There was this alien family from the moon. They worked hard their entire lives to pay for a space vacation to Earth. By then when they had saved enough to fly to Earth, Earth is nothing but rubbles of smoke and dirt.
Alien Dad: ‘I can’t believe we've paid so much for this shit. This is exactly like home.’
Friday, 13 November 2009
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Before I Axe This Draft
Like the rest, Mother attempted to fail her intelligence test. They were jostled into a dark cell with swinging naked bulbs. Genders a building apart. They were squeezed into benches, sixty people filling the cell to the brim. The air was thick with gravity, sickness and hunger. Mother stared long and hard at the thinned windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband in the next building. Questionnaires were thrust to the ladies; they were printed on the shreds of their flags. Flags of defeated nations were recycled mainly for toilet paper. Always shreds of them, never in a single whole piece. It was against new decree to keepsake a whole flag of the defeated nations.
She saw herself instead reflected by the hanging bulbs that hovered like stars upon the black windows. Mother must have lost half of herself; she could feel her ribs under her breasts and goose bumps on her thin scalp. She wanted so much to reach for the thinned window, to touch herself or to touch her husband in the next building, or to touch the real stars outside this tiny cell. Her warden barked for her attention and proceeded to instruct the ladies through an interpreter to fill the questionnaires. The nervous interpreter spoke clumsy English which incurred dozen of bewildered eyes in the shivering darkness to question his questions. After a while though the ladies have not gotten used to broken language, they scribbled their answers with ease and careful stupidity. Like the rest of the men in the next building, they attempted to fail their intelligence test.
But deep down, the men and ladies knew that the tests applied to them for so many days now were inconsequential to their fates. Their captors have long gathered information of their previous employment status and genetic facts. They were men and women of intellects and this bit did not bide well at all for them in times of intellectual prosecutions. These little tests that could well went on for weeks were designed to break them. The submissive ones would be sent to the colonized mines and the rest, shot like dogs.
Like the rest, Mother thought that the Germans would lose the war. Though it was unlikely as the Germans had to fight two fronts, it was the Soviet sabotage of the Manhattan Project allowed the Germans to first develop their atomic bombs and tip the balance of war in their favor. Calculating that their nuclear arsenal were still infantile and expensive to produce, the Nazis had focused their atomic holocausts on USSR and pushed into heart of the Soviet to increase Germany’s size of Lebensraum.
After the test, the ladies were lined back to their holding area. It was a makeshift bunker where they cramped to sleep sitting up. They had been holed up here for almost a month after the fall of their country. During the daytime, they could walk around the fortified camp where they could see their husbands and sons across the barbwire, but interaction was forbidden. Sometimes they would be brought in to the building for interviews and sometimes some will not return. Music, mostly Germanic folk tunes were allowed but books and board games were banned. At nighttime when they were not made to do tests, they had to endure hours of propaganda films and radio.
Through the radio it was apparent that the prosecution of the intellectuals had topped Chancellor Göring’s priority for domestic security of the defeated nations. The radio urged that harboring intellectuals could be a capital felony and reminded that it’s a national duty to blow whistle on suspected intellectuals and harborers alike.
Moments after the radio and the lights went out in their bunker, a bony woman whispered to Mother in raspy voice, as if she was speaking in the rain. ‘How long is this going to last? There must be a point to all this.’
‘They will move us again.’ Mother replied with her tired eyes still closed. She listened to her own heartbeats and thought about her husband.
The bony woman remained silent for a moment as if she was listening to her own heart too when the shadows of the barbwire thrown from the roving watchtower swam across their walls. ‘Death camps?’
Mother did not answered to that. It would be unlikely, Mother thought. After all the tests on ripped flags they had done, there must be a point. Somewhere. ‘That, or the moon.’
Mother could felt the head of the bony woman nodding softly. They kept quiet when shuffle of footsteps pounced outside their bunker.
‘There’s nothing there on the moon.’ The bony woman moved her cracked lips.
Then there was a gunshot from the male bunker across the fortified fence. Immediately, the ladies rose and tried to rush outside to see. The armed guards by the exit pushed them back in and they attached themselves by the grilled windows and saw that more gunfire exploded, illuminating the night each time. The women began to cry and one tried to scream her sons’ names, the others covered her mouth and held her down. Two bodies were dragged out from male bunker and could not be recognized in the moonlight.
After a while, the women slide back into their sitting positions and were all insomniac, Mother closed her eyes tightly and replied to the bony woman, ‘There’s nothing here either.’
