But I Am Really Not Dead

In the past few weeks, I've been getting emails of a certain kind, from a few of my readers. The emails sound carefully phrased, as if the reader genuinely wants to ask something, but isn't sure how to ask it without coming across as intrusive or presumptuous, and is therefore picking and choosing his words delicately.

Well, here's the answer to the question. No, I am not dead, nor dying, nor ill, nor has any drastic event unfolded in my personal life. The reason I have not been blogging is just that I have not felt like blogging. In fact, I haven't felt like blogging for a long time. I haven't even experienced any withdrawal symptoms.

Work has certainly been keeping me very busy though. Right now, I am working in an environment which not only refuses to hire additional lawyers to deal with the increasing workload, but also refuses to hire replacement lawyers (to replace those who have left). So basically, a shrinking pool of manpower is taking on an expanding amount of work. Then the remaining employees grow stressed and unhappy and become more prone to quit, thus feeding the vicious cycle.

Oh well, what is new? This is not the first place where I've seen this happen. Very large organisations are like very large dinosaurs - they are strong, powerful but not necessarily very intelligent. In fact, I was only 18 years old when I got to see a very strong, powerful and stupid organisation close-up. No prizes for the right answer.

In other news:

1. My new house is still not quite ready, but I hope to be able to collect the keys sometime next month. (Please recommend a few out-of-the way places where I can buy cheap, good furniture).

2. I am still diligently swimming, currently averaging about 90 laps per week, and finally, I have taught myself to do a decent flip turn (well, decent by my own humble standards).

3. I bought myself a new classical guitar! And I am trying to grow the fingernails on my right hand, to achieve that brighter, clearer quality of sound when plucking the strings.

4. I have a new blog. But it's going to bore the hell out of you, unless you happen to be working in the same kind of job as I do (heck, even if you work in the same kind of job as I do, you might still be bored to death). Anyway, here it is - the Asian Banking Lawyer blog.

5. Next month I'm giving a talk to about 250 Literature students from six schools, about poetry and how to write it and read it. It's an event organised by CHIJ Saint Nicholas.

6. I recently met up with two Singapore filmmakers (a producer and a director) who wanted me to share the juicy details of what DPPs really do for a living. The two filmmakers are making a new film that involves crime - and the main character is a DPP.

7. Ever since I registered my daughter for Primary One (that was back in July), the Education Ministry has become aware that I haven't sent her to Kindergarten Two. Since then, every fortnight or so, someone from the Education Ministry calls up my wife to ask why. I guess that my wife and I, as parents, are now being suspected of being negligent or very poor.

8. I have now got an iPhone 4! For $50 only!! And I pay zero dollars for the monthly subscription!!

What? You were hoping that I'd give you some news about socio-political issues in Singapore? Instead of all this boring, trivial stuff about my own life? Sorry, folks. I haven't really been reading the newspapers myself.

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Mr Wang at the Esplanade

Just received an email from someone working for the Esplanade. In conjunction with National Day, the Esplanade will be holding a national poetry exhibition in August. Selected works by Singaporean poets will be exhibited at different areas throughout the Esplanade building.

The Esplanade wrote to ask for my permission to use a poem of mine - it's entitled Construction. I said okay.

I feel somewhat happy for this poem. The Quarterly Literary Review Singapore previously published this poem and it also appears in my book Two Baby Hands. But apart from that, Construction has not received much airplay or attention.

Construction

They were building a subway
station right next to our block.
Most of the time, you could not see
the workers. They worked deep down below,
beyond the reach of light -
like so many termites carving
ceaseless secrets into the hidden parts
of a wooden house.

At noon, they emerged from tunnels,
blinked into the sudden sun.
After a quick meal, they lay
in the shade of void decks
and swiftly folded themselves into sleep.

They became so still and quiet
you might have thought them dead.

Then a small breeze came, and one of them
stirred slightly, though he did not wake.
He would not have known it,
if you had come close enough to watch him breathe -
the way his chest slightly rose
............ ......... .............. and fell,
then, almost like a miracle,
slightly rose
............. and fell again.

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New York, New York

I had some free time to explore New York. This was my first time there, so it was quite interesting for me.

