The Importance of Being Not-So-Perfect
by Yeoh Siew Hoon
Every now and then when I am in the mood for inspiration, I head off to a not-so-perfect area of Singapore.
I call this my Orchard Towers moment. For those who don’t know Singapore, this is one area where life is still played out on the streets in all its diversity, colour and, let me find a word for it, rawness. Oh ok, raunchiness too.
I had just had dinner at Tanglin Club – what a bastion of respectability that is. It was packed. I think clubs are enjoying a revival because of recession-hit pockets. I was meeting up with two playwright friends.
One told me his playwriting days are over because a new generation has taken over. So he’s found a new passion – writing opera librettos. He is also writing his memoirs.
What’s it about, I asked, wide-eyed with awe. Clubs do this to me.
“My life,” he rolls his eyes. Then laughs, “Actually not all about my life, otherwise it would be boring. It would be about my views on life and things.”
I think he’s being modest. A couple of things he will share will be the time he spent in Bangkok as a young man and his student days in London. “I will write about the bars and tiger shows in Bangkok, the orgies I had. Why not? I was single then.”
He also recalled his first time at a strip bar in London. “It was the first time I had seen a white girl naked.”
And now he is ready to bare his soul. Writers are brave that way. They share all, yet are some of the most solitary creatures I know.
Perhaps it was this conversation thread that prompted me to ask my other playwright friend for a drink at Harry’s at Orchard Towers. It was packed. I think bars are enjoying a revival because recession-hit folks need to drown their sorrows even more.
We found two chairs outside. The drain stank. It reminded me of the old days when you landed at Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong, and the first thing that greeted you was the whiff of the nullah.
Every now and then, a taxi would stop and out would pour a girl in the tightest, shortest, skimpiest outfit and she would totter by in the highest, skinniest steepest shoes.
It’s hard to carry on a conversation with such distractions.
“So what’s Malaysian politics like right now?” I asked. I have been told men like to talk about politics and sports, and the latter I know very little about.
“Awful, we had a glimmer of …, hey, was that a girl or boy?”
“Girl. Glimmer of?”
“I thought I saw a glimmer of an Adam’s apple there.”
After a while, we gave up conversing and took up observing. The girls gathered under the lamp-post; the men who would go up to them to “chat”; and then occasionally a pair getting into a taxi and disappearing into the night.
“What happens if you go off with them and don’t like them?” asked my friend.
“Well, he’s seen the wares, hasn’t he, so he must have decided he likes them or not before,” I replied as though I knew.
“No, I meant, what if she doesn’t like him?”
Ah, the ability of poets and playwrights to always see the other side.
Catch Yeoh Siew Hoon every week at The Transit Cafe.
Ian Jarrett
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