Saturday, 24 October 2009
City Of Life And Death
It was a Chinese film about the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. For most movies I always know what to expect but with Nanjing I was being experimental and had wanted to watch a China made movie ever since I returned from Mainland.
My impression with the Rape Of Nanjing was not at all sufficient. I knew that it was the Chinese holoclaust where many chinese were brutually murdered or raped by Japanese. But beyond that I know not what to expect other than the extent of a documentary film.
The movie was presented in black and white. Grim and dastardly. The Nanjing soldiers despite putting up a brave resistance had lost China's capital to the better equipped Japs. Liu Ye, the only Chinese actor I knew in the movie was brilliant until the very end. Liu Ye had minimal dialogue and had expressed himself impressively with his eyes. Until his very end, which was fifteen minutes into the show.
Yes, the star of the movie, the ironman Liu Ye himself perished fifteen minutes into the movie.
The fall of Nanjing then unfolded the tragedy of hopesfall and pain. All men in Nanjing are rounded up and machine gunned, burned or buried alive.
What was left was women and children, a lawless capital with restless Jap soldiers with endless ammunitions.
Ironically, the only haven that stands between them was a Nazis businessman Rabe who founded a safe house. Like savage beasts, when the Japs wanted to expand their comfort women population, they cunningly devise all sorts of methods to gain entry into the safe house.
The movie was infested with gore, merciless slaughter, rape, rape and more rape. Streets of Nanjing were littered with corpses, metal barbs and singings of the victorious Japanese soldiers. Children were thrown off buildings to coerce folks into submission. Naked corpses of comfort women piled up \and discarded past the lines of eager Jap soldiers waiting to have their ways with the remaining battered and near death comfort women. Some women were raped to death, while others went insane and were shot like dogs. This is a movie of intense fear and hopeslessness.
Perhaps the film's subtle message was the hope of life and the courage of self sacrifice, but those values were overshadowed by its horror and japanese atrocities. To me, it is like watching Hostel or Saw, but worse. In torture porn, it's quite individually directed. The fear is contained compared to Nanjing's travesty of death and death of your loved ones.
This film is suitable for the older generation of grandpas and grandmas who cursed whenever a Jap drama came on telly and blew up whenever their forgiving grandchildren who don't give a fuck about history, don't have roots and will grow up to be dipshits.
This movie is also suitable for all Japanese people who shunned the atrocities that their forefathers did and wondered why we Chinese hated them so much. They should watch it and feel the shame that they should be having.
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Upstairs
I'm writing this because I can't sleep.
Someone is dropping coins a floor upstairs. Heavy, loud coins are being dropped, rolled around and picked again. Sometimes it's a coin and sometimes it's a lot of them. Sometimes they sounded like marbles and sometimes it scratched at every corner of my ceiling.
It's two in the morning and it has been going on for two hours now.
I don't want to go upstairs and complain, because it will be the same old stale story: some dead kid who like to play coins in the middle of the night used to live there and stuff like that.
Why can't it be sex noises instead?
505
Grand Taoist Master = GTM
Before the GTM went into the top of the mountain, before he stepped into the cave to meditate, the GTM did before he waved his disciples goodbyes and before he would enter a ten year trance that would promise enlightenment, he bought with him only a change of robes and his grass slippers.
And ten dollars.
'Why ten dollars?' Tze Wen, his youngest disciple asked the GTM before he went off.
'So perhaps I can purchase a bowl of noodles when I complete my training in the mountains.' GTM replied.
Tze Wen pressed on, 'But a bowl of noodles only cost two bucks, master.'
The GTM smiled and replied, 'Read more news, you idiotic calf. Inflation will kill us all.'
With that, the GTM went into the mountains.
Wile the rest of the sect went on with their business, Tze Wen though naive decided to wait for the GTM at the foot of the mountain. He read everyday.
At only the fifth year, Tze Wen caught the GTM coming down from the mountain. GTM was unshaved, smelly but oddly radiant.
'My master, you have anticipated that it would take ten years before you could gain enlightenment and nirvana, it has only been five years. I know because I read the news everyday. Have you already been enlightened or are you giving up?' Tze Wen asked.
GTM just smiled and asked to be lead to town.
In town GTM used his ten dollars to purchase a pack of cigarettes instead of food.
'Why are you smoking? It's forbidden in our sect.' Tze Wen surprised. 'What happen?'
