Waffles, et cetera.

This picture is so self-contained it does not need a caption.

For an off-campus late night dessert on a Tuesday night, you can easily take the 200 Bus Route from Heng Mui Terrace to Holland Village, a former home of British soldiers that has now turned into a rather yuppie expat stronghold catering to the very Westernized tourist. Once you arrive, you can go to a dessert cafe (its name currently escapes me) and buy waffles and ice cream for half the regular price, which comes out to roughly three to five sing dollars.

I plan on going back there eventually to get my non-Asian food fix. As weird as it sounds, I really miss eating spaghetti and pasta.

--

Today, I had lunch with a Malay boy living in my hall whom I grew to immediately like only because he does not like participating in hall activities, and the sixteen-year-old loser in me always feels an immediate pang of sympathy for antisocial people forced into hyper-social situations.

He also dons longish hair and chipped black nail polish, and carries around a small notebook of poems scrawled meticulously in tiny handwriting. Somehow, knowing that emo people exist in Malaysia cheers me for no apparent reason.

--

While I dearly love my Southeast Asian Literature class, all my other classes (or modules, as they call it here) feel like a rehash of every other general education course I've bullshitted my way through freshman and sophomore year of college.

I don't really have a problem with this. Studying abroad is an oxymoron.

During my Chinese Studies lecture, I finished rereading The Giver, a book that I haven't read since I was probably eleven. Revisiting a book from childhood through a more adult perspective is an odd feeling. It's somewhat akin to reading a letter that you wrote to yourself sealed in a time capsule to be opened several years later, but then maybe not.

When I was eleven, I had really big glasses and long hair. I liked to rollerblade a lot, and I had a crush on my next-door neighbor. I liked math, the color purple and Italian food.

It's never too late to read The Giver. It can easily be read in one sitting, or several inconsequential lectures.

--

I already booked my plane tickets to Thailand for the weeklong semester break at the end of September. Technically, this window of time is supposed to be treated more as a study session for midterms and projects, but bloody hell to that.

I think about many of you quite dearly.

Indonesia.

Making a weekend getaway to Indonesia is a relatively easy task. For 45 Sing, you can take a round-trip boat trip from the Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal to Bintan, one of the largest islands in the Riau province. Once you arrive, you can take an hour-long taxi drive to a relatively isolated strip of beach occupied by a handful of private wooden beach huts. If you don't mind the lack of air conditioning, you can spend a night there for the rough equivalent of 9 U.S. dollars and meet Lobo and his family, the people who run this idyllic little place.

I shit you not, my friends. You can literally spend a night in a wooden beach hut.

--


How do you describe the perfect weekend getaway (which is a cliched phrase in itself) without resorting to cliche? What do you do when, without a single shred of exaggeration, the ocean really is clear, the stars brilliant (you can see the Milky Way!), the food excellent and the locals friendly? When the lettering on the wooden sign welcoming you to Shady Shack is so wonderfully worn-down you can almost swear that it was done on purpose for kitschy effect? Perhaps the crowning moment of this near-perfect surreality was when we were offered a drink of coconuts, handpicked from the tree right before our eyes and consumed with a straw straight from the shell. These things aren't supposed to happen in real life.

The lazy writer's way out, of course, is to post a bunch of pretty pictures. And swear that they were not cut out from a travel brochure. [Photos courtesy of the ever-crazy Chris Hsien.]






Everyone rides motorbikes in Indonesia. It is the Indonesian equivalent of the family mini-van. On our way to Shady Shack, it was not uncommon to see an entire family--a mother and a father cradling a small child on their laps or in-between their bodies--all fitting on a single motorbike.

I really want to explore the rest of Indonesia. Kids play soccer on the streets and random street festivals occur throughout the city. Unlike Singapore, there is litter on the ground fucking everywhere. There is something about this place that is downright raucous, dirty and thrilling.

