(Editor's note: Jimmy Carter, America's 39th President, died 29 December 2024 at the age of 100. We are reprinting a profile of him that originally appeared in the October 1995 issue of Esquire.)
“At the risk of antagonising you—” I began to say.
“There’s no way,” Jimmy Carter interrupted.
“You mean better men than I have tried?”
Carter smiled. The things he has won with that smile.
“Have you thought about the Nobel Peace Prize today, I mean before this very moment as I bring it up?”
“No. I haven’t thought about it today.”
On commercial flights, Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, and their Secret Service detail are the first to board the plane, from the tarmac, so they don’t make a fuss in the passenger’s waiting bay. If you fly out of Atlanta a lot, sooner or later you will see them on Delta, first class, bulkhead, starboard side, Rosalynn on the aisle, the two of them inconspicuous, heads down, reading. (On a long haul, Carter is a Louis L’Amour man.) Once things are pretty much stowed but before he can possibly get in the way of the operation, Carter rises and walks the length of the plane, shaking every hand. He used to say, “Hi, I’m Jimmy Carter,” as he did when he was a stranger campaigning for political office, but by now he recognises that introducing himself is an extraneous gesture. “Hello,” he says. Men who haven’t spotted him approaching swallow their Adam’s apples, and women gulp—they do, really.
Carter almost always wears a blue blazer and grey slacks—no necktie on airplanes—and he always looks you in the eye. He is seventy, and his face has lost some of its elasticity (it goes quite slack when he is tired), but otherwise his appearance hasn’t worn down in that rural way his mother’s did. He is fit, about five feet nine, 155 pounds, and he has boatish feet and masculine, tool-carrying hands that I suspect cannot tap or clap on the beat. His carriage is not musical. If a fellow pilgrim manages to engage him for a moment, you will overhear him say, “I enjoyed being president,” in the way another man would say he enjoyed the year he served as, oh, Tail Twister in his Lions Club. He regains his seat swiftly and resumes his reading. You are now flying with the 39th president of the United States of America, the first president to be born in a hospital and probably the last one to have slept only with his wife.
This February noonday, after a change of planes in Miami, Carter and his party were bound for Haiti. The Washington Post and The New York Times would make a splash of the chilly reception that awaited him there. Larry Rohter would report, accurately, on the front page of the Times that Carter “returned to the scene of one of his greatest diplomatic triumphs today. But instead of a hero’s welcome.... Mr Carter landed here to find the walls of the capital covered with graffiti insulting him and no official representative of the Haitian government at the airport to greet him.” The graffiti was rather sparingly brushed, I thought, in red on whitewashed walls, in the same hand or a forger’s. The politest of it called Carter a faux democrat, or it told him to go home, and the nastiest told him to fuck off, more or less. Carter shrugged it off, telling me later it was the work of the left wing of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s party, Lavalas, just venting a streak of rage at him for his work last September in engineering the comfortable removal of the despicable General Raoul Cédras and his epauletted circle.
As for the total lack of government welcome, Carter said, it would have been inappropriate for the Aristide administration to have polished the silver. He was here this time merely as “a college professor, in no official capacity.” So we drove on deep into Port-au-Prince as all college professors do when they land in the Third World, steering a broken-field run around potholes, goats, and pools of human misery, in a slab-sided, twelve-vehicle motorcade under the protection of the American Army and the American Embassy, Humvees taking the point and the drag, .50-caliber machine guns affixed to the roof.
The Carter party ascended John Brown Avenue to the higher ground and cleaner air of Pétionville and secured modest lodgings at a clean but dog-eared establishment called the Villa Créole Hotel, its breezeways banked and canopied by explosions of bougainvillea, frangipani, oleander, and hibiscus. Flowers hung like grapes from the eaves. In less than an hour, Carter had changed into a pale-yellow guayabera, the kind of tropical shirt that looks like a see-through dentist’s blouse, and was receiving a briefing behind opaque, jalousied windows in a room that the bed had been taken out of. Rosalynn Carter sat at her husband’s side, taking copious notes. When she concentrates deeply, she pooches her lower lip way out; when Carter fixes on a tight focus, he runs his tongue into the hollow of his cheek or along the picket fence of his bottom front teeth. Inside the spartan room, one informant after another sketched Haiti’s problems for the couple.
“With the return of Aristide,” said one of the speakers, “there was the belief that a miracle had occurred and the expectation that others were on the way.” He meant, of course, the miracle of financial assistance. The international purser’s office, he said, had “ossified.”
“Is it any more ossified than the government is in coming up with a plan for what to do with these funds?” Carter snapped. On reflection, it was more a snip—but it was quick.
“Well,” said the speaker, dropping his chin into his chest, “you have a government that has inherited a civil-service system that is largely inoperative. . . .”
Seeing that he had deflated the man, Carter said, “I’m not being critical. If I had a billion dollars to give them, could they show me what they would do with it?”
Carter knew all the answers would be negative. Because Haiti had nothing, needed everything, not much effort had gone beyond the wishing. “I’m looking for specifics, plans, the proper ministers, to see what we can do,” he said patiently.
Computers, one fellow volunteered, seeing a specific way to score points with the Great White Father from the Big Rich Nation. He said they needed fifty computers to assist with parliamentary elections. Not specific enough. “What kind?” Carter demanded. “Can they be American-made computers or European? They need the French language, right?”
“Jesus taught that the foundation of greatness is service to others,” Carter said. “If you try hard, God will understand when you fail.”
This went on for an hour, this tedium. Then the Carters walked a few steps to another meeting, this one in an airy open hall giving onto a coral-rock drop-off, swifts out there dive-bombing mosquitoes, geckos fly-catching along the walls, 27 representatives of 18 political parties waiting in a horseshoe seating arrangement to have a word with the former president.
“In Nicaragua, fourteen political parties came together to face the Sandinistas. It would seem to me that 18 parties would guarantee an extreme fragmentation of the vote.” He wondered if there had been any thought about forming a coalition or two. He was nicely told it was every man for himself until further notice. The afternoon wore away dully. Carter sat, listened. He was never impatient. His questions were clear. His attention did not stray. As a cock in the courtyard mistook sundown for sunup and crowed, Carter stood and said, “I know the pleasure of victory and the sadness of defeat, and I wish you all victory, at least in the establishment of democracy.” Then it was back down John Brown Avenue to the palace of the Duvalier Docs, Papa and Baby, for tea with Aristide before supper.
What Jimmy Carter does with his days would bore most men to tears. There is this perception of him dashing vaingloriously round the globe to save people from themselves as well as disease, all the while the grail of a Nobel in the back of his mind. But what he does by and large is go to meetings, one ass-numbing meeting after another, the preponderance of them at the Carter Center in Atlanta. If there were a going-to-meeting Nobel, Carter would get it. The sexiest, most sensational meetings he had last year, the only ones, in fact, that attracted headlines, were in North Korea, Haiti, and Bosnia. In each case, his vast body of critics cited naïveté, said he was sucking up to dictators or undermining American diplomacy or giving away the store. For example, any number of United Nations sources will tell you that last December the Bosnian Serbs used Carter mercilessly to trip a cease-fire: They were dead on their feet; winter was about to grip hard; they needed a break. Carter would say that if that is the case, they used him mercifully; let him be the beard if it stays but one itchy trigger finger. Besides, all he had to do was go to meetings, and that is what he does—when he is not off trying to inoculate some nation against everything but love.
On 1 October, Carter will be 71. Also in October, the Nobel-prize winners will be announced in Oslo. This year, the seventh year he has been nominated, the smart money—as well as some of my own—is already down on the Georgian. Every man has been slighted at least once in his life, turned out by an employer, handed his walking shoes by a lover, unfairly laid low. To the spurned, nothing could ever taste as sweet as proving that the rejection was wrong and stupid. For a one-term president who wasn’t through yet, who was dumped off an executive-branch chopper in a one-holer like Plains, Georgia, to get a life at age 56, a morose wife at his side, for a fellow like that to burst back from the wilderness as Schweitzer, Salk, Solomon, Joseph (the carpenter), Sunday (Billy, the preacher), and the State Department all in one, among others in there (Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas—Marshal Dillon, for all we know), is a pretty impressive act.
“I’d like people to know that we were right, that what Jimmy Carter was doing was best for our country, and that people made a mistake by not voting for him,” Rosalynn would later write.
“All the Carter haters are out again,” says Carter White House chief of staff Hamilton Jordan, “saying he has his own State Department down here, it’s outrageous what he’s doing, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. What he’s doing is showing people that he was the man they voted for in ’76. A lot was done to disparage the person that he really is, the farmer, the Baptist, the southerner. Those things were trivialised in Washington. And what people are seeing after the fact is that those things were real. The Sunday-school teacher, human rights, caring about poor people, the disadvantaged—all real.
“I never will forget, when Reagan was in office, fairly early in his term and the political and media establishment were falling all over him—Carter went with a bunch of people on a bus up to Harlem to build a Habitat for Humanity project. And I happened to be in Washington, which I try to be infrequently, and there were all kinds of cartoons about it, all kinds of comment. ‘Well, Carter is finally doing something he knows how to do.’ They were making fun of the fact that a former president was riding on a bus with a church group up there to build houses for people. It tells you a lot about where the values were inside the Beltway.”
Jimmy Carter will be recalled as the president who let inflation get out of control and as a totally moral man who didn’t know how to cope with the bestial immorality of the Iranians,” Theodore White said as 1981 began. “The combination defeated him.” On 4 January, 1981, Carter taught his last Sunday Bible class in Washington. “Jesus taught that the foundation of greatness is service to others,” he said. “If you try hard, God will understand when you fail.”
Nevertheless, the Carters came home sore losers, especially Rosalynn. “I’d like people to know that we were right, that what Jimmy Carter was doing was best for our country, and that people made a mistake by not voting for him,” Rosalynn would later write. Carter himself found the defeat “incomprehensible.” Not only had he been rejected, as he wrote in one memoir or another, but the country “had chosen a horse determined to run back as fast as possible in the opposite direction.” He got back to Plains to find that his peanut-related concerns had tanked. He was a million dollars in debt. And he had a thoroughly citified daughter, Amy, 12, who was having such a miserable time of the transition that she was outside, up in a pecan tree, and she wouldn’t come down for supper.
After they got Amy off to a school in Atlanta, and happier, Carter finished his book Keeping Faith, and Rosalynn worked on hers, First Lady from Plains. They talked about the presidential library and the “onerous responsibility” of raising money for it. Carter said he didn’t want a memorial or a monument—he kept saying he had more of a “teaching centre” in mind. They entertained architectural proposals. One novel proposition included a shrine visible all over Atlanta, featuring a spire that was meant to represent the Camp David accords; depending on your perspective, a cross held prominence or a Star of David or a Muslim crescent. You could have read contract agate by its light at night. Rosalynn thought that with some modification, she kind of liked it. Carter was so mad he couldn’t speak. A vein in his temple throbbed. “I’m not going to have a library,” he said.
