O ma famille

I’m not talking about Suri Cruise’s impossible dad, but here are three parents’ false beliefs:

There is always a better man/woman out there for my daughter/son and it’s not my current in-law.

There is always a job that yields a generous pay from minimum time spent in office out there for my children, which is not the one they slave for now.

There is no better son/daughter than mine though my neighbours’ eyes spell ‘ungrateful brats’ when they chance to brush too roughly on my dear ones’ faces.

And so, that accounted for how I was condemned to the children’s purgatory. To reflect, smile and repent. Too bad I delight in rolling, and slowly rotting in ruins. If totalitarian rule taught me anything, it must be that to progress, men had to be subjected constantly to the looming fear and the threat of extinction.

Oscar Wilde nailed it – children begin by loving their parents. After a time, they judge them – as, regretably, my life is not as dramatic as a play, I’m obliged to cut short the quotation. Instead of dully refusing to forgive them, children always have better options, like defying the wishes of their elderly, wobbly parents and have a jolly good time sniggering at their red faces. The only thing good about being an adult.

My small man syndrome is beyond cure. I should move, move underground, be neighbour with Ninja Turtles.

 

Just monsters

What do my new office and fairyland have in common? Both are terrorized by an evil monster.

The last stop of a visit to Krakow’s Wawel Castle is invariably the Dragon’s Lair. I groped and felt my way down dark, wet, winding stone steps to the legendary monster’s resting place and was under constant attacks of waterdrops. Extremely annoying when they chose to slap on one’s glasses. But I do like the Krakow Dragon. There is a twist in his lengend, perhaps. He is not simply slain. A young man tricks him to swallow sulphur, and so the vicious creature ends up with a stomach that burns unbearably. To quench the heat, it gulps down water from the Wisla, river next to the castle/dragon’s lair. An ‘inplosion’ kills him. What an undignified way to die for a ‘bad guy’ in tales.

From what I heard, there is also a monstrous thing in the office. It coughs up not fire. Something worse – information. Ever since the internet’s relentless hook on our lives, info famine eats into our lives too. Google, Wikipedia, news stations, online papers are all virtual cultery, for us to carve info. How much does one need? How much should one fish in? How to drain out the fish and not get drowned? The sketchy description of the office monster brings an image of Elephant Man in my mind, a machine with a mind of its own, forever stretching, strutting out his long trunk, trundling out lines afte lines of info, daring one to sneak closer and snatch away the precious piece. But this is the traditional duty of princes. Or smelly ogre. Shrek.

And I’m so shrekish green.

I never thanked J for telling me the stories about the barb-wired Cloth Hall and the underground marketplace, the lowered entrance of the churches on Rynek Glowny, and of course, how the town was throttled in panic at the sight of a Nazi flag at the top of Wawel Castle again, all thanks to the filming of a television show documenting K’s occupation during the war. Because of the people I met there, I miss Poland.

Tirades, perhaps

I’ve decided to break the rule. Blogging, I thought, should steer as far away from private life as possible because, first, the very idea of exhibiting a life that interests no one but the writer carries the same appalling effect of the nude pictures of – well, to be blunt, people with a whole army of flesh that mutinies around their bodies or size-zero models. Secondly, it is downright annoying and unforgivable for someone to moan about life if that life is but a tedious one. Instead of slowly breathing moisture to the air every two seconds, do something, will you? And putting miseries and self-pity into concrete forms such as words is the best way to ensure one’s progress into a pathetic, self-absorbed frog.

However, I’ve decided to be that frog. Otherwise, my heart will burst, as Mr Rochester says. Of course, we’re talking about different kinds of passion.

There are things that other daughters, other girls can do, take as parts of their lives but I find strange and unnecessary. When one is at home, it doesn’t follow that every minute is to be spent with the family or the family members who happen to be in the same house. Please don’t encourage the illusion that this runs like auto-pay – I do need some private moments. It is unrealistic to ask for quietness in a 400 sq m, enclosed area, as soon as I realized this, my earplugs have been firmly in place whenever I need a clear mind.

This word might not exist in your world, but please don’t banish it from mine. We are, all of us, individuals though some girls never realize it. Because of this, it’s only natural that we have different habits and sometimes incompatible approaches to even the same things in life. Never have I tried to change yours, can you at least try biting your lip? And as individuals, I do believe I’ve the right to keep some secrets; whereas others enjoy babbling off every thought, every gossip collected on that day over dinner table, I gain no pleasure in doing so. Don’t nag me for being mysterious. Think me pretentious if you want.

Everyone changes.

Merry Christmas. Decalog

This is not a sermon.

Beyond the rain-stained glass, there is no Christmas light; behind the bedroom wall smeared and scarred by chipped plaster, I hear no Christmas carol. The mother next door was deep in a shrieking, ranting competition with her girl, and I see dark shadows, some behind curtain, some trapped in window frames, shedding lamplight of the room. Ubiquitous orange lamplights – in every family, along every street. Is it Christmas? Well, time for a challenge to the preconception, misconception of the traditional picture of Christmas.

