#mmm2

Don’t come too near; you might see light glistening off white fangs, a white underbelly. A woman doesn’t fight like that, you say, and then notice the claw, the tail in the half-moon. Kits running around your ankles. Beware the woman you meet on the path at night; don’t look in her eyes. She could be tanuki, if she has far-set eyes with shadows, or kitsune, close-set eyes and high cheekbones. Sometimes you have called us prostitutes, left money at the shrine after a night with us. But we are not after money, and you will go home betrayed with fur on your clothing and leaf-mould on your breath. Don’t be surprised at the trail of blood on our doorstep. A frightening vision—you trusted her docile nature would protect you, that you could inflict harm without being harmed? I don’t carry a fan, but a scrap of sharpened stick, and if you follow a flame into the forest, what can you expect? When I shed my skin for you, I left intact my animal heart, the desire to crack bones between delicate teeth. 

IV. The Fox-Wife’s Husband Considers the Warning Signs

When you were pregnant, you didn’t just crave dirt and ice, but grasshoppers, field mice, frogs. When you had our baby, I caught you licking his head absently on more than one occasion. Sometimes when you thought you were alone, you gnawed on your forearm. You kept a collection of bones in the house. Maybe I wanted to see you another way. Maybe I missed the clues on purpose. Until now, I wasn’t looking for evidence. Until now, I hadn’t thought of you as different, as separate. But now you are gone, there is no denying it; I thought you were part of me but really you were something else entirely. 

V. The Note The Fox-Wife Leaves Him

You didn’t know I was happier in the dirt before this terrible skin, its senses, before the dread of waking every day to me, to you. This isn’t what I knew before, the air and light. Heavier, and darker than I expected, not just the body, my mind—remembrances hang in the trees like ghosts, every glen a graveyard. You don’t know what satisfies—maybe my heart was hungrier than this. And when I leave you behind whatever I become next will be better. I know it. Don’t come looking for me, I don’t want to be found. The next life for me must, must be what I’ve hoped for. I shed claws and wings once already; don’t think it won’t be easier to shed this, where the cling and thrum of gristle and blood grow so faint I forget them.

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Kallakurichi, a state in Tamil Nadu, lies 4000 miles away from Singapore. Yet, Muthusamy feels like he’s never left home. “Work is tough, but my younger brother is here with me so life is bearable,” the 27-year-old said. He makes a living as an onsite electrician at a local construction firm. 

That Sunday was meant for grocery shopping. Having just finished buying toiletries for the month, a close friend suggested they head home early – to avoid the hassle of jostling through the evening crowd. That is one suggestion that he remains grateful for till this very day. Otherwise, Muthusamy would have played witness to the biggest riot Singapore has seen in over 40 years. Startled and in disbelief, his first reaction was to thank his lucky stars for leaving Race Course Road early that night – a decision that he has never looked back upon. 

“I couldn’t imagine someone had just lost his life at a place I was at a few hours ago.” Shuttling workers to and from dormitories, chartered buses are part of the landscape every weekend at Race Course Road. Muthusamy’s dormitory lies on the outskirts of heartland Yishun, a far cry from the vernacular district of Little India. Scheduled to commute at half-hour intervals, bus conductors and drivers can be quite feisty and unforgiving at times, he adds. “They don’t speak our language so it is hard to communicate.” 

“Most of the time, we don’t understand each other.” 

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Salmah is wearing her tudung˚ again. For those who don’t know, the tudung is this scarf that good Muslim girls wear. People like Salmah just want to action, act like good girl, but later in school, she will meet her boyfriend, and hold hands with him. This wearing tudung also, I don’t know who teach her or where she learn. Last month she never used to wear, her hair was always tied at the back with a red scrunchie. She would often take it off to wear at her wrist, like a bracelet.

Just one month and Salmah has found God. 

I never saw her hair after that. Maybe it’s now permed or dyed pink or itching with kutu,˚ but if I know about most girls who wear tudung, it’s that they don’t care about their hair. They just care about looking like good girls and kissing their mother’s hand at the front door and winning their mother’s trust so they can later hold their boyfriends’ hands in school. I have seen Salmah do it, and I have also seen her punch Sazalie’s chest playfully. Action manja.˚ Sazalie is her boyfriend, quite cute, but he cannot pronounce his r’s properly. He says “argh” instead and when I hear him talk I tell myself I must get a boyfriend whose tongue is not so short.

So here we are in the MRT on the way to the poly. Salmah is trying to revise her notes, using a pink highlighter that is almost dried up. I usually don’t study in the MRT, so what I do is fan myself with a copy of The New Paper in my hands. (The headline today is: Will She Strip Again?) I do it not because it is hot, but because I want to ask Salmah if she is not hot wearing her tudung in the afternoon like this, but without opening my mouth. I don’t know if she is getting the hint, but she is looking down at the opened file on her lap and mumbling to herself. Salmah and Sazalie. They sound like a happy couple, the names would look good on a wedding invitation card, but I have seen them fight before. Salmah is terrible when they fight. She will make her blackest face, and turn it away from Sazalie. Her lips will pout. When Sazalie looks at her right, she will look left. When he looks to her left, she will look right. Their faces will be the two like poles on two magnets. That is why I think that all this girlfriend boyfriend business should start only after you finish school. So young, and wanting to find romance, my mother calls it “cinta monyet”, or “monkeys in love”. I have tried talking to Salmah about it, but she will always ask me back, “why you so kaypoh?˚ If I want to have a boyfriend, or 10 boyfriends, it’s my own business.” This coming from a girl who wears a tudung to school.