One night, Rosalynn woke up in the wee hours and Jimmy was sitting up, something that never happens. (In bed, Carter sleeps; otherwise, why go to bed?) “What’s the matter?” she asked. “I know what we’re going to do with the library,” he said. Conflict resolution. Thirty-five acres on high ground two miles east of the bull’s-eye of downtown Atlanta. They say this is where Sherman watched the whole shooting match smoke down to cinders. When Carter saw the rendering that came up to his vision—four graceful, circular, interconnected buildings under dogwoods and pines, azaleas in springtime giving the grounds benevolent fire—the developer put on a background tape, music from Man of La Mancha, “To dream, the impossible...”
When Carter was a young midshipman at the Naval Academy, he read Tobacco Road by fellow Georgian Erskine Caldwell. It horrified him. The book offered a gross mischaracterisation of what he saw as the noble rural southerner. Then Carter read James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It became his favourite book, after the Bible.
“Agee’s book helps you understand Carter,” Carter biographer Doug Brinkley told me. “It’s Carter’s realistic compassion for these people in rural poverty. In Haiti. In Africa. He sees dignity in these people. In his 1976 campaign autobiography, Why Not the Best?, Carter begins by saying he is southerner and an American. But he is not a lost-cause southerner, out there cleaning the Confederate memorial.
“When he came back to Plains from the Navy in ’53, he knew Jim Crow had to die,” Brinkley went on. “He had been in an integrated military. He said, ‘This is the future for the South: We have to make it better.’ He looks around, finds a speed-reading course nearby, borrows ideas from an agricultural-efficiency station in Plains. He makes use of what he has around him. Put him in a room full of junk and he’d make a machine. Spanish on tapes. Lions Club meetings. You see him at the peanut festival, spinning the raffle wheel, fifty cents a ticket, for some charity. Never too big for it. Sure, other politicians will go to the Elks club for their own political purposes—Carter will, too—but he also believes in the Elks. He’s a proud Rotarian. You have to go back to Harry Truman for that kind of president.”
When I took these notes, Brinkley and I were driving together in late spring from New Orleans to Plains, Brinkley at the wheel, gushing like this stuff had been backing up too long in his pipes. He is the director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans. He has published biographies of James Forrestal and Dean Acheson as well as an account of a mobile American-studies course he runs called The Majic Bus (a lot of Kerouac, a lot of dharma there). He is 34 years old, and like Kerouac he loves the road. We were living on heat-lamp chicken and M&Ms and pool-hall hot dogs, skirting the Gulf of Mexico with a wall of wisteria on our left, draped like a sweet purple curtain between Dixie and the North. I was bound for Jimmy Carter’s Sunday-school class.
For longer than this century, the Carter family has lived along the two-lane Georgia road that runs from Columbus, on the Alabama line, to Savannah, on the Atlantic seaboard. The mailing address for most of them has been the farming community of Plains, which had a population of 550 when Jimmy Carter was a boy, during the Depression, and has a population of 720 or 721 now, when statesmen and thugs come calling, in roughly equal numbers, looking for Carter’s appraisal, assistance, advice.
Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, is dead now 12 years, but I can still remember her standing in the door of her pond house, an ocher board-and-batten affair with a cedar-shake roof, on a bright, vernal morning in 1976. She told me to come on in, saying, “I have a hangover from wrestling.” I asked her to elaborate, and she said, “I love wrestling. I went last night, and I’m hoarse from hollering.” She had a Newsweek on her coffee table. Her son was on the cover. The headline said, CARTER’S SWEEP. “You just ask me anything and I’ll tell you the truth or nothing,” she told me. She took an overstuffed easy chair and swung her legs over one arm. I asked her about this thing Jimmy was up to. “The way Jimmy told me was, well, I have to go back a little bit. I had crushed my shoulder in a fall when I was in Hawaii. It was a painful thing and it still bothers me. I was in my room at the mansion in Atlanta, and Jimmy was in the rocker, beside my bed. I said, ‘Jimmy, what will you do when you’re not governor anymore?’ I know him so well. I knew he wouldn’t be content just to come back to Plains. “He said, ‘I’m going to run for president.’
“I said, ‘President of what?’”
The first few years the Carters were back to Georgia, it was as if they had fallen off the face of the earth. You rarely read a thing about them. Then, in 1986, Bill Kovach left The New York Times to edit the Atlanta newspaper. One of Kovach’s first moves was to go to Plains. He played Quentin Tarantino to Carter’s John Travolta; Kovach resurrected Carter, if only locally.
In 1989, the herd turned round in a good mood and struck. Said the Baltimore Sun: “Jimmy Carter is without question the best ex-president we have today.” The Minneapolis Star Tribune: “He may indeed be the best former president the United States has ever had.” The Washington Post: “Not that the competition is staggering, but Jimmy Carter is becoming the best ex-president we have.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, under the headline EXCELLENT EMERITUS: “Attention to detail. A distaste for politics. Above all, a commitment to doing the right thing. The qualities that hobbled Jimmy Carter in the White House seem to be making him a great ex-president.” And Time and Newsweek and US News & World Report pretty much said so, too. Then last year, everybody changed their minds.
By Christmas, when Carter got back from Bosnia, he was dangerous, a loose cannon, a freelance State Department. No review of his work passed without a mention of the Nobel motive. And when Carter published a book of poetry earlier this year, he may as well have been wearing a sign that said, KICK ME.
Michiko Kakutani of the Times was the fairest with criticism: “...well-meaning, dutifully wrought poems that plod earnestly from point A to point B without ever making a leap into emotional hyperspace.” She recalled an associate saying of Carter’s White House tenure that “he knew all the words and none of the music.” The Washington Post account, by Henry Allen, began: “Happy, happy, happy Jimmy Carter. So happy. More than buoyant. Delighted, even gleeful Jimmy Carter, with smiles that seem amazed and embarrassed at how happy he is, like a little boy with the Christmas puppy his parents had said he could never have.”
Well, there’s small minds carping at you, and then there’s the public: To date, according to Carter, his poetry book, Always a Reckoning, has sold more than any of his previous 12 books. The Carters earn about USD400,000 a year from their books, one source told me. Carter promotes tirelessly—he can sign 1,000 books an hour—but he will not sign books after church on Sunday. He will pose for pictures with visitors till the cows come home, but he won’t give you his autograph. There’s just something sacrilegious about it.
"President Carter has mastered the Bible,” Doug Brinkley was saying on the road to Plains. “When you go to his Bible class, you realise this is him. He begins and ends his week there.” I got to the Maranatha Baptist Church on an April morning. Brinkley said Carter is always energised on Sundays. He virtually bounded across the apron in front of the pulpit.
The lesson this day was from the Book of John. It was about Jesus going to see Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, his best friends. (My notes hit the high points but can’t reproduce Carter’s rapture perfectly.) “They were having their supper, having a good time. And Mary anointed his feet with perfume and wiped them with her hair. The perfume was worth the equivalent of a year’s wages. Maybe she had to take out the pins that were holding her hair bound. I would be embarrassed. It was a transcendent act, beyond boundaries. But the son of God, he’s going to die—I would probably do something dramatic.”
Carter was pacing. I had never seen him this animated. His soft monotone, such a liability for him in politics, had become an instrument; there was music in him.
“Mary did a good and lovely thing. What can I do that would be good and lovely? It doesn’t have to be great. If someone aroused our anger, hurt us, you could search for a way for reconciliation. It doesn’t have to be publicised. A phone call. A postcard. Go down the street and knock on their door.
“We shouldn’t carry our resources around in a jar and use a medicine dropper to expend them. We should give what we have for His glory, not for our own. That’s difficult for me. Mary did a gauche thing, an intimate thing, an embarrassing thing. She went too far. How can we break through our shell and do something good and lovely, reach out to another human being?” Afterward, if you brought a camera, you could go out into the pecan grove that surrounds the church and capture yourself for all time standing next to the only man who is said to have regarded the presidency as a stepping-stone. Invariably, while they are posing with him, people tell Carter he ought to be president again. He smiles the thought away. It is the last thing he would want. He was rid of it and its tethers the day we quit him. As Hendrik Hertzberg, a New Yorker editor and a Carter speechwriter, said in a talk at the LBJ Library in Austin recently: “We tried a saint. It didn’t work.”
I moved to Georgia from Tennessee in 1970. Compared with the rest of the region in those days, Atlanta was a mecca of liberal thought. The newly elected governor looked like the guy on the Kennedy half-dollar; everybody said so. The first sentence of his inaugural address was: “The time to end segregation is now.” Of course, the lieutenant governor was Lester Maddox, the old seg who had beat Carter four years before but couldn’t by law succeed himself. Carter himself hadn’t run the leftest campaign of the century—left of George Wallace, yes, but still there were racial edges. You needed them to win that capitol in 1970, even though the body of Martin Luther King Jr. lay entombed for two years in the red Georgia clay. There are no photographs of Carter with King (Georgia’s only Nobel Peace Prize winner, so far) because the two never met. They could have, easily, but Carter was white and politically ambitious. Well, sleeping dogs and all that. He did what he had to do. You knew he was a good man.
When Carter was governor, I was a reporter and had to deal with him now and again. Twenty-five years later, on my way to his office, the one thing I remembered was that when he says he will give you an hour, he might make it less, but he won’t make it more. As I sat admiring an Andy Warhol triptych of Carter on the wall outside his door, I heard:
“All the best! All the best! I’m off to the airport!” It is the cry of the Carter Center, as former diplomats, now employees, take their leave of the peach- and rose-hued walls. There are about thirty-one nasty conflicts going on in the world, all of them civil wars. The foreign policy of the United States does not allow conversation with revolutionaries. The same goes for Great Britain, the Commonwealth countries, France, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and the Organization of African Unity. That leaves a lot of armed young men looking to talk to Jimmy Carter. The man could have put his feet up (the presidential pension is USD148,400 a year, and it doesn’t cost spit to live in Plains), but he sensed a void and filled it. Earlier this year, to effect a cease-fire in the twelve-year-old civil war in Sudan, Carter gave the Sudanese his son, Chip.
Carter had just gotten off the phone with Chip when I was shown into his office. Chip told his daddy it was 119 degrees Fahrenheit where he was in southern Sudan and that he couldn’t understand why anybody would want such scorched earth, much less fight for it. Before hanging up, Carter had wished his son happy birthday. Chip was 45. He had a wife and two children and lived in Decatur, Georgia. He hadn’t asked for this assignment. He just woke up one day two weeks before his birthday and learned that his father had superseded any prosaic midlife crisis he may have been enjoying by giving him away to the Sudanese.
Carter had needed to get into southern Sudan during the annual two-month-long dry season to reach the last big concentration—about 150,000 cases—of guinea-worm disease. There were 3.5 million cases in 1986, when the Carter Center decided to eradicate it. The last disease the world eradicated was smallpox, 18 years ago. Typical Carter, as biographer Brinkley puts it—he can’t just settle for fighting, he has to eradicate. To get into Sudan and distribute the filters that will save the people from these disgusting, crippling worms, Carter had to stop a war between Muslim and non-Muslim that has claimed 1.3 million lives. To show how serious he was, Carter put up Chip. The culture was impressed. The war stopped.
