Je voudrais mon steak bleu

So, wow, Ricky Martin is gay. How surprising!

Still, I bet his coming out is more noteworthy than the revelation of many secret marriages of Hong Kong celebrities, with the latest fallout being that of Charlene Choi and Ronald Cheng. Marriage is, by and large, a social institution. You get wed because you want people to know. Unless you are that dude in Braveheart who fights the nasty English and has to secretly marry his spouse (and later bury her) due to political reasons, then do not get married. As simple as that! But again, I think Hong Kong celebrities have a masochistic complex with the media and actually enjoy to be exposed.

There are stories so much more worthy to be heard. It will take me years to fathom these narratives’ inherent depth. The source is not even far, well, at least temporarily in my case, my source is far. How often do we listen to an earlier generation’s stories? How often do I ask my parents the kind of investigative questions a journalist or a biographer do? My grandparents are a lost source. Among the grandchildren of my generation, my sister and I perhaps had the most access to him. Alas, our bond had never been predicated on language, since, in terms of tongues, we were mutually unintelligible. So is my dad, a lost source. We have collectively lost him; even when he was still available, he was not too fond of recalling the past. As for my mom, I think my sister and I have so far learned quite a bit of anecdotes, vignettes, pictures, and lieux de mémoire. Nonetheless, they are like pieces of the puzzle scattered across four time/space continua, Dutch East Indies, Postcolonial Indonesia, China under Mao, and Hong Kong since 1970s, each so different from the world we now know that there is absolutely no way I can manage to do justice to retelling them.

I, of course, do not even attempt to make any sense out of her life, or find a way to relate to it, another highly charged word. The reader might fault me for reading too much Lacan, but yes, sometimes a postmodern spin appears to be the only way to go. Fleeing from the country you have always known, leaving your beloved parents behind, and not being sure if you would ever be allowed to come back again. Absurd, yes, and at the height of the riots against you, it probably was the only reasonable thing to do. My mother said she had been literally pushed out to the airport apron by some relatives for fear of robbery (absurd, again), she landed in Phnom Penh for layover and had the first steak in her life at the airport restaurant. As she sliced the steak in halves, blood squirted out of it and she was dumbfounded. I was pretty sure, when I first listened to this story as a teenage, she did not order her steak bleu. Now when I think about it, if I were her, that dining scene was probably just another Kafkaesque moment added to an incomprehensible day. A day added to a even more incomprehensible time when life itself was so full of factors beyond your control.

Fast forward to my life, my first real sojourn in a faraway place was marked with amnesia. The internet was still at its infancy, so distance (informational, geographical, and emotional) was very much felt in a concrete manner unlike today, but life was not as radically different from home or the previous life I had known that warranted remembering how the day did go. I flew United. I ate a cup noodle in the middle of the uneventful flight. That is probably as much as I can remember.

Not bad, huh, I grilled it, à point!