It’s been a while since CC and I have been home at the same time, and it’s been never since CC and I and the kid have been home at the same time, so it has been family fun all day every day since I arrived last week.

There has been a trip to the beach at Sentosa, where the baby cooed at the peacocks and charmed even the pimply teenage boys who came up to play ball with her;

the Bishan pasar malam, where, just like at the best heartland night markets, the hawkers laid out fifty-cent underwear; aluminium made-in-China shaving kits; fishballs on sticks; small packets of boiled peanuts; cold sugarcane juice in plastic bags; and the glorious bounty of local fruits, I don’t know why my dear mother wastes her time with oranges and apples, common, common. The fruitsellers holler “One dollar one dollar one dollar” amid piles of longans, rambutans, duku langsats, and mangosteens, and then the durian uncle deftly pries a fruit open to announce: “Yellow!”;

clearing out old toy chests to find countless teddy bears, a Smurf the size of a four-year-old child, a panda dressed in plaid, and a China Monopoly boardgame complete with paper visas to Germany. One of the bears is the color of a butter cake, with arms long enough to wave above his head as if he were railing against the price of honey these days. His name is Bear-Bear. In the great tradition of Chinese-spoken English, “Bear-Bear” is pronounced: third tone, second tone. I’d hoped we’d find Lambie (third tone, second tone) too, but I think he must have perished in the soft-toy mold-a-thon. Mary’s little lamb went to school, but Lambie went on all family vacations. He was, at some point, lost in some European hotel and, subsequently, refound in the laundry. He’d been stitched up several times over the years, but my last memory of him still sees stuffing escaping through a small hole in the neck.



Altogether, down-home family time—where we shop for a bookshelf for upstairs and a shower hose for downstairs—is not necessarily making for a news revolution on this blog, but it is awfully nice, and the baby smells like sweetness.