Here is my final strip:

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Much ado about how much
by Colin Goh

We Singaporeans like to say that we greet each other with “Have you eaten?”, whether in Malay, Mandarin or Chinese dialects. It tells others what kind of people we are, namely, food lovers.

But I have to say that in my personal experience, “have you eaten?” was a greeting my parents only exchanged with their peers or elders, and never with me. (Maybe it’s because I was a “fatty bom bom”, so people felt that the answer to that question was rather obvious.)

Meanwhile, my generation must have appeared to outsiders like stereotyped Red Indians (i.e. “native Americans”) in an old-fashioned Western film, because we would always greet each other with a brusque “How?”

The typical reply to that question, however, was unmistakably Singaporean: “Lai dat, lor.”

I used to chalk this existentialist response up to mere humility – that we Singaporeans somehow felt it impolite to suggest that we might be happier than others in our company.

So when I first moved to New York, I adapted my reply. When people would ask, “How’re you?”, I would answer “Surviving”, or at most, “Okay.” If people asked, “How’s it going?”, I’d say, “It’s going.” (To be honest, to this day, I have no idea what “it” is, and where “it” is supposed to be going.)

After a while, it occurred to me that the impression I was giving people wasn’t one of modesty, but of grumpiness or depression. Because the New Yorkers I met would always reply, “Good!” or “Fine!” whenever you asked how they were, even if they were in the midst of wading through six feet of sewage. I guess both the Singaporean and American responses could be characterised as insincerity, but I was beginning to prefer the one that radiated positivity over the one which suggested I needed Prozac.

Then a few months ago, I encountered a greeting that was extremely sincere, but not necessarily polite. I might have mentioned this in a column last year, when I wrote about moving to the town of Flushing in the borough of Queens, which is home to New York’s largest Chinese community. When the Wife and I first met our next door neighbour, a fellow from mainland China, his greeting wasn’t “How are you?” or even “Hello” or “Nihao”. Instead, his first words to us, said while jerking his chin in the direction of our house, were: “Duo shao qian (How much money)?”

We were to encounter “duo shao qian” as a common salutation over and over again in the ensuing months. It was said in lieu of “good morning” by the cab driver who’d arrived at our place to drive us to the airport. It was the second question put to the Wife by her foot reflexologist, immediately after “where do you live?”

Meanwhile, a Singaporean friend who also lives in Flushing reported how he was flying his model airplane in the park, when he was suddenly aware that a mainland Chinese gentleman was standing right next to him. The gent’s first words? You guessed it. “Duo shao qian?”

“It’s crazy,” said our friend. “Just the other day, I saw a guy walking his dog, when a Chinese woman stopped him, pointed to the dog and asked, “duo shao qian?”, because she wanted to buy a similar breed for her kid.”

No less than the New York Times corroborated our experiences, in an article last week about the city’s growing number of mainland Chinese tourists. According to Jane Soong, a guide who leads tours of Manhattan in Mandarin, Chinese tourists are often curious about the values of the real estate they see. Said Ms Soong, “They’ll ask, ‘How much would that building cost?’ And when I give them an estimate, sometimes they say, ‘That’s not so expensive.’ ”

Some of our American friends think this inquisitiveness about monetary value is intrusive and gauche, but I’m more ambivalent. To me, it’s less offensive than those Singaporeans we occasionally meet at gatherings in New York, who invariably ask, “So back home, what district you live in?” or “what secondary school you went to?” Because when the Chinese ask “duo shao qian?”, it’s just gathering information to help them make a financial decision, and not to assess where you are in the social hierarchy.

How we greet people can say a lot about who we are, but then, so can how we choose to interpret it. Being asked ‘how much’ all the time seems a bit too much, but when you think about it, it’s much ado about nothing.

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Chicken and Duck Talking
by Colin Goh

One sweltering evening last week, the Wife and I were watching TV when the doorbell rang. Opening the door, we were surprised to see a short Hispanic man with craggy features that made him look like he’d been invented by Tolkien. It was Lou, our gardener.

Well, not exactly our gardener, and technically not a gardener either. We’d rented a house that came with a garden, which Lou had been hired by our landlord to mow. After several months, however, our landlord decided we should take over paying for Lou’s services.

The Wife and I thought this was fair. We’d been using the garden for backyard barbecuing, and also enjoying watching the wildlife passing through it daily: numerous cavorting squirrels, different species of birds, fireflies in the late summer, and a mangy old tomcat we’d nicknamed “Rapist”, as we’d once caught him in flagrante delicto with a very nervous-looking young tabby.

