Since my last post was about rage (against the system), I thought it would be fitting to do a quick one on Valentine's Day before I leave for work.
Naturally, I have major plans for tonight: finishing up an article on healthcare economics, researching corporate tax incentives in Singapore for an interview tomorrow and spending the evening trying vainly to keep my poor exhausted 16-year-olds awake long enough to finish their comprehension exercises. (To this aim, I have purchased a bag of peanut butter chocolate hearts.)
All the Valentine's candy going on sale in the supermarket reminds me of how as a kid staying with my grandma in Aljunied, we'd go for walks in the afternoon and I'd stop in front of the old provision store and beg her to buy me heart-shaped boiled sweets that came in flavours like strawberry and melon. (I think they were called HartBeat Love Candy, complete with neon-styled logo.) I spent most of the late 80s' with sticky pink or green fingers and mouth.
Anyway, the kitschy appeal of this track has always reminded me of those long-ago sweets, and dreamy afternoons spent at the playground, or wandering down those endless HDB corridors, watching sunlight filter through the neighbour's lush, thorny forest of potted plants. (Ignore the video visuals though - ironic hipster stuff.)
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Class(room) Rage
I saw an advertisement today in the Sunday Times for a prominent - and very expensive - tuition centre, featuring three top students who referred to themselves as "intrepid baker" and "curious lover of all things Japanese". (I suppose allowing the students to write their own self-descriptions is a nod to their creativity, but give the kids another five years or so and they're going to be very, very embarrassed.)
This, coupled with a recent article on how tuition centres are now making potential entrants take tests, really pissed me off. As a tuition teacher myself, I know better than to take credit for my students' intelligence or ambition, like the ad appeared to do. The fact is, most students arrive already shaped by their parents. If you come from a middle or upper-middle class family, one that sets aside money for your education and takes you to plays and museums and trips abroad, then of course your grammar will be perfect, your mind agile and your personality engaging. You too will write precocious essays on criminal justice and debate global politics in a convincing and intelligent manner. You too will attend a top girls' or boys' school.
Like most educators, I love teaching kids like that. But I don't often get to, because I work in a tuition centre that doesn't require pre-entry testing (except in cases of foreign students who have not yet passed their English requirement). My students are the regular kids I grew up with - the neighbourhood children who hang out at the void deck, speak in their mother tongues and hope to enter polytechnic after Secondary 4. My students arrive in my Secondary 1 English class looking depressed after getting their secondary school postings. For the sake of not embarrassing them in public, I never ask what stream they're in.
These are the students who need tuition most. They need to revise basic skills at their own pace, and get the personal attention that their overworked teachers can't give them. For them, the struggle to learn is more urgent, and ultimately perhaps more satisfying. Last year's major achievement for me was helping a shy, undersized Normal Technical student do well enough to be promoted to Normal Academic. I was moved that he had found the courage to stay back after class and ask for help. Until then, he hadn't said more than two or three words in all the weeks he'd been in my class.
I offered guidance, but he did the heavy lifting of all the extra grammar exercises I assigned. At the end of the year he told me (while smiling, a rare sight) that he had been promoted, and I told him honestly that the news had made my day - in fact, my entire year.
So it galls me that these tuition centres call themselves tuition centres, when they're really enrichment centres. They enrich those who are already wealthy in knowledge. The classes are definitely fun and engaging, but let's not pretend they are essential, or that they are fully responsible for their students' success. They're not.
You know, the students I teach are not oblivious to the differences between the opportunities available to them, and the opportunities given to the better-off. They too would like ergonomic classroom furniture, live animals to play with and high-quality learning materials. They would like to debate Occupy Wall Street and the death penalty, and read something apart from dubiously-sourced online essays. You might even say that for my students, it is all the more essential that they should be exposed to good writing and nuanced perspectives on controversial issues. My students are after all the masses, the common majority. And they deserve much, much better.
This, coupled with a recent article on how tuition centres are now making potential entrants take tests, really pissed me off. As a tuition teacher myself, I know better than to take credit for my students' intelligence or ambition, like the ad appeared to do. The fact is, most students arrive already shaped by their parents. If you come from a middle or upper-middle class family, one that sets aside money for your education and takes you to plays and museums and trips abroad, then of course your grammar will be perfect, your mind agile and your personality engaging. You too will write precocious essays on criminal justice and debate global politics in a convincing and intelligent manner. You too will attend a top girls' or boys' school.
