Q

An ode to my Crash Baggage

Unceremoniously left in the basement trash area, I’m so sorry. You deserved so much more. Maybe i could have sent you for repairs, after all you were indestructible for so long.

To my dear readers, I have all my life tended to anthropomorphise my inanimate possessions, and am especially prone to object sentimentalism. The day I left my faithful Crash baggage for the last time, my heart was heavy, heavy with the weight of my own betrayal and callousness. Even today, when I remember my dear trusty luggage, the heaviness remains.

So today, an ode to my luggage of many years.

You came into my life in 2019.

USA, our first trip together, and what an adventure we had! You were left on the carousel while I passed through customs, through a silly turn of events. And with barely an hour of transit, I begged through warm tears for you to be released. By ingenious miracle, you were! You were, literally, unbreakable – a slip acknowledging an attempted check by TSA stubbornly forced into your innards, but you refused to nudge open for anyone but me! I knew then it was going to be a grand time between us. I’ve retold this tale proudly many times over.

And then COVID, we were stuck in Singapore, you and I. Nevertheless you were significant in my ventures: you accompanied me not across borders, but to a new home. My first time moving out alone!

When we could finally fly, you did with me, to Bali, Lisbon, Porto, Paris; for work, to Seoul; to Chiang Mai; to my first trip to visit K’s family in Wrocław, to Munich, to Taipei, Sydney, London, Dublin, France again, Bali again, Wrocław a yearly affair, to my first time in Beijing and Shanghai, to Tokyo, to my very first ski trip in Japan, to, Galicia, to London and Portugal again. That fateful last trip where you finally cracked.

Oh Crash Baggage, what a time we had together! What glorious, glorious memories we shared. I wish so much I had spent more time at our final goodbye, where I could thank you – a proper one – for being my mainstay through some unbeatable experiences. You were so good to me, the best luggage I could ever, ever hope for.

I will never forget you. I promise you this as the ‘very, very sad classical’ playlist I’ve put on echoes my very, very sadness. As that heavy stone that has been sitting in my chest pitches up to my throat and hot tears threaten to spill from regret, guilt, sentimentality, gratitude, and so much more. Memories of you, that bright and jovially scuffed up yellow, that iconic dented body, well-used and so proud for it, whizzing down dozens of carousels towards me. My joy at seeing that familiar sight of you, always. My pride having you by my side in so many cities. You were fun, reliable, loud, loaded with meaning, so functional, yet so good looking. You were a lion and a dog, fierce and loyal. I miss you and always will, every day of my traveling life.

Adios Crash baggage, I hope with all my heart you are well recycled, and that your spirit is carried over more continents and oceans than I can ever bring you.

August 29, 2024
Batam, 2024

There is a special joy in being a girls’ girl.

It is to be heard, and seen, and known, and felt. It is to simply be yourself, to shrug off the costumes of roles you perform, with the confidence of knowing you are wholly accepted. And if you have forgotten who the ‘simply you’ is, they will help you find it again.

I’ve half-jokingly referred to this weekend’s getaway with the girls as ‘a spiritual and emotional retreat’.

The truth is it is closer to the truth than the humour implies.

What did we do besides sit around and talk about ourselves, each other, and life? A top-notch massage with the sound of waves, excellent breakfast spreads that kept us dreaming the entire day for more, spontaneous deadlift and pull-up tutorials. Being vulnerable and sharing what we have carried as a heavy stone for years.

I am sitting at the cusp of having so much to learn about the world and others, and so, SO much to unlearn to be better for this world and others. To be a girls’ girl is the strength that comes with knowing they will rally around you. I’m ready to take on what’s upcoming.

