Scribble scrabble.
#2095 | It’s 2019, and stupidity is somehow still romantic.
Hey guys,
So tonight I caught what is possibly the stupidest show I’ve watched since Dylan Dog Dead Of the Night in 2010, and I was so mad I came straight home to write a post about it. The show in question is the 2019 remake of the very popular manga turned drama, It Started with a Kiss, starring Darren Wang and Jelly Lin, and till tonight I have never felt such a strong compulsion to fling a shoe at the movie screen before. Instead, bound by social conventions and niceties, I settled for sighing very loudly and rolling my eyes at every turn till my boyfriend told me to stop being a hater, which is why I’m here instead where no one can interrupt my tirade. Here we go.
The movie’s plot doesnt digress too much from the original drama, which admittedly, is very problematic in hindsight. I actually watched the original taiwanese drama back in the day, ten years ago now, and I remember being very addicted to it, which just goes to show that I had kind of mortifying taste. The story follows a girl who’s kind of stupid (her challenged intellect is actually a real and emphasized plot point in the show) and who is in love with the school genius who has an IQ of 200. Seriously, only in asia will you be a total king in school because you’re smart. But ok, we like our As and what not, so I can buy it. Anyway, said genius rejects her confession of love, but her house collapses in an earthquake and she somehow moves in to his (no surprises there!) very huge mansion because their parents were friends back in school. And although he is totally disgusted by her stalkerish behavior (at some point she actually sleeps with a pillow that has his face printed on the side), he eventually falls in love with her and asks her to marry him because – and I kid you not – “no one will ever love me more than you have”.
Lets put aside the total ludicrousness of the plot. If Koreans can have their alien boyfriends and the Japanese can have their custom made robotic boyfriends, then fine, we can have an earthquake that forces the female protagonist to move in with her school crush. Whatever. And I can even close an eye to the bad acting and the incredibly irritating romanticizing of this puppy dog behavior where a girl stalking a guy around the school is seen as cute and somehow persistently romantic instead of actually creepy and kind of maniac. But I nearly lost it when the female protagonist, who’s one defining characteristic the whole movie was that she’s really stupid, was described as being a carefree romantic. She rocks up to the new house, meets her new foster family, and is mocked by a kid for being stupid. In that moment, the mother of her crush takes her hands, sighs, and says: “Actually, I always wanted a romantic character like yours. It’s better to live a simple, carefree life, you’ll be happier as a person.”
At this point in the movie I turned to my boyfriend and said loudly: “When are they going to stop equating total stupidity to an actual romantic quality? It’s kind of totally insulting for everyone involved.”
And he was like: “Jem this is a movie theater, keep it down.”
But the more the show went on the more upset I got. The show’s writing never gave the actress a chance to introduce any sort of complexity into the character – she continues to faithfully be the wide-eyed, melodramatic girl who laughs cutely when she gets 9/100 for math because she’s so cute that it hurts her brain to study. She devotes her entire existence to the material comforts of her crush, running out into the rain to give him a blanket (even though he had an umbrella and a jacket), stalking him when he moves out of the house to make sure her romantic rival isn’t spending the night at his new place, and even staying up late to sew him some kind of voodoo exam charm before his SATS in a show of support. Of course none of this is done quietly: she appears at his exam venue looking all wraith-like, her dark eye circles a physical stamp of her devotion to him, and promptly faints from exhaustion, getting knocked over by a car and causing him to miss the exam so he can get her to the hospital. She only deviates from being this nonentity of a person once, which is to stand up for another friend of hers (who’s obviously also secretly in love with her) when her crush is characteristically cruel to him. She says: I regret liking you, I’ll go to university and move on from you.
And he corners her, forces a kiss onto her, and says: oh yeah? You think you can move on from liking me? Right. And walks away.
How, in 2019, is this still a thing? How is this still being greenlighted, still being made?