I was trying to come up with novels, movies about this festive day. The list is painfully short because it’s Christmas and I refused to cheat by googling. Charles Dickens’s The Christmas Carol, Love Actually and Sleepless in Seattle (it starts off at this time, doesn’t it, with Meg Ryan tossing her blond hair about in the driver seat, singing a Christmas song?). As I sat scowling away on bed, laptop on lap, I remembered there’s one more. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Decalog – the third commandment, Remember the Sabbath Day.

Spoiler Warning
The one-hour film is best to train one’s patience. And, there is almost no Kieslowskian poetic images and scenes, be prepared. The audience is dragged in the deceptive circle devised by an irrational, inconceivably rude and slightly paranoiac heroine who bursts into her ex-lover’s happy married life on Christmas Eve. Banking on the gentle nature of him, she pleads, begs, blackmails the hero into deceiving his wife and hop into a search of her current boyfriend. The two drive around Warsaw aimlessly in the man’s taxi, having only the woman’s fitful pangs of wimps to cling to about possible places her boyfriend would visit. The bitter joyride takes them to the shameful treatment of asylum inmates, a deserted Central Station, and a gigantic, bulbs-wired Christmas tree – the taxi rams into the trunk as an argument flares up. The hero ends up spending the entire night with her, all the while his wife crams on the sofa, trying to sleep.

If the film was so shot to keep the audience in suspense, I wish the fine line that kept me hanging there would snap sooner. The nonsensical woman has her way for too long, I thought. The fierce impatience is now scraped away with my first viewing of the film. The ending floods out all irritations. A tiny white pill raps away on the bleak platform of Central Station. The heroine drops it. It was for suicide. Now she needs it no more. The woman was walled up in hopelessness – a failed relationship, an aunt whose health deteriorates so much that she recognizes her no more, and the long-buried regret that she let go of her true love because of misunderstanding. But on Christmas Eve, around Warsaw, a capital crouched under the Iron Curtain, along roads void of people and Christmas lights, down the squalid of hospital and asylum, nothing bright or cheerful outside their old taxi – six hours and patience of an old lover for just one hectic night are enough. He gives her hope.

And after all, it’s a season of renewed hope.

Merry Christmas.

We drank a toast to innocence

The sky was a black, bottomless mouth. He gasped. I stared up at his throat as he breathed light snow down on red-brick roofs, naked branches, all parachuted stealthily in dark coppices of my eyebrows and eyelashes before sneaking down to lick and smear the delicate tip of my suede boots. On my first snowy night last year, what did the footsteps of white flaks sound like, I wonder? But human beings are big and clumsy; we whip up a useless whirlpool of noise around ourselves with the slightest movement. Eventually, we deaden the sound of snow.

I think, somehow, our stories are like snowflakes that night. Crumbles of ourselves we dropped in the invisible hole suspended behind our computer screens; they found their resting place in my blog, your forum, our mailboxes. Days and nights, our fingertips tapped away on the keyboard, eager to smother the entire screen and one another’s mind with the pale, insignificant hours plucked out of our separate lives. Our words paved the eight-hour barren field in between the way overnight snow the earth. But these stories were not cold like snow. And our footprints are not as transient as those on the snow; they are safe from the gleaming sun, the giggling children, scampering across the seamless white roads. That is, until one day, either of us bothers to press the delete button. Only then would our stories cease to evolve.

There is nothing to forgive, and certainly, absolutely nothing to forget. No, I don’t think so. Do you? Last night, for the first time in a year, I revisited your space, now abandoned like the Artic tundra. Every entry was penned by you, but do you realize I never saw only the you I knew between the lines? Different you-s peep out from behind every line, every passage, guide me through the time I missed in your life – your childhood, your spontaneous museum tours, and the time I was not by your side. There was a six-year-old, he gulped down a whole bottle of milk in front of the grocery store before wiping away the white moustache with the back of a his chubby hand. And in our library, there rooted a twenty-six-year-old, stripes of green light slanted across his face as the photocopier next to him choked up a pile of sheets, all for his precious thesis. The same goes for my writing – so I hope. They were invitations to come stand under the lanterns-clouded autumn sky with a four-year-old girl; to the crammed bookshelf of a conceited, fifteen-year-old loner.

But I don’t think we can go back and patch up from the past. Neither of us wants to. This afternoon, Dan Fogelberg’s Same Old Lang Syne was on the radio. The DJ was unforgivable; playing this song on Christmas Eve was extremely cruel, even though it never snowed here, nor would it rain this Christmas. Just for a moment I was back at school, he sang, so I shall trundle out evidence of our innocence, the hide-and-seeks in the library, the russet ceramic-floored hallways, the lotus fountain and our balcony under the sun-sketched sky, let them evaporate.

I miss the warmth of your cheek against my palm, for the first and the last time in more than one year. Merry Christmas.

280906 – 140907

Lizzie should be reading the confession letter from Mr Darcy here (Pride and Prejudice)

Mr Darcy should run into Lizzie right here (Oh, Pemberley!) and stroll aimlessly, silently about

My first day in Claycroft (28th Sept 2006)

First thought on arrival – actually, my mind went blank after the young girl closed the door behind her. She was considerably taller than I was and volunteered to drag my bulky suitcase downslope and up the winding stairs of Claycroft for me.