I would get to Chip, but I didn’t want to peak early. I opened with a question that had nagged me since I drove west to east across Georgia to catch him in church. I had noticed every Georgian had a pond. People would dig a moat around a double-wide and call it a pond. “Mr. President, I will begin with what sounds like a frivolous question.”
Carter: “It won’t be the first.”
“What does a pond mean to a man from south Georgia?”
“If you flew over Georgia, say, at five-thousand-foot altitude, in almost any part of our state you would see almost one hundred ponds at any time. Because everyone wants to have access to a pond or proximity to a pond. And I never have had this question asked before, about why that’s true.”
I had intended merely to ingratiate, but, Carter being Carter, he reached into himself and responded with staggering seriousness.
He is just as thin-skinned as he ever was. He can cite you chapter and verse of criticism. He seems particularly irritated by the perception of him as a man who acts precipitously.
“In fact, it’s fascinating to me: The first thing I’ll do tomorrow morning when I get up is go out to my pond. We built this pond in 1937. I think one thing is that this is a major opportunity for us to fish. And there’s a fascinating culture of growing fish. And everybody brags on the quality of their pond, like we used to brag in the Depression years on the quality of our bird dog.
“Poor people all over the world have looked on fish as a major supplement to their diet. When I was growing up in the Depression years, every creek—even a creek as wide as that couch you’re sitting on—would have a clear, worn path on both sides, where fishermen walked up and down.
“And it’s an engineering challenge to find a nice place to build a pond where it’s least expensive and most beneficial. There’s a very strong element of cost-benefit ratio here. And I would guess that if you ever—I don’t know if you own any land or not—but if you ever own 25 acres or 250 acres or whatever, my guess is that before very many months go by, you would be contemplating working on building a pond.”
In his life, Carter must have given fifty thousand interviews. If you are going to open, then, with a question he has never been asked (implausible, you say, but it happens, as you see), you might want to consider a subject a little loftier than my choice. When Carter was done thinking through the meaning of ponds, we got back to his son Chip’s mission.
“I was afraid that he might be kind of disconcerted, but we called him and I explained that I had promised that he would go to Sudan.”
“What was Chip’s reaction?”
“He said, ‘You mean me?’ I don’t know enough about the culture of Sudan to understand how important a son is. In some cultures, it’s almost like me being there. So Chip is there. I think it is one of the more dramatic negotiations we have been in, and I think the Sudanese war is the worst one in the world. I’ve said this for the last five years. But the bottom line is the United States is not interested in Sudan. Once our country gets down on a leader or a regime, then nothing they do has any legitimacy, or anything they do is satanic and everything their opponents do is angelic. It’s a harsh, black-and-white delineation.”
“What would you do with you if you were president?”
“I would call on me more.”
He is just as thin-skinned as he ever was. He can cite you chapter and verse of criticism. He seems particularly irritated by the perception of him as a man who acts precipitously. “What I think people don’t want to understand is that I don’t embark on a sensitive mission without getting permission from the president. And everything I do to the best of my understanding and ability is completely compatible with US policy. And that puts a great restraint on us. It just happens that last year, contrary to our general inclination, those forays were highly publicised. They did involve our government. They were in the Western World. They were white folks. So people cared.”
But most of his missions are in places the United States doesn’t give a happy damn about. “In the Third World, I’m a hero,” Carter says. “I’m not bragging to you, but when I go to Africa, they know that I’m one guy they can depend on.”
Here is where I elected to bring up the Nobel. It is not preposterous to think that he is running for it. The second trip to Haiti, for example, was not entirely necessary; no one begged him to come, least of all Aristide. Even Doug Brinkley, an acknowledged cheerleader, was disillusioned as a witness. “This was a loss for Carter, wasn’t it?” he had asked me bitterly as we flew out of Port-au-Prince. “There wasn’t any great outpouring for the saviour, was there? And he doesn’t like losing. Look at what he’s done with a complete repudiation by the American electorate: He’s out there running his second presidency.”
Laureate Elie Wiesel nominated him for the Nobel this year. I asked him if he thinks about it much.
“I don’t. That’s not something that obsesses me at all. Although this is one of the things that people like to say, that I go to the jungles of Sudan to eradicate guinea worm so that I can get a Nobel prize. It certainly would be nice to get a Nobel prize, but that’s not a driving force in my life.”
Then Carter said, “I’ve got to go.” He rose, saying, “I’ve enjoyed this.” I had had him for one hour and thirty-eight seconds. He was on his way to Warm Springs, Georgia, to the house where Franklin Delano Roosevelt had complained of a “terrific pain in the back of my head” on this very day 50 years before and died of a cerebral haemorrhage. Roosevelt was the last Democrat this country saw fit to reelect to the presidency. Carter was to receive an award this day, the Four Freedoms award. A last-minute speaker, just announced, was Bill Clinton.
President Clinton wasn’t there for Carter; he was there because his picture and the ceremony would be on the front page of The New York Times the next day. Carter was in the photograph, unidentified. When Clinton was introduced, everyone—about five thousand people—stood and applauded. After a suitable clap, Carter sat down, stage left of Clinton. The applause continued and continued. Everyone continued standing. Carter, seated before all, studied his notes, ran his tongue into the hollow of his cheek, looked at a squall line rolling in from yonder. He did not look at the president, and he did not stand again.
When it was Carter’s turn to speak, he was brief. He said the last time he was in Warm Springs it was to announce his own candidacy for president. He said he was a midshipman the day FDR died, and he cried. He said, “I was just a farm boy, but I can remember distinctly when hogs sold for one cent a pound. Cotton was five cents a pound. But perhaps most important, peanuts were a penny a pound.” Roosevelt, he said, “transformed my life.” He said he was “eternally grateful.” And he sat back down, five feet from the president of the United States of America.
That morning, Carter had told me: “I rarely talk to Clinton. Although I’m a loyal Democrat, one of the sterling requirements of the Carter Center is that we’re totally nonpartisan. I deal just as easily with Dole and Gingrich as I do with the Democratic leadership. Not because I need them. I don’t need anything. What could anybody do for me?”
Originally published on Esquire US
I am no arbiter of cool, but I think anyone would have a difficult time denying the title to Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. For everything they had in common as California natives of the same era writing about many of the same places and people, these two writers had just as many stark contrasts. Even their versions of cool operate in different realms. Didion’s is captured in the many black-and-white photos of her that proliferate in the literary world, from tote bags to bookmarks to nearly every single cover of any book written about her. Hers is a severe, sentence-fragment kind of cool. Babitz’s cool is the charmer’s cool: gregarious, seductive, biting, intimidating, hilarious, sexy. Didion’s cool was quiet and physically unassuming, which she used to her advantage in her reportage. Babitz’s cool was boisterous and socially dominating—the kind of cool that would drink you under the table and then go home with you.
Another contrast: Didion has remained a prominent figure, though she’s become almost ubiquitous in the past two decades, whereas Babitz’s career followed a much (much) rockier path. In fact, until 2015, when an article in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik sparked renewed interest in Babitz’s work, many of her books were out of print. Anolik then expanded that piece into Hollywood’s Eve, a hybrid biography of Babitz’s life and career spliced together with Anolik’s reflections on her own relationship with Babitz in the aftermath of the Vanity Fair attention. Then, a few years after Hollywood’s Eve, Babitz passed away (one week before Didion did), and Anolik discovered a box of materials she hadn’t seen before, which included a letter Babitz wrote to Didion, a note so telling and revealing and evocative that Anolik had to return to her subject a third time, only now with a compelling foil. The result is Didion & Babitz, truly the culmination of Anolik’s already excellent work on Babitz as well as a brilliantly cutting examination of the complicated legacy of Didion.
Anolik uses the phrase “a man’s woman” to describe both of her subjects in Didion & Babitz, and it struck me as ironic that these two figures could be, as personalities, so appealing to men and yet, as writers, mostly seem to appeal to women. At the very least, much of the commodification of Didion’s and Babitz’s cool is aimed at women. Didion in particular is so universally known that pretty much any woman embarking on a literary career will inevitably be faced, again and again, with her essays. Katie Roiphe, in In Praise of Messy Lives, puts it this way: “I don’t think I have ever walked into the home of a female writer, aspiring writer, newspaper reporter, or women’s magazine editor and not found, somewhere on the shelves, a row of Joan Didion books.” In Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour puts it a little differently: “I have read Didion my whole life and have been told I should worship Didion my whole life.”
Understandably, many women have a complicated relationship with Didion. But what relationship, if any, do men have with her? And what about Babitz, whose reputation as a “groupie” often discounts her credibility? Is it because of the “Cool Girl” label? Do men think these writers will only reach women? Or are men reluctant to learn the truth about how women think, live, believe? Are they afraid of what they’ll learn? About women? About themselves?
When Didion and Babitz started out, they entered a hostile literary environment where some men spoke of women writers like this:
At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, the sniffs I get from the ink of the women are always fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.
Norman Mailer, ladies and gentlemen. Never mind the fact that he wrote this in 1959, the same year Shirley Jackson published The Haunting of Hill House and Lorraine Hansberry premiered A Raisin in the Sun—Mailer manages to toss pretty much any non-white, non-male, non-straight, and non-Jewish person into his pool of also-wrotes. This is the secret core of prejudice: It is never isolated. It will always indict more types of people under its purview. In this way, bigotry is all-inclusive.
Let’s start with Didion. Her literary career began officially in 1956, when as a senior at UC Berkeley she won the “Prix de Paris” essay contest administered by Vogue, where she would work as a copywriter until the mid-sixties. Anolik points out that although Didion liked to wax proletariat, as in her claim that “the people with whom I preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out in gas stations,” she was, as Anolik writes, “every inch the all-American bourgeois girl.” She was also decidedly ambitious. At the end of eighth grade, she gave the graduation speech in front of her classmates and their families. In high school, she sat on the Sophomore Ball committee, worked on the yearbook staff, was elected to the student council, and hobnobbed with the children of elites, such as Nina Warren, the daughter of California’s then-governor Earl Warren (of the Warren Commission fame). At Berkeley, she joined a sorority, where she befriended Barbara Brown, the daughter of Pat Brown, another California governor. Also during this period, she wrote her first short stories, reported for the school’s newspaper (including an interview with the poet W.H. Auden), and won a place in the same guest-editor program at Mademoiselle that Sylvia Plath had won two years before, which she would later immortalise in The Bell Jar.
At Vogue and later Life and The Saturday Evening Post, Didion launched a career as an essayist and journalist, though her true ambition lay in fiction. Indeed, her first book was a novel, Run River, which debuted in 1963, but it wasn’t until the publication of her essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem that Didion began to establish herself as a major writer and generational voice. As the sixties gave way to the seventies, she was counted among the ranks of the New Journalists, an umbrella term for magazine writers (from Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson to Gay Talese and Jimmy Breslin) who challenged the conventions of journalistic style and form. For decades, she worked as a Hollywood screenwriter with her husband and co-writer, John Gregory Dunne, though few of their screenplays were actually filmed; they were more prolific as script doctors. She was known for her detached style, often referred to as “cool,” which works perfectly in concert with the black-and-white Julian Wasser photos of her that feature on the covers of any book written about her.
