Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Palinode XXVI There are mysteries here that cannot be described except by retraction. The earth does not revolve around the sun. The son does not revolve around the father. Image: Galileo Galilei at his trial by the Inquisition in Rome in 1633. Galileo pushes away the Bible.  https://www.pinterest.at/pin/371265563023128932/

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Of the many social faultlines exposed and deepened by the current crisis, race stands out for its power to attract blame. The US is seeing a spate of hate crimes against Asian Americans , encouraged by a blame-China campaign by Trump and his allies. Singapore, which has long shunted its South Asian migrant workers into crowded dormitories, is caught unprepared for a surge in coronavirus infection among this vulnerable population. Actions taken to address this surge have been slow and confusing, even dangerous. A migrant rights advocacy group discovered that a group of migrant workers were locked up in their room by their dormitory operator. This is horrifying but not surprising, given the country's racialized fear of an exploited and silenced population.  In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , Toni Morrison argues that the American ideal of freedom is not formed by the...

Palinode XXV Every man in my family loved to sing in a voice unhoused and homely. Every man in my family loved to dance the Hippy Hippy Shake with his spouse  as if meeting for the first time at a tea dance in the Golden Venus, where no tea was served but plenty of spirits. That you danced away the nights after moving to New York from Singapore and found the songs of the golden goddess shaking out page after page after page made you a man in my family, in my book.  Image credit: https://fontsinuse.com/uses/7587/hippy-hippy-shake-the-swinging-blue-jeans

My poem "The Editor" has just been published in the Eunoia Review . Thanks, Kim, for sharing your story with me. The poem really comes from not just that one long interview, but a number of discussions we had about dating white men. Everyone has a different story to tell about that experience, and yours is coupled with your job as an editor in my imagination. We make big and small edits to the script given us, and I, for one, know how terrific an editor you are. You will notice that I took out some lines for the sake of greater succinctness and focus on you. Big thanks to Joel too, for giving permission to include him in this interracial story. And to Ian Chung, for publishing the poem in Eunoia Review, a project of passionate dedication. "She did not want to date white guys. She did not want to date at all, loving the icy flavor of keeping to herself the soul’s good news...." Read poem .

Palinode XXIV The rat that leapt off my back to enter heaven first is still a rat. I am an ox, stoic and traditional, keeping to the rich furrows cut by abiding love. It’s true: when I was ten I wished I were a monkey, overturning heaven with my antics, changing into a fish, a freckled bustard, a roadside shrine. But mother died and went ahead of me and all wishes for change left too. If I should turn into a rooster or a pig, how would she recognize her boy when she passed by the rocky fields? Or, now, these regions of fire? Image credit: https://www.epicentrofestival.com/

Palinode XXIII Inside the heavy canvas bag,  all greasy, sealed with motor oil, my handy pliers, flat nose, round nose, and needle, my screwdrivers of many lengths and heads, my ball peen hammer, the use of you never learned, except the measuring tape I caught you once bandaging round your biceps and then your unconcealed thighs.

Palinode XXII If I had  such a strong sense of direction in life, why can’t I now find my way out of this maze, but feed each day-night on seven youths of regret and seven maids of grief?  A marbled sculpture of the Minotaur | Courtesy of pinterest.com

Palinode XXI When Stesichorus, he who fathers a chorus, retracted his blame  on Helen for Troy’s devastation, he recovers his eyesight. He could appreciate beauty again. Each time I retract a statement I made in life, I recover my voice. That’s how much you want the dead to speak to you again and again but only to contradict their death, in other words, themselves.

Palinode XVII (Revised) I met my four brothers the other day, the two older ones, the two younger, all whom father loved more than he loved me, gave them better jobs and lives, which taught them lordly bearings, still galloping straight to the races on Saturdays and Saturdays, their hands clutching the racing form, their shining hooves stirring up a stampede of dust in my mouth.

