Reading list – June

Tags

books, reading

Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld

Is there any Curtis Sittenfeld book I don’t like? The best boarding school novel I’ve read since Malory Towers

Shrill, Lindy West

This is a series of essays type memoir by the outspoken feminist writer who I first encountered on Jezebel . I didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. I thought I’d read it in fits and starts, but I read it through.

West talks about fat shaming, rape jokes in comedy, online trolls, romance. I loved this line: “feminism is just the long, slow realisation that the stuff you love hates you” and this: “privilege means that those of us who need it the least often get the most help.”

There were parts that were downright funny, like the note from her landlord about complaints “about creaking and vocalisations late at night (3am) and there were parts that were powerful, like her letter to Dan Savage on his war on fat.

Bel Canto, Anne Patchett

This book is like a jewel. You do not need to love opera to read it. There are terrorists but it is not sad except a little.

Ms Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey

I liked the first novel by this writer, so I tried another. The thing that irked me about the first novel also irked me in this one – the prejudices of the English. There is a Brazilian girl “affectionately” called “Nut Tart” (because of her skin colour and her attitude to men), Scot and Irish people are marked as different and a South African girl had “a flat primitive face”.

However, this book had something that drew me, it’s set among a community of women, a boarding school, but not just any – a vocational school that trains women to be physical education teachers. The youth of the girls and their worship of their teachers is emphasised.

The lead character, Ms Pym, is single by choice and has little interest in mending that state. The principal of the school, Henrietta, is unlike Ms Pym one of those unattractive women destined to be single as a result, but who found her niche and flourished.

What struck me was how prejudice and liking the popular ones plays a role in British justice. Still, the end could have gone either way and the way it did was interesting.

Persuasion, Jane Austen

Objectively, her best novel, though Pride and Prejudice remains my favourite. With Sense and Sensibility and Emma, there were points at which I felt the novel was going on too long. The final couplings were also clear from the beginning. This was not not the case with this novel. I also liked how it was about an older woman and how Austen  tried something different in making Anne the loner and runt of her family.

The Uncoupling, Meg Wolitizer

Wolitzer does feminist novels par excellence, and each one is different. This one is almost a parable, taking its premise from the Greek play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens go on a sex strike to stop the men from engaging in war. In a suburban town in New Jersey where the local high school is staging the play, the women suddenly go “off sex”. This is a novel about relationships, sexual and otherwise, between adult and teen romantic partners and between parents and children. Apart from this, I liked the way the relationship with tech – again both adult and teen – is woven into the story.

Wallflower at the Orgy, Nora Ephron

The title of the book refers to a line in the introduction – “Because working as a journalist is exactly like being a wallfloewr at the orgy. I always seem to find myself at a perfectly wonderful event where everybody else is having a marvelous time, laughing merrily, eating, drinking, having sex in the back room, and I am standing on the side taking notes on it all” – which I realised could be the credo of my life, though Ephron did not remain a wallflower. I read this book of essays at a time when I had been trying not to be  wallflower and got crushed. It reminded me of my place.

Hot tip: all the essays are enjoyable, but skip the Mike Nichols one.

Life after life, Kate Atkinson

The novel is premised on a twist of Nietzsche’s amor fati dictum: what if you had to live your life again innumerable times in exactly the same way? Would you embrace it? Instead, the epigraph proposes through a character in the novel: “what if we had a chance to do it again and again, until we finally did get it right?”

The central character Ursula has this chance. The novel tweaks crucial moments – the moment of death – in her life to explore other possible endings.

Apart from the experimental plot trajectory, there is a sheer delight of upper-class English country life, with characters that one wants to see more of.

The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford

I fell into this craving more of the English aristocratic country life that Atkinson detailed, not expecting much more except that Nancy Mitford had been an author I had wanted to read for a while. I experienced that very specific pleasure of thinking you’ll like an author and it turning out so.

It’s hard to say what happens exactly in terms of plot, but the whole thing hinges on the tone that you either love or hate.

