Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

This piece was published in the Sunday Times on 31 December 2006. I really wish I could publish all the emails that were sent to me in response to my last column - they were really, really great - but a promise is a promise about confidentiality. I can’t bring myself to, ahem, rat on that responsibility!
Sunday Times 31 Dec 2006
A Mouse in the House
by Colin Goh

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my request in the last column for advice on whether I should relocate to China to take up work. I’m always surprised and touched that anybody reads my nonsense, let alone takes time out to comment.

I received about 20 extremely detailed emails from secondary school students and housewives to lawyers, journalists and businesspeople. Almost all had some horror story about dealing with the Chinese to share. Yet all but one thought I should still seize the bull by the horns, even if it meant me being gored in the process. As one of you put it, “Hey, at least it’ll be fun for us to read about it in the papers.” Well, thanks for those encouraging, if somewhat sadistic, sentiments. I’ll let you know!

Anyway, after 8 long, eventful months, the Wife and I are now back in New York City.

We’d finally wrapped the film, launched the DVD, signed the contract with our international sales agent, and cleared out all our crap from our borrowed office. And while we were sad to say goodbye to friends and family, we were looking forward to once again sleeping in our own bed, cooking in our own kitchen instead of eating out or dabao-ing from the hawker centre, and catching up with all the stuff that makes New York New York: the new Tom Stoppard and David Hare plays on Broadway, the anniversary concert of Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’, the multitude of movies, and of course, decent pizza.

It felt nice, yet a little strange, seeing our apartment again after so long, and we were pleasantly surprised to find that the friends we’d sublet the place to had maintained it so well. In fact, they’d left it cleaner than when we first moved in! Everything was neat, the stove and bathtub were scrubbed, and they’d even cleared out our cabinets of various expired foodstuffs.

There was only one blemish – the dead rat lying feet up and mouth open on the otherwise sparkling kitchen floor.

“A real New York welcome home present,” said the Wife, handing me the broom to sweep ‘Mickey’ up. Eew.

It was a small rat - at first I thought it was a Beanie Baby toy that our friends’ little kid had left behind. But closer inspection revealed the gruesome truth. By the absence of smell, it must have died only recently.

In the four years of staying at this apartment, we’d never had any problems with vermin. Not even insects, something that surprised us, coming from Singapore where a trail of ants would materialize the moment you left any piece of food out.

Well, I guess the real New York finally caught up with us – after all, the city is now reputed to have around 12 rats for every person: one of the highest rates in the world. And no, they don’t bear the slightest resemblance to Stuart Little.

When we called our friend, she revealed that her family had encountered three rats during their sublease. “And one of them, boy, had real character,” she added, without giving too much detail (and, frankly, we really didn’t want to know about it either). She said that the rats appeared when the supermarket below our apartment had started renovation. “Guess your place was the nearest tourist destination.”

I was suddenly struck by an image of rats in Hawaiian shirts partying it up in our pad, dancing round the oven to UB40’s “Rat in Me Kitchen”, and shouting “Wheee!” as they slalomed off the walls of our bathtub like skateboarders at Bishan Skatepark. Perhaps the dead one we’d found was just the rodent equivalent of John Belushi.

Needless to say, despite the otherwise spick and span state of our apartment, and our jet lag, the Wife and I embarked on another furious round of scrubbing. Aside from a few pellets, however, we found no other traces of Mickey & Co.

To date, we haven’t seen any further sign of them either, but one never knows, and our behaviour has consequently changed. We’re more judicious about leaving food around, we’ve begun wearing slippers indoors, and I’ve even been mopping daily. In some ironic way, the rats had made us, um, squeaky clean.

“Infiltration, paranoia, enhanced state of alert… It’s like some mini post-9/11 metaphor,” said another friend when we told him of our situation. “I guess you guys have been away for so long, you needed a reminder of what it means to be a New Yorker again.”

I wanted to chide him for being insensitive, but you know what? He’s right.

Rats!

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