beloved places

Dear readers,

first and foremost, in case you're wondering, the title of tonight's post is from a concert title somewhere next year, where Alexander Souptel will finally perform with the SSO. tkwek's definitely looking forward to it - anyone else thinking of going? 

next, it's an essay this week! sort of a column-style piece, we sincerely hope you enjoy it.

travellator,

The Straight Times Editor

The Long Hard Road

In the past years I’ve made a number of trips to China – this vast superpower that all but slumbers on Asia’s rooftop – and I’ve met within the Orient a great many different types of people; not vindicating stereotypes like characters right out of your regular modern kungfu flick, but true-blue down-to-earth yellow-skinned locals of the Red Nation. Among them are the fabled Shanghai shopper, the shrewd expat boss, the ingenious advertiser and many others, but the most memorable – not to mention the most stunning, in more ways than one, – of them all is most definitely the die-hard reckless driver.

He appears in many streets, under many guises, though more often than not the retro-style synthetic leather coat of a not-so-friendly neighborhood taxi driver. Touting tough exteriors that are not just essential for cutting lanes and getting to distant stranded passengers, but also for keeping the dangers of the road at bay (even with the driver’s-seat grill, the knife-edge finds its way into unexpected places), they often strike the rocks to reveal a slicing thirst for adventure coupled with a pint-sized temper – which happens to be as short as they are fast.

And fast they are, on and off the kerb. I’ll forever live with the brilliantly jolting memories of the bear-hug gentleman, complete with the unfathomable square dark-glasses of the 60s, hunkering over the steering wheel as he shot us up the road-shoulder and onto the footpath all the way down the jam-packed highway to catch our flight home. Another far cry from the cushioned rides and smooth roads of home came a few years before that, on a tour in Yunnan, where we were treated to a breathtaking – literally – journey from Lijiang to Dali by another driver who’d had the luck of having twins in one-child China.

Wild horses, too, would not make me forget the silently humorous chap who blared a impeccable English translation of the popular Chinese hit “Lao Shu Ai Da Mi” (the lyrics, were, literally, Mice like Rice) all the way from a placid village housing leprosy patients to a school in another township – ferrying a disgruntled chain-smoking local official and a family of bemused Singaporeans. Our very first trip to Yunnan, China, too, brought us into tangent with a lively father who added his son to our tour group as an impromptu summer vacation.

But there is more to them than a happy-go-lucky love of the road. Each is bestowed with a spirit that cares for his passengers more than his vehicle, a thoughtfulness one would rarely see among home-grown drivers, and a high moral code that everyone abides to on the road – making the circus on the tarmac one of the safest in the world. Each, too, has a gift for lateral thinking, sharpened by years of cutting the Gordian knot every day on the road.

It is no surprise, then, that the Chinese call these brave warriors of everyday battlefields ‘Shifu’, or ‘Master’. Outgoing, resourceful, and most of all, respectable, they shine on the roads with a driving power that eludes many, giving the modern China with its back doors and tainted products a whole new face.

They in themselves are a living testimony of the heroes of old who once plied the ‘jianghu’, or waterways, of China, doing all manner of saintly acts. Yet these quiet saints have chosen, each in his vocation, to remain below the windscreen, serving with humility and dignity the China that slips around them in the whirlpool of progress that industrialization has brought – a whirlpool which would not have been possible if not for them.