Sidewalk

I see them huddled by the sidewalk. Her hand was in his, and she was smiling - smiling so brightly. I walked by in a hurry, hurrying to get out of the cold. Homeless teens with nowhere to go, nowhere they needed to be. I rushed on in my expensive jacket and expensive boots, leaving them behind. And still they smiled while I scowled.

Grandfather

The sad invariability of life and the whole concept of the last-minute-epiphany is that we only rush to cherish that which is under immediate threat. The crushing news of my grandfather's possible lung cancer hit like a locomotive. After complaining of pain in his chest, he was brought to the hospital for a checkup, where the doctor assessed that it had a 50% chance of being lung cancer. Further tests were required. And the tests came back positive for cancer.

The cancer has had time to work its destructive magic; the lungs have all but fallen and the liver is its next intended target. For a man in his eighties, and for a cancer this advanced, chemotherapy is no longer an option. It would only make him suffer needlessly on top of the cancer that is already eating away at him. The worst case scenario for a stage-three cancer patient: three months.

I sit here very well aware that I will not get to see my grandfather again for a final time. The last time I saw him in Chongqing, his mind was on the brink of succumbing to Alzheimer's. He could still recognize who we all were, but frequently forgot where he was, and if he left the building there was a very real chance he wouldn't be able to find his way back. Seeing somebody you've known all your life to be intelligent and sharp slowly lose his most basic mental capabilities is an arduous and heartbreaking process. The person you've loved is slipping away, and in his place becomes a stranger, even to himself. At least he still has his physical health, we used to say. At least his body's still sound.

Growing up thousands of miles away from most of our family meant that the memories of my grandparents are few and far between. I remember going on a walk with both grandpa and grandma in the Beijing Aquarium, and grandpa would ask every so often if we were still in Chongqing. I remember him tending to the doves he used to raise, building little cubby holes for the doves to roost in. I remember his habit of raising terrified, timid dogs that never dared to leave the house. 

If stories were to be believed, grandpa has the exact same temperament as my dad. Excitable and easily agitated, then the storm would pass just as quickly as it gathered and to him it'll be as if nothing has happened while leaving everyone else agitated instead. Ask my grandma and she'll have hordes of stories of how he'd obstinately have an argument with a shopkeeper over something he deems completely logical, then walk away, leaving the shopkeeper flabbergasted and red-in-the-face. Substitute 'grandpa' with 'dad' and my mom will have almost the exact same stories.

I'm sorry that I can't say that I know my grandfather well. From what I've heard and gathered, he's an honorable, honest and hardworking man that has lived through far more during the Chinese cultural revolution than many of us will in our lifetimes. Our grandparents are heroes. They've planted their feet firmly on the ground when the world was shaking and crumbling around them. In a time too cruel for us to even imagine, they've thrived. Each one of us is here today because they were strong when they needed to be. I think it's time for us to be strong for him. In his time of dire need, where he will likely face the toughest challenge of his life, we will surround him with love, even from the other side of the world where I am.

What is the legacy, then, that my grandfather will eventually leave behind? Is it in the number of children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren that bear his last name? Is it in the worldly achievements attained by his descendants? Or is it in the knowledge that a family loves and sticks through everything together, no matter the differences or troubles faced? Years from now, when I think of my grandpa, I want to think of the family I knew with him as the patriarch. The thing that makes me feel warmest is the image of all of us, extended family and all, sitting together at a table filled with a hearty home-cooked meal. In my memory, I look up and there grandpa is, sitting at the head of the table, and that to me is legacy. 

Three Discoveries

This summer I learned three things about my past. Previously tight-lipped about her past, my mother has recently been more willing to talk about the circumstances of our family's lives more than twenty years ago. Perhaps my mother and I are both realizing that these summer vacations where I get to spend months at home are going to become few and far between. In our time spent together this summer, I have strangely come to learn a lot about myself, things I would never have discovered on my own.