--



That weekend, all we did was play. We forgot about time and pretended we were kids again. We swam when we were hot, sunbathed on the beach when we got lazy, ate food when we were hungry and immersed ourselves into feeling the texture of coral washed up on the shore or watching a tiny jellyfish struggle against the ocean current.

At night, a young woman named Rina served us homemade Indonesian food with steamed rice. Someone made a makeshift bonfire right on the beach. And then someone else started playing the guitar and everyone in Lobo's family started singing songs in Indonesian.

When you have a combination of fire, music and beer on an Indonesian coastline, you can pretty much say that life is grand at this point.



The five of us from the States wandered away from the huts to gaze at the stars. At one point, we decided to lie down and fell asleep right on the beach. We woke up an hour or so later to sleep properly inside the hut. We then woke up at six in the morning to watch the sun rise and walk across the shore where the tide was low. We watched tiny, near-transparent crabs dart briefly across the sand before digging themselves into tiny holes in the ground.





It rained very briefly. Melissa and I (the only two girls on the trip) fell asleep back at our hut to the sound of rain and ocean. We woke up again for a very late breakfast--omelette and coffee with a lot of condensed milk and sugar.

We had a final dinner at some hole-in-the-wall restaurant near the ferry site. They served us many small plates loaded with squid, chicken, beef and vegetables--most of them covered in something really spicy.

We didn't get back to NUS until maybe eleven in the evening. Since I didn't bring a camera with me, the only thing I have to show for my trip is a dark tan and a lot of Indonesian sand falling out of my hair. I was so exhausted I fell asleep like that, all sticky from sunscreen and ocean air.

--


It took me maybe four weeks to get to this point, but I feel like finally, an equilibrium has been reached between my external environment and my internal landscape. I no longer feel so randomly anxious, and I dare say that NUS is starting to feel like home.

It's liberating to be reminded that the human mind can adjust to any situation if given enough time. A mundane routine can be made out of the most foreign circumstances.

A true story from Kuala Lumpur.

The dress is a loose, backless thing that ties around the neck and falls just above the knees. It is only twenty ringgits, but looks like one of those expensive dresses that you eye longingly in the shop window of a tiny vintage shop in downtown Los Angeles. Furthermore, there is something about the decorative blue and orange patterns on the fabric that fulfills my vague ideas of what a bargain dress from Malaysia should look like--exotic, skin-baring and tropical. The kind of dress you wear with sunglasses and a tan that your friends ogle over when you come home bearing presents and stories.

I find it in some nameless store in some big mall plaza in Bukit Buntang and it is love at first sight.

Hours later, we are being driven home in a taxi cab by some fat, Chinese man whose thick accent we can barely understand. I pay for the fare and as we are walking into the dormitory, I suddenly realize that I left the shopping bag with my beautiful dress in the cab. The cab, of course, has already driven away by the time we run back out to where we were dropped off.

"Well, there are two things you can do right now," my friend says. "You can either say that it wasn't mean to be and leave it at that. Or we can try to go back to Bukit Buntang right now and try to find the taxi driver with your dress."

I agonize about it for maybe five seconds. I say: "I want my fucking dress."

So it's maybe one in the morning and we are driving back to where we were just thirty minutes before, for quite possibly the most ridiculously impossible task ever. I am pacing up and down the streets around busy intersections and taxi stands searching high and low for a red cab that is driven by a fat Chinese man. I walk up to a hired cab in the middle of the street and open the passenger door, only to find that the driver is someone I've never seen before. At one point, my friend interrupts a small cluster of Indian taxi drivers who are killing time by their unoccupied cabs. We ask them if they happen to know a co-worker who is a fat Chinese man.

They laugh in disbelief and ask us, "Do you know his cab number? Do you have his number?"

We don't, of course.

We give up at some point and go home a second time. I keep half-hoping for some bizarre miracle that will deliver the dress in my hands again, but of course that is never going to happen. Maybe, my friend says, another woman will come across the dress and it will fit her perfectly and a man who sees her in this dress will fall in love with her. They will get married and raise a child who will find the cure to AIDS, and it all wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for my stupid careless mistake of leaving the dress in the car.

