Occupy Movement Singapore: Three Complete Novels

by CJ Tan

As I stomped down the street in a fury, I obsessed about Sienna in voice-over, as if the voice had leaped ahead of the action, as if he were already writing in his diary. “I see now that she’s like the other Pinoys. Cold and distant. Many foreigners are like that, women for sure. They are like a union fighting against us.” That’s a bombshell in appraisal. I am angry not just at Sienna but at women in general. I will unconsciously sabotage his relationship with Sienna later on by giving her the cold shoulder so that she would reject him like all the rest.

  After that I spent a lot more time at home writing. I was on a real slide down. I tried everything. Vitamins. Aspirings, Booze. I developed a special liking for apricot brandy because you couldn’t taste the bitterness so much. Well you know, I spent a lot of time just sitting about and then hanging out on Facebook and check out “Sienna Macapagal-Arroyo”.

  Highlighted and selected some text on her comments on her Facebook wall. Went to Google Translate and pasted it in the box. A rough translation of her Pinoy blog post read: "It's so annoying to have gangster Singapore uncles stare at you when you bump into them. There are more dogs than humans here in Singapore including my no good ex Poh Quee."

 

  One day was no different from the next. I watch Poh Quee’s facebook and the stuff that he put on her wall, sleep a little, scribble in the journal.

  It’s a fact that our elite Ministers will never be able to understand the life of the peasants!

  Singapore is increasingly populated by two groups of people: the Hawker and the Banker. I am the Hawker who has seen my salary stagnate and deteriorate and the Banker get fatter and fatter in bonuses.

  From what I could tell on TV, Suman was doing well because he was being interviewed all the time and once or twice. I caught glimpse of Sienna too, at some rally, cheering up the crowds for him, just like a little girl beaming up at her father as he spoke on anti-foreigner sentiments.

  He said most Singaporeans understand the need for immigration and are comfortable with diversity, but feel the competition on space, jobs, public housing, transport and opportunities.

  He said that the government is already addressing these issues by increasing the supply of flats and enhancing the public transport infrastructure.

  However, he pointed out that there is still a small group of Singaporeans taking a negative view on foreigners, and they are currently dominating public discourse. He said the majority of Singaporeans should speak out against such views when they do not agree with them.

  He said, “Treat others like how we would like to be treated. Although we may not agree with the number of foreigners in Singapore, we should still treat another human being like a human being.” Well, that would get me so angry. I thought that I could had that admiration, all that love and all the attention.

  She tried calling me. Pleading with me. I would no longer come to the phone. I knew it was my fault, knew I should have seen the true colors of Sienna and leading her on. But something stuck in me, a feeling that it all might have been different if she wasn’t a Pinoy or facing a threat that her dependant’s pass may be cancelled once Poh Quee divorced her.

  I felt it was never too late to explain. That she saw me wrongly as just a convenient excuse to hook up to any Singaporean male. I really was misunderstood.

  She made one last attempt to see me at PHA. I hadn’t slept in days when I walked in about noon time on a blinding hot day.

  Sienna was standing near the rear of the office but when I saw her, I ducked from sight. Then Morny stepped in and asked her what department she was going to. She pointed to the organisation chart up there, presumably the 20th level which is the Information Security Department and after that Morny shook his index finger at her and telling her that the level was out of bounds to members of the public.

  Well, I quieted down I guess. I realized then how much she was like the others, so cold and distant. How many people are just like that.

  I looked into your Pinoy dreams one night and they were full of dollar signs. They were full of people getting by on their Mercedes, their two maids, their country club membership or Singapore citizenship. Getting by and not living. Getting but not achieving. Buying and selling but not giving.

  You like to hold on to this idea of being this clean, perfect Pinoy when really it’s the dirt that makes you who you are.

  I guess I gave up on myself then. Gave up even on my security guard rounds. I just wasn’t making it at all. The week of the rank-and-file picnic, I slept all day and worked only nights, got stopped by a foreign prostitute asking for directions. When I said I was off duty, she got mean with me. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “No, I am off duty.”

  “But how come you are wearing the uniform and the badge?”

  I took off the badge pinned on my pocket. Pointed to the area. “See it was off… all the time…”

  “Like hell it was.”

