Peripathetic, p.12
Peripathetic, page 12
I see myself shuffling in and out of workplaces, a litany of co-workers and colleagues lined up single-file within a mental rolodex, all of us knowingly walking towards an open grave, where labour’s annihilation rests on our collectivisation. In The Mushroom at the End of the World Anna Tsing makes a lucid observation: ‘Precarity means not being able to plan. But it also stimulates noticing, as one works with what is available.’ Within this life of labour, there is no recourse, only the stolen small joys. I am only another pair of legs on this hamster wheel.
water girl
I’ve lived in Australia for three months, subsisting off savings from my life modelling job, amid other punk-learned endeavours like dumpster-diving and shoplifting. On a reckless whim, I decide that yes, an international romantic relationship can happen, even though we’re both young and unsure of the bureaucracies behind orchestrating something like this. What’s more important is that we’re deeply in love.
A close, well-off friend generously lends me $10 000 so I can put it in my bank account, to look like I have money if the Australian authorities ever check. Between researching how I can find a way to live on this continent as a non-tertiary-educated immigrant with no career prospects, I gradually find myself without regular income. I mention this at a punk show, and my new friend Amy says I can ‘totally work cash in hand’, a concept I hadn’t heard of before. Amy does cash-in-hand work to evade taxation, and one of these jobs is to be a ‘water girl’ at amateur league AFL games at various Adelaidean suburbs.
Having little interest in any kind of sport, I had never heard of Australian Rules Football until now. The job, at $50 a pop, involves running out to a location on the field as soon as you notice a little break in the game, because ‘the boys’ need to be hydrated. On my first day, I turn up in a band t-shirt even though everyone’s in athleisure. It didn’t cross my mind to try and look sporty, even though if you think about it, of course you’re supposed to look sporty at sports. I also run out at the wrong time, to which someone yells, ‘Oi China!’. But I don’t feel offended, merely amused at their inaccurate guess. I have yet to encounter the real sting of racism.
Amy and I don’t drive, so the woman who’s in charge of hiring ‘the girls’ comes to pick us up at a convenient spot in the CBD. These footy games are occasionally located in the outer suburbs, and Adelaide’s public transport system is too inefficient to promise a direct route to these secluded ovals. Ophelia is talkative and friendly, often commenting on nearly everything we see on these car rides. ‘How Australiana,’ she chuckles, when we arrive at a suburb full of Australian-flagged houses one afternoon. At the time, I don’t know what that means, but I don’t know how to feel about nationalism in a country I wasn’t born in, either.
Under Amy’s guidance, I learn how to watch the game. ‘Which one’s your favourite?’ one of the girls asks me one day. I stammer and shrug – I’ve never socialised in a gendered fashion at school as a result of being a loner, and I find rituals like these perplexing. I surmise that the $50 payment includes chit-chat about which of ‘the boys’ we consider attractive as well. To some it can be considered a perk. They laugh. I laugh nervously. It’s okay! I’m just the token weirdo in this sea of normality. Unlike Amy, I haven’t learned to fully hide it. This is cemented one day when Amy tells me a funny story about a guy she’s fucking, and I cackle like a maniac, howling, ‘NOOOOOOOOOOO!!’ loudly at half-time, when the boys are in a group huddle with their coach. Everyone turns around to stare at me in annoyed bewilderment.
life model
At the cybercafe, I listlessly look through the notifications of an arts industry Yahoo listserv to find a post in strangely worded English, advertising openings for ‘art models’ at a prestigious university in Singapore. Like those ‘WOMEN NEEDED’ flyers stuck on lampposts I immediately dismiss it as a scam, but two days later decide to ring the number out of curiosity. If the ad turns out to be true, then $40 an hour would be equivalent to hitting the mother lode, particularly so in a country with no minimum wage laws. I don’t think I’ve ever made more than $10 an hour in my life.
A man answers the phone, and after some polite chit-chat as to my current circumstances (young, and, to increase my chances at getting this job, unemployed and about to begin art school), he requests a meeting at a cafe. I’m wary, but the cafe is in a crowded mall in the middle of the city, so I go.
The university professor takes to me immediately. He likes that I look ‘alternative’, with my bleached platinum blonde hair and various face piercings, an anomaly in Singapore in the 2000s. After all, as I emphasise, I’m about to begin art school. I also know it’s because I’m thin, light-skinned and Chinese. Being from Beijing, he attempts to speak to me in Mandarin; I try for a few sentences, then flounder when the topic goes beyond conversational. He looks frustrated, as many mainland Chinese people are with anglophone Chinese–Singaporeans – but I get the job.
I have no experience, but according to the prof, ‘you’ll learn quickly’, and ‘no one has experience starting out doing anything’. All I have to do is to take off my clothes and assume a position worthy of artistic scrutiny to be gazed at by students learning how to be artists in a country where creative thinking has little value. On my first day, I step gingerly into a classroom helmed by a Californian lecturer who yells enthusiastically to her cohort of dead-eyed students, all sitting in a circle with sketchpads on their laps. She continues to lecture, and nearly an hour elapses before I’m asked to step onto the raised podium in the centre of the room. An hour of free money, I think – that’s something new. On the podium, I become a robot, doing little exaggerated actions for several seconds at a time so the people below can make out the contours of my body. The lecturer’s exhortations below make me feel as if I’m at an aerobics class. I’m a life.