Incredible things like,

I. My godfather was a leader of a Taiwanese triad. 

When my mom was working as a waitress in Madison to support the family (Dad's measly income for being a PhD student couldn't feed 3 mouths), she struck up a great working relationship with her boss Bobby, who would later be named my godfather. According to their rival restaurant's proprietor, wee Bobby worked for said rival restaurant when he was just a laddy with a penchant for busing tables and sharpening katanas. (I'm assuming all Asian mobs use katanas, for why wouldn't they?) After having a irreconcilable disagreement with his boss, being the enterprising little mobster my god-daddy was, he rallied up his contacts and founded his own restaurant, while at the same time demanding that the rival restaurant be shut down. Only after certain negotiations,which I'm hoping involved machetes and outrageous fake-italian accented curses, were they allowed to keep their business open and running. He's not an unreasonable man, that god-daddy of mine.

Of course, after this casual reveal by my mom halfway through dinner last night, all I could think of was whether the crisp $100 bill he sent me for my 10th birthday (practically like handing over the keys of a Swiss bank to a kid that age) came at the cost of some high-stakes criminal shenanigans. I can only dream.

II. I was a left-hander by birth, right-hander through conditioning.

I almost cried when I heard this. All my life I held a deep obsession for left-handers while cursing the heavens for forcing upon me a life time of cheap, common right-handedness. As it turns out, it was apparently my parents who forced little defenseless James to switch over to using his right hand. Their reasoning was that the world was built for right-handers, and didn't want me to always have to be in combat with the right-handed chopstick user on my left at the dinner table. Friends have always asked me why I hold my fork and spoon the left-handed way, and I just always said it felt right. Mom and Dad, you can try to suppress this but my true nature will find dastardly ways to reveal itself. Soon.

III. I was a foul mouthed sassy little bitch at the age of 2.

This should come to no surprise to anyone who knows me, but it actually surprised me. According to my mother, when I was a little toddler just mastering the basic ABCs of pejorative curses and racial slurs, a woman walked into the elevator we were occupying. I took one look at the woman and proclaimed in a most amazed voice to my mother: "Mom this woman is TOO UGLY!". To my credit, years later when she told the story to me, mom did affirm that the woman was indeed of a hog-faced disposition. I can only hope the poor lass didn't have her life shattered by a sassy-mouthed toddler.

Beijing - Week 1

Day 1 of my captivity. Impending doom looms over my head. My oppressors, henceforth referred to as Mother and Father, have kept me in a cell, in a foreign land known to the locals as Beijing, with a bed so thin you can feel each individual metal rail beneath. Such utter cruelty, but my thin hide will have to weather the harsh conditions for now. My sentence was to infiltrate a Beijing law firm while keeping up the pretense that I could make heads or tails of their Chinese documents. I prayed for salvation at night, prayed for free WiFi, prayed for the children without fresh water or tamagochis, for the transvestites without the proper parts and the gays without Grindr.

Day 2. Like a common criminal, I was transported by car to the legal facilities under close supervision of two female guards. I was brought before the reigning supreme ruler of Lawyer Kingdom, and he decreed that I was to shadow their best lawyer and absorb her essential life-forces. She looked suspiciously like my previous boss from the hospital at UW, and for a brief moment I wondered if they were long-lost siblings, then wondered if asphyxiating from choking on bubble-tea pearls would be a tasty tapioca-filled experience. I was assigned a work-space, where all of my slavely duties were to be performed. I sneakily befriended the receptionist and received the WiFi-password to their facilities. Tumblr is making my life here slightly more bearable. God bless memes, and god bless kittens that haven't mastered typing.

I am to make my own way back to my cell, which is simply cruelty at its very finest. Navigating the public transport in Beijing is like rape - if you don't use some force, you'll never enter. The city of tens of millions are all mobilized during peak hours, and buses are a cesspool of inadvertent groping and awkward butt-to-butt/crotch-to-butt touching. After a few transfers, I am dropped off at the wrong gate by the zoo (which I live next to), and I had to flag an illegal taxi to bring me back to my quarters. I wave goodbye to the unscrupulous woman who charged me 25 yuan for a 5 min trip but she was already gone, leaving me amidst the ripe smells of monkey feces.