Like most educators, I love teaching kids like that. But I don't often get to, because I work in a tuition centre that doesn't require pre-entry testing (except in cases of foreign students who have not yet passed their English requirement). My students are the regular kids I grew up with - the neighbourhood children who hang out at the void deck, speak in their mother tongues and hope to enter polytechnic after Secondary 4. My students arrive in my Secondary 1 English class looking depressed after getting their secondary school postings. For the sake of not embarrassing them in public, I never ask what stream they're in.
These are the students who need tuition most. They need to revise basic skills at their own pace, and get the personal attention that their overworked teachers can't give them. For them, the struggle to learn is more urgent, and ultimately perhaps more satisfying. Last year's major achievement for me was helping a shy, undersized Normal Technical student do well enough to be promoted to Normal Academic. I was moved that he had found the courage to stay back after class and ask for help. Until then, he hadn't said more than two or three words in all the weeks he'd been in my class.
I offered guidance, but he did the heavy lifting of all the extra grammar exercises I assigned. At the end of the year he told me (while smiling, a rare sight) that he had been promoted, and I told him honestly that the news had made my day - in fact, my entire year.
So it galls me that these tuition centres call themselves tuition centres, when they're really enrichment centres. They enrich those who are already wealthy in knowledge. The classes are definitely fun and engaging, but let's not pretend they are essential, or that they are fully responsible for their students' success. They're not.
You know, the students I teach are not oblivious to the differences between the opportunities available to them, and the opportunities given to the better-off. They too would like ergonomic classroom furniture, live animals to play with and high-quality learning materials. They would like to debate Occupy Wall Street and the death penalty, and read something apart from dubiously-sourced online essays. You might even say that for my students, it is all the more essential that they should be exposed to good writing and nuanced perspectives on controversial issues. My students are after all the masses, the common majority. And they deserve much, much better.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Material New Year
By semi-accident I took on a massive freelance writing project - over twenty interviews and articles in about two and a half weeks, on top of my existing daily workload - and it made sure I spent my Christmas and New Year working frantically. I did find the time to visit the (disappointing) hagfish exhibit at the Underwater World - I am an aficionado of disgusting deep-sea creatures, the hagfish is my totem animal - and have a very nice dinner at Thanying, the royal Thai restaurant at Amara Sanctuary. I love the fact that it's so quiet and empty, you feel compelled to whisper over your food. Any tears caused by the fiery tom yam soup must be allowed to roll down your cheeks silently, or the waiter might frown at you.
It's good, however, that I'm working so hard. I view it as penance for having spent such a horrendous amount on Christmas shopping (primarily for myself). I love designer goods, but I'll never be able to pay full price... so when the sales come, I react like a shark scenting blood.
Unlike most Singaporean women who drop a thousand dollars on assorted coin purses and card holders and wallets and medium-sized handbags, I prefer clothing. I look out specifically for things like tailoring and material - I don't like wearing man-made fabrics unless absolutely necessary. As for labels, the ones I truly love are usually out of reach (even at sale price) so I hunt for less well-known ones: I recently purchased pieces from Martin Grant, Jill Stuart and Amanda Wakeley. But my favourites are usually linked to some childhood idea of cool: a minimalist grey Helmut Lang dress, a cream and gold disco extravaganza by Sass & Bide that I have yet to wear.
Sometimes I justify buying clothes by imagining a future when my daughter (should I have one) will be overwhelmingly grateful for the vintage Marni, the adorably retro Lela Rose. The same way I was for my mother's oversized Loewe tote and 80s' Aquascutum cardigan. But I think what I really want from that imaginary future scenario is the sense that all of this was not in vain. My relentless pursuit of 'good taste', the careful curatorship of my small wardrobe. All those hours spent searching for images of the same garment before taking the plunge. The time spent on the train, in the shower, before bed, contemplating the right shoes and accessories. We women devote so much of our lives to the performance of dress, and for what? (Certainly not just for the benefit of men.) When we dress, we are telling you something about ourselves - this is who I am, this is what I care about - and at the same time, we are also asking a silent, hidden question: do you see me?