Maybe.

Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia, is one of those magical-sounding places that sounds like it shouldn't exist--like Timbuctu or Translyvania. Just saying it feels sexy on the tongue and lips. Try it.

Kuala Lumpur also has strings of lights hanging from the palm trees that outline their streets, so at night the city is in a state of perpetual golden rain. In the evening, women dressed from head to toe in black intermingle with men dressed up as near-grotesque caricatures of women. Homosexuals do this to avoid persecution because while it would be socially unacceptable for two men to hold hands in public, no one bats an eye if two mannish-women donning eyeliner and high heels walk down the street as a romantic couple.

Apparently, it would also be strange that a brown girl and a yellow girl would be walking down the street together as friends because here in Kuala Lumpur, the different ethnicities tend to stick with their own kind as much as possible.

Nabiha and I should guest-star in a Malay Sesame Street episode where we teach Malaysians the importance of interracial friendship.

--


Nabiha and I have been friends since we were in first grade. While our lives have taken us to very different directions since we graduated from high school, it was by pure happenstance that for a window of time she would be in Malaysia and I would be in Singapore.

I can't tell you enough how much I love this girl to death.

Who would have thought that two childhood best friends from the suburbs of Southern California would, years later, end up smoking hookah and sipping Bloody Marys smack in the middle of Malaysia? We both relished in this happy twist of fate. Over the weekend, we did girlish things like shop for shoes, strip down near-naked to get cheap body massages and gossip about everyone we've known since elementary school. We wondered outloud what random country we would both end up meeting in next.

Being twenty-one is a ridiculously young age.

--

On my first night in Kuala Lumpur, we tried durian for the first time. Durian, for those of you who don't know, is a thorny Southeast Asian fruit with a distinctive pungent smell that has been likened to rotting sewage, gasoline, stale vomit and other unflattering things. In Southeast Asia, it is illegal to take a piece of durian on the train or on the bus because its overpowering odour might be mistaken as a gas leak.

In spite of is notoriety, people seem to like it here. A lot.



We bought a plastic-wrapped package of it from a random fruit stand for five riplings. I said it looked like mini pig fetuses. Nabiha said it looked like a shriveled, jaundiced penis.

In spite of forewarnings from fellow exchange students who have sworn that they will never eat such a nasty-tasting piece of shit a second time, my virgin durian experience was rather anticlimactic. It had a strange, nutty-flavor with a slimy, porridge-like consistency. I expected for it to taste like rotting flesh, or at least burn a hole in my inner cheeks.

It didn't taste that great, but a morbid curiosity made me keep me eating it. It was like the gustatory equivalent of watching a bad B-movie: you kind of want to walk out, but then you kind of want to see how it ends. And you're too goddamn cheap and too goddamn lazy so you're just going to sit through the whole thing anyway.

I hope my next relationship isn't like that.

--



--



I've been thinking a lot about why people get so wrapped up in storytelling and why we still need them in the first place. One of the many conclusions I reached was this: we need good stories because we wish good story structure for our own lives.

We crave recurring motifs and place unnecessary significance on them because it makes our lives seem less random. We wonder if minor, arbitrary coincidences are foreshadowing of something bigger and better. We hate it when there are loose plot threads, unresolved chapters or lack of poetic justice. We both love and dread suspense, embrace closure and laugh at irony, so long as it's not so tragic and it doesn't happen to us.

My current tentative post-graduate life plan of the moment is to find a random job in Japan. Work hard, get to know the language better. See what happens.

Yesterday, I took a seven-hour bus ride from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, the capital city of Malaysia. There is something inherently liberating and wonderful about traveling alone to a country you've never been to before. I can easily get lost or get killed in a freak accident in the middle of nowhere, but there I was, sitting on my lone side seat with nothing but a backpack and a hand purse in a bus full of strangers with passports from Indonesia, the Phillipines and other surrounding countries.

