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A review by lpm100
Sarong Party Girls by Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
3.0
Sarong Party Girls
3/5 stars
"White supremacy is alive and well in Asia (Singapore Episode)/ Cautionary Tale of a fictionalized floozy."
*******
I'm going to have to call this "didactic fiction," because it's the only way I can rationalize reading such a trashy fiction book. (James Michener, this is not!)
Background: English is the first language in Singapore, and it is the common language between the three ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay, and Tamil).
But, with most people from these groups speaking other languages at home, a clunky/folksy / colloquial hybrid has developed called "Singlish."
This book is written in English plus Singlish. (Hokkien/ Bahasa Malaysia/ Teochew/ Cantonese/Chinglish)
I was interested to read this book because:
1. I'm very familiar with Chinese culture (married to a Mainland Chinese for 15 years now and with a house full of children) and I wanted to study some of the differences between Chinese on Singapore vs. the Mainland.
2. I love Singapore (beautiful country!) and I wanted to get an idea of what life is like through the eyes of local people.
Jazzy/ Imo(gen)/ Fan/Sher are the four characters composing the Floozy Quartet.
Our protagonist, narrator, and vehicle for this introduction to the Caricatured Sarong Party Girl is Jazzy: a foul-mouthed, Gently Aging Barfly-Slutmonkey.
Lower middle class, not wanting to be..... and yet having no choice in the matter.
She lived at home with her parents and was so dislikable that I can only hope that the author was using her to smear the Sarong Party Girl lifestyle. (Picking up some Englishman at closing time in a bar whose name she didn't realize until she woke up in his apartment the next morning-- shortly before the second pounding.As many bars as she had gone to in as many people as she had been mounted by looking for that *One Special White Guy*..... I'm surprised that there was any tread left on her tires at all.)
One thing that is not clear from this book is the approximate size of Sarong party girls as a subset of all Singaporean women. (Not all Singapore Chinese women are spg's for the same reason not all black people are characters off of "The Wire" / "Friday.")
I certainly hope to G-d that this was not the author's semi-autobiography, because I can't imagine that human being that acts like this is really alive.
*******
Thoughts:
1. Singapore is a wonderful place, and it is absolutely *swimming* in money. Almost all of these places that they were trying to get somebody to take them to (Australia / Canada / United Kingdom) all have lower income per capita than Singapore. $59,797 vs $51,812/43,241.62/40,284.
The United States has a slightly higher GDP per capita ($63,543.58), but the weather is not as good in most of the country as it is in Singapore and also there you have to deal with "the 13%."
2. The book REALLY needed a glossary or some footnotes. The last book that I read that had heavy use of an English pidgin (Yeshivish in Goodman's "A Single Life") l, the author took the trouble to save us 50,000 Google searches by using end of page footnotes.
A clear glossary / footnotes might have told us the English meaning of the word and the derivation. (Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese languages are all very different to each other: Hokkien and Cantonese have nothing to do with each other other than being spoken by Han Chinese.)
3. Chinese people are the same everywhere.
a. No nonsense/matter of fact. (The protagonist evaluates herself and her friends like they are being auctioned on a slave block, and she evaluates their romantic prospects in the same way.)
b. Categorical. (These white foreign men are all interchangeable, and Jazzy and the other Three Big Characters assume that they are all "good" without thinking about how many other different types of guys they will be passing over.)
c. Once a woman is 28, she is considered to be in old lady territory. (This line of reasoning is still very true in the Mainland.)
d. They love proverbs. (I never knew that there was a such thing as an actual proverbs class until page 2 this book.)
e. (p.44) VERY color struck (=light skin girls are "better"). Also, the protagonist thumbed her nose at Malay men, presumably because they are darker like Filipinos or North Indians.
The protagonist also starts ignoring one of the members of the Floozy Quartet because she ended up choosing to marry a local Chinese man? (p.250)??
Of course the protagonist would not even consider a black guy (p. 52)-and they would definitely have had higher availability and more choices for her. (She was also very concerned about the, um, basket size of these *many* male sexual partners, so... there would have been no worries in that department with a black guy.)
f. (p.112) Where there are Chinese men there are MANY hookers of all types. Sauna. KTV. Barbershop. Both in Singapore and the Mainland.
4. When I passed through Singapore, I was asked 100 times "Where do you think this is? China?" Mainland Chinese are The Enemy (p.39). And that theme is returned to again and again throughout the book.