It's good, however, that I'm working so hard. I view it as penance for having spent such a horrendous amount on Christmas shopping (primarily for myself). I love designer goods, but I'll never be able to pay full price... so when the sales come, I react like a shark scenting blood.
Unlike most Singaporean women who drop a thousand dollars on assorted coin purses and card holders and wallets and medium-sized handbags, I prefer clothing. I look out specifically for things like tailoring and material - I don't like wearing man-made fabrics unless absolutely necessary. As for labels, the ones I truly love are usually out of reach (even at sale price) so I hunt for less well-known ones: I recently purchased pieces from Martin Grant, Jill Stuart and Amanda Wakeley. But my favourites are usually linked to some childhood idea of cool: a minimalist grey Helmut Lang dress, a cream and gold disco extravaganza by Sass & Bide that I have yet to wear.
Sometimes I justify buying clothes by imagining a future when my daughter (should I have one) will be overwhelmingly grateful for the vintage Marni, the adorably retro Lela Rose. The same way I was for my mother's oversized Loewe tote and 80s' Aquascutum cardigan. But I think what I really want from that imaginary future scenario is the sense that all of this was not in vain. My relentless pursuit of 'good taste', the careful curatorship of my small wardrobe. All those hours spent searching for images of the same garment before taking the plunge. The time spent on the train, in the shower, before bed, contemplating the right shoes and accessories. We women devote so much of our lives to the performance of dress, and for what? (Certainly not just for the benefit of men.) When we dress, we are telling you something about ourselves - this is who I am, this is what I care about - and at the same time, we are also asking a silent, hidden question: do you see me?
Friday, November 11, 2011
I'm Still Here
I've been busy with work and a writing workshop I'm participating in, but yesterday my cousin reminded me of the existence of my blog. So I'm back.
Thanks to being cooped up online for two hours every week with other would-be writers, I have been forced to think about things like Derrida and post-modernism. (Luckily, adulthood has bestowed upon me the diminished attention span of a housefly, so I don't actually have to spend that much time thinking about those things.)
But sometimes I worry that I'm too laid back, that I'm no longer smart enough to get excited about deconstruction and semiotics. At the same time, I don't want to churn out tedious romantic novels or chick flick screenplays, lucrative as Twilight may have proven to be. What I want to produce is the novel equivalent of a great rock anthem - something loud, fast and aggressively dumb, with sly flashes of virtuosic brilliance. Something that won't get relegated to the ghetto of weepy Asian women's literature, next to the Catherine Lim.
Maybe this dumb-jock inner self is why I was always bored by the precious, Literature student convent girls who should have been my best friends, based on all the surface commonalities like a love of Jane Austen. At age 13 and 14 I was well on my way to becoming that person: glasses, modest skirts, sentimental-minded, always toting around a book far beyond my maturity level. The Girl Most Likely To Get An English Degree, Fall In Crush With My Professor And Compose Sad Moleskine Poetry While Sniffling Over Tea At Starbucks.
But there was this older kid at school, whose name I can't remember now - Reynard? Raymond? Ray-whatever was two years older and a fellow prefect. He was a goofy slacker with bad posture and a permanent deadpan expression, master of the one-liner. By teenage standards, an incredibly funny guy. The Bill Murray of Presbyterian High.
One afternoon I was sitting in the canteen with several other girls, and Ray-etc stopped by to say hello. He was in top form that day, probably encouraged by the favorable audience reaction. All the girls were giggling non-stop, pausing only to give him speculative looks along the lines of "Why, hello there, funny man! Keep this up and I just might let you slip a hand under my school skirt!"
I don't know why, but instead of similarly dropping my panties, I felt compelled to keep up with him. I wanted to make him laugh as much as he made me laugh. So I slung a few of my own - nothing outstanding, I hadn't put in any practice in front of a mirror - and to my dorky surprise, he actually laughed. In fact, he laughed and said, "Hey, you're pretty funny!"
It was the best feeling, ever. And it sparked an undying craving for more. And more.
