Losing the Battle of the Bottle
by Colin Goh

I guess all parents expect to fight with their kids at some point. I just didn’t figure on entering into mortal combat with my daughter when she was just three months of age.

And losing.

“Oi! You think you’re David Beckham or what?” I cried, as Yakuza Baby kicked her bottle out of my hand onto the floor for the umpteenth time.  “Or maybe Mariah Carey,” I muttered as she then broke into a high-pitched yowl.

With summer ending, the Wife has to go back to her university to teach, so I told her I’d stay home and bottlefeed the baby during the hours she’s away.  It should have been a piece of cake – after all, during the first 6 weeks after bringing Yakuza Baby home from the hospital, I bottlefed her during the wee hours of the morning, so the Wife could have at least a few hours of unbroken sleep. But for some bizarre reason, she was now vehemently rejecting all attempts to put anything other than Mummy’s nipple in her mouth – even though the bottle also contained breastmilk, often freshly-squeezed.

“I think she’s just acquired a taste for my breast and now feels everything else is an inadequate substitute,” said the Wife.

“Oh great,” I rolled my eyes. “A three month-old food critic. K.F. Seetoh, tepi sikit.”

At first, when I’d stick the teat into her mouth, Yakuza Baby would make a face not dissimilar to the ones my ang moh friends would make whenever I’d feed them durian or century eggs for the first time.  Then she’d spit it out, and scream. Thereafter, if I so much as came within three feet of her with a bottle in my hand, she’d shriek like an extra from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

“This website says it’s common,” the Wife said, showing me the forum page of La Leche League International (www.llli.org), North America’s leading breastfeeding support group. What an appropriate name, I thought. ‘Leche’ is Spanish for ‘milk’, but it also sounds awfully like the Malay word for ‘troublesome’. The general consensus amongst the forum posters was that the solution was finding a teat the baby would accept – and preferably have someone other than Mummy do the feeding, so that baby won’t smell the maternal goodness she’d much prefer.  The problem was that this “someone other” was invariably no one other than Daddy – which wasn’t much help in my case.

I then checked with my daddy friends – but while I was cheered to note that I was far from alone in my experience, their response was pretty much the same: try out different teats till you get the right one.

So the next day, I went a-teat hunting. (I couldn’t shake the image in my head of myself as Elmer Fudd, tiptoeing with a finger on my lips, saying, “Be vewwy, vewwy quiet, I’m hunting nippews!”) At the Babies R’ Us superstore, I bought one of every single bottle-and-teat combo available.

“Amazing,” I told the Wife as I emptied my haul onto the coffee table. “So many companies claiming that their product most closely approximates the human breast! If only they’d told me back in school how much money one could make from studying boobies, my career path would have been entirely different.”  She gave me a look that would have curdled a pot of laksa at ten paces.

Over the next few days, we experimented.  Each time, the Wife would duck out of the house, placing herself safely beyond Yakuza Baby’s olfactory radar, while I test-drove the different bottles. There was the one with a teat supposed to provide the mouthfeel of an actual nipple, another with mock areola, and the one which claimed it could mimic the suction and compression of actual breastfeeding. I tried nipples with faster flow, slower flow, specially-cut holes, rubber, silicone, everything.

And failed every single time. Yakuza Baby reacted to each and every teat like someone discovering that her CPF had been invested with Bernie Madoff.

So now I’m at my wit’s end, and have no choice but to ask you, my dear readers, if you have any suggestions or tips to share. Has your baby ever refused a bottle, and what did you do to remedy the situation? Please email me at: colingoh@yahoo.com, and I’ll try everything short of child abuse out and present the findings in my next column.  (Your identity will be kept confidential, not to worry.) Whoever provides me with a solution that works will have my undying gratitude. I wish I could give a more valuable prize, but I recently lost a lot of money on baby bottles.

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Talk to me, baby
by Colin Goh

We’ve been calling our daughter ‘Yakuza Baby’ (for latecomers to this column, she popped out during a Japanese gangster movie) for so long, I wouldn’t have been surprised if her first words were, “Mise mo nee yo, kono yarou?” (The Yakuza equivalent of “Kuah si mi?” or “Whatcha lookin’ at?”)

So I was somewhat surprised when it turned out to be, “Hawr.”

“Did Yakuza Baby just say ‘Hello’?” I asked the Wife, eyebrows raised.

Hitherto, her communications had been limited to: crying; burping; smiling; cooing; an indignant “Weh!” when she wants attention; and a violent kicking of her left leg, which is her signal to us that she needs to poop or pee. (Figuring out what this motion meant has saved us a bundle in diapers.)

“Hawr”, with a heavy ‘h’, was her first articulated utterance. I leaned over her bouncy chair and asked, “What was that again?”

“Fah,” she replied, with a giggle. “Hawr.”

“’Hawr’? Do you mean ‘Hello’?”

“Hawr,” she repeated. “Glah grrgah hnnng.” (I may have gotten the spelling wrong.)

“She responded!” I exclaimed to the Wife. “We’re having a conversation!”

