Kota Tinggi waterfall, Malaysia, July 31, 2005, after a mindfulness retreat.
Life, with no quarrels
AFTER the September 11, 2001 attack that destroyed New York City's World Trade Centre and part of the US Pentagon building, America, or rather, Georgie, Dickie and Donnie, declared war on terrorists. The trio (George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) insisted the rest of the world take sides -- either for America or against it. By implication, there can be no one on the sideline.
But why should I and other non-Americans who have no quarrel with anyone, who have never received an atom of benefit from the United States, get involved? Those of us living in Singapore neither subscribe to, nor take issue with its ideology, political system or Hollywood approach to life. We insist on minding our own business and getting on with our own livelihood, family and friends. We do engage with neighbours and the world at large, but always been on terms of mutual respect, trust and amity.
Most people in Singapore believe life can be sweet only when they study hard, work hard and achieve a positive cash flow. Poverty is no disgrace but is downright inconvenient and hampers us from shopping, travel, eating out, dressing well, reading glossy magazines, chatting on the latest cell phone, attending noisy angmoh concerts, gulping beer and watching football on giant plasma TV, driving gleaming cars, visiting prostitutes in nearby Indonesian islands, and sleeping on soft sheets at day's end.
I don't indulge in these comforts. I can't breathe in a crowded shopping mall. As a middle-aging writer and journalist, I despise those make-up lifestyle articles in glossy magazines. I don't eat sharks' fin, drink bird's nest soup or swallow Viagra pills (which turn your eyes blue and then blind, followed by a heart attack). I don't go to the cinema unless the movie is mindlessly entertaining.
I don't waste good money on alcohol, spas or slimming treatments. The only effective machine to shed kilos is the treadmill where one hour of inclined run can eliminate a half-kilo of body weight, so I have experienced.
I don't care for those Cs that male Singaporeans crave -- condos, credit cards, clubs, cars and chicks. But most individuals still measure worldly success by the number of Cs they have accumulated, including, of course, cholesterol.
I don't live Spartan, either. I have one or two not inexpensive tastes: I lust after hardbound, quality books, and I've bought more than a roomful, mostly from Amazon.com and the Folio Society in England. At $30 to $100 a tome, they are an indulgence. I once borrowed a 10-volume exquisitely-printed set of Tale of Genji from the local Kinokuniya bookstore for a photo-shoot to illustrate my newspaper article on pivotal works of literature in Asia in the last millennium. The store offered to sell the entire set to me for $500 but I didn't take it because (a) I didn't have that much cash, and (b) I couldn't read the grassy Japanese script on the cream-white rice-fibred pages.
I enjoy a long run and I lift dumbbells to get rid of neck and shoulder ache. When I was doing compulsory military service as a very young man in 1970-71, I hated exercises and was unfit. I used to suffer continuous headache and a runny nose. Now, I have re-discovered the psychological exuberance and physiological euphoria of running. After a strenuous 8-12km stretch along Singapore's east coast, I luxuriate in the feeling of being on top of the world as I drench my body in the park's open-air shower while planes lumber overhead towards the nearby airport. And I rarely have headache and runny nose now.
I have also learnt that rigorous strength training with dumbbells and barbells strengthen my muscles to the extent that joint pains are eliminated.
I like scuba-diving and drifting underwater with arms folded, watching rainbow corals and lucent fishes (the ultimate bystander sport) although scuba equipment is expensive and travelling to remote dive resorts with 40kg of gear is physical and financial hardship. I am also a natural-born coward and occasionally get panic attacks when popping my head under a restless sea.
I have job-hopped through many demanding careers, starting with my first big job as Quartermaster in the Combat Engineers. After military service, I worked in personnel management in a few factories (nowadays, it is called "human resources", as if humans are just another corporate commodity). Somewhere in 1977 the potbellied, hard-drinking editor-in-chief of the local morning paper, T. S. Khoo, invited me for tea and to join the company after I wrote a letter pointing out the foggy language of several articles in his paper.
So I switched from shop floor to news room. In the process, I picked up some skills in writing and editing (cutting and simplifying other people's writing), and interviewed countless individuals from both High Street and back lanes. As a result, I grew more confident and relaxed about myself, and my attitude towards people, things and life in general. I've ceased to agonise over my appearance (thin frame and thinning hair), status (just above the bottom of the food chain) and background (peasant stock, like my China-born sinewy father, uncles and most Hakka emigres, except the flabby ones who owned pawnshops).
Job-hopping is an effective means to career advancement for individuals like me who graduated from the school of hard knocks and don't have academic qualification, family wealth or good connection (the three easy routes to success in merits-pretentious Singapore). After my army days in the early 1970s, I started work in a waste-paper factory, did well and learnt all I could, usually in 18 months to two years, and then quietly scouted for another job in a related profession that offered better pay and more responsibilities.
I moved on, job after job, factory after factory, and then I went into journalism, publication after publication, again staying in one place for two, three, or at most, five years.
Recently, I acquired a master degree in mass communication at a point in time when I was planning to jump out of life's carousel. Since I won't need this qualification which required two years of intensive study and writing, and over $20,000 in fees, I did not bother to collect the formal scroll at the Nanyang Technological University's office for more than two years after graduation. My excuse was that the campus is 33km away and the drive would cost me a small fortune in petrol.
