The Skeptical Optimist

I’ve had a really good run of interviews lately – just thought I should post some links up before they disappear forever from the Primetime Morning page. One of the ones I am particularly proud of is this one that I did with Wole Soyinka, Nobel Prize Laureate and political activist.

He was in town for the Sun Festival and I got a chance to sit him down and talk about his writing, his dreams (at the grand age of 75) and his political views. I’ll admit freely that before I met him I only had a vague idea of Nigerian history and its political struggles. Of course, like any interviewer worth her salt, I did quite a bit of research before I actually did the interview. Still there’s nothing like hearing it firsthand from someone who experienced it. The best interviews I do transport me into someone’s thoughts and memories – and I really hope that that comes across when the interview goes to air. What really moved me was when he talked about how he had come to a certain acceptance that the “utopia” he wished for Nigeria would not come to pass in his lifetime – but that didn’t mean he would stop trying to make the world a more fair and honourable place.

Somewhat more lighthearted, but no less intellectual really was my interview cum cooking session with Chinese cookbook writer Fuchsia Dunlop.

I’d actually written a paper on her memoir about eating in China as part of an independent study module I did for my ongoing Masters in English Lit that I’m doing in NUS. It was about cultural transformation through food and it’s truly fascinating how Fuchsia has really taken on an incredible amount of Chineseness (if there is such a thing) through learning, cooking and eating all manner of Chinese foods. Her command of Mandarin, especially it’s specialized culinary vocabulary is astounding and never fails to impress Chinese chefs. I love the way she describes falling in love with spicy Sichuanese cuisine and also the very astute observations she has about China’s gastronomic culture and how that will be the way out of its food scandals. I definitely recommend the memoir, although being the half-baked Chinese cook that I am, her cookbooks are a little intimidating!

And of course… now the Neil Gaiman interview is up on the website! Neil has graciously credited me on his blog which is making my blog stats go a bit nuts with Gaiman fans. Sorry to disappoint! I am neither macabre nor fantastical! But if you are curious about the interviews… they are up here and here. Enjoy!

Tags: Fuchsia Dunlop, interviews, neil gaiman, Wole Soyinka

just some snapshots of the trip we took – spring in Western Australia is a lovely time… and the kids really enjoyed being farmboys, the city folk that we are!It actually really shocked me how much they enjoyed all the feeding of sheep, rabbits, llamas, etc… Sometimes I think the world we live in is too much a virtual one and being able to get outdoors into wide open spaces with other living things, that’s always a good thing…

Tags: family time, farmstays, travels, western australia

It’s obvious that one of the most crucial factors in the annual drive to drum up patriotism is the National Day theme song. Growing up in the 80s and early 90s the ones that have really stuck in my head have those punchy sing-along choruses: think “Count on me Singapore”, “We are Singapore….” and “Home” (which I happen to think is the most successful in the ratio of cheesiness to ability to move). I look back with amusement and nostalgia when I think about how we used to mangle the words and melody as we enthusiastically or sometimes only dutifully sang along.

Catchy music coupled with skilfully written lyrics go a very long way in producing a heady mix of heart swelling emotion and inexplicable pride. Successful timing in the planning of the National Day Parade show is also very key in producing a sort of tears welling up – wave of emotion that keeps those crowds balloting and queuing up for tickets every year. It is a “show” after all – a show of how we feel about our country, something that is kept fairly quiet the rest of our year.

One of my memories of covering the parade as a reporter is standing in the bleachers of the old National Stadium as the last spectacular burst of fireworks and music gave way to the opening strains of the national anthem. I turned to a colleague, who gave me a look that said “I know exactly how you’re feeling and what you’re thinking”. You couldn’t help but feel that surge of emotion that singing the anthem and reciting the pledge after all the fanfare and bombast. But I was also aware at that moment that the reason why these words seem to strike some primeval chord in my head was because of the 16 years of prior conditioning that had me singing and reciting these words every single school day of my life. It was a very strange sort of double awareness.

Not having had to sing the anthem or recite the pledge for some years now, I’ve been able to take a clearer, more objective look at this engineering of national pride. (Don’t get me wrong, I am proud of Singapore – of its achievements and of its efficiencies. There is also nowhere else in the world that I would rather just wander around small HDB shops and sit down at a coffeeshop for some noodles…) But somehow, it’s the heavy handedness with which we sometimes find ourselves being told to be patriotic, to be proud, to remember a certain kind of history, that I find myself recoiling from.

