Singapore: Day Six

Day Six: A fight.

We fight in the morning about sex and I call Akira “useless.” He is sad, but doesn’t fight back. I want a real fight, with yelling. I want him to lose his temper, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t get angry. The closest I’ve ever seen him come is when David visited me in Japan and Akira was jealous and I had to defuse his jealousy.

I throw his suitcase on the floor spilling out the contents. He picks everything up. I want to slap him, yell at him, spit in his face. I tell him I’m leaving and he does nothing but apologize. I make fun of his English.

When he leaves for work, I am still angry.

My wanting to fight has nothing to do with Akira. He is only a near and convenient target. My wanting to fight has only to do with me.

I shouldn’t be here in this place that I’m not interested in. I feel fat and ugly and abandoned. These feelings are not dependent on this situation, this location. I feel this way all the time. When I try to outrun these feelings, they follow me, have followed me around the world. I tried to outrun those feelings, but here they are, on the other side of the dateline, with me, in a hotel room in Singapore.

I’m not interested in Singapore. I’m not interested in seeing the museums or the tourist spots. I’m not interested in going to the beach. I know that this lack of affect is not about Singapore, but about me. This lack of interest in this place is only symptomatic of my lack of interest in my life. I don’t care anymore about the future. I’m tired of caring about anything.

In the morning, after he has gone, I go and sit beside the pool. I read a pamphlet that I picked up in a mosque on Arab Street. The pamphlet is about Muslim women and how they are misunderstood. They’re not oppressed, says the pamphlet. Like any discussion about Muslim women, the pamphlet focuses initially on the veil, the symbol of religious opression. The pamphlet explains that what looks like oppression is really just the upholding of the Islamic requirement that women dress modestly to avoid unwanted attention. This, it explains, is natural order of things. In fact, it is Western Christian women who are oppressed because they suffer from unwanted attention brought about by their freedom to dress any way they want. The pamphlet goes on to explain more salient ways in which Muslim women are free of opression and Western women are oppressed, but frankly I find it to be the whole thing to be somewhat disingenuous, ignorant of the ways in which feminism has improved the lives of countless Western women and men. Still I appreciate the attempt to turn the tables, and in fact I even appreciate the sentiments behind this transparent bit of propoganda, but I can’t much get behind the restrictions that Islam in practice (or any religion) places on women. I mean, the prophet may have said in so many words and passages that women were equal to men, but few of his followers challenge themselves by trying llve to this effect. I’ll take the perils of Western feminism over the safety of religious doctrine any day.

It’s not a sunny day and I am not at the pool for very long before it starts to rain. I pack up my things and decide to have a takeaway lunch from the hawker center down the street. I go to the now-familiar dim sum stall and order chicken feet, carrot cake, rolled dumplings, and steamed pork ribs. I am unhappy and I want to put myself into a carb coma, so I walk down to the convenience store and I buy a loaf of bread and a jar of kaya (a coconut jam made with eggs, sugar, coconut). Back in the room, I eat all the Chinese food and half the bread spread thick with the sweet kaya. I watch bad movies on cable (Donald Trump’s life story and some amazingly awful Micky Rourk and Don Johnson movied called Harley Davidson and The Marlboro Man.

It is a gloomy day, everything is gray and tired and soggy--and I am too.

Akira’s plan for the evening was to go out to dinner with a coworker. He had watched me carefully as he told me about this a few days before and I had said, fine, no problem. Underneath that, I was pissed off that he would even think to make plans for Friday night that didn’t include me. Fuck you, I thought. I came halfway around the world to see you and you make plans to go out on Friday night with a coworker? I really was pissed off when he told me and I said nothing to him.

After work, he returns to the hotel. His coworker is supposed to call later so they can meet. While he is waiting, we talk and he tells me that he was glad I decided not to go home because he had wanted to spend time with me. When he says this, I get angry again. Yeah, sure, I tell him. You wanted to spend time with me? Is that why you’re going to dinner with your coworker?

He ended up not going, lying to his friend when he called.

It didn’t make me any happier.