In other news, here’s the latest weather forecast: “Cloudy conditions will continue all day. Low of 23 and high of 29 degrees.” Which is very cool!

And the latest hearing test results: ” Severe to profound sensorineural hearing loss. Predominately profound in degree.” This is not cool at all.

We were on a northward-bound KTM train from Tanjong Pagar towards Malaysia, along the way leaving our childhoods behind. On the train, you asked me how big the universe is and what lies beyond. I have forgotten my reply, just as I have forgotten to remember you every September. And now, twenty-one years older than you ever will be, as I leave another year behind, reading the book again, I found lines I didn’t know I was searching for.

你离去的影子很长，
我找到了说不出来的忧伤。

I was pissing the day away. And there, out my wide open toilet window facing the east, in the twilight sky, was a lone star – flickering, bright white, with a hint of red. Surely not? On Christmas Day? I stared at the star awhile wondering if it’s an aeroplane. And there it continued to shine, steady and stationary. I rushed off to search for and download a star identification app and held up the phone screen facing it, and nabbed a suspect. Rigel. Asked ChatGPT “what stars can be seen with naked eye in eastern part of singapore night sky?” It threw up another – Betelgeuse, which is “reddish, prominent”. And I turned back to the toilet and looked out the window again and could only see clouds.

I wonder who still remembers Sky Wu and Ukulele’s song. Anyway, a compilation of pictures from the past half year!

Coming into this, I was actually kind of ambivalent about the whole thing, about how I would connect to it. Yup, surely it will touch on universal themes such as gender roles and parenthood and adulthood which everyone can relate to in some form or other. Nope, surely the misanthrope me won’t be able to honestly or actually relate much to it – I have never ventured into that neighbourhood (that one involving offspring and being tied down by these people for, say, the next twenty years), childrearing (other than making faces at and performing slapstick routines for kids I run into, I’m a bit shamefaced to say I always run far from, and disown, them at every opportunity), and had seldom given a serious thought to gender issues.

Then, immersed in the play, which featured not one, not two, not three, but four(!) couples whose relationships overlap and entangle with one another, I became very much certain and in agreement with the whole best-script-award-winning thing. (And I’m not saying it because Faith is probably going to read it. Other more qualified people earlier also say already.)

The Fourth Trimester is a very talky, dense and domestic drama – I mean in the best and most down-to-earth sense. There are long dialogues and conversations and scenes of, eh, pumping, of messiness; I love how realistically messy the centrepiece and fixed-in-the middle-of-the-stage living room was throughout most of the play, and of how everyone is so perfectly cast and attired in the everyday clothes of the typical Singaporean home and office. The stories? We go deep into them: First-time parents struggling with a newborn, breastfeeding and their own parental trauma, a couple struggling to conceive and what it means for their relationship, a picture-perfect power couple with two kids struggling in their marriage (“do you even like me?” hit particularly hard), and a forever single struggling to find the one and who is never single but who has.. reasons. Again, what a cast.

Anyway, you don’t come here for escapism or fantasy or as a refugee from real life; you come here to embrace the realities – of being parents, of making a marriage work, to see the unseen labours of being a mother and a wife and all the expectations it entails (and also of being a father and its associated manly nonsense), and of navigating life as adults oh so suddenly and are we still our own persons and what happened to our dreams, and with generous doses of humour and cheeky contemporary references (all the more to smirk, laugh and nod knowingly at).

The Fourth Trimester is among the most grounded plays I have watched so far. Yet how effortlessly it takes off and soars.

P/s: It’s still on till 30 November!

Through Alishan, Sun Moon Lake, Shifen and Jiufen, Taipei, Hualien, Taroko Gorge, Luodong, from close up to faraway.