August 26, 2024
the nonlinearity of age

i’m amused at how world-weary i assumed myself to be at 23. in my early 20s, or even my teens, there was such a firm confidence in my maturity. i felt old. i felt like i’d experienced all that life could offer. i felt blasé.

at 31 i think of myself mostly a child. just yesterday i fell while trying to tightrope walk on a tree root. just last week i felt inchoate, dwarfed by the presence of nature vast and ancient as i’ve never encountered.

how was i so certain – about myself, my thoughts, and the end of novelty – when i had yet to have a snowflake melt on my palm?

yet there is no condescension when i face my age-young self. i was, perhaps, truly old in some ways. in relation too, in context of. i admire my earnest commitment to beliefs i had no way of verifying. today i am fenced by the sole certainty that an absolute truth is often out of reach, or perhaps requires far more courage and effort than the lethargy of my intellectual cowardice can rattle into being.

that aside,

my modest little epiphany is that feeling your age has nothing to do with the linear progression of time and years.

i enjoy today my infant-like wonder at the world, and my hope that there is more to discover.

maybe tomorrow some of that old-young bravado will re-emerge, and i will again assert this and that, wanting a better world that i deem to have explored to its ends.

August 19, 2024
Winter in South Island, New Zealand, 2024

Flew across glacial mountains, back home to Singapore, just a tad changed. Where do I begin to describe the magic that was New Zealand? As the last large habitable land touched by mankind, there is a specialness to the space. Am I naïve to claim it remains less sullied than any other parts of the world I have experienced?

Queenstown, backyard of our hotel. The crisp air and quiet waters. Here we had a cup of coffee, starting our pleasurable habit of seeking comfort in a hot beverage in the near zero weather.

I particularly love this about NZ. At any time, your vision is framed by vast nature; postcard perfect yet unassuming. It does not fight for your attention, it simply and confidently is, as natural as nature is land and sky and sea.

The day we were joined by friends and their tots, departing Queenstown on a cruise to Lake Wakatipu.

You don’t mind at all the chill and its harsh kiss on your cheeks as the ship pulls against the wind. At a little farm we marveled at sheepdogs’ professionalism, speeding off to stare down their eponymous wooly pals into submission.

We watch the kids skip stones, tumble down hills, collect pinecones for first snowman. We doodle ships and landscapes on the journey back to land.

Departing to Wanaka, K and I spent some cozy nights under heated blankets in a little hut, rising early to drive up winding mountains towards their caps of snow. Daft Punk’s Giorgio by Moroder on repeat.

Skiing. That familiar routine of wake; drive; squeeze into boots and helmet and goggles and gear, duck walking in pain and snow; ski, lift, ski, lift; lunch and cider (maybe two); ski, lift, ski, lift; some tears and tantrums in between (mine and the kids’). You end the ski day at 4pm deeply satisfied: you have done so much and earned any indulgence that may come after (and there is still many hours left to the day!)

How much more perfect can it be? On our days off-skis, K and I (and the rest of our gang) took hikes, one of our favorite activities together as a couple.

We went on Routeburn trail near Glenorchy, a fairytale path of moss green even in the winter frost. An easy, serene route, friendly enough for the whole family. We slipped under a bridge and waved to a family across the lake.

On another day, there was Meg’s trail, a sunset hike we took sans kids. The kind of trek up that is thoroughly my joy, a little burn to thighs as you push against gravity. I relished particularly our little puzzles across streams: it is horizontal bouldering if you have shorts legs like I do.

It hits me today that everywhere there is quiet from man-made mechanical noise. There is the wind rustling flora, whisper of a hare’s hop, myriad song of birds, and a shout from the kids, but not much else, as it should be. The quiet is a big factor to the peace I found there, sensitive as I am to noise.

We moved southward to Cardrona, kickstarting the most precious phase of our trip: living in a homestead with our friends and the tots.

The space and backyard is immaculately laid out to facilitate tranquility. Hot tea with a view that runs for miles, snowcapped mountains foregrounded by undulating hillscapes.

Everyday, some form of chaos and adventure, never unwelcome. Every night, grilling dinner by the fire we made, sipping wine, sitting on the comfiest foldable chairs (and falling through all three of them), nodding off to the warmth at the hearth.

