Rose

So imma get a story in real quick about something that happened on Valentine's Day, while I am still in the silly mood: I met my old flame on Valentine's, and she gave me a rose.

It wasn't a romantic thing by any stretch. We had gone out a few times some years ago, the fuse did not ignite, she found someone as trad (Traditional Catholic) as she was and they got married. Meanwhile my pride got hurt and I got mad at the Trads for many years and went into another relationship saying "yeah suck it, Trads!" and then that relationship fell apart and I have to work on myself and that means (gasp!) not being so mad at the Trads anymore.

Anyway this woman has a strange fixation on my sister, whom she had never met. Today I happened to pass by her stall and after a while she shot me a text saying, "yeah we got um some extra roses and don't know where to put them... maybe your sister can have one?"

And I said, inwardly, what the fuck am I supposed to do, go home and give my own biological sister a rose on Valentine's Day? Besides, Jamie is a florist, she has spent the whole week of overtime messing with rose bouquets; she will throw up if she kerplops home after Hell Week and sees yet another rose. You're a florist too, bro surely you would know that!

But I did not say all of that to her. Instead I said, "Yes"

I could be mean to her, I could doubt her motives; but it has been so long, and I have already ranted all my rants. I am tired. I do not question it anymore.

So I went back to the stall and my Old Flame handed me a rose (meant for my poor suffering sister) and madafakas NOW I HAVE A ROSE

I charged straight into a single's event wielding this stupid rose like gals and pals look at this ROSE I got on Valentine's Day and afterwards I galloped up and down Middle Road holding this ROSE. On Valentine's Day!

On this special day of Valentine, some people are in love

Some people are in love with the idea of love

But me, I just like to have a rose

It's festive!

In the end I did bring it home and put my one rose into a nice vase and told my sister that this rose is meant for her. Jamie, who had brought home two vase-fuls of yellow and orange roses, was as confused as I am, but did not turn it down. Now, it graces the top of the dining room counter. The outcome is the same whether the rose was meant for her or for me. End of story.

I see you

Photo: Andrew Lin

— Swing Dance Meditations: Part 7 —

Acts of love happen often on the dance floor. Platonic acts: Friendly gestures, handshakes, asking to dance, thanking the partner after each dance... And in addition, drawing from my experiences learning martial arts on the dojo, floorcraft, making sure my friends are not swinging into pillars, fanning them with my hand fan, and letting people know that they are allowed to rest. I rack my brain looking out for everyone, at least, as many people as bandwidth can allow.

I was brought up by very affectionate parents who communicate love through touch. Mom is very much a hugger, and Dad likes to initiate handshakes. Dad initiates handshakes for any or no reason at all; he would do it at any moment if he felt like it, at home, on the road... Touch has become a way with which I receive and communicate reassurance. 

I realise that this has made me and my sisters outliers in Singaporean society. The average Singaporean parent communicates love through providing means. They do not say "thank you" when presented with small favours, but treat them as expected. They become surprised and curious to see me fistbump my sister so often, or thank my parents when they give me something. It surprised me, in turn, to see how much of my family culture comes off as strange to an outsider.

I experience love when I feel seen. I had the problem of not being able to take a complement and responding to complements by diminishing it or deflecting them. The spell was broken in August last year in Bangkok by a dance partner who told me that I had good situational awareness. We just had had a class in a stuffy dance hall. When it came time for a break, I took off into the service corridors and got the air conditioning units running. And she saw me doing it.

This was a complement that said, "I see you."

Nathanael asked, 'How do you know me?' 

Jesus replied, 'Before Philip came to call you, I saw you under the fig tree.'

Nathanael answered, 'Rabbi, you are the Son of God, you are the king of Israel.'

(John 1:48-49)

"I see you like Jesus saw Nathanael under the fig tree."

I came home to Singapore and made more friends who see something in me and say it to my face. I learn to take them as graciously as I can. I learn to see my friends and complement them as well, sometimes to return the favour, sometimes to pay it forward, since Allah doesn't care about the accounting.

