Saturday, February 27, 2010

Shaken...and stirred.

What, another earthquake?

Like many people, my initial reaction to the magnitude 8.8 quake that hit Chile was one of utter disbelief. The global consciousness is still trying to grapple with the one that hit Haiti and the tragic consequences.

I saw some of the initial footage when I turned on the TV at seven this morning. I was catching a train to New York and wanted to check quickly, before heading out of the house, if the snow storm of the last two days had abated.

It was only when I was settled in the 'quiet car' (I always sit in the 'quiet car' because over the years I've grown tired of eavesdropping on others' cell phone conversations) of the Acela Express two hours later, and the train was pulling out of Union Station, that I was able to catch my breath...and react.

I spent the next half an hour trying to get in touch with a friend and classmate from Georgetown. ML had just completed the master's program and returned home to Chile. We were going to say goodbye over drinks before she left. But in the end, both of us, still dealing with the aftermath of Snowpocalypse II in the DC suburbs in MD, didn't make it to the event.

I sent her a DM on Twitter, but saw that her last tweet was posted on Feb 1. Under different circumstances I would be glad to know that I wasn't the only one getting a little tired of tweeting constantly. What had started as a novel 140-character exposition -- mostly of naval gazing thoughts, sometimes, of self-gratifying exhibitionism -- was quickly redefined when all the major news organizations jumped into the twitterverse. I began starting my day checking tweets from @cnnbrk, @bbcworld, @npr, @cbsnews, etc. I am more interested in following, than being followed.

So there I was sitting in a train on the northeastern corridor of the USA, trawling through tweets for updates in Chile.

Twitter had become the 'go-to' source whenever a major disaster hit. The first images out of Haiti were sent on Twitter. Last year, when the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta were bombed, the news broke on Twitter, and I relied on Twitter for real time updates. Using both Twitter and Facebook, I was able to track down all my friends.

So to find ML, I then tried Facebook. As usual, the FB for Blackberry app was cranky. It took some extra long minutes (and breaths) before I could see her profile and status. She had updated her status to let all her friends know that she and her family were safe. What a relief. I then tried to send her a message. Fail. Fine, I will try to write on her wall. Fail. Finally, I gave up trying to resend repeatedly. I posted my message to her in my own status in the hope that she will see it.

She did. As my train was pulling out of Phily, I saw that she had written on my wall in response. She described sitting in her car at the traffic lights and wondering why it was shaking so much. At that moment, the feeling of horror came rushing back to me.

I had experienced this before. The shaking, that is. Twice. These were when I was living in Jakarta, Indonesia a couple of years ago. Both times, I was far from the epicenter of the quake. There were no major damage. No one got hurt. But I still felt the shaking.

The first time it happened, I was watching TV. It was just past midnight. I first noticed a rattling sound. It took a few seconds before I realized it was coming from the poster frames on the wall.

"It's an earthquake."

I barely said it before the room started spinning. I was on the 13th floor. I jumped up, intending to sprint to the sleeping kids. But for a few minutes, all I could do was sway along with the building. Then, it stopped. I grabbed the kids. Then, I did something stupid. I took the elevator down.

The second time it happened, I took the stairs down -- with one kid on each arm. This time I was better prepared. I even had an emergency backpack with water, torchlight, transistor radio, first aid kit, etc. It was the same rattling sound, only louder, and amplified with cracking sounds issuing from fissures deep in the walls. I couldn't see the cracks in my walls as some of my friends and neighbors did in theirs, but I could sure as hell visualize the walls tearing and ripping apart from those damn sounds.

And there was shaking too. A lot of shaking. One of my friends who lived at the same property but in a different apartment building told me, months later, that she still felt the shaking. She was in bed the first time it happened, and felt her whole bed shake. I wasn't surprised that she wasn't able to sleep well for some time after that. Another friend who lived in a house in a different part of the city said she couldn't really feel the ground shaking. But she felt nauseous and saw the water in her swimming pool shaking (rippling and sloshing) when she went outside.

As my train was pulling into Newark, it struck me that I had all but buried the shaky experiences. It took my friend's description of the shaking she felt to unearth my own memory of being shaken. Strangely, if not for Twitter and Facebook, I may well never recall those real time, personal moments.

Now that I've remembered, I don't feel so shaky anymore. My thoughts are with the people of Haiti and Chile. I feel thankful that the tsunami spared Hawaii, and hopeful that others will be spared too. I am also thankful that I could walk away from the shaking, a little stirred, but otherwise unscathed.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

My Funny Valentine

I had a date with the sweetest guy in my life.

It's been a while since we went out on one of these dates. He had been really busy these last couple of years. So I was anxious for it to be perfect. (Then again, I'm always anxious that everything be perfect.)

So I made sure to book all the tickets in advance, and check the time and instructions for where to stand in line, etc. twice over.