Ray-(mur?) graduated and went on to the local university and I never saw him again, but who cared. Far more precious was the realisation that I didn't have to be the appreciative audience. I could be the one getting the reactions, the creator with the power to make people laugh, cry or throw up.
So that's why I didn't grow up and get a job, instead choosing to work a couple of dead-end freelance gigs so I can stay up until 4 am writing paragraphs I'll delete in the morning. I'm 27 years old. I'm worried it's too late for me to accomplish anything noteworthy, and too late for me to find another foothold in the workforce I left behind. That's why I ponied up $400 to take part in a workshop, just for the vague promise of having my work reviewed by an agent at the end of it all. What happens if it doesn't work out? I don't know. In the spirit of my unwritten novel, I try not to think too hard about anything. And that's why I'm still here.
Thanks to being cooped up online for two hours every week with other would-be writers, I have been forced to think about things like Derrida and post-modernism. (Luckily, adulthood has bestowed upon me the diminished attention span of a housefly, so I don't actually have to spend that much time thinking about those things.)
But sometimes I worry that I'm too laid back, that I'm no longer smart enough to get excited about deconstruction and semiotics. At the same time, I don't want to churn out tedious romantic novels or chick flick screenplays, lucrative as Twilight may have proven to be. What I want to produce is the novel equivalent of a great rock anthem - something loud, fast and aggressively dumb, with sly flashes of virtuosic brilliance. Something that won't get relegated to the ghetto of weepy Asian women's literature, next to the Catherine Lim.
Maybe this dumb-jock inner self is why I was always bored by the precious, Literature student convent girls who should have been my best friends, based on all the surface commonalities like a love of Jane Austen. At age 13 and 14 I was well on my way to becoming that person: glasses, modest skirts, sentimental-minded, always toting around a book far beyond my maturity level. The Girl Most Likely To Get An English Degree, Fall In Crush With My Professor And Compose Sad Moleskine Poetry While Sniffling Over Tea At Starbucks.
But there was this older kid at school, whose name I can't remember now - Reynard? Raymond? Ray-whatever was two years older and a fellow prefect. He was a goofy slacker with bad posture and a permanent deadpan expression, master of the one-liner. By teenage standards, an incredibly funny guy. The Bill Murray of Presbyterian High.
One afternoon I was sitting in the canteen with several other girls, and Ray-etc stopped by to say hello. He was in top form that day, probably encouraged by the favorable audience reaction. All the girls were giggling non-stop, pausing only to give him speculative looks along the lines of "Why, hello there, funny man! Keep this up and I just might let you slip a hand under my school skirt!"
I don't know why, but instead of similarly dropping my panties, I felt compelled to keep up with him. I wanted to make him laugh as much as he made me laugh. So I slung a few of my own - nothing outstanding, I hadn't put in any practice in front of a mirror - and to my dorky surprise, he actually laughed. In fact, he laughed and said, "Hey, you're pretty funny!"
It was the best feeling, ever. And it sparked an undying craving for more. And more.
Ray-(mur?) graduated and went on to the local university and I never saw him again, but who cared. Far more precious was the realisation that I didn't have to be the appreciative audience. I could be the one getting the reactions, the creator with the power to make people laugh, cry or throw up.
So that's why I didn't grow up and get a job, instead choosing to work a couple of dead-end freelance gigs so I can stay up until 4 am writing paragraphs I'll delete in the morning. I'm 27 years old. I'm worried it's too late for me to accomplish anything noteworthy, and too late for me to find another foothold in the workforce I left behind. That's why I ponied up $400 to take part in a workshop, just for the vague promise of having my work reviewed by an agent at the end of it all. What happens if it doesn't work out? I don't know. In the spirit of my unwritten novel, I try not to think too hard about anything. And that's why I'm still here.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The Problem With Ching Chongs
Years ago, when I was having a hard time fitting in at secondary school, I often consoled myself that I would soon be away from it all. Away, especially, from my schoolmates, who were like creatures of a different species - speaking a different language (Mandarin), caring about different things (Mandopop, TV drama serials), holding different priorities in life (vacationing in Taiwan or Hong Kong, owning a logo-bedecked LV wallet). Good riddance to all that! I thought at graduation.
Ironically, work has since brought me back to the same milieu I thought I left behind 11 years ago.