So, we agreed. “Great! I’ll send Lou your way!” “said the landlord. But Lou didn’t show for several weeks, and we promptly forgot all about our new mowing obligation as we went home to Singapore for our annual trip.

When we returned to New York, however, we got a pointed reminder: our yard was now overgrown, with weeds reaching up as high as my thigh. It had also become a KTV lounge for cats: every night, Rapist and friends would treat us to their rendition of the soundtrack to ‘881’. Not coincidentally, I suspect, Lou picked that time to reappear.

“Buenuthardthhhh,” he said, and I looked at the Wife. We were suddenly reminded that negotiating with him wasn’t going to be so easy. Not because he was difficult – Lou was an amiable chap – but because he was completely incomprehensible. Firstly, he always spoke extremely fast, and secondly, his tongue was fatter than Jamie Oliver’s. Between the speed and the spit, one could only assume he was speaking Spanish. We’d once seen him arguing with the landlord, and it was a classic demonstration of the Cantonese idiom “gai tung aap gong”, meaning a chicken and duck trying vainly to communicate with each other.

In fairness, we were probably as unintelligible to him, as he couldn’t speak English while our Spanish was limited to a few niceties - “cómo estás?” (how are you?), “muchas gracias” (thanks a lot) – and some salty invective stashed away for emergencies – “besame el culo, cabron!” (kiss my butt, you goat!).

But Lou came prepared for the linguistic difficulties. “Vrrrm, vrrrm?” he mimed pushing a lawnmower.

“Vrrrm, two weeks, cuanto?” I asked, raising one hand and rubbing my thumb against my fingers (the universal sign for “how much?”).

“Nono, patellapattellapatellaquarthththth,” he said (or at least that’s what I heard), raising four fingers, followed by “hunnardollththth.”

“I think he wants to mow four times a month for a hundred dollars,” said the Wife, flipping open a Spanish dictionary.

“That’s a lot. It’s not a big garden,” I said, turning back to Lou, and re-raising two fingers. “No, no, dos! Uno mes, dos vrrrrm! Forty dollars, one month, two times?”

He shook his head. “Nonono! Cortelthéthththpedquarthththth!”

“That’s already more than the landlord pays you,” I said, which was the truth. The Wife and I had already agreed to give Lou a raise, as the summer promised to be punishingly hot. (That and the fact that on several occasions, Lou had referred to the landlord behind his back to us as “El Cheapo”.)

“No dos, no,” Lou gesticulated, indicating the height of the grass by raising his hand to the level of his nipple. “Hierbapthththth, el gato patellapatellapthth!” To our alarm, he then adopted a crouching posture and started meowing, “Raaoww! Raaaow!” and next proceeded to wiggle his fingers around his backside. “Poot! Poot! Poot!”

“I think he’s saying that if the grass grows too high, the cats treat it like a toilet,” whispered the Wife. I was just dumbstruck.

“Uno mes, tres vrrrrm, fifty dollars?” the Wife raised three fingers, counter-offering a compromise.

Lou paused, then smiled. “Hokay! You… friend! Amigo! Cortelthéthththped, todoththlothth thábadoththth, carécarécaré, feefty, friend!”

“No El Cheapo?” I asked. Lou grinned, spreading his arms wide. “Nonono! Amigo!”

We wrote a short note recording our understanding, got him to sign it, and we shook hands. The next day, our grass was back to normal, and the cats were gone.

I couldn’t help but think: everyone keeps banging on about how we must all speak perfect English for international business, but Lou managed to secure improved terms from an ex-lawyer with qualifications in three jurisdictions without a word of it.

Admittedly, he did so by impersonating a defecating cat. There’s got to be a message in there somewhere.

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Wanted and Unwanted
by Colin Goh

The Wife and I zipped into Singapore last week for a very short business trip, and we were surprised to find that a little bit of New York had preceded us.

The bit was a feature I always took note of whenever I had to mail something – a very common item in U.S. post offices, but completely alien to Singaporeans, at least until now.

I’m talking about a ‘Wanted’ poster.

Whenever I’d step into the post offices in New York, the Wanted posters tacked to the bulletin board would always pique my curiosity: a simple letter-sized sheet of paper, bearing a mugshot of the fugitive and sometimes a still from a security camera, together with brief details of his offence (“wire fraud”, “possession of child pornography”, “mailing an explosive device with intent to kill”) and a line or two of “miscellaneous information” such as “works as a butler at casinos” or “flight risk, known to travel to Europe, Israel and Caribbean Islands. Subject may have fled to another country. Please refer to INTERPOL.”

