What happens in Newtown

Not that I mean this to be a guide for what would happen if you went to Newtown. That, you'd have to tell me.

What happens in Newtown, when you're me, is this.

You walk up King St for an hour, and then change directions and walk for another hour. Along the way, you stop in many of the shops selling indie fashion and handmade accessories.

Somewhere around the second of those shops, the introjects you have been carrying around of your mother and grandmother pop up.

Just as you're picking up a pair of very cute bobby pins made out of yo-yos (the fabric ones, not the ones that keep coming back to you -- but oh, how I wished these would come back with me!), fastened with tiny buttons, Mummy's voice pipes up.

"Aren't those just circles of cloth with buttons on them? I could make those!"

And then you wander over to a wallet with an applique owl on it, and out comes Mama. "Aiyo. Look at that. It's just a simple machine applique. I can do that!"

And so, on you go, the two generations chattering along on either side of you while the yo-yos stay on the shelf, their siren calls to you unanswered. For now.

(I'm fully aware that my mother and grandmother are not really in my head. Just so you know. But, you know, a good Chinese mother always makes sure that her voice stays with her descendants long and loud. There are some parts of Chinese motherhood to which I don't necessarily aspire.)

For the rest of your time in Newtown, you may be enticed to enter a second-hand bookshop on the sole grounds of there being a Lat book in the window. The Good Introjects of Newtown will not keep you from buying everything you pick up there, because they cannot write, illustrate, lay out, print and bind a copy of Leunig's When I Talk To You for $5. And so, you will leave with books.

And you will start for home, but all the way on the bus and on the other bus you will think, "But books aren't everything." They're something, that's for sure, but you can't pin them on your hair and look cute, or use them to dress up a plain cotton tote.

By the time you reach home, you will wish more than anything that your needlework supplies consisted of more than four colours of embroidery thread and two metres of plain cheesecloth. Your fingers, even the sore one with the mysterious bruise that has kept you out of 2.5 days' work, will itch to do, to snip and stitch and join and make something.

And then you will remember that last week, you discovered two of your dresses had buttons that were falling off, and decided that it was easier to get rid of all the buttons than to secure the loose ones. And while you kept the cute, oversized buttons in a safe place, you thought, "Someday I'll find something to do with them."

You'll even remember that you have a dastardly habit of saving every bit of fabric that comes your way, even the canvas size tags that come with some brands of jeans.

And, by the end of the evening, the introjects will be patting you on the head with great pride, saying, "See? You would have paid far too much if you'd bought something like that just now."


And you will think, maybe that's true and maybe it does give you a sense of satisfaction, knowing this is the fruit of your creativity... but that doesn't mean I'm not going back to Newtown soon.

And I will leave the voices where they belong: with the owner (grandma) and in the past (mother), respectively. And oh, what fun the yo-yos and I will have.

Beauty in the mundane

The tedious act of filing long-neglected client notes, brightened by the sudden recognition of an old motif friend hiding in full view.

Hello, stripes. Lookin' good, as always. I feel like lengthening you and printing you across a shirt.

My new friend

Meet En En.

And here's how we met.

Happy Easter!

The valley

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me,
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me."

(Psalm 23:4)

So straightforward. So blunt. No hiding from the reality of grief. David had an honesty that I think many of us are afraid to use. In the low seasons of our life we pretend that we're only looking out on the valley, even when we're in its deepest, darkest bends. Or we behave as though the valley doesn't exist, it's just a play of light and shade.

It does exist. The feelings are real. The pain is there.

But so is the one who will never leave your side.

I am so thankful that even though death is a given in this derailed world, there is the promise of companionship and comfort.

This is for the ones halfway around the world whom I'm holding in my heart. I pray you'll have the courage to call the valley what it is.

What do you think?

Somewhere between Berrima and Bowral, NSW

I wonder if I would really be happier away from the traffic, the pollution, the crowds.

And it just kept getting better

I've been told I have a freakish ability to remember conversations from a long time ago. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's just that I have very memorable conversations, like this one from yesterday.

So I turn up at the auto workshop.

The mechanic walks into the office while the receptionist is handing me the invoice for my little dented friend's routine service.

I can see he's slightly uncomfortable. Maybe he's not used to fixing these old cans, I think. After all, there isn't another compact car within sight, nor another non-luxury marque, let alone another 14-year-old hatchback with oxidised sports rims and charming body scars from past hailstorms.

"So, there's bad news and there's good news," he says.

I think, "Well, you've already told me the bad news, over the phone. Yes, so the alternator's gone. But I don't have the money to pay for you to change it right now, so don't give me the same bad news again. I don't really enjoy encores of negative things."

"Part of the bad news you already know..."

"Oh, that's... good?"

"Yeah, so the alternator's shot, as I told you over the phone. But you said not to fix that so I've left it for now, just bring it in when you're ready. It isn't too much of a problem because your car doesn't run on a lot of electronics. The other part of the bad news is..."

I steel myself for the worst, and certain parts of my life flash before my eyes.

I have had a car stall on me with a completely flat battery, right on the curve of the Jalan Gasing roundabout in PJ, at 5pm on a Friday. If you have ever lived and driven in the Klang Valley, you know the implications of that innocuous sentence. I can still see the fists waving, hear the angry shouts in a collage of languages.

I have also had a car (incidentally, the same one) lose a tire while I was driving at 80. The tire didn't fall off, neither did it dissolve. It exploded. At 80 kilometres per hour. And my best friend (all categories) and I lived to tell the tale.

