The San-gu Neighbour

My mother-in-law has this neighbour – a skinny, mousy, bespectacled fellow who has this habit of standing outside his flat bare-bodied except for this pair of shorts. He's in his forties, quite ordinary looking, but always has this pleasant smile on his face – he’s one of those people whom you would warm up to quite easily because he looks rather friendly and harmless. I have to admit that I took a liking to him when I first met him, and found myself thinking that Singapore needs a lot more people like this man – friendly neighbours who take the initiative to say “Hi” and display an interest in you.

But what I did not realize is that he is actually a san-gu in disguise. San-gu is a Chinese term referring to those old ladies who love poking their snotty noses into other people’s affairs probably because they stay at home all day long and have absolutely nothing better to do. These are the people whose front doors are perpetually opened so that it would be easier for them to dash out of the door when they hear a commotion outside (yes, they are mostly old ladies above sixty who normally shuffles around, huffing and puffing with effort, but once they hear a possible gossip, they suddenly become Olympic sprinters).

These are the people who would stick their heads out of the windows to peer at you when you go to / return from work. And they have super-hearing as well; they can hear an argument five floors up, and will take a lift to your floor and loiter right outside your door, just out-of-sight, in order to hear what’s going on.

They cannot stand missing out on things; they have to know every single detail of your life. They live, thrive and survive on gossip. These people would go insane if they live in a peaceful neighbourhood where nothing happens.

My wife calls this particular neighbour Mickey Mouse. She can’t remember how her siblings and her got to giving him this nickname, but they have been referring to him as Mickey Mouse (not to his face of course) since they were kids.

Anyway, Mickey Mouse doesn’t go to work – my wife told me that he was retrenched a few years back (this information was relayed to my mother-in-law by an actual san-gu) and has become a house-husband since. His wife is still working though. Thus, he spends the whole day sticking his Mickey Mouse head out of his door watching people, wearing nothing but his spectacles and shorts.

He’s really no different from your typical nosey, old san-gu, except that he’s male, not that old, and your typical san-gu is usually fully-clothed (thank God), so you can see why it took me a while to see through his disguise.

As he is unable to obtain gossip from the ‘conventional’ san-gus (by virtue of the fact that he is male), he has chosen to befriend my mother-in-law so that he can get gossip from her. Hence, he is always lurking outside his house, waiting for her to come out so that he could get the latest news. And before you know it, he has started taking an unhealthy interest in my in-laws’ household affairs.

But what really bugs me is the fact that he is always around in the morning when I bring Jaslyn to my mother-in-law’s. I would arrive early in the morning at about 7 a.m., and Mickey Mouse would be there, bare-bodied, peering out of his door and smiling. After a while, it became really creepy.

(He used to carry my daughter a lot too – my mother-in-law would bring Jaslyn out of the house and he would offer to carry her. Jaslyn, who is a pretty sociable child, would allow him to do it. It really bothered my wife and I to see this bare-bodied uncle with armpit hair sticking out holding our daughter, so we put a stop to it by instructing Jaslyn to say “Nonono” to him whenever she sees him.)

Anyway, the faithful old Thomson TV at my in-laws’ house finally stopped working last week after 2 decades (quite thankful for that since it means my mother-in-law can’t watch that dreadful Ch8 show ‘Portrait of Home’ (Tong Xin Yuan) at 7p.m. – I don’t really care if she watches it, but if the TV is on, my daughter will be watching it as well and this is one sick show – lots of screaming, scheming, vulgar language, abuse, adultery, promiscuity, more screaming and scheming, etc. And this is deemed prime-time material!). My wife bought a new Sony TV to replace the old one and it was delivered to my in-laws’ place on Saturday when only my mother-in-law was home.

Needless to say, Mickey Mouse was around to witness the delivery and he promptly came by to enquire on the TV model, how much it was, etc. And being the irritant that he is, told my mother-in-law that she should have informed him about her intention to buy a TV as he would have been able to get it for a lower price.

Now, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being ‘Tolerably Irritating, like a Mild Itch’ and 10 being ‘Excruciatingly Irritating, like a Cancerous Ulcer’, I think people who come over to look at something you just bought (after careful consideration and comparison of prices) and inform you that, “You should have asked me first, I can get it for you at a much cheaper price!” rates an 11. The law should allow people like that to be bludgeoned to death with the item of purchase.

Apparently, Mickey Mouse owns a similar model as well, and he asked my mother-in-law if she could lend him the remote control to test it on his TV. Don’t ask me why. If he had asked me, I would have said, “What the f**k do you want to borrow my remote control for? How do I know that you are not going to do something funny with it like putting it down your shorts? And go put on some clothes, you pervert.” Anyway, my mother-in-law lent him the remote control which he returned later.

