If You Train, Don't Drive

At the ripe old age of 31, my complete lack of knowledge about and enthusiasm for driving surprises many. Cars - symbols of industrialistcapitalistcolonialist america! And as the president of the environment action group in my junior college days (an 8 member-strong incarnation of Captain Planet, determined to recycle every scrap of torn love letters and mis-applied lecture notes our peers so carelessly discard), perhaps a small voice of protest still remains.

Most probably it's just laziness. Plus the truth is, drivers miss out on so much that happens on public buses and trains. Well, nothing actually HAPPENS on buses and trains. Arrivals and departures. Conversations on the mobile phones. Many gameboy battles lost and won. Lovers doing some public loving. But mostly naps...people dozing off, dreaming private dreams. Nothing happens, and everything happens.

Kidnap Droolpeacefully kidnap

Just last week, we attended a conference on taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien as part of the SIFF's retrospective on him. Taking the cue from Hou's latest film, Cafe Lumiere, the first paper used Hou's scenes of train stations and train cabins to trace what really is the writer's own personal jresponse to cinematic sublimity and quiet. The writer made an interesting observation: that every time cars appear in Hou's films, it's a sign that something bad is going to happen. Trains are the location for occasions of silent, almost transcendent, love and union. Once inside cars, lovers break up, all relations crumble.

lovers napI repeat: Take the train. Don't drive.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The point is if the train is ever soooooo empty.... i will take it. Otherwise, i still say DRIVE. at least its not body squeezing bodies. Or an odor all mixed up that if can really collect that distinctive odor.... you will strike it risk and call it a new brand of parfume known as the "Sweaty Train Smell"

And lastly, you will not see THAT loud talking auntie who expects the world to give her the seat!
7:12 am
Tym said…
I miss taking the train, partly because it was a great place to get some serious reading on the way to/from work. (I get motion sickness if I read on the bus.)

Even when the train is full, it doesn't smell as bad as the bus!
9:56 am
ampulets said…
I'll rather risk having to deal with funny smells. Or the temptation that all these folks who have bought Roti-Boy bring along with them on the train/bus.
7:15 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

miracle man

Image
I can never quite tell if Ma J is asleep or just pretending The old lady in the bed next to Ma J's is in hospital because of a second stroke. When we were visiting Ma J this afternoon, the old lady's middle-aged son was also there. He was in his usual round-neck tee tucked into a pair of blue jeans with a belt made of buffalo hide. His limbs are slim, but his belly is round. His bald head, too, is round and abnormally large for his small frame. Let's call him Ah Biao , or if you prefer an English name, you can think of him as Bill (after his buffalo hide belt). When J and I walked out of the ward, Ah Biao or Bill followed us. Three of us stood around the counter by the nurses' work area. J and I were quiet, enjoying the break. Then Ah Biao wanted to show us something special. "Eh, I show you something." Ah Biao unzipped his black waist pouch and took out a small yellow cloth pouch. He untied the colourful string that secured the opening of the pouch. He weigh
Read the rest of this post

on a Hou Hsiao Hsien movie set

Image
By the tracks of the Jiji Station, the oldest train station in Taiwan OK, not quite. We did not even manage to go all the way south to Hou Hsiao Hsien's KaoShiung or even Tainan, but we did venture out from Taipei for 3 days to Taichung. But the real takeaway was actually this supposed feature of Hou Hsiao Hsien's films - trains! Trains are about the best thing about traveling. Unlike cars and taxis, trains are a social mode of transport. Train stations allow for reunions and departures, points to assess and affirm relationships. I admit that all this fades away when you are tired or in a great hurry (or both). But seriously, cars (oh, 4-wheelers!) have only brought about pollution and wasteful consumption, traffic jams, asphalt, mindless obsession with speed and countless quarrels in the stressful, enclosed interiors of cars. Friends, take it slow. Take the train. Read a book. Hold your partner's hand. Be there with the people around you. With Taiwan's highspeed rail
Read the rest of this post

fear not history

Image
Fiction on this island has never quite flourished. Perhaps because we've never quite made peace with our histories. But two genres of fiction hold special place in Singapore as a result. Ghost stories - the art of unresolved pasts. And that even stranger fruit of fact-as-fiction/fiction-as-history. Part speculative history. Part documentary fiction. A romance of obscurity. The Lan Fang Chronicles , Choy Ka Fai's work supported by the Arts Council's Arts Creation Fund and commissioned for this year's Arts Festival, is maybe of this latter genre. Choy Ka Fai chances upon the Lan Fang Republic, supposedly the first democratic republic in SEAsia, set up by the Hakka Chinese in West Borneo. His research in West Borneo, China and Holland takes him through archival material, abandoned sites, photocopied photographs, a supposed descendent of Luo Fang Bo (founder of Lan Fang) and accounts of Dutch missionaries and colonists. These materials allow him to re-construct a sk
Read the rest of this post