Because Summer Rain Is Not Manly Enough

Like mana from heaven, except it hurts like hell

You know that life has a special hard-on for your misery when you get caught in a hail storm during summer. Walking down the Akerselva, I had gotten used to the sounds of the river. Such that when I once again heard the crescendo of imminent rain, I ducked beneath the nearest tree in a futile attempt to stay dry. Futile because not only were my clothes already damp from previous passing showers, but also since the wind was pouring on the misery by blowing rain right into the shelter. And so standing there feeling rather pathetic, the foremost concern in my head was getting out from under this ridiculous tree and finding better shelter, preferably of the concrete variety.

Eventually the rain died down, or more accurately merely lightened up into a fine misty curtain of water that clung to my clothes and hair. Realizing that this was probably the best time to run to the nearest building, I set out across an open field to a clump of apartment buildings nearby. In retrospect this was probably a really stupid idea, walking across an open field with no shelter when the next passing shower was no doubt surreptitiously creeping up on me. And true enough, the weather waited till just the right time when I was far enough from the tree cover but still nowhere near the flats to make its move. Half way through the field, it began to hail.

When it first began, it was light enough that I actually thought it was snow. So there I was, an extremely bewildered Singaporean in this field in Norway wondering if it is normal for snow to be falling in the middle of the summer. As the hail increased slightly in intensity, I realised that I was wrong, but quite stupidly decided to stand there and enjoy the moment. This was fantastic stuff! Surely there’s a poem waiting to be written about these little white pellets hurtling down from the sky. And imagine the whole process over the span of mere seconds, where at the air is filled with these tiny white globes frozen in place.

Standing there, caught up in some extremely ill-timed romance, I only realised how painful hail could get when a particularly large smashed right into my neck. It was like taking a rubber bullet from a nerf gun except wetter and there wasn’t someone to shoot back at. Even then, my befuddled brain oscillated between “shit that hurts!” and “amazing that something so beautiful could cause so much pain.” I know, you wish so much to be artistically inspired that you end up being quite a dullard. Happily nature corrected this stupidity very quickly by sending more very large and very painful hail with increased intensity. One batted my ear so hard I instinctively reached up to feel if it was still there.

I started to run, although again in hindsight this might not have been very wise. It was one thing to stand stupidly in a hail storm, it was quite another to run against the wind. It was like running into a small wall of white pellets. Cursing and swearing, I reached the edge of the field. There was an old man going out on a walk, black umbrella protecting a very bald head. And as I dashed by spewing fairly creative insults at the weather, he stood there looking slightly reproachful. Well you have the umbrella; of course you can be reproachful.

Eventually I reached the shelter, but by then each pocket of my sweater had a handful of hail in them. The road looked like a schizophrenic paint-job, the black tarmac now with polka dots. I felt like I had just taken part in a riot where rubber bullets had been used. In fact I looked so weary that on the bus ride back, the bus conductor took a glance at my dishevelled self and did not even bother to check if I paid the feel. I was glad, because I was too tired to find my ticket anyway.

Boller

Ugly, Cheap and Delicious

At risk of this becoming a “food blog,” I introduce something that I will most certainly miss upon leaving Norway. This guy might not look like much, but beyond the somewhat squashed up first impression, there are many things going for him. For one, he tastes great – much like a hot cross bun without the cross and instead being filled with raisins or chocolate. For another he is filling, as must sweet buns are. Finally he is cheaper (we have arraived at the conclusion that there is nothing cheap in Norway, only cheaper things) and 20kr for a pack of three, or in SGD terms, that’s about $5.

Now, since I’ve been seeing specially sold Boller flour mixes in the supermarkets, I think the next logical step is to attempt to bake one.

An Inevitable, and Comforting Truth

Dedicated to the courage of my friends

While cleaning the kitchen today, I chanced across a local Norwegian newspaper. I do not understand any Norwegian, but still there is something about newspapers that make you flip through them, even without reading. The last few pages of the paper were bathed in pink, and in the headline, the word Gay sat there prominently, proudly and almost (I would like to imagine) fearlessly. The article was entirely incomprehensible to me, and so I leafed through most of it, looking for a while at the pictures of young men looking happy and holding hands.