Advertisements

Reading list – May

Tags

books, feminism

The Wife, Meg Wolitzer

OMG this. This is how you write a feminist novel. The feminist thesis here is that women’s work is often unrecognised, and sometimes basically stolen. The idea of the wife as slave. But with enough personality there to become enthralled in the story.

Nick of Time – Elizabeth Grosz on  Nietzsche 

This is the second part of the Grosz’s book on space and time. I realised that I’m not that interested in space and time. Heh. At one time I wanted to make these two concepts the frame of my PhD thesis and maybe it would have been cool if I had except that I resisted because I felt that it would be pandering to the desire to use concepts that male philosophers take seriously. Instead I landed up with tired old tradition/modernity but at least that was a natural fit.

Anyway, some interesting points in this book:

a. Nietszche’s view of history and it’s usefulness of feminist protect – that the past is important but must not overwhelm, that one must take from the past what is useful and move on – to “remember what one needs in order to move on”.

b. The “will to power” is not just one, but many competing wills, it is the synergy of different wills that makes something happen

c. The eternal return: Given the infinity of time and the finite nature of matter and possible combinations, there will be repetitions.  “In the long run, probability become necessity” Grosz says.

Normal People, Sally Rooney

I had the same problem with this book as I did with Conversation with Friends, only with the latter I got over it and the book won me over overall, and that didn’t happen in this case.

With Conversations with Friends, I started out skeptical but by the end of it, there was enough complexity there.

What irritated me was the rather juvenile game-playing and lack of communication between the central couple, and this became acute in Normal People. Here, I loved the initial section of the book, but after the second section gets under the constant misunderstandings and breaking up and (not quite) making up just felt silly to me.

Maybe they would resonate with a twenty-something but I guess I am too much of an old lady to have much patience with it. Not that I am over game-playing but please, people with this much intelligence should also be clear-eyed about what they are doing.

I was also uncomfortable with the presentation of masochism. Not that I’m an expert on S&M, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be a person who has low self-esteem in her life asks to be manhandled in the bedroom. Rather, the opposite, I would think. Instead, a woman who seemed to be fairly rebellious in the beginning is basically turned into a craven mess by the end. And we are supposed to be charmed.

However, this book was almost universally loved by critics. I don’t get it. Tell me, what am I missing?

The Woman at the Window, A.J. Finn

I’m turning into a grumpy old woman but I really didn’t get into this. I guessed about the protagonist’s  husband and child do it wasn’t really a surprise. I found her  irritating – I know, I know, she had a disorder, but there is only so much of a person saying how much they drank and (inexplicably) how many times her robe fell down. The surprise was a bit of a surprise but I didn’t really care.

Funeral Games, Mary Renault

This is the final part of the Renault’s Alexander trilogy. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to read it, because I didn’t really see what the point was to reading further after the central character died in the previous book.

However, it was strangely engaging. Not just the wrangling over the throne, but also characters like Euridike who married Alexander’s half brother with intellectual disabilities. I liked it so much, I went on to another historical fiction novel.

Helen of Troy, Margaret George

This was a super read in general, though Madeline Miller remains my favourite in this genre. George invents  a character Gelanor, a wizard, who follows Helen to Troy and remains one of her friends from her hometown there. I’m quite sure what the point of him was and it stretched credibility that a queen would be allowed to go off here and there with this man.

There are some episodes that I found less convincing, but I could see why George did them as she did. For example, one ambiguity in the myth of Helen is the love between her and Paris. George attributes Helen’s abrupt attraction to Paris as Aphrodite’s revenge on her for a slight – for not praying to her for her blessing on her marriage to Menelaus.

Also, George shows Helen as seeing Menelaus with a slave girl, thus mitigating her decision to run off with Paris, but really given the age in which those events were taking place, a king’s dalliance with a slave girl, especially given that Helen was supposedly off Menelaus by then, would not really be seen as in any way equivalent to the queen running off with a prince from another state.