  “Hell it wasn’t.” She cursed.

  So disagreeable. The way it was I thought, seems like I don’t have a friend in the world. Everything stunk suddenly. The dinge they just seemed to know when I was down and out and the whoe black world started singing the blues at me.

  Well I can also remember this young gal student or hooker from China and she says in her accent: “I bleed a lot from my cradle. Doctor said it was fireballs from my uterus.”

  Shit, and I thought I had troubles.

  The people you sometimes meet along. You feel so helpless to do anything for anybody and all those young couples coming out of the bars really just turn you off inside out.

  Well I was still all alone again by myself, naturally. A loner. Words to that effect. Bored stupid most of the time. To say the least. One night late I went to Jurong Point Shoppin Centre to look up Poh Quee.

  "Ya see that woman there?"

  "Yeah."

  The dude's really chattering like he's swallowing pills too big for his throat. "That's my wife, gulp, but it ain't my wife soon. She left me a month ago, gulp, it took me this long to find out about her"

  I turned around to look at him. He was real sick-looking, white with big hollow eyes, crazy man.

  By now, I'd saved a couple thousand dollars that I wore in a money belt about my waist. I felt heavy and sluggish a lot of time. Lowly fat. A real thug. Well nobody expects a security guard to be Tom Cruise.

  I can remember the day that I had to go to Toa Payoh to meet this friend I found on Facebook. Andy. I was on aspirins that day out of the giant econo-size bottle three and four at a time plopped in my mouth and chewed like chicklets. My teeth.

  They came riding over in an off duty taxi. Andy, a nice-looking guy about twenty-nine: a dark pin-striped suit, white shirt, floral tie, long modish hair.

  We went into a cab to a kind of hotel, Hotel 81, a little run down but not, you know skid row and then followed Andy to his room. It was just then as we are going through all these corridors in the hotel and I am feeling pretty cranky from lack of sleep and maybe reds a little groggy, a speed hangover, you know, that I began to become aware again of this dream I was in. Call it the dream-of-almost-certain-death.

  In Andy's hotel room, everything is barren, clean. A bed a bureau, little picture of the Blue Boy on the wall no signs anyone real lives here. No hot plates.

  When Andy locked the front door behind him, he walked over and unlocked the one closet in the room, pulled out these two light blue Samsonite cases - the kind you can drive a truck over.

  Said, "It's all out of Singapore stuff, clean, brand new and top quality."

  He placed the cases on this freshly made white bed-spread and they looked heavy, many, bounced a little, made the springs sigh. They were equipped with special locks which he quickly flipped open and then he lifted the lids and all I saw stacked in gray packing foam were row on row of brand new hand guns.

  Well, I knew what I wanted. A.44 Magnum but Andy said, "That's an expensive gun."

  "I got money."

  Andy looked me ove
r and sort of nodded and he slid out this leather pouch all soft like something you put jewels inside and he zipped it open and there was this .44 Magnum. Holding it like some precious treasure. Just took the edge of his fingertips and ran them along all that heavy blue shiny metal. A small cannon. Unreal.

  "The .44 Magnum." He whistled. "It's a monster. Could stop a car - pull a bullet right into the block. A premium, high resale gun. Three hundred seventy four bucks - that's only a hundred twenty-five over list. He was like some salesman showing off the fall line, fast talking, a hustler, the type who sold lottery tickets in a high schoool. He really seemed proud of his goods and I had to admit, that was a monster, a mother.

  I reached out to hold the gun like out of my dreams but Andy drew back from me. Said, "I could sell this gun for five hundred today 0 but I just deal high quality goods to high quality people."

  He was looking me over very carefully again. Said, "Now this may be a little big for practical use, in which case I would recommend the .38 Smith and Wesson Special. Fine solid gun. Snubbed nosed. Otherwise the same as the service revolver.

  Now that will stop anything that moves and it's handy, flexible. The Magnum, you know, that's only if you want to splatter it against the wall. Worth every dime of it."

  He hefted out of this shiny silvery pistol like in the detective stories. Said, "I'll throw in a holster for another thirty bucks."

  Andy let me hold the gun and I hefted it this way and that, pointing it out the window toward the bank and then citing along the eyes of Blue Boy on the wall. Andy was smiling as he watched me. He said, "Some of these guns are like toys but with a Smith and Weston man you could hit somebody over the head with it and it will still come back dead on. Nothing beats quality."

