I Remember...

By Philip Foo

Unless you write yourself, you cant know how wonderful it is; I always used to
bemoan the fact that I couldnt draw, but now Im overjoyed that at least I can write.
And if I dont have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write
for myself.ANN FRANK, A Diary of a Young Girl.
And that was what I did, sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, Oxford
Dictionary of Current English and a pencil sharpener beside me. It was daunting at
the beginning, putting pencil to paper, and I could not remember the number of times
I stared blankly at the refrigerator facing me in the kitchen, scouring my mind to
recollect memories of past events. Somehow, the encouraging words from the books
I had read to prepare me for this journey seemed to lubricate the long stagnant
gears of my mind and I just do itthe way I wanted it to be done.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Jun 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499000979

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Unless you write yourself, you can’t know how wonderful it is; I always used to bemoan the fact that I couldn’t draw, but now I’m overjoyed that at least I can write. And if I don’t have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself.—ANN FRANK, A Diary of a Young Girl.

And that was what I did, sitting at the kitchen table, pencil in hand, Oxford Dictionary of Current English and a pencil sharpener beside me. It was daunting at the beginning, putting pencil to paper, and I could not remember the number of times I stared blankly at the refrigerator facing me in the kitchen, scouring my mind to recollect memories of past events. Somehow, the encouraging words from the books I had read to prepare me for this journey seemed to ‘lubricate’ the long stagnant ‘gears’ of my mind and I ‘just do it’—the way I wanted it to be done.

I must record here that the initial draft of this book was written with an eight-inch lead pencil, filched from Rachel’s office. Raphael suggested that it would be easier and faster if I did it using the computer, but I told him that nothing beats the 2Rs (Rub and re-write) when writing. My pencil is now a two-inch stub with its eraser at the top almost bald (an apt description of a certain part of my anatomy, if I may say).

To my family and all my kin, I hope you find the ‘memoirs’ amusing, touching or even a quizzical You sure or not? Whilst my ruminations and insights may not grind well with some, the events as related are true to the best of my fading memory.

In most functional families, the parents are the pivotal point, the epicentre from which the rest of the members revolve. Once the parents no longer exist, the rest scatters, like seeds from an imploded pod. Subsequent generations are left with no inkling of who their forefathers were, no trace of their ‘family tree’. I hope, by this book, I can initiate the recording of our family history, not only by just a name in a ‘branch’ of the family tree, but also a brief description of the individual and his achievements or infamy.

Finally, this story of mine is not meant to be didactic. It is a story of my journey in life. I tell it the way I see it. You decide on the moral lessons that may be derived from it. To prove a point as to where I stand when it comes to moral exhortations, here’s a little story:

A heavy thunderstorm left a cat and a cockerel stranded on a small patch of elevated ground in a kampong. Surveying the area, the cockerel told the cat, I will jump and fly over to dry land over there, pointing to higher ground three metres away.

Eyeing the distance, the cat said, You go first. I’ll be right behind you. So, the cockerel, taking a deep breath, and flapping his strong wings, jumped and flew over to safety. The cat, getting up on its feet indolently, went to the edge of the patch and sprang forward. His leap was several inches short and he landed in the water. As he clambered, wet and shivering onto dry land, the cockerel laughed non-stop at the cat.

So, what is the moral of the story? To know mine, look for it at the end of my story.

CHAPTER ONE

My name is FOO HEE TAI, PHILIP, and I was born on the 1st. May, 1947, the ninth child of my parents, FOO WAH MENG and CHAN SEOW ENG. That is my official name as it appears on my birth certificate and subsequently Identity card. To my family and relatives I am known as FOO HEE KWANG. All along I had believed that the latter name was probably a nickname given to me by my family and I got used to acknowledging and responding to either name when called.

It was until I began researching and digging into my family tree to write this book that I unravelled the mystery of my dual name. I discovered that the Chinese character ‘Kwang’ meaning ‘bright’ consisted of two words—‘gold’ and ‘sun’—placed next to each other. You do not need a rocket scientist to tell you that when the sun shines on gold there will be brightness and that was what my parents named me—’Kwang’—as bright as the light emitting from the gold under the sun!

But, alas, it was not to be. My father, in his jubilance in adding another to his brood, had gone to the Birth Registration Office to register my birth without consulting my mum as to how to write the name of the new-born baby and he spoke only Hainanese and his written Chinese was limited. Thus, when it came to filling in the name ‘Kwang’, he only knew one of the two words—‘Tai’ or ‘sun’ in Chinese, and he left it at that. And so, my official name, translated from Chinese to English, became FOO HEE TAI.

What’s in a name? one may query. To the Chinese, it meant a lot. To me my half-spelt name meant that the sun is shining on nothing, just giving heat. No wonder I had a fiery temper. No gold meant ‘undiscovered/hidden potentials’. I am still trying to find out what is hidden under the thick skull of mine!

My English name, Philip was given to me by my elder sisters during the time when having an English name was ‘cool’. I was not comfortable with this name and did not use it even during my adult life. Only until I was converted to a Roman Catholic in 1990 did I then include ‘Philip’ to my official name in my ID and my passport. Now most people call me Philip.