When we went to my in-laws’ place the next day, my mother-in-law promptly informed my wife that Mickey Mouse had said he could have gotten the TV at a much cheaper price. That started my wife fuming. Then, she told my wife that he had borrowed the remote control as well and asked, “Do you think he switched our remote control with his?”

At this, my wife exploded. How in the world would she know whether the remote control had been switched? And if you distrust him so much, why in the world did you lend the remote to him in the first place?!

I think my mother-in-law also realized that she had done a very silly thing / asked a very silly question because she did not pursue her line of questioning (or maybe she was afraid that Mickey Mouse could be squatting just outside her door listening to the commotion).

Whatever the case, I hope this will teach her to be more wary of that ulcer in future.

I am also thinking of teaching Jaslyn to say, “Uncle, don’t be so san-gu. And please go put on some clothes.”

Ben Stein's Last Column

Really really like this article...

Think most of us spend a phase in our lives worshipping celebrities, or coveting inconsequential things, or trying to bring attention to ourselves by doing outrageous stuff. Not saying that it’s wrong – God knows I have gone through that particular phase as well, but we all grow up eventually , some faster than others... And there are some of us who come to feel that life should not just be about ourselves; it should be about loving, and respecting the people around us – real people, like our parents, our siblings, our friends (and well, maybe even enemies), our teachers, bosses, the bus driver, the lady who collects discarded tin cans, the worker who comes round to clear our trash... and not that celebrity on the magazine cover who doesn’t know anything about us.

I guess why this article speaks volumes to me is because it so perfectly articulates my sentiments about how skewed societal values have become, how we should re-examine our priorities in life, stop being so self-centred, and maybe consider how we can go about making life better for other people...

Well, enough about what I think (how self-centred!). On with the article...


How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today's World?

For many years Ben Stein has written a biweekly column for the online website called "Monday Night At Morton's." (Morton's is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Now, Ben is terminating the column to move on to other things in his life. Reading his final column is worth a few minutes of your time.

As I begin to write this, I "slug" it, as we writers say, which means I put a heading on top of the document to identify it. This heading is "eonlineFINAL," and it gives me a shiver to write it. I have been doing this column for so long that I cannot even recall when I started.

Lew Harris, who founded this great site, asked me to do it maybe seven or eight years ago, and I loved writing this column so much for so long I came to believe it would never end.

But again, all things must pass, and my column for E! Online must pass. In a way, it is actually the perfect time for it to pass. Lew, whom I have known forever, was impressed that I knew so many stars at Morton's on Monday nights.

He could not get over it, in fact. So, he said I should write a column about the stars I saw at Morton's and what they had to say.

It worked well for a long time, but gradually, my changing as a person and the world's change have overtaken it. On a small scale, Morton's, while better than ever, no longer attracts as many stars as it used to. It still brings in the rich people in droves and definitely some stars.

I saw Samuel L. Jackson there a few days ago, and we had a nice visit, and right before that, I saw and had a splendid talk with Warren Beatty in an elevator, in which we agreed that Splendor in the Grass was a super movie.

But Morton's is not the star galaxy it once was, though it probably will be again.

Beyond that, a bigger change has happened. I no longer think Hollywood stars are terribly important. They are uniformly pleasant, friendly people, and they treat me better than I deserve to be treated. But a man or woman who makes a huge wage for memorizing lines and reciting them in front of a camera is no longer my idea of a shining star we should all look up to.

How can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today's world, if by a "star" we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model?

Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

A real star is the U.S. soldier who was sent to disarm a bomb next to a road north of Baghdad. He approached it, and the bomb went off and killed him.

A real star, the kind who haunts my memory night and day, is the U.S. soldier in Baghdad who saw a little girl playing with a piece of unexploded ordnance on a street near where he was guarding a station. He pushed her aside and threw himself on it just as it exploded. He left a family desolate in California and a little girl alive in Baghdad.

The stars who deserve media attention are not the ones who have lavish weddings on TV but the ones who patrol the streets of Mosul even after two of their buddies were murdered and their bodies battered and stripped for the sin of trying to protect Iraqis from terrorists.

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton's is a big subject.

There are plenty of other stars in the American firmament. The policemen and women who go off on patrol in South Central and have no idea if they will return alive. The orderlies and paramedics who bring in people who have been in terrible accidents and prepare them for surgery. The teachers and nurses who throw their whole spirits into caring for autistic children. The kind men and women who work in hospices and in cancer wards.

Think of each and every fireman who was running up the stairs at the World Trade Center as the towers began to collapse.

Now you have my idea of a real hero.

