Yumi on the coast
Nothing a douse of garlic chili pepper sauce can't fix.
Pictures from CDC.
I stole these pictures today when I went to CDC. They were taken two weeks ago. 
Look at the handsome fellas I get to sometimes volunteer with every sporadic Saturday! (One of them is a priest-in-training, by the way, and I suspect that the rest of them are gay. Shame.) By the way, I'm holding a chocolate ball in my head. The woman with the camera caught me unguarded so the only choice I had left was to hold the ball of chocolate awkwardly in front of me. Mmmm, chocolate.
Soup.
Gloves.
I learned today that the massage oil we use to massage the AIDS patients cost twenty five dollars a bottle. Dude, that's expensive.
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The best part of volunteering at CDC? Meeting really great people. Spending time with AIDS patients. Honing my massaging skills.
The worst part? The sterile smell of latex gloves on my hands afterwards. Plus, I always feel immensely exhausted by the time it's time for me to go home. One of my really good friends who took a massage course said that there is this holistic theory that when you give people massages, you are absorbing some of the negative energy that is released from your patient's body when you ease the tension in his or her muscles. I don't have a hard time believing that.
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I need a massage. Someone needs to beat the shit out of my poor, tense back.
We like new.
I finally bought a new sketchbook and a black marker from the university bookstore, which has been long overdue.
There is always something very exciting for me about starting on a new sketchbook. I can't help but wonder what big and momentous life event I will be drawing about next. Something big and momentous and life-changing always happens in the duration of every sketchbook.
My last sketchbook began on December 9, 2005 and it's somewhat of a relief to put it away. I am happy for all the blank pages that are waiting to be filled in this new one.
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I am almost done with this book. I still have a lot more to write about Cambodia.
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Because I am a semi-regular volunteer at the Communicable Diseases Center, I was invited to go to the 9th anniversary celebration dinner of the Patient Care Centre Committee, which CDC is under.
Few things are as inspiring as knowing that there are good people out there working hard to ensure the well-being of less fortunate people. Plus, you can't beat spending a Friday night going to a free event that has free food.
I'm sad that tomorrow will probably be my last day volunteering at CDC. This has probably been one of my more rewarding experiences during my stay in Singapore.
This is me with Professor Teo, the person who got me into volunteering at CDC in the first place. He's a sweet man who owns an Astro Boy watch!
Some of the other volunteers whom I see on the sporadic Saturdays that I am able to volunteer. I wish I had a chance to get to know many of them better. We're a cute bunch.
Cambodia (Part II). A pizza that's too happy for its own damn good.
Cambodia (Part I.)
I shot my first gun in Cambodia, a shooting range that is a little outside of the country capital Phnom Penh. It was a little anticlimactic to say the least, only because this American M-17 was such a big, unwieldy gun that propped awkwardly against my shoulder and I couldn't even really see if I was hitting my target or not. What was I expecting anyway? An intense bloodrush of pure power? A sudden pixelated transformation into a gun-toting sex vixen? Va-va-boom! Maybe I should have chosen a smaller handgun instead.
These are the kind of things you can do in Cambodia that aren't available in a tiny, meticulously clean country like Singapore. You can go to the Happy Shooting Range where, along with whatever Russian or American gun tickles your fancy, you can order a can of beer from a laminated menu like you're at some freaking restaurant. You can ride on the back of a moto through very unpaved, bumpy roads interrupted by puddles from the previous night's rain. You can amuse yourself watching monkeys at a local park, eat a very happy pizza (more on this later), climb hilltop temples with precariously steep steps and soak in the everyday rhythm of a country that has, as an understatement, gone through a lot of shit.
According to the United Nations report, Cambodia ranks in the world's fifty poorest countries. Everywhere you go there are street children, beggars and people with disfigured limbs who have learned enough English to beg Western tourists for money. Just barely three decades ago, over 1.7 million people (with some estimates as high as 3 million) perished under Pol Pot's oppressive regime. The unmarked graves in the killing fields outside of Phnom Penh and the haunting photographs in the Tuol Sleng genocide museum testify to this horrible event.