From a certain perspective, one might reasonably assume that the Didion so described—native of the West Coast, working in Hollywood, participating in a nonfiction revolution, an epitome of Cool wearing sunglasses in ads for French luxury brands—would lean, or even swing, toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. But although her allegiances changed and evolved throughout her long career, she tended, on the whole, toward the right. Her perspective has been described alternately as “a Goldwater Republican” (Bret Easton Ellis), “a dyed-in-the-wool Republican” (Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar), and “among the most fundamentally conservative writers in America” (Thomas Mallon) on the one hand, while on the other she’s been called an “apostate” (along with John Leonard) by her former editor William F. Buckley. Additionally, one of her iconic black-and-white portraits was emblazoned on a tote bag for the website Literary Hub, a decidedly liberal publication. She’s also been described as a feminist by writer Evelyn McDonnell; “not a feminist, my ass,” is how she puts it. Writers as various as the conservative firebrand Christopher Hitchens, the pop culture writer Alana Massey, and The New Yorker critic Hilton Als have considered themselves devotees.
That’s because Didion isn’t so easy to pin down politically. She herself characterised her politics as “pretty straightforward, stay-out-of-our-hair politics,” the “same as they were when I was voting for [Barry] Goldwater.” She dismissed feminism in the seventies, refused to read Virginia Woolf, and once declared, “I agree with every single thing that Norman Mailer puts down on paper” and that he “is one of the few people who can write about sex without embarrassing me.” She could, at times, espouse a by-your-own-bootstraps ideology we still hear right-wingers spout today. Yet she could also accurately diagnose the media’s racist groupthink about the Central Park Five in 1989, see through the Republicans’ mission to impeach Bill Clinton by any means, and generally capture the duplicitous realpolitik of twentieth-century America. During the rise of Ronald Reagan, a disillusioned Didion registered as a Democrat—“the first member of my family (and perhaps in my generation still the only member) to do so”—only to discover that the switch “did not involve taking a markedly different view on any issue.”
In American politics, Didion remained her most pitiless and unforgiving; her repeated mention of Goldwater seems spiked with equal parts nostalgia and resentment. In the foreword to Political Fictions, Didion writes, “It was clear for example by 1988 that the political process had already become perilously remote from the electorate it was meant to represent.” In 2001, she remarked in an interview with L.A. Weekly, “I don’t know who is represented by the current Democratic Party, or the current Republican Party.” Her disillusionment with the American political system might well be her greatest gift to the men of today: By falling out of line with mainstream conservatism while never fully embracing conventional liberalism, Didion maintained an outsider status that both elevated her analysis and made her career, retrospectively, a benchmark against which to measure the right’s cyclical descent into fascism.
Here is how a contemporary man should approach reading Didion to get the very most out of the experience: One can follow Didion’s trajectory, her merciless observation of American political and cultural life, as a narrative of how American conservatism has radically shifted since the sixties. Not that the Republicans of this era were moral paragons by any stretch, but there is one hell of a contrast between Eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex and Donald Trump nakedly trumpeting it. If Didion was a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican” in her early career, how does she compare to our present-day diehards? How do her conclusions (as vague or as lofty as they may be at times) about American power and money, about the futility of our electoral process, the crass, calculated cynicism of it—how do these square with conservative thought now?
Reading Didion, then, is to read through our recent history as much as it is to read about it. Men can read her essays, her reportage, her immaculate nonfiction for Didion’s own perspective, but what’s most productive is to read her against everyone else.
Eve Babitz is another story altogether. Her Cool is the playful, flamboyant type. Her writing brims with intelligence and insight, but its lessons and insights focus on individual human foibles rather than macro concerns about society as a whole. She was an It Girl, a groupie, a hanger-on, and a legendary charmer. In her writing, which may not possess the same skill as Didion’s, we find a frank and guileless account of a generation from a unique perspective—one that’s usually overlooked, if not downright disdained. It’s most succinctly–albeit grossly–put by Julian Wasser, the photographer behind Didion’s iconic images. Wasser also shot an iconic image featuring Babitz: a photo of artist Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve. Anolik adroitly uses Wasser’s characterisation of the two experiences to typify the contrast between Didion’s and Babitz’s reputations:
When I asked Wasser if he’d instructed Joan on how to dress or where to stand during their session, he replied, his tone reverent, “With a girl like Joan, you just don’t tell her what to do.” When I asked him why he’d chosen Eve for the Duchamp photo, he replied, his tone contemptuous, “She was a piece of ass.”
“A piece of ass” like Babitz, though, could gain access to areas even unassuming reporters like Didion could not. She didn’t hobnob with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities to get their stories; rather, she told stories about hobnobbing with rock stars, famous artists, and celebrities because that’s how she lived. They were her stories.
Babitz had an enormous pool to draw from. Her mother was an artist, and her father was a studio violinist. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. As a child growing up in Hollywood (she would attend Hollywood High), she was exposed to the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Bernard Herrmann, Kenneth Rexroth, and Bertrand Russell. In her early twenties, Babitz wrote, she was “alive with groupie fervour, wanting to fuck my way through rock ‘n’ roll and drink tequila and take uppers and downers, keeping joints rolled and lit, a regular customer at the clap clinic, a groupie prowling the Sunset Strip.” She was, in Anolik’s wonderful phrasing, “a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat.”
Babitz would go on to do things like design the album cover for Buffalo Springfield Again; introduce Frank Zappa to Salvador Dalí; appear as an extra in The Godfather Part II; and sleep with the likes of Steve Martin, Glenn Frey, Harrison Ford, Jackson Browne, and Joseph Heller. She chronicled some of these scenes, in her best work, with stunning fluency, despite the fact that she “didn’t want to be a writer; it would scare men.” This line comes from the title story of her collection Black Swans, and she elaborates on her view of writers: “I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most of the men I knew.” A bit of deflection, to be sure, as Babitz cared so deeply about but felt so inadequate for literary creation that minor discouragements delayed her apprenticeship. Her first book, Eve’s Hollywood, didn’t come out until 1974, even though she’d completed a draft of a novel “about being Daisy Miller, only from Hollywood” 10 years earlier, when she was 20.
Her second book, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., is her best book, as it displays most fully the kind of uncomfortable truths Babitz could so casually wield. The whole book, a brief prefatory note explains, is essentially an attempt by Eve, the narrator, to “get this one I’m in love with” to read her writing by making it all about him. In reality, this was the artist Paul Ruscha; in the book, his name is Shawn. In Didion & Babitz, Anolik describes Slow Days as depicting Los Angeles with “a total lack of interest in approving or disapproving of its characters’ morals.” This, ultimately, is where the great value of Babitz’s work lies. Her stories and essays come without any moralising and without any attempts to mould reality into a recognizable shape. Yet so much of her writing has an air of truth to it, and an authority in its vision. Her assessments of herself and those in her orbit could be brutal, even unkind—but the truth is in the character Eve’s firm belief in them. Babitz’s devastatingly frank voice and savage wit, in life and in prose, still hit you with a pang of recognition, only she doesn’t instruct you what to do with the feeling. For instance, when Anolik’s Vanity Fair piece renewed interest in Babitz’s work, leading to reprints of her books, her line to Anolik was this: “It used to be only men who liked me. Now it’s only girls.”
In her final years (she died in 2021), Babitz veered into right-wing paranoia and delusion, ranting to Anolik on the phone about how she was having an affair with Donald Trump (which obviously wasn’t true). Anolik told me how she worried that Babitz would run into trouble on the streets of West Hollywood, where she lived. She wanted to don one of those bright red MAGA hats, “so I’d buy her Chinese MAGA hats—you know, MAGA in Chinese characters,” Anolik said, in order to obscure her rabid Trumpism without her knowing. “She loved those hats.” She lived in filth, the stench so bad Anolik could barely stand it. “I think there was a dead cat in her place,” she told me, “a dead something.” But despite the tragic nature of where she ended up, Babitz’s record of late-twentieth-century America is a gift from someone canny enough and charming enough to gain entry to its most rarefied spaces.
“If a man is looking for insights and angles into women,” Anolik told me, “I’d recommend Eve, if only because I believe that Eve, at her best—by which I mean, in Slow Days, Fast Company, her one masterpiece—was a better translator of female sensations and stratagems. In Slow Days, Eve offers to readers a study of feminine consciousness that has extraordinary charm and verve, not to mention expansiveness."
In her first book on Babitz, Hollywood’s Eve, Anolik categorized the writer with the New Journalists, which struck me as arguable, perhaps, but not really accurate. When I asked her about it, she was quick to say that she no longer sees it this way. “I’m so glad I got a second crack at Eve,” she said, because for Anolik, Babitz now falls into the tradition of the “artist-adventuress,” an “American Colette.” I completely agree. Her antecedents were figures like the Russian writer Teffi and the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, her contemporaries the art groupies Ultra Violet and Candy Darling, and her descendants Gawker’s Emily Gould and the poet/essayist Kim Addonizio. These writers were best in the short form, didn’t always produce large catalogues of work, and suffered, personally and professionally, from cultures dismissing them as “pieces of ass,” as gossips, as gushing TMI-coded dilettantes.
Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women.
Here, at last, is the most important lesson Babitz can teach men: Women who live unconventionally, women who drink and do drugs, women who fuck, women who talk, women who reject you at the bar, and women who make art out of all of those things—their inner lives are just as deep as yours, if not deeper. Their perspectives show them a side of society men rarely glimpse: the barrage of dismissal and obstruction and condemnation, and the constant threat of violence and subjugation. Babitz, who was as big a fan of feminism as Didion, was a victim of this herself. She internalized a belief that women shouldn’t write because it might put off men. Can you imagine if one of the twentieth century’s most lively and original chroniclers never wrote a word because of the insecurities of men?
I say these are the lessons from Didion and Babitz that men might learn, but after last week’s election results, I don’t have much faith in American men, no matter how many writers not like them we expose them to. Women have told men about the danger they regularly feel. They’ve written at length about sexism, chauvinism, the patriarchy; they’ve campaigned for suffrage, bodily autonomy, marital agency, sexual freedom, and financial equity. Men know these things. Have known these things. And yet here we are, with a nation of men for whom rampant misogyny and sexual predation are not disqualifying. Neither Didion nor Babitz ever had delusions of swaying men to the side of women. In a 2000 piece on Martha Stewart, Didion remarked that Stewart’s success was not that of “a woman who made the best of traditional skills” but rather “the story that has historically encouraged women, even as it has threatened men.” For all the strides made by women in the past 60 years, we’re still living, sadly, in Norman Mailer’s America.
So men can go ahead and read Didion and Babitz as much as they want, but I can’t help recalling something Babitz, ever the cutting realist, said after she went through a horrifically painful fire accident in the late nineties: “People think this will make me a better person. It won’t.”
Originally published on Esquire US
When Esquire Singapore caught up with Ayden Sng last year, he was in the throes of filming the Channel 8 series All That Glitters. Much of the conversation lingered around the idea of typecasting—a familiar, if frustrating aspect of Singapore’s acting scene. It’s easy to empathise with Sng’s desire to break free from these shackles and truly test the limits of his craft. How many times can one play the good son, the polished, educated love interest—the character that always feels safe? But Sng isn’t one to shy away from reinvention. He’s an actor hungry for growth, even if it means throwing himself into the unknown and rebuilding from scratch.