Last column, I told you a few of the rules I had learned to keep my sanity. Well, here is a final one to help you keep your sanity and keep you in the running for stardom: We are puny, insignificant creatures.

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin--or Martin Mull or Fred Willard--or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life.

I did it moderately well with my son, pretty well with my wife and well indeed with my parents (with my sister's help). I cared for and paid attention to them in their declining years. I stayed with my father as he got sick, went into extremis and then into a coma and then entered immortality with my sister and me reading him the Psalms.

This was the only point at which my life touched the lives of the soldiers in Iraq or the firefighters in New York. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human.

As so many of you know, I am an avid Bush fan and a Republican. But I think the best guidance I ever got was from the inauguration speech of Democrat John F. Kennedy in January of 1961.

On a very cold and bright day in D.C., he said, "With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth...asking His blessing and His help but knowing that here on Earth, God's work must surely be our own."

And then to paraphrase my favorite president, my boss and friend Richard Nixon, when he left the White House in August 1974, with me standing a few feet away, "This is not goodbye. The French have a word for it--au revoir. We'll see you again."

Au revoir, and thank you for reading me for so long. God bless every one of you. We'll see you again.

By Ben Stein

Link to the full article here:
eonline.com
Link to a shorterned version here:
freerepublic.com

Being Average

average: 1) being intermediate between extremes, 2) usual or ordinary in kind or character, 3) midway between extremes, implying both sufficiency and lack of distinction
www.dictionary.com

Is being average a bad thing?

I still remember my GP tutor asking the students in the class to provide a brief description of themselves during a tutorial (this was during Junior College, 1991 - seems like eons ago!). When it came to one of my friends' turn, he stood up and said, "Well, I'm an average sort of guy-" and before he could continue, my tutor interrupted him and said, "There's no such thing as average; everyone is unique."

Not so long ago, on the local reality show Eye for a Guy 2, when one of the many guys who were vying for Denise Keller's attention shared with her his insecurities and described himself as 'average', he was rebuked for thinking so little of himself. "I never thought of you as average until you brought it up (or something to that effect)", she told him admonishingly. He was of course eliminated during that episode (which isn't such a bad thing - the rest of the guys were subjected to further humiliation and embarrassment which made for very painful watching).

Is being average a bad thing?

It would seem so. In meritocratic Singapore, where the motto is 'Strive for Excellence!', in a society which places so much emphasis on results and achievements, being average is just... not good enough. If you go for a job interview, 'average' is definitely not how you want to describe yourself.

Interviewer: Tell us a bit about yourself.
You: Well, I'm an average sort of guy-
Interviewer: Okaay, we'll contact you soon to let you know of your application.

They want to hear you use words like 'ambitious', 'driven' and 'motivated'.

Interviewer: Tell us some of your faults.
You: I have been described as overly driven and motivated-
Interviewer: When can you start work?

In our cultural context, 'average' isn't even really 'average'. My performance appraisal is on a scale of 1 to 5: 5 - Excellent, 4 - Very Good, 3 - Good, 2 - Average, 1 - Below Average. As seen from this rating scale, you can easily substitute 'average' with 'Poor' or 'Condemned' or 'Should Start Looking for Another Job'. If the government could get away with it, I bet they would make being average a criminal offence and put those found guilty of it behind bars so that the strive for excellence would not be impaired.

So just what does being average mean?

Being average means you may not be an especially outgoing person, but you do have a bunch of good friends that you occasionally hang out with. You don't perform spectacularly well in tests; sometimes, you actually fail spectacularly (!), but most of the time, your grades are just... average.

Or you may be one of the many drones working for a big corporation; you don't stand out, but you do just well enough at work to keep the job. You feel tired and worn out and spend a fair amount of time staring at the computer screen blankly, feeling like you should be doing something else but having no idea what. You are not earning big bucks; maybe you are just earning enough to make ends meet. After paying for your loans, bills and insurance, you are left with peanuts (actual peanuts). You know you should be saving more, but sometimes, you just can't control your spendings.

Being average means that you are sometimes overwhelmed by this society's relentless and oppressive drive for materialism and excellence, and you are just trying to find your own little spot or space in this increasingly bizarre world to retain your sanity. You don't want too much attention, but you do want to be noticed and heard, hence you blog.

But most importantly, being average means that you are a down-to-earth, hardworking (sometimes), responsible and decent person. Being average means you are earning an honest living and doing your best to get by. I am not saying we should take pride in being average, but it is definitely nothing to be ashamed of.

So, the next time someone asks you to describe yourself, go ahead: tell them you are just an average sort of guy*.



* Unclechong does not assume any responsibility or liability should the reader be unable to find a job.