The worst, totally offensive thing about that whole farce is that it quite clearly wasnt set up as satire, and nothing about the scene possessed any kind of timely self-awareness. Everything about the lingering camera pull, the background music swell – hell, even the totally cinematic golden hour lighting for what is supposedly a midday occurrence, suggested that we find this moment to be a romantic one, a show of hidden affection for her, a win in the larger scheme of girl-likes-boy.
No. Take your win, and stuff it.
The problem with framing stupidity as a cute, romantic quality is that everybody loses. Girls lose, because in performing this utterly brainless behavior that orients itself around the movements of a man, they have no chance to cultivate any sort of self-respect. Boys lose, because instead of being allowed to develop thoughtful relationships with women, they’re socialised to mentor and encourage this flouncy behavior in their potential partners. Society loses, because millions of dollars invested into a first world education system is wasted on kids who’d rather prance around and make origami structures out of their exam scripts. Worse, when you frame stupidity as a primitive, instinctive quality that is seductive in its naivete, it validates a matching primitive response from the other party, which of course has been socially nurtured over the years to refer to a traditionally alpha show of force. In the absence of level intellectual engagement, girls swoon, boys take charge, consent flies out of the window, and we all have to clap and call it romantic.
At the end of the movie, when the boy realises that no one will ever love him as much as she does, and proposes to her, I felt this incredible melancholy settle into me. I felt sad because these are the romantic narratives that we have grown up with, that are not unfamiliar to us even as we revisit them a decade later. I felt sad because when there was an opportunity for a remake to improve upon the original material, even keeping in mind all that has happened in the world, the writers made a choice to present the same, dated narrative that has no doubt fed into international stereotypes of Asian girls being moony, giggly, and all about the man. I felt sad because these narratives are cute, they’re (unintentionally) insiduous in their cuteness, and so young girls will watch these growing up, and think that self-respect, intellectual independence, and love are mutually exclusive, and given the emphasis on romance the world over, many of these girls will choose the only version of love they are conditioned to know and accept. I felt sad because there are ways to preserve the innocent and all-consuming excitement of a schoolgirl crush without rendering it toxic, and the showrunners did not take that choice to deepen the development of the show.
Because let’s be clear: it’s toxic behavior. This show was a classic portrayal of toxic girlfriend behavior, except with a cutesy filter slapped on. When a man she likes rejects her, she can’t take no for an answer. When he tells her he wants to be left alone, she blackmails him with an embarassing clip of him dancing which she got from his mum. When his family’s business goes into crisis, she makes it all about her, and takes it upon herself to make decisions about how long he should work, sleep, and eat. When he stays late at work, trying to save his company from going bankrupt, we see her near tears, sitting by a cup of coffee she made for him, which he didn’t drink (or want). This inability to take no for an answer, and insistence on making everything about oneself is problematic behavior whether it’s performed by a man or a woman. Angling it as romantic, and writing this as a lead up to a happy ending, is an insult to all parties involved.
It’s 2019 people. Resorting to literal, low IQ that correlates to an all consuming devotion to a man is lazy and annoying character development. Maybe it’s time we demand more from our romcoms. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time for us to be totally radical, and stop framing an inability to pass algebra as cute.
x
Jem
#2094 | Doing Literally Everything in my Activewear
All photos taken on the Nikon Z6, and edited on VSCO
In my mind hong kong is good for a couple of things, and those things mainly – nightlife, food, and the option of easy access to seasonal weather. Hiking, obviously, is conspicuously missing, a natural byproduct of the other thing I conspicuously lack; ie. a sense of balance. It was no small horror then, that on our recent trip to hongkong my two very fit girlfriends wanted to dedicate a day to hiking… even though one of them had recently sprained a leg doing the exact same thing in Jogjakarta. Why would you voluntarily elect to hike again a mere six months after being incapacitated by the very thing? Quite clearly this hiking business drives people loopy. And there is no point protesting against loopy, since logic plays no part in its formation, so off we went.
