Chasin' Paper

I have now been living in Singapore for almost a month, and I’ve learned a few things.  First and foremost, air conditioning is the greatest invention since the printing press.  Second, since geckos eat mosquitos and spiders, they are your best friends and you should always welcome them, even if they insist on lurking in your bathroom at night, then leap into violent motion just as you lift your tired eyes to look in the mirror.

Yes, I’ve been picking up life lessons left and right.  I’ve also spent the last week at my school, Catholic Junior College, learning the ins and outs of teaching in Singapore.  Although I’m not teaching classes yet (the students are in their exam period leading up to the end of the year in December), my Head of Department was kind enough to entrust me with a task of vital importance to the direction of the College as a whole: paperwork.

Last Friday, I received a stack of five hundred detailed reports on students’ extra-curricular activities.  Since these reports go out to parents, the school needs teachers with a good handle on English grammar to correct them.  Determined to make a good first impression, I approached the reports with the dedication of a sheepdog and the fastidiousness of a hairdresser, ready to herd errant clauses and snip any modifiers dangling where they weren’t wanted.

My zeal lasted about five minutes.  The exhaustive inventory of my future students’ contributions to society was riddled with complicated sentence structures that were invariably wrong, yet stubbornly defied my efforts to fix them.  Furthermore, it was clear that most of the reports had been adapted from a single template, because I corrected virtually identical sentences literally hundreds of times.

I even began labeling the recurring grammar mistakes in my mind.  In fact, some of them I came to despise in a deeply personal and possibly unprofessional way.

My inner monologue went something like this:  “I hate you, Subject-Verb Disagreement in Stock Sentence #3 About Community Service in Bangladesh!  I want to take you out behind the garbage dump in a burlap sack and beat you with a stick!”

Mike crosses out two words with his red pen, then snorts angrily and crosses them out again.  He takes up the next paper on the stack in front of him.  Two seconds later…

“Go die in a hole, Incorrect Preposition in Stock Sentence #5 About the Mathematical Society!  Your mother was a superfluous semicolon and your father reeked of split infinitives!”

Grading these reports did more than threaten my sanity and raise my blood pressure, however; it taught me that what I hate, what I despise more than almost anything in the world, is an overachiever.  Not for me the Student Council Vice-President who plays three instruments and dedicates his every weekend to rebuilding orphanages in Cambodia.  The extra-curricular report for a child like that (let’s call him Mervin) is likely to be a full page, single-spaced, with more sentences in need of editing than there are grains of sand in the desert.

But the rare slacker, now… there was a true blessing.  Every now and again, though not often enough, I would take up a new report, only to find one short, sweet sentence: “This page is intentionally left blank as the student did not meet the participation requirements.”

“Yes!” I exclaim, overcome by a rush of morally questionable joy.  “Bless you, child!  The record of your utter lack of contribution to your school or your community is both beautifully concise and grammatically flawless.  Oh, well done!”

...I realize that my post thus far has basically been one long complaint.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m still extremely excited for this job.  As an example, I sat in on a class today led by a veteran Lit teacher from Ireland, and afterward I was raring to go.  David is everything I want to be as a teacher: he recited critical passages from Othello in a booming voice, brandished a broom handle to portray Iago trying to kill his wife, and translated the Shakespearean word “fie” into its closest Singaporean equivalent: “Wha’ la?!”  I swear, I wouldn’t have been surprised if David’s hair – which is white and wispy – puffed out like Einstein’s, struck not by lightning, but by the sheer static force of his academic fervor.

Alas, I am not yet able to impress upon Singapore’s youth the brilliance of Shakespeare or Dickinson.  What I can do, for the moment, is complain about paperwork.  But I’m in good company, for my fellow teachers assure me that complaining is the national sport of Singapore, and Singapore’s teachers are its Olympic athletes.

In the end, although I would like to get up in front of a class, the paperwork really isn’t that bad.  At least it makes me feel like I’m doing something to earn my salary.  As the American rapper and venerable wordsmith Plies says in his song, “I Chase Paper”:

All I do is paper chase

Ion’t got time, I can’t wait,

‘Cause I need millions on my plate!

My paper may be lined and perforated instead of green and covered with dead presidents, but at least I’ve got a lot of it on my plate!