'I have reach enlightenment.' GTM traded his clothes with the stable boy. 'My enlightenment is that there is no more enlightenment. This is it. Live your life now.'
GTM completed his sentence by throwing off his grass slippers and smoked his way into the crowd.
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
The Living Room
He polished the beer dry, the green bottle gleamed in the darkness of his living room triumphantly. That is how it should be done, he thought, beer should never be warm. People should never talk and drink at the same time that will only bring out the shit from the beer. Beer is as shitty as it gets if it’s warm, toast as a bone.
He smiled with his numbing face as he nodded to himself in the dark. The first beer always gets him in the face. His head nodding to the rhythm in his earphones as the clear crisp guitar scratched eight times on the seven and nine frets to the explosive bass drums. Of the beat to A Certain Romance.
‘God.’ He smiled to himself, ‘Arctic Monkeys should play in my wedding.’
He was in the living room, in front of youtube at his dinning table. It was midnight and so he had used the earphones. He had finished cleaning up the house when he decided he needed a beer, regardless if he had a buddy or not. It was hot and the beers were freezing in the fridge and he had finished sweeping the floor and mopping after mopping with soap and he had had his shower and he was alone and nobody is going to drink anything out from his fridge for the entire week.
The living room was dark because he had wanted to save electricity. Two people are paying for the fee of five people and that’s just crazy talk. He wished it was the afternoon and so he could unplug the earphones and let Andy Nicholson’s bass burstfire and ricochet off his purple walls. Instead he had to settle in playing air guitar and dance the forbidden dance that nobody are allowed to see in the confine of his chair.
The first beer warmed up him enough to write. Write what? Anything! He just needed the focus to keep his fingers tapping the scores away at the keyboard; otherwise they will just stick to swimming off in the air to the voice of Alex Turner. So he typed out one page detailing to the details of his afternoon cleaning every corner of his house. Then the first beer asked him to ask himself what’s the point. He shrugged while nodding to snare drums of ‘Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…’ deleted the entry and begun a new one about brushing his teeth. Twenty words through and he wondered about boredom of teeth brushing but went on anyway because he had loved the constant drumming of his fingers across the keyboard and the guitar riffs in his ears. He soon scrapped away that entry too, scratched his numbing face and started a new one about enjoying cold beer after cleaning the house. He would write about the wonderful music of Arctic Monkeys and write about him writing.
When he was bored and his fingers tired from making nonsensical entries, he shut off the laptop at his dinning table and jumped into the corner of his very red couch, flicked on the table lamp and read Andre Dubus. He would read until he fell asleep on his numbing face to his first beer. His fingers aching of typing, his neck complaining from nodding with his ears, his shoulders ruining from the mopping and his eyes will open again to his living room when she returns from her night shift.
He smiled with his numbing face as he nodded to himself in the dark. The first beer always gets him in the face. His head nodding to the rhythm in his earphones as the clear crisp guitar scratched eight times on the seven and nine frets to the explosive bass drums. Of the beat to A Certain Romance.
‘God.’ He smiled to himself, ‘Arctic Monkeys should play in my wedding.’
He was in the living room, in front of youtube at his dinning table. It was midnight and so he had used the earphones. He had finished cleaning up the house when he decided he needed a beer, regardless if he had a buddy or not. It was hot and the beers were freezing in the fridge and he had finished sweeping the floor and mopping after mopping with soap and he had had his shower and he was alone and nobody is going to drink anything out from his fridge for the entire week.
The living room was dark because he had wanted to save electricity. Two people are paying for the fee of five people and that’s just crazy talk. He wished it was the afternoon and so he could unplug the earphones and let Andy Nicholson’s bass burstfire and ricochet off his purple walls. Instead he had to settle in playing air guitar and dance the forbidden dance that nobody are allowed to see in the confine of his chair.
The first beer warmed up him enough to write. Write what? Anything! He just needed the focus to keep his fingers tapping the scores away at the keyboard; otherwise they will just stick to swimming off in the air to the voice of Alex Turner. So he typed out one page detailing to the details of his afternoon cleaning every corner of his house. Then the first beer asked him to ask himself what’s the point. He shrugged while nodding to snare drums of ‘Perhaps Vampires Is A Bit Strong But…’ deleted the entry and begun a new one about brushing his teeth. Twenty words through and he wondered about boredom of teeth brushing but went on anyway because he had loved the constant drumming of his fingers across the keyboard and the guitar riffs in his ears. He soon scrapped away that entry too, scratched his numbing face and started a new one about enjoying cold beer after cleaning the house. He would write about the wonderful music of Arctic Monkeys and write about him writing.