At this point, this short tale can take two directions. On one hand, I could have immediately loudly bemoan the liberal enlightenment of Europe and the back-water, partially state assisted culture of discrimination that still pervades in Singapore. Then I would launch into a point by point tirade of the dismal situation of homosexuality in the eyes of Singapore law, taking long personal attacks against the 377a debates. Then finally, I would look to the AWARE saga as an event of encouragement and empowerment, urging everyone to not lost hope.

Of course, this all has been done to death by just about anyone with a soapbox to stand on. And tragically, the Internet has both loud idiots and soap boxes in large supply. This by no means takes away from the truth of the matter – the current state of affairs in Singapore is indeed deplorable. However, given the excitable nature of local online communities, many people have blown almost everything out of proportion, to the point where there are only extremes and no consensus for moving forward.

I suppose that for a moment, standing in the kitchen, I felt the stirrings of self-righteous indigence that would spawn all the above. Yet, looking again at how comfortably a whole gay segment sat in the newspaper right beside the sports section, there is a strange sense of hope.

For when we peel back all the rhetoric, appeals to religion and public conscience and passionate speeches, the fact of the matter is that homosexuality being decriminalised in Singapore is a fore-gone conclusion. What is being debated on in Singapore, from the sterile antechamber of Parliament to the faceless digital space of online forums, is all merely quibbling about when this day will come. The reason for this does not rely on any appeal to natural justice, or ideals of equality, although they can right be so. Instead, history provides are far more convincing picture on how this will all play out. After all, every western nation (including Norway) we now view as “enlightened” has gone through the very same debate process currently ongoing in Singapore. And, as history as shown, each debate has only weakened the incumbent, conservative position, until it has to be conceded entirely.

There are some amongst us that would attempt to paint the respect for individual liberty and equality before the law as “western values” that are too permissive for our delicate, conservative Asian values. This is hilariously racist even, suggesting that only our White Men Gods are deserving of certain individual liberties while Asians remain in social bondage. Still, even if the western experience cannot apply, recent history in Asian also shows the overwhelming trend towards decriminalisation. China decriminalised anal intercourse as early as 1997. Indian courts has ruled 377a to be unconstitutional. And so, Singapore is increasingly left on ever thinning ice, clinging to Asian values that the two most populous Asian countries no longer adhere to. No government is immune to international pressure, and even for the most obstinate PAP, the time will come when such pressure can no longer be ignored.

The tempo of change all point to an invariable conclusion that there will be a day where we can open a Singaporean news paper and have a gay segment that is not under politics or crime, and that that day is coming. The 377a debates are but a speed bump in the inevitable. For so long as there remains individuals who fight with courage and conviction for things fundamental to them, then the days of 377a are numbered, and those who insist on resisting are fighting a losing battle, like trying to stop the a tide with tissue paper (I suppose some think this as a peculiar form of martyrdom). They may claim God to be on their side, but we have history and time on ours.

Being Frugal in Norway

First, as I am sure many would have realized, eating out in Norway is a very quick way to spend all your money. Unless you are a gastromaniac who can live solely from the pleasure of eating alone, the only way a person is going to conceivably save up for things like books or clothes is to eat as many meals as possible at home, and on the cheap. This includes packing lunch, a practice which I swore never to do again after primary school when I was laughed and bullied on account of the red polka-dotted lunch box I was made to bring to school. Tragically though I find myself having to wake up early to prepare lunch these days, although happily I have a way cooler lunch box (it better be cool because it was not cheap).