So a particularly interesting thing for me this year was finding out that the National Day theme song was by local band Electrico . I can see where this idea to get an “indie” band to write the song came about – it’s really an attempt to engage a segment of the population – who like me – has become more wary of this whole top down approach to national feeling.

So how successful is it? I’m really not sure… yes it captures a certain Coldplay-lite moodiness and angst but I’m not sure it’s for me. I think one of the prerequisites of a successful National Day song is whether the crowd can easily sing along to it. So there we go, I don’t see many people who aren’t auditioning for Singapore Idol going for the slightly more complex melodies and key signatures in this particular piece. Also, while it’s not exactly obnoxiously prescriptive – I’m really not sure what it’s trying to say: what do you see?

Well, if I am ambivalent about this year’s song – one thing I am not ambivalent about is this parody version by our local internet satirist Mr Brown.

Even though Mr Brown has been “co-opted” into this year’s National Day Parade – I still really enjoyed his spoof. From the use of Ah Beng Hokkien to the familiar car-centric gripes, it’s difficult not to relate to the song. Plus, brownie points for his not so subtle poking fun at the essentially meaningless art direction of an alternative music video.

In my mind, this is the spark of hope for our attempts to create and cement a national identity: humour. As a country, we really need to learn to laugh at ourselves and at the powers that be. I don’t mean a comedic, slapstick, low-brow sort of humour- but an intelligent, knowing and engaged humour. One that sees bureaucratic attempts at foisting patriotism onto its citizenry for what they are and that takes everything with a pinch of salt. Note, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be proud of Singapore – but that we should be completely aware of what we are proud of and how it is not really connected to repeated singing of national day songs or even a spectacular fireworks display.

Tags: Electrico, Mr Brown, music, national day parade, national day songs, patriotism, Singapore

Thanks to everyone who has been patiently coming back to my blog to check whether I had new entries up! I have been packing, moving house and unpacking this past month… It’s really crazy how much 2 adults and 2 children can accumulate! And that’s not taking into account all the stuff we threw away, gave away, sold and donated.

Honestly, moving house this time has made me realise how little I really need to get by. The kids too, even though I can’t resist more cute threadless t-shirts or cool toys for them, they really don’t need that much. My 2 year old just spent about half an hour the other day playing with a small soft toy mouse and an old baby sock!

Anyway, it’s been really fun reorganising the house the way we want it… I’m particularly happy with my bookshelf, we finally managed to alphabetize the novels, although who knows how long that will last. My husband says, moving into the new place was like rebooting the computer, and I have to agree, it’s made the house less cluttered and more logically planned. That is until the kids next take over our living room with a lego battle!

Watching the Shaolin monks perform in the Singapore Arts Festival performance “Sutra” was a strange experience for me.

I could definite appreciate the acrobatic grace, fluid strength and poetic placement of kungfu in the context of a minimalist Anthony Gormley set and the beautiful evocative music of Polish composer Szymon Brzoska. Still, cross-cultural forays in art are always risky business – how much of an outsider eye are you bringing to an insular tradition? Can you ever hope to erase the perception that we are looking at non-Western performers as an exotic spectacle?

After all, the renowned Flemish-Moroccan choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui who is behind this collaborative project said it first grew out of his fascination with Bruce Lee and kungfu movies. So this Cherkaoui some how do a Quentin Tarantino Kill Bill turn in high art… well not quite. There is a real attempt, even within the work of art itself to address the difficulties and challenges of cultural dialogue, of mutual incomprehension that occurs when two different traditions meet. The work being unconscious of the kungfu stereotypes in the West, somehow paradoxically can’t escape from the overarching cliches that have fascinated outsiders for so long.

I really wonder how these monks’ lives have changed – from being isolated in the Shaolin Temple in Henan, China to touring to sold out critically acclaimed shows.

One of the most moving parts of the work I felt was when Sidi Larbi finally joins in the kungfu sequences near the end of the performance; he doesn’t pretend to have mastered the art of kungfu – instead he follows the monks’ movements through an almost gentle dance. He makes no attempt to execute their breathtaking flawless leaps into the air, he just lets the language of their bodies flow into his own somehow and turns their each stance and punch into an elegant fluid dance move. It was really something to behold. Somehow through the abstract form, an understanding was reached about how although we might never be able to truly embrace a culture alien to our own, and there is still much richness that can come out of the encounter.