The part where the travel to Troy is super boring and generally I wanted to slap them both, but I guess that is often how the moony-in-love come across to others. The relationship I found more interesting was Helen and Menelaus’. She chose him, although she was not 100 per cent sure of her choice, there was attraction there. And then after it all, she lived with him.

I remember a reviewer noting how George emphasises that Agamemnon is simply looking for an excuse to attack Troy in order to use his weapons and also to annex a profitable land , and that this might be a commentary on the present-day US. This strikes me as apt, though I’m not sure her intention was that specific.

In contrast to Miller’s unforgettable portrayal, Achilles here is a sullen, almost deranged man-child.

The book dragged on a bit, but the tragedy of the war is really well drawn. I cried at certain deaths – Troilus’ sticks out.

In the end, George gives Helen back her daughter Hermione, which is not a small consolation

You think it, I’ll say it, Curtis Sittenfeld

A measure of how much I love this writer that I would read a collection of short stories. Ironically, my copy didn’t include The Nominee, the story I downloaded this book for. Nevertheless, I enjoyed all the stories in the book, though I cannot actually recall even one of them now. That’s the thing with short stories, I think. They are so fleeting, like dreams. They will come back to me, again like dreams.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane Sherron de Haart

I did not think I was fangirl enough to read a massive tome on the US Supreme Court judge, but I learnt a lot from this book. For example:

1. Her nickname was/is Kiki

2. She studied English literature under Nabokov at Cornell

3. There were quotas for women – only about 5% were allowed in, and all the Jewish girls were assigned one part of the dorm.

4. She married as an undergraduate and her in-laws were very supportive. Harvard retracted her scholarship when she married (the logic being that her father-in-law was wealthy so she wasn’t a needy student anymore) so her father-in-law paid her tuition. Her mother-in-law offered to look after her baby so she could study further.

5. The dean of Harvard  law school asked the nine women in her class why they  were taking a seat away from a man. The periodicals library could only be accessed by men

6. Her husband Marty shared the shopping and cooking and chores while they was at Harvard law school. Then he got cancer and she arranged for his classmates to lend him their notes which she would spend all night typing up.

7. They moved to new York and she transferred to Columbia because he got a job. The reason she couldn’t stay back was because she was scared of losing her husband to illness. But why couldn’t he have stayed back? Yet she did leave him later to write a book on Sweden’s legal system

8. Tied top of her class and edited both the Columbia and Harvard review but didn’t get a job offer when she graduated. A former teacher had to lean heavily on a judge to get her a clerkship and she overcompensated by working harder than anyone else.

9. Was paid less than men in her first teaching job at Rutgers

10. Got back to work a month after giving birth to her second child

11. Surprisingly,  she started her career in acacdemia, teaching and then running the first women and the law course at Columbia.

12. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was her aha moment on feminism

13. Her first test first test case was sexual discrimination – against a man. Her second test case – a woman who wanted to give birth but was dismissed by military in case she had an abortion. Both test cases were the opposite of what one would expect a feminist activist to pick  – a man’s right, a woman’s right not to have an abortion. She was being strategic, showing  judges that even men suffered under sex discrimination

14. Her friendship with conservative justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia – when her husband died, she remained stoic but he cried during the Court tribute

15. The case of the strip-searched 13-year-old making her feel the need for another woman on the court

16. A run through of some of the sensitive cases of our time – gay marriage, abortion rights, the Florida election of George Bush, the rights of Muslims detained without trial after 9/12.

Ginsburg joined the court when Clarence Thomas had already been appointed. She now witnessed the appointment of Brett Kavannaugh (not in the book). I wonder how she feels serving with these men. (Edit: just read this) So much changes, so much remains the same.

Flaneurie 10

Tags

Fat, flaneurie, Hong Kong

Rare to see a fat Chinese woman. I not only saw one today, but one who flaunted her sexuality and clearly saw herself as the attractive person that she was.

She had sharp facial features that were accentuated by make-up.