Day 4 finds me making my way towards the law firm once again by bus. Nobody looks good on a bus. The most dressed up, dignified looking gentleman can get on a bus and within a few stops, get reduced to a seating, frazzled and irritable chump. Something about the combined effect of closed quarters at high heat and engine vibrations, mixed with the foul temperaments of every other passenger nudging and shoving each other just breaks you. In my heat-induced semi-coma, I wondered if bus drivers regularly have love affairs with their dumpy conductors in the dark corners of bus-parking-lots, and if they use sexual bus-terminology like 'beep beep the bus is pulling into the station'. Before I could finish a compilation list of all the bus-puns they could use, however, my attention was unfortunately diverted across the aisle to the man persistently digging his nose with only his pinkie, because he's classy like that. He then used said pinkie to swipe across the screen of his white iPhone, and I wept for the hard work of all the Chinese children in Apple sweatshops.

I was summoned to King Lawyer's office, where I was told that they were slightly disappointed in my proficiency in Chinese. Their original plan for me to read cases and discuss them with my mentor is falling apart because I was pretty much only able to read Chinese take-out menus. As usual, Father had lied to me. When I expressed my concern about not being able to handle documents in Chinese, he assured me that my disabilities in deciphering ancient hieroglyphic-codes would be conveyed to the firm, but apparently they were expecting a student that grew up in China. The game-plan was changed, and I was now to study Chinese procedural law (if they can find the English versions) and go observe cases at court (if they'd allow non Chinese citizens in).

Hands

Madison at night, where the drunks emerge to sway to their tipsy tango, where hobos cuddle outside shopfronts for warmth in the sub zero winter. We avoided the busy main street to avoid the rowdiness, choosing instead a quieter, parallel street. On the way to your car, we talked about your work but I wasn't really listening, for you reached over and commented on how cold my hands were. That's the way it is, I said, freezing hands run in my family. In astonishment you rubbed my fingers between your own toasty palms, and I let you. Then I stopped you by interlacing my fingers with yours and we were holding hands for the first time, and you let me.

Greater Context

I had resolved to write you off as one of those types. The type that promises but never fulfills, that keeps you waiting but never delivers, the type that disappoints. I’d seen my fair share and I was tired-no, exhausted of them. I keep flying back and forth across the world always expecting it to be different on the other side of the world, but of course it never is. I was resolved to be strong, to be able to say that this was it and I’d be finally to move on without putting you on a pedestal that nobody else could ever reach. 

As fate would have it, I came face to face with you as I was rounding the corner by the waffle store. A flash of surprise, recognition, then panic, coursed through my mind simultaneously. For a split second I considered making a run for it. I had already taken a step in that direction but then turned back, for I was simply not capable of taking another step away from you, from the one person that I hadn’t been able to stop dreaming bout. I thanked the heavens for my foresight in doing up my hair, thanked the lord for not yet killing my will to look presentable while making my mid-day lunch run. I kept my composure as you asked if you could make up for standing me up previously, and somehow I kept my voice unwavering as I said you could come over that night. I only noticed how fast my heart was racing as I nodded and nonchalantly walked away. All the way home I couldn’t keep that stupid silly grin off my face.

That night, when you were here, I asked if you noticed we were sitting in the exact same positions on my bed as the day we first met. In the past year, I had forgotten how easy our repertoire was, how absolutely perfect our conversation and laughs flowed. I tried dating in Madison but no one came close to replicating this undeniable magic we could create. At that moment I knew that I still loved you, that I hadn’t managed to stop loving you despite how hard I tried, and maybe in a romance drama set in the mid-1800s it would mean something but apparently not today. In a better state of mind, I would perhaps ask myself if I had any idea what I was jumping back into, but then again, would they call it love if it didn’t drive you crazy?

“Come here,” I said as I lied down on the pillow by you. You were hesitant, halting, and I asked why you were so scared of me. You didn’t want us to do something we’d end up regretting, but aren’t we perhaps a year late for that conversation? I placed my hand on your face, then on the back of your neck, pulling you forward. You moved closer, closer till our lips were an inch apart, with only our breaths colliding. We were still for a moment, and it seemed as though all the heartbreak we had inflicted upon each other was lingering in the space between our lips and to seal them was to say that it had been all worth it and that the impending pain would be ours to willingly bear. When my lips finally met yours, I felt a sense of homecoming. I was back where I had been longing to, afraid to, but needed to. 

