The Expatriates by Janice Y K Lee

What a lovely book! Set among the American expats in Hong Kong, this was a backdrop which felt very familiar, so it was fun reading about it. Highly recommend it!

Mother's Day

Mother's Day was well-spent at the park (cricket, picnic lunch, some grown up time, some kiddie time). Would've been perfect if Singapore were a little cooler, but that's being greedy now.

A lot of Whatsapp messages were received on Mother's Day, and many Facebook posts were tagged. Not really sure if I'm comfortable calling myself a 'superhero' or 'an angel from heaven'. It's a bit intimidating, don't you think? I'm human, I make mistakes, I'm imperfect, and I'm a mum only because I love being one.

Alphonso Mangoes!

Are in season... And we've got a whole crate full of them...Yay, smells like the summer of '89

The Swan Lake

Reverse schooled (v): When a child introduces a 30-something parent to something cool and new, and the parent learns with wide-eyed rapture.

K came home from school the other day, and said he learnt about folk-tales in his language class, and would like to watch the ballet The Swan Lake. I had never seen a ballet before. I had watched Natalie Portman's Black Swan and I had watched my friends daughter's ballet recital with students under the age of 12, but never seen a proper ballet. So we googled The Swan Lake and watched it together on YouTube. Little K knew the sequence of the Acts and what happens in each Act, so he talked me through it as the story progressed. It was in the final act, that I saw tears welling up in his eyes as he said, "Now Prince Seigfried & Odelle decide they want to die together rather than live apart". His emotional grasp of the ballet shocked me. At the age of 7, I would've imagined that he would find an hour long ballet boring, but I was so wrong! He surprised me with the breadth of his interests - from Star Wars to Swan Lake it's quite a span! As for me, I learnt and saw something new yesterday. And it sure was pretty!

P.S. Here's me thinking in verses again:

Swans tiptoe across my screen,

As violins make their melody prance,

And a story unfolds of a tragic love,

Beautiful words that can be spoken only in dance.

I watch him tearing at the swan's despair,

Her hollow arched back and despondent gait,

As I watch my own swan's metamorphosis,

I am stunned by the moment's weight.

He has learnt a new language today,

Felt a stir in a new depth within,

Rooting for love he doesn't yet understand,

Unknowingly but not unwittingly, to win.

The Dressmaker

I got into this book because of a book club I recently joined. I didn't eventually make it to the book club meeting, so as usual, here I am blogging about it.

The book is a good peek into rural Australia from the '50s, but it's a little simplistic, even caricaturish, in its lead characters. The heroine is extremely good. At everything. The village folks are extremely narrow-minded and cruel. With everything. There is no grey (which usually make for fascinating characters, for me).

Not the best book I've read, but it was my first book set in Australia, so it gets points for expanding my literary horizons! Besides, Rosalie Ham is a gifted story teller, she keeps the pace going even though it's a slow story in a rural village-life kind of setting.