When he was bored and his fingers tired from making nonsensical entries, he shut off the laptop at his dinning table and jumped into the corner of his very red couch, flicked on the table lamp and read Andre Dubus. He would read until he fell asleep on his numbing face to his first beer. His fingers aching of typing, his neck complaining from nodding with his ears, his shoulders ruining from the mopping and his eyes will open again to his living room when she returns from her night shift.
Friday, 28 August 2009
The Bed
The bed is one of the very last things they had bought of their furniture. This is not necessarily true; she had bought the bed frame along with the dressing table and the wardrobe for a bundle price. But he has never thought a bed frame enough to make it a bed - the bed is the mattress.
The history of beds he had slept in came in various forms. He had spent nights on the couch if his brother’s girlfriend came over. He had slept on the floor mattress, barely a piece of cotton in his parents’ room whenever his mother had turned on the air conditioner. His two other brothers would each take a corner around his mother’s bed. Elbows and toes in each other’s hair and they would speak to each other in the cooling darkness. They would talk about everything until it was really late in the morning and they all have to wake up later for school and work. In his formative years of emotive tantrum, he would refuse to sleep in the house. He would sleep at the bench a distance from his flat, he would sleep beneath the shop house at the beach and he would sleep in his friends’ house. When his insomnia came after he graduated, he would sleep anywhere in the house and at least attempted to anyways. He tossed and turned in the kitchen or under the bed. Finally he will always gave up and stared blankly outside his kitchen window.
The irony when he goes traveling is always the hotel beds. There they were, majestically comfortable and puffy and cloudy, they are always the ones he had to spend the minimal time with. After all, a rare chance to go overseas no one would want to spend it all by sleeping in. On their Thailand trip he did it. He was so convinced that he had food poisoning from eating fired bugs from street, he insisted on spending the rest of his vacation in the hotel’s king sized bed, the kind that swallow you alive with thread counts, satin pillowcases and yellow table lamps.
In fact when he had shopped for his bed, he had used the word ‘that kind that eats you alive’. He’s shopping for the ultimate cotton coffin. The one that you won’t mind dying in. He had heard so much about dying in one’s sleep. His primary school principle had told his school that it was a very much-preferred way to die. It is a very romantic and a dignified way to pass on. When he did nursing, he was then told dying in one’s sleep is actually suffocation. He shrugged away that scientific notion and went ahead and ordered ‘the kind that buries you alive’ mattress anyway. He guessed that he was more afraid of deprivation of comfort than death itself.
It was not that he had intend to spend a lot of time sleeping or bought the bullshite about how people will spend a quarter of their lives sleeping and thus the need for a better bed. He needs a good bed now that’s he’s married with her. He has to believe that it can work. If you ask him to close his eyes and talk about his parents or just get him drunk enough to feel sad, he will tell you about the voices between the walls. How when he was a boy in his bedroom tuning in to his parents’ conversations before they slept, across the rooms. It was before the time when his parents fought and slept in different rooms. It was a quieter time when they would ask about each other’s day and tease about little things. Sometimes his mother’s voice would go shrilly and called his father ‘Friend’ in Hokkien. People would nickname each other silly sweet titles but theirs was ‘Peng Yu Eh’. He could always picture them at the head of the bed, propped up on pillows, his father would probably smoke and they would talk until their voices were no more across the rooms. Or at least until he curled up and sleep like a ball in the covers. Safe and comforted by his parents’ bedtalk.
When they shopped for the bed, he had specifically asked for a high bed so that they can ‘climb into’. Actually a normal twelve inch mattress would suffice but he felt that he had to be animatedly specific to oppose the low lying Zen-like beds that were rampantly so in the rage. As a result he fell from his new bed once. It was three thirty in the morning and he was due for his morning shift in the next three hours, he woke up upon a thud and found himself on the floor. He was so embarrassed and looked around in the dark for her. She was sleeping like a log, her back against him with her face in her hair. At least he paid well for the individual pocketed spring mattress.