I don't want to paint a completely bleak picture, though, because that would be misleading. Unlike the hustle-bustle touristing blitz of Bangkok, Phnom Penh has just started opening its door to the rest of the world. While many cheap guesthouses have started cropping up near the river and lake districts within the capital, this city still remains a less trodden path compared to its glitizier Southeast Asian counterparts.
I like this place. Adolescent boys fish in the river, families play badminton in the open courtyard near the National Museum and people take naps in the park by Wat Phnom. Everyone rides a motorbike to everywhere, and life continues on.
I would daresay that out of all the countries I've visited so far, Cambodia has been the most eye-opening and most rewarding. It's a beautiful country with a lot of sadness and despair, but tentatively stepping towards a more hopeful future.
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Angkor Wat, which is located in Northern Cambodia, is freaking huge. It was built in the 12th century and represents the classical age of Khmer architecture. According to Guinness World Records, it is the largest religious structure in the world, and I don't have a hard time believing that.
Most people buy the one-day pass to access the majority of the temple sites. You can also buy a three-day pass or a week-long pass. Unless you are an archaeologist, a Southeast Asian art historian or someone who happens to get off on ancient temples, I suggest you just buy the twenty-dollar one-day pass. Because after a while, in spite of the grandeur and the sheer enormity of it, all the temples kind of start looking the same.
As I told my fellow traveling companion, I think I've seen enough temples in Southeast Asia for the next thirty or forty years.
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So a tiny trivia point that is slightly related to Angkor Wats that is only interesting to dorks like me. If you haven't seen "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" or any Hayao Miyazaki movie, look no further.
According to Jun, my Japanese exchange friend who may or may not be a filthy liar, Hayao Miyazaki modeled the look of the island of Laputa from the temples of Angkor Wats for the movie "Laputa: Castle in the Sky," especially one of the temples that is known for having a tree protruding out of its stone walls.
!!!!!!!!!! NOW HOW COOL IS THAT?!?!?!?!?
By the way, somewhere in Japan, they sell a reproduction of the necklace that Shiita wears in the movie, the magical stone from the floating island that gives you the power of levitation. I know this because my Japanese friend Toubi owns one, who got it as a present from a friend. And now I freaking want one, even more than all the Men's Pocky, softcore Japanese porn books and Hello Kitty vibrators in the world.
Now I am not the type to demand jewelry from my male admirers (an impromptu present of yellow legal pads and Sharpie pens would be more likely to steal my heart), but if anyone ever buys me this necklace.... I will bear you a son. I will bear you a goddamn baseball team!
For our honeymoon, we would go to the Studio Ghibli museum in Japan and look at neat things like this, which is also from Laputa:
Not shown: the part where we ride off to the sunset on a Catbus.
Language.
If there is one thing I am going to miss about studying at N.U.S., it's just how freaking diverse everything is. There are so many international students here it's not uncommon to be in a group of people and have at least three nationalities and three languages going on. Usually, what happens is that everyone is conversing in English, and then little translations of whatever native tongue goes on the side of the main conversation.
It's an interesting concept. There are things that are said on the surface level, but then you never know what the other person is really saying in his or her native tongue. I rather enjoy participating in this linguistic hodgepodge.
Because after a while, asking people if they are from Norcal or Socal gets kind of old.
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So I'm trying to become more literate in Japanese, and since I figured that reading newspapers and books are out of my league, I'm going to start small. I joined Mixxi (the Japanese equivalent of myspace) and I read blogs. I look up the words that I don't know and I read them again.
After a while, you give up trying to imagine what the English equivalent is. You listen and read the words for what they are, not as stand-in symbols for something else. Because no matter how hard you try, even the best translation in the world will never capture the rhythm and implied silences that come with every word and every sound. It is what it is.