I spent most of my time in museums. New York has some really spectacular museums - you could spend an entire day or two in a large one, if you really wanted to see all the exhibits.

Here's a picture I took at the Natural History Museum. The museum has plenty of dinosaur fossils and the picture shows one of the largest ones.

When you're standing right there, close to the fossil, it's pretty remarkable to think that once upon a time, such a massive creature was real and alive, and stomping and stamping its way around planet Earth.

I also visited the world-renowned Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Quite delighted to see many famous paintings which up till then, I had only come across in books, postcards etc.

Here's one of the paintings, The Death of Socrates. A painting that you would appreciate a lot more, if you saw the real thing in full size, and also know the story of how Socrates died.

I also went to the Apple store to buy an iPad for a friend. The iPads are still selling like hot cakes. You can't get them unless you place a prior reservation. And the rule is that the reservation lasts for only 24 hours - you need to pick it up within that time.

I would have bought one for myself, but I'm not sure how an iPad would gel with the data plans in Singapore.


It seems to me that in the long run, an iPad is the way to go, for a book lover like me. I've often had to restrain myself from buying more books, because my house is already full of books and they take up so much space. I throw away and give away books, and yet I still have so many.

With an iPad, I could switch to reading ebooks. Right now though, I'm not too sure what the range of available book titles would be like.

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The Reality TV Show

I'm back from New York. I passed my reality TV show - not with flying colours, but I passed, and that's that. So I guess I'm on track for promotion early next year.

One really interesting thing we did was a complex business simulation exercise. The course participants were broken up into six groups. Each group was supposed to be one company.

At the beginning of the game, each company has exactly the same balance sheet, sells the products and owns the same kind of factory equipment. Each group then has to make a set of decisions, on issues like how much to invest in R&D; how much to spend on employee training; how many employees to hire or fire; whether to purchase new industrial equipment or not; and what price to set for the products.

At the end of each round, each team's decisions are entered into a complex computer model. Decisions made by any one team influence the result of all other teams, because the parameters of the game are that all six companies are operasting in the same market.

The model then spits out a detailed set of results, which are publicly announced. These include results such as which team gained the most market share; which team wins an award for "Best Factory"; which team produced goods with the highest quality; at what price each team sold its products etc etc.

Then there is a set of confidential results for each company, detailing its financial performance in that particular round, and also details about its inventory holdings, and its productivity ratios.

The objective of the simulation exercise is to see which team can generate the highest retained earnings, over seven rounds.

The game is quite complex, and takes into account a wide range of factors such as the depreciation of assets over time; the life cycle of the factory machines; fluctuations in market demand; and changes in interest rates. The teams also have options to do things like borrow money from the bank.

Each team can also carry out quality improvement projects; engage external consultants; purchase market forecast reports etc. Each of these decisions come with a price, of course, and each company has a limited amount of money.

The game ran over a period of one and a half days.

Anyway, I was the CEO of my team and we won - yes, we were No. 1, making 67.1 million dollars over seven game periods.

You can think of the game as a very complicated kind of Monopoly.

The other interesting feature of the game is that each team had a psychologist sitting in the room of each team. The psychologist was there to observe each participant in the team.

This part of the exercise was to focus on intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. After the game, each participant gets to discuss his own performance with the psychologist, who will comment on the participant's observed behaviour.

Each participant also receives a grade, on a very broad set of different criteria, such as whether he was collaborative; whether he communicated clearly; whether he was confident etc.

Although I was the CEO of the winning team, I only got an average score as CEO. The psychologist said that my weakness, under time pressure, was in commanding and persuading my team members, whenever I had to articulate an innovative strategy or complex idea.



I was also criticised for being poor in delegating. I personally over-focused on details, when as CEO I should be splitting up the tasks more, and getting my team members to do the analysis.

Innovation and far-sightedness were noted, as my key strengths. In Round 2, when my team members were mostly thinking about Round 2, I was already strategising and planning ahead for Rounds 5 to 7.

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Oxford University Press - Gazing at Stars

Got an email from Christine Lindop, a freelance editor with Oxford University Press. She is working on a new book - a collection of short stories specially edited for readers for whom English is a foreign language.