She was wearing a black light knit dress that was semi-transparent and a black lacy bra underneath and I found myself glancing at her above average size breasts (for a Chinese person) and admiring them, then wondering about how irate women get about men speaking to their boobs and I was convinced that had I been speaking to her I would have been one of those men.

As it was, she was with a man who I presumed was into her , (although she was carefully dressed and he seemed to have not made any effort) because how could he not be.

Hong Kong’s June 4 Tiananmen Square memorial

Tags

China, Hong Kong, June 4, Tiananmen Square

I am sad to say that I have lived in Hong Kong for over a decade and never been to the annual June 4 rally to commemorate the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. I rectified that this year.

The march is the only place in China where this tragedy can be publicly remembered (Taiwan, which China claims as part of it, also commemorates June 4, but well). In this sense, the march is #soHongKong. It is Hong Kong as China but not China, Hong Kong as the rebellious part of China where rebellion is tolerated, the part of China that many people risked their lives swimming to escape an oppressive way of life and who have a deep suspicion of the government in Beijing.

The march is Hong Kong at its finest. It is super crowded – organisers estimate there were 180,000 people in Victoria Park last night, the police say 37,000, there were definitely tens of thousands. The road leading up to the park was flanked by pro-democratic political parties campaigning and fundraising (however, the people seeking funds were not aggressive, just grateful if you gave something). It was packed like a Mumbai local on that road. Yet, I felt in no danger.

It got less packed as one reached the park, but it was still crowded. Nevertheless, the sense of discipline and calm was amazing. Everyone picked a spot and sat quietly. People were supportive and accommodating, none of the usual grumpiness. It had rained the entire day and the ground was wet in patches. That didn’t deter people from coming out.

There were young people, but what surprised me was how old some people were. There were people so old it was incredible they were standing for so long. The man next to me said he had attended every year for the past 29 years, missing only one protest the year his son was born.

There were screens set up here and there, but one couldn’t see much. All the speeches were in Cantonese. My friend translated some, but not all, of it for me – there was a eulogy for the fallen students and a testimony from a Hong Kong woman who had been one of the student protesters. There were different performances of songs that had become anthems to the cause and which sounded vaguely familiar to me. At intervals there were slogans shouted – “never forget”, “down with the one-party dictatorship” “democracy for China” – and the park resounded with the cries. Even though I couldn’t understand most of it, I was moved.

At some point, we all lit our candles, there was a moment of silence for the fallen students and then we bowed several times in tribute.

I had hesitated to join the march in previous years basically because I didn’t know what to do and didn’t have anyone to go with. What I realised is that while it is nice to go with someone, it’s not really necessary. You just follow the crowd, sit there and absorb the atmosphere.

Protests are a numbers game. Sometimes standing up for what you believe is as easy as putting your body in a place where it is visible.

There will be a march on the afternoon of June 9, starting at Victoria Park at 2.30 pm, to protest against the Hong Kong government’s plans to change the extradition laws to allow transfer of fugitives to mainland China (something that has not been allowed so far, because of the lack of trust in the rule of law there). If you’re in Hong Kong, you could consider going.

Here’s a video by the South China Morning Post on the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

 

 

 

 

Sports Day

Sports Day has been a big deal for me since I was in primary school. The adrenalin rush of participating in a race, but also cheering for your house, watching the march past, even doing some random drill but in a nice costume were a welcome break from the tedium of the academic year, despite the heat, dust and grime. As I grew older, I had a more prominent part in the races; though I rarely won, I usually qualified. My sister was always in everything so I always had someone to root for.
Now I get to relive the glory day through the kids. Last year, Nene did very well at Sports Day, so this year, he had something to anticipate. He kept telling me how he’s the fastest in his year, and I did a mental uh huh.
But it turns out, he is. He basically won a medal in everything he competed in, coming home with a huge haul that satisfied his magpie tendencies. It was really inspiring to watch my skinny boy streak ahead in the 400m and keep up that insane pace right till the end.
Meanwhile, Mimi did me proud too. I wasn’t expecting much, since getting Mimi to exercise is a struggle. She does want to do well at Sports Day though, so I tried using that to motivate her to run a few rounds of the playground – hardly a scintillating activity for someone who doesn’t want to exercise, but I tried and failed to motivate her to join Nene’s friends in their admittedly hectic running games.
She only did that now and then though, and it turned out she wasn’t chosen for the finals in most of the races, though she did come third (out of four in the one she ran, but another girl crossed into her lane) and to my surprise, won the javelin throw in her group. I was overjoyed that she had a gold medal to show off too. More than that, I realised that she could actually be a strong runner if she practices.
Mimi, of course, took a dim view of her comparative winnings, and there was a bit of drama on the way home. Oh well.