One night he was turning in with her, they heard noises between the walls. Being a newly weds in a new house there will always be irrational fear of breaking and entering. He climbed out of bed and checked all the windows, locked them and returned to the bed. More crashing sounds broke out from upstairs. It was one in the morning. The couple above raised their quarrels and their kids began to brawl. He listened closely and thought that he was back in his old flat when his parents used to fight endlessly in the nights. He used to wonder about his neighbors. What would they think and how would they look at him in the morning when they see each other in the corridors? Would they try to look into his house? Lying in the bed with her and listening to the fight a ceiling apart, he had become the neighbor. He pulled the covers to their chin and asked her to ignore the quarrel. And there he slept in the thick and soft bed, holding her hands and prayed that they will never end up like that.
The history of beds he had slept in came in various forms. He had spent nights on the couch if his brother’s girlfriend came over. He had slept on the floor mattress, barely a piece of cotton in his parents’ room whenever his mother had turned on the air conditioner. His two other brothers would each take a corner around his mother’s bed. Elbows and toes in each other’s hair and they would speak to each other in the cooling darkness. They would talk about everything until it was really late in the morning and they all have to wake up later for school and work. In his formative years of emotive tantrum, he would refuse to sleep in the house. He would sleep at the bench a distance from his flat, he would sleep beneath the shop house at the beach and he would sleep in his friends’ house. When his insomnia came after he graduated, he would sleep anywhere in the house and at least attempted to anyways. He tossed and turned in the kitchen or under the bed. Finally he will always gave up and stared blankly outside his kitchen window.
The irony when he goes traveling is always the hotel beds. There they were, majestically comfortable and puffy and cloudy, they are always the ones he had to spend the minimal time with. After all, a rare chance to go overseas no one would want to spend it all by sleeping in. On their Thailand trip he did it. He was so convinced that he had food poisoning from eating fired bugs from street, he insisted on spending the rest of his vacation in the hotel’s king sized bed, the kind that swallow you alive with thread counts, satin pillowcases and yellow table lamps.
In fact when he had shopped for his bed, he had used the word ‘that kind that eats you alive’. He’s shopping for the ultimate cotton coffin. The one that you won’t mind dying in. He had heard so much about dying in one’s sleep. His primary school principle had told his school that it was a very much-preferred way to die. It is a very romantic and a dignified way to pass on. When he did nursing, he was then told dying in one’s sleep is actually suffocation. He shrugged away that scientific notion and went ahead and ordered ‘the kind that buries you alive’ mattress anyway. He guessed that he was more afraid of deprivation of comfort than death itself.
It was not that he had intend to spend a lot of time sleeping or bought the bullshite about how people will spend a quarter of their lives sleeping and thus the need for a better bed. He needs a good bed now that’s he’s married with her. He has to believe that it can work. If you ask him to close his eyes and talk about his parents or just get him drunk enough to feel sad, he will tell you about the voices between the walls. How when he was a boy in his bedroom tuning in to his parents’ conversations before they slept, across the rooms. It was before the time when his parents fought and slept in different rooms. It was a quieter time when they would ask about each other’s day and tease about little things. Sometimes his mother’s voice would go shrilly and called his father ‘Friend’ in Hokkien. People would nickname each other silly sweet titles but theirs was ‘Peng Yu Eh’. He could always picture them at the head of the bed, propped up on pillows, his father would probably smoke and they would talk until their voices were no more across the rooms. Or at least until he curled up and sleep like a ball in the covers. Safe and comforted by his parents’ bedtalk.
When they shopped for the bed, he had specifically asked for a high bed so that they can ‘climb into’. Actually a normal twelve inch mattress would suffice but he felt that he had to be animatedly specific to oppose the low lying Zen-like beds that were rampantly so in the rage. As a result he fell from his new bed once. It was three thirty in the morning and he was due for his morning shift in the next three hours, he woke up upon a thud and found himself on the floor. He was so embarrassed and looked around in the dark for her. She was sleeping like a log, her back against him with her face in her hair. At least he paid well for the individual pocketed spring mattress.
One night he was turning in with her, they heard noises between the walls. Being a newly weds in a new house there will always be irrational fear of breaking and entering. He climbed out of bed and checked all the windows, locked them and returned to the bed. More crashing sounds broke out from upstairs. It was one in the morning. The couple above raised their quarrels and their kids began to brawl. He listened closely and thought that he was back in his old flat when his parents used to fight endlessly in the nights. He used to wonder about his neighbors. What would they think and how would they look at him in the morning when they see each other in the corridors? Would they try to look into his house? Lying in the bed with her and listening to the fight a ceiling apart, he had become the neighbor. He pulled the covers to their chin and asked her to ignore the quarrel. And there he slept in the thick and soft bed, holding her hands and prayed that they will never end up like that.
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