“Are you sure it’s not just gas or cooing?” the Wife furrowed her brow, incredulous.

“No, this is the first time where there’s been a back and forth exchange, involving distinct sounds and deliberate repetition!”

I turned back to Yakuza Baby. “Chope, are these random sounds you’re trying out, or are these actual words in, um, Bablish?”

“Fnngah,” she answered, helpfully.

Similar dialogues ensued several times a day over the next couple of weeks, each lasting around ten minutes or so. She was especially engaged whenever I spoke Bablish back to her, instead of English. Her eyes would light up and she’d smile and laugh, as if she’d found a fellow baby to chat with. I really wondered how the conversations got translated inside her head. Probably something like:

Yakuza Baby: “Hawr!” (“Greetings, O He-Whose-Nipples-Produce-No-Milk! Have you perchance come to wipe my buttocks?”

Me: “Gnaaaah.” (“I exist only to serve you, your highness.”)

Yakuza Baby: “Mfoo!” (“Verily, make sure the wipes are warm, not like the last time!”)

Frustratingly, each time we tried to record her babbling on video, she would fixate on the camera and either clam up or cry.

“Maybe we have to negotiate a fee with her agent first,” I ventured as I turned to Yakuza Baby. “CAA or William Morris?”

“Ek-ek-ah,” said Yakuza Baby, as if in affirmation.

“You know,” I told the Wife one night after putting the babe to bed. “If Yakuza Baby is building an actual vocabulary, such as it is, maybe we should think about being more consistent in how we communicate with her.”  Right now, we spoke to her in whatever took our fancy: Singlish, Malay, Hokkien, Mandarin and of course, the high-pitched sing-song “Aw, is iddle-widdle li’ul baby comfy-poos?”-style of baby talk. Often all in the same conversation.

“Can you not be so Singaporean?” the Wife shot back. “She’s, what, two months old! What’s your hurry? You want to teach her the Queen’s English so that she can address the UN General Assembly by five? Please, lah! Now it’s more important to just enjoy the time with her, and for her to pick that up. She’ll learn in her own good time!”

Still, I wondered what would happen if I raised the bar on our exchanges a little.  The next morning, I sat opposite Yakuza Baby and went, in perfect BBC tones, “So… where do you see yourself in five years?”

She gave me a quizzical look, but said nothing.

“Do you have any complaints about the amenities in this facility that you wish to surface to the management?” Still nothing.

“Do you believe there can be peace in the Middle East?” Not a peep.

“How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” At this point, she simultaneously spat up milk and pooped in her diaper.

I guess the experiment was productive, but all it produced was a mess. “Maybe that was a little contrived,” I conceded, as I cleaned Yakuza Baby up. “But don’t you think we should nevertheless start communicating with her like an adult, in standard English?”

“The only thing you’re communicating,” said the Wife, rolling her eyes, “is that you’re a wan…”

“Yah, yah, whatever,” I growled quickly, even though I knew she was right.

At this point, Yakuza Baby chimed in with a throaty “Hawr!”

“Did I ask for your opinion?” I made a face, but realised that nothing I could say, in any adult language, could match that single syllable for eloquence or sheer delightfulness.

“Blorp,” I said to Yakuza Baby as I nuzzled her belly, and she concurred.

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Since this is scheduled to run on National Day, I thought I’d write on something of national significance – you know, for a change.  And last week, when I opened my letterbox and saw the Baby Bonus application forms that my family back in Singapore had mailed me, I knew my topic had to be our country’s perennial baby deficit.

To wit, I’ve been noting over the years how the Gahmen keeps anguishing over the following issues: (1) that Singaporeans just aren’t having enough kids despite years of exhortations and financial incentives; (2) that too many of us are marrying late because we’re waiting for some mythical perfect spouse; and somewhat contradictorily, (3) how more and more teens are having sex.

Early one morning at 3 a.m., while changing Yakuza Baby’s diaper, it suddenly hit me: the solution to all 3 issues is (brace yourself) ENCOURAGE TEENAGE PREGNANCY.

Chope. Before you start writing irate letters to the Forum page, hear me out. I’m not suggesting some free-for-all shagathon. I think that the social taboos and ee-yur factor aside, teen pregnancy can be managed. I mean, we’re Singapore; social engineering is what we do.

Because deep down, don’t you think it’s ridiculous that we need babies so badly, but are hung up on some arbitrarily-decided age and a social convention like marriage? As long as our babies have people who care for their welfare and progress, does it matter that their procreators didn’t sumpah over a piece of paper at Fort Canning? Let me explain how I see it working:

(1) Encourage youngsters to have babies between 16-20.  Why not? Their raging hormones make them less than picky about partners, and they’re comparatively eng, with no careers to establish. And don’t give me that ‘but they must study’ nonsense.  We all know they already spend half their time trying to pak-tor (or worse, downloading porn), so we might as well channel it into more productive activities.  Anyway, your ancestors probably had you at this age, and what, you’re going to criticise Great Grandma?