Spagetti, Sausages, Mushrooms and Budget-sauce of Olive Oil

At any rate, the staple meal is usually pasta. This is because a) it is easy to cook and b) it tastes way better than instant noodles. In fact I have eaten so much pasta that at this point I am beginning to realize some really cheap ways to cook pasta, thus stretching my kroner supply. An easy fix is, don’t use sauce! As a student with little time to prepare authentic sauce, I end up using the bottled version that like doesn’t taste amazing anyway. So one day I figured I would just easily substitute the bottled sauce with pesto paste or (even cheaper) olive oil.

Shrimp, Seaweed, Salmon (buried somewhere) and Rice

Of course, it quickly became apparent that unless I wanted to develop a chronic fear of pasta by the time I came back to Singapore, I would have to use another staple food at some point. And there really is nothing more reliable than rice. Toss in some readily available shrimp and salmon (hey this is Norway after all), and it even looks decent. Here I used short grain rice or Japanese rice for the sticky texture and generally for the dish to taste like donburi.

My super cool and slim lunchbox means that everything gets a little squashed.

And the best part about rice? Using the leftovers.

Being Eurasian

Writing this comes as a bit of a rude shock, since the idea of writing about mixed ethnicity has always been something I found to be immensely boring and predictable (Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston being some of the chief culprits). There is always a person of a minority ethnicity stuck in an environment that is otherwise homogenous. Then there is always The Mother with whom our character has the most bizarre love/hate relationship. Expand this idea for enough pages and suddenly you have “immigrant literature.”

Of course as fate has conspired, I now have to level all that same critique at myself. I level some blame at my uniquely Singaporean upbringing, which while publicly trying to cast race as a non-issue is almost ludicrously obsessed with the idea of race, from having it as a mandatory field in most forms as well as the ever racially correct representation on television shows and posters. If anything, growing up on our little island has made me all the more racially conscious, each time I fill up “others” on those blasted forms a small pinch on my racial consciousness to ensure that it was wide awake.

On top of state fumbling of racial issues, there is the general bizarreness of growing up in a Eurasian family. My late grandmother was the consummate anglophile, who claimed that Queen Victoria had given her a spoon. My mother, being hundred percent Chinese, was the suffering daughter-in-law, ever at odds (in that discreet passive aggressive way families always employ) with my grandmother who would at times gleefully proclaimed the inadequacies of being Chinese. Add on to this bizarre duet the fact that my grandmother was Chinese herself having married my Eurasian grandfather, and one might get a gist of the sort of family politics I grew up in.

And so, childhood was a muddled series of tales about “my friend Elizabeth” and the ever present reminder that YOU ARE MORE CHINESE THAN ANYTHING ELSE! People in Singapore like to think that Eurasians have some sort of definitive culture, down to those tacky “ethnic costumes” that get paraded around during National Day. That isn’t true, and those ethnic costumes are linked to only a particular group of Eurasians of a certain European descent.

More accurately, I grew up as a hyper-westernised Asian, who along the way tried his best to reject Chinese tradition (seeing as we only celebrated it 2-3 days a year during lunar new year) but eventually came to realise that it was not worth the effort (especially considering the resulting nagging the mother would deliver). Eventually you came to realise that you weren’t really Chinese, and you should be proud of that fact. I learned to be proud of being Eurasian, although what that meant no one was ever really clear. And in the same way, it annoyed me to no end when a person’s first reaction to me saying that I was Eurasian was “really?! But you totally look Chinese/Malay!” which I cannot help but take as a minor insult. I know there’s no small amount of racial vanity going on, but who isn’t to some extent vain about their ethnicity? Telling a Chinese person they look Filipino right after they said they are Chinese certainly isn’t going to be the most polite comment to make.

And now, I find myself walking around in Europe, the ancestral continent that isn’t. And it is readily apparent that just like Singapore, I was not ethnically at home. To Europeans I looked Asian (there has been some creative guesses at me being Japanese, Korean and even Vietnamese). It seems that here too, a Eurasian would be doomed to walk a cultureless in-between or neither here nor there (now thankfully without forms asking about my race).