Coming to Singapore did not quite give me the inward jolt of entering another country. After all, it is a highly developed city-state and everyone speaks English anyway. For the lack of a better comparison, I consider Singapore as the Orange County of Southeast Asia--a safe, clean country, almost to the point of being sterile. It is the kind of sheltered, highly regulated bubble-environment that parents would trust their kids to go study abroad for four months.

Entering Malaysia for the first time was another story. Through my bus window, I saw young boys in school uniforms, women covered from head-to-toe in black except for a single slit of skin around their eyes, jaded-looking teenagers navigating their motorbikes through traffic. Unlike Singapore, there is graffitti on the walls and litter on the streets. Finally, i thought, a place that is a little rough around the edges.

The bus kept driving along. I fell asleep for a while and when I woke up, the city has disappeared and instead, there was an infinite expanse of green outside my window. As far as the eye can see, nothing but a sea of palm trees covered in vines and other knotted jungle foliage, broken by the occassional billboard advertising potato chips or tourist traps. For probably the first time since I came here, I felt very calm inside. After some time, I fell back asleep. We still had several hours to go before we finally reached our destination.

--

We (as in Nabiha and I) are going to leave soon to haggle for some cute shoes, but when I come back, I want to tell you more about smoking hookah at one in the morning and how the live musicians broke into a cover of 'Hey Jude' and it was such a wonderfully perfect moment.

Girls.

These girls are way too freaking cute. Amy is an exchange student from China, and speaks Chinese and English. Toubi is a Chinese-born exchange student from Japan, speaks both Chinese and Japanese, and is currently in the process of learning English. Amy and Toubi speak Chinese to each other, Toubi and I speak Japanese to each other and when all three of us want to engage in conversation we speak in English. Quite an interesting linguistic ecosystem to participate in, but somehow it ends up working all the same.

It's raining hard over here.

While I am thrilled by the newness of everything, I miss the familiarity of everything.


Yumi Sakugawa E209
Temasek Hall, National University of Singapore
12 Kent Ridge Dr.
Singapore 119243

If you ever happen to have a pocket of time for letter-writing, consider thinking of me. Give me your address, and I will do the same for you.

Very brief snapshots from Sentosa Island.

Ironically, my favorite experience about Sentosa Island was probably both getting there and leaving there via cable car. Everything else in-between was rather besides the point.





























---














Still rather floating, still trying to rediscover my rhythm of living on this hot and humid island.

Boo-urns. Booooooo-urns.

Today, I went to Sentosa Island with the EAP crew, which is essentially a big, fat tourist trap full of big, fat tourist-y things like laser light shows, 4-D movies, a big statue of a Merlion with eyes that glow neon green at night, and other flash-bang attractions intending to fool you into shelling out money to buy their hokey souvenirs. The point is, somewhere between the morning of boarding the bus and the evening of being back in the residence halls, I lost my cell phone.

Now if Robbie (my apartment mate) was here with me, he would probably find it in a very obvious place where I misplaced it and call me a slut, which is what usually happens when I am back in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, I am in Singapore, which means that somewhere between NUS and Sentosa Island, my cell phone is being held hostage by a very malevolent force. Sad, sad, sad. I guess I will have to shell out approximately one hundred Singaporean dollars tomorrow at Clementine, the nearest shopping center, to regain cellular connection with the rest of the world.

In spite of my immense irritation / confusion, I am trying hard to keep things in perspective. After all, there are far worse things to lose when you are traveling abroad. Such as: a passport. Or a wallet. Or a limb. Or your soul.

--

Even if you are in another country, you are still occupying the same internal landscape of your own personhood. It's a naive expectation on my part that going to the other side of the world will somehow allow me to escape certain issues that I have been mulling over before I left. As someone pointed out to me, you are still you even if you happen to be in Singapore and not back home.

Going abroad has a way of making you overly contemplative.


--

UPDATE:

So just kidding. Someone found my cell phone on the bus. I am one lucky duck.