In the seven-and-a-half years I had known him, he never failed to surprise me or make me smile every day. We were going to see the Terracotta Warriors at the National Geographic Museum in D.C. My guy loves museums and exhibitions. (You can imagine how much time he spends at the National Mall. Thank you, Smithsonian Institution.) But this one was a little more special than the rest.

The Terracotta Warriors were life-sized clay figures of generals, soldiers, and entertainers, created as burial companions for Qin Shi Huangdi, the first emperor of China. We just celebrated the first day of the Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year in other Asian cultures) which fell on February 14 (which is of course, also Valentine's Day) and so, what better way to introduce him to Chinese history and culture than this?

On the Metro redline train headed to Farragut North, he had a million questions (as he always does) about the emperor.

"You remember what we discussed last night right? He was from the state of Qin, and he unified the other states to form one country...China. He also started the building of the Great Wall."

"So is he a good guy, or a bad guy?"

"Well, he did a lot of important things, but he was also a tough ruler. He is definitely a controversial figure."

"Yeah, like when he built the wall. He made all those people do it right?"

I nodded. The look in his eyes told me that he could feel the suffering of the peasant workers from more than 2,000 years ago. My little guy reminds me so much of an old man, sometimes. It struck me then that we first started going on these dates -- just him and me -- about four years ago. The outings were much simpler affairs then, of course. Most of the time, it was just lunch at a pizza joint. (I think I'm fully responsible for his addiction to pepperoni pizza.) Our other favorite haunts were the zoo and the Botanic Gardens in Singapore. Even back then, he was already the proverbial little professor. I always had to carry paper and crayons, for sketching and writing.

As his mind grew, going out with him got more and more fun. He kept my mind sharp and growing too, despite the ravages of age and the cluttering effect of mundane daily chores, errands and responsibilities. But we also had less time to spend together. He is at school all day now, and we can't just sneak off for Friday pizza lunches every week. In fact, we haven't had a chance to do this since last summer when his sister was still in playschool and we could spend half the day playing golf before we had to pick her up.

So, this was a really special date. That day, we spent just over an hour at the exhibition. But it was the best time we had together for a while. Time seemed to have stood still for us, as we wandered around, the audio tour sets pressed to our ears. He would point out an interesting artifact to me. I would spot a map (he loves maps) and point it out to him. Mostly, we had fun just trying to press the numbers on the sets at the same time, like two seven-year-olds trying to step in the same square on a tiled floor. (And yes, he asked me lots of questions, including, "Where's Taiwan?" I chickened out on answering that one, saying, "OK, let's stay at early Chinese history for now, and move through the periods slowly before coming to modern times.")

Afterward, I took him for lunch (but of course!). He was strangely quiet though. I picked the cafe at Kramer Books because it was a sanctuary from the weekday lunch routine of waiting for tables and rushed meals, and also because eating in a bookstore was just the kind of thing he would like. He was picking at the noodles. But the chocolate ice-cream perked him up. In fact, he was so perky after finishing the ice-cream in what appeared to be one long breath on a cold winter's day, that the lady lunching with her books next to us couldn't help speaking to him.

"It's really good, isn't it?" she said, giving him the sweetest smile.

"Yes!" He was ready to talk. He doesn't usually respond so enthusiastically when a stranger speaks to him.

"Did you have a good time today, Amon? Shall we try to do this more often?"

"Yes, mum."

"Will you still have lunch with me when you're grown up, and working and living on your own?"

"Until you're a hundred years old!"

"That's really sweet, but maybe I won't be here anymore when I'm a hundred."

"Well, then I could come have lunch with you at your grave."

I guess that means he'll be calling me for another date.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

The Year of Living Dangerously

Happy Birthday...to you, and to me.

Today is the seventh day of the Chinese New Year celebration, which traditionally lasts 15 days. Each of the days is significant in its own way, and the seventh day is 人日 (ren ri) or a day dedicated to all mankind. It is literally celebrated as a symbolic birthday for everyone.

It seems almost poetic to 'launch' my blog on this day, as I celebrate my rebirth from the year that has passed, into the year of the Golden Tiger. Astrologers and Feng Shui practitioners believe that wealth will be abundant this year (good, I need some of that) and that this is the year when things will happen at great speeds (procrastinators, beware).

So this is as good a time as any to finally stop procrastinating and JUST DO IT. I have resisted doing this, as I usually resist everything that is popular, or the 'in' thing to do/see/read/eat for a very long time. For someone who loves to write (and usually writes too much) it should have been natural to hop on the blogosphere mass rapid transit when it became the 'it' way to ride some years ago. But I resisted it.

So why start now, when there are already so, no, too, many blogs and bloggers out there -- some of which are mind-blowing good reads, but most of which are mind-boggling obfuscation?