They were snapshots of an exciting Hollywood blockbuster that was taking place for real, but which brushed against my mundane life only when I was buying stamps.

Occasionally, when browsing them, I’d imagine myself as some FBI agent in a Kevlar jacket with a shoulder-holstered pistol, flipping down my aviator sunglasses and addressing my similarly macho team-mates with Tommy Lee Jones’ Oscar-winning schpiel in the 1993 movie, The Fugitive: “What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles… Go get him.”

So seeing the posters of Mas Selamat Kastari everywhere in Singapore was an eye opener. I mean, I knew that keeping a lookout for him was a national priority. I could gather that from how the ‘Escaped Terrorist Spotter’ cartoon I did for TalkingCock.com, featuring MSK in a variety of disguises, has already exceeded 80,000 downloads and even been picked up by the international newswires. But I really didn’t anticipate the ubiquity of his official ‘Wanted’ poster on the ground.

They were everywhere. Tacked to the tree outside my parents’ place. Pasted in shopping centres. Pinned two to a board at Ghim Moh Hawker Centre in what I can only call “4D” configuration: one big, one small. While re-entering Singapore after a visit to Johor, I saw several displayed at the immigration checkpoint, perhaps on the off-chance that he’d escaped the country and now wanted to come back.

We also didn’t expect to hear so many MSK jokes, but they were present in virtually every conversation we had. People were referring to him as “Mat Alamak” and “Masi Lemak”, and a friend told us that she’d met a child who’d renamed her lost hamster after Singapore’s most wanted man.

His escape is clearly a grave national security crisis, but it had also, perhaps inevitably, become a cultural phenomenon. Was the ubiquity of his image somehow undermining the seriousness of looking for him?

Things were put in perspective for me at, of all places, the National Library. I was there to do some research at the Lee Kong Chian Reference Library on the 7th Floor, and the security guard was checking my bag. On his table was a little slanted plastic signboard. On its outer face was a series of rules for what could and could not be brought into the Library. On its inner face, visible only to the guard, was the mugshot of You-Know-Who.

“Uncle,” I couldn’t help myself from asking. “Do you really think Mas Selamat is going to come to the Library to borrow books?”

“Well, maybe he needs to check email and here got free internet,” the Wife chipped in.

The guard’s previously serious face broke into a grin. “This is not just for the Library lah,” he replied. “It’s to help me remember even outside. Like that sure catch him, one.”

“Well, if anyone can do it, it’s you, Uncle,” I smiled, giving him a thumbs up. “You’re very focused!” He nodded, switched back to his game face, then waved us in.

From a publicity point of view, I guess the campaign is fulfilling its objective; awareness is awareness, no matter how it manifests. So I don’t think we should get our knickers in a twist over all the levity. In fact, it may actually be performing a valuable function: dampening any potential paranoia or panic.

In other words, it’s good the campaign is giving us more than we’d wanted.

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Growing up in a half-Peranakan household that spoke mostly English and just as much Malay as Hokkien or Teochew, and being educated in a mission school (then) famed for churning out bananas, I never really pondered the fact of my Chinese ethnicity to any great extent. Sure, we observed the usual traditions, but mainly around the time of festivals. Being Chinese in Singapore for me was just like, oh, having a mole or something. It’s there. So what?

I started to think much more about being Chinese after I moved to New York. But it wasn’t some fit of “Joy Luck Club” angst from suddenly finding myself in an ethnic minority or being inundated by the dominant Western culture.  Ironically, it began when I found myself being surrounded by other Chinese – “real” Chinese at that.

A few months ago, the Wife and I moved to Flushing in New York’s borough of Queens (video gaming fans will know it as ‘Dukes’ in Grand Theft Auto IV), the biggest Chinatown on America’s East Coast. Here, many stores don’t bother with English signs; aunties and uncles share their phlegm freely with the general public; and at night, itinerant chuanr carts emerge on the sidewalks, just like in Beijing.