When Ayden Sng first stepped into the industry at 25, Mediacorp was the unknown, an uncharted territory for a young actor eager to make his mark. Five years and countless Channel 8 dramas later, Mediacorp has become a familiar space, almost too familiar. The shows blend into each other, the roles begin to blur, and the people—well, everyone knows everyone. “TV filming in Singapore is like a big family,” Sng tells me, playfully cross-legged on a couch in a narrow studio. I’ve never been to the set, but I nod because I can imagine it. Sng, with his easy charisma, fills the room with a lightness that’s both infectious and disarming. He speaks with what I can only describe as a fragile meticulousness, but with the crew during the photoshoot, a more relaxed side of him surfaces, emboldened by the cadence of Singlish and the occasional slip into Mandarin. It’s been a long day—leather jackets layered against multi-layered turtlenecks, striking pose after pose under blinding lights—but you wouldn’t know it from the way he carries himself. There’s no posture here; this is the Sng his collaborators have come to know. It’s obvious he feels at ease here, but for an actor dedicated to their craft, comfort can be a cage, and growth, after all, often blooms in discomfort.
In late 2023, Mediacorp’s The Celebrity Agency embarked on a collaboration with China’s Huanyu Entertainment to select three local actors to be represented by the prestigious agency. Sng was selected as one of them, which meant that the actor would have to be based in China for the foreseeable future and direct his focus on the sprawling Chinese market. An opportunity like this is the stuff of dreams for many Singaporean actors because it could spell the eruption of their career into global heights, beyond the shores of our small nation. Yet, with any leap into the unknown, it carries its fair share of risks. For Sng, it is akin to pressing the reset button on his career. If navigating the local scene in Mediacorp was his first unknown as an actor, then the colossal landscape of China is his next great unknown.
Regardless, this is a fresh start, and in a market brimming with unlimited possibilities, Sng can finally break free from any typecasting and fully explore his range as an actor… right?
“In China, I’m essentially starting from scratch, so ironically, I’m looking to be typecast again,” he reveals, catching me completely off guard. Quite honestly, I had mapped out the entire interview in my head during my research—half-ready to set pen to paper and frame the cover story as “The Reinvention of Ayden Sng”. It would have been a grand angle that showcased how Sng has a second shot at avoiding the pitfall that is being typecasted. After all, wasn’t breaking out of typecasting part of his struggle back home?
He elaborates, “Stage one for any actor in a new market is to be typecasted because people need to think of you for a specific type of role, that’s the easiest way to get cast.” He continues, “After you’ve been in the market for a few years, that’s when you need to break out of that mould and showcase your versatility.” When we spoke to Sng last year, he was at the tipping point, on the verge of shedding that mould in the local market. “Stage three for me would then be to defy all of this.”
However, navigating a market as vast and varied as China’s means that “typecast” isn’t as simple as it sounds. “Honestly, I’m still trying to figure that out,” he admits. “China has a lot more genres than we have in Singapore—historical dramas, fantasy fighting, WWII period dramas. It’s a discovery phase.”
Despite this ambiguity, he’s finding his footing. In one of his recent projects, the wuxia drama 临江仙 (Lin Jiang Xian), he plays an immortal—a role that tested his physical limits as an actor. “It was my first time doing wire work, in over 40°C weather,” he recalls, smiling. “I was flying around with a sword for over 12 hours a day. It was exhausting, but memorable because it was a series of firsts for me.”
But there are challenges acting in China that go beyond the physical. The uncertainty of navigating a foreign territory, on top of the pressure of having to perform at the top of your craft can be intensely palpable. “You get one shot, and you have to make it count,” Sng confesses. This urgency means that now the hunger for growth he’s held for years—the one that has felt so distant—is within his grasp, he’s finally seizing it. From vocal training to movement classes and picking up the intricacies of wire work, Sng has been placed in an environment that demands rapid growth, a stark contrast to what he had been used to. “Growth used to be something that was always on my mind and was something I was trying to do”, Sng admits. “But now, it feels like I have to do it, and quickly.”
Despite the highs of being in a new market, being uprooted from everything familiar—culture, routine and rhythm—has been taxing. “Even though my Mandarin is fairly proficient, I don’t have the cultural context to respond in a way that is required of me,” Sng reveals, likening himself to a deer in headlights during social interactions. He also describes himself as a sponge, absorbing more than contributing, which he concedes makes him a dull conversationalist. “There are times when I wish I could reply to them in English, then I would know what to say, but I can’t.”
“And this is coming from someone like me who thoroughly enjoys Mandarin and Chinese.” Ironically, this challenge is part of why he loves being in China: the total immersion in Chinese culture. This affinity with Chinese culture can be traced to Sng’s childhood. “Growing up, I definitely consumed more Chinese content [than Western content],” says Sng, enraptured for the first time in our conversation. “Which is why working in China feels like a dream come true for me.” Before the internet made television shows and movies from other countries like China widely accessible, Channel 8 was the cornerstone of Sng’s childhood entertainment. “Chen Li Ping was my favourite actor,” he beams. “I watched her when she was [My Teacher] Aiyoyo.”
Creating and starring in Chinese media clearly ignites something deeper within Sng, which explains why his tone remains upbeat and hopeful, even while opening up about his challenges in China. The 30-year-old isn’t closing the door on Western projects just yet though. “The goal would be to be involved in more international projects,” he says. And in true Sng fashion, the reason is quite simple: growth.
Whether it’s Hollywood, the UK or regional countries—it matters not which foreign market he steps into. He’s more concerned about discovering the inner workings of the industry across different settings and refining his own craft. His journey in China is a prime example. “You go there completely clueless,” he confides. “You do two shows, and then you have a stronger understanding of what you can and cannot do. You realise what you’re weak at and the skills you need to improve on.” This learning process endows Sng with a roadmap, a clearer path towards bettering his craft and guiding him to becoming the actor he wants to be.
For many, success in this industry can be measured by the number of followers you have on Instagram, the accolades, the fame. But for Sng, the idea of “making it” isn’t as straightforward. “Someone earning SGD3,000 might want more, and when they get SGD6,000, it still won’t feel like enough,” he continues. “There’s always going to be something you want or feel like you need to improve on. So, it’s really about enjoying the journey.” Instead of asking himself “Have I made it?” his instincts are to ask himself, “Are you happy with where you are, and what you’re doing?
It is a grounded view of success, one that emphasises that cliché of journey over the destination.
Yet, in a career that has been marked by transitions—from Singapore to China, from typecasting to growth—Sng’s definition of “making it” is more about internal satisfaction than external achievements. He is more concerned with his own evolution than ticking off boxes of conventional success. “To create that kind of joy machine for yourself. That’s something that people need to find.”
The television format is fast-paced and unrelenting; actors are typically not afforded the luxury of time when preparing and filming for a role, especially in Singapore where productivity is a priority. While a drama with 30 episodes (roughly 1,200 minutes) may take three to four months to film, a 110-minute movie often takes just two to three months. For an actor, the unhurried, deliberate nature of cinema creates an ideal environment that allows them to fine-tune every performance and mull over every nuance. “Taking more time to create something good, that’s something that every actor would like to do,” Sng says, earnestly.
The extended preparation time that films offer actors—the slow burn of cinema—may explain why the medium has yielded some of the greatest acting performances in history. Think Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, Mahershala Ali in Moonlight, Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love. From Sng’s perspective, it wasn’t a particular film that has triggered his desire to explore cinema. Rather, it was the performances themselves that struck an emotional chord with him. “It’s just something that would make you want to be in a position where you can do something like that.”
His criterion for a good film is refreshingly honest, “as long as it’s entertaining”. Whether it’s laughter, tears, or fear, if the film elicits the intended response, he would consider it a success. And if it can keep his attention for more than 10 minutes… cue the score and hand over the Oscar. Who’s to tell Sng a film is bad if he enjoyed it? Film, like all art forms, has always been subjective. A distraught office worker suffering from corporate burnout will have a completely different experience watching The Perks of Being a Wallflower than an awkward teenager battling with social anxiety and identity. That same office worker could watch My Dinner with Andre and form their own interpretation of the film, coloured by their own life experiences. “Filmmakers, in some sense, have a huge role to be able to shape how their audience thinks based on their own worldview.” Sng opines. “But how the audience reacts to it is a reflection of overall social sentiment at that point in time.”
If you couldn’t already tell, Sng thinks—deeply. A scroll to the bottom of his Instagram page reveals pictures with long introspective captions attached to them—mini dissertations on maturity, identity and freedom. These days, those personal journal entries are long gone, replaced with simpler captions and sometimes, even just a single word. What changed?
“Somebody in the industry told me that nobody’s reading any of my posts,” he reveals. “They suggested one-word captions instead.” It’s practical advice considering the fleeting attention span in the landscape of social media today. However, there’s more to this than a strategic social media move.
“I think I used to have more things to say,” he reveals, pointing to the insular nature of filming in Singapore. “When you are stuck in an environment for very long, you’re not really absorbing enough knowledge to form a perspective about a lot of things,” says Sng, adding further depth to his move to China.
Comfort, close relationships and familiarity—these are some of the things Sng has had to leave behind in dedication to the craft. But there is something else: his cats.
“I feel like my cats would call me irresponsible because I’m hardly ever home.” His life is divided between two countries. He has cats in China, cared for by his assistant and also in Singapore, looked after by his family. It’s far from ideal for someone who doesn’t mind being branded as that “crazy cat uncle”. In a perfect world, Sng would have Doraemon’s magical door, bringing his cats along with him wherever he went.
He admits that the constant travel and time away from home come with emotional challenges. “I wish I could spend more time with them,” referring not just to his cats but to the other important people in his life. But instead of letting the guilt consume him, he approaches himself with kindness, “I don’t let the guilt eat me up. I know that I’m trying my best and that’s what matters.”
Photography, Digital Imaging and Retouching: Jayden Tan
Styling: Asri Jasman
Art Direction: Joan Tai
Hair: Christvian Wu using KEVIN.MURPHY
Makeup: Ying Cui Pris at AASTRAL BEAUTY using LANCÔME
Styling Assistant: Kyla Chow
Gillian Anderson isn’t a sex therapist, but for four years, she played one on television. From 2019 to 2023, she starred as Sex Education’s Dr. Jean Milburn, a lusty, complicated, sometimes manipulative (see: human) woman, bumbling and grasping through midlife while single-parenting her teenage son, Otis. But even though the role was pure fiction, something about Milburn’s funny, loving energy made people want to talk to Anderson about sex. For years, her literary agent received inquiries from publishers and editors about interviews she might do, confessions she might write. For a long time, she put them off. But then her editor suggested something more communal: other people, submitting anonymously. Anderson was finally convinced by the idea of a large and varied group. “We had many different versions,” she says. “And then I realised what would be most beautiful and affecting was to hear from as many different women as we could.”