Well, because the Tiger has jumped me. I started the year finally understanding the path of least resistance. (No, it doesn't mean eating for almost two hours at Momofuku or finishing the whole extra large piece of pecan pie by myself for lunch.) I finally stopped beating myself up over not being able to become 100 per cent vegan. It started with eating a piece of chicken from another person's lunch and not feeling guilty about it. That night, after yoga practice, I had a conversation with my teacher about it. Then, I had an epiphany.

Not eating meat didn't make me a better yogi. Neither did beating myself up when I succumbed to fish or shellfish. The core learning of my practice has been about letting go and learning to go with the flow. After eight years of practice and four of teaching, I thought I had learned what I needed to. But instead, my streak for freakish control and self-imposed perfectionism had taken root right at the heart of the practice I thought had elevated me above it. I was driving myself crazy trying to be a 'perfect' yogi by striving to become 100 per cent vegan, when that was clearly not what my body wanted and not something I could or wanted to do...at least, not at this point in my life.

The one teaching that I learned early on in my yoga journey that drew me in was that there is one truth, but many paths. My only goal should have been to find and learn my path, and let the journey take me there...and not to restrict myself to the straight and narrow road that I believed to be the way the journey should take.

So once I found the path of least resistance, I could start to live dangerously. It's amazing how much we're all creatures of habit and opinion. We resist because we're afraid of change, of new things, and/or we fear what others may think of us. It is hard to shed those misgivings and misconceptions that we spent most of our lives building up around us. (I can't dye my hair bright orange because everyone will think I look like a clown. I am not a romantic person; I'm so going to hate this movie.)

Once I got started down that track, it became eas-ier (not easy) to just do stuff...try stuff. From a small step like finally picking up 'Eat, Pray, Love' (maybe it's the cabin fever speaking but I don't hate it) to a huge leap of faith like laying it all bare in the blogosphere...the process feels incredibly liberating.

So now I'm jumping the Tiger, and riding its back. This will be my year of living dangerously.

p.s. anyone wanna take a trip to Vegas (to see Marie Osmond) and/or take kungfu classes?

Friday, February 19, 2010

Welcoming The Tiger

I have a healthy respect for the tiger. The tiger is the third animal in the Chinese zodiac. Those born in the year of the tiger are supposed to be courageous and powerful, yet sympathetic and reflective. Go figure.

To me, this big cat epitomizes the elegance and power of nature. And of course, no one expresses this sense of awe this creature inspires better than Blake. Hence, my poetic (and some may say, pretentious) posting in the countdown to Chinese New Year.

So the truth is, CNY is my least favorite festival (Chinese or otherwise). I would much rather celebrate Mid-Autumn or Winter Solstice. I didn't even like CNY as a kid with all the money from the hong bao (red packets) and, as a teen, even more money from Black Jack and poker winnings. I could not (and still cannot) stomach the excess of the festivities -- so much food and overeating! In many affluent ethnic Chinese communities today, the significance of putting out the good food and feasting after a hard winter to welcome spring is lost. In fact, nowadays, what we see commonly is an overtly literal manner of expressing wealth or the desire for wealth. Take for example, people who abandon their pets for new, bigger, more expensive, more trendy (etc. etc.) ones every CNY. Oh, and I won't start on the NOISE, because this note will turn into a rant.

I only started baking my own pineapple tarts and taking pains to prepare the reunion dinner feast when I moved away from Singapore and away from proximity to anything remotely Chinese in culture. Whether I like it or not, it is still the most important festival for all ethnic Chinese communities around the world (from China to Southeast Asia, and even here in America). And then of course, being a parent changes perspectives.

Like many of you who are as schooled in Blake as in Confucius, I much prefer to spend time putting up the Christmas tree with my kids, then teaching them how to write 春 with a calligraphy brush. I recognize that I am responsible for how much culture I impart to my kids, especially since we're not living in a majority Chinese community.

So, of course I feel guilty as hell that I'm totally not prepared for CNY this year. No decorations, no tangerines, no hong bao (yet), no tarts and no food for reunion dinner. Blame it on the snowpocalypse. So to make amends, I will give up my regular yoga class this Sunday to take the kids to Silver Spring for the best dim sum in the region, and then to watch a lion dance performance and view an exhibition on Confucius in a mall in Gaithersburg. Amon and I also have a date to go see the terracotta warriors at the National Geographic in D.C. (hope Farragut North metro is accessible by then).

These, I feel are much better ways of imbibing culture and tradition than canisters of tarts and bak kwa (although I won't mind some of those).

So, I look forward to welcoming the tiger. And I hope all of you do too, in your own way. (Actually, my only real wish is to see the Tiger who uses irons and woods again. I'm not going to judge what he did or didn't do. I just want to watch him play golf...cos it's damn boring without him on tour!)

新年快乐!

This was written on Feb 12 and the first day of the Lunar New Year fell on Feb 14.