I began to question myself, my decision in flinging myself into that room. It was too nice, too neat; the view outside too charming – everything posed static in the crisp autumn sun, mocking me cos there was no one to share my joy. I scrambled to my old hobby, my safety net – to exalt in loneliness and took the pictures in this entry.

The Tempest

The rain on the window panes sounded like ferocious branches demanding to get in. Still in my first two months in Claycroft. Strangely enough, the weather there could do nothing wrong in my eye; if anything, it opened my eye, I saw snow, clear blue sky, grey drizzles here.

This is real, not a painting, no special effect added by a dumb slob like me. Sunset in Claycroft, from my room.

Wasabi in Claycroft (UK)

dazed by pink

Who’s the yellowest of all – Wasabi, flowers or the photographer?

Wasabi’s scented pillow

A real, proper bee doing his job

A flower’s face

Another siesta

Playing hide-and-seek on J’s birthday (lovely flowers from an equally lovely girl)

sprouting out!

Playing Godzilla with J’s dainty collection

Keeping J from her favourite food – creamy canned soup

I want a bubble bath!

Wasabi’s own ‘parasol’

Rise and Shine! Wasabi’s buddy – Maggie

Bull Ring (Birmingham)

Wasabi is J’s birthday present this year, a handmade doll from a friend.

Wasabi in Prague

Astronomical Clock (Old Town Square)

Part of the rainbow (Old Town Square)

King Wasabi along Royal Path to Charles Bridge

Befriending celebrities – Mozart and Chaplin

Never stiff as wood

siesta

Sweet meditation on Charles Bridge

Wasabi as Cinderella

Virtuoso audience?

Competitive Wasabi:

Which is bigger – my head or the mushrooms?

Jump! I want to have pork tonight.

Fluffy evening sky

Wasabi was a birthday present. It’s a handmade stuff toy from a friend, sent to me last year.

City of glass

Glass is cool – to the touch and the eye in Berlin.

Glass was the first thing that seized my eyes and kept delighting me, kept me suspended in crisp, delicate rapture, all the way from HauptBahnof, Reichstag and the rebuilt Potsdamerplatz. If I could, may I plaster myself against the cold hard plains and roll all over them? My thirst for glass is unquenchable, incurable.

But I’m picky. A harbour fenced by plain, glossy phalluses is downright a visual pollution, an insult to glass, a true lady of all construction materials. Even Batman can’t redeem the dull, useless phalluses here, not in my eye.

HauptBahnof – arrival

Two skies in Berlin

Glass tunnel

Potsdamerplatz

Smooth cyber-moder cluster – Sony Centre

Lego! My favourite toy

Holocaust Mahnmal – Treacherous paths, tragic past

Holocaust Mahnmal (Holocaust Memorial) by Peter Eisenman

Mirrors are relentless. But men and women have perfected the art of pretence – with clothes, make-up, plastic or ruefully accept imperfection as an indespensible element in life. I don’t like looking into the mirror because helplessness is heavy. Anyways, most of the flaws I see cannot be corrected, not by an unadventrous slob.

Likewise, the past is relentless, more so than the reflections in a mirror because there’s no way one can turn away from it. Europeans must find it strange that I should be so touched by war museums and monuments, that a girl from a city unscathed by the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes should heave out endless sighs in Warsaw Old Town Sqaure and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. But it takes immense courage to face up to one’s past, to tidy up and sort out one’s past, no matter how tragic, how shameful it is. I was moved by the courage demonstrated by the people in Warsaw and Berlin. It must be exhilirating to live in a country that doesn’t flinch away from its past, I often wonder.

The Holocaust Memorial is next to Brandenburg Gate, right behind the DZ Bank. It’s a vast field filled up by more than 2700 black, unadorned rectangular blocks of different height. Visitors can enter the monument from all direction and roam in it along the many paths between the blocks. The whole experience of wandering in a maze built on uneven ground and dwarfed by dark, solemn blocks drew me closer to the bleak, senseless past. I wonder if it’s a metaphor – it’s never simple and easy for a country, an entire race, to meditate, reflect upon and finally emerge from the past.

I really admire the design because it’s an open monument, that people can walk through it for sightseeing or on their way home, to work or shopping give the sense that this episode in history, shameful it may be, shall be remembered and form part of one’s life. After all, memorial is about keeping alive the memories. Moreover, it looks solemn without giving a daunting, distant air – children played hide-and-seek there while I was in it. This should prepare the innocent little ones for the tragedy they have to learn as they grow older and are ready.

Former leaders of Khmer Rouge are now being hunted down for trials. I hope God will not fling down a farce as he did with the trial of Milosevic. How self-centred – he was the only one who had the last laugh. But perhaps he has been wearing a quirk, arms crossed, for the last sixty five years, over some countries in the Pacific, countries that whitewashed massacres, that altered history books, that painted over their gruesome, barbaric pasts?