(2) Kids between 16-20 will have parents who are roughly between the ages of 32-50, i.e. people who are still healthy, relatively stable in their career, and can therefore spare some time to help take care of the baby.  They might even have grandparents around, so potentially, the child-rearing burden can be shared between three generations.

(3) Young mums get paid to take care of their babies full-time for 2 years following their birth, at salaries comparable to full-time national servicemen.  Consider it ‘MS’ (Maternity Service). This would also ameliorate the resentment some men feel about their female peers getting the jump on them career-wise.

(4) Young dads continue to serve NS, which they’ll now do so much more willingly. I’m guessing here, but I think most guys would rather run and touch the occasional faraway tree than have to change diapers at 3 am every morning. And they’ll be given more bookout leave to visit Mummy and Baby too.

(6) Once both parents complete their MS/NS, they get a free university education. Why not? For some reason, we’re obsessed with wanting our graduates in particular to have kids, so why not just make those who have kids graduates?

(7) By the time teen parents graduate and enter the job market, their child would be ready for pre-school or even primary school, which will free them to concentrate more on their careers.

(8) Give teen parents, as well as their own parents, the usual tax breaks, financial incentives and statutorily-mandated extra leave each year, to help everyone shoulder the burden of the baby.

(9) What if teen mum and teen dad decide, post-baby, that, oops, they’re really not that into each other?  Not that big a deal, since the grandparents and great-grandparents are around to give, frankly, more mature support.  And what’s new about divorced or absentee parents anyway? You can’t shield kids from every unpleasantness in life.  Better for mummy and daddy to be freed to make more babies for the country.

(10) For any unfortunate unwanted kids, the appropriately-acronymed Ministry of Manpower (MOM) can set up CDCs (Child Deposit Centres) to pair them up with willing foster families or just bring ‘em up themselves.  We’re already called a ‘nanny state’ by some, why not turn it into an accolade?
But when I told the Wife about my brilliant initiative, she just patted my cheek and said, “Okay, so if your daughter gets knocked up in secondary school, I’ll tell her Daddy thinks you’re being patriotic?”  That kind of stumped me.

Then she added, “Clearly you’ve too much time to think.  Better take over the 5 a.m. bottle-feeding shift too.” I guess Mummy knows best.

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Feeling the heat over a hot babe
by Colin Goh

Corrigenda: In my last column, I described how my Mother-in-Law had advised the Wife to avoid eating yams during the postnatal confinement period, because “people say sekali the baby’s down there will be itchy.” According to my Mother-in-Law, however, I misheard her: in fact, it is the mother’s down there that will allegedly be afflicted. She wishes me to correct this immediately, lest “people” think she has been dispensing erroneous advice. Yam-lovin’ mummies, you’ve been warned!

If I were ever to have a superhero name, I’d be Kancheongspider-Man.

Because, as I’m learning, dealing with a newborn baby is an enterprise fraught with anxiety. With every little thing you do, you hear a tiny imp whispering in your ear, “You’re doing it wrong. You’re going to ruin this child forever. You’re going to make her (pick any one of the following or feel free to substitute a catastrophe of your own choosing): cross-eyed/bow-legged/botak/stay back one year in kindergarten/ineligible to get into an Ivy League university.”

I’ve been feeling especially uneasy of late, which I think has something to do with all these mainland Chinese women staring daggers at the Wife and me as we trundle Yakuza Baby about.

“Look at that one over there,” I murmured to the Wife. “If she could, she’d hiss at us.”

“Hiss neh’mine,” replied the Wife. “Wait she spits at us, then we habis. Walk faster.”

Nothing makes you feel less Chinese than living amongst real Made-in-China Chinese, and boy, are we feeling it here where we’re currently based, in the New York suburb of Flushing, the largest Chinatown on America’s East Coast. And it’s all over the issue of baby bundling.

At first, we were mystified by all the dirty looks and clucking of tongues. But it all became clear one sweltering summer day, when we took Yakuza Baby to the neonatologist for a routine checkup.  En route, we encountered yet another Chinese lady scowling at us.

“You can’t dress your baby like that!” she barked at us in Mandarin.

“Like what?” I was puzzled. As the temperature was a muggy, Singapore-style 31 degrees Celsius, we’d dressed her in a light cotton shirt-and-pants combo with a frilly bonnet to shield her from the sun.

“Your baby will be cold!” she said.

“It’s so hot you can fry an egg on the sidewalk!” I retorted.

“Babies are different!” she insisted, and raised her own baby for us to see.  Well, you couldn’t actually see the child at first, because he was hidden behind a mound of clothes. He had a heavy woolen knit hat pulled over his eyes, and wore a fleece baby bunting outfit under which was another full bodysuit.  He looked like he was auditioning for one of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expeditions to Antarctica.  “Dress your baby warmer!” she scolded us as she huffed off with her Eskimo child, who was as stiff as a board.