Life is occasionally easy, often tough, and always interesting. But I hate vacuous statements like, "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going" I first read it in a Batman comic during my primary school days. Doubtless Batman is a tough guy, but what about individuals like me who are not as tough as the Caped Crusader, who don't drive Batmobiles or have steel ball-bearings on our abdomens?
When I was growing up in Singapore in the 1950s, we lived under British colonial masters, studied in English language schools, sang God Save the Queen (until today I still don't understand why Q2 needed saving) and regarded white men ("ang mohs" or red-haired barbarians) as our cultural and ethnic superiors.
A decade after independence, I found myself working as personnel administrator in a dredging company. One afternoon, a newly-hired ang moh dredge engineer arrived at the airport, phoned the office and ordered me to send the company car pronto to pick him. In panic, I asked him to hold the line while I consulted with the managing director's secretary, Jackie Leong, a pretty but unpleasant looking Cantonese girl who ran the office when the boss was away. Jackie told me to tell the engineer to go fuck himself and make his own way to the office or be sacked. Accordingly, I repeat her message (minus the copulation instruction) over the phone to the ang moh. He got into a cab, rushed to the office, offered profuse apologies to everyone and saved his job.
Jackie told me later that "go fuck yourself" was the firm and correct way to handle white men who didn't know their station in life. Unfortunately, even today, many Singapore girls over-educated in English schools, still consider the white man divine. They live in the hope of being screwed by an ang moh and migrating with him to some frozen ghetto in New York or Chicago.
Two years ago (2003), while I was eating lunch in a kopitiam (coffee shop) along Paya Lebar Road with some colleagues, we saw an ang moh man in the back of an open pickup truck, squeezed with a bunch of sweaty, swarthy labourers. Like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, we too experienced a spiritual revelation as we exclaimed in unison: "Ang moh in pickup! Ang moh in pickup!" Since that fateful day, we realised ang mohs were simply construction coolies of a different hue.
I'm now in late middle age and I reckon there're another 25 years or less before King Yama summons me to the Underworld. Like a miser who knows his hoard of days is diminishing, I've got to ration life.
Life is Dharma. Buddha's holy teaching, the Dharma (or Dhamma in Pali) is the only authentic, practical, workable guide to life, the afterlife and ultimate Nirvana. Any life not centred on Dharma practices is simply a life doomed to oblivion.
I've wasted the best years of my youth when my mind was at its most pliant, following the Christian evangelical faith. I studied this ang moh religion, including memorising entire biblical books such as the epistles to the Romans and 2 Timothy, and even attempting to learn New Testament Greek, for crying out loud! Gradually it dawned on me that the Christian teaching was all fabrication and depended solely on faith. Nonetheless it made for a comfortable living if one kept quiet about its troubling aspects and was practised in preaching, and organising bible-study sessions and prayer meetings with doe-eyed females.
Some of my secondary school classmates are still enjoying being full-time evangelical preachers and pastors, and still hanging out with said doe-eyed creatures. I am surprised that after all those decades their minds are still unable or unwilling to see the scam behind the gospelling. I suppose all men think with their penises first, and when young, dulcet flesh abounds, it's difficult to get away from it.
The saving grace of the religion is its grandiloquent language and insightful sentiment as expressed in the King James Old Testament (God saves me from the modern insipid translations), particularly in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, three books with an agnostic and a cynical attitude towards providence and the god-based life.
"Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanity. And moreover, because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge; yea, he gave good heed, and sought out, and set in order many proverbs." (Ecclesiastes 12:8, 9).
So I returned to my Buddhist devotion first taught me by my saintly grandmother when I was a child living in Chinatown. And today, through critical study and mindful meditation practice, I hope to gain insight and understanding into the nature of reality -- that life is suffering, impermanent, and essentially empty of a self.
Sitting down in meditation for an hour each session is painful on my knees and butt, and my mind wanders like the ever-changing Monkey God. The adventures of Monkey are found in the novel, Journey to the West, my father's favourite reading matter. He told me that Monkey and his four other pilgrim companions who headed west from China to India in search of the sutras, represent the five aspects of man: the monk Tripitaka represents the pure spiritual aspect, Monkey is the unreliable, restless intellect, sex-starved Piggy the carnal desires, Sandy who carries all the luggages, steady character, and the dragon horse the physical body.
Throughout the journey, the pilgrims encounter and defeat numerous demons. My father said evil has many faces. Each time the pilgrims overcome a demon, another one in a cleverer guise appears.
Life is short and eventually my physical frame will wear out, no matter how much fitness exercises and strength training I do. And when consciousness slips from my body like a worn blanket, I hope there will be kind friends by my side to continually whisper Dharma reminders and read the Tibetan Book of the Dead to encourage, guide and prod my consciousness on the right path through the awful transition state (the "bardo") before the next rebirth.
As I can't afford publishing my opinionated writings in a book, I've put them on this Web site as a convenient way to share them with likeminded people. (The Web, although cheap, is still not free as I've got to pay about US$99 a year to Homestead to host these pages.)
-- Francis Chin, Dec 5, 2002, updated Sept 7, 2005
Namo tassa Bhagavato Arahato Samma Sambuddhassa