The following morning I woke up with a start, like that kind of awakening one gets as if remembering someone’s supposed to be in bed with you. Except you’re not, and that sense of grief I had felt a year ago came unwelcomingly back. I had been ready to do more that night, but you wanted to wait till I returned from my trip to Beijing. Was this what my love life boiled down to? The only one I could connect with lives in the one place I couldn’t even legally reside anymore, and instead of moving on I had only managed to reaffirm in my mind how fantastic we were together. 

How could two people that were perfect everywhere else be so fucked in the grand context?

Gazing

There we laid, upon grass that lightly tickled out necks, as we crossed off another cliche - star gazing. With the light breeze fluttering between our toes, you traced a finger across my arm and said that stars made you realize how insignificant we all were, in the grand scheme of things. In the eyes of the universe we are but a speck. I disagreed. Look at all those millions upon millions of stars, I said. Screw the stars because they are the ones that are insignificant. Each one twinkling with the same one-pixel glow, half perhaps already dead by the time its light found its way to earth. I turned to you and affirmed that there was only one of you, there ever only will be one of you, and what I had was more impressive than the stars.

Needle

I'm not someone who's afraid of needles. I know of many friends who would rather stare down the  cross-dressing Satan lobster monster from Powerpuff Girls (the scariest cartoon rendition of anything I've ever seen) than be in the general vicinity of a needle. Even as a kid, I'd face mandatory injections or blood-draws with a stoic bravado not usually present in me. Having something stuck in me was simply not that terrifying for me, a rule that would prove to be true later on in my adult life as well. Very adult, in fact.

I used to go for weekly facial sessions with Annie, who would prick my face with a needle for hundreds of times, and then squeeze out all the 'bad' blood that cause blemishes. The process takes two to three hours at a time, and you'd think that having a needle hovering above your face all that time would be just unbearable, but in the name of beauty, I stuck it out and eventually came to adore it. When I moved away from Singapore, I still dream of having facials done and miss the fantastic bundle of gossipy energy my Taiwanese beautician has. 

As a result, I was under the impression that if I could take Annie's weekly prickling for 7 whole months, I can withstand a tattoo needle without screaming bloody murder and threatening to slaughter the tattoo artist's entire family and dog. I had found the perfect design, a Japanese haiku, written in calligraphy, that translates to "The thief, left behind, the moon in my window". With my design in mind, I made an appointment with the Blue Lotus lounge, reputably the best place for tattoos in Madison.

Heart pounding, I walked into the tattoo parlor.  I had probably never felt so intimidated in my life, I felt like I was in a classic fish-out-of-water movie where the hero (me, in this case) has to overcome his distance among the people on the other side of the tracks where hilarious misunderstandings ensue, after which they all come to have a deeper understanding and begrudging respect for each other. And this was only after I made it up the first flight of stairs.

To my surprise, Noah asked if I wanted to get it done right there and then. I was only scheduled for a consultation but he had a cancellation which left him free to do mine, if I wanted to. I faltered for a milisecond and decided to do it. It was long overdue, and with the perfect design I figured I might as well get it done now so it can begin healing. Hence began the process. 

He had me lie on the side (I wanted it on the right side of my ribs) while he prepared the ink and the strangely medieval-looking needle. "It's gonna hurt a little," he said. "So remember to breathe." 

Nothing could have quite prepared me for that first contact. The needle buzzing, I felt a sharp piercing on my side, like a rusty vibrating fork scratching me to death. Every few second or so he would lift the needle up and wipe away the excess ink, then go back for it. The worst of the pain came when he started working on the bits that were directly above my ribs, where there was contact with bone. It felt like someone was trying to drill into my bone, and the vibration would slow down as you felt the needle bouncing on your bone. I wondered why I was subjecting myself to such torment as an involuntary tear flowed down my cheek onto the sterile-wrapped chair.

"Is it over?" I moaned when he took a longer-than-usual pause.

"Nope." He replied, while another tattoo artist laughed in the distance.