I do learn quickly. This may be attributed to my usually sedentary hobby of sitting in one position reading for hours on end, but I find that long poses, which last anywhere between 30 minutes to two hours, come easily to me. This job is where I learn the habit of waking up an hour before classes begin, going to work in my pyjamas – I’m going to take them off anyway – and then staring into a false middle distance, bleary-eyed and half-asleep. During these classes, I think about my plans for the week, contemplate something I’ve read, or think about nothing at all. Contrary to assumption, no one appears creepy, and I don’t feel embarrassment. Rather, it’s the students who display a coy deference towards me – their subject, but also a living human thing who has chosen to expose what is considered private and vulnerable to strangers for money. How did the body become such a sacred yet abject thing? I gradually get to know other life models in between class changes, and start work at other tertiary institutions which offer fine arts courses.
This is the richest I’ve ever been. I average between $700 and $1000 each week. I begin thinking about travelling outside the country. What does the world look like? For fun, I start a zine distro and a punk touring collective, organising gigs for international bands touring the Southeast Asian region, sometimes going along with them to places as far-flung as the Philippines. Before I know it, my world expands, and I unwittingly learn lessons; I begin to feel more comfortable about my corporeality, more blasé about my body. I will never have a job like this again.
victualler’s assistant
‘It’s fun,’ Eileen exclaims. ‘You get to everything before the plebs do!’ Every couple of months or so, I meet up with a motley crew of women I got to know over LiveJournal. We’re moderators of a longstanding local buy-sell-trade group and our positions are highly coveted. It’s not unlike being the manager of a thrift store – as soon as someone’s used goods arrives, you get first dibs. I never intended to be a moderator, but because I’m already spending so much time on the computer at the cybercafe, Eileen, whom I got to know from a book lovers’ community, suggests that I’d be perfect for it.
Eileen is a pint-sized, very excitable woman. I’m drawn to her immediately – she posts Murakami quotes and uses words like ‘obtuse’ to insult others. She also refers to herself as a ‘textual bulimic’ and often invokes Nietzsche. When I eventually meet up with her, she seems to like me too, even though we’re worlds apart: she’s just graduating university to become a lawyer, and I’m a junior college drop-out with hardly any prospects in life. These bi-monthly meetings would go on for years.
One day Eileen gets in touch on Facebook, the newfangled thing everyone’s on. It reminds me of Friendster, except you don’t leave ‘testimonials’ – you interact as if you were on chat, but where everyone can see. LiveJournal’s still going, but I hardly see updates anymore.
‘Sorry for being so MIA the last two years, my internship was really eating up my life! I’m finally done, though, and I don’t think I want to become a lawyer lol’. Eileen informs me that she’s starting a business with a boyfriend and they’re looking for staff. ‘I remember you being pretty cool,’ she writes. ‘If you need a job, I can pay you $10 an hour and all you need to do is to help us every now and then’.
I’m still employed as a life model, but the proposition sounds interesting enough, the thought of having more income increasingly appealing. Furthermore, $10 an hour is pretty fucking good for a customer service role; I remember the last one which paid me half that. The business Eileen is starting is a little cafe-slash-bar-slash-events-venue in a rapidly-gentrifying part of the city, beloved for its colonial-era architecture and refurbished Chinese-style shophouses.
Eileen invites me to meet her there a day before the grand opening, introducing me to Richard, her boyfriend, who knows a lot about coffee because he attended university in Australia. He also knows a lot about Japanese whiskey because he’s travelled to Japan several times, proclaiming himself a ‘Japanophile’. I’m supposed to learn how to make coffees under his guidance, and even though I have never drunk an Australian coffee in my life I decide to give it a shot.
My coffees turn out to be mediocre. How do you copy something to perfection when you have zero understanding of how the original is supposed to seem and taste? I’m not sure what the customers think because I never get any complaints; I wonder to myself if it’s because they know nothing about coffee too, and drinking this so-called Australian flat white provides them with a proximity to the kind of cultural literacy they aspire to.
Most of the customers who come into the cafe are anglophone Chinese like I am, except much older. I overhear conversations about poetry and German films. Some of my shifts coincide with spoken-word readings and activist fundraisers, both worlds I gingerly dip my feet into – I like some of these people who regale me with enviable stories about their lives, but otherwise they are generally unrelatable, even though I try and fill conversations with references to travel, pretending to sound like a seasoned hand when it’s still very much a novelty. Money is a thing that opens up your world.
At Eileen and Richard’s cafe, I learn to pull German weisse beers and open bottles deftly with a bottle-opener, skills I have to pick up from scratch. At the time, even though I don’t consider myself ‘straight-edge’, I stay away from alcohol and cigarettes for no real reason other than a stubborn holding on to some vague collection of ethics.