But Flushing is also Chinese in a quintessentially New York way.  Every weekend, in front of the steps of the Flushing Library, young mainlanders sell Olympic ‘One China, One Dream’ t-shirts and shout, “Support China!” while right next to them is a stand operated by the Falun Gong, displaying gory pictures of alleged torture suffered by their devotees in the motherland. Meanwhile, across the road, a street vendor peddles suspiciously cheap branded handbags and iPod Nanos, just below the offices of the “Global Service Center for Qutting Chinese Communist Party, Inc”. (Whenever friends from Beijing visit us, they all can’t resist snapping photos of themselves making ‘V’ signs under its signboard.) My supermarket distributes free copies of the propagandist China Daily, the possibly just as propagandist Epoch Times and even the Manchu Monthly.

The Chinese here come from all over China, not just the cosmopolitan cities, and the diaspora is also amply represented: there are Hong Kongers, Taiwanese, Malaysians and even a smattering of us Singaporeans. Immersed in the sheer variety of Chinese-ness, one can’t help but ponder one’s position along the spectrum.

I was forced to contemplate this recently when the Wife and I were trying out a new Northern Chinese restaurant, a small and cramped joint packed with all-Chinese diners. The manageress was trying to recommend the deep-fried songshu yu (“squirrel fish”), while we were nervously trying to figure out a polite way to inquire whether there was actually any squirrel in it.

Just then a diner at another table piped up and asked, “Hey, anybody here knows a good travel agent?” Instantly, recommendations came from the other tables. The manageress added her two cents, “Better buy your ticket early, while the US dollar is low!” Everyone laughed. She didn’t stop there. “Better buy property too!” she continued. “Property prices in Flushing have tripled since 2000!”

“I’ll wait for the dollar to drop some more,” moaned another diner. “It’s too expensive for me now.”

“Ask your friends!” ventured a fellow from a table in the back. “They might cut you good deals.”

This brought an immediate rebuke from yet another customer.  Dropping his chopsticks with a clatter, he barked, “No! Always buy from strangers, especially laowai, because you can negotiate without awkwardness!  If you buy from friends, it’ll cost you 20 percent more!” A low murmur of “you daoli, you daoli” (“that makes sense”) reverberated through the restaurant.

Being there in that small room, conversing in differently-accented Mandarin, sharing insider knowledge for personal profit, labelling Westerners “laowai” (foreigners) even in a Western country… there was a cosy, conspiratorial air that made me feel a heightened sense of Chinese community – perhaps for the first time in my life.

It was, however, short lived. When another diner said he was confused by the distinction in New York real estate between condominiums and co-operatives, the Wife decided to offer a brief explanation. I tried to simplify it further by saying, “Condos are easier to rent out, unlike co-ops, where you need permission from the board.”

At this, the manageress smiled. “Not in Flushing. You just bribe the building superintendent. $1000, and no problem!”

Everyone else guffawed, nodding away. I blinked, wondering why this possibility never even entered my mind. Then someone smiled pointedly at us, “You aren’t from China, are you?”

“We’re Singaporean,” I replied, sheepishly. And I never felt more so.

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The following was published in the Sunday Times on 4 May 2008:

A Comic Recollection
by Colin Goh

Two weeks ago, I trudged across midtown Manhattan to meet some folks concerning a future project.  (Sorry, can’t reveal details yet.) Their designated meeting place was the Jacob Javits Convention Centre, which, in some ways, represents the convergence of two aspects of my life.

The Javits was where, some years ago, I took the New York bar examinations to qualify as an attorney.  It was the hardest exam I ever took, not because it was intellectually challenging, but because it required memorizing several phone directories’ worth of material. For once in my life, I was grateful for Singaporean rote training, a fact emphasized by the candidate seated next to me, who moaned “Oh! My! God!” every few minutes.

This time, however, the Javits was hosting the New York Comic Convention, which, though second in size to the one in San Diego, has the distinct advantage of being in the capital of the comic world: Gotham City itself.

I grew up on American comics. My parents were very enlightened about what many dismissed as a corrupting influence on children; they felt that as long as I didn’t read comics exclusively, it was fine. More than any other form, comics taught me how to read, write, draw, and thanks to their depictions of different kinds of vernacular dialogue (compare, say, the Thing’s speech patterns with Thor’s), the ability to “code-switch”, something that many language teachers say is the preserve of an elite few.  Phooey, I say to them (or whatever the Hokkien equivalent of ‘phooey’ is). I learned it from possibly the most low-class artform of all.