After probably 20 minutes, my suffering was finally over. It was like I birthed a child, only from my ribs, and my child was a beautifully inked calligraphy of a haiku. My breath caught as I checked it out in a mirror - it was absolutely mesmerizing. My right arm was sore from holding it over my head all throughout the process, but amazingly, that was the only thing that hurt. The fresh tattoo was red around the edges like a burn wound, but apart from that it didn't feel like anything at all. 

I walked out feeling completely empowered and probably high from the endorphins released when I was in pain. I promised I would get one with Jaystine when I was back in Singapore, we'll see if I manage to find another perfect design by then.

Collisions

They say there's no such thing as coincidence - especially fictional TV detectives with a penchant for removing and replacing their sunglasses as they deliver one-liners - but of course there is. The world was built on coincidence. Life began as a series of infinite random collisions until atoms and molecules finally meshed in a way that sparked off life. You and I were both products of random coincidences, it just so happened that it was that spurt of your father's ejaculate that found its way to your mother's rarely hospitable uterus, and by chance they found themselves at a point in life where they didn't have to suck you out with a vacuum, so hooray for you.

So don't tell me everything happens for a reason. Why would it? The universe isn't conspiring to make you happy, and it isn't planning a grand finale where you will finally make sense of it all while learning little lessons from all the seemingly-bad things that happened to you. Because the universe doesn't give a crap. No one's out there puppeteering your life, basically everything that happens to you happened by chance. You ask why do bad things happen to good people. Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Things happen, sometimes they're excellent like french toast served in bed by an army of midgets, sometimes they're terrible like homeless people who look you in the eye as they masturbate on the street. Ever notice how you only start believing that 'things happen for a reason' after something good happens later on? That's you searching for connections where they don't exist, connecting the dots from a now-comfortable vantage point.

I believe that nothing happens for a reason. Absolutely nothing. The world doesn't owe you happiness, and trying to rationalize everything as something potentially meaningful would just be self-denial. So when good things happen, don't take it for granted and when bad things happen don't take it personally. People happen to be shitty and disasters occasionally happen. In the grand scheme of things, we're just little tiny molecules bumping into each other, hoping that one of those collisions would be slightly more meaningful than the other million.

Opening Night

Describe the perfect date.

"Do people really still ask these unoriginal cliches? Dinner and a movie, awkward hand-touching in the cinema and pathetic single-stemmed roses, hastily purchased 10 minutes prior to the date? To me, the crux of a good date isn't about what two people do or how much he spends, but instead about the hope it gives them. A perfect date is one where neither party ever develops the impatient toe-tap, the stifled half-yawn, or the inconspicuous watch-glance. To me, the best dates are the ones that are completely unstructured. Just head out together, with nothing planned and no tables booked, no cute script memorized and no discussion questions prepared for moments of awkward silence. 

One time we just took a walk together with no intention of going anywhere. A passing comment about how Library Mall's construction was finally completed after two years led to us deciding to walk along the new pathway instead. That change in course brought us to the newly renovated museum's gift shop. Little comments about the painfully pointless decor that the gift shop sold made me optimistic; you can't hate so many of the same things without having some sort of genuine connection. The back and forth repertoire was organic and sitcom-funny without being rehearsed, the casual way his hand sometimes lingered on the small of my back thrilled without being overly PDA-ish.

From the gift shop we entered the museum-actual, and realized that we stumbled on to the grand opening night of the newly refurbished Chazen. We were among the work of Warhol and Picasso, and I was enthralled by the beauty he resonated, glowing even beside masterpieces of the greatest artists the world has seen. Perhaps the timing was what made all this even more magical than it surprisingly turned out to be - it was exactly two months after the last time I'd seen my previous, which was in turn exactly two months after we first met. I was slowly being brought back to the mentality of believing in relationships. 

For me, at least, this was a date that I perhaps needed most at that juncture of my life. It gave me a boost of hope and a taste of what I'd been missing, as well as the touch of a man I'd come to dream about for months to come. The unfortunate fact that I'd been unceremoniously dumped without warning a few weeks later didn't change the fact that it was a date I deeply cherished. As easy as it is to write him off as a lying, manipulative jerk, but that wasn't the question now was it? The perfect date, that was what I'd gotten."