The First Day

With two connecting flights and a layover in Seoul, it took around 22 hours to travel from New York to Singapore.  All things considered the trip was a miracle of international travel, replete with every comfort and convenience (including an impressive amount of wine), but not even Korean Air can overcome jet lag.  So when I rubbed the sleep from red-rimmed eyes at 5am local time my first morning in Singapore, I was hardly ready to greet the day.  I fear I didn't make the best first impression on my flatmate Umar, a fellow international teacher from Britain who certainly didn't deserve to deal with my grouchy, jet-lagged self all day.  But he bore the pain with unfailing courtesy, and even took me on a tour of some of Singapore's showier attractions, on the grounds that once school started we wouldn't have time to think, let alone play tourist.  And I discovered, once I stopped focusing on how exhausted and grumpy I was, that the hype is all true: Singapore is one hell of a place.

I saw too much to talk about it all here, but the highlight of the tour was unquestionably the Gardens by the Bay, a collection of three parks built entirely on reclaimed land.  Our goal that first night was to see the Supertrees, a grove of vertical gardens built to resemble giant trees, which use technology to mimic the ecological functions of trees (I thought that the only function of trees was to provide shade, and that they could be easily replaced by a building or an umbrella, but my more scientifically inclined classmates have told me that I'm mistaken... and also that I'm an idiot).  The Supertrees have water catchment technology, air intake and purification, photovoltaic cells, and - I'm sure - a squad of Superhamsters running on wheels to generate electricity.

Every night the grove of Supertrees puts on a light show, and thanks to Umar's master plan, we arrived just in time to see it.  Beautiful, unearthly music filled the air, and the trees lit up with a multitude of colors that flashed and changed with the song.  It was unlike anything I've ever seen - while watching it, you could forget that you were in a bustling metropolis known for its technology and banking, and think that you were in another world.

In fact, my inner geek was having a field day, convinced that I had somehow been transported to the lush jungle world of Pandora.  I had to concentrate to keep from looking around nervously, worried that mercenary gunships were coming to destroy the Hometrees.

All in all it was an amazing night, and I can see already that Singapore is a gift to the imagination.  As I settle in and become less of a tourist, I hope I don't lose the sense of wonder that I've experienced during my first few days here.  After wrangling with the Ministries of Education and Manpower over my Employment Pass and other bureaucratic necessities, it's easy to see how I could begin to take this city for granted, and focus only on the little annoyances.  That would be a shame, because even from the little that I've seen so far, Singapore is a breathtakingly beautiful city, and I am so incredibly lucky to be able to live here for a while.

Live to Eat

I’ve been researching Singaporean culture in preparation for the upcoming year, and from what I’ve seen, food plays a crucial role.  Various food-related activities such as eating, talking about food, listening to people talk about food, and blogging about where to go for the best food, all seem to take up an inordinate amount of your average Singaporean’s time. 

Since I myself spend the majority of each day thinking about what I have eaten, am eating, or will be eating in the near future, I cannot but applaud Singapore. There are classy restaurants, bars, and diners aplenty, and street food like you've never seen before in the form of Singapore’s world-famous hawker centers.  Hell’s Kitchen chef Gordon Ramsay even challenged several hawker chefs to a cook-off recently, and they won by popular vote.  

http://blogs.wsj.com/scene/2013/07/08/gordon-ramsay-defeated-by-singapore-hawkers

Not only that, but hawker food is eminently affordable - you can get a full meal in most hawker centers for the price of a slice of pizza in New York.

Sounds pretty good, right?  Well guess what, Singapore... I'm not impressed.  I hail from Rochester, New York, and we're no slacks in the cuisine department.  Unfortunately, our culinary expertise is not well known internationally (to be fair, it's not well known in the US either, including many areas of Rochester).  Nevertheless, I bristle in patriotic defense every time I hear someone say that the food in Rochester is garbage.  

"Excuse me," I say, walking right up to the aforementioned hypothetical food critic, "but you're dead wrong.  Our food is in no way affiliated with refuse, rubbish, or trash!"

"Oh yeah," retorts Mr. Wise Guy Critic, "then why is Rochester's only identifiable contribution to world cuisine called a Garbage Plate?!"

Well... damn.  He's got me there.  It is true that our signature dish, the meal that put us on the map (although that might actually have been our crime rate), is called the garbage plate.  But you know what?  It's tasty!  And the garbage plate has a long and storied history, one that can match anything the Singaporeans talk about on their food blogs.  I've done a little research to support this claim, so kick back, grab a beer, and please read the following on an empty stomach.  This is the story of the garbage plate.