“Can she be right?” I asked the Wife, panic in my eyes. “Are we child abusers, exposing Yakuza Baby to the risk of catching frostbite in summer?” Now that we’d been enlightened, it was true that practically every Chinese child we saw on the street was bundled up like mini-Michelin Men, even as their parents mopped their own sopping brows. The same couldn’t be said for the babies of other ethnicities, however.

“It’s a Chinese thing,” said the neonatologist, a Caucasian lady who did her best to keep from rolling her eyes when we consulted her. “My husband’s Chinese and his mom’s always bugging me to wrap my kid up.  Even when he’s sweating!  Did anyone tell you you shouldn’t shower for a month? Or eat ginger constantly? They’re obsessed about cold!”

“I think there’s a deep cultural memory amongst many Chinese people of living in the harsh countryside, where freezing was a real concern,” she posited. “When a trip to the bathhouse in winter was to risk freezing, and eating heaps of spicy ginger was the cheapest way to keep warm.”

The doctor assured me that babies do just fine in air-conditioned places. “Your daughter spent five weeks in the neonatal ICU, which was at a constant 18 degrees Celsius. As long as you don’t place her in the full blast of the A.C., she’ll be dandy.”

I was relieved. Quite apart from being acquitted of baby neglect, I couldn’t help but think: my daughter wouldn’t really be a Singaporean baby if she couldn’t tahan a little air-con! As for dealing with the ire of our mainland cousins, well… we’ll just have to give them the old cold shoulder.

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Confounded by confinement
by Colin Goh

I must confess my surprise at the amount of mail my recent pieces about the arrival of my daughter have garnered.  Are my accounts of grappling with a baby touching some kind of chord? Or do people just like knowing that I’m suffering?

Either way, I’m grateful for the advice many of you seem to want to share with me. Certain recommendations, however, instead of providing solutions, have raised even more questions – mainly about the confinement period.

“Don’t allow the Wife to drink any water during her confinement,” a few of you wrote. “She should only drink red date tea.”

“And make sure she doesn’t wash her hair either,” others added.  (To which the Wife responded, “Ee-yur.”)

I’m always tickled that Chinese Singaporeans refer to the month immediately following childbirth as “confinement”. The actual Mandarin term for this period is zhuo yue, which literally means “sit for a month”, - essentially all the new mother is encouraged to do. As I soon learned, it’s an interval marked by many arcane rules.

“Don’t walk about so much,” ordered the Mother-in-Law, when she arrived in New York to administer the Wife’s confinement. “People say your womb will drop out.”

Unbelievably, there were even more peculiar injunctions to come.

“Don’t eat durian while breastfeeding,” she continued. “People say the child will have a smelly head.”  Oh-kay, I could vaguely understand that one. But the next was, “Don’t eat hae koh (the shrimp paste used in rojak), people say the baby will have a scaly head.”

“Scaly head?!” I spluttered. “And who are all these people saying this?”

“People, lah,” she replied, albeit now with the tiniest quaver of hesitation in her voice, which she quickly paved over with another prohibition. “And don’t eat yam. People say sekali the baby’s down there will be itchy.”

As Wikipedia was glaringly silent on the effects of foodstuffs on heads and more subjacent parts of the infant anatomy, I decided to consult the Wife’s obstetrician/gynaecologist.

“Just do what she says,” replied the OB-GYN (as they’re referred to in the US), who is Taiwanese. “My mother told me not to cry so much after I gave birth because it would ruin my eyesight, and good Western-trained doctor that I am, I didn’t believe her.  I went from 20/20 vision to these super-thick glasses.”

But scaly head?

“Just because she can’t produce a Lancet article and the results of triple-blind clinical trials doesn’t mean her statements are false – only that empirical studies haven’t been conducted yet,” she said, adding, “Want to see scaly heads?” before whipping out photos of babies with seborrhoeic dermatitis.  My turn to go “Ee-yur.”

“Don’t sweat the details and just appreciate the good intentions,” she continued. “It’s a good thing for mothers to rest as much as possible after childbirth, and to watch their diet since it does affect the breastmilk. Anyway, what’s it cost to lay off durians or whatever for a few months?” Damn, there goes my new durian rojak oh nee recipe, I thought.

“I guess these beliefs stem from some experience, even if they’re not scientifically evaluated,” I said to the Wife (who insisted on washing her hair right after labour, and wild horses couldn’t stop her from doing it, and she’s doing just fine thankyouverymuch). “Maybe some women in rural China went back to toil in the fields immediately after giving birth, and injured their uteruses. Or maybe Chinese babies are sensitive to shellfish, even when cooked and mashed. I just wonder if other cultures have similarly weird beliefs.”

I learned the answer two weeks later, when a nurse dropped by to check on Yakuza Baby. (New York State monitors premature babies till the age of 3, to catch any developmental problems early.)

“Chile doin’ jes’ fahn,” said the nurse in her Caribbean accent, after running Yakuza Baby through some exercises. But the routines clearly got the child excited, because she began hiccupping.

“Lick your finger and draw a cross on the baby’s forehead,” commanded the nurse.

“What?” I looked at her incredulously.

