarketing call in the USA, shortly after I’d arrived. Here’s a dramatic reconstruction of how it went: Me: Hello. Telemarketer: Hello, ma’am, I’m calling about your credit report. Me: (stunned, awkward silence) Telemarketer: Ma’am? Me: (voice suddenly dropping two octaves) Sorry, wrong number. My voice had never been mistaken for a woman’s prior to this, and I thought the telemarketer must have had some form of auditory dysfunction. But this embarrassing situation was repeated in virtually every subsequent call, which naturally led to a lot of personal anguish. That can be a lot of anguish, especially in the US, where one is guaranteed to receive at least one telemarketing call every day. I began to wonder about the correct solution to this recurring annoyance. Should I bother correcting the party on the other line? Or would that just make them apologise and render the conversation even more awkward? Or should I just ignore their mistake and lower my voice with my next line, and just carry on as if nothing happened? Or should I just accept my fate and pretend to be a woman? The Wife soon twigged on to my private hell. “Why do you use a different voice when you answer the phone?” she asked. “You sound like a RGS girl at a sports match.” “Arrrrghh!” I cried. “You mean even when I try to sound manly, I sound like a schoolgirl?” “No, no,” the Wife replied, explaining how RGS girls adopt a low, masculine growl whenever they have to cheer at sports meets, allegedly to stave off hoarseness. (That it scares the living daylights out of the opposing teams is a plus.) This case of mistaken gender never used to happen to me back in Singapore or anywhere in Asia, and I was a little relieved to learn that some Asian male friends had had similar experiences in the US too. So perhaps it was just that Americans aren’t familiar with the range of Asian voices. I did some quick research which suggested that Asians have slightly higher pitched voices due to a range of factors, both cultural and genetic, but that even within Asia, there is variance. I’ll confess that while working in Thailand, I sometimes felt I sounded like Barry White in comparison with many of the guys around me. But it didn’t mean they were any less masculine – I’m sure every one of them could have Muay Thai’d my ass seven ways to Sunday if they wanted. And contrast the voices of Singaporean ladies (not just growly RGS girls) with the cutesy squeals of Japanese women. In other words, voice doesn’t tell you very much, unless you’re ignorant of context, which is a criticism often leveled at Americans. But over my years in the States, things got progressively better, which puzzled me. Why were telemarketers mistaking me less often for a woman? Had my voice cracked again in some instance of second puberty? It all began to make sense when I learned that the majority of the cold calls I was receiving were now coming from call centres in Asia. Globalization was restoring my mojo. But every now and then, I still feel like I’d gladly trade my reedy tenor for an authoritative baritone. You know, like the guy who does all the voiceovers for Hollywood blockbuster trailers, who’s always intoning lines like, “In a time of savage battle…” or “in a forgotten land…” or “one man stands up for everything he believes in…” I wonder how my life might be different if I sounded like James Earl Jones rather than Eric Tsang. Returning to the issue of the US presidency, it struck me that sounding good isn’t such a dispositive factor after all. I mean, being unable to pronounce ‘nuclear’, making constant grammatical mistakes, and having a laugh that’s been compared to Beavis’s pal Butthead didn’t stop someone from winning the White House. Share on Facebook