I use dances to sharpen the skill of seeing the other. I learn not merely to treat my partner as a conduit to practice, as an audience, or as an instrument, but to have a conversation with them. I learn about each partner's dispositions and preferences, and put them into a mental dossier, itemised: Do they prefer certain moves, do they not prefer others? Do they tend to turn me down? What aspects of the dance are important for them? What do they tend to wear? Are they energetic on the dance floor, or are they phlegmatic? Do they have a preference in the music: tempo, genre, intensity? Are they open to new moves, or exotic moves from other traditions? Do they make eye contact, and do they rely on it? I remember things that people say; I act on them and they find out about it through the dance.

I receive love when I feel seen during the dance. To give an example, we have a follow in the community who dances in a strange way: instead of being passive like most other follows, she frequently takes the wheel, and lead me into moves. She imitates my moves, and I imitate hers. She brings in strange moves from other dances and laughs while doing it. She is also a maniac who makes eye contact with me when dancing with other people.

Since I treat dance as a way to build character, I have been dancing different ways from month to month. For this reason, I feel exhilaration when I see my friends change their dance game, because this is a sign that they are growing too, and that I am not alone on this path of growth, after all.

Jeongnyeon

Swing Dance Meditation: Part 6 - A Dance Philosophy Somehow Inspired by K-Drama

I watched Jeongnyeon twice over earlier this year. It was the time when I had completed my Lindy Hop beginner classes, and had begun dipping into the wild uncontrollable world of socials. Being freshly inserted in this hullaballoo, I experienced a period of transition where everything was overwhelming and uncomfortable. During this time, thinking about Jeongnyeon and the way she handled her difficulties became a source of inspiration and strength for me.

Jeongnyeon finds her own Bangja

Jeongnyeon skips class and found the silly at the square. She brings the same silly to the stage and endears the crowds with her own special, extra silly Bangja. I learned that dancing Lindy Hop was not merely a static, historically-informed exercise where I do the exact moves of the ancestors, but adopting an attitude; you might make mistakes, but just as a wrong note played with confidence becomes a right note (example here), the same applies also to dance moves.

There were a few socials where my interior focus was to own the bullshit. I frequently make the mistake of initiating something silly, then in the middle of it backpedalling because what if I was too silly? When this happens the follow catches a half-cue and becomes frustrated. In September last year I made a choice to consciously choose to follow through the silly move, instead of instinctually pulling back. Just by that choice, I felt that I had progressed from the beginner ranks.

I find my own Jeongnyeon and Yeongseo

The character of Yeongseo was Jeongnyeon's foil. She is in many ways Jeongnyeon's polar opposite: Jeongnyeon is spontaneous, free-spirited, acts on instinct, and prone to trouble, while Yeongseo is academic, serious, stable, and a hard worker. The Bildungsroman was not written just for Jeongnyeon, but for Yeongseo as well, such that the latter, while initially standoffish, eventually became more co-protagonist than antagonist, and their paths of growth eventually converged. Jeongnyeon needed Yeongseo to grow in maturity and regard for others, and Yeongseo needed Jeongnyeon to let go of her inner baggage and to express herself more creatively.

I have felt the tug of both characters in me on the floor. In November I reflected on my dance and found out that I needed to be a lot more mindful of my follows, and my leaning hard into spontaneity, while a response to my old trauma, came at the cost of potentially alienating my friends. Because of this, I began to learn from the best leads on the floor: this would be Geir, who does not pull fancy moves, but moves with the music and makes his follows feel at ease - to the follow, this was a bigger plus than fancy moves by far. I signed up for extra classes to pay attention to the ineffable qualities of dance. I also began to build an interior dossier on each follow's preferences and dispositions, so that I could dance the best way with every one of them.

Of course, in this process I get to lose some of the silly which I had accumulated in September and October, which entails even losing some moves. I am currently scrambling to get them back. Insh'Allah, I will find a happy medium between these two philosophies.

