CreativeClubSG

 Flowing There is a moment near the end of 冯友兰 ’s History of Chinese Philosophy where the voice softens. After centuries of schools, arguments, sages, wars, reforms, dynasties rising and collapsing, he does not end with triumph or doctrine. He ends with a description of how a human being may live. Four ways, he suggests—not as ladders to climb, but as modes of inhabiting the same world. What startled me when I first encountered this was how little changes on the surface. A person at the beginning and a person at the end may look identical. They wake, work, eat, speak, age. And yet inwardly, they are living in different universes. In the earliest way of being, life simply happens. One is born into conditions, customs, needs. Hunger dictates action, fear shapes choices, desire pulls the body forward. History has always been full of such lives. Think of peasants during the Han dynasty or medieval Europe, whose entire cosmos was weather, soil, tax collectors, and ritual. They did not...

  Nothing but Memories, Nothing Even of That Today I called Sodeep. Another story. He never ceases to amaze me. He laughed immediately and asked, almost theatrically, “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Of course—both. He told me he has had a good six days since the New Year. I suspected the main companion of that goodness even before he said it: alcohol. New Year’s Eve, he said, was the best night of his life. Four friends. All born in 1964—January, March, September, September again, and December—now sixty-two years old, still swinging. Fourteen bottles. A 25-year Chivas. Thirty-five thousand spent on one great night, paid by two remisiers who decided that money, that night, should turn into sound, sweat, and memory. The place was the Powerhouse . Powerhouse is not merely a club. For an older generation, it is a time capsule. Born of Clarke Quay’s revival in the 1990s, Powerhouse carried an industrial, muscular energy—cavernous interiors, bodies packed close, music ...

  Two Ways of Being Seek arrived quietly, as he always does. He brought his own sake and a small ceramic cup—nothing ornate, nothing symbolic in an obvious way, yet everything about it spoke of intention. He knows what he needs, and he carries it without excess. I had brought my own plain water. I had taken an antihistamine the night before and decided not to drink. It was not a moral decision, just attentiveness. Antihistamines already slow the nervous system; alcohol would only blur the edges further. At this stage of life, wisdom often announces itself as restraint rather than indulgence. I was comfortable with that. Watching Seek drink his sake was enough. We sat with our backs against the waterfalling glass screen. The water fell endlessly behind us, indifferent to our stories, generous in its constancy. It felt like the right backdrop—something moving, dissolving, repeating. Seek spoke of Paris. Not the Paris of postcards or cinema, but a city he found dirty and unkempt....

Today I waited at the NTUC bar with a glass of Glenfiddich 12 years old, wondering for a moment whether my friend had lost his way. Whisky does that—it slows time enough for old doubts to surface. I sat there quietly, the glass warming in my hand, thinking about how friendships stretch across decades, sometimes thinning, sometimes returning with an unexpected density. We were students of one of the greater schools in Singapore, yet we were neighbourhood children first—products of a very particular time. The late 1970s. Singapore was modernising rapidly, but what we absorbed then was not modernity itself—it was the shadow of Western hegemony . We did not yet understand the world; we only sensed that something powerful lay beyond us, somewhere behind English accents, television screens, and imported songs. I grew up poor. There was no television at first, and when black-and-white TV finally arrived, it was precious—encased in a wooden cabinet, with a lock. It heated up when left on too...

    When I met Sodeep again, the sensation that washed over me was oddly familiar — as if time had folded in on itself and placed us back into one of those afternoons at Chinatown, when I still kept a studio there. I remember watching him from a distance in those days: the way he would sneak across from the Subordinate Courts, slip into Block 23, and retrieve his whisky from an old cupboard like a monk tending to a secret altar. He would take a quiet drink, settle himself, and let the world’s weight soften into an afternoon nap. He reminded me then — and still does — of the drunken swordsman in old tales, or the Tang poet who believed clarity arrived only after the world began to blur. There was always something romantic, even mythical, in the way he approached life: half in rebellion, half in surrender, always moving between pleasure and philosophy as though they were two doors opening into the same room. Years passed — years in which both of us walked our separate paths, min...