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tudung - A headscarf worn by Muslim women

kutu - Head lice

manja - Derived from the Malay word meaning “to pamper”; in this case it describes coquettish behaviour

kaypoh - Nosy or prying

Two men at a sports bar, talking shit, waiting for the football game to start. Des Moines, Iowa, United States of America.

Why do Chinese people have slanted eyes?

The deserts, they are that harsh. All that sand and wind and sun. If their eyes are that way, it helps, see.

Bullshit—the Bedouins have beautiful big eyes.

But the Bedouins have beautiful long eyelashes too, yes? Like camels.

Okay, I’ll give you that.

*

Girl in the common bathroom, looking in the mirror, in her hand a needle. Huaihai District, Shanghai, China.

After a week, there were whiteheads around the sutures, like the tiniest little pearls studding her eyes. She took a sewing needle to them, she’d always had a steady hand, honed by the embroidery her mother had taught her as a child. When she drew blood, she blotted it away impatiently, waiting for it to clear so that she could continue poking into her skin, flicking away each hard bead of concealed oil upended.

It’d been two weeks since she left the People’s Liberation Army 455 Hospital. There had been a school-holiday special on double-eyelid surgery: from 3,000 renminbi to 1,999 renminbi, how could she pass on that?

When she moved her eyeballs from side to side, it hurt. She took to swiveling her whole head rather than just her eyes when she had to look at something. She was told that the scarring would take a few months to fade, she was prepared to wait it out. She wasn’t told about the possibility of double vision, of the bright lights that would follow.

She was irritated—and hurt—that they ascribed it to vanity. For this wasn’t vanity, this was getting ahead in life. Didn’t they know that merely having a university degree wasn’t the be-all and end-all anymore? The happiest day of my life, her mother said on the day of her convocation, and she was touched but also she had the undercurrent of an urge to take her mother by the shoulders and shake her, to say, Really? Really? Is your life that small, Mother?

Did they know that the chances of employment for a grad with double eyelids and wider eyes are 70 percent higher than those of a grad with single eyelids? That, ceteris paribus, with the same grades and portfolio, the prospective employer will unswervingly choose the one with the double eyelids? Eyes with double eyelids give the overall impression of a person being more energetic. A more energetic person will contribute more productively to the company. There was also the Wuhan study that showed that women could expect to earn 1.5 to 2 percent more for every centimetre of height added, but she would stick to high heels for now.

So when they say, Serves you right for being vain, she wants to say, What do you know. She didn’t even ask them to pay for it—and even that wouldn’t have been too untoward; she had friends for whom the double-eyelid surgery had been gifted by their parents as natural consequences of completing the gao kao. Weren’t you fine before this, they say, with the pair of eyes that heaven above consigned you. When will you get it? she wants to ask them. Why would you ever think that “fine” is enough?

She blinks away the tears, tries to unsee the bright balls of light. The post-surgery ptosis is throbbing, like it sometimes does. She won’t hold anything else against him, but it’s not fair that she has to live with this droop that was never there before. If she has to, she can live with the rest, the tearing, the temporal scarring, the whiteheads, the bright lights, the double eyelids achieved at the expense of looking perpetually shocked. But the ptosis; can he just please fix the ptosis?

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picture from amandaleekoe.com 

Too often, we skim over the distinct complexities of individual ethnic and migrant communities, premising other cultures and beliefs on our own. We see through a glass, darkly—perpetuating hearsay and cementing stereotypes. We force-fit one and all into rigid CIMO boxes, and sit on the fence for issues that matter. We marginalise the marginalised, sometimes knowingly, sometimes ignorantly. This week’s selection explore such myths and misunderstandings—and cause us to stop and think:

Is this a presumptuous narrative? What is the media really portraying? Is this an authentic and shared experience? Would it be fair if the same were said of me or “my kind”?

We are all different in one way or another, but let us take off these lenses, be slow to judge, and quick to listen.

To follow week two’s contents, click here.

Ruggedman and Mbryo Set To Release a Joint Album Titled MMM2

Talented rapper, Ruggedman and his protégé, Mbryo have announced they are working on the second part of their joint album entitled ‘Money Making Music’.

Christened ‘Money Making Music 2′, the star studded album features collaborations with music stars such as Olamide, Patoranking, Ice Prince, and Terry G.

Other acts featured on the album include Reminisce, Wande Coal, Korede Bello, Jaywon, Dammy…

Music: Ruggedman ft. Olamide | Teaser From The Forthcoming “MMM2″ Album

Here is a teaser from a soon to be released song by Ruggedman and it features YBNL boss Olamide baddo. Now it is official that Rugged Records is working on a part 2 of their Money Making Music collaboration album, from their artists Ruggedman and Mbryo. A few days ago, they released the artwork for Mbryo‘s soon to drop remix of his Halleluyah song and it features Korede Bello, Dammy Krane and…