Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following was published in the Sunday Times on 13 July 2008:
Sunday Times 13 July 2008
Feeling the Heat
by Colin Goh

Summer is my least favourite season.  As I’m writing this, it’s actually cooler in Singapore than here in New York, so I’m extra grumpy.

I’ve always maintained that one of my ancestors must have had indiscrete relations with a polar bear, because as far back as I can remember, I’ve hated the heat.  In school, I had to carry a small towel to mop up my sweat, which meant sporting an embarrassing bulge in my side pocket, like some tumor. In J.C., I even carried a fan around, like a Chinese courtesan (a fat, pimply, sweaty courtesan). I was – literally – the uncoolest guy around.

Things didn’t improve as I got older. Being an NSF meant I was Now Sweating Full-time. And after graduating, I entered a profession (law) where not only was it mandatory to wear a dark suit, but in certain instances, you were required to drape an additional gown over it. (Thankfully, by the time I joined, they’d jettisoned the wig.) If the government knew I produced this much liquid, they wouldn’t have bothered with Newater.

Even in the office, when I could doff my jacket and roll up my sleeves, the relief was brief.  By 7 pm, the air-con in the building would shut down automatically, and for some reason, the windows were all permanently locked.  (Too many lawyers leaping?) With the average workday lasting till 9 or 10 and often beyond that, this meant several hours spent roasting in my own juices.  So I brought in my own personal electric fan, which I would blast straight at myself.  I still remember one of the partners warning me, “Eh! Sekali you kena hong sip, then you know!” (‘Hong sip’ being some Hokkien malady involving the wind penetrating one’s organs that is as yet unknown to western science.)

Yet, while I was busy dripping, I would also see people around me sporting sweaters or draping cardigans round their butts, mad dog expats out in the noonday sun, or those wackos who insist on wearing woolen caps and leather jackets despite the tropical torridity. There were many days when I felt like the protagonist in Eugène Ionesco’s play, ‘Rhinoceros’. (For those of you who are curious about this classic meditation on conformity, but who might be leery of avant garde theatre, you can check out a recent movie that is an extremely accessible, if less than faithful adaptation. It’s titled ‘Zombie Strippers!’ and features Jenna Jameson firing ping pong balls out of some place I can’t describe in a family newspaper.)

By some jolt of cosmic irony, however, I married one of these ‘rhinoceroses’ – someone who likes al fresco dining, walks in the great outdoors, and dislikes air-conditioning, which to me is nothing short of a human right.

Thankfully, shortly after our wedding, we moved to New York, where the change of seasons allocated our discomfort more democratically – each of us would suffer for about three months of the year, she in winter, and me in summer.

Of course, New York can be hotter than Singapore in the summer, and the effects of heat even more punishing – subway stations, for instance, become a urine-scented sauna.

It’s also getting even warmer for reasons Al Gore would be happy to share with you, and I now find myself not just physically uncomfortable, but morally too.

Because now, whenever I reach for the air-con, some eco-Taliban will inform me that air-conditioners actually make the world hotter by not only transferring heat from indoors to outdoors, but also by guzzling electricity that in the US comes from coal powered plants, leading to an overall rise in greenhouse gases.

They go on to tell me my efforts to keep cool will make life difficult for my children and my children’s children. My usual response to this is: that’s weird, because I don’t have children, and as for my children’s children, why are children having sex?!  Of course, I’m just being facetious, and much as I hate to admit it, the scolds are right. Especially when they point out how climate change is eroding the habitats of polar bears, those suspected ancestors of mine.

So lately, I’ve been trying to reduce my air-con usage, though I can’t be persuaded to go entirely, um, hot turkey. I now cart a personal fan along with me from room to room, and blast it straight at myself, just as I used to do back in Singapore.

I sincerely hope scientists figure out how to either solve global warming or at least make air-conditioners more eco-friendly really soon.

Never mind the polar bears, I could die of hong sip.

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