Went to Singapore's one Ikea store today. Unfortunately, they did not have what I was looking for: Christmas lights to amp up some mood lighting in my otherwise bare and boring room. The search continues.

The Singapore Zoological Gardens, Rec Day, etc.

How the National University of Singapore (NUS) show off their pride right before the school year:





Every hall and faculty spend at least four months and pull several all-nighters in preparation for this annual event that occurs on the weekend before the school year starts. Essentially, your group or organization design an elaborate float with moving parts constructed entirely of recylable trash, whether it be aluminum cans, cardboard, colored paper or whatnot. The float is usually accompanied by a troupe of choreographed dancers wearing very bright, outlandish costumes.

While our hall did end up winning the prize for 'Most Cost Efficient' (or some other crap like that), some other hall won the more prestiguous Best Float award. I felt like I was in the Southeast Asian lovechild of the Rose Parade Float and a J-rock concert.

While we were waiting in a hot and sweaty crowd to hear the results, my EAP friend David asked my hall people jokingly, "So what do you think of Yumi?" A local named Jonas replied, "She is quite bubbly."

I believe that is the first time anyone has ever used that adjective on me.

--

One interesting about Singapore is the different sounds of English that you hear on a daily basis. There is the rapid staccato-fire of Singlish spoken by the locals, which is essentially English spoken in a very heavy Chinese accent, with stresses on the last syllable and spiced up with 'lo', 'la' and 'meh' at the end of phrases and questions for emphasis. (Overheard while waiting in a line to board a tram: "Quick-ly, la!") Then there is the English spoken by the Chinese, Malaysian, Vietnamese and other Asian students whose English-language education has given them a more subdued British lilt to their pronunciations. And then of course, every now and then there is the brash American accent overheard on subways and in many popular tourist locations.

I realized today that I have subconsciously began mimicking the enunciations of the people around me. When I am around my hall people, I stress the last syllables of my words, I stretch out words in weird ways and my Southern Californian origins are no longer so horrendously apparent in everyday speech. I suppose this is all a part of living in another country.

--

The Singapore Zoological Gardens







--



Whenever I have spare pockets of time, such as when I am waiting in line to take the campus shuttle, I read The Best American Short Stories 2005. Reading this is like going to a good dim sum restaurant: little tidbits of different word snacks that keep your literary appetite very satisfied and entertained. I do like my short stories delicious.

--

When I was waiting at the Southeast Asian department for a woman in the office to finish with my paperwork, another woman at the front desk noticed that I was waiting and offered me a cup of tea with sugar and cream. I must say, the academic bureaucracy at NUS are quite nice.

--



--
Every other Saturday, I am going to try to go to the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) and help volunteers with the AIDS patients as a way to get off-campus and know the rest of the country on a more personal level. I went today for the first time and met three very cool locals, two of them who are or have studied at American universities and one of them who is a fourth-year student at NUS.

The AIDs patients at CDC usually get cramps and aches in their weakened legs, so it helps for them to get massages for their limbs. I sat with an older male patient with a sunken left eye and we talked about movies, music and politics while I massaged his thighs and feet with lemon-scented oils. I told him about the sights I've seen in Singapore while he disclosed his love for Harry Potter movies and house music, and how before his legs got weakened he would go to disco clubs and dance all night long.

"You don't look Japanese," he told me. "You look like a China doll."

I am Merlion, hear me ROAR.

I met up with David (a cool cat from UCSB) for lunch and we both had Muslim food at the food stall in the Arts and Social Science faculty. It was really, really delicious.

Today, I randomly met an exchange student from China who happens to live on the same floor as I do. I really like this whole meeting people from different countries thing.

--



The Merlion--part lion and part fish--is a big trademark symbol of Singapore. Singapore used to be known as Temasek (coincidentally the name of the residence hall that I am currently living in), which is the Javanese word for sea. In the 11th century A.D., a prince from the Sri Vijaya Empire rediscovered the island and according to legend, came upon a mystical beast which he later learned was a lion. As a homage to this sighting, he changed the name of the island from Temasek to Singapura, which is Sanskrit for Lion (Singa) and City (Pura). Hence, the merlion is a symbolic representation of Singapore's past and present--the country's past as a humble fishing village and the present as a thriving port city.

