Massage as medicine

Panda does not want any of it.

I went to see my neighborhood Chinese medicine doctor the other day after a bad run-in with some cockles (little bivalves that are currently very hard to come by in Singapore).

The doctor asked me a lot of questions, looked carefully at my tongue and eyes, held my wrist between his thumb and forefinger for a few minutes, and noted the yellow-green pallor of my skin. Diagnosis: I am not getting enough rest (true), under a lot of stress (sure), and my liver and lungs (and everything connected to them in the Chinese medicine sense) haven't had a chance to recover from the food poisoning because of all of the above plus the Cipro I tried initially. He prescribed bed before 11pm (livers apparently rest best between 11pm and 2am) and four herbal medicines in pill and potion form.

He gave my prescription to an elderly lady in a lab coat at the front of the clinic, and I watched as she pulled various roots and seeds from the tiny drawers lining the walls, ground them into powder, and threw them into a little terracotta pot to boil. While I was waiting for my concoction to brew, I wandered around the rest of the clinic and found myself suddenly in a room full of silent babies. They were getting massages.

Some sat upright and others lay on their backs, but one lay on his side like a tiny dictator--hand extended out for servicing by his attendant. The nurse masseuses carefully kneaded their backs, scratched their heads, and rubbed tiny circles into their palms. The babies drooled (more than usual) in ecstasy.

Baby massage seems awfully decadent, but I can say, four days of bitter herbal brew and my tummy is feeling much better.

At the mall

I needed a SIM card, so I headed over to Mustafa Center, which I discovered is a 24-hour, multi-level warehouse store that rolls the thrill of shopping and the risk of dying in a stampede in one.

I pressed my way through shoes (1st), gold products (B1), and stuffed animals (B2) to the SIM card counter (way back of B2). Amit was standing there, and I showed him my phone, which I had bought in Rwanda and wasn't sure was in the same frequency zone as Singapore.

"Wanda?" he asked puzzled. I explained it was a country next to Sudan in Africa and watched as his eyes grew to the size of pingpong balls. "The place where many people are killed," he said. He shook his head, "A very bad country."

I paused to think about how to respond but not long enough because I blurted, "No, no! Every country has gone through a similar thing. Everywhere at some point, people have killed each other, even here in Singapore."

He did the thing I've noticed people do here when slightly embarrassed, which is to act as though the inappropriate thing that just happened, entirely didn't, the way maybe a crazy American grandmother might do. He told me I needed to get an adapter to plug in my phone and charge it before we could check the SIM card. I wove my way to House Appliances (front of B2), dug through bins for the adapter, waited in line behind a couple buying Jenga, a man buying AXE medicated lotion, and a teen buying a furry jacket with tiger stripes, and then headed back to Amit. He was stepping towards the direction of the exit. "Nine thirty, time for me to go home," he said. "Next guy comes at ten thirty. You wait for him if you need to call Wanda tonight."

PSA

On TV, an adorable little girl drawing a picture of depressive-looking mother and little brother figures--sprinkling both with little blue circles to indicate abundant tears. With a grim expression, the little girl then draws three white lines on the paper. A very serious man voice says, "These are the reason her daddy is in jail. Don't smoke illegal cigarettes."

La la la

A couple hours after I landed, I found myself in a meeting. At one point, there was a lively discussion and everyone started speaking in a quick, rhythmic language I'd never heard before. I started wondering whether there was a common language in Singapore that I wasn't aware of. It sounded to me a bit like Khmer mixed with Russian.

Later on, I found out it had been English. To be fair, I had been really tired. Also, there are little dialectic ticks in the English spoken here that throw me off. The word "la," for one, fills in for "um," "oh," "yes," "well," "really," and awkward pauses. I'm getting better, but a good deal of the time still, I'm not sure what the other person is saying. La.

Slots

On the Singapore S-Pass (work visa) application, my choices for race are Caucasian, Chinese, Indian, Malay, and Other. For religion, they are Buddhist, Christian, Free Thinking, Hindu, Muslim, Taoist, and Other.