To my Chinese friends, this will undeniably sound like a long and unwieldy rant that makes no sense, at best. At worst, it will sound like some anglophile raving about how I wished my eyes were blue and my hair was blonde. It is difficult to deny that there might be some of that in here. But it goes far beyond that, pertaining on a far deeper level to the idea of racial identity. Chinese people can (and do) often wish they were another race. My grandmother had convinced herself that she was partially white. But the main thing is that even while wishing they were another race, they would always be able to remain as Chinese people. When Chinese culture comes back in the vogue (if that ever happens), then they would have something to be proud about. You have your festivals, customs and traditions to call your own.

Contrast that to the nothing of not truly belonging anywhere. Yes, it can be a happy independence, to not be bound by the shackles of tradition. But no man can be an island, and in the quiet hours, I do long for the supportive arm of tradition, even if it may turn out to be bondage. I now realise why Amy Tan and Kingston were so (horrifyingly) rambling all over the place about ethnicity. It is a extremely uncoorporative idea, filling at once multiple themes and streams of thought, defying any effort at being presented as a cohesive whole. Even now my brain quietly argues about whether tradition is necessarily tied to race in the first place. Yet, even with all these inconsitencies, the duplicity of feelings, you cannot help but want to write about this ever present spectre of race that looms over you, a dark cloud that is impossible to avoid.

It ain’t a university without roman columns

NUS needs to build some of these

This is a picture of the Law Faculty building in downtown Oslo. Yes, much like old BTC, the law faculty here is apart from the main campus. You may draw whatever inferences you want from that, but a Norweigan who I had drinks with was kind enough to state what was on everyone’s mind, “Law students here, like law students and lawyers everywhere, are huge snobs.” In short, I happily note that being snobs or atas is not a problem unique to the common law, but is one of those universal rules of life.

Snobs of the world unite?

The Law Faculty is located right in the middle of downtown Olso, along a street called Karl Johans Gate. Karl Johans was one of Norway’s kings, and had goverened over a period of uniterrupted peace and prosperity. Today, he has an equestrian monument on the palace grounds, looking down the street named after him. Despite never doing much fighting during his reign, he is now fighting a (losing) constant battle against the odd seagul which likes to pearch (amongst other things) itself on top of the statute. You can only lament at how time eventually reduces even the most powerful of men into mere monuments. Better to die in obscurity than to forever be cast in bronze and affixed to one spot for the rest of eternity, with only birds and tourists for company.

Karl Johans Gate, the palace is just visable in the distance

Karl Johans gate stretches straigth through a slew of historic looking buildings and is  the main tourist stretch. Consequently you have people peddling all kinds of things that have absolutely no practical use, but for some reason a tourist will be likely to find endearing or cute. Walking down the street, there is some comfort to be had in the ornate and olden architecture. It is very much a pleasant depearture from all the glass and chrom that Orchard road practically screams your way.

Not that all of Oslo is necessarily stuck in this sort of quaint school of architecture. Move closer to the central station and the usual suspects of skyscrapers will rear their ugly heads. But perched on the very edge of the harbour is the extremely striking Olso opera house. A comparison with the Esplanade is regrettably unavoidable, since both are meant to be art performance houses by the bay. Fortunately for Oslo, where the Esplanade was designed by a madman going through a hangover after drinking tiger beer from durian husks, the Oslo opera house was modeled after that iconic piece of natural geography which has come to define Oslo: the fjords. As such, the opera house emphasises sweeping lines and is made almost entirely out of white marble (of different grades) and sweeps right down into the water of the bay.

(bigger pictures @ http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=111330&id=720126995)

A Foody Interlude: Pasta Hero

Food is probably Singapore’s biggest trump card, since practically everyone who has grown up or even visited the little island will tell you that there is no lack of food. Cheap and good being the general adjectives used. So, there’s been more than a couple letters that have been sent my way that begin “so how’s the food there?”

