Midnight Snack
This would have acted as an addendum of sorts to the last post, save perhaps for the fact that it didn’t really add anything.
I was only around nine when I went to Singapore for the first (and last) time, and I only remembered it today because of the traffic in my brain.
Foremost on my mind was the utter lack of Manila-style traffic. We stayed in a house owned by my mom’s friend, who had lived in Singapore for 20 years. The last time she was in Manila, she told me, she couldn’t stand the traffic. It’s only in Manila and Italy (although my biased brain disregarded the latter), she said, where driving is literally a life-and-death situation. [Coincidentally, both have mainly Catholic populations.] When I heard her deride Manila traffic while simultaneously looking out towards Singapore’s spotless streets from the second-floor window, I felt an inexplicable sense of pride for being a part of a city with the (perceived) worst traffic in the world.
I really don’t know why I’m proud of traffic and Filipino time and other so-called Filipino faults; I guess uniqueness is a virtue even if the actual trait isn’t.
There are other things I remember about Singapore, of course: Chicken Tonite (no Madame Copyreader, that’s not a typo), for one, which is a weird chicken dish in potatoes and white sauce. I ate it every night and loved it. My mother tried to imitate it many times over and in many different variants (Beef Tonite!) when we came back home, but I have a suspicion that any subsequent offerings were nothing like the original.
I also saw the play Les Misérables in Singapore, and the original London cast performed. Later in my life (around October of last year) I learned that a friend of mine went to the same play in Singapore, all those years ago, before he ever existed for me. It’s funny how things work out.
I remember my mom haggling over an Olympus camera; a cable car ride to nowhere; the taxi drivers; and, vividly, the trees everywhere, along the streets and across the skyline.
I also remember how the comfort wrought by a place as well-off as Singapore only made me love home more.
Technically it isn’t midnight here, but somewhere out there in the wide, wide world the landscape looks like an outpouring of azure and Prussian blue over cities and fields of aster, and that’s where I am.
posted by Jael @ 4:22 PM
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