“Do it, mahn!” she said, and I obeyed. And to my utter surprise, it worked.

“Won’t find dat in no medical textbook,” she giggled. “But my mother in Trinidad always swore by it.  First time I seen it in action, though.”

It was also the last time it worked. Maybe Yakuza Baby was just so stunned by my bizarre action that she stopped. Still, it reminded me to be less dismissive of these ancient prescriptions – you just never know.

Besides, I’m still Singaporean and kiasuism’s in my DNA. After all, I wouldn’t want anyone’s womb to drop out.

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Multitasking Tips for Zombie Daddy
by Colin Goh

Last column, I described how I felt the routine of changing, feeding and soothing my newborn daughter in the wee hours of every morning was zombifying my brain. I then asked readers to send me any tips they might have for multitasking, to make my nightly grind more productive.

I received a good number of suggestions, but mostly a barrage of criticism along the lines of: Why on earth would you even want to multitask, you churlish, self-centred dolt?! You should be happy to focus all your attention on this lovely human being!

To which I can only throw up my hands and say: guilty as charged. I guess I got all kan cheong after reading in Wired magazine about a fellow named Ethan Nicholas who’s now making pots of money from an iPhone app he wrote while taking care of his infant son – cradling him with one hand, and coding with the other. Talk about ‘spoil market’!

The first multitasking suggestion I got came from a reader who told me she was able to read while feeding her baby, by turning the pages with her toes. I tried this out, and have the paper cuts on my feet to prove it.

In a similar vein, another reader shared with me how, by some judicious positioning of the baby’s head in the crook of his arm, and holding the bottle tilted backwards like a violin, he could feed his baby using only one hand, while freeing the other to Twitter or use the TV remote.

When the Wife saw me attempting to try this with Yakuza Baby, she threatened me with Jon and Kate-style proceedings.

“But one of my readers can do it!” I protested.

“Maybe he trained in some Chinese acrobatic troupe and can also spin plates from poles balanced on his nipples!” she barked. “Are you also going to try that, Mr. Unable-to-Assemble-An-Ikea-Bookcase-Without-A-First-Aid-Kit-On-Standby?” Point taken.

The next suggestion was submitted in one form or another by at least eight different readers: Use the opportunity to reflect, and think seriously about how you want to bring up your child, and maybe (softly) share your thoughts with her.

I tried this, and it yielded very interesting results. Interesting as in disturbing. After much reflection, I decided I wanted to give my little Yakuza Baby the same kind of loving, supportive upbringing I had, but that hopefully, she’d turn out completely different from me.

“If you get it into your head that you can have a career in the arts,” I shared (softly) with her, “you might find yourself one fine night holding your own baby and wondering not only how come you aren’t writing lucrative iPhone apps, but also how come you can’t afford an iPhone.”  I also began wondering what kind of boyfriend she’ll grow up to have and all the various ways I might intimidate him.

In the end, this well-intentioned exercise made me realize that it really isn’t a question of whether I will mess up my child, but how.  I recalled the wise words of the British poet Philip Larkin, who wrote: “They [four-letter word that is unprintable in a family newspaper] you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do/They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you.”

Probably the most practical suggestion came from several readers who told me: buy a sling or strappy baby carrier to free your hands, lah! The Wife did buy a sling, but unfortunately chose one made of warm fleece, which makes it useful for the winter months here in New York, but sheer torture for a half-man/half-polar bear like me, especially now during summer.  When I put it on, I immediately started sweating, and the sling became a sauna for Yakuza Baby.  A generous friend did send us a strappy carrier, which was a lot more comfortable, and also less ah soh-looking (an important consideration for daddies). Unfortunately, my tiny, premature daughter hasn’t yet hit the minimum recommended weight to use it, but it’s a matter of weeks. So I’m optimistic my travails will soon be ameliorated.

My favourite suggestion of all, however, came from Matthew Sng, who forwarded me a piece on Dr. Anthony Atala, an expert in regenerative medicine who made headlines in 2006 when he successfully grew human bladders in his lab, and is now trying to bio-engineer other organs. “Grow another arm!” was Matthew’s cheery accompanying message.

To me, growing extra limbs presents the ultimate solution to preventing my life from degenerating into a zombie movie. Sure, it’ll transform it into a mutant movie instead, but in my book, that’s progress.

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Zombie Daddy Wants to Pick Your Brains
by Colin Goh

First things first: thank you for the deluge of emails in response to my last column, about my struggles with the contents of my newborn daughter’s diaper.  I was heartened to hear so many of you confirm that the traditional ‘shee-shee’ potty training technique works. I was particularly amused to receive emails from several Teochew readers bemoaning the aural similarity between the Teochew word for sleep (‘ngh’) and the, um, pre-pooping grunt.  I guess we Teochews know something about diapers – after all, that ancient bit of doggerel, ‘Teochew nang, ka-chng ang-ang’ (‘Teochew people, their buttocks are red’), must have come from somewhere.