The funny thing was though that watching them for me was as strange as it would have been for me to watch Spanish flamenco or African tribal dance or Brazilian capoeira. No matter how much I’ve been told otherwise, I don’t really feel Chinese in any deep fundamental cultural way. I’ve learnt, slowly and sometimes painfully that how I look has really no relation to who I am culturally.

When I was in primary school I used to flunk my listening and writing tests in Mandarin and subsequently get scolded by my Chinese language teachers for not being “Chinese” enough or for being a disgrace because I couldn’t do well in my own “mother tongue”. Nevermind that my mother only  spoke Malay and Penang Hokkien. I think somewhere between getting poked with a red pen and having my exercise book thrown on the classroom floor, I decided on a boycott. This lasted all the way until I reached university, barely scraping through with passes through each O’level, A’level milestone. I took a class in Chinese in the American college I went to to try and fulfill a requirement for my Comparative Literature degree and it was such a welcome change. There were Asian-Americans, Americans, international students all grappling with Chinese and no one ever questioned my lack of ability just because of my skin colour.

Of course it’s not just about the language, although that is, I’ve found, one of the only ways to access a lot of Chinese culture. I was brought up in a Catholic family that only followed a few Chinese traditions, namely Lunar New Year, Qing Ming and calling every relative by their appropriate title. Even then it was always slightly fusion with the oranges being taken to the church to be blessed and the grave spring cleaning followed by a rosary recitation.

So watching the monks made me realise – I’m really not Chinese at all. Not in that motherland sort of way. So what does that mean? How do I approach culture? Where do I find “roots” or “traditions”. It’s not an easy question to answer at all.

I’ve been following the events at AWARE, a women’s organisation in Singapore that champions gender equality, with great interest. Basically, for all you non-Singaporean readers of my blog, AWARE was an all-inclusive women’s organisation that helped all women regardless of race, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Recently there was a “coup” where the veteran executive committee members were pushed out in elections by relative newcomers whom had joined in the past 3 months for the express purpose of staging what one could call a hostile takeover of the organisation. These new members who now control AWARE recently had a press conference where they stated that they had done so because they were unhappy with what they deemed the pro-homosexual stance of the previous leaders of AWARE. Many of the new members of the committee come from a conservative Christian church which believes among other things that homosexuals can be “reformed” and that women should be “subjugated” to their husbands who are the heads of the family.

(deep breath)

It’s very difficult to articulate how I feel about this without just ranting or becoming completely impartial. I shall state for the record that I am happily married, with 2 children and was brought up Catholic. However, I have many friends who are single, gay, unmarried with children, confused (nothing wrong with that) and have made life choices that would not be considered conventional ones. I care for all of them and refuse to pass any judgements on the decisions they have made. In fact, I find that it’s often these friends who are the most empathetic, tolerant and open to new ideas and challenges.

Back to the issue at hand, it’s one thing to hold conservative views on homosexuality and premarital sex because of your religious affliations – everyone has the right to their own opinion and everyone respects that. It’s even ok to air your views in public platforms or blogs. But it is not ok to stage a takeover of a secular organisation that has been a welcoming and understanding place for every woman, regardless of their life choices or sexual orientation. As ethicist Alex Serranti pointed out in a truly incisive essay, women who are faced with babies out of wedlock, rape victims, victims of gay-bashing, wives in abusive marriages, all turned to AWARE before knowing they would get non-judgemental help. Can this still happen with the new AWARE with its patently Christian agenda that is pro-abstinence, anti-abortion, anti-homosexual and pro-family.  (not to say I am anti-family or that anyone is, but families in abusive situations should not be allowed to continue). I’m afraid to say I’m not confident that this organisation can now represent my friend who is in a happy, stable gay relationship or my friend who recently had a baby out of wedlock, without passing some kind of biblical judgement on them.

Can a secular organisation be allowed to be taken over by a group of women openly declaring their religious leanings and openly admitting that it led them to stage this “coup”? I’m not sure how this saga ends, but it’s a sad thing if to further your own agenda you can’t set up your own organisation but have to take down the work of a veteran women’s rights NGO and turn it into a mouthpiece for your own beliefs. Civil society groups are secular and should be for everyone and include a plurality of views. They should be open, tolerant and not secretive, manipulative or manipulated.

Tags: aware, civil society, secular vs religious

I have to admit that I have a real soft spot for the Esplanade’s Mosaic Music Festival. Into its 5th year now, the festival programmers love charging ahead and challenging the Singaporean prediliction towards safe, boring, MOR (middle of the road) music. While they might bring in one or two big names – they seem to always make an effort to bring in at least one cutting edge rock band, a few experimental electronic groups, jazz stalwarts, international and regional musicians, and indie faves.It’s truly eclectic programming, but one that has also shown a consistent commitment to quality, diversity and an adventurous spirit not often seen in the music concert scene in Singapore.