And this is my unrealistic dream of mine, to one day be so literate in Japanese I can actually read their newspapers and books as well as I can in English. Maybe even write in Japanese. Now how cool would that be?
I have a long road ahead of me.
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Languages are sexy. They're like people. They have their own personality, history, quirks and rhythms. You may fall in love with it upon first sight or hearing, but it takes a whole lifetime to truly know it as well as your own skin. And like most people, the more intimately you know a particular language, the more rewarding the whole experience is.
As a friend of mine once said, write it like it's hot.
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I'll be back in the States on the 19th of December. More specifically, I'll be arriving in Los Angeles at approximately 11:05 AM.
It feels strange, thinking about that.
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Hey, to person whom I owe a guest blog: I haven't forgotten you. While I have been thinking about other things, there's something that I am waiting to experience this weekend and it may be worth writing about. Yes, I know, I am being purposely vague. Now I hyped it up too much for you. Forget I said anything.
[Added cool art pictures from City Hall in previous entry. Check it out!]
Terrence is a Malay-born Chinese who went to engineering school in Singapore but decided afterwards that priesthood was his true calling. I had a chance to talk to him for the first time today when I went to go volunteer at the CDC. He is currently in his second year of priesthood training and spending time with the AIDS patients is a part of his job.
While we waited for the other volunteers to arrive, he asked me if I was Christian and if I ever gave serious thought towards any religion. I told him that while I did not prescribe to any particular religion, Buddhism was probably the most compatible with my philosophy of thinking.
"Religion is something everyone should seriously look into at some point in their life," Terrence said. "People don't really give enough time to thinking about their spirituality."
And indeed, I've never been a very religious person, and I wonder if I ever will be. Even my so-called spiritual explorations from childhood have been cursory at best and has never amounted to anything permanent. It goes something like this: light Bible-reading in fifth grade; awkward eighth grade agnosticism; and rabid high school atheism bred from a regular diet of Ayn Rand, Nietzsche and Camus. And now, I'm a typical godless Angeleno who uses the phrase "not religious but spiritual" to sum up occasional private conversations with a vaguely benign deity, exploring Buddhist temples, hanging out with my Hindu friend and not being Christian.
After I was done volunteering, I thought of all the things that would suddenly become irrelevant if I were to completely immerse myself into a pathway of God. Things like whether or not your shoes match your purse, or if so-and-so has a crush on you, or if you have a crush on so-and-so, or what shiny new furniture to buy from Ikea to make the living room in your apartment look the right shade of effortless hip. Filtering everyday life through the prism of a higher calling does not necessarily make life any easier or simpler, but I would imagine that it negates a lot of unnecessary crap.
I went to Singapore's National Library for the first time today to check out an exhibition opening of Singapore's woodcut artists.
I really like big libraries in big cities. If I weren't so tired, I would go into more specifics of how awesome they are.
But for the time being: big libraries good.
Black and white good. Do you know what else also good? The free food and drink that came with the exhibition opening. Boo-ya!
This cutie-pie on the left is Zineng, my Southeast Asian Studies classmate who has been kind enough to give me the down-low on all things worth checking out in Singapore. Not surprisingly, he also has a really cute story about how he met his girlfriend involving an airport and a love letter.
What the fuck, these things are only supposed to happen in movies. What a jerk!
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Hung out with two Japanese exchange students the day before.
Hanging out with them makes me realize that the gaps in my Japanese language are a lot bigger than I previously suspected.
The weather was nippy that day. Get it? GET IT?
I'm cool. I look at art.
While Singapore may not quite have the dirty and chaotic rhythm of other Southeast Asian countries that actually allow trash on the streets, this little island-state tries hard to prove to the rest of the world that having ridiculously strict laws does not necessarily equate complete death of creative expression. Hence the country is now hosting an international art festival where artwork by artists from all over the world are displayed in public venues scattered throughout the country, whether this occurs in former government buildings, religious temples or random outdoor spaces.