A good number of you also sent ‘so what’s fatherhood like outside of diaper-changing?’ queries. To which I can say, my experience is like something out of the movies.

Specifically, zombie movies.

I’m no stranger to burning the midnight oil; all my previous jobs have entailed extended periods of working for days without sleep. But even though I was warned by friends with kids to prepare for sleep deprivation, I hadn’t anticipated the distinct strain of brain-deadness that comes with baby-care, with your consciousness randomly weaving in and out of your head as you robotically repeat a set of purely reflexive responses: Baby cry. Stumble to crib. Pick her up. Shamble to changing station. Unwrap diaper. Wince. Wipe. Change diaper. Warm milk. Fend off baby’s attempts to bite my nipple.  Feel sense of paternal self-worth eroding as she expresses her clear disappointment that, tsk, it’s the bottle dude, not the booby lady. Feed her. Burp her. Wipe up spit-up. Change diaper again. Sing and rock her to sleep. Wonder how come I know the full lyrics to so few songs. Wonder if it’ll give her some future neurosis if I keep singing her ‘Comfortably Numb’ by Pink Floyd. Wonder how come I still know the words to ‘Semoga Bahagia’ from primary school, but still have no idea what they mean. Swaddle. Replace in crib (if she allows me). Sterilize bottles for next feeding. Rinse. Repeat. Do not pass ‘Go’. Do not collect $200.

My zombified mood is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that I volunteered for the night shift. You need to get proper sleep, I told the Wife, because you have to be healthy and produce all that milky makan for the baby. So I’ll handle all feedings and changings between 11 pm and 6 am, no problem. Why, it’ll be just like my old swinging batang days again! Except it’s not. Wiping bottoms bears very little resemblance to eating prata with friends, even when done at the same hours of the night.

The fact is, there’s something surreal about the dead of night.  The place you only think you know takes on strange aspects. Every night at 3 a.m., as I feed Yakuza Baby, I peer through my window and observe the nightlife: the Chinese restaurant workers returning from work, cigarettes invariably dangling from their lips; the garbage collectors; a drunken Korean businessman stumbling home after a bulgogi-and-soju nightcap at the nearby 24-hour barbeque joint; the neighbour’s daughter sneaking out to meet her boyfriend; stray cats sniffing around my garbage can; and even once, a pair of feuding raccoons.  I’ve lived here in this neighbourhood in Queens in New York for over two years now, but it’s like seeing a whole new place nearly every night.

But anthropologically interesting though staring out the window can often be, National Geographic it’s not, and I wonder: there must be something more productive I can do at the same time as I feed Yakuza Baby, before my brain really rots and I become an actual member of the living dead. I can’t really read or work, because all the lights are kept too low. Besides, those require a free hand, something also crucial for watching TV.  Because you absolutely need the ability to change channels with late late night American TV, when the weird shows and even weirder commercials come out. (My latest addiction is a borderline creepy Korean reality show called ‘Tracking Your Ex-Boyfriend’, which is basically an exercise in stalking. But because it has subtitles, I can watch it with the sound off and thus not rouse the baby.)

So since you folks were so kind as to share your tips for dealing with poop, perhaps you can tell me: do you have any suggestions (preferably based on real parental experience) for how one might multitask with a baby in one arm, and a bottle in another? Email me at: colingoh@yahoo.com. This zombie daddy needs your brains!

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For those of you who’ve ever felt that your life is just an endless stream of crap, well, you’re not alone.  Because that’s exactly how I’m finding the fatherhood experience. Literally.

Sure, I’ve read the books, and heard my friends’ war stories, but none of it truly prepared me for the sheer, unrelenting monotony of diaper duty.

“Ooh, lookee,” I’d say to the Wife at 3 am, unswaddling our baby daughter on the changing pad. “Yakuza Baby has left her Daddy another little present, all gift wrapped. I wonder what’s inside this time? Something nice? An iPhone, maybe? An Amazon gift voucher? Hmmm… no, it’s just another pile of poop.” Story of my life, really.

It’s gotten to the point that when someone recently asked me what I do for a living, I replied, “Nightsoil carrier.” (A facetious answer, yes, but it elicits about the same level of blankness as when I say, “multimedia production”.)

I’m not generally squeamish about poop.  When I was a schoolkid, every morning before heading to school, my duty was to prowl around the house hunting for whatever my dogs had ejected the previous night, and scoop it up using a horribly deformed trowel I’d made during a Workshop/Technical metalwork project. (I failed the project, but the trowel went on to find a most suitable purpose.) I attribute my generally positive outlook on life to this experience, because when your morning begins with poop, the rest of the day just seems so much more pleasant.

But with my dogs, I only had to clear crap once a day.  And one bleary-eyed morning last week, it dawned on me that for the next few years, I was going to be wiping bottoms every few hours. My life, as it were, flashed before my eyes as a conveyor belt of soiled diapers, stretching to the horizon and beyond.