In the previous years, I’ve enjoyed acts like Broken Social Scene and Yo La Tengo – one of my all time favourite bands. And this year I found myself happily soaking in the sounds of toytronica group Psapp, a Brit group who use toys to add textures to their music and have a slight obsession with cats. You might be familiar with their sound, seeing as they are behind the theme music of the popular show Grey’s Anatomy. Plus, just revelling in the wonderfully moving, long and discursive jazz solos of the Brad Melhdau Trio.

I know it’s not music for everyone – but listening to Brad Mehldau, one of the greatest living jazz pianists, I realised the importance of complexity, experimentation, improvisation and grasp of a certain kind of culture.

We live in an increasingly fast paced society where we need things to be simple, quick and to the point because of constant updates and feeds, etc. Think twitter, facebook updates, news headlines short enough to fit into an iphone screen or a 2 minute hit. We have opinion columns, aggregators, Digg, google, wikipedia – all providing answers and ideas that are here one minute and gone the next. It’s difficult to find long, complex sentences and thoughts that have been probed and prodded for all their nuances and shadings. And so it is with the music that is popular – there are too many 2-3 minute songs with one emotion, one thought: usually about heartbreak, sex, violence or so-called female empowerment. It’s music that has a catchy beat, memorable but simple riff or loop and it doesn’t stray too far from the formulaic verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Sitting there and listening to Mehldau and his talented bassist and drummer take apart jazz standards, dissect them for the emotion of their melodies and exploit the possibilities of their chord progressions until they became wholly new compositions was just eye-opening. I’ve aways liked Mehldau and own many of his records, but to hear it live was just quite an amazing experience. It reminded me that music can hold so many ideas and thoughts and feelings – especially when it’s allowed 10-15 minute piano solos, long takes on songs that unfold and envelope you in their multiple strands of harmony and melody. It’s not easy to listen to sometimes, and I noticed people around me checking their mobile phones for SMSes and flipping through the programme during the show – but I believe it’s a discipline of concentration that’s worth working on.

Music like that reminds you that there is a world that can be brought into greater clarity through the abstraction of music. That there is an aesthetic nature to it all that transcends the mundane and even language itself in its capacity to communicate sentiments, memories, nostalgia and newness. Mehldau and Mosaic also tell us more about the richness of what humanity is capable of and how much more there is to discover. It’s not all about pop queens and boy bands out there – there is music being made out there that is able to make you think harder and better – if you’re only willing to listen.

Tags: brad mehldau, complexity, mosaic music festival, music, psapp

One of the things that I’ve always been really interested in is how to create art, or at least do something that makes you happy- while simultaneously helping other people and making the world a better place. Sure, it’s really easy for artists to say that their art is enough, that it enriches the lives of the people around them, provokes them to think differently and in that sense “makes a difference”. Sure, that is true to a certain extent – but only for people who have access to galleries, theatres, concert halls: performance spaces that often place filters on access through tickets and even the way they are marketed. An art gallery might have free admission, but a shabbily dressed worker might feel too intimidated to enter.

Truly committed humanist artists I believe, find a way to marry ideas of artistic vision, social entrepreneurship and public outreach in their work. They make art that touches people in the conventional sense, yes, but also perhaps says something about the true state of the world we live in today, with all its attendant inequalities, injustices and forgotten stories. Then they somehow find a way to tie this to the real life situation on the ground, perhaps by tying up with an NGO or by getting a corporate sponsor involved to make a concrete improvement in the lives of the disadvantaged or perhaps to our overburdened environment.

Some photographers who are going to be on Primetime Morning this coming week,are seeking to do just that. They were involved in what they called “The Rice Project”  where besides spending time documenting life of post-tsunami survivors on the Sri Lankan coast, they also distributed rice, that staple in the lives of almost all Asians.

These are just some of the moving pictures that they sent to us as part of the interview: bare feet that are testimony to the relentless poverty of the region, an almost ominous shot of the tide coming in, recalling the unprecendented natural disaster, the tired haunted look of a small boy collecting rice grains on the road that have fallen from an aid truck and most encouragingly the indomitable hope of children, many perhaps born post-tsunami, into a world that had irrevocably changed.