***

An annoying part of the day was that I volunteered to help out, was assigned to help the teachers at the throw stations, but when I went there, I basically got blank looks. If no help is needed, it’s fine, but then I found myself in this limbo where I would look like the ‘not helping’ parent having signed up.

Now, this is where V would just shrug and move on, but I felt obliged to keep asking around. The thing is, I could see that the teachers could benefit from help – running a station with only two people all day can be super tiring – but just did not want to bother thinking about fitting another person into their (hardly complicated) routine.

This year’s Sports Day was better thought out than the previous year, but it kind of amazes me that given that they do this event every year presumably, it seems fairly badly organised.

When I said this to V, he told me to “stop being negative”.

At the risk of continuing with my negativity – because this blog is my venting space, after all – I was reminded once again of why I stay away from PTA stuff. The weird thing I found with this school’s PTA is that they seem to want to get more parents involved, but when new people show up, they make no effort, except the very perfunctory, to interact with them, except to say “welcome” and then go back to their own cliques.

Increasingly, I’m noticing how bad people are at the basic social skills – i.e. chatting to a stranger. Hong Kong is particularly bad at this because people hide behind language. But I have noticed that even people who speak English will do this, or stick to their narrow racial (yes, racial) group because presumably speaking across accents might be too much trouble.

There was a time when I would go around bridging this divide, but I can’t be bothered anymore. However, even in my can’t be bothered state, I make more conversation with strangers than those who presumably do not see anything strange about their behaviour.

 

 

 

Hell is other people

And I’m probably one of them.

After a Saturday that started well – I went down to play football with Nene – but quickly deteriorated – a terrible woman insisted we stop playing lest we hurt someone, then called security on us even when we moved to somewhere where there were no people, and the apologetic security was forced to back her because of the rules, then when we go home V who backs me up in general starts nitpicking on the finer points – I decided I had finally had it with people near or far.

I have been finding my interactions with people, even the nice ones, increasingly anxiety-producing of late. I am convinced I am rubbing people the wrong way. I get into a discussion with someone, and then I end up rehashing it in my head and wondering whether I went too far.

Recently, I replied to an email from a long-lost friend who I actually like, trying to be lighthearted, and it apparently came across the wrong way because she never wrote back, even to my apology.

I am over-sensitive, not just about what other people say to me, but to my effect on other people. If anything, I am more sensitive to how my words affect other people, than to their on me, unless its V.

I have no idea what caused this, but I have finally had enough. Since I cannot control my feelings (enough, I have tried), I can only try to step back from other people.

I find that I cannot really control what I say, I am resolved not to say anything. Or at least minimise the saying. As extreme as this sounds, I think this is a good policy.

Think before you speak as it were, and speak less overall.

In the meantime, I cut myself off Facebook as a preliminary step. At the risk of sounding like one of those people who performatively declares they’re off Facebook, I feel the need to say this. Since my Facebook interactions are a source of anxiety that are quite easily remedied by not engaging in them, I decided to delete the app off my phone. Obviously, I miss it, and instinctively reach for it. But I’m making myself refrain for a week.

The thing is that Facebook has also become one of my sources of world news, so it’s not entirely practical to be off it, but I’m exploring Twitter, which is much more easy to be detached and anonymous on. Instagram, with its limited personal interactions, is allowed.