One quiet evening, a well-dressed man comes in and orders a whisky on the rocks. Richard and Eileen aren’t there on Sundays, and I have no idea what a glass of whisky looks like. Deciding to wing it, I pour from a Yamazaki 12-year bottle and fill the glass to just below the brim. The customer looks at me the whole time, his eyes agog. I give him the drink, and he continues staring at me as if I’m batshit insane. A few seconds of silence. He doesn’t say a single word, but finally he finds his voice. ‘This isn’t how you serve a glass of whisky,’ he intones, an eerie calmness in his voice. ‘Okay,’ I respond, unsure what to do next. He picks up the shot measure and helps himself. ‘Cool,’ I say. I want to disappear into the ground. He acts like nothing has happened and walks back to his seat, the full glass of whisky still on the bar, its accusing presence amplifying my embarrassment.
service and food champion
The situation at home becomes more unbearable, and I find myself staying late in libraries after school. My mother’s anxiety and other unaddressed mental health issues, coupled with my father’s apathy, alcoholism and depression, start spilling over and turn into gaslighting, control and blame. In the face of this, my younger sibling tries to live his life as ordinarily as possible – he plays sports and joins a church, even though the family is non-religious. I sense his scorn whenever we are in the same room. ‘Why don’t you have any friends? You’re so fucking weird,’ he says to me one weekend when all I’ve done is stay in my room and scroll through LiveJournal for twelve hours. I contemplate telling him my friends are online, but that will only confirm his beliefs.
Every day after school, I take a bus that stops outside a row of shops near the apartment block my family lives in in the northeastern part of Singapore. One of these shops is the smallest McDonald’s I’ve ever seen: it’s the size of a newsagents, with only twelve tables – because of this it’s almost kitsch. Aren’t all McDonald’s stores meant to be towering two-storey behemoths with all the space imaginable? One afternoon I see a sign stuck to the window advertising for staff, and my gut instinct tells me to go in to ask for an application form. I return it the next day and they ask for my availability on the spot. Hooray, I’ve landed my first job.
I go home and tell my mother, and she explodes in anger. ‘Do you really need to be working at such a young age?’ And: ‘What will the neighbours think?’ I’ve dealt with these maniacal bouts of abuse before, so I say nothing and disappear into my room. Luckily or unluckily, there are no laws deterring minors from being employed in Singapore; children between the ages of thirteen and fifteen cannot work in an industrial setting ‘unless with family members’, otherwise ‘light work’ is legal. There are no minimum wage laws either. I start the job on $3.50 an hour, working alongside other teenage miscreants as well as women in their 60s who see no choice of ever retiring in this cut-throat society, glitzy on the outside, miserable on the inside.
My manager is a twenty-something woman called Michelle and she takes her job very seriously. On training day, she shows the newcomers videos set in a 1970s United States, with a transatlantic voiceover that draws our attention to the protocols we have to follow. ‘Always look a customer in the eye, smile, greet them, then ask them what they want. After that – and this is the most important part – ask them if they want to upsize,’ Michelle instructs us. ‘We have to follow all the QCs. If there are any issues, just tell me and I’ll KIV it’. It’s the first time I’ve heard anyone use so many acronyms in one sitting.
I take this first job very seriously. Michelle becomes a model of sorts. When other managers come to appraise the store, I make a show of doing my best. Everyone takes the job equally seriously, working purposefully. Arrive at your shift fifteen minutes prior, change over to the standard-issue uniform, punch in using the time-sheet machine. I enjoy seeing the slip go in and get spat out, like a robot bestowing approval.
There are other firsts: I’m gingerly making friends, even if we don’t make plans to hang out outside of work hours. It’s a great excuse to not be at home: I enjoy working there far too much, goofing around with Belinda and Arif alongside the older women, who inadvertently become grandmother figures, and who tut-tut at our teenage mischiefs but enjoy our juvenile energy anyway; they frequently ask if we’re getting fed, slipping us bits of food that later get written off as waste. I project my familial baggage on them and pretend they’re my siblings and grandmothers – there might be a reason why they refer to workers as ‘the family’ in staff videos. No one ever talks about their life outside of work. I meet my first real girlfriend there. I make double McChickens and quadruple Big Macs, because I can. I like to think I invented the Double Filet O’Fish. After all, they did not credit Alan Dimayuga, a long-time manager in 1970s San Francisco, who was purported to have come up with the Extra Value Meal. One morning, a member of the kitchen staff calls in sick, and Michelle asks me if I can fill their shift when I show up to work that evening, even though I’ve yet to undergo any training in the kitchen. ‘It’s really easy, I’ll show you,’ she tells me, a gurgle of panic in her usually measured voice. She demonstrates how long I should steam the buns for, and how many frozen beef patties to slap onto the grill before it’s too many. Each burger is then individually wrapped and slid down the metal chute to appear at the front display behind the counter, hot and perfect for the customer. Michelle is right; it’s not hard. If I forget a detail, the playbook is right in front of me, each one the same as the next the world over.
This versatility turns out useful, because I start getting more shifts, alternating between the front counter and the kitchen. But Michelle makes a mistake in an order one day, and I come out of the kitchen to point it out. Big mistake! That day I’m called in for something called ‘insubordination’. Michelle is hysterical, so hysterical I can see the veins on her neck pop.