Silk Road Travelogue

Link to Photo Album #1

This trip happened because you could fly to Tashkent from Kuala Lumpur for cheap, starting late 2025. It was about 3/4 solo and 1/4 day tours. By default, an intrepid traveller would come here to plow the Silk Road and hit Khiva, Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent (in this order or the reverse). However, I went for variety, because these two countries have something in them for everyone

• Modern city with abundant amenities, cute metro stations, Korean food, some Silk Road stuff: Tashkent
• Nature + ski / hiking: Amirsoy, Chimgan, Shing Valley
• Silk Road stuff: Samarkand, (Bukhara and Khiva)
• Aral Sea ecological disaster-tourism, the second largest art collection in the former Soviet Union, fashion shopping: Nukus

The most useful languages to learn here are Uzbek, Tajik and Russian (as lingua franca). People in Nukus, Karakalpakstan speak Karakalpak, and people living around Chimgan speak Kazakh. A sizeable Korean community gathers at Sacred Heart Tashkent on Sunday evenings. When the usher found out that my Korean was dogwater, she switched to Mandarin for my benefit. These plus English makes 8 languages in total encountered on this trip

Part 1: Cities

Tashkent

TASHKENT: Cushy city I would describe as a mix between Paris and Seoul. You can tap into any bus and metro station with a credit card. I had thought Magic City was a tourist trap until I visited and realised it was really an Uzbek trap. Uzbekistan Ovozi Street is nice and leafy and posh. There are little corners around town where you can hide in and pretend you are in Korea; The restaurant "Makkeoli" served one of the best makkeoli that I have ever tasted

Nukus

NUKUS: Town at the edge of the desert in the Khwarezmian delta reminded me of Lincoln, Nebraska because the buildings were short, streets are in a nice grid and the airport is within walking distance to everywhere. I was here to see the famous art museum and buy clothes at Inddi Fry (they take online orders, so I probably didn't have to go in person, but I did anyway for the sheer hell of it)

Part 2: Mountains

Link to Photo Album #2

Chimgan

Here was where I first tried riding a horse unassisted. It started when I spied a posse of tourists on horseback riding to the mountain. Among them was a lady in a beige trenchcoat, the sort that every fancy urbane woman in Tashkent has on during the Autumn, but she steered her steed with ease, as if she had spent all her life on the steppe; her hair was blown about by the stiff breeze; she had the likeness of Siranush Harutyunyan; I was so awestruck that I found the next rider that came along and asked for a ride on his horse. The rider's name is Isobek, a Kazakh, and his horse is called Vasily. After some time messing about, Isobek gave me a crash course on horse controls and let me loose. I had been on many guided horseback tours where the horses were strung along by the guide and never got to steer the horse myself, so I thank this duo here for pushing me one step up!

Seven Lakes (Haftkul, Shing Valley)

Seven lakes lie along the Shing River. They are pretty as heck and are visited daily by daytrippers from Samarkand across the border. The village of Padrud was one of our stops. They are blessed with electricity 12 whole hours per day. The roads are perilously paved over scree and should be attempted only by donkeys or the pluckiest drivers

Part 3: Silk Road

Link to Photo Album #3

The Heavenly Horses

This was the 4th Century BCE. Alexander the Great had a fit and tore through Asia building cities named "Alexandria" instead of going to therapy like a normal person. On the ruins of Cyropolis he built Alexandria Eschate, the "Furthest Alexandria" (modern Khujand). The garrison installed here would grow into a network of Hellenic city states in the Ferghana Valley. These were known to the Han as Dayuan 大宛, meaning "Great Ionia"

It is now 104 BCE, in the reign of Han Wudi. The Great Ionians had developed a reputation for breeding the Heavenly Horses: absolute units, sturdier and hardier than any variety known either to the Chinese or to their frenemies to the north, the Xiongnu. (They allegedly also sweat blood out of their pores, but I have no idea what to do witu this information)

Emperor Wudi, who craved violence* and anticipated war with Xiongnu in the near future, sent an envoy to Alexandria Eschate asking to buy some sweet sweet Heavenly Horse. The court of Alexandria Eschate convened.