Last year, Anderson’s publisher, Bloomsbury, set up an online portal. The actress posted a call: “Whatever your background, whomever you do or don’t sleep with, whether you’re eighteen or eighty: if you identify as a woman, I want to hear from you.” Eight thousand women started to transcribe their fantasies, each beginning with “Dear Gillian.” Eight hundred pressed submit. The result is Want: 350 pages of anonymous sex fantasies selected and ordered by Anderson.
At 56, Anderson has the ease and grace of a woman who has always been beautiful, used to being wanted, but now she’s perhaps more comfortable than ever in the particularity of her own skin—perhaps, too, her own wants. Her hair pulled back loosely on our Zoom call, she talks emphatically, thoughtfully, leans forward, back, runs her hands wantonly over her face and hair. I ask her about how discussing this topic as a public person who would also like to keep a good amount of her life private could get prickly. “I’m trying for cryptically but honestly,” she says.
Anderson has made a career out of playing women who inhabit adjectives that might make people wince or cringe, that would almost certainly make a particular type of suitor swipe left instead of right: tough and cold and hard and sharp. Except, on Anderson, they’re hot.
For nine years, starting in her early 20s, she played The X-Files’ Agent Scully. Bristly and cerebral, Scully was the antithesis of her giggly, often teenage female counterparts on other early nineties shows—she hardly ever smiled. In 2000, Anderson portrayed (desperate, angling) Lily Bart in a film adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth. In 2005, Bleak House’s (proud and furtive) Lady Dedlock, then A Doll's House’s (wily and determined) Nora in London’s West End in 2009. Later, Miss Havisham, Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt. A master of a certain type of subtlety—an eyebrow raise, a shifted lip—Anderson can appear blank and placid on the surface while somehow brimming with life underneath.
In 2013, Anderson took on the role of detective Stella Gibson on The Fall. Steely and brazen, Stella propositions a new coworker and near stranger in the first episode. In Want, Anderson writes about this role as pivotal: “Stella was effortlessly confident physically, intellectually, and sexually.” It felt, she writes, like “stepping into my sexual power in my 40s.”
Want, Anderson says, is all about women stepping into their sexual power. Much like inhabiting a made-up role, the book is filled not with aberrant acts these women are confessing but with imaginings they’ve conjured and have now written down and shared. With the added fact of anonymity, each contribution functions as an opportunity to stretch, play, explore, and create, without the threat or pressure of real-life consequences. “This is fantasy’s ultimate offering,” Anderson writes in the book’s introduction. “The chance to live momentarily outside of reality, where rules and expectations don’t exist, where we can indulge our deepest desires and submit absolutely with unreserved abandon.”
The results, some spanning pages and some a single sentence, are both what you’d expect and not: fingers, fists, cunts, clit, anal. Anderson reports that “threesomes, moresomes and thensomes” were the most prevalent fantasies she received. She says she thought there’d be more violence. But then, she adds, “Who knows what that says about me?”
One woman in Want fantasises about her husband’s brother; another, a colleague, a married man who laid bricks next to her house for months and, on his last day, gave her his sweatshirt; another, a beautiful woman she saw once and never again. Many—often women who are contentedly ensconced in heterosexual marriages or so they say—have fantasies about their female friends.
There are bondage and entrapment fantasies, fantasies of submission, of role-swapping, of risky, public sex. “I am a pleasure station!” one woman writes, ecstatic. Some are particularly invested in setting: “I often imagine it happening near a waterfall in a lush forest,” another writes. One wants to be laid out naked in a medical theatre, to have her vagina examined by a crowd of students. “They are allowed to look and touch whatever they like, all for the purposes of studying the female body,” she writes. ”I reach orgasm with them all watching professionally and taking notes.”
There’s a delight in reading these pages. It’s a woman, many, none of whom you know well, sitting a little bit too close to you. You can smell their sweat, the specific sour of their breath. You want to move away but can’t. Maybe one grabs hold of your upper arm, and then she says something to you, not about her kids, her job, whatever other obligation might prove to you that she’s worthy, prove to you she’s a woman in the way everything in life has told you that she should be, but instead: She tells you what she wants.
The book is broken into twelve sections, including “Rough and Raw,” “The Captive,” “Strangers,” and “Power and Submission.” Anderson introduces each new section and writes at the beginning of “The Watcher and The Watched,” “If I had my druthers, I would move about the world invisibly. And, indeed, at the very heart of all my fantasies, I am the watcher not the watched, or sometimes, I switch between watcher and participant, but I am most definitely the director.” This is what fantasy offers each of these women, what it offers all of us: a chance to completely control both how and who you want, the terms, the setting, the conditions, and also, their willingness to want you back. This feels particularly rich for women, as our yearnings—in sex, but in plenty of other settings as well—have often been contingent on whether we might be wanted first. We are, historically, the objects, not the subjects—desperate to be wanted, often quick to forget that we can (or not) want back.
Halfway through our conversation, Anderson tells me a perfect (awful) story about this: As part of Want’s promotional tour, her team is setting up pink “vox boxes” where women can enter and listen to some of the fantasies from Want, then share their own. One day, a man approached and asked about these boxes. “I’ve never thought about women’s pleasure before,” the man said.
What men—many of them kind and loving partners in other aspects of their lives—haven’t thought about, have failed to ask about, have just never been told, is everywhere inside this book. “My husband isn’t attracted to me sexually,” one woman writes. “Most of the time sex for me is trying to please him with oral and then when he is done, he leaves the room and I finish myself off with a vibrator.” Another says, “I grew up in a sex-positive household, nothing was taboo. But now I’m almost 30 and I cannot seem to express my secret desires to my husband. It feels… embarrassing and scary.”
Anderson made her own anonymous contribution to Want, but she’s mum even on which section it belongs to. She wanted to be wholly folded into what she describes as the “melody” of how each of these contributions moves from one to the next. “I think I did assume so many different things about the act of writing down my own fantasy, how easy it would be, based on how easy I find it to speak about things,” she says, “but the act of writing felt like it was drawing something out, not just the truth of something, but something even more intimate than I’m used to revealing on a daily basis.”
This made her feel that much more impressed by the “courageous act” of these women who shared their fantasies. To have sat down, pulled out something truer maybe than they even knew or could access in their actual lives, and sent it to her: “You felt honoured,” she says, “to read some of these outpourings, and amazed at the level of thought and elegance, and, you know, rawness, not just in terms of close to the skin, close to the surface, but raw in terms of just an outpouring of one’s truth or experience.”
She keeps using the word courage, and it seems clear that the opposite of this word is fear and shame. Those feelings are also everywhere in these letters: women writing anonymously, writing for and to themselves but still couching these outpourings in apology (“it’s embarrassing to admit”; “I’m ashamed to say”; “I can hardly believe I’m writing this”).
“What is very revealing,” says Anderson, “are the areas that we are the same. Where, no matter the fantasy, the takeaway is the need for intimacy, the need to be desired, to be seen, a desire to be held, to be comforted, to be safe.” What felt equally, almost stunningly true, she says, was the prevalence of shame.
In the final section, “gently, gently,” Anderson writes, “we also received a number of letters that spoke of just wanting to feel seen, expressing a desire for romance, affection, and softness, and a longing for a strong connection to another person.”
“Is it crazy that my wildest sexual fantasy is to feel safe?” one woman writes. “I’m almost too scared to write this,” writes another. “An articulation of a need that fills me with embarrassment. An inadequate fantasy. So small and insignificant, pathetic almost, yet writing it down in black and white fills me with terror…I want to be kissed.” It was this section, I told Anderson, that I found the most moving, not only because of how straightforward each fantasy felt but also because it further amplified that one need not have lurid orgiastic desires, to feel shame and terror for wanting at all.
One of the biggest questions Anderson says she had, reading through the 800,000 words of submissions she and her editors received for the project, was why more of these women haven’t shared their fantasies with their partners. And why did so many of those 8,000 women who started their submissions fail to press send? “It’s obvious these women are incredibly powerful, articulate, and capable, but they wouldn’t dream of sharing their fantasies with their long-term partner,” she tells me. She says at those same pink boxes they set up for women to talk about their fantasies, in private if they chose, what most surprised her was “the amount of people who just won’t talk.”
The seed text for Want was Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Gardens, a similar compilation of women’s deepest fantasies about sex and bodies and want. Of course, 1973 was also the year Roe v Wade was decided, while 2022 was the year it was overturned. As Anderson speaks more, both about the power of women sharing their stories and about so many women’s reticence, I can’t help but think of this. Many of us, as women, don’t speak our wants because we have clear memories in our bodies of all those other times when we have stood up and tried to want, when we have perhaps briefly gotten, but then someone has told us never mind, someone has told us to sit the fuck back down.
Anderson talks about how she thinks the collective force of this book is a sort of primal scream of female yearning. But, I ask her, isn’t one of the problems with us screaming just how few people seem willing to listen when we do? In her introduction to “gently, gently,” she quotes her fictional Sex Education son, Otis. “It’s time to stop passively hearing and start actively listening,” Otis said on the show. How, I wonder, does a person actively listen to a woman’s primal screams?
“There is an active platform right now,” she says, “to tell it like it is.”
For years before My Secret Gardens landed in 1973, one of the foundational aspects of the women’s movement was Consciousness Raising meetings: women in groups who got together in living rooms, kitchens, and apartments and talked to one another about their lives and fears and wants. As in all movements, there were different factions and battles, and sometimes these groups broke up. But also, women got together, and for the first time, many began to realise that what felt like their own individual problem, shame, or secret was actually much more widely felt, much more commonly seen and understood. Often, they began to see how their individual shame, secret, or problem was not due to their own shameful failings but was instead a product of the systems under which they lived.
“The act of creating,” says Anderson, “the act of writing these things down, is birthing something. It’s strange and beautiful and wonderful and dark and light and sensuous and dangerous. It’s awakening these things which you can store away and keep to yourself, and not necessarily think of as a creative act until someone hands you the key, and asks you to write it down, be a part of this.”
Often, when women scream, no one listens. Often, people hear but do not listen actively enough to change or give or shift. Want is one of many contributions to the roiling, rumbling primal scream that so many women attempt, then shy away from, then disavow, then, in desperation, return to and try again. It’s a reminder that there’s a different power in screaming that is communal. That in listening actively to what we want ourselves, giving brief private allowance to conjure what might be our most shameful yearnings, collecting and offering them to one another, we might find new ways to seek more control and power in the world.
Originally published on Esquire US
“To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?”
-Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1
About 20 people gathered to celebrate Carolyn Too. They were her friends and her colleagues, and they came to speak lovingly of her: how gregarious she was, and how generous with her time. They recalled her smile, her easygoing nature. Stories about the first time they met her poured out, as did little anecdotes about how much Carolyn meant to them. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Sentences were punctuated with sniffles. Even Carolyn wasn’t spared the torrent of emotions as she dabbed at the corners of her eyes.
Dear friend of Carolyn, You
are cordially invited to join us for
a special occasion as we gather
to honour Carolyn while she is still
with us. This event “Celebration
of Life” is an opportunity for us
to celebrate Carolyn’s life, share
cherished memories, and express
our love and gratitude.