Fed up of my husband’s painful reactions to anything I tell him, I’ve decided I’m not going to tell him anything sensitive. For reals.

And I’m going to stop engaging so much in office discussions. This is a tried and tested means of keeping calm and carrying on.

I don’t see friends in Hong Kong that often, so not much to remedy there. I have resolved to listen more and talk less though when I do see them though. Unfortunately, alcohol doesn’t help.

Basically, I’m putting myself in an isolation tank.

Flânerie – 8

Tags

flaneurie, teens

I ate lunch sandwiched between two tables of teenagers.

On my left, two thin white girls sharing a pizza. On my right, two Chinese girls, who were then joined by two Chinese boys.

International school kids.

“We’ve been waiting here for 10 minutes,” one girl said.

The boys didn’t react. One of them took out his phone and started looking at it, barely contributing to the conversation. I recognized this rudeness as the awkwardness of youth.

I considered myself stuffing an entire pizza into my plump self with only a second of embarrassment.

And I pitied these waifs.

Lovely Langkawi – a perfect spring break

Tags

langkawi, malaysia

We went to Malaysia for a minibreak last month. I was determined to do a beach vacay because, while my entire holidaying philosophy is that flying somewhere to lie on a beach is theoretically heaven, but  would always been my second choice over “seeing stuff”, preferably of cultural/historical value, I have had to eat humble pie in the face of my new identity as a parent.

The kids enjoy beach holidays best –  I have seen this both times we were near a beach. The going to places to see stuff tends to stress them out, and they are not old enough to really retain clear memories of the things they say anyway.

So, since we had only a few days, I plummed for something in Southeast Asia – started off with Cebu, moved to Phuket and finally settled on Langkawi.

I’ve only done a short stay in Kuala Lumpur (sans kids) and while it is a nice enough city, it’s not somewhere I would necessarily want to revist (except for the Vincii shoe store). This time, I really felt Malaysia more.

Flight

We flew Malaysian Airlines, with a stopover in KL. When I told colleagues my choice of airline, they gasped. I had totally forgotten the two Malaysian Airlines accidents in recent years.

That said, I was impressed by the down-to-earth but competent service the last time (or is it times?) I flew the airline (we were lucky enough to be upgraded to business class on one leg that time, my one and only business class experience), and this time was no exception. I would say the service on this airline is the best I have ever experienced. The crew are warm, slightly chatty and get things done. Singapore Airlines is supposed to have the best service but I find the air hostesses there a bit stuck up, possibly because of their Singapore Airlines girl fame.

The flights were short – only an hour on the domestic leg – but the in flight entertainment system worked from the time we sat down to when we reached the gate. On the shorter flight, they didn’t distribute headphones, but if you had your own, you were set. There was no pressure to give up your headphones if you were using them towards the end of the longer flights. I don’t know why airlines don’t get that if they only let people keep watching TV, there would be less folk jumping up while the plane is taxiing only because they are restless.

I was not a fan of the food though, which is a shame because Malaysian cuisine is so delicious. I remember my foodie colleague complaining about exactly this aspect, so it’s something they need to improve on. Incidentally, the best in-flight meal I’ve ever had was a Peranakan special on a Singapore Airlines flight; some Jet Airways meals in the early days were also lipsmacking good.

Hotel

We picked Holiday Villas mainly for the excellent location right on the beach at its price point. I was disappointed with the overall decor of the hotel and the obviously old furnishings.

However, the room was spotlessly maintained by housekeeping, the hotel restaurants were reasonably priced and the beach access and pool were excellent.

Itinerary

Day 1: We landed in the early evening so just hung out at the pool. We had dinner at a shack called Cactus opposite the hotel (another advantage of the hotel was that there were these cheaper options outside), which is quite highly recommended online. The food was ok, we thought.

Day 2: We did a morning at the stunning beach. White sand, super clear water, little fish zipping around, perfect temperature. Everything you could ask of a beach.

