The Pensieve

Seeing how today is Children’s Day and that they’re going to declare an unofficial break from their preparations for exams and such, I thought I’d just take a sneak peek into some of the little things which didn’t seem to mean much in my childhood, but are like popcorn, hershey’s kisses and cotton candy compared to my sad existence rite now…

So here are the twenty things that popped into my mind…

1. claiming to go swimming with Gerald but sneaking off to hang out at the old Oriental/NTUC area at Hougang instead

2. sneaking off on detours with Veron and Liyan to the ‘mama’ shop on the way back (it’s the block 526 one at Ave 1/street 21) from school instead of heading home right away, yeah and i think i was about 9 years old…

3. getting to go off lessons up to 15min earlier with Mingda and Peiling (cos we were prefects, albeit abusing our privileges) and using those 15min of freedom from boring chinese lessons to play around

4. getting angbaos containing only 2bux

5. having WW hanging around me during recess, at my duty area, and doing comic antics to get my attention. (it used to irritate the hell out of me, but now that i think of it, it’s super funny)

6. sneaking to Yuying sec sch (next to Xinghua, my pri school) to buy their fries, hell, it wasn’t the fries that was nice, in fact it tasted like soggy cardboard, but we just loved the idea of being rebels… (Is Yuying still there?)

7. threatening to book the little hooligans in my class and level, i love to take out my little blue book and pace up and down the hall before assembly

8. taking out the stigma/style from all the little ixora flowers at my aunt’s place, squeezing those little oranges and claiming the worms came from Jiajin’s stomach to my relatives’ great disgust

9. building my smurf house (it has got poles and smurf pics) when the tent shrunk so it couldn’t fit my ‘house’ anymore, i used blankets and curtains, hung raffia pompoms on poles at the entrance and had a small fan that ran on solar power inside

10. hiding behind the curtains/under the bed/in the maid’s room/in the storeroom/in the drain outside the house/under the stairs whenever my dad came to take me home from my auntie’s place

11. being forced to learn how to cycle and swim… boy i was such a wimp!

12. seeing Junrong howl when we had our BCG jabs. Heh.

13. my bro scurrying around the house running errands for me. though now he’s unlikely to even budge an inch to get his own food

14. biting my cousins. :D perhaps that’s why i’ve got retribution in the form of malaligned teeth.

15. Yvonne declaring that she likes Chee Feng in front of Mr Lin Min and the whole class! *priceless*

16. Every single ensemble practice. Except for the time i got the drumstick thrown at me.

17. Going out for bubble tea/coffee bean with Liz, Sanz, Mich and Laurie almost every Saturday after our respective band, NCC and choir practices, and then Sanz always had to be the first to leave, cuz got -curfew- *haiz*

18. Band practice!

19. Having project after project in sec school, I remember juggling a ‘Horoscope’, a ‘cool house of the future’, a Fibonacci sequence, a lit presentation on symbolism in the ‘Joy Luck Club’ (help!) and making our own English oral exam pictures and paragraphs to test each other… all at around the same time. I love projects! *grinz*

20. my four years in secondary school

Btw, was discussing the typical facie of craniosynostosis with Suzy… and you know what, I think it looks like a Hershey’s kiss! At least the top part does, correct?

NB: This is not a translated version, the original version is indeed in English.

If I had to use a single picture to represent this book, I would use this:

Synopsis
It is only many years later, that at age 30, Kathy finally allows herself to reminisce about the years of her childhood. She, together with many others, had been brought up in an idyllic, sheltered environment of Hailsham, an establishment deep in the English countryside. All the children are brought up with fantastic lessons, art classes, music, games, all any child would have wanted and an emphasis that personal welfare was crucial for them. But none of them really questioned why they were there and what lay ahead in their future…

It is only in their late teens where the idea of ‘donations’ become introduced to them. At first only in passing, as if it were an unimportant part of their lives, and gradually, introduced as some sort of natural process in their lives, as a means to which they would live out their lives.

Unknown to them, (or rather, their minds just did not want to accept the truth), they were actually all clones of real people, brought up only as a host for the organs that their real people wanted/needed. I’m sure everyone reading this would have balked at such an idea, but interesting enough, they did not. They just accepted their fates quietly, some even taking lessons to be a carer for other donors before they started their own donations.

It’s a chilling novel, of love, loss and hidden truths. An entire complex myriad of emotions - rage, pity, self-loathing, pain, melancholy, a sweet sort of sadness. It’s a masterpiece indeed!