Palinode XX Our last dinner at the burger joint with the bikers theme, eating not with disciples on the road, I did not have any, but with my family, reassembled from the winds, you and your worldly American, your sister, her husband, and her two sweethearts, your mother sagging and smiling, brought me unspeakable happiness until the waiter, leather-clad, dark glasses, who had been staying out of sight diplomatically, asking us just once how we enjoyed his recommendations, saw that we were done and brought us the bill.  Image credit: still from film by SG Road Vigilante

Palinode XIX If you can’t tell by their gasping, go closer, but not too close, and read the red lines printed by the masks, ventilation or surgical, across the isolated zone of their wheezing.  

Palinode XVIII Nights I could not breathe and took to standing by the kitchen window. No stars in the city, but the dull crash of a rubbish bin and cats screeching. Image credit: HDB flats in Yishun on 08 Mar 2013. Housing. Photo by OOI BOON KEONG. Read more at https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/hdb-flat-owners-mri

Palinode XVII I met my brother the other day, still galloping to the races on Saturdays and Saturdays, his hands clutching the racing form, his shining hooves stirring up a stampede of dust in my mouth. Image credit: Singapore Turf Club

Palinode XVI We thought we had forgiven him, our father who abandoned us for another family, but everyone, without exception, arrives here with thoughts worse than murderous. We will make him empty the sea with a teaspoon, or run 1000 km in circles small as a pinhead, or pin his dick in a nest of fire ants. I can’t decide what’s most fitting for the man. You are the poet, descendant of Dante and ancient hellish Chinese imaginings. What do you recommend?   Gustave Doré's depiction of Minos judging sinners at the start of Canto V of Dante's Inferno

Palinode XV The bicycle wheels that fetched you home from pianica practice, your legs hanging off the side. The wheel of fortune on TV  and in the TOTO stand. The ten-cent ride on the Ferris wheel in Beauty World, always threatened by fire. The car that never would have materialized if your sister had not dated a driver with reliable wheels. The wheeling years when my lungs collapsed and I dragged them  in and out of hospitals like a dead parachute. The wheel of rebirth we no longer bet on, though once we did, the working poor, so rich with hope we wished life goes round. Image credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKidrGuyhSM

Palinode XIV An electric wheelchair would have given back my legs but your mom spoke against your idea. She was afraid I would voyage beyond her care, meet Calypso of the flower shop, drown between Scylla of the stairs and Charybdis of the cant of people’s talk, be picked off by Polyphemus driving a lorry of livestock. So as not to make her life more difficult, and it was, and it was, I turned down your electrifying offer and took the name of nobody.  Image credit: https://seniorcare.com.sg/guide-power-electric-wheelchair/

Palinode XIII At the cinema you were excited by the bare-bodied students of kungfu lifting water buckets on their broad shoulders, the Hollywood car chase led by an amnesiac Marine captain at the flashing wheel, and so was I, looking for a shot of testosterone in my disabled life, until the picture of you taken from behind came unbidden on the screen, and I had to close my eyes against the fire engulfing the overturned  car, the water buckets clattering down the temple steps.  Image credit: https://www.shifuyanlei.co.uk/blogs/news/127207491-3-ways-to-train-like-a-shaolin-monk

Palinode XII I couldn’t believe my ashes were lowered by a ribbon into the sea in a gift box. Not a chance to stay on anyone’s fingers. Not a chance to fly with the wind and whip back into anyone’s eyes. Singapore does not take, nor give, chances. You dropped me off the dedicated boat to the sea bed, where I lay unopened, where I dissolved.

You can sympathize with Phoebe the factory girl, Gary the pop star, Justin the family heir, Yinghui the entrepreneur, and Walter the titular five-star billionaire because they are people, and we are all taught to be sympathetic to the plight of others, but as characters, none of them rise above one dimension. Any attempt at complication, for instance, Yinghui's change from leftist activist to successful businesswoman, is unconvincing. The most interesting character is, actually, a minor one, Justin's younger brother, a half-cynical, half-naive aesthete., drawn with a few deft strokes. The problem lies in the prose, I think, which is serviceable, but lackluster. If there is no spark of life in the characters, there is also no spark of life in the setting, the many descriptions of Shanghai. The prose does not convince me that skyscrapers have different personalities. And the plot twist could be sighted from a mile away. Maybe I should have started with The Harmony Silk Factory i...