x
Jem
#2093 | Tell me what to drink – LQV Hong Kong
Pictures taken on the Nikon Z6, edited in VSCO
If having a tall French man smile at you and tell you exactly what to drink is your kind of vibe, then you must make a point of swinging by Le Quinze Vins Hong Kong. I claim no credit for stumbling upon the place since our happy evening there was no coincidence – my friend who relocated to hongkong for work last year (and who now dubiously claims to be the hong kong tour guide extraordinaire ) led us there during our recent visit. A solid recommendation too, which led to this exchange:
me: hey i wanna plug LQV in a blogpost is that k
marcus: yes please note that i’ll be anyone’s tour guide for a modest fee
marcus: of a bottle of wine at LQV
me: that’s very reasonable indeed
marcus: as reasonable as the wine prices at LQV
So it goes.
If you’re headed to Hong Kong, it follows that you’re headed to a bar. It’s not like I have a pokedex of every single wine bar in hong kong, but I’ve been to my fair share over the years, and LQV is one of the more memorable ones. It joins a growing trend of wine importers that also sells bottles on the side, bars which are getting increasingly popular due to the advantages of scale (LQV has over 1,000 wines) and cozy hole-in-the-wall vibes (I’m pretty sure it only seats 30pax, max). It’s a great way to discover new wines, theoretically, though if you’re a cheerfully undiscerning winehead like me, the best part is really asking for recommendations and being extra delighted when the wines appear in the correct sort of glass, making you look like a more refined wino than you actually are. The wine, by the way, was excellent. And yes, it’s true, the place smells like a stale fart, characteristic of all serious wine bars that also serve cheese.. but if the rapid adaptation to the horrendously ugly iOS7 was anything to go by, people will get used to anything. So it’s not a deal breaker; in fact, possibly it adds to the place’s charm.
Le Quinze Vins
G/F, No.9 Swatow Street, Wan Chai, Hong Kong, China
+852 2673 7636
12pm – 12 am
x
Jem
#2092 | How good does Crab Congee sound?! // Chee Kei, Hong Kong
So how good does crab congee sound, anyway? Crab is such a luxury, yet such an obsession with us Singaporeans, which is to be expected since our national dish is the debatably the chilli crab. All that is a roundabout way of saying, I suppose, that when we heard of a place in Hong Kong serving up golden crab congee, we kind of were all over it. Obviously.
Chee Kei is a local place with several branches, the one we visited this time was near our hotel in Causeway Bay. There was a short queue which moved quite fast, so we were seated in about ten minutes and ready for some yum yum in our tum tum business. You can order ala carte or in sets, and it’s quite good value for money at approximately 70 to 100HKD per set depending on what you get. Chee Kei is primarily known as a wonton shop, but dont be fooled – the permanent queues outside the outlets are there for the crab congee. For wontons abound in hongkong but crab congee is one in a million.
And of the fabled congee? It comes in a little bamboo pot, with a crab sitting atop a steaming bowl of pasty golden porridge. Golden, because the porridge is blended with crab roe, which makes it absolutely magical.
銅鑼灣店
Causeway Bay Shop
香港銅鑼灣波斯富街84號
84 Percival St., Causeway Bay
Phone: +852 2890 8616
x
Jem
#2091 | a stream of consciousness aboard the cx635
Hey guys,
So I want to tell you guys about that time I got upgraded at the gate for a flight, which was approximately two hours ago. I always find that I feel the immense need to write about my air journeys and possibly it’s because of the bubbly solitude of flights that creates more space in my head to fill with thoughts and random observations which sometimes includes the throwaway musing that actually i am the most talkative person in the world, except usually 90% of it sits in my cranium and doesn’t leak down to my mouth. And that was a thought that also occured to me today as I was sipping on my house red wine in premium economy which was chilled although red wine shouldn’t really be chilled, but which was very sweet anyway because it had been enhanced with the delicious knowledge that it was premium economy wine which i had done absolutely nothing to deserve but was being given anyway.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I was walking to the gate in a sort of grumpy mood because our flight had been delayed and the grumpiness was equal parts because it had been delayed and because i was not surprised that it had. Indeed, I have taken more delayed than undelayed flights on Cathay, for a Cathay flight to be delayed has become sort of routine. In fact, the last time I was in hong kong, the flight home was cancelled and it was because they had misplaced their aircraft and it never arrived. So I had to stay in the airport hotel unable to sleep because I was anxious about being bumped to the morning flight which of course led to me oversleeping and almost missing my morning flight. Also, when I was 18, I had taken a Cathay flight which had been delayed five hours because there had been a security threat on board and they had to get the police to come escort him off and this was right after I had seen a documentary on 911 so it was very dramatic and I was sure that would have been the end of me. Which it wasnt, but all this is to say that my impression of Cathay Pacific has been less than stellar.