  I was clicking back the safety as I drew it from my belt and Andy watched me and then he said, "You interested in an automatic?"

  I told him no. I would take just these, the Magnum and the .38.

  Andy seemed very pleased with me now. Said, “You can’t carry it around even with a permit”

  Well I knew what he meant but I wanted to go through that open door, wanted to touch the trigger. I asked if he knew of a good firing range in the neighbourhood.

  “Oh sure, here, take this card,” Andy said, handing me a small embossed white business card. “You go to this place and give them the card. They will charge you but there won’t be a hassle.”

  Well, so then I was pulling out my roll and counting off seven brand new hundred-dollar bills, just like that, seven of them, seven big ones and Andy watched me and seemed pleased with himself and with me and the light in the ceiling fixture flickered a little and turned waxy orange overhead and I heard him ask, “Say, you must have been a computer engineer before. Couldn’t help but notice your jacket.”

  Well I was started, managed to say, “Huh”.

  “HP Hewlett Packard.” Andy said. “I saw it on your jacket I was formerly a computer engineer too.”

  I just handed Andy that stack of bills and he counted them and crinked them and then counted them again. And then looked at me waiting for me to say more.

  “Yeah, I finally said, “One non renewal of contract and then out I went.”

  Andy wet the top of his finger and counted again. As he counted, he let out a few lines as if he had rehearsed them all along.

  “Computer engineering and software IT are a sunset industry in Singapore. If someone wants to stay in this industry, better work in public sector or they will end up like me as a criminal. If possible, those working in the IT field in private sector should make their exit before hitting 40 years of age and go into lecturing, on any executive jobs in public sector or even in the social services sector where there are more Singaporeans.”

  Then he pocketed my money and for a second, I felt the loss, heard myself saying in a loud voice, “They would never get me to go back. Never. They have to shoot me first.”

  Well then I realized I was just talking. Talking too much. I mean what was the point? I asked Andy if he had anything to carry the stuff in and he found me a little blue nylon gym bag from under the bed and dumped the stuff out and wrapped the guns into an old sheet and put them in a bag and zipped it oup and handed it to me. All the while he was doing this, he seemed a little scared f me, I thought, like I said a little too much for him just then. The light seemed very bright in my eyes and when I took the gun bag in my hand, there was a spark where my fingers touched the material. Andy looked away to close up his suitcases and look them again and stick them back in the closet. I started out the door. “Wait a second, CJ,” he said. “I will walk you out.”

  From that day on, it was practically all dreams for me. Day after day of getting organised. Fixing up the apartment: charts, pictures, newspaper clippings and maps. There was this thing that I had to do and I had to do it right. It was my whole life, you might say. To compensate for my weakness from being wounded and the scars I did twenty, thirty, forty push-ups a day. Too much sitting around had ruined my body. I had to get in shape. I practiced Yoga too and resistance to pain and suffering. I would try to pass my arm through the flame of the gas burner without flinching a muscle, for instance, on the theory that total organisation was necessary and every muscle must be tight to be effective.

  At that range, Andy told me about I always got down to business in a hurry, learned how to stand rock solid with that Magnum at an arm’s length. My body would shudder and shake, my arm rippling back and I’d be sprung bolt upright from the recoil but I held my position, firing as quickly as I could round after round on the big Magnum.

  Well it seemed you know that there was this…. There was this thing that I had to do, the moment I had been heading for all my life like going through that door, as I say, the door to someplace, but my body fought me always. It just wouldn’t work hard enough. Wouldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t shit. Wouldn’t eat. I worked so hard for it. Swallowed pill after pill. Wrote all night long in this journal, making calculations, and learned to make myself comfortable to the feel of the gun. Some nights I would just stay up watching TV with the Magnum resting on my lap. It was like the guns were new arms for me, they had to be that if it was going to work.

  One show I watched a lot in those days was “Rock Time,” the late afternoon local teeny-bopper dance show. Those kids would be bopping and dance and the camera would zoom in on your firm young breasts.

  Watching that show I couldn’t feel my face anymore. It had become granite. I was like stone. What was the world doing out there to me in here? Why did assholes like that get all the beautiful young chicks?