The truth of that is authentic Norwegian food is expensive enough even with a proper cash supply and consequently almost impossible to try and sample while on a “recently-had-wallet-stolen” budget. I have had the odd meal, like a wonderful shrimp baguette for 10 SGD (it is the size of a subway foot long and then some), generally the food I have been eating has been the food coming right out of my amazing rice cooker. I guess it’s one of those ironies of life that the rice cooker doesn’t cook rice, but just about everything else.

The very first plate

For the first two days, I stuck with making safe stuff like pasta. Basically I let the water boil before putting in the pasta to cook al dante, then when it’s done drain the whole thing. Leaving just a bit of the water inside, I dump in a pinch of pesto, and some sauce out of a bottle (I can’t find creamy sauces here, everything seems to be tomato base – once this tomato sauce runs out time to experiment making creamy sauce). So essentially it’s just cook spaghetti, put in sauce, stir around.

Now with meat

The second meal I actually added in sausages and layered the serving plate with cheese so that when the pasta gets served on it, you get that nice gooey cheesy texture in the sauce.

No Free Lunch

Karl Johans Gate, from the cafe of my free lunch

When you are in a new city with an astonishingly low amount of money, your mind tends to add mental supplements to what your eyes are seeing. Expensive shops immediately have “impossible” signs labelled to them, while cheap and free practically scream “eat here or don’t eat at all.” On the whole, you suddenly become acutely more appreciative of good deals that people are normally blind to when they have cash lining their pockets.

So, there I was wandering down the Karl Johans Gate in central Oslo. Since it was mostly a touristy area, most of the shops were impossibly out of my league. While under different financial circumstances I might have gone in to browse, at the present I could only gape and stare and wonder what kind of special idiocy makes people spend that much money on useless things. Just as I was feeling slightly guilty about how money (or the lack thereof) makes us all hypocrites, a man stopped me.

“Excused me but you seem to be quite lost”

Immediately, my paranoia at having had my wallet stolen immediately leap into action and I discreetly moved my hands over my bag. We exchanged greetings, and he almost immediately labelled me as a tourist (well so much for hoping to fit in quickly – apparently I really was walking around with my mouth agape). He owned a small travel agency nearby and was currently taking a walk to take his mind off work. As the conversation went on, he learnt that I had been robbed in Heathrow and immediately insisted on buying lunch.

At this point, my natural Singaporean caution and my newly post-theft suspiciousness came to the inevitable conclusion that this guy was going to scam me. I tried to politely decline, but he insisted. Hoping to quickly indulge him before he pulls out some insurance pitch on me, I agreed to a small road side cafe. As he queued up for food, I wondered (besides trying to sell me insurance or harvest my kidneys) why would he offer a free meal to a complete stranger. The notion that he was really being altruistic seemed impossible since a) “no free lunch” is practically a mantra in Singapore, used even by the government and b) back home no one talks to you because they are genuinely interested in who you are, but rather what’s in your wallet or how you can help them.

He soon came back with a bagel for himself (which he gave me half), a coke and tea and scones. As we talked I tried to surreptitiously scrutinise my tea for traces of drugs. He talked at length about living in Oslo, and how as a middle class business man he took offense to how the socialist state was basically supporting all kinds of rift raft. Due to the lack of border controls, Norway was being besieged by gypsies and beggars from Eastern Europe. While cautiously eating my food (the scones were terrible), I made the odd response, trying my best to avoid dull comparisons like “well in Singapore we also do that.” With my somewhat rudimentary understanding of EU/EC politics, I managed to hold my own in the conversation, or at very least provided a platform for him to bounce off.

As the meal wound down, I finally (almost grudgingly) acknowledged that indeed this man was really just doing it out of the goodness of his heart. I could not help but marvel at the idea, even when upon reflection; it is probably the most human thing to do. Even so, this realisation didn’t stop me from instinctively getting alarmed when he offered me the remaining coke in his bottle (don’t worry he used a cup).

Ballad of the Internet Memes: Oslo, the First Days

Yes you can haz

This post will be shamelessly referencing Internet sub-culture. It is not to say that normal, proper and sane English lacks the capacity to express certain moments in life. Rather, while the English language is as always eminently capable, the mishmash of things that the Internet has grown somehow manages to capture just the right amount of misery and “fuck-it-all” attitude that puts you on the road to recovery.