Palinode XI Live and let live, I said to my fishes in the tank when your mom complained about church leaders. Live and let live, I said to my potted plants in the common corridor when your sister refused to speak to her aunt after that trip to Australia. One by one, the guppies and the barbs and the killifish turned on their side and floated up. Out on the corridor, my chilli plant lost its fiery interest to live.  Credit:Straits Times, August 3, 2017

Palinode X You must understand no one is tortured here unwillingly. The man who abandoned his parents at their hour of need climbs up the grinding stone with wailing abandonment. The corporate raider, for his greed, throws up his hands for the handcuffs and screeches joyfully as he is whipped. And dashing for the cliff-edge the double agent flings her beautiful body over a field of knives. They are all literalists, sensualists of a stripe, artists. The weeping and gnashing of teeth in the outermost darkness, those retractions are the poets. The above palinode is a retraction of t his ode (Part 7) .

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Pining for our Second Saturdays gatherings? Fear not! We've collated some recs from our authors, hosts, and regulars for your enjoyment. And if you have not yet attended this special NYC monthly event, here's a taste of the community in store for you. If you have suggestions of your own, please send them! On the recommendation of both his brother and The New Yorker, poet Josh Lefkowitz has started doing one "Yoga With Adriene" video each morning before he resumes the process of sitting on various chairs and couch cushions for the following 12 hours until bedtime. Or you can put yourself in the very good hands of Candice Miller, who not only hosts Second Saturdays but also runs the yoga and meditation studio YogaCare. Check out their schedule tab for all class times . If you're tired of sitting down during the day, you can take a walk with crime writer SJ Rozan through the cherry trees ...

It makes for grim reading, this 490-page novel by Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska (b. 1971). The relentless poverty, the constant cruelty, the grinding disappointments, the numerous deaths. It follows a pair of twin girls, conjoined at the head before the break-up of Yugoslavia through the birth of the Republic of Macedonia, taking in its epic span an immigrant's life in London. Yet the grimness is compelling for me for a number of reasons. I do not know much about the conditions of life in post-Communist Balkans, and this novel paints in a vivid, but never showy, manner the ordinary grayness of it all. I must also confess to a morbid fascination with the phenomenon of conjoined twins, and this novel describes the many aspects of life that such a phenomenon must affect, from walking to going to the bathroom to studying to dating to getting married, and having sex; no part of life is left untouched, and so the reader live through it all with Zlata and Sreba. Then there are the ...

Palinode IX I met a suicide here, a young man who looked eighteen, who could not stop talking in parables. He had made the world a better place, he was convinced, by leaving it, but, boy, how he missed, how he missed, his friend who was more than a friend.

Palinode VIII The war accommodated me to hardship— rooting for a sweet potato in a ditch, flying from the soldiers— as much as the prosperity afterwards accommodated you to success. You escaped the draft for nation building and wrote your poetry books. Much as I wished to do likewise, throw down the weight of duty, like a sack of rice, I could not run away from the sweet potato I had eaten.  Workmen clear up raid debris in Singapore on January after a Japanese bombing raid on the British naval base.

Palinode VII Remember that construction worker run over by the bus, setting off a riot? I see him in every Indian here, short or tall, handsome or devastated, starving or sleek-headed and satisfied. I can’t help it. Why can’t I see Rajaratnam our Deputy Prime Minister or the guitarist Alex Abisheganaden instead? I go up, like getting on a bus, to every Indian here and I ask, are you Sakthivel Kumaravelu? And they say, every one of them, smiling, or grimacing, or furrowing the brow, Don’t you wish for me to be him? Reuters: Migrant workers fear massive Singapore dormitory lockdown is coronavirus timebomb. Image: Centurion Corporation