One night, a dinner whipped up by the lovely homestead owners. Possibly the best roasted potatoes I’ve had, definitely the best potato cheese soup I’ve had. In fact, everything from the steak to grilled greens were excellent, excellent, excellent. If one could eat like a king, this is the definition of it.

Other days, lunches and dinners out at, really, the only hotel bar & restaurant in the area. The kids getting their knees muddy at the playground while we dig into loaded wedges, alfresco, in 2°C. Sometimes with a nice cocktail.

Entertainment all around the clock, with ‘good morNINGs’, ‘big pasta!’, gathering a ridiculous amount of branches, an entire world map drawn with newly-charred branch by the hearth.

Oh, New Zealand, you have been wonderful. Something about your air and land and waters spoke so deeply to me. The serenity, the idyllic and content, the slowness, the lack of pretense and lack of need to be so. The walks and hikes, mud and dust a-flying. The crunch of snow beneath my boots, powder and windstorm. I thank you for all these memories.

August 17, 2024
A Coruña, Galicia

Northward, a different land, a sea-mirrored twin.
Dreams of triumph roil these waters a thousand years
after our hero first breathed life into shells:
iridescent white-pink conches, winking slyly,
reborn bones of a foe once buried.

we shake rain dew off clear umbrellas, summer-drenched,
and climbed atop a ragged-teeth boulder, like a hero once had.

later, i thought it must be here, the coast of death, that the dog’s tongue was stained.
a rock snail gave its life to the discovery of purple. and so our hero bends a knee,
his fingers dyed a bruised berry, while behind him a column of stone rises
from the undulating coastline, a perpetual flame dancing in its belly.

Q

August 3, 2024
A feather from a boulder

One of those nights where sleeplessness was welcome. I felt again that sensation, wrapped within a dream, both somatic and cognitive: that contrast between what’s unbearably heavy and oppressively light.

Have you ever had one of those dream-not dreams? Not a chain of events, but a repetition of a feeling.

The first time I had this dream I was a child. The first and most vivid of all acceding instances. In it, I carried a large object — I will call it a boulder, although in my mind it had the incomparable largeness and weight of the perceivable world.

Bearing this weight, I walked door-to-door. I say that for as a metaphor. In the reality of the non-reality they were intervals of nothing. At each interval, I took from the boulder, each time I could only grasp and release a pinch. Each pinch was light as nothing, a down feather of a baby bird.

After the first dream, I have had frequent recurrences of this dream. Not as vivid but always, at the centre, that feeling. Not the heaviness nor the lightness, for when awake I carry sandbags and barbells above my weight, and have felt the slip of snowflake so inconsequential it dissolves on my palm.

No, it is that in-between, that contrast, the shock of nothing from everything, a down feather when I expected a boulder, that sticks with me.

The other night where I, in a rare state, welcomed sleeplessness, I felt that contrast, that discomfiting dissonance. Not in a dream but floating towards one. And after two decades of being called to this sensation in my sleep, it finally struck me the simplicity of what this meant. Or, let’s do away with maudlin needs to ascribe meaning. It struck me why and when I have these dreams.

When I’m stressed and overwhelmed, and when every action I take to address these stressors appear futile. Carrying the world, no amount of tasks ticked off is enough to complete what needs to be done.

This discovery, though, is less fascinating to me than that feeling of dissonance. It feels such a singular and isolating sensation that I’m not sure I share with anyone. The contrast of weight between boulder and feather.

June 30, 2024
24 April 2024

Is to age to become so utterly, disgustingly trite? I am bored, bored, and BORED to near death by my boring preoccupations and thoughts. I do not want to think about: housing, children, and health.

I want to think about the immaterial, the fantastical, and the madness that is in every infinitesimal gap of every material thing.

I no longer want to be enraptured by these gormless pixels that so easily tell me what to do, think, buy, and say.