  After the show, I went to a drink stall and was disappointed with how the stall assistant treated her customers, and that the stall used to provide good service.

  I was at Rochor Original Beancurd. I bought some food and I requested to pay for the takeaway beancurds at the same time. Upon seeing the staff packing the beancurds I wanted to take away, I told her we will be collecting those later, and the rest was for eating here.

  She got a bit unhappy, threw the packed soyabean drink into the basin on the floor and then raised her voice saying that she will leave the takeaway beancurds in the fridge.

  Seeing her rolling her eyes and her unhappy tone, I was displeased and asked for her name. She rebutted, 'you have no right to know'.

  Then out of curiosity (and since I’ve never seen her working here before and with such bad service), I asked how long had she been working there.

  She rebutted, 'Two years! Who are you? What right do you have to ask? You Singaporeans think you are so great here and bullying us! I can work for one more year and buy one big house in China. You? You work for 30 years in Singapore and you still can only buy one fucking pigeonhole! Don’t think you are so high and mighty!”

  Singapore has tried to attract foreign talent and foreigners while at the same time encourage native Singaporeans to reproduce. However, 2 polarising scenarios have occurred - foreigners bad-mouthing Singaporeans and Singaporeans bad-mout
hing foreigners.

  And yet, Singapore politicians keeps encouraging this to take place by bring these 2 groups who hate each other together.

 

  If this is America's Funniest Home Video, this is a very funny joke. How sick is it?

  Pretty soon, I started taking the pistol with me wherever I went. It was like having an insurance policy. I started parking near the XingPost HQ at night. I was looking for Poh Quee, I guess. Not to harm him but to show him I was still around. Still there. Even more so. There were always a few people working late at nights. He was probably out with someone else. That sign in the window read: “ezy Cash in 10 minutes” It comes to a man at such times when he is like that with such equipment on him that his real safety, if he wishes to preserve himself as he is, is in the dangerous places. That he must do what is he is afraid of doing sometimes.

  I guess I really wanted to know what would happen if I ever had to use one of my pieces. To make that dream somehow visible for me.

  You see I had this plan to make myself somebody at last, a celebrity. To go down in history. Had this plan I was working on, though, in the meantime, I needed to stay as real with myself as I could. Because when you think of all those other guys. I thought I couldn’t fail otherwise. I had just as good brains education-wise, had the guts, was getting to be a sharpshooter a very good shot. It was all a matter of how real I could stay for how long. I thought some guys let their problems get the better of them.

  I thought a guy was better off keeping his problems to himself, under the circumstances, because everybody has problems, don’t they? No use projecting them onto the whole human race. You just do what you have to. Go bam.

  What with me it was a little bit this unreality thing. The feeling of it I mean. To go down in history I needed to be real every minute of the day I could inside the dream of night. Well it was in driving, cruising like that, I guess, that I was able to keep in touch with myself that way.

  Like I was there inside the control room while life went on and on outside. And I knew I had only to take that piece in my hand and punch a really big hole in the glass separating all of us. To be somebody in this world. Really go down into history.

  On the streets people looked so out of it. Raw face like steamed pork. The whores, scam artists, foreigners. World without end amen.

  All that night as I went back to the control room I thought to myself that man in his pathetic outfit and his pale face and that there was nothing any decent person could do about it. That was just part of the condition of life. I thought it was an outrage that he should be such a victim of foreigners like that and I let his namecard just lie there on the seat next to me until I clocked in for the midnight shift and then you know I took the namecard and stuffed it into my jacket pocket and signed in.

  That night I just couldn’t sleep at all. I had so much work to do. The idea that had been growing in my brain for some time now took entire hold of me. I had collected all the material I could find on Suman’s itinerary from Airport to the Hotel and about the city. I knew the allocation of secret agents personnel from clippings in the papers and was compiling a kind of action or game plan. Words to that effect.