Fuck My Life is an internet meme that is pretty self-explanatory. You type up some horrible string of events that has happened to you and the internet has a kind of collective laugh at your misery, whilst inwardly reassuring itself that hey, at least someone out there is getting it worse. There are some pretty amusing ones to be read out there such as:

“Today, I was woken up by a loud noise, which I thought was an earthquake. It sounded like a car had driven right into my living room. Which was exactly what it was. FML”

In light of recent events, I think it’s only fair to add in my own two cents of misery:

1)      Today, I travelled from Singapore to Norway. Worried for my safety, my parents had insisted that I carry my wallet in a money pouch around my neck. Since I was not going to see them for a while, I figured I should indulge them this one time. By the time I reached Oslo, Norway, I realized I had been pickpocketed. The person had cut the string of the money pouch and had taken everything. Now I’m in a foreign country without a credit card and very little money. FML.

2)      Today, I moved into a new student dorm. I was excited to finally be able to use the internet. At the counter, the guy asked me if I wanted to use the Internet as well as an Internet Phone. I had thought that was a stupid question because if you can use one you can use the other. When I arrived at my room, I could not access skype. Students have to pay extra to use AV communications across the internet. FML.

So in short to all the wonderfully concerned friends and family, the short version of it was that my first experience of Norway was of being an almost penniless FOB wandering around in a kind of stupor and then walking into further disappointment later on upon realization that Skype does not work.

BONUS:

Since this blog post is premised on a rather vulgar internet meme, I am including (to the delight, I’m sure, of a particular friend) the complete list of “that’s what she said” moments I heard while flying to Norway.

1)      Are you sure that’s going to fit in there? (passenger to stewardess regarding overhead luggage)

2)      Is it normally this colour? (passenger to stewardess over food)

3)      Can’ we just go in from the back? (passenger on using the rear entrance to the plane)

4)      There’s so little space to put your head (complaints about seats)

5)      You can’t put your liquids in there (security)

6)      Wah, so big (Singaporean passenger)

Don’t Mask Disagreement as Intolerance

I wrote a letter to the press recently, and here it is reproduced in full for benefit of my friends who were unable to read to original in the press. I have also used the original title, and not the one prescribed to me by ST (which was really quite strange, and I note the paper’s strange affiliation with the word “don,” which to my knowledge no person uses in everyday parlance.)

In the wake of Prof. Thio Li-ann’s decision to not teach at New York University (NYU), much has been made about the lack of tolerance for views in that university. Both Prof. Thio and Mr Eugene Tan from Singapore Management University have cited the series of events as an unfortunate display of “intolerance”.

With respect to both the learned professors, I feel that this is a mischaracterization of what transpired in NYU. A right to freely express one’s views comes with the right of others to disagree with said view, and courage must be taken to defend what one may believe in. The NYU position throughout this unfortunate series of events has been that while the faculty may disagree with Prof. Thio’s position, it believed that academic freedom should be respected. Even when alumni threatening to boycott future fundraising events unless Prof. Thio was sacked, the university was steadfast in its position that it would not force Prof. Thio to leave.

It is disingenuous to paint disagreement as a suppression of alternative views. Surely one cannot be naive to the fact that the attitude in the United States towards homosexuals is significantly different from that of Singapore. Just as Prof. Thio was entitled to her view that homosexual acts should be criminalized, so were the NYU faculty and students entitled to their view that such discrimination is abhorrent. The very nature of a market place of ideas is for a society to debate and decide on what ideas it adheres to, and in this case, the market was against Prof. Thio.

In many ways, what happened at NYU has been disappointing. In cancelling her courses, Prof. Thio has lost the chance to truly field her arguments in an open marketplace of ideas. The NYU students too have lost the opportunity to be taught by someone who, all views aside, is an extremely intelligent academic with a great presence in the class room.