I really loved the darned things. And like all things you love, they can break your heart. In JC, I started a small comic shop, fueled by pure hubris: I hoped to share my beloved medium with others through judicious curation. But the vast majority of comics buyers at the time weren’t interested in reading:  they only wanted to buy multiple copies of special issues, slip them immediately into protective plastic bags, and then resell them for a profit. On shipment day, the store often felt dispiritingly like the floor of the stock exchange, except the traders had more pimples. Most of the really innovative work remained unsold, and unappreciated.  After closing the shop, I gave up collecting comics and read only the barest handful of titles.  Much of the content by then had become saturated with increasingly nihilistic superheroes and gimmicky storylines anyway.  It seems I wasn’t the only one to turn away from comics – by 1996, industry leader Marvel Comics had even gone bankrupt.

But visiting the Con, I learned that the industry had turned a corner over the past few years. Better writers, artists and editors have regained control, and though superheroes still dominate, the content is much more diverse. There are works out there which rival any prose novel – Alison Bechdel’s literate and nuanced ‘Fun Home’ is the best thing I’ve read all year. Graphic novels (storylines contained within a single volume, as opposed to single issue ‘floppies’) are also a real growth area because they can access regular bookstores, who are devoting more space to them too. In 2007, they became a US$375 million market.

But chope: if you’re thinking of jumping into comics hoping to make big bucks, here are some reality checks – part of the buzz about comics comes from being able to translate them into games, toys and movies, and cross-pollinating audiences. This usually only works with established characters. So unless you’ve created Spider-Man, moderate your expectations.  One of the most depressing things you can do in life is visit the Con’s artists’ alley, where legendary creators are willing to doodle for you for $10. Guess who doesn’t have contractual entitlements to merchandising and adaptation royalties?

Also, although more profitable than in the past few years, readership is still generally depressed compared to, say, thirty years ago. But that’s the case for all periodicals, not just comics. People just aren’t reading as much as they used to. The industry is also afflicted by the same problems that the digital world poses to all other media, including piracy and speculative revenue models.

Still, despite the challenges, it was nice to see my old passion evolving and widening. As the Cons are usually assemblies of male nerds, I was especially happy to see more women and girls attending. (I’m not counting those hired to walk around in Princess Leia bikinis to flog Star Wars merchandise.)

But I was also glad one thing hadn’t changed at American comic conventions: I’m never the fattest guy in the room. Heng ah!

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Swearing? Who Gives a Bleep?
by Colin Goh

By now, many of you must have seen that YouTube clip of a man’s cellphone recording of his altercation with a taxi driver.  Apparently, things were ignited when the cabbie, asked to move his vehicle, responded with the f-word.

“The F Word” is also the title of one of several food-related TV shows that I follow religiously that star British chef Gordon Ramsay, who is famous not just for his cooking skills, but his ability to unleash creative expletive-laden invective. (Sample quote: “You moved like a [bleep] tortoise giving birth!”)

And according to a much-circulated New York Times article last Wednesday, the culinary world resembles nothing so much as a US Marines barracks: a recent New Yorker magazine profile of New York’s hottest chef at the moment, David Chang, are littered with his profane utterances, while vulgarities are sprinkled like bacon bits on a salad in any given episode of the highly popular cooking competition ‘Top Chef’, not to mention anything involving Anthony Bourdain.

I was a little surprised by the article – mainly because the bad language never really registered with me.  “We’ve been watching these shows for years!” I said to the Wife. “What the heck is wrong with me that I never really noticed the swearing?”

“Who the heck cares?” replied the Wife, who, unlike me, actually used ‘heck’.

I paused to ponder this.  I came from an all boys’ school, so cussing was never new to me, but I do remember being stunned on my first day of national service, when arriving at my assigned company, the duty corporal greeted me by substituting Hokkien obscenities whenever punctuation marks were called for. To this day, whenever I hear a military person speak of a strategy of ‘shock and awe’, I think back to that first day at Nee Soon Camp.

But I wasn’t offended. In fact, this new benchmark of cursing amused me, and I actually began to archive profanity I found especially innovative. Naturally, the army was a treasure trove.

I guess it’s only natural to be curious about anything that’s seen as taboo.  When learning any language, we always want to find out a few choice expletives. I remember when hosting a Japanese exchange student during secondary school, his first question to me was, “Colin-san, what is ‘[very inflammatory Hokkien expression concerning the anatomy of one’s maternal parent]’?”

But I might have been particularly perverse during the interregnum between NS and university, when I dated a girl precisely because she swore like a fishwife, giving me personal insight into the persuasiveness of the venerable exhortation, “Talk dirty to me, baby.” The conversations during our dates often resembled the dialogue in a Quentin Tarantino movie, and my parents were certainly displeased when in their company, I’d inadvertently leak some of the vocabulary I’d absorbed.