5. Everyone is in such a hurry to look down on someone else.
The local caste system seems to be like:
White expats>Eurasians~Upper class Chinese>Lower class Chinese> Tamil Indians> Malays.
6. There is the special case of the tiny fraction of Eurasians (<1% of Singapore) and they appear so many times in the book that the author MUST have wanted us to remember them.
a. (p.104) One Eurasian character will not even talk to people that he thinks to be "below his level."
b. (p.263): "But when it comes to marrying, they confirm will prefer to marry other Eurasians. 'We are such a small, unique race,' one of them explain to me a long time ago..... 'We really owe it to our ancestors, to Singapore history and identity, to try and preserve the purity of it. Otherwise the Eurasians will gradually disappear!'"
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. Some things are the same everywhere under heaven: you have some woman passing over guys who are not quite first tier to fight other women over guys who really are first tier (and these men have two and three women at any time - - character Imo was the child of a junior wife) and passing over dozens of other otherwise viable/workable choices in the process.
The protagonist was actually groped so inappropriately (p.286) that if this had happened in the United states, the counterparty would have been arrested.
(That groping certainly did not happen in a mosque/ church / temple/ book club/ volunteer organization!)
2. Some things are the same everywhere under heaven: If you want a particular race of people as a dating partner, then your best choice is to just go where there are lots of them instead of trying to sort through a very small supply wherever you happen to be.
Protagonist was interested in white guys? A very small matter for her to go to Australia or someplace in Eastern Europe for a summer study abroad program and she would have been spoiled for choice. And, it would have been cheaper than all of these wasted years (~10) in the bar, and less complex than all these machinations that she was setting up.
3. American cultural energy is everywhere: I cannot believe that there is even one single Chinese person in the *world* by the name of "Cedric." (p.29) for that matter, I can't even believe that there is a non black American person with the name "Cedric."
*******
The takeaway lessons from this book are:
1. Know your dating market.
If it's not where you are, then you might have to go to what you want.
And you may have to go a long way.
2. Don't go through life with blinders on, and become so fixated on finding one thing that you throw away other perfectly good choices.
3. The distribution of sexual partners among men has a pretty high gini coefficient: 90% of women are after the top 10% of men.
If a woman was willing to consider guys at the 70th or 80th percentile, her number of choices would increase by nearly a full log unit.
4. Women who become Pump and Dumps as a result of going after a man with too many choices get what they deserve.
5. Your young life and reproductive years can pass by you before you even know it, one single stoned Saturday night at a time.
*******
Acquired vocabulary words (in order of appearance in book):
Kaki (friend)
Cock decision/ Talking cock (nonsense)
Aiyoh (yowsers, ouch)
Kau beh (complain)
Ang moh (foreigner, usually white)
Goondu (idiot)
Alamak (oh, no!)
Potong (cut off/ steal away)
Hantam (criticize, hit)
Rubba (rub)
Terok (acute/severe)
Ah beng (Chinese version of a thug-lite)
Guniang (this/ a girl)
Mabuk (drunk)
Siam (Hokkien)
Roti prata
Kampong (ghetto/village behavior)
Bang balls territory (back against the wall)
Kopi(s) (coffee)
Cheena (Chinese)
Yong gan de zhou (strut)
Got air
Market uncle (vendor)
Confirm ("definitely")
Habis (finished)
Chor lor (rough, crude)
Kani nah (eff!)
Toot (stupid)
Babi (pig)
Chio (sexy)
Lumpar (layabout; bum)
Atas (snobby, high class)
Longkang (cesspool)
Walao (damn!)
Stylo (stylish)
Tektek (titties)
Kopitiam (coffee time)
Blur (clueless)
Fasterly
Shiok (cool)
Ah chek (old guy)
Garabing garabing (pow!)
Susah (difficult)
Kuai lan (combative)
Lumpa pah lan (all talk no action)
Ah chek (middle aged thug; uncle)
Steam (sexually aroused/arousing)
Pok-ing (screwing)
Lan jiao (means male genitals but is used as a swear word in heated arguments)
Chee bye (damned)
Yonks (a long time)
Kena (be afflicted with [something])
Chiong (rush, charge)
Tolong (please)
Bulbul (bird on Singapore's $5 bill)
Berms (some type of pants?)
Lagi (more; moreover)
Arrow (assert authority)
Pantat (buttocks)
Parang (Malaysian machete)
High(drunk)
Flower prince (Playboy. Chinese English version of the word hua hua gong zi)
Zaogeng (overexpose)
3/5 stars
"White supremacy is alive and well in Asia (Singapore Episode)/ Cautionary Tale of a fictionalized floozy."