I don’t mean to say that all art should have some social/corporate/NGO agenda – in fact, perhaps it’s the hardest to make good art when there is some sort of interference, even if it is with the best intentions. But somehow, these photographs succeed and these photographers succeed. There is a way to make art that can change the world, even if it means being hard nosed with corporate sponsors or social entrepreneurs. And when you do get it right, the feeling must be one of the best: doing something that you love and truly making someone’s life better.

Exhibition details:

Venue: VivoCity, South Avenue & South Court
Dates: 13 Feb (Fri)  — 22 Feb (Sun) 2009
Opening Hours: 10am to 10pm daily

Tags: aid, art, photographers, post-tsunami, social entrepreneurship, Sri Lankan

In an age of inexplicable natural disasters that inflict unthinkable devastation like tsunamis and earthquakes, it seems almost crazy that humans should continue to fight against each other, killing sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, cousins, grandparents. Each day that I’ve read the news over the past 3 weeks or so, I’ve been confronted by tragic and often horrific footage coming out of the Gaza strip: badly injured children being rushed out of ambulances into poorly equipped hospitals, bomb ravaged landscapes, grief-stricken mourners at funerals, bloodied corpses wrapped in shrouds lined up in endless rows. You see a lot of tragedy and pain in a lot of news footage and after a while you sort of desensitize yourself as a means of self-preservation. Somehow though, as a mother perhaps now, I find it very difficult to get over what’s happening in the Gaza strip.

This is not meant to be a polemic about who’s to blame in the complex quagmire that is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and I don’t even know how to begin to think about solutions for the violent impasse that has been going on for decades. In my opinion, both sides of enough blood on their hands to launch any number of war crimes tribunals. In situations like these in any case, at this point, does it really matter who we point the finger at? Innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire and more die every day in the most terrifying ways that can be imagined. What must it be like to know that nowhere is safe? Especially if you’re a child and are even more sensitive to this lack of security?

In the news station we often get access to footage that is more explicit than we deem it fit to broadcast, often images that are too disturbing are edited out for the sake of the viewers. I’ve edited some of this footage, and a lot of what I’ve left out cannot even be described here. Very often we think of war and conflict as this abstract happening that’s far away, and paradoxically in this age of instant reporting, blogs and 24 hour network news, it’s sometimes both farther away and nearer.

How do politicians and army generals think of abstract “operations” and “missions” and “collateral damage”? All I can see is the too small limp bodies of children, carried barely alive by grief stricken, hollow eyed paramedics .

Tags: children, collateral damage, gaza, news, war

It’s been a long and eventful 2008. Just in general with prison breaks, larger than life political elections, devastating earthquakes, horrific terrorist attacks and of course an unthinkable financial meltdown. It’s been a busy year for the news business – which means not a good year for the world in general. Usually most people look forward to the new year as a chance to start afresh, do better and feel happier – somehow though 2009 appears to be viewed with some apprehension. This is one of the few times that a buoyant optimism hasn’t really been the mood for the new year.

For me, I feel that 2008 was the year the world sort of speeded up, with more intense news coverage, more internet connectivity and use, more of just everything. When you live in a fast-paced city like Singapore, sometimes we often forget to look back and reflect or even just hold on to the past.

My kids’ daycare is moving premises, and on the last day of their time at the old centre we went to pick the children up and I gasped because they had completely taken down every single piece of artwork, every last poster, photograph, set of shelves, divider, curtain – and just white washed the entire space. It was as if the last 2 years of my child’s life in school had been completely wiped out. I mean, sure they are going to a new swanky daycare centre, with brand new facilities et al. But it was the casualness with which they performed this move and erasure that really struck me. After all, a lot of us have the same experience in Singapore; I’m thinking of schools, workplaces, religious institutions and of course homes that have just disappeared off the face of island without much afterthought. I often wonder what this does to our sense of belonging and memory. Singaporeans are a pragmatic bunch, fundamentally, but these constant erasures have to affect us in some way.

(As I write, there are a few days left to the bulldozing of a large part of the Seletar Airbase, a place known for its colonial black and white houses, tranquil atmosphere and community life. Just another casualty of progress of course. Just another blip in our speeded up lives.)

So this new year – I say, be optimistic, look forward and try not to be too bogged down by worries and fears. But at the same time, take stock and remember to look back and appreciate the places, people, memories still around you… in many more ways than one, life is fleeting and there’s no point if it’s not lived fully.

Tags: 2008, 2009, hope, memory