That freaked me out – and so when I was at the library, a certain title jumped out at me: “The Diaper-Free Baby”.  Basically, there’s a growing movement here in the US, particularly among the granola-eating, sandal-wearing crowd, to train babies and toddlers to signal to their parents when they need to go to the toilet, and then once safely over a bowl, relieve themselves on cue.  The aim is to save money spent on diapers, not to mention the environment. Critics in the US scoff at this as a mere fad, saying that parents have to spend much more time and effort monitoring their kids for when they have to go, than just tossing a diaper in the trash.

Reading the book, however, I was more surprised at the statistic that most American kids wear diapers till they are 3 years old or more.  And I was stunned to learn that the diaper-free technique being advocated was one that probably every child in Singapore, if not all of Asia, has undergone.

The technique is roughly like this: you start watching your baby and learning her signals for when she needs to go. Once you pick ‘em up, you hold your baby over the potty or toilet, and go ‘shee-shee’ when she needs to pee, and ‘ngh-ngh’ when she needs to poo. Basically, over time, babies learn to associate the sounds with the urges, and gradually, the ability to control the release of their waste. Sound familiar?

The Wife and I confirmed this with our respective mothers, both of whom said they had employed the method, and stopped using diapers on us after only a few months.  They were incredulous that this age-old technique was news to Americans. It led me to think that the critics of the procedure must have been paid plants of the diaper industry: 3 years’ worth of diapers, plus associated products like odor-suppressing bins and bags, wet wipes, diaper rash creams, etc., amounts to a steaming pile of revenue.

So we’ve decided to try the method out when Yakuza Baby attains greater motor control. If it worked for our mums, why not for us too? It can’t hurt. But there is one point of disagreement between the Wife and I over its execution, and it is a fundamental one.

“In my family, it wasn’t ‘shee-shee’,” said the Wife. “It was ‘sss-sss’.”

“Well, we can’t go ‘ngh-ngh’ for pooping with my family,” I responded. “’Ngh’ in Teochew means ‘sleep’, not ‘poop’. It will confuse the poor child.”

And so on. We still haven’t come to an agreement on the terminology, so if you all have any suggestions, email them to me at colingoh@yahoo.com.  I generally receive a lot of crap at that address as it is, so messages specifically about crap would be considered progress.

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Sunday Times 17 May 2009
Past Imperfect, Future Tense
by Colin Goh in New York

“I think I’m going to be a useless parent,” I told the Wife last week.

“Is that a supposition or a statement of intent?” she replied, eyebrows knit with alarm. “I warn you, ah: don’t think you can siam changing diapers.”

“Premonition, lah,” I sighed. We were sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit spending time with Yakuza Baby (so nicknamed because, as explained in the last column, she came into the world while we were watching a Japanese gangster movie).

My sense of foreboding arose after it struck me how different our daughter’s life would be from either the Wife’s or mine. I know all kids grow up in ways their parents can never fully anticipate - I doubt my dad ever foresaw his son forging a career consisting of long stretches spent accessing a parallel universe through a keyboard and screen – but what lies ahead for Yakuza Baby seemed especially opaque to me.

Living in New York, we can never share our past and heritage with her in any truly tangible way.  Sure, we could tell her about it, and show her photos, or maybe she’d get to see some of it during visits, but it wouldn’t really be the same.

Part of it would be not having old friends or family nearby.  Getting to wave to Ah Kong and Ah Ma via webcam just can’t compensate for actually having grandparents around.  As it is, thanks to the H1N1 virus, my poor parents have had to postpone their visit to see the grandchild they’d been demanding for years until… well, until I guess all the pigs in Mexico have completed their course of Tamiflu, whenever that might be.

And while the Wife’s mother did manage to make it here before the outbreak broke (she came to implement the Wife’s traditional Chinese postpartum ‘confinement’ treatment, or, as I like to call it, the ‘All-Ginger-All-The-Time Diet Plan’), the porcine pandemic also affected her ability to spend time with the baby. Halfway through her visit, the hospital banned anyone other than parents from visiting the babies, especially because the school that is the locus for New York’s outbreak is only a mile away. We had to beg the administrator to tolong-tolong let her see her granddaughter for five minutes the day before her flight home to Singapore. “So ko lian,” the Mother-in-Law lamented as she held Yakuza Baby’s teeny hand. “Donno when she can get to taste my ter tor tng (pig stomach soup)!”

And I guess that’s kind of why I suspect I’ll be a useless dad. Whatever life experience I can impart to my daughter would never have the heft of reality. To her, our life in Singapore would always have a hand-me-down, fairy-tale quality about it. Really? Your country, like, banned chewing gum and smacks people on their ass and stuff? And you used to, like, write for a “newspaper”? What’s that, Dad? Is that like a blog? Duuuude! She might eventually taste, and even like, ter tor tng, but probably only in a ‘Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman’ kind of way.