Spent an entire afternoon today checking out the venue at City Hall. Since people no longer use the rooms within the actual building, artists have installed photographs, paintings, video art and media installations within empty courtrooms and hallways. Considering how much censorship goes on within this country (not to mention the fact that there is basically only ONE political party representing all of Singapore), I was surprised by how political many of these pieces were. The fact that they are all situated in a former governement building further heightens the tension and irony of it all.
For the most part, I was very impressed with everything that was showcased here. They were either conceptually intriguing or simply wonderful, beautiful eye candy. It reminds me that divine moments are still possible in art.
David took a picture of me and Jeremy, with me looking very serious and contemplative. This is Ahhhhhrt we are dealing with here, Ahhhhhhhrt with a capital A! Too bad I don't really look like this all the time in real life; otherwise, I might actually have a chance of fooling older men into thinking that I'm a real woman of depth and intrigue.
My actual thoughts in this photograph: "I LIKE TACOZZZ!!!!!!! LOL!!!!!!"
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Every time I make any conclusive statement about where I stand regarding my own creative life, I start believing in the opposite sentiment a few days later. I miss charcoal. I miss painting. I miss the physicality of it, the tactility of it. When will I ever learn? Just shut up and do it.
This girl cracks me up. Especially when she does an imitation of my so-called Socal accent.
Run, Yumi, run!
More quarter-life crisis musings. This has nothing to do with Singapore or Southeast Asia.
My ideal job title is to be a professional Yumi. A professional Yumi does what a Yumi wants to do and is paid to do so. But since that job title does not quite exist yet, I wonder if maybe I should go into either the visual arts or writing, or some fantastic combination of both. When I am not thinking about either of those things, sometimes I wonder if I am meant to be an academic and lock myself up in an ivory tower translating Japanese literature into English and vice versa. This might actually not be too bad.
I feel less burdened not having to take studio classes this quarter, and I can't tell whether this relief stems from being able to fully absorb myself into words and essay-writing, or the complacency of not having to torture myself by the aesthetic challenges that studio classes inevitably present. A part of me dreads having to go back to taking studio classes once I am back in the States, and I wonder if this is a temporary thing.
I read a phrase in a friend's information booklet for a visual design school and under the components of fine arts, it described painting as "visual research," which couldn't be more accurate. Approached correctly, art is a valid science that requires vigorous methodologies, experiments and constant intellectual questioning. Truly great artwork does not spring spontaneously out of fanciful, sporadic sweeps of inspiration; the process of art-making is and should be considered research, however dull and tedious it makes it sound.
At this point in life, visual research for the sake of visual research doesn't appeal to me. As I've been telling a dear friend of mine, the more I think about it, the more I realize I love art best when it is framed under the context of narrative--whether it is in film, animation, graphic novels or even some fantastic paintings that aren't necessarily included in the cloistered world of musuem space. Art in terms of storytelling. Art that inexplicably seduces you into that grand narrative sweep that words alone can't quite do.
So where to channel my art-making outlet in the greater context of collective culture, if at all? The answering of this question, for the time being, is on temporary hiatus. I only hope that I will be brave enough to rise to the task when I do think I have an answer.
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Very recently, I named my writing muse Bob and my drawing muse Rob. Bob and Rob tend to lead very separate lives, and do not mingle with each other too much. Bob is quite predictable and is more of a nine-to-five regular working man who reads the paper at breakfast, while Rob is the kind of fickle bitch that comes and goes whenever he damn well pleases, the muse equivalent of a charismatic asshole boyfriend you love to hate and hate to love.
Bob and Rob are quite wary of each other. I am hoping that one day they'll at least want to hold hands, but that might be asking for too much.
The land of infinite Pocky flavors.
How my working in Japan after I graduate is a win-win situation for everyone:
For myself:
A chance to postpone finding a real career for at least one year while not starving myself. I will also finally conquer my subconscious penis-envy by eating a whole package of Men's Pocky and growing a moustache.