I am SICK of it. I want to be ridiculous.

April 24, 2024
Dearest Q of many years past;

If only I can reach back to your times of most impatient loneliness and loneliest impatience. If only I can give you a hint that – as you rightly and defiantly believe – you do meet the one you have dreamt up ages ago and continue dreaming of.

All the times you feel unmoored: like life is moving forward but you merely floating, seeking a somewhere intangible and undefined. All the times you feel unknown to others. A profound aloneness. All the times you wonder what you must do to find or conjure this somewhere, something, or someone.

Is it dogged persistance? Hard work? Something about yourself to be changed or learnt?

No, Qing, you simply have to wait, intolerable as it is. Until your lives – floating, but towards each other – meet. Buoy to anchor.

One day, soon, he will be your universe. One day, you will write your vows to him and they will be the most truthful words you’ve spoken. One day, he will mean more to you than you do to yourself, a detachment of the ego and an attachment to love as you have always wanted.

He is a much gentler, kinder soul than you are, the sort you long to be. Good news! He brings a softness to your stubborn, prideful spirit, and you will want to be more and better for him; for what you bring into the world with him.

Dearest young baby Qing, there is one last piece of news I would bring you, if I could. You may not believe me, but hear it anyway: He loves you just as much as you do him. If you have ever feared your capacity to love (and you have!) … don’t. He has just as much to give, and wants all you have to offer.

Love you so, so much, you in 2024

April 14, 2024
Book Review: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera

As its title suggests, the novel is one of seeming paradoxes that come into focus as perfect parallels. Milan Kundera’s works are at once Brechtian yet decidedly romantic. The Unbearable Lightness is a concise testament to his literary style. The exposing of fictive and literary techniques; the non-chronological narrative placing the climax and ending ahead of its traditional time in a plot; the constant exposition of political ideas, beliefs about relationships, humans, love, life, death, and loss.

While the characters are moulded to be vehicles of Kundera’s exploration of themes / ideals, they are no less nuanced and complex – in fact, much more so – than a character in any other fictional work. Just as with Immortality, it is challenging to not identify and feel strongly for the fictive persons of Kundera’s imagination (borne of an image, a gesture, a sound, a feeling within himself) despite and because of their faults and very human-ness.

I am in love especially with an excerpt in the last page of this novel. You can say I’m pleasantly surprised at how melancholic yet romantic Kundera made the ending. It verges on kitsch, which most of the book expounded on (mostly against). Which makes it suspect as a deliberate and self-reflexive literary choice on the author’s part. After all, as Kundera himself believes, no one can escape kitsch.

She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

July 9, 2023
2023

It is, already, a month into 2023.

How has yours been?

I crossed into the year atop a hill, in 5°C, with only the rolling fields and hills in the horizon. There was no light but the moonlight; there was no one else but my two companions.

We watched the fireworks go off in Czech towns across the border – pinpricks of starlight bursting with a gentle pop-pop.

The rest of January is as it always is: full of family, friends, celebrations, drama… you know how it is.

This time, distinctively, full of art. Two museums in Wrocław, four in Munich, then an art gallery fair in Singapore. Getting to see Cy Twombly’s work up close; squeezing in a painting of my own; relishing the splendid memoir of Marina Abramović gifted by K’s mom; receiving a book on Basquiat from K himself.

For the rest of 2023, I want to keep this creative energy about me, and it may mean more travel, visits to galleries, downtime to harness art from free space.

I never understand when people said “This is my year.”

What does that mean? Every year is my year, just as it is not at all. I may own much of how it shapes up, but it is so easily and completely at the mercy of everything else too. 2020 is a perfect global reminder.

So 2023 is simply another year, a year in which I will grow; stagnate; take some steps back and some leaps forward. In which I will give and receive love; create art, dread some days, anticipate others. It is simply another year I keep on being. That is exciting, and enough.

February 1, 2023