Also, according to marketing research, Merlion is more feasible for the country's tourist industry than Merplatypus or Mergoat.



So I didn't take a picture of this, but I did see the Merlion from a river boat!

--

Usually, I don't think much about how peasants and the rural class contribute to the greater sociopolitical and economic dimensions of Southeast Asia, but the professor who was signing my forms to add a class in the Southeast Asian studies department happens to be teaching a class in that particular subject. He also happens to be a rather young professor with stylish bifocals and a very wry, self-deprecating sense of humor. He also happens to be kind of good-looking.

If I sign up for this class, does that make me a total intellectual sell-out?

Naw.

Too much debauchery.

Highlights of today:


Making a pilgrimage to the east coast of the island to eat some good sea food. Had black pepper crab, chili crab, and sting ray (texture of tough fish) with three other EAP people. By the time I was done, my lips and tongue were numb with spiciness. I am satisified. They had frog legs, which hopefully I will experience before I leave this country.


Happy birthday, Singapore! Singapore is 41 years old today. I wore my red and white spaghetti tank top in commemoration of this wonderful event. Singapore is such a harsh young mistress with so many arbitrary rules. Quite sexy and domineering, this Singapore. Singapore really knows how to crack the whip and cane. Rarrr!


Went to Double-O, a club / bar that is not good for the liver. Wednesday is lady's night in Singapore, which means that you get free entrance and in some cases, free drinks if you are endowed with the double-X chromosome. I drank far more than I should have. Excessive drinking is bad. When will I ever learn? Woe is the ignorance of the young.

I've only been in this country for a week, and I am already itching to visit another country. Such wanderlust. I am so young (and so not sober.)

Peace out.

Chinatown.

Showering always feels good in Singapore, because nine times out of ten you feel very hot and sticky at the end of the day.

I went on a night safari today, which meant I got to see lions (and leopards and tapirs, oh, my!) and other cool rainforest animals that I usually don't see in a daily basis. After we got dropped off back to our respective halls, myself and two other EAP students randomly came across three locals chewing the fat and hanging out in the Eusoff halls drinking beer so we joined them for a while. They gave us tips on good places to eat exotic sea food such as frog legs, turtle soup and sting ray (apparently all on a street on the east coast of the island called Geylang Road) and sordid details concerning the drag shows of Thailand. I am very much excited to experience both at some point in my four-month stay here.

--

The warning sign posters that they post in the subways can be quite unintentionally funny, such as this one below:



It isn't enough that the expression on the man's face is the picture-perfect definition of swarmy. Some big wig in the advertising department took one look at a rough draft of the poster and said, "You know what, someone needs to photoshop in a wolf silhouette because otherwise the message won't be clear enough." Everyone else in the meeting room let out a collective "ooOooooOoooohh." Hands were shaken, and champagne bottles were opened, and everyone patted themselves on the shoulder for having a successful brainstorming session.

Or something like that.



--

I went to Chinatown yesterday.





Singapore has a very interesting demographic. Among the 3.32 million permanent residents, 77 percent are Chinese, fourteen percent are Malays, and eight percent are Indians. Whether you are walking through the city or riding the subway, you will always come across women in saris, headscarves, Indian men, and foreign tourists. Which is why you would find something like the Sri Mariamman temple, a Hindu place of worship, smack in the middle of Chinatown.










--

It's always the little things you miss when you are abroad. Such as:

- napkins. To reduce the littering, I guess.
- toilet seat covers.
- Vitamin Water. God, how I miss Vitamin Water. Their brightly colored drinks, their snarky little labels. I used to have them every day. They were my life blood. I'm going to go cry myself to sleep now.
- My red Christmas lights in my room back home.

I also miss having the freedom to litter extensively without fear of being fined.