Palinode VI I knew we lost you when you flew to England, but the loss hit me like a plane crash when we stood on the college lawn— you in your graduation garb, explaining we would have been bored by the Latin ceremony— and had the photograph of my wreck taken. Perhaps the fall began when I quit school at nine, but at that age how was I supposed to know I would have a son who would fly so close, so dangerously close, to the sun? Image credit: Daily Mail/ Robert Judges/ Rex_Shutterstock

This novel is a good introduction to the Catalan writer, so the glowing blurbs assure me. "A masterpiece," praises one reviewer. I don't know if I would call the novel that but it is certainly very engaging. Two brothers, both young men, from a small town died in a car accident. Four narrators describe their reactions to the tragedy and carry what plot there is forward. First up is a banker who works in the town but lives outside of it. He is therefore the most detached of the four narrators, seeing in the deaths a question for his own satisfactory but rather mundane life. Next is a trucker who resents mightily the older generation for taking the fat of the land and leaving nothing for the young like him. To fill his empty life, he turns to prostitutes, and then finds himself falling in love with the fiancee of one of the dead men. The third part is narrated from the perspective of the fiancee, who tries to deny the reality of what happened. An artist concludes the book w...

Palinode V Yes, the Prime Minister is here too, in this day-night. He sits on a rocky outcrop, silent, unwilling to retract his expressed regret for sending women to college or other stubborn opinions. When I asked him about his children’s fight over his house, whether it should be torn down or turned into a museum, he could not speak. He had tears in his eyes but no tongue in his mouth. He has made his will and will swear by it. Image credit: Chicago Tribute (Phillippe Lopez/AFP/Getty)

Palinode IV All the time the air sacs in my lungs winked out like lights in an inhabited valley, the locks of my heart closed at semi-regular intervals, my legs waterlogged, I thought, I have no regrets for living the way I did, where I did. The lights blessed the smoky Saturday dances with the implausibly slim waists of girls. The canals met us with boats on their leisured way somewhere to which our legs would deliver us. But we never left the valley. We bought a house, paid for by running the machines maintaining cool and comfortable the valley air. We had the two of you, as the valley said to do. And then, first, the smog drifted over from the next valley and choked to death all our animals and the smog, staying years and years, so long we had almost acclimatized ourselves to it, was followed by the flood. Image credit: CNN

Palinode III Tell your mom I don’t love her less than your sister. I didn’t speak to my wife last because we had a whole life together. I thought it was fair since she has our vows your sister has the last words of her dad. I’m full, I nodded to the bowl of pork porridge she brought. If I had to do it again, I would have done it differently, but there’s no do again when one is dead and now your mom is always hungry. Image: http://www.chineserecipesforall.com/recipes/view/pork-congee

Palinode II Your mom, look at her, crying so piteously, as my body is wheeled into the fire. There she goes, collapsing into herself, like a burning roof. Hold her up. Hold her close, my Hecuba. I’m sorry I ever thought of her as Helen. The Love of Helen and Paris by Jacques-Louis David (oil on canvas, 1788, Louvre, Paris)

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . On Monday, Singapore's High Court dismissed all three legal challenges to Section 377A, the law that criminalizes the LGBTQ community. After ten years of Pink Dot, the annual mass rally for equality, after the increasing show of support from straight allies and local companies, after influential political leaders such as the former ambassador to the US and the brother to the Prime Minister called for change, after a former Chief Justice and two former Attorney-Generals wrote public critiques of the law, the High Court's judgment has not budged a millimeter from the 2014 judgment of the Apex Court. Most infuriating is the High Court argument, which agrees with the government's, that Section 377A "serves the purpose of safeguarding public morality by showing societal moral disapproval of male homosexual acts." The fight for equality must continue. Already one of the plaintiffs has filed ...

Palinode I I take it back. Life is better than shit. My dad did not say shit but he should have. You only find this out on the other side when you start missing your sense of smell. The colors are all right, still dancing their foxtrot, their ja ja jambo. Voices still appear slinky, or slate, or stupendous, like Charlton Heston as Moses. But no smell. Nothing. No shit. That’s how you know you are now in a dream from which there is no waking. I take it back, I take it all back, what I said.