I teach in a newly created suburb, and many of my students fall into the same category as my former classmates - the "ching chongs", as I derisively labelled them. The stereotype holds so depressingly true, in every case. The flip flops or Crocs, the jumbled stream of Mandarin and Singlish, the HK-style cafes and Korean pop stars, the defiant loudness and overconfidence, the casual, unthinking racism and sexism. All there, all accounted for.
A student once rudely insisted that there was no such thing as a restaurant that didn't allow people to wear flip-flops or T-shirts in. She didn't believe me when I told her there were even restaurants where you had to make a reservation. They were not present in her universe; ergo, they must not exist at all.
It's not the lack of worldly knowledge that I find troubling. (At that age, I'd never been to a fancy restaurant either.) But what is most disturbing - the essential point about being a ching-chong - is the total and absolute lack of curiosity about the outside world, except where things like money and advancement are concerned.
My former classmates, who are mostly upwardly mobile professionals, now drink wine and celebrate their birthdays overnight at Marina Bay Sands. They dine at Au Petit Salut and spend their holidays in Europe and Japan, according to Facebook. But nothing else has changed, no inner being has emerged or developed. They go to Rome for the Prada store, not for the museums or art. One restaurant or bottle of wine is generally as good as another, but the best ones are the most expensive ones. Books are always of the self-help bestseller variety. There is no connection to anything greater than the sum of their lives - nothing but empty darkness outside their brightly impenetrable spheres of work, friends, family. The rest of the vast and richly varied human race exists only as mild entertainment, or a source of income.
I know most of my students will grow older along similar lines. And to them and their families, it will be just peachy. But no wonder our society is so unhappy, so dull and seething with deep discontent. How can there be more Singaporean art or music, design or architecture, books or films, when there are so few artists and writers and intellectuals, or even an audience? All those scenes are dominated by the English-speaking products of top schools and Ivy League universities, flown home to set up galleries and artisan coffee shops and macaron bakeries. A heavily outnumbered demographic, and one that is also inclined to sticking with its own kind.
Immigration is not helping matters, since in this case it means an influx of people who don't have a tradition of questioning or thinking. But then, how can you fault the Indian or Chinese student, who just wants to keep his head down and cement his family's position in the middle class? You can't ask them to indulge in creativity when their home countries are only just emerging from poverty. Like their parents before them, they must be economists and scientists, not curators or visionaries. (We never seem to extend invites to the whistle-blowers, the activists and starving artists.)
Perhaps their presence - while arousing a good deal of resentment from the ching chongs - is also, bizarrely, a safeguarding of the ching chong ways. There is no need to speak English with the China-born. No need to leave one's comfort zone - they stick to theirs and we stick to ours. No need to push for gay rights or social welfare issues, not with new citizens who are still conservative enough to believe that homosexuality is a perversion and people should pull themselves up by the bootstraps. True globalisation would have resulted in the collapse of the ching chong's insular mindset. This carefully calibrated version just extends it, like how the Great Firewall of China preserves Chinese ignorance by only letting approved information in.
Anyway. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, and snobbish, and too Westernised - all things I have been accused of being. But as I walk through the teeming crowds at Compass Point, or try to persuade yet another recalcitrant student that she needs to speak English in the classroom, I think to myself that maybe - just maybe - I'm right.
Ironically, work has since brought me back to the same milieu I thought I left behind 11 years ago.
I teach in a newly created suburb, and many of my students fall into the same category as my former classmates - the "ching chongs", as I derisively labelled them. The stereotype holds so depressingly true, in every case. The flip flops or Crocs, the jumbled stream of Mandarin and Singlish, the HK-style cafes and Korean pop stars, the defiant loudness and overconfidence, the casual, unthinking racism and sexism. All there, all accounted for.
A student once rudely insisted that there was no such thing as a restaurant that didn't allow people to wear flip-flops or T-shirts in. She didn't believe me when I told her there were even restaurants where you had to make a reservation. They were not present in her universe; ergo, they must not exist at all.
It's not the lack of worldly knowledge that I find troubling. (At that age, I'd never been to a fancy restaurant either.) But what is most disturbing - the essential point about being a ching-chong - is the total and absolute lack of curiosity about the outside world, except where things like money and advancement are concerned.