I am on a car-abuse story roll here. I have also seen a car (why yes, the same one. How could you tell?) overheat after a short journey, and spew boiling water and steam all over my poor dad who'd lifted the hood to investigate. By some miracle my dad still has his dashing good looks, but by now you should know that I have quite a dossier of car mishaps.

So, I think while absently gazing at a speck on the 1970s Formica counter, how bad can the bad news be?

"So we washed your car..."

(That's bad?)

"You washed my car? You... but you didn't have to. That's so nice of you. [The car really needed it because, you know, I park on the street and there are these trees and where there are trees there are birds, and I don't have access to a water source out there...] Thank you!"

"Yes, but..."

The receptionist chips in with, "Don't worry, it gets worse."

Yes, I was worried that he was just pretending, but you've done very well to reassure me now that something bad has indeed happened. Thank you!

"... so we didn't realise that the door wasn't closed all the way, and the seat got soaked."

Another file from that dossier gets pulled up. In it, I am 21, driving to uni for a final paper in my final semester. My best friend (uni category) is in the passenger seat. It's pouring. And the right leg of my jeans is completely soaked, and I feel as though I'm driving one of those inner-tube things from a water theme park to school. My dutiful passenger is handing me tissues, one at a time, that I am stuffing into the door frame in the hopes that they'll channel the rainwater, which is flowing uninhibited through where the rubber seal used to be, straight down to the floor instead of having it drip onto me. I'm cold. I'm soaked. And it's all because of the car, I think, none too charitably.

Present-day me, the one who has lived through that time and far worse ones, knows that on the grander scale of things, soaked car seats are not worth fluffing one's feathers over. Especially when one has no feathers. Especially after a week like I've had.

"But that's OK. It's not a big deal."

"I mean really drenched."

"I really don't mind. It's fine. It'll dry out after a few..."

"So we thought we'd get a hair dryer to dry it off."

"Oh, come on, it's really not that big a deal. You don't have to do that."

"But that's what we did."

"Oh, right. You've done it. Well, thanks! You didn't have to. I mean, you didn't even have to wash my car in the first place, and then you didn't have to dry the seat. So it's all dry now?"

(Where is the bad news he kept referring to earlier? So far I have heard that my car was hand-washed when I wasn't expecting it; my formerly soaked seats have been dried... this isn't exactly Pompeii, folks.)

"I haven't finished. So we got out the hair dryer and dried the seat, and the thing melted a big hole right in the middle of the seat."

So that's what all the song and dance was about.

"Oh, is that it? Well, never mind. It's just a car seat. I can live with it having a hole."

"Oh no you can't." "But I-"

"So we went out and got you some seat covers to put over them."

"You what?"

"You can't drive around with a big hole in your seat. We had to do something."

We walk out to my car and I can see, in the dim fluorescent lighting of the workshop's expansive interior, that my seats are now covered in blue nylon tweed.

"If you don't like the colour we can always get it changed. Just let me know."

By this time, I'm laughing out of control, because it has been such an insane week and if I were roti dough being stretched, I would be at the point where elongated holes are forming.

I stand there, looking at my sparkling car with its dressed-up seats that completely clash with the rest of the interior, and that doesn't even matter because after what's happened in the past few weeks, it's going to take so much more than clashing car seats to floor me.

It's all crashing through a funnel now, the news about our family home and the news about my ketchup sister's cancer and dozens of other, smaller barbs that have sunk in over the past 20 days, and like so many rocks in some insane mental avalanche they tumble right on top of this ridiculous situation in which I drove into an auto workshop this morning with a dirty, beat-up car running on old oil and I'm leaving with a clean, beat-up car with fresh oil and new car seats.

I laugh and cry all the way home.

A sense of belonging

"[The North Korean defectors'] life in the South is immeasurably richer and freer, but they crave a sense of belonging. 'Most South Koreans are indifferent to their plight,' [Andrei] Lankov said. 'And to not have your suffering recognized is an almost unbearable form of violence.'" -- Tom O'Neill, 'Escaping North Korea' in National Geographic. Full article

Is there anyone in my life whose suffering I'm choosing to stay blind to?

If I had to have violence in my life, let it be the slapstick comedy kind -- even the concussion-without-impact or the cake-batter-whiplash kind I experienced recently -- rather than the inadvertent cruelty of not hearing another human being's cry.

The human family

Picture by Jenny Rollo

“In a happy family you don't receive in proportion to your input. You receive in relation to your needs.

“If we could but recognize our common humanity, that we do belong together, that our destinies are bound up in one another's, that we can be free only together, that we can survive only together, that we can be human only together, then a glorious world would come into being where all of us lived harmoniously together as members of one family, the human family.” -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Today's repeated-listening song

Selah performing 'Unredeemed' live on K-Love. Originally seen on Angie Smith's blog.



I don't think there's a sound on earth that I love more than male-female vocals in harmony, with piano accompaniment.

A pig at breakfastime

"'Can I have a pig too, Pop?' asked Avery.

"'No, I only distribute pigs to early risers,' said Mr Arable. 'Fern was up at daylight, trying to rid the world of injustice. As a result, she now has a pig. A small one, to be sure, but nevertheless a pig. It just shows what can happen if a person gets out of bed promptly. Let's eat!'"-- EB White, Charlotte's Web

A guilt trip, sibling comparison and preamble to a meal, all in a single short paragraph. A true master, Mr Arable.