When it comes to the conversations in an end-of-life scenario, people tend to become more mindful—aware even—as they tiptoe around the past tenses. The overcompensation of putting everything in the now—Carolyn is here. Carolyn says this. Carolyn has cancer. As though there’s still the semblance of control of the situation; that through the powers of words, you can steer the circumstances to a favourable reality.
About 30 minutes before the living funeral, the mood was considerably lighter. Cheeky, in fact, as Carolyn nodded towards the opposite corner of the bed, gesturing me to sit. “Don’t worry, I’m very chill one.” We are in her bedroom, where the make-up artist is finishing up applying eye shadow on Carolyn.
Dressed in black, Carolyn leans to her left, angling herself just enough that it’s comfortable to face me. Her smile comes as easily as she engages you, as you immediately feel that you’re meeting up with a long-lost friend. Carolyn feels overwhelmed. She didn’t expect the swell of media attention over her living wake; her three-bedroom flat feels more intimate with two film crews crowding her living room. It’s an unrehearsed choreography of camera shots and blocking; the irony of capturing the naturalness of the scene while still being an intrusive presence.
“The idea of a living funeral is new,” Carolyn says. “There was one previous case in Singapore that I saw and I was inspired by it. We, [the] Chinese, don’t do this sort of thing. But when I brought up this topic to my close friend, she said, what’s the difference? You always have parties at home anyway. This is just like that but bigger.”
It almost sounds flippant the way Carolyn says it but she has always been affable. She prefers it if people shed the enforced social civility and just relax and have fun. She once saw the idea of a living funeral as taboo but now she is warmed up to it.
It feels rude to mention that Carolyn looks tired but she has issues with sleeping. Carolyn points it to her cancer. She feels it—her tumour, this dread guest—in her stomach. She has an ascitic tap, where she drains the fluid that’s produced by the tumour to reduce the discomfort. “I have to do this every morning and it’s quite tiring,” she says. “Plus, I’m diabetic so I also have to do my insulin shots, I need my meds. I have to eat so that I can sustain my sugar throughout the day.”
There are days when it might get too much for her; all she wants is to do nothing. But as she lies in bed, reason takes the wheel and her mind formulates a compromise: if it’s too much in the morning, do it later.
“It is human nature to try to survive,” she explains. “It’s not like I don’t wanna go to work so I take leave. If I don’t do it, I will die.”
“Life is just a candle, and a dream
must give it flame.”
‘The Fountain of Lamneth’, Rush
This is the length and breadth of Carolyn’s life.
Carolyn Too is the eldest of three children. Her family owned and operated a confectionary business. Early memories of bringing her classmates and stealing bites from unattended confections floated about Carolyn’s consciousness. She was bubbly as a kid. However as she transitioned to her time at CHIJ St Theresa, her recollection fell slack.
She didn’t take to the education system and left school after her O’levels. While pursuing her mass communication diploma at MDIS, Carolyn also worked part-time at a balloon company and as a KTV DJ.
The next phase of her life was a long-standing tenure at Pearson Education. For 13 years, Carolyn had a sales team and sold textbooks to private universities. She switched to Marshall Cavendish, where she travelled extensively, and then to LexisNexis. She stayed for two to three years before quitting due to the environment being hectic.
By then in her 40s, her kidneys started to fail. It was probably due to being a type one diabetic since her 20s. Still, she took the news in stride. She was offered two kinds of dialysis treatments. One was hemodialysis, which involved cleaning her blood at a dialysis centre three times a week. The other option was peritoneal dialysis, where waste is collected from the blood by washing the empty space in the abdomen (peritoneal cavity). This is a daily affair but it can be done at home. Carolyn picked the second.
She still had to go for surgery to insert a peritoneal catheter via a laparoscopic surgery. After the first treatment, they found that the water output was less than what was put into her body. An x-ray confirmed that the catheter was slanted so another operation had to be done to straighten it.
But when her urologist operated on her, they spotted a large tumour in her ovaries. Carolyn was alone when they broke the news to her. She cried as the nurse comforted her. They drew blood from her and eventually inserted a permanent catheter in a vein near her neck for hemodialysis. Test results confirmed she had ovarian cancer in the second and third stages.
She broke the news to her family, they were supportive. While thoughts about how long she has left clouded her mind, her innate positivity broke through like a high noon sun: “let’s get through chemo. I can tahan the process,” she had said.
The clinical team suggested transferring her to the oncology department at the National University Hospital (NUH). They would have a better understanding of her situation. At NUH, they found a 28cm-long tumour sitting in her pelvic area. They placed her on chemo treatment, but each session left her weak due to renal failure complications, and she had to be hospitalised after each chemo session.
Her hair thinned out from the chemo; her head became spotted with ulcers. Vomiting was a common affair; her appetite waned. There was dramatic weight loss. Sam Yew, Carolyn’s close friend, aided her when she was in hospital. She put him down as “godbrother” as it was easier for him to visit during COVID restrictions; the appellation stuck and that’s how she has been referring to him since. When she was warded, Carolyn could tell if the other patient in the room was about to die. That’s when the two visitors-per-bed rule is relaxed and the patient’s bed is surrounded by relatives and friends.
Sometimes, she can hear children crying—plaintive pleas telling an elderly parent that “they can go now”. Carolyn tries to block it all out by cranking up the volume in her earphones. She knows dying is what waits for all of us at the end. But even with that knowledge, there’s still the fear and uncertainty of how she would go. Will there be pain or suffering? She prayed; eyes squeezed tight as her fingers interlocked so keenly that her knuckles became bone-white. In her prayer, she made a simple request: “When it happens, just take me in my sleep.”
After her chemo treatment gave her the all-clear, she was in remission for about two months before the cancer returned.
“And as it is appointed unto men once to die,
but after this the judgment.” Hebrews 9:27
In a study conducted by the Lien Foundation on Singaporeans’ perception of death, only half of the 1,006 people surveyed have talked about death or dying with their loved ones. One of the biggest triggers for opening up conversations about death and dying is when one is faced with a life-threatening illness or when someone they know passes away.
About 36 per cent of the respondents stated that they were comfortable talking about their own death but when it comes to talking to someone who is terminally ill, that number dropped to 20 per cent. The big reason for this is that the respondents have no idea how to broach the subject.
But that survey was in 2014. Since then, conversations around death and dying have opened up, albeit slowly. Prompted in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and through initiatives like the 2023 National Strategy for Palliative Care and online portals like My Legacy, the public is becoming increasingly receptive to the idea of funerals being an occasion to celebrate life instead of death.
The Life Celebrant is one such funeral service that focuses on the deceased’s life during the wake. Founded by Angjolie Mei, a second-generation funeral director, the idea to commemorate rather than mourn, started when she had to organise her own father’s funeral. She’d always known her father as a stoic man but she discovered another side of him through stories told by his friend who came to the funeral.
To further demystify death and dying, Angjolie wrote her autobiography called, Dying to Meet You: Confessions of a Funeral Director. She went on to launch a podcast of the same name in 2021, where she and a guest talk candidly about the topic of death and life.
HCA Hospice, Singapore’s largest home hospice care provider, was behind the first widely-documented living funeral late last year. Michelle “Mike” Ng was an HCA patient who took quickly to the concept of a living funeral when it was first suggested to her by HCA’s principal medical social worker, Jayne Leong.
“Living funerals form a part of the legacy-related work that medical social workers typically facilitate with patients and their families,” Leong explains. “But it is not recommended to all families as every family is unique and may have different ways they wish to honour and celebrate their lives and legacies.”
Mike’s living funeral was documented by Our Grandfather Story (OGS), a digital publisher. Uploaded to YouTube, the video was OGS’ most-watched content with 3.3 million views to date. Viewers’ comments were largely positive and sympathetic; many saw the concept of a living funeral as ideal. One of them was Carolyn.
Like Mike, the idea of a living funeral was suggested to Carolyn by her own medical social worker, Shannon Sim. This time, Carolyn is open to more coverage of her living funeral. Aside from Esquire Singapore, The Straits Times and Channel 8 were the other two media covering the occasion. With this level of media intrusion, does the Observer Effect come into play at Carolyn’s living funeral? Would the mood be different, or, perhaps more relaxed, without the presence of journalists and cameras?
“The intimate connection between patient and invited loved ones and significant others to these special events are organic experiences that will happen regardless of whether there is media coverage of the events or not,” Jayne Leong says. “For Mike’s living funeral, she expressed her wish for more people to know about holding a living funeral, hospice care and talking about death and dying openly, thus we invited the media to cover her story.”
Steps were taken to ensure prior consent from the patient and their guests. Should anyone feel uncomfortable about being photographed and filmed, their request for privacy is respected.
Shannon led the organisation of the event. They invited friends and roped in volunteers to help with Carolyn’s make-up, setting up the decorations and documenting the affair. Catering and other expenses were covered by HCA.
It was a lovely experience, which is an uncommon thing to say at a living funeral. Throughout the four hours, Carolyn’s friends said their peace. Reminiscences of the past were traded; laughter punctuated the sombre air. Carolyn belted out a few tunes with her karaoke buddies and gifted personalised cards with handwritten notes about how much each of them meant to her. It had the timbre of a farewell party for someone making that big move overseas.
The doctors gave her a prognosis of no more than six months to live. That was about a year ago. Against all odds and assumptions, Carolyn abides. She even managed to tick another item off her bucket list: spending the day at Disneyland in Hong Kong. As ever, ‘godbrother’ Sam was there by her side to watch over her.
Still a presence on social media, Carolyn continues to dole out information on her progress and help allay fears about death and dying. She walks her dog. She even plans to travel alone to Taiwan—much to Sam’s chagrin.
For Carolyn, she believes that there is more to this after she passes. A heaven, where there’s no pain, no sadness. “There is a fear though,” Carolyn adds, “not about the end but how I am going to go. The suffering is what I’m afraid of. The fear is always there but I put it aside and live in the moment.” We all ride on hope, living one day at a time. But some like Carolyn, will hold on tighter than ever; their fierce focus is on the present as their candle burns at both ends.
(Editor's note: Hours after this article was uploaded, Carolyn's medical social worker, Shannon Sim, said that Carolyn is not continuing with her dialysis and is now on terminal discharge.)
(Update: Shortly upon returning home, Carolyn passed on peacefully surrounded by her family and care team.)
It was a decision made during COVID. To not give a damn. To not care if the brands that he worked with knew what he does in his art practice. It may seem unusual for a marketing person to take on this stance, but Eduardo Enrique isn’t the average marketing person.
“All I do for work is to convince brands to stay true to what they believe in and connect with the public in a very sincere way,” Enrique shares.
Like many major world events—9/11, a reality-show star becoming president, the Rohingya refugee crisis, Covid—it is these sorts of grand incidents that one would be cast into an existential funk. For Enrique, he wonders if he should stop hiding who he is and what he does.
He is no stranger to taking on a nom de plume. His earlier endeavour was Dick Worldwide, where he took fashion accessories and turned them into phalluses. Dick Worldwide blew up when Hypebae reported on his project. He didn’t give a lot of information about himself. He specifically kept away from using pronouns that might give away his gender identity.
