Day & Night
Today is my cousin’s housewarming party. He is getting married on New Year’s Eve and is ready to move into his marriage home. The apartment is on the 15th floor of a high rise condominium, complete with swimming pool, seafront and hillside views. It’s good to be home!
Day and night: a view of Penang from 15 floors above
His mum invites the family reverend for a prayer and blessing session, followed by nibbles of kuih and tong suey. The older ones adjourn for dinner downtown at 5pm and because it’s too early for us to eat dinner, the younger ones stay behind to watch TV.
Young & Old
Depending on your posse, daytime TV can be monopolised by Taiwanese soap operas, where crying, fighting and leukemia are involved in every episode. Because none of us can understand the drama without reading Malay subtitles, us cousins decide to watch liquid vinyl being poured into a mould to make the limbs of crash test dummies on Discovery Channel. We watch how Archimedes discovered the propeller system on the History Channel, before moving onto more intelligent channels like E! where Tiger Woods’ sex scandal is top story. We switch to Channel [V] to be greeted by Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun video, before moving to Youtube to watch Beyoncé’s Single Ladies. Then it is 8pm, the right time for dinner.
Wan Phing Lim 