I thought about whether to include that whole spiel as it seems ungrateful to rag on an airline that had upgraded (spoiler!) me to premium economy but then I thought, it’s all true what I feel about cathay and anyway even people can do both great and annoying things, what more airplane carriers. So they’d not be mutually exclusive. Anyway as I appraoched the gate and scanned my boarding pass, the machine emitted an alarming bleep and the stewardess took my passport and struck out my pass and gave me another one. And I couldnt help noticing that the new boarding pass she gave me had been pre printed already and was lying on the gate counter so this all seemed very premeditated.
why are you giving me a new pass? I asked her, and she was all like, so your seat has been changed. And this made me even grumpier because it seemed to me evidence of an overbooked flight, but then she raised her very perfectly manicured eyebrow and pointed at my new boarding pass which now said premium economy and suddenly all my grumpy feelings evaporated from my being and floated up to who knows where.
!!!
It seems prudent to contextualise my excitement: being randomly upgraded has always been one of my life dreams. People dream of buying cars and houses, but not I. I just want to be the subject of a random airline upgrade and also to watch Sierra Boggess and Ramin Karimloo do the live duet from The Point of No Return at least once in my lifetime. The second will never happen it seems, since Sierra has gone on to greater things, and who knows where Ramin is now, probably fronting Jesus Christ Superstar on some stage in Osaka. And the first has stubbornly refused to happen. Until now.
I have been upgraded once, just once before. This happened on ANA on the way back from Tokyo some years ago, where I’d been sent for work. My sister had come along with me on that trip, and the system hadn’t registered that we were passengers so it had given our seats away. The woman at the counter had looked very stressed about this and apologised so many times, she was the picture of Japanese Anxiety which if you’ve read Amelie Nothomb’s Fear and Trembling you’ll know exactly what I mean. Her anxiety was creating anxiety in me so to calm her down I pretended to be ~super calm~ and I said: please dont worry about it at all to which she said I’m SO SORRY and I said dont worry please and we seemed to be caught in this endless loop of mutual reassurance until she went aha! and put us on Premium Economy. And I was so excited I wanted to pee myself. She seemed really pleased to have found a solution too. In fact the only person who didn’t seem pleased was my sister who didnt understand how significant this was for me, to have been upgraded, even if it weren’t a random upgrade but rather, a sort of very luxurious apology for a minor inconveneince. She just went, so it’s like the same, but with bigger seats? which made me wonder seriously how we could have been related at all.
But no, this was my first time being truly randomly upgraded and I felt the very precient click of things falling into place and my life dreams being held gently and allowed to take flight. I got to my seat and there was so much space in it I could actually cross my legs and read my book quite comfortably. And of course, there was this wonderful sunset throwing golden dusty light into the cabin and it all seemed very cinematic and beautiful.
Because I was so excitable I spent a lot of time poking around which greatly annoyed the lady next to me who had obviously paid actual money to be there. I guess my behavior was what you’d associate with someone who’s soul truly belongs in Economy. I made my chair go up and down and messed with the drink holder and asked for blankets and water and looked through all the movie selections even though I dont watch movies on flights. I was a little bit too obvious staring at my row mate’s tv screen because she spent an hour watching the advertisement for the Hong Kong Airport over and over again!!!! Instead of an actual movie! Like, lady, you just came from the airport. It was alright. Wait till you see Changi Airport.