  The only solution seemed to lie in true force. After I memorised Suman’s route, I strapped on the empty holster of the.44 and practiced late into the night at drawing and squeezing off imaginary rounds. I had devised this system of metal gliders along my inner forearm so that the .44 could rest hidden behind the upper forearm until a spring near the elbow was activated. I had also figured a way to strap a knife to my calf with a slit cut in my jeans so that the knife could be pulled out easily. The problem was concealment. The guns bulged on me everywhere. I looked bulky and armored. It was only by wearing two shirts, a sweater and a jacket that I was able to obscure the location of all my weapons but then I resembled some hunter bundled up against the arctic winter and the weather was getting very warm outside. The rest of that evening, I sat at the table dumb-dumbing forty-four bullets, scraping Xs across their heads. I had a big poster of Suman’s head in the room and I would sight at him through the scope of the .38. At last all bundled up in my shirts and sweater, my jacket and guns, I fell out on the mattress into my half-sleep, like a big furry animal drifting into his own world. Last thing I remember is writing in this diary: Listen you screwhead. There is a man who stood up against the cunts, the digs, filth, the greed and extreme capitalism

  Capitalism and market competition, in extreme and especially as it is advocated in Singapore, means to each his own. You do well, you enjoy your good life (even to the extreme). If you don't do well, that's too bad. Its your own fate or fault.

  Today we are so much richer - one of the richest country by per capita income. But I am not sure if the SENSE OF UNITY, SENSE OF PURPOSE & NATIONAL TEAM SPIRIT between the people and the Government have all become stronger. Not everyone is doing as well. Not everyone earns as much as the per capita income number. But property prices had skyrocketed.

  Naturally with one of the highest income in the world, our cost of living here is also one of the highest. Everyone understand this.

  About that time, sometimes late at night, I began to frequent this all-night deli in Novena for snacks when the streets were relatively deserted. Well this one particular night I had just gone over to the fridge to get a pint of fruity alchohol when I hear a very nasty low voice talking to the lady cashier and I turned around the counter and saw one Pinoy man at the automated teller machine. The dudes and the cashier hadn’t noticed me yet.

  Cashier said, “Hey, dude! I was here first. Stop trying to cut the queue!”

  Pinoy Said, “Dear…. You have been at the ATM for more than five minutes. Give it up will you! If you want do more transactions, go back to the end of the queue!”

  Cashier said, “But who gives you the right to push me? Can’t you just ask nicely?”

  Pinoy Said, “I don’t give a shit to a lady who can’t even remember her own password on her ATM card!” One of them used his forearm to block her access to the ATM.

  With my pint of milk in hand, I stepped closer towards them. One of them stepped on my feet in the midst of melee.

  “Watch it dude. I am holding a glass bottle. Don’t you have manners talking to a lady? A Singaporean?”

  Surprised, he turned towards me and said, “Go back to home and fuck his own mother some more. Because that’s where you come from and you miss her cunt hole.”

  But I refused to take no for an answer.

  I confronted the Pinoy and berates him for ‘being like all the others – foreign fuckers’.

  I socked him. Socked him hard on his cheekbone. He fell sideways and crashed into a can of coke. Knocked him out for a couple of seconds.

  I instantly drop into a menancing karate crouch. The intensity of my rage raised. I am still trying to hold myself together. It’s like watching someone trying to cork an exploding bottle but I am unable to contain it myself.

  Well, I couldn’t feel anything else except the trembling in my hand as the grits came tumbling down and then the lady cashier sort of came apart too and screamed. Sort of leaned or fell across the cashier counter as she scrambled for her own baseball bat in her hand.

  When I turned to go, I saw her pick up the phone to dial the police. I waved a finger towards her and warned her not to dial, “The punch is for all Singapore citizens who stood up to the injustices”

  He’s also smiling in a shit-eating grin mixed with just a hint of predatory bared teeth as he reaches for the exit door. Realising that I am seriously disturbed, the cashier tries to humour him and even offering him a drink for the ‘angry little Singapore man’.

  I know I am being humoured and it pisses me off.

  As the saying goes, when a man has taken blood, once a man has taken blood like that, there is a definite dent in his life and it isn’t anymore the same as it was. Time has a different feeling. And it just blends one minute into the next. The film over life seems to slide
back and forth so that one minute you are inside this horny dream, all wild and hot with blood and the next it is like some sort of soap opera.

  I told myself that one day, someone would clean up the city. “This is my home and I should have priority in the queue. This city is like an open sewer and someday, I will flush it down the fucking toilet.”