That afternoon we took ourselves to the cable car and sky bridge. Neither was something I was particularly keen on doing, but V seemed to want to (his idea of a holiday is not hanging out at the beach ad infinitum). It turned out to be worth it though.

The cable car is actually quite a steep climb and drop (Mimi claimed to be scared. We tend to brush off her fears as drama, which they often are, but I think she is slightly scared of heights, or at least overthinks them to the point of scaring herself). One can pay extra to take an elevator down to the sky bridge, or do a rather steep walk. Mimi insisted she wanted to walk so yours truly was forced to accompany her, and while it was pleasant and calmed Mimi down, I began to dread the climb back up. If you’re someone with any kind of mobility issue (V can’t take steep downward climbs, for example), take the lift. Luckily, Mimi agreed to go up by lift, which honestly is quite stuffy given that they cram quite a few people in, but it gets the job done.

The sky bridge was short but quite beautiful. They really should clean the patches you can freak yourself out by standing on though – one can barely see below, thus defeating the purpose.

The ticket is good value for money, because it includes a visit to the 3D art exhibition (basically a lot of 3D murals you can take photos in front off, where Mimi proved she is a model in the making and I proved that I still don’t know how to pose attractively), and a really awesome 4D movie at the cable car lower station. There is also a rabbit petting area, lots of souvenir shops, restaurants and a few other attractions that you can pay separately for, so the whole attraction combined is worth a visit.

Day 3: Rather bizarrely, I had not been keen on snorkeling on this trip, partly because my only experience of snorkeling (in Phuket) had not been positive and partly because I felt Mimi might not take to it.

However, given how beautiful the water was when we got there, I began to feel it might be silly to miss out on snorkeling, even though the cost of the trip was expensive because only two to three companies are allowed to take visitors into the marine park.

Our tour was much better than the Phuket one though (even though we had booked that one through the Marriot, thus proving that price or brand is not necessarily a guarantee of quality). This time the boat was a large full sized one, the number of people manageable, and I had forewarned V that he was not to just wade off in his excitement, leaving us to figure out how to work the equipment.

This excursion was another lesson to me on not underestimated one’s children because Mimi took to snorkeling fairly easily, while Nene struggled (possibly his mask did not fit properly; he was probably experiencing what I did in my first experience so I could sympathise). We didn’t go out too deep but even near the shore there were so many beautiful colourful fish. We even saw a baby shark.

On the negative side, the fish kept nipping us if we stopped moving (thankfully not the shark), probably mistaking our dangling legs for coral. And the lunch was strictly so-so while the toilets were pretty dire.

Day 4: Our last day we decided to just dedicate to chilling on the beach and at the hotel. I had planned to take the kids to a wildlife centre, but they showed little interest and in principle I am against animals in captivity unless the zoo is particularly large and well reputed.

We spent hours at the beach in the morning, so long that V who had gone back to shower, got worried and came down to check that we hadn’t drowned. Nene was obsessed with catching things – crabs successfully, fish not so much (though a lady who borrowed our bucket succeeded). They also did the usual sand castle building and digging holes. Mimi got the hang of floating on her back.

The most exciting event was when a guy who had been fishing just a bit ahead of us caught a baby shark and a puffer fish in his net. He kept the shark and let the puffer fish go.

V and I got massages in the afternoon (and the very lovely Yuan Spa, if you’re interested) and then I did another stint at the pool with the kids in the evening.

One of the interesting things about Malaysia – or at least Langkawi – is that the tourist crowd is quite mixed. There were a number of Indians, locals, Westerners but also Arabs. So at the pool, there’d be people in bikinis to ladies in long kaftaans. And noone was giving anyone the side-eye which is how I think the world should be.

Food

The food is obviously awesome. Because of Malaysia’s ethnic composition, there was Chinese food for the kids and more spicy Malay and Indian food for V and I. In fact, we had mutton curry and naan from an Indian restaurant down the road two nights in a row.