*******
I'm going to have to call this "didactic fiction," because it's the only way I can rationalize reading such a trashy fiction book. (James Michener, this is not!)
Background: English is the first language in Singapore, and it is the common language between the three ethnic groups (Chinese, Malay, and Tamil).
But, with most people from these groups speaking other languages at home, a clunky/folksy / colloquial hybrid has developed called "Singlish."
This book is written in English plus Singlish. (Hokkien/ Bahasa Malaysia/ Teochew/ Cantonese/Chinglish)
I was interested to read this book because:
1. I'm very familiar with Chinese culture (married to a Mainland Chinese for 15 years now and with a house full of children) and I wanted to study some of the differences between Chinese on Singapore vs. the Mainland.
2. I love Singapore (beautiful country!) and I wanted to get an idea of what life is like through the eyes of local people.
Jazzy/ Imo(gen)/ Fan/Sher are the four characters composing the Floozy Quartet.
Our protagonist, narrator, and vehicle for this introduction to the Caricatured Sarong Party Girl is Jazzy: a foul-mouthed, Gently Aging Barfly-Slutmonkey.
Lower middle class, not wanting to be..... and yet having no choice in the matter.
She lived at home with her parents and was so dislikable that I can only hope that the author was using her to smear the Sarong Party Girl lifestyle. (Picking up some Englishman at closing time in a bar whose name she didn't realize until she woke up in his apartment the next morning-- shortly before the second pounding.As many bars as she had gone to in as many people as she had been mounted by looking for that *One Special White Guy*..... I'm surprised that there was any tread left on her tires at all.)
One thing that is not clear from this book is the approximate size of Sarong party girls as a subset of all Singaporean women. (Not all Singapore Chinese women are spg's for the same reason not all black people are characters off of "The Wire" / "Friday.")
I certainly hope to G-d that this was not the author's semi-autobiography, because I can't imagine that human being that acts like this is really alive.
*******
Thoughts:
1. Singapore is a wonderful place, and it is absolutely *swimming* in money. Almost all of these places that they were trying to get somebody to take them to (Australia / Canada / United Kingdom) all have lower income per capita than Singapore. $59,797 vs $51,812/43,241.62/40,284.
The United States has a slightly higher GDP per capita ($63,543.58), but the weather is not as good in most of the country as it is in Singapore and also there you have to deal with "the 13%."
2. The book REALLY needed a glossary or some footnotes. The last book that I read that had heavy use of an English pidgin (Yeshivish in Goodman's "A Single Life") l, the author took the trouble to save us 50,000 Google searches by using end of page footnotes.
A clear glossary / footnotes might have told us the English meaning of the word and the derivation. (Contrary to popular belief, the Chinese languages are all very different to each other: Hokkien and Cantonese have nothing to do with each other other than being spoken by Han Chinese.)
3. Chinese people are the same everywhere.
a. No nonsense/matter of fact. (The protagonist evaluates herself and her friends like they are being auctioned on a slave block, and she evaluates their romantic prospects in the same way.)
b. Categorical. (These white foreign men are all interchangeable, and Jazzy and the other Three Big Characters assume that they are all "good" without thinking about how many other different types of guys they will be passing over.)
c. Once a woman is 28, she is considered to be in old lady territory. (This line of reasoning is still very true in the Mainland.)
d. They love proverbs. (I never knew that there was a such thing as an actual proverbs class until page 2 this book.)
e. (p.44) VERY color struck (=light skin girls are "better"). Also, the protagonist thumbed her nose at Malay men, presumably because they are darker like Filipinos or North Indians.
The protagonist also starts ignoring one of the members of the Floozy Quartet because she ended up choosing to marry a local Chinese man? (p.250)??
Of course the protagonist would not even consider a black guy (p. 52)-and they would definitely have had higher availability and more choices for her. (She was also very concerned about the, um, basket size of these *many* male sexual partners, so... there would have been no worries in that department with a black guy.)
f. (p.112) Where there are Chinese men there are MANY hookers of all types. Sauna. KTV. Barbershop. Both in Singapore and the Mainland.
4. When I passed through Singapore, I was asked 100 times "Where do you think this is? China?" Mainland Chinese are The Enemy (p.39). And that theme is returned to again and again throughout the book.