One said, "It's been nice doing business with the Han, but the Heavenly Horses are our only edge over everyone else. Should we really let them have it?" Another scoffed, "Let's not entertain these weaklings. They are too far away! Even if they send an army here, the Taklamakan Desert will claim them before they reach us"

So they roughed up the delegation, robbed them of all their treausres, and replied: "Come And Take Them"**

Naturally Emperor Wudi went apesh1t and sent forth General Li Guangli who slapped together a comically large army of riffraff and they crossed the Taklamakan Desert and ransacked the cities of Great Ionia and replaced the king of Alexandria Eschate with a new king and grabbed 3000 Heavenly Horses and went back to China through the Taklamakan Desert again, in the process losing 20,000 out of 30,000 men and also 2000 of the looted horses.

Reference: Book of the Later Han 《后汉书》; artistic license

*Note 1: "Wudi 武帝" is a posthumous regnal name; the character 武 was chosen to reflect the fact that this emperor habitually craved violence

**Note 2: Whether any Spartan individual was involved in the conversation is left to the reader's imagination

Clans of Zhaowu

The Sogdians had become overlords of the Central Asian Silk Road by the 8th Century CE. In the Chinese Annals (e.g. in the Books of Tang) they were known by their Chinese clan names (tied to the places of their origin) and collectively as the Nine Clans of Zhaowu 昭武九姓. Sogdians enjoyed a high level of prestige in Tang society and were often made governors of the northwestern commanderies. Unfortunately, the most famous Sogdian individual in Chinese history was An Lushan. He was very bad news (c.f. An Lushan Rebellion)

The Sogdian identity lives on today in the region of Sughd, the language of the Yaghnobi, the nation of Tajikistan, and every business in Samarkand who puts "Sogdiana" in their name for style points

Embodied Faith

Photo: Andrew Lin

Swing Dance Meditations Part 5: I was robbed

of an embodied faith when I obsessed over God in the realm of thoughts and ideas, over such a long time of my life. I learned and knew of what to believe, what to say, and how to make what I believe and say consistent to the teachings of the church, of all the little tricks of the mind that convinced myself of my own consistency. I did not live in my body. I wrecked my body on long commutes and sleep deprivation thinking that suffering will make me attain the greatest good. But when I tasted the teachings of Jesus channeled through movement and touch, tension and compression, and saw the thoughts and dispositions of my friends through the conduct of their dance, each of them unique and personal, I realise that I had deprived myself of the awareness of God's love in my own body: I did not know what it felt like in my body when I extended orthodoxy into orthopraxis, because I had not taught myself to feel, but convinced myself that feeling things were sinful.

I thank Jesus for not having stayed an abstract figure, but came to Earth as an embodied being. Humanity has a gnostic instinct that naturally elevated the mind and damned the body to Hell. By living among us he sticks a massive middle finger to our errors. He condensed the 613 Mitzvot of the Torah, implementable through blind faith, into the two axiomatic statements

1. Love God

2. Love your neighbour,

the "what" and the "how" of reciprocating his Love. Whereas the "what" involves the Creator God which is necessarily intangible and ineffable as in all of the other Abrahamic traditions, the "how" concretises it into action that allows the Love to bleed out from worship into our daily lives. Most importantly, as Jesus is incarnate and can represent the object in (1) and (2) simultaneously, these two axioms can even be thought of as a single axiom of the Incarnation.

Because of this, I do not shy away from feeling the sense of touch. I do not see the devil in the gleam in my partner's eye, because when Jesus comes to earth, he baptises our body, our senses and our pleasures. He baptises our blood and guts. He baptises the humble feeding trough where they set him down. He baptises the raggedy shepherds of Bayt Sahur; he baptises the dumb beasts of the manger in Bethlehem. May no one come and tell you that these precious things which he baptised can ever be unclean.