EARLY CHILDHOOD

I believe I was brought up by my grandmother when I was a baby. My mother had to slog as a maidservant and my father as a cook to bring food to the table. It was no mean task for my parents to feed a family of ten children plus two nephews with their meagre wages. Spending ‘quality time’ with the children was something ‘alien’ or unheard of. My parents were then working for the ‘Ang Mohs’—the colonial master of Singapore. They were a big deal then.

I remember growing up in a huge ramshackle wooden house with an attap roof (this was later upgraded to an asbestos roofing when my parents saved up enough). I still remember our address—271-7 Tempenis Road,Singapore 19. The road was later renamed Tampines Road as the former name seemed to have a lewd suggestion of a congregation of priapic males in that area.

By the time I was running around the house, aged about four, it had been upgraded to a solid wooden house on a solid concrete red-coloured cement floor and asbestos roofing. With four bedrooms, a hall, an open verandah, dining area and an extended kitchen, it was the biggest and grandest house in the ‘kampong’. The kitchen was built as an annex to the house and it was constructed singularly by my father’s own pair of hands. He was that good at carpentry. The bathroom was located separately and about twenty metre away from the main house. Water supply came from a well around which the bathroom was built. Water was drawn with the use of a bucket attached to a rope strung through a pulley above the well. We had running water on taps only in the 60’s’. Same too for electricity.

The toilet was also located away from the main house, about 50-70metres to the left. It was the ‘bucket system’ of disposal of ‘night-soil’ then, with the ‘night-soil’ collector coming to retrieve and replace the bucket every two days. With so many of us in the household the bucket would be filled within a day and going to the toilet was something we did not relish, especially on the second day. The best time to go would be immediately after the filled bucket had been replaced with an empty one and that would be the time my siblings and I would

Reviews for I Remember...

[allriledup · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A series of entries all beginning with the prompt "I Remember". Some profound, some banal, some cringe-worthy (especially with regards to race matters), but ultimately all providing a glimpse into what growing up gay in a white middle class home in Tulsa, OK in the 40s and 50s was like.

[jon1lambert · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An inspirational book.

[ablueidol · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the challenges facing us in the 21st century is that we have too many reading choices; each year (yes each year) around 320,000 books hit UK and USA bookstores alone. And the pace of this is increasing with smaller and smaller print runs meaning more and more specialised segmented reader markets. Don’t know about you, but over my allotted 70-80 years I may manage 1001 books to read before you die; meaning that over my life tsunami of published books, I will read a passing sip of around 0.1% only. Think about all those great books that you are going to miss because of the noise from the ones with the best marketing budgets. Or from reading, what you always read.I Remember by Joe Brainard is one of those books that was buried with the fishes a long time ago yet deserving of a wider readership. Ok let us get to the killer; its poetry linked to the New York School of the 1950-60’s, which had a massive influence on contemporary music, art, dance, prose, and poetry. The ‘movements’ approach was observational, physical, using contrasting vivid imagery to shock the observer, listener, or participant into an emotional response that enables a revitalised experience of the world. The poetry of the ‘movement’ was a reaction to the confessional styles of poets such as Sylvia Plath who tended to write about their inner struggles. Before you think, I sip Earl Grey tea in some fancy café jabbering on about the prevenient nature of the stanza or the catachrestical no-no, of the imagery let me tell you otherwise. My last experience of any poetry was 1975 when I did English Lit O level and although I enjoyed T.S.Elliot and Sylvia Plath, poems on seeing daffodils or Nightingales croaking did zilch for me-and rhymed couplets, please give a guy a break. To my horror, I discovered I have to write an 80-line poem for my University Creative writing course in the autumn. Reading the course materials calmed me down. The course teaches you to start with an image or word and then free write a story. This triggers decisions on line, stanza, metre etc depending on the mood and scope of the poem. Suddenly it started to make sense so much so that I wrote my first poem in over 40 years. It was doing the background reading that led me to I Remember by Joe Brainard, which is poetry in ways you don’t imagine. He was a major painter, as well as poet, with a keen interest in collage and assemblage. One of his central works was a collection of over 3000 postcard size images that reflected the public-private experience of living in New York. The book reflects this technique by assembling hundreds of lines starting with I Remember. You may recognise it as a well-known technique for teaching children poetry. The lines list the fashions and fads, public events and private excesses of his 40s and 50’s childhood as well as his creative life of the 60’s and 70’s in simple, honest and witty lines that spin off from each other. In reading, you are hooked into a poetry biography like no other. You may never have given avant-garde 70’s poetry a thought before but make it one of your 1001 books to read if you get the chance. It’s only a 175 page slurp of a book readable in 1-2 hours as you surf through lines like this:I remember when babies fall down “oopsydaisy”I remember, with a limp wrist, shaking your hand back and fourth real fast until it feels like jelly.I remember trying to get the last of cat food from a can.I remember when a piece of hair stands up straight after a night of sleeping on it wrong.I remember before green dishwashing liquid.I remember a free shoehorn with new shoes.I remember never using shoehorns.Not convinced? Let me leave the final word with Paul Auster.I Remember is a masterpiece. One by one, the so-called important books of our time will be forgotten, but Joe Brainard's modest little gem will endure. In simple, forthright, declarative sentences, he charts the map of the human soul and permanently alters the way we look at the world. I Remember is both uproariously funny and deeply moving. It is also one of the few totally original books I have ever read.