In Continuum.

So, that tradition during the Chinese New Year is never more obvious, than the tradition of the lion dance. You see crews mounted on the back of lorries traveling down the streets of Singapore every now and then to chaste a certain company or household of bad luck, armed with their percussion instruments and their fake lion heads. That's what they do, they go around houses to chase away bad luck by hitting those percussion instruments as hard as they can, while putting on a show of how a giant-headed smiley boy would tame a lion with naught but a straw fan. Quite some skills there for a giant-headed smiley boy, but that's what usually happens anyway. Lion dancing is a tradition that has been around for as long as the Chinese people I reckon, and that is saying a lot. Even in modern day Singapore, you can see them running around everywhere in their colorful and flamboyant pants. Even my neighborhood is not free from their endless percussion instruments that seem to go on forever, and never with a tolerable melody whatsoever. Instead of wearing off bad fortune, the only thing that it wore away this morning was my patience. Nonetheless, despite the annoyance, I guess I have a soft spot for lion dancers, and a lot of other friends that I know of with equally odd careers. 

It is a strange sort of blessing to have friends from different facets of life. They always say that the army is like a mini-version of an actual society. We have people with a higher education, then people with mid-ranged education, people who are incredibly smart, people who are incredibly stupid, and then there are the ones who are smart, but just can't be bothered with a lot of things in their lives. I have met all of those people in my army life, and every conversation that I have had with them was an interesting one, simply because of how liberating it was to throw aside our differences and just engage ourselves in a conversation. There was a guy whom I got to know from the army, and his day job other than being in the army was to traffic drugs. That is not to say that it is a particularly admirable job, but it was still rather interesting -admittedly - to hear about the risks involved, how the transactions are done, how much he earns with every closed business deals. He ended up being caught outside, served his time in prison and then did his term in the detention barracks for a little more than a year. You would think that a person with "Fu4 Mu3 En1 Qing2" tattooed on his forearm would do something less heartbreaking to his parents. But anyway, that's an interesting friend that I met in the army.

Anyway, the lion dancers. I remember the Chinese New Year of 2006, the company organized a battalion-wide gathering at the cookhouse, and a lion dancing performance was supposed to occur. I think it was the intent of the battalion HQ to cut cost, which was probably why they looked around desperately for corporals who might know a thing or two about lion dancing. So this friend of mine from my platoon volunteered, and said something about how he's actually part of an actual crew outside the camp, that he knew how to lion dance, to the surprise of us all. You see, he isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, never the type of person we expected a whole lot out of. He isn't very bright, having just graduated from ITE with a diploma to fix air-conditioning, and the trait is similar even in the context of the army, as brainless as it already is. He can hardly spell the word "four", and to me he was just the kind of person that the society would give up on simply because - he's not good enough.

But there he was, with the body of the fake lion draped over his head and the head of the lion in his arms, and he danced to he beat of the percussion instruments as if he was born to do something like that. He jumped onto the knees of his partner behind, turned the head in different directions, made the lion blink a couple of times before jumping back down to taunt the giant-headed smiley boy. To those that never thought very highly of him, we swallowed back our words at that very moment. It did take him a long time to form the word "Fu" with the peeled orange skin, but he still managed to do it anyway, and that received a round of applause from everyone there at the canteen that day. By the time it was all done, there was a ringing sound in my ears and not to mention the pulsating drums in my head. But those did not interfere with my newfound respect for the guy whom we all deemed as being worthless and stupid. He was still good for something after all, even if the society cannot be bothered with somebody with a education level like him. If not in the career of lion dancing, he contemplated on getting into the air-conditioning fixing business, which I found to be terribly sad for some reason.

Either way, his career options aren't very spectacular. Either you lion dance for the whole year, or you fix air-conditioners for the whole year. It is possible to do lion dancing for just fifteen days, and then fix air-conditioners for the other three hundred and fifty days, but even that is a dead end in the long run. He sure knows a lot about air-conditioning though, telling me about the different kinds of air-conditioning units and how to fix them, and I was amazed at how little they need to study to get the diploma, which is supposed to be a three year course. Anyway, it is kind of sad that the society is probably never going to look too highly at someone like him, someone whose talents are in fixing air-conditioning and lion dancing. But the truth is, even big major companies have air-conditioning problems at times, and all of them are superstitious about bad luck coming through the front door too. All the companies need people like him to fix their air-conditioning, wear off their bad luck, and yet we have so little respect for people like that. They say that you can judge a society by how they treat their poorest, and I suppose in the case of Singapore, the people higher up in the food chain just cannot care less about the people at the bottom - people like him, the lion dancers.

My sister has a thing about noise, she can't stand it. Yet, she is a city-girl at heart, liking the convenience in traveling and the ease in getting an internet access. She complains every single time there are lion dancers nineteen floors below, drumming away and waking her up from her slumber. I have been woken up several times in the past few days, at eight in the morning and just four hours after I've fallen asleep. But unlike my sister, I don't storm out of my room to complain about it to my mother with a face darker than a rotten plum. I know, that these people need to exist, and they need to do whatever they are doing right now, because they haven't got much of a choice other than lion dancing. Give them a job in the office, give them a job with a better pay, and maybe we can have the right to complain about crazy percussion instruments waking half the neighborhood up in the morning. But that is not the case now, because the majority of our society still cannot care less about people with jobs like that. But as long as the tradition of having a Chinese New Year exists, there will always be lion dancers, and always a way out for someone like them, someone like my friend.