Back in the day (around 1918 or thereabouts), Nick Tahou opened a restaurant in Rochester called Hots and Potatoes. There was one dish on the menu that had essentially everything you could cook in the kitchen, all put on one plate to become an affordable meal that would stay with you approximately until your next paycheck.  Nick's son inherited the restaurant (now called Nick Tahou's) and created the classic garbage plate that we still love today, which consists of two cheeseburgers over a bed of macaroni salad and home fries, liberally covered by a melange (that's french for big mess) of meat sauce, ketchup, and mustard.

Other restaurants quickly jumped on the bandwagon, realizing that garbage plates were the perfect item for drunk college students on a Top-Secret Food-Finding Mission between midnight and 4:00am (I don't know about you, but I've certainly been there).  It is unknown what precise thoughts went through the mind of the first student to try a garbage plate, but it probably went something like this:

Drunk College Student: Whoa... when I throw up this food in about 40 minutes, it's going to look exactly the same!!! ...awesome...

And the rest, as they say, is history.  In more recent times, garbage plates have become a part of our cultural heritage - in many high schools, for example, the successful consumption of an entire garbage plate is a coming-of-age ritual signifying that a boy has become a man.  Since my family moved to Rochester before my junior year of high school, I experienced a good deal of culture shock when I realized what was expected of me.  "I'm supposed to eat that?!" was my sentiment.  With time and perseverance, however, I came to relish the excitement, the danger even, of downing a plate and subsequently wondering whether I was going to projectile vomit over everyone in my US History class.  It was like a game of Russian Roulette, except if I lost, so did everyone else...

But enough of that trip down memory lane.  I only indulge in it now because soon enough, my memories will be the only place where I can savor the sweet, sweet taste of a garbage plate.  For exactly that reason, earlier this evening I went to my hometown's equivalent of a hawker center: the infamous Hungry's Grill.  Before you ask, yes, there is a bar next door called Thirsty's.  We are nothing if not a pragmatic people, we Rochesterians (Rochester-ites?  Rochestinians? Ah, screw it).

It was the best garbage plate I have ever eaten - seasoned, perhaps, by the bitter but poignant knowledge of my imminent departure to a land where food is not compared to garbage, even in jest.

As I sit here digesting, I begin to feel a deep sense of peace and tranqui- bleeurgh.

...Whew.  Hey, you know what?  That drunk college student was right - it really does look the same as before!

The Journey Begins

Greetings, fellow slaves of the Interwebs!  If you're reading this, then chances are you're either related to me, or you have too much free time on your hands... bless you either way.  As you may have guessed from the  blog's title, I'm going to Singapore.  I'll be teaching English lit while making very little money (is there any other way to teach English lit?), which gave me an excuse this summer to reread Pride and Prejudice and wish once again that I was Mr. Darcy - not that I ever need a reason for that.  I love 19th century chick lit and my students will too, damn it!

But I digress.  I meant to talk about my upcoming relocation, which is a pretty big step for me.  For the last four years I was living it up in the Berkshire Mountains at Williams College, a school slightly bigger than your average matchbox, where my most difficult free will decision was whether to order mozzarella sticks or chicken tenders at snack bar, and my greatest fear was getting rejected by girls at parties.  Now I'm moving halfway around the world, where I'll face many new challenges that I could never have imagined up in my ivory tower.  According to my insurance brochure, for example, I run the risk of getting hit by a motorcycle, savaged by rabid dogs, mugged, and bitten by disease-carrying mosquitoes with a taste for white meat.  All at the same time.  And I'll probably still get rejected by women at parties.

Once again I'm getting away from my point, which is that when I imagine the next fifteen months of my life, all I can see is a tantalizing and slightly nerve-wracking blank.  For the first time in a long, long while, I have absolutely no idea what to expect.  Singapore is a fresh canvas on which to paint the masterpiece of my life so far - or not, since I shudder to think what punishment awaits graffiti artists in Singapore.

But if I can't splash my story in gaudy paint on the pristine streets and high-rises of Singapore, I can still post it on the Internet.  So if you're interested in learning a bit about Singapore, or listening to me lie outrageously about my adventures, then you know where to find me.