I’ve since stopped swearing so much, except for the occasional outburst, but I can’t say it’s because I suddenly re-acquired civility. I’m one of the few who doesn’t buy the notion that employing vulgarities are, as we Singaporeans say, ‘so L.C.’ (for ‘low class’). I know people from every economic strata who curse – from Geylang durian sellers to Wall Street CEOs. In fact, my salty ex and, as I also learned, my corporal, actually came from very ‘H.C.’ backgrounds and went on to graduate from top universities. I think for most people, it’s a phase we grow out of, largely because it gets boring after a while.

Yes, yes, yes, swearing leaves an unpleasant impression, risks misunderstanding, is intellectually lazy, blah blah blah, but you know, it’s been around for eternity (it’s even in Shakespeare), and people should just shrug it off and deal with much more offensive uses of language – like incitement to hatred, or lying.  In fact, I’m much more annoyed by disingenuous people who employ substitutes like ‘sugar’, and (I’m not making this up) ‘grasshole’.

Am I out of touch with popular sentiment? Maybe, though I take some comfort from the fact that online commenters on the aforementioned YouTube clip seem to be heaping much less opprobrium on the foul-mouthed cabbie than on the clip’s recordist, for his hyperbolic comparison of being sworn at to a seizable offence under the assault provisions of the Penal Code.

And do I wish people would curse less on my favourite TV shows? Yes, but mainly because their expletives get bleeped out, and I want to hear what they’re actually saying instead of whatever the networks have hired R2D2 to dub over.

That’s my honest opinion. I swear.

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The Slippery Slope between Prodigy and Tragedy
by Colin Goh

It’s terrible, but when I read about how Sufia Yusof, the mathematics prodigy who was admitted to Oxford at the age of 13, had been found prostituting herself in London, the first thing that popped into my head was an old BBC comedy sketch.

It was from the radio show Knowing Me Knowing You, where the idiotic host Alan Partridge (played masterfully by Steve Coogan) was interviewing “Simon”, a child prodigy, who at 9, was Oxford’s youngest ever Fellow. Partridge set the tone for the entire programme when his first question to the prodigy’s father was, “When did you first realise that Simon was abnormal?” To which the father replied, “Gifted, you mean,” only for Partridge to concur, “Abnormally gifted.”

I find Sufia Yusof’s story tragic, but I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. I had the same feeling some years ago when I attended the New York premiere of a documentary on perhaps Singapore’s most famous GEP student: Grace Quek, better known as Annabel Chong. For those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Chong, she rocketed to worldwide notoriety with The World’s Biggest Gang Bang, a pornographic video of her having non-stop consecutive sex with 251 men (later revealed to be actually “only” around 70).

“Annabel” turned up for a post-screening Q&A session, which I thought she fielded deftly, and I was left with the impression of someone extremely smart, but so full of hurt and rage that she felt compelled to respond in an extreme way.

Some have suggested that the entire exercise was a way to exorcise her trauma after being gang-raped while studying law in London, while she herself has said it was an artistic statement questioning the unfairness of lauding men as “studs” for having multiple sex partners, but not women. I guess – though while watching the documentary, I mostly remember thinking: how uniquely Singaporean of her not to be content just making porn, but trying to break a record while at it.

I’m not suggesting in any way that the pressure of excelling academically automatically leads to risky sexual behaviour, but I do think that growing up in artificially-constructed circumstances can really screw you up.

The Wife, an assistant professor in the field of education here in New York, says that quite a number of her fellow academics are increasingly ambivalent about ‘gifted’ programmes. While the goal of helping each child develop his or her own gifts at his or her own pace is laudable, often the kids are assessed on very artificially-drawn criteria, and set up with expectations that can never be realized when they eventually leave their hermetic existence and rejoin the real world.

Also, the benefits of (1) exploring different possibilities rather than committing to one path at such an early age, and (2) mixing with people of diverse abilities and backgrounds, invariably receive short shrift whenever we talk about “giftedness”. What does it say about us that we aren’t as worried about creating elite, uncaring sociopaths as we are about Boy-Boy not being one up over our neighbour’s children?