My former classmates, who are mostly upwardly mobile professionals, now drink wine and celebrate their birthdays overnight at Marina Bay Sands. They dine at Au Petit Salut and spend their holidays in Europe and Japan, according to Facebook. But nothing else has changed, no inner being has emerged or developed. They go to Rome for the Prada store, not for the museums or art. One restaurant or bottle of wine is generally as good as another, but the best ones are the most expensive ones. Books are always of the self-help bestseller variety. There is no connection to anything greater than the sum of their lives - nothing but empty darkness outside their brightly impenetrable spheres of work, friends, family. The rest of the vast and richly varied human race exists only as mild entertainment, or a source of income.
I know most of my students will grow older along similar lines. And to them and their families, it will be just peachy. But no wonder our society is so unhappy, so dull and seething with deep discontent. How can there be more Singaporean art or music, design or architecture, books or films, when there are so few artists and writers and intellectuals, or even an audience? All those scenes are dominated by the English-speaking products of top schools and Ivy League universities, flown home to set up galleries and artisan coffee shops and macaron bakeries. A heavily outnumbered demographic, and one that is also inclined to sticking with its own kind.
Immigration is not helping matters, since in this case it means an influx of people who don't have a tradition of questioning or thinking. But then, how can you fault the Indian or Chinese student, who just wants to keep his head down and cement his family's position in the middle class? You can't ask them to indulge in creativity when their home countries are only just emerging from poverty. Like their parents before them, they must be economists and scientists, not curators or visionaries. (We never seem to extend invites to the whistle-blowers, the activists and starving artists.)
Perhaps their presence - while arousing a good deal of resentment from the ching chongs - is also, bizarrely, a safeguarding of the ching chong ways. There is no need to speak English with the China-born. No need to leave one's comfort zone - they stick to theirs and we stick to ours. No need to push for gay rights or social welfare issues, not with new citizens who are still conservative enough to believe that homosexuality is a perversion and people should pull themselves up by the bootstraps. True globalisation would have resulted in the collapse of the ching chong's insular mindset. This carefully calibrated version just extends it, like how the Great Firewall of China preserves Chinese ignorance by only letting approved information in.
Anyway. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, and snobbish, and too Westernised - all things I have been accused of being. But as I walk through the teeming crowds at Compass Point, or try to persuade yet another recalcitrant student that she needs to speak English in the classroom, I think to myself that maybe - just maybe - I'm right.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Palate Cleanser
Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn't possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll's house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes - bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance - but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors - these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman's face holding his post before a spreading blaze.
- Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
- Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1934)
Sunday, August 7, 2011
An Unloved Woman
When I was 14, in secondary school, we were taken in school buses to the chapel at Kuo Chuan Presbyterian Secondary on a blinding hot Saturday morning. The air was so mercilessly radiant with heat that we practically ran into the building, jostling for standing space in the lobby with about a hundred other students.
Their chapel was far larger than ours, and the air-conditioning was stronger, too. We were ushered into seats that sloped downwards to face a small stage with a large white canvas screen. Almost without warning, the projector flipped on and a close-up photograph of a smiling white woman's face appeared on the screen. Her hair was long and dark, and she was heavily made-up with lipstick, fake lashes and eyeshadow. The flash seemed to reveal something like begging in her wide open eyes.
Still, it was an attractive face. But then a man in an ill-fitting dress shirt and jacket - poor preacher's clothes - walked up to the podium on stage and said good morning.
His American accent was flat, curiously easy for us to understand. A Midwesterner, perhaps. He moved energetically, but I had the odd feeling that beneath his surface there was another self who could not be tamped down, despite his efforts. It was like catching glimpses of skin sliding underneath layers of clothes - the tender underside of a blue-veined wrist, the pale, slim curve of collarbone, now hidden inside a man's striped shirt. The washed out whiteness of the skin around his eyes.
"Do you see that person?"
He gestured to the screen, without looking at it himself.
"That was me, ten years ago."
Gasps and laughter from his teenage audience. The woman on the screen continued to smile broadly, unaware of being mocked. I understood then that she was dead and gone.