Somehow, I felt that this book was a parallel of the real world. We aren’t clones but we sure aren’t much different from them. How many of us have accepted our lot without question? How many have dared to challenge our ‘fate’? And how many of us are so comfortable in our current environment that we do not think about how else we could make our lives fuller?

I’m not saying that it’s bad to be living our lives like Kathy did with hers, sometimes, you’re just not given any choice. But, think about it, don’t you feel that need to do something different? Something just extraordinary, and perhaps, just perhaps, have that little chance to realise greater potentials?

Anyways, here’s an excerpt from the book, just so you all out there can get a ‘feel’ of Ishiguro’s style.

‘Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves - about who we were, how we were different from our guardians, from the people outside - but hadn’t understood what any of it meant. I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day; similar if not in the actual details, then inside, in the feelings. Because it doesn’t really matter how well your guardians try to prepare you: all the talks, videos, discussions, warnings, none of that can really bring it home. Not when you’re eight years old, and you’re ll together in a place like Hailsham; when you’ve got guardians like the ones we had; when the gardeners and the delivery men joke and laugh with you and call you ’sweetheart’.

All the same, some of it must go in somewhere. It must go in, because by the time moment like that comes along, there’s a part of you that’s been waiting. Maybe from as early as when you’re five or six, there’s been a whisper going at the back of your head, saying: ‘One day, maybe not so long from now, you’ll get to know how it feels.’ So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realise that you really are different from them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you - of how you were brought into this world and why - and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. The first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it’s a cold moment. It’s like walking past a mirror you’ve walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else, something troubling and strange.’

— from ‘Never Let Me Go’, Kazuo Ishiguro

‘Il Mare’/'Siworae’ (Korean) 2000 directed by Lee Hyun-seung
Genre: Romance
Rating: ****/*****

‘The Lakehouse’ 2006 directed by Alejandro Agresti
Genre: Romance
Rating: ***/***** (would be ** if not for the beautiful scenery)

What is it about Hollywood that they have to remake Asian films? Almost always, the Western remakes are flashier, more flamboyant, have better shock potential, and significantly better sets, but they inevitably either twist the real meaning of the story or fall short of transmitting the subtle emotions that have made so many Asian films wonderful masterpieces of the human soul.

Score points for ‘Lakehouse’:
- sparkling waters, pink sunsets/dawns
- more glam looking actress and actor
- the introduction, where they show the directors names and stuff, was beautifully done, love the handwriting…

Score points for ‘Il Mare’
- the set more effectively projects the permeating sense of yearning and loneliness
- smoother transition between existences two years apart
- cuter Cola (the dog)
- better soundtrack (I love the song at the ending, what’s the title?)
- the lady realised that it was only because of her that the guy ‘died’

Major Boos for ‘Lakehouse’
- corny transitions between two-year apart existences, making it seem as if… it’s just odd.
- portraying Sandra Bullock into a potential psy patient… at times it looked like she was hallucinating!
- the accident killing the guy did not happen (though it was the same for ‘Il Mare’, they did film it as if it happened, and the impact of it was much greater!)
- the guy found the book the gal forgot tat the train station, but he couldn’t put it into the mailbox but had to hide it under some floor planks???
- why does Sandra Bullock have to a be a doctor huh… (doesn’t run well with her believing in time-transcendence) Couldn’t she have been like a writer instead…
- I thought it was ridiculous when we have Bullock in her 2006 and Reaves in his 2004 both staring at the mailbox’s lever going up and down, and exchanging letters like that. I know I would have freaked if it were me! Are we having a romance movie here or a horror movie?

Major Boo for ‘Il Mare’
- Couldn’t you just let the guy die and leave it at that? Heh heh… Then we can have the actress stop mooning over her ex (who isn’t even good-looking) and let her take up architecture and move into the house that the actor commissioned to have built for her! Don’t you realise that if you’d killed him, it would make this quote in the movie all the more meaningful?

“It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

- Something was wrong with the subtitling, I couldn’t read the last quarter of quite a few sentences… but thankfully, the movie didn’t have as much dialogue as emotion dialogue so I was still able to follow quite well

Review of ‘Il Mare’
The simple set, simple emotions, and scenes, even the one with her red mittens being washed away by the sea was so poignant, combined with the perpetual look of yearning on our hero and heroines faces determine the entire mood of the film - one of loneliness and a yearning for a twin-soul (what we beautifully and poetically term as ‘alma gemela’). I believe this is the making of a masterpiece. To express so much with so little. I highly recommend watching it, not at all because it’s some sob story but to find out how well you will relate to the characters (even if you hadn’t been in any relationship before).

And I totally feel the truth in this phrase…

“We’re tormented because love goes on, not because it goes away.”

Ah, bittersweet.