Perhaps the most amazing thing even to myself was what transpired when mealtime rolled around. For reasons like nausea and stuff I dont really eat on airplanes, I find it an awful experience. Firstly, motion sickness. Secondly, the food’s always very whatever. Thirdly, if you say yes to a meal, it stays in front of you for hours and they dont take back the tray for what feels like forever and you cant really do anything else with the space being occupied in front of you, not even get up and go to the toilet or reach for your bags, and all you can do is regret saying yes to the meal. But when the stewardess asked me about my meal choice I actually said, without hesitation, that yes I’d like the lobster sauce pasta please, which amazed even me.
It’s funny that they called it lobster sauce pasta because obviously there was nothing in there that was even pretending to be lobster meat, it was just pasta with prawns covered in lobster flavored sauce. But it was delicious. I was doing a lot of thinking while eating, I was thinking things like i cant believe im eating on a plane! and this stuff is delicious! and is this really delicious or am i just thinking it is because I am happy about being upgraded? And I also asked for a glass of red wine and felt very fancy about the whole thing. I finished the pasta even though I wasnt hungry, it felt only right. And then the stewardess gave me some strawberry ice cream and I was like do you have the adult flavors? and she looked at me and she was like, this is the adult flavor. Anyway it was very good.
X
Jem
#2090 | Shari Shari Kakigori will change your dessert life
All photos taken on the Nikon Z6, 35f1.8
Hey guys,
Kakigori is a sort of Japanese shaved ice dessert, in essence the Japanese counterpart to Singapore’s ice kachang, korea’s bingsu. And yet the Japanese do it better. I say this not lightly: Shari Shari Kakigori is, like, life changing.
I tried it for the first time last June when Hong Kong was at the peak of its relentless humidity, and thought it quite magical. I second guessed myself though, I thought possibly that could have been attributed to the consumption of anything cold in that weather. And this year, again, I went back in the dead of winter. Still incredible, and this time, my two girlfriends reflected the delight on my face, confirming Shari Shari as straight up ah-mazing across the board.
Where Singapore’s ice kachang is icy and Korea’s bingsu is packed powder, the Japanese kakigori is fresh snow that melts in your mouth. The ingredients they favor are different too, all sakura and matcha and tea. We went for their best seller, the Earl Grey shaved ice, which comes with mochi on top and milk pudding + peanut powder in the middle. It’s very fluffy – and the earl grey flavor is evenly spread out so you dont end up with a melting puddle of flavorless ice at the end of the affair. And, most importantly, the flavor is delightful. The secret, apparently, is in the water – they claim to import their ice from hokkaido, the water giving the kakigori a cleaner, silkier taste. This also creates the illusion that your dessert is light, guilt-free, and almost healthy, which of course is exactly that: an illusion. Still, this doesn’t change the fact that it’s so damned good. Literally redefining the standards of an ideal dessert, actually.
Other flavors available include Hojicha, Mango, Raspberry, so on and so forth. I tried their seasonal flavors the last time and the Earl Grey this time, and the earl grey is still my favorite. It’s now a staple on my Hong Kong itinerary, and a strong recommendation to anyone headed to HK. And if you’re in Hong Kong over the summer, note this down as a compulsory activity. Stat.
SHARI SHARI KAKIGORI HOUSE ( 氷屋 )
Address: G/F 14 Haven Street,
Causeway Bay Hong Kong
Tel: +852 2529 1223
Opening Hours: 1:00PM – 12:00AM Daily
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShariShari.Kakigori
Direction: 7 mins walk from Exit F1 of Causeway Bay MTR Station.’or
Address: 47 Staunton St, Central
Hours: Varying, normally about 1-11pmPrices: Approx 70-80HKD/kakigori⋅
Click here to see the rest of my culinary recommendations for Hong Kong on TripAdvisor!🙂
x
Jem
Camera Info
I shoot on a Nikon D750 with a 35f/1.8 lens, a Fujifilm x100v, or my Samsung Note 20 Ultra. Pictures are edited in Lightroom Mobile or VSCO