General comments

Like the service on Malaysian Airlines, I found people in Malaysia generally friendly and laidback. It helps that many people we encountered spoke English. As an Indian, one does not also feel racially out of place.

The above are exactly the things that are lacking in Hong Kong, and made me think about how pleasant it would be to live in a place where people do not shy away from other people.

Given the price, the beauty, the food and our overall experience, I would definitely go back.

Met Gala – the most fabulous of the fabulous

Tags

camp, fashion, Met Gala, Red carpet

I don’t usually cover the Met Gala but there was so much breathtaking fabulosity this year plus I have been seeing some fairly ignorant memes on social media so I figured, why not?

The Met Gala is organized by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It’s a fundraising event that was turned into social marquee extravaganza by Anna Wintour of Vogue. Every year, there is a theme, based on the institute’s new exhibition.

Further reading here.

This year the theme was “Notes on Camp”, taking off on Susan Sontag’s essay.

What is camp? Sontag says to talk of camp “to betray it”. Nevertheless, she persisted and so will I.

Sontag insists that camp is a sensibility and in that sense ineffable. It is hard to pin down its meaning, but we will try. The best illustration of camp, of course, is in its doing.

She cites Oscar Wilde:
“One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” Camp is a mode of aestheticisation, that prioritizes form (in this case style) over content. It is not about beauty, but artifice.

Camp has a kitschy quality, so bad it’s good. It is by nature over the top. “Exaggerated”, “outlandish” are words that come to mind.

“The hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance. Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers.”

This will explain the profusion of feathers on the Met Gala red carpet.

“One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp (“camping”) is usually less satisfying”

Thus the irony in people – especially people with a truckload of money and fashion designers at their beck and call – being asked the do camp. Yet, surprisingly, they mostly succeeded.

Further reading: Hamish Bowles musings on the theme. A Jezebel piece on why the theme sets celebrities up to fail.

And with no further ado, here are the ones I enjoyed the most:

Janelle Monae

Tom and Lorenzo pointed out that it is debatable whether Surrealism counts as camp – Sontag explicitly names Dali as not camp – but conclude that the eye that blinks clinched it in favour.

See how the eye just takes it into the “too much” territory that is definitely camp?

I heart this ensemble blinking eye camp or not.

Lady Gaga

Gaga has been doing camp for all long as she’s been on the international radar at least bit of late she had gotten kind of staid.

Here she reclaims her throne as Our Lady of Camp with three costume changes and a thousand bolts of theatricality.

Further reading: TLo on Gaga and camp.

Kacey Musgraves

Channeling Barbie. Nuff said.

“Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.'”

Hailee Steinfeld

Dua Lipa

“In naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails. Of course, not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate, and the naïve.”

Camp is not trying to be ironic, but sometimes ends up being unwittingly so.

Cardi B

“Camp asserts that good taste is not simply good taste; that there exists, indeed, a good taste of bad taste”

Jared Leto

“Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.”

Androgyny is a strain of camp, as is drag as is the conversion of person to thing.

Michael Urie

Love that so many dudes brought their A-game.

Ezra Miller

“Where the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted”

The Kardashians

These ladies epitomize camp on the red carpet on a regular day but they did their best to outdo themselves.

Kylie won this round.

Honorable mentions

Best model

Best couple

Who did you love?

 

Flaneurie – 7

Tags

children, flaneurie, Hong Kong

A cheeky little boy, hugging his grandfather in the train and saying: I love you, ye ye.

Then patting his tummy and saying: “3 babies in there” (in Cantonese)? while grandpa indulgently goes “shhhh”.

Apart from the awwww, it’s also gratifying to know that Chinese kids also say embarrassing stuff.

***

Then a boy sleeping upright in a train seat and his grandma next to him holding a hand on his chest to make sure he doesn’t fall forward.

Hong Kong’s ageing society is much discussed as a demographic crisis but what I see every day are children who are so lucky to be around their grandparents.