Here in the US, there’s definitely an industry devoted to stroking parents’ egos about how Junior is actually a genius, and playing on their status anxieties to sign up for expensive programmes to help him get a notional leg up over the riff-raff. It gets even more ridiculous when this competitiveness is taken to early childhood (Baby Einstein DVDs) and even pre-natal stages. (BabyPlus Womb Songs, anyone?) According to Alissa Quart’s book, Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child (Penguin Press, 2005), “Designating children as gifted, especially extremely gifted, and cultivating that giftedness may be not only a waste of money, but positively harmful. The overcultivated can develop self-esteem problems and performance anxiety.” She cites the case of Brandenn Bremmer, who entered college at 10, and then committed suicide at 14, after complaining of having “perfection” demanded of him.

When the news of Sufia’s admission into Oxford first broke, I met a gentleman who said he wished his son could be just like her. “Isn’t it be great to have such a head start over your peers?” he asked me.

I thought back to my hormone and alcohol-fueled undergraduate experience and said that for a 13 year old far away from home and mixing with much more mature people, it could be both terrifying, disorienting and lonely. Being great at sums doesn’t mean much then. What’s the hurry anyway? I asked him. Is it worth the psychological trauma just to get a few years’ seniority, which is ultimately meaningless in the working world? He didn’t seem to understand then.

I wonder if he still wishes his child were like Sufia.

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Sunday Times 23 March 2008
It’s Easy to be Sleazy
by Colin Goh

Sometimes the political coverage here in America’s newspapers can make FHM look like my old church bulletin.

Just over the past few years, I’ve read, inter alia, about how New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey confessed to having a gay relationship with his security adviser; how Idaho Senator Larry Craig was arrested after allegedly soliciting sex by playing footsie with an undercover policeman in an airport toilet; how Republican Congressman Mark Foley sent kinky emails and IM messages to his teenage pages; and the latest bombshell: how New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had trysts with really expensive call girls.

Then just a few days back, Spitzer’s replacement, David Paterson, confessed to “several” extra-marital affairs, and worse, McGreevey returned to the headlines with revelations that he, his now ex-wife, and his driver used to engage in “threesomes”. And hanging over all of them, the Buaya-in-Chief himself, former President Bill “I-did-not-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman” Clinton.

“Piang eh,” I said to the Wife. “I knew politicians played dirty, but this is ridiculous.”

“What’s also ridiculous is how after the scandal is blown open,” she replied huffily, “they always have this press conference where they make their poor wives stand next to them to ‘show their support in this trying time for the family’ or donno what nonsense.”

“You mean you wouldn’t stand next to me and support me at my press conference if I was discovered to have, I donno, an erotic cupcake habit?” I asked, hypothetically. (Very hypothetically.)

“You mean you’d hold a press conference to admit you have an erotic cupcake habit?” she answered, her look of disgust shortly becoming one of suspicion.

“Just… saying only, lah,” I smiled, not particularly convincingly judging by her reaction. (Note to self: better lie low about cupcakes over the next few weeks.)

The Spitzer scandal has certainly set many tongues wagging, from op-ed columns to talk shows and the blogosphere, over a whole range of issues, including: whether men are just inherently horndogs; why should we care about personal indiscretions as long as they don’t prevent the guys from doing their job; how come the Europeans would have just shrugged all of this off; why their spouses should just dump them immediately; why their spouses should give them another chance; hypocrisy and hubris; yadda yadda yadda.

But to me, what’s most puzzling about these scandals is why would such powerful, influential men (and they seem to be always men) with so much to lose, still indulge in such high-risk behaviour? I mean, is the urge to engage in such activities so overpowering that they can’t wait till they’re out of office? Or is it some form of death wish, a secret longing to bring the charade that is their life to an end?

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests that high-achieving men often snap under what he calls the ‘rank-link imbalance’ – they suddenly realize how lonely they’ve become, after having spent so many years clawing their way to power. This “boo-hoo-hoo, nobody understands the real me” epiphany is felt even more acutely when contrasted with their mighty public personae. And so they do dumb things to restore some level of intimacy. Why dumb things? Because in the process of climbing up the greasy pole of success, they’ve lost touch with ordinary people, and also notions of common sense.

Maybe. But it could just be that high achievers are risk takers, and that attitude applies even to their social lives. Or maybe powerful men simply like being powerful, and nothing is ever enough to satisfy their need to dominate; having a secret double life is just possessing another level of power over others.

And when I think about it: this sordid stuff isn’t confined to the high muckamucks either. I’m sure all of us know regular joes who’ve led secret existences too – those ‘entertaining-the-client’ trips to the KTV ‘launge’, late night porn-surfing, the second families in Bintan, secret photos of the maid, erotic cupcakes… (okay, maybe not that last one). And for the rest of us, maybe it’s not that we’re wired more correctly, it’s just that our fear of shame trumps our temptation.