But at the same time I was lamenting the loss of the past, I was also getting a glimpse of Yakuza Baby’s future.  I knew that growing up in New York, she would be more patched in to globalizing forces than anywhere else in the world.  We Singaporeans like to think we’re multi-cultural, but we don’t have a patch on New York. I counted at least ten different nationalities amongst the neonatal ICU nurses alone. In the course of Yakuza Baby’s stay, she was tended to by Russian, Irish, Thai, Filipino, Chinese, Dominican, Jamaican, African, Korean, Indian and regular Caucasian American nurses. And then there were the patients. I wonder what school for Yakuza Baby will be like.

So while her sense of heritage might not be as complete as I’d like, on the other hand, her future is probably much more pregnant with possibility than I could have ever imagined. I guess it’s a trade-off I can live with, not that I really have a say in it.

And maybe I’m being overly sentimental about Yakuza Baby not getting enough contact with Singapore anyway. With today’s global population flows, who knows?

Case in point: the hospital staff member who came to take down Yakuza Baby’s details for her birth certificate introduced herself with “Hello, I’m Bee Leng…”  Bee Leng? I asked. With a Hokkien name like that, are you by any chance from… And she was!

Nowadays, even when you can’t go home, home just might come your way anyway.

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Sunday Times 3 May 2009
I Give Up!
by Colin Goh

To cope with the new addition to our family, I’m having to make a few subtractions.

Even without factoring in Yakuza Baby (as we’ve taken to calling our newborn daughter, since the Wife gave birth to her while we were in the middle of watching a Japanese gangster film), the economy, like some wrathful elder god, is demanding sacrifices, virgin or otherwise.  (More likely the latter, because I understand the former are in short supply these days.)

“The bad economy has already caused two of our projects to be postponed till next year, and even the fees for my column kena potong as part of cost-cutting measures. Then there are lagi all these baby supplies! We need to cut back,” I told the Wife as I scrutinized my credit card statement. “What can we give up?”

“Hope,” she replied, wittily, if not particularly helpfully.

It is perhaps the coldest of comfort, but tempering my gloom is the knowledge that I am not alone in having to re-evaluate priorities. Last week, the Pew Research Center published the results of a survey on the effects of the current recession on Americans – and it showed that they were pruning, if not slashing, the list of household items they consider essential. I walked around our rented house here in New York to see if my feelings tallied with the new American zeitgeist.

I paused by the microwave oven.  According to the Pew survey, only 47% of households polled considered it crucial – a precipitous 21 point drop since 2006. I certainly wouldn’t buy one now in these parlous times, but no sense in chucking out my old set. Anyway, I use it only rarely, mainly to heat up leftovers or disinfect sponges.

I then considered the air-conditioner, which apparently fell 16 points on the necessity scale, but decided it die-die had to stay. To any true Singaporean, air-con approaches the status of a human right.

I rubbed my chin as I contemplated the television set.  Astonishingly, here in the land of the boob tube, TVs were increasingly being seen as non-essential (a 12 point drop).  But this result had to be evaluated in the light of the findings that broadband connections and iPods actually went up in the necessity rankings. I guess hunching over a computer screen while brushing crumbs off the keyboard was becoming the dominant mode of watching stuff, supplanting slouching on a couch, remote in one hand, beer can in the other.

So could I get rid of my set and cable TV package? Maybe. After all, I can find most of the shows I like online anyway. Once upon a time, I might have thought jettisoning the TV would lead to a corresponding rise in I.Q., but I can’t anymore.  If I’m replacing TV with the Internet, it just means that instead of watching crappy gameshows or whatever, I’m now watching videos of kittens jumping into cardboard boxes and the like. Hardly a step up.

The Pew survey revealed mixed results concerning cellphones.  If you were younger, you tended to feel that cellphones were essential, while a landline was unnecessary; but most seniors felt exactly the reverse.  As someone right smack in the middle of the age continuum, my views were appropriately centrist – I’d be happy to dump both cell and landlines, and remain happily uncontactable till the end of my days. Unfortunately, I can’t, and so my phones must remain, their every ring and chirp a sneering rebuke.

“How?” asked the Wife. “What have you decided to cut?”

“Not much,” I replied sheepishly. “Three ‘no’s’ and one ‘maybe’… And I don’t think we can get rid of the car either.” (Unsurprisingly, this being America, the Pew survey showed the car retaining its spot as the family’s number one necessity, despite the recession and rollercoaster petrol prices.)

“Ah, you just lack the stomach for sacrifice,” chuckled the Wife, patting my tummy.  I felt ashamed – surely there was something I could eschew, something that provided great comfort but wasn’t critical to survival, to prove I could endure deprivation. But what?

The Mother-in-Law, visiting from Singapore to help supervise the Wife’s postpartum recovery, provided the answer, albeit unwittingly. “Today, I’m cooking ter kah or chor for you,” she said, referring to that classical Hokkien convalescent meal of pig’s trotters stewed in ginger and black vinegar.

As the Wife made appreciative noises, I had a flash of inspiration. “No!” I cried. “Swine flu! Must cut down on pork!”

The Wife stared daggers at me, but the Mother-in-Law, suitably kiasu, concurred.

And there, I had made my sacrifice, proving that sometimes, you needn’t go the whole hog right away – you can start with just the feet.

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