This is part of a series entitled Bookworms World Stories, which showcase the work of writers in English from different parts of the world. Christine's volume is scheduled for publication in 2011 and will consist of stories from Asia.

I'm known for my poetry rather than for my short stories, but Oxford University Press told me that they would like to use one of my poems, entitled Accident, in the preliminary pages of their book. That's because my poem has inspired the title of their book, Gazing at Stars.

I said ok. This is the poem:

Accident

And I,
gazing at stars,
stumbled over you,
tripped
and
fell painfully in love,
couldn't get up
for ages.

Okay, the actual poem doesn't really look like that. The lines are arranged and spaced in a certain way, to suggest serendipitious wanderings and a sudden fall. But Blogger doesn't seem to give me any option to replicate the line arrangements - it automatically aligns all the lines for me.

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Little Snippets From Mr Wang's Daily Life

Professor Edwin Thumboo is compiling a new anthology of poetry and wanted to include one of my poems in it. My publisher emailed to ask if I had any objections. A slightly strange question, since my publisher holds the copyright for the next nine years and I have no grounds to object anyway. But anyway, I am perfectly okay and happy with the idea.

The new anthology is aimed at students in Singapore schools, and will contain a selection of poems from writers all over the world. The objective is to expose the students, through poetry, to a variety of different social, cultural and linguistic contexts. Edwin Thumboo wants to use the following poem of mine:

My Father Takes My Son For A Walk

Small waves sing and sigh and run to the shore,
Push and pull at their ankles, as they walk hand-in-hand
Along the edge of the sea.

My father is white-haired now, his shoulders stoop.
With each step he is approaching the end of his life
Altthough in this moment he does not think of it.

My son is a young child. Shells and boats excite him.
In the years ahead, the old man beside him will
Become for him an uncertain memory.

I have my own journey. I am watching them,
As if from a very great distance, as if I were a wave
Travelling out into the endless sea.

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"But I Didn't Tell A Lie ... I Just Didn't Tell The Whole Truth" - The SAF

In March, an SAF training accident occurred. A few days ago, the Straits Times reported it:

ST May 25, 2010
SAF commando shot by Thai villager
By Jermyn Chow & Lester Kok

A COMMANDO on a night training exercise in Thailand was accidentally shot by a local villager out hunting.

First-Sergeant Woo Teng Hai, a regular from the 1st Commando Battalion, suffered head injuries in the incident on March 13.

The 25-year-old serviceman was hit by pellets from a shotgun, the Defence Ministry told The Straits Times yesterday. He is now on medical leave.

Mindef spokesman Darius Lim said 1st Sgt Woo was taking part in a 'routine training exercise' in a 'designated training area' in Kanchanaburi province, west of Bangkok.

But the story was not complete. It was missing a very material piece of information.

Another SAF servicement had been shot. He is a 19-year-old NSF. More than two months after the accident, the shotgun pellets are still lodged in his cheekbones and shoulder.

How did these facts now come to light? Did Mindef tell the public about it? Nope. Mindef kept very quiet about it. Instead it was an unnamed relative of the NSF who called the Straits Times, to report it.

ST May 26, 2010
Another SAF soldier shot by Thai farmer too
By Jermyn Chow & Lester Kok

NOT one but two Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) soldiers were hurt while out on a night military exercise in Thailand in March.

A local farmer out hunting accidentally shot Private J. Pritheery Raj, a full-time national serviceman (NSF). Two shotgun pellets are still lodged in his cheekbones and his right shoulder.

The 19-year-old is now on medical leave.

News of this second shooting surfaced after a relative of Pte Raj called The Straits Times on reading its report that a villager had fired his shotgun at First Sergeant Woo Teng Hai. The regular commando is said to have been blinded in his right eye.

The Defence Ministry, which had confirmed the accidental shooting of 1st Sgt Woo on Monday, admitted yesterday that another soldier had also been hurt in the same incident.

It was a cover-up. Exposed by the NSF's relative.

This is a simple example of why Singaporeans do not trust the SAF. All too often, the SAF just does not behave with integrity.

My only hope is that the SAF will treat both servicemen - the regular and the NSF - fairly, and give them proper compensation.

And not treat them in the the way they had treated ex-NSF serviceman Lawrence Leow.

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