For my parents:
They will be thrilled that I want to spend time in the motherland. They will also happily convince themselves that I will come back from my work experience more Japanese and engaged with a very Japanese husband.
For my friends:
They will have a place to crash for free when they visit me.
For Japan:
They will have claimed yet another consumer culture-whore. Hello, Hello Kitty!
For Tadanobu Asano:
He doesn't know it yet, but the mental parcels of love I telepathically send him will be received even more strongly now that I will be in greater geographical vicinity of him.
The only people who lose:
The legions of imaginary admirers who will all commit mass suicide upon my imminent departure. Either that, or beat their hairy chests while howling in enraged anguish: "WHY, YUMI, WHYYYY?!?!?!?!"
Insomnia.
I hardly ever draw in my sketchbook in the time that I've been here, and I wonder why. But speaking of the haze, there is a terrible haze going on in Southeast Asia right now. Due to the smoke arising from people burning down rainforests in Indonesia, Singapore is now awash in this sickly gray smear. While it is not as severely affected as other surrounding countries, it was bad enough to cancel a hot-air balloon riding activity,with the argument that you wouldn't be able to see anything once you were up in the air. (This hot-air balloon riding activity organized for the EAP students, by the way, is less glamorous than it sounds; the hot air balloon is still tethered to the ground while you are up in the sky, hence giving you a panoramic, albeit stationary view of the whole country.)
As I was telling a friend earlier today, this is far worse than the perpetual smog that casts a yellowish-brown cloud over Los Angeles. I never thought I would hear myself saying that.
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In the rare weekend when I am not country-hopping, I try to make time to volunteer at the Communicable Disease Center, where myself and a handful of other volunteers spend about two hours talking to AIDS patients and giving them massages for their weakened leg muscles.
Unlike other developed countries, Singapore does not give a state subsidy for drugs used in treating AIDS patients, which makes them unaffordable for the average Singaporean. Government officials claim that the focus should be on prevention education as opposed to treating those who already have the disease, which cannot be completely cured. While a big portion of HIV infections in this country are contracted by heterosexuals engaging in sex with prostitutes (whether locally or overseas), some activists argue that Singapore's antiquated laws making gay sex illegal between men creates an obstacle in improving the situation.
In this tiny country where littering is illegal and people celebrate the opening of yet another gargantuan shopping center, human cases like the homeless and HIV patients are considered gross anomalies in the backdrop of an island state that is clean, abundant with green foliage and rich.
The Mid-autumn moon festival reached its end on Friday, so when I came to volunteer on Saturday all the patients had a plastic inflatable toy by their beds and a whole mooncake sitting on their food trays. This is to remind them, I suppose, of the world that extends beyond their hospital beds.
One of the patients I spoke to is one of the luckier ones; he will be able to rejoin the outside world in less than a week once he has gained enough strength in his leg muscles to walk on his own. His name is David, and he instantly picked up on my American accent when I first met him. He told me about how he used to live in the United States before he eventually got a job as a marketing consultant in Taiwan.
David said that as far as he can remember, he has never traveled extensively for his own personal pleasure, even though his marketing consulting job sent him to countless countries for business-related trips. He said the ultimate example of this was how he had been to Beijing many times but had never seen the Great Wall.
He's forty-two-years-old, and once he is released from CDC, he will be going on a two-month trip to the United States, starting with Los Angeles to visit an aunt, working his way up to San Francisco and heading back to his former hometown of Chicago, where he once lived as a college student. I imagine that it will be a wonderful vacation for him.
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Peter was the first patient I massaged when I first started volunteering at CDC, so he has always been a personal favorite of mine. I was told today that he passed away last Saturday.
His friend Tan, a fellow patient, was depressed by this recent event. Even though he had a limited command of English, my friend and I tried to console him as we massaged his legs and arms, which ached from a recent injection.
"You shouldn't be sad," said my friend, who is better than I am at saying the right things at the right time. "Your friend in a peaceful place right now. He doesn't have to suffer anymore."