For the next half-hour he recounted his story. He had always felt like a woman inside. By his 20s he was living as one, and saving up for the big operation. The night before he was due to check into hospital, Jesus appeared in a vision and told him not to do it.
"With His blessing and through His strength, I abandoned my sinful lifestyle in the city," said the man on stage. "I found a circle of new brothers and sisters in church and grew stronger in my faith, day by day. Through my pastor and his wise counsel, I was introduced to my wife, with whom I have two lovely daughters." Applause.
"I was lost, but now I am found," he continued, his voice quivering. "The devil almost had me in his clutches, but Jesus saved me and pointed me in the right direction. He lifted me up into His arms and told me that He has loved me all my life. Today, I stand here before you as living proof of His salvation! Hallelujah!"
That was the cue for an altar call. People streamed out of the pews and down the aisles towards the stage where he prayed softly for them, almost drowned out by the music.
The woman on the screen was still there, smiling down on all the souls accepting Jesus into their lives. She looked like she had been caught in a moment of fun, vamping for the camera amidst lights and drinks and music of a very different kind. How easily she had been destroyed, in a kind of death worse than real death, with no grave or urn or ceremony to mark her passing. Jesus did not love her, and she hadn't even loved herself.
The man below was flushed as he prayed, his hands outstretched towards the bent heads of teenagers. His voice was steady and his arms raised high, but still there was the faint shiver of fragility that I saw in the woman's face. It was better to be dead and barely remembered than to be in a living hell, I thought. Better to be her, than him.
Their chapel was far larger than ours, and the air-conditioning was stronger, too. We were ushered into seats that sloped downwards to face a small stage with a large white canvas screen. Almost without warning, the projector flipped on and a close-up photograph of a smiling white woman's face appeared on the screen. Her hair was long and dark, and she was heavily made-up with lipstick, fake lashes and eyeshadow. The flash seemed to reveal something like begging in her wide open eyes.
Still, it was an attractive face. But then a man in an ill-fitting dress shirt and jacket - poor preacher's clothes - walked up to the podium on stage and said good morning.
His American accent was flat, curiously easy for us to understand. A Midwesterner, perhaps. He moved energetically, but I had the odd feeling that beneath his surface there was another self who could not be tamped down, despite his efforts. It was like catching glimpses of skin sliding underneath layers of clothes - the tender underside of a blue-veined wrist, the pale, slim curve of collarbone, now hidden inside a man's striped shirt. The washed out whiteness of the skin around his eyes.
"Do you see that person?"
He gestured to the screen, without looking at it himself.
"That was me, ten years ago."
Gasps and laughter from his teenage audience. The woman on the screen continued to smile broadly, unaware of being mocked. I understood then that she was dead and gone.
For the next half-hour he recounted his story. He had always felt like a woman inside. By his 20s he was living as one, and saving up for the big operation. The night before he was due to check into hospital, Jesus appeared in a vision and told him not to do it.
"With His blessing and through His strength, I abandoned my sinful lifestyle in the city," said the man on stage. "I found a circle of new brothers and sisters in church and grew stronger in my faith, day by day. Through my pastor and his wise counsel, I was introduced to my wife, with whom I have two lovely daughters." Applause.
"I was lost, but now I am found," he continued, his voice quivering. "The devil almost had me in his clutches, but Jesus saved me and pointed me in the right direction. He lifted me up into His arms and told me that He has loved me all my life. Today, I stand here before you as living proof of His salvation! Hallelujah!"
That was the cue for an altar call. People streamed out of the pews and down the aisles towards the stage where he prayed softly for them, almost drowned out by the music.
The woman on the screen was still there, smiling down on all the souls accepting Jesus into their lives. She looked like she had been caught in a moment of fun, vamping for the camera amidst lights and drinks and music of a very different kind. How easily she had been destroyed, in a kind of death worse than real death, with no grave or urn or ceremony to mark her passing. Jesus did not love her, and she hadn't even loved herself.
The man below was flushed as he prayed, his hands outstretched towards the bent heads of teenagers. His voice was steady and his arms raised high, but still there was the faint shiver of fragility that I saw in the woman's face. It was better to be dead and barely remembered than to be in a living hell, I thought. Better to be her, than him.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)