“I mean, how do you know I won’t be another Eliot Spitzer and you’ll kena stand next to me at some rostrum in the future?” I asked the Wife.

“I know what you make as a writer, dear,” she patted my cheek and smiled consolingly. “You can’t afford call girls.” Heng ah!

And maybe that’s what entitles us to heap scorn on leaders who fall below our own standards: we know how easy it is to be sleazy, so we put them in office and pay them the big bucks to be better than us.

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Sunday Times 9 March 2008
Finding My Own Voice
by Colin Goh

There’s an article from Salon.com that’s making the rounds, about whether Barack Obama’s baritone voice gives him an edge over Hillary Clinton, who has occasionally been dubbed “Shrillary”, especially when she gets excited.

If that’s true, it’s depressing. Not that I prefer any particular candidate (Al Gore, come back!), but the notion that people can be swayed by delivery over content, and also that gender stereotyping is alive and well in the 21st century should make anyone groan.

It’s also personally depressing for me to know that voice can be a determinant of one’s perception. This goes back to the very first time I received a telemarketing call in the USA, shortly after I’d arrived. Here’s a dramatic reconstruction of how it went:

Me: Hello.
Telemarketer: Hello, ma’am, I’m calling about your credit report.
Me: (stunned, awkward silence)
Telemarketer: Ma’am?
Me: (voice suddenly dropping two octaves) Sorry, wrong number.

My voice had never been mistaken for a woman’s prior to this, and I thought the telemarketer must have had some form of auditory dysfunction. But this embarrassing situation was repeated in virtually every subsequent call, which naturally led to a lot of personal anguish. That can be a lot of anguish, especially in the US, where one is guaranteed to receive at least one telemarketing call every day.

I began to wonder about the correct solution to this recurring annoyance. Should I bother correcting the party on the other line? Or would that just make them apologise and render the conversation even more awkward? Or should I just ignore their mistake and lower my voice with my next line, and just carry on as if nothing happened? Or should I just accept my fate and pretend to be a woman?

The Wife soon twigged on to my private hell.

“Why do you use a different voice when you answer the phone?” she asked. “You sound like a RGS girl at a sports match.”

“Arrrrghh!” I cried. “You mean even when I try to sound manly, I sound like a schoolgirl?”

“No, no,” the Wife replied, explaining how RGS girls adopt a low, masculine growl whenever they have to cheer at sports meets, allegedly to stave off hoarseness. (That it scares the living daylights out of the opposing teams is a plus.)

This case of mistaken gender never used to happen to me back in Singapore or anywhere in Asia, and I was a little relieved to learn that some Asian male friends had had similar experiences in the US too. So perhaps it was just that Americans aren’t familiar with the range of Asian voices.

I did some quick research which suggested that Asians have slightly higher pitched voices due to a range of factors, both cultural and genetic, but that even within Asia, there is variance. I’ll confess that while working in Thailand, I sometimes felt I sounded like Barry White in comparison with many of the guys around me. But it didn’t mean they were any less masculine – I’m sure every one of them could have Muay Thai’d my ass seven ways to Sunday if they wanted. And contrast the voices of Singaporean ladies (not just growly RGS girls) with the cutesy squeals of Japanese women. In other words, voice doesn’t tell you very much, unless you’re ignorant of context, which is a criticism often leveled at Americans.

But over my years in the States, things got progressively better, which puzzled me. Why were telemarketers mistaking me less often for a woman? Had my voice cracked again in some instance of second puberty? It all began to make sense when I learned that the majority of the cold calls I was receiving were now coming from call centres in Asia. Globalization was restoring my mojo.

But every now and then, I still feel like I’d gladly trade my reedy tenor for an authoritative baritone. You know, like the guy who does all the voiceovers for Hollywood blockbuster trailers, who’s always intoning lines like, “In a time of savage battle…” or “in a forgotten land…” or “one man stands up for everything he believes in…” I wonder how my life might be different if I sounded like James Earl Jones rather than Eric Tsang.

Returning to the issue of the US presidency, it struck me that sounding good isn’t such a dispositive factor after all. I mean, being unable to pronounce ‘nuclear’, making constant grammatical mistakes, and having a laugh that’s been compared to Beavis’s pal Butthead didn’t stop someone from winning the White House.

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