Saturday, Feb. 19, 2005 - 12:26 a.m.
AC Boy:
When he starts dating a girl, he makes sure that they watch a movie at Lido Shawcentre. The attraction for him isn't the arctic airconditioning in Lido 2 (they have no choice but to snuggle), or the narrowness of the seats (they can enjoy the accidental contact of bodies and believe it to be accidental). The girls will never guess, but he brings them to Lido Shawcentre because it has the longest escalators in the country, one set stretching from the first to the third storey, and then another from the third to the sixth. The escalators, those wonders of modern technology, allow him to demonstrate his chivalry by a small and almost inconsequential gesture - he stands on a step lower than the girl, ready to catch her if she falls. The chivalry is a pretense, and the girl knows it, but of course she enjoys the pretense. She enjoys having someone say, I will catch you if you should ever fall.
RI Boy:
The RI boy has thought about this logically. If a girl is stupid enough to fall off an escalator, she should not be allowed to procreate. Yes, he knows about the airconditiong and seats in Lido 2 as well. Yes, he sometimes takes those same escalators too, but he always stands on the same level with a girl. If he wants to be symbolic about it, that gesture says that there is no hidden intent, that with him, complete honesty is possible (though he has learnt not all girls want this). When he goes to Lido with this type of girl he prefers to take the lift. When the lift door slide shut there is immediately a sense of forced intimacy in the mirrored walls. The mirrors allow for indirectness, a device to let her catch him looking at her reflection.
AC Boy:
Shawcentre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where he can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those sotong RI boys. It is not as easy as it looks and it is all in the timing - push the chair in too fast and one rams the girl into the table, doing it too slowly betrays a distinct lack of finesse. That is why, before ever performing this on a girl, the AC boy will have practiced it at home a number of times, on mothers, sisters, cousins, maids. After the meal, he leads her out of the building through the heavy glass doors on the first floor, and never via the automatic sliding doors. In this gesture he shows his strength, and that he can use his strength to open doors for her, so that she need not open any for herself.
RI Boy:
It is only on special occasions that he brings her to restaurants. The average RI boy does not hail from housing estates with Anglo-Saxon names, and the only western restaurant that he lunches at on a regular basis is McDonald's. They eat at the chicken-rice stall in Far East Shopping centre, or at the hawker centres in Ghim Moh, or Bishan. At these places, they can both feel relaxed and talk in their natural vernaculars, and not worry about using the wrong fork because there is only one. Not always, but sometimes, there is real understanding from these conversations. At the hawker centres, he cannot pull chairs out for the girl because they are fixed to the ground, and invariably at these places, there are never any doors between them.
AC Boy:
By forgoing Armani Exchange for two weeks, he has saved enough money to buy the girl an impressive-enough looking ring. He asks the salesgirl if she has an anonymous looking box for the ring, instead of one with the words "Soo Kee jewellery" emblazoned on its top. He flips through a few women's magazines at a bookshop to find out what makes a good kisser, and calls up a friend from school to confirm it. The friend says that the kiss itself doesn't really matter - it's more of the force of the surprise that will overwhelm her. He notes this and runs the mental scenario through his head again, the simultaneous holding of her hand and the leaning into her face, all accomplished in one swift, unexpected action.
RI Boy:
He re-reads the poem he wrote again, sixteen lines cobbled together from a few Shakespearean sonnets, and Keatsian odes, courtesy of literature class. He is mildly satisfied with it and thinks that she will be impressed, unless of course, she is also taking literature for O' levels and is studying the same anthology of poems. The next day he brings the poem to school, and asks his friend, the best lit student in the class, to critique it. After reading it, his friend tells him he needs to find his own voice. So during recess, he sits at the canteen table with the crumpled poem and a fresh piece of paper, trying to find the first words to express his virgin, juvenile love.