5. Everyone is in such a hurry to look down on someone else.
The local caste system seems to be like:
White expats>Eurasians~Upper class Chinese>Lower class Chinese> Tamil Indians> Malays.
6. There is the special case of the tiny fraction of Eurasians (<1% of Singapore) and they appear so many times in the book that the author MUST have wanted us to remember them.
a. (p.104) One Eurasian character will not even talk to people that he thinks to be "below his level."
b. (p.263): "But when it comes to marrying, they confirm will prefer to marry other Eurasians. 'We are such a small, unique race,' one of them explain to me a long time ago..... 'We really owe it to our ancestors, to Singapore history and identity, to try and preserve the purity of it. Otherwise the Eurasians will gradually disappear!'"
*******
Second order thoughts:
1. Some things are the same everywhere under heaven: you have some woman passing over guys who are not quite first tier to fight other women over guys who really are first tier (and these men have two and three women at any time - - character Imo was the child of a junior wife) and passing over dozens of other otherwise viable/workable choices in the process.
The protagonist was actually groped so inappropriately (p.286) that if this had happened in the United states, the counterparty would have been arrested.
(That groping certainly did not happen in a mosque/ church / temple/ book club/ volunteer organization!)
2. Some things are the same everywhere under heaven: If you want a particular race of people as a dating partner, then your best choice is to just go where there are lots of them instead of trying to sort through a very small supply wherever you happen to be.
Protagonist was interested in white guys? A very small matter for her to go to Australia or someplace in Eastern Europe for a summer study abroad program and she would have been spoiled for choice. And, it would have been cheaper than all of these wasted years (~10) in the bar, and less complex than all these machinations that she was setting up.
3. American cultural energy is everywhere: I cannot believe that there is even one single Chinese person in the *world* by the name of "Cedric." (p.29) for that matter, I can't even believe that there is a non black American person with the name "Cedric."
*******
The takeaway lessons from this book are:
1. Know your dating market.
If it's not where you are, then you might have to go to what you want.
And you may have to go a long way.
2. Don't go through life with blinders on, and become so fixated on finding one thing that you throw away other perfectly good choices.
3. The distribution of sexual partners among men has a pretty high gini coefficient: 90% of women are after the top 10% of men.
If a woman was willing to consider guys at the 70th or 80th percentile, her number of choices would increase by nearly a full log unit.
4. Women who become Pump and Dumps as a result of going after a man with too many choices get what they deserve.
5. Your young life and reproductive years can pass by you before you even know it, one single stoned Saturday night at a time.
*******
Acquired vocabulary words (in order of appearance in book):
Kaki (friend)
Cock decision/ Talking cock (nonsense)
Aiyoh (yowsers, ouch)
Kau beh (complain)
Ang moh (foreigner, usually white)
Goondu (idiot)
Alamak (oh, no!)
Potong (cut off/ steal away)
Hantam (criticize, hit)
Rubba (rub)
Terok (acute/severe)
Ah beng (Chinese version of a thug-lite)
Guniang (this/ a girl)
Mabuk (drunk)
Siam (Hokkien)
Roti prata
Kampong (ghetto/village behavior)
Bang balls territory (back against the wall)
Kopi(s) (coffee)
Cheena (Chinese)
Yong gan de zhou (strut)
Got air
Market uncle (vendor)
Confirm ("definitely")
Habis (finished)
Chor lor (rough, crude)
Kani nah (eff!)
Toot (stupid)
Babi (pig)
Chio (sexy)
Lumpar (layabout; bum)
Atas (snobby, high class)
Longkang (cesspool)
Walao (damn!)
Stylo (stylish)
Tektek (titties)
Kopitiam (coffee time)
Blur (clueless)
Fasterly
Shiok (cool)
Ah chek (old guy)
Garabing garabing (pow!)
Susah (difficult)
Kuai lan (combative)
Lumpa pah lan (all talk no action)
Ah chek (middle aged thug; uncle)
Steam (sexually aroused/arousing)
Pok-ing (screwing)
Lan jiao (means male genitals but is used as a swear word in heated arguments)
Chee bye (damned)
Yonks (a long time)
Kena (be afflicted with [something])
Chiong (rush, charge)
Tolong (please)
Bulbul (bird on Singapore's $5 bill)
Berms (some type of pants?)
Lagi (more; moreover)
Arrow (assert authority)
Pantat (buttocks)
Parang (Malaysian machete)
High(drunk)
Flower prince (Playboy. Chinese English version of the word hua hua gong zi)
Zaogeng (overexpose)