“I didn’t want to attach an identity to the project because it plays a role in what licences you have as an artist,” Enrique says. “It's not a celebration of masculinity. I chose penises because [they are] the oldest form of mockery where there are graffiti of penises back in Renaissance times. If I said I was a woman in the Middle East, the public will see the work in an entirely new way.”
Identity defines what sort of roles you can have, or even what sort of roles the public expects you to inhabit. As an artist, Enrique finds it challenging to play with sexuality in his work because there’s too much tension around the subject. For Brand Love, Enrique’s last exhibition in Singapore before he left for Hong Kong, he continues questioning pop culture’s fixation with brands with a what-if: What if there was a Nike retail bondage store?
Taking the identity of a well-known sports brand, Enrique reconstituted it and created fetish garments and bondage equipment. He made sure to keep the installations to be ‘fair’ across genders. “There were two mannequins—one male, one female. I wanted to make sure there’s a good balance between the sexes,” he says.
“Because we’re in the age of representation, everybody represents something; [they] represent the voice of a certain thing. That’s why my identity as an artist has only to do with the fact that I’m also [a] marketer; it’s never a celebration and a critique against consumerism. It’s an observation because I’m also [a] huge consumer.”
For New Painting, which was held at the Substation in 2020, there was a piece of work with the spray-painted words ‘God’ and ‘Gucci’ with checkboxes next to them. On the first day of the show, a woman, who was smoking mere minutes ago, came in and approached Enrique. She asked him which one he’d pick. He looked at the painting, then back to her. Both, he replied. The woman looked at him and, with a smile, said thank you and left.
“I’m a creative trying to bridge disciplines. Especially in Singapore, everything is so young and arbitrary,” he admits.
At this point in time, Enrique feels that he is at a perfect intersection to talk about consumerism because he represents the companies in selling the product while commenting on the commercialism part of it. “There’s a love-and-hate relationship,” Enrique says.
But does that make him a hypocrite? Or can one man embody opposites?
Enrique funds his own shows. That keeps him free and honest; he is untainted by favours that come with other people’s money. But Enrique thinks that is just how he is. He’s never asked for permission. For his first show, New Painting, he eschewed asking people for permission lest he heard the word no.
He’s a one-man operation, a self-starter. He chose the Substation, put up his own money, created the artwork which he mounted himself, and opened his exhibition to the public. In his head, he has calculated all possible scenarios of things that could go right and wrong. If he had dwelled on these scenarios, he’d never have put up an art show.
Eduardo Enrique’s bio on The Artling states that “the artist explicitly denies talking about his nationality, as he maintains that one should not be judged based on their geographical origin”. Fair that. But it is in this writer’s opinion that to know where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve started from.
Enrique grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. It’s a setting he describes as “very conservative”. His family model isn’t traditional: his parents divorced and his mother raised her kids by herself.
He sees parallels with his mother. “We have the same work ethic,” Enrique reveals. “She’s a go-getter and she finishes what she starts. I don’t think her parents allowed her to be creative. My mum wanted to study architecture but she was forced to choose something else.
“But she is a fount of creativity and while she never articulated it, she taught me that, to a certain extent, there always needs to be an element of joy in what you do.”
His childhood was idyllic, but living in a third-world country that’s prone to coups and political upheavals, he became familiar with uncertainty. His family were nomads; Enrique never spent more than four years in the same place. It’s a transient lifestyle that is rather normal to him. He remembers that when he hired someone to help him move, the person asked where the rest of the furniture was. “I’m like, no, this is it,” Enrique says. “As a minimalist, I’ve to let go. Materialism is cyclical.”
Even the artworks?
“I think you need to be detached to them emotionally,” he says matter-of-factly. “I dispose of a lot of my artwork. I’ll tell people on Instagram that I’m getting rid of a piece and it’s up for grabs.” There is an item that he cannot abandon.
Nike shoes.
He was never much for brands, even when he was living as a stereotype of a Brooklyn hipster when he was working for the creative agency, Swell in New York. Biking, buying vinyls... Enrique was into fashion but he wasn’t into the hype of it.
“My whole background is in fashion advertising; fashion was about vanity,” he notes. “As a child, vanity was my way of patching up a lot of my insecurities. You buy things to feel empowered, to feel cool.”
So, when he saw a black pair of Nike Air Force 1, it spoke to him. Enthralled by the silhouette, he forked over money for the sneakers and became a returning customer. He has a collection of Air Force 1s that he can’t bear to be rid of. He lugs them around, this minimalist and his yoke of passion.
His mother and he lived separately but they still saw each other. Enrique was working at Fabrica then. “She ended up in Singapore. She called me one day and said, hey, I’m going through breast cancer treatment. I quit [my job] and moved to Singapore.”
She got better and Enrique expected to be in Singapore for six months but it stretched to six years. During his tenure, he worked for two creative agencies and made his foray as a full-fledged artist.
A friend—who prefers to remain anonymous—owns, according to Enrique, “one of his best pieces today”. It’s called "Nude Model in Air Jordans". Taken from his exhibition New Paintings, the piece is a large canvas with the title spray-painted on the back. “When I started, it was important for me to land the idea that I’m not interested in technicality. I’m a conceptual artist. I don’t care about the quality of things. I want people to feel like they could have done what I’ve done.
“New Painting was about classic themes with a twist of modern consumerism. For the front, I tried to render nude modelling or Jordans in so many different ways. But I’ve decided that the front will remain hidden. The painting only exists in your mind and that to me is the best painting I’ve done.
“This guy looks at it and says that he loves it but can’t articulate why. I told him that I’ll sell it to him if he promises never to see what’s on the front. He agreed, and knowing him, he never did peek at the front.”
The original plan for Brand Love was to put up a pop-up in the middle of the street. Enrique’s name wouldn’t be on it, but it would be a pop-up that was selling these art pieces. “I’m not Banksy. I’m not somebody with a following,” he states.
So, Enrique got local art gallery Art Now to house his exhibition during Art Week. “I wanted to make it clear that is art,” he explains. “So we put up all the signs that say I’m not affiliated with Nike. There was only so much planning we could do until Nike sends in the cease-and-desist. It would have been a much different show but I’ll be happy with that outcome as well.”
This time, he got collaborators to design the interior. He set aside a space for Nike’s cease-and-desist letter. A space in the corner, almost like a taunt. It remained empty throughout the showing.
Sexual liberation, a commentary on materialism, but there’s another takeaway from Brand Love that not many people will pick up. It’s about courage. “I wanted people who viewed the exhibition to tell me that it took a lot of courage,” Enrique says. Remember, this man is an overthinker and that sort of trait can eclipse that first step in doing.
Can you imagine doing something that doesn’t shake things up? You can chalk it up to Enrique’s revolutionary South American way of thinking. But to have a true revolution in the culture, you’ll need to challenge the status quo. Love Brand is Enrique’s own little coup in the local art world. He hopes that it’ll at least inspire people to take bigger risks.
Enrique’s life is a series of happy accidents. Recently married (he met his flight-attendant wife on the plane), they are moving to Hong Kong for his new job with Edelman. “Motion represents so much of my life and Singapore is such a dream to live in. There’s no safe place than here, but I am curious about what else is out there,” Enrique says. “Hong Kong seems like a chaotic place, and having come from the chaos I need a little bit of it.”
But first, they would need to travel to Russia so that his wife can get her travel permit. It would be weeks after they arrive there that Russia would invade Ukraine. The battle reminded Enrique of his past, but what he thinks of current events will be another story of his to tell.
Still, his life is never boring. “My biggest fear in life is to get stuck," Enrique says, "so I’m always challenging myself to just keep blooming."
Originally published April 2022
The Stripper Index has been making the rounds on Twitter again. If you missed it, this index lauds the strip club as a leading recession indicator. The economy is wobbly if exotic dancers, who rely on daily cash tips to make a living, are seeing lower earnings. The original online oracle (@boticellibimbo) is a stripper and graduate student from Columbia University. Heralding the current unofficial recession via a tweet in May 2022, she shared that she would check stock alerts to decide whether or not it would be worthwhile going to work that night. Her recent tweets bring hopeful tidings for the American economy—her old clients are back in the clubs, flush with discretionary dollars for their favourite dancers.
As an arts advocate and longtime self-employed person in the entertainment sphere, it's heartening to hear of consumers directly and enthusiastically supporting their local artists, especially in an economic downturn. After that ignominious Sunday Times survey was published in June 2020, where 71 per cent of respondents picked “Artist” as the most non-essential pandemic job, I’d like to see a little more appreciation and yes, money, coming our way.
I’m not an economist but wiser minds agreed that we've been at risk for a technical recession since February 2020, when Covid-19 did its thing. We remember the lockdown and the things that kept us sane. We ran with our music blasting; we streamed shows; we connected with other isolated humans online and we doom-scrolled beautiful photos on the ’gram. All these mental health essentials that the average person relied on to survive the Circuit Breaker, they continue to rely on to enhance their present lived experience daily. Strangely, it seems that many (at least 71 per cent of the people who took The Sunday Times survey) don’t realise that the progenitor of the music, the shows, the video games and the images that they consume, is an artist.
Being a creative isn't the same as having a hobby. And having a “cool” job in the arts doesn't insulate you from needing to pay bills. Whatever economists want to call the downturn we’re in, it’s hitting artists especially hard. Art does not appear, fully formed, from the ether. Even if the gear needed to create art is a fixed cost, the experimentation needed to get to a finished art product is a frighteningly variable cost… and the bills pile up fast.
At the start of the troubles in 2020, peer-to-peer sale sites like Carousell were awash with photographers selling camera lenses and musicians offloading instruments. It was sobering to realise that artists were flogging the tools of their trade. As an erstwhile lawyer, I will now take a Harvey Spectre dance break: Even if someone were legally declared bankrupt and creditors are at the gate, the law recognises the need for the bankrupt to earn a living. The bankrupt’s tools of their trade cannot form part of the bankrupt’s estate (aka what is allowed to be sold to satisfy their creditors), otherwise the bankrupt can't earn any income at all. Many artists, like gig musicians, were prevented from earning any professional income during Covid-19 but the bills still needed to be paid. Making the decision to sell their gear and being unable to buy their way back in, led to highly talented creatives exiting the industry in favour of quicker cash generating options like food delivery. We might be paying for this creative brain drain for a while.
As much as we wryly bemoan the alleged cultural desert we live in, Singapore does have an artistic brain trust to defend. The Forbes 30 Under 30 list regularly features Singapore musicians, including an act I used to manage, The Sam Willows. Nathania Ong is presently treading the boards on the West End playing Eponine in London’s second longestrunning musical Les Miserables. Sam See has headlined comedy shows in 25 countries and is a regular on the Edinburgh comedy circuit. Sonny Liew’s graphic novel, The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye, won a slew of awards, including the Eisner Award for Best Writer/ Artist. Shavonne Wong is an award-winning fashion photographer who pivoted to creating her own models and minting them as NFTs, amassing celebrity fans that include Idris Elba.
"But NFTs aren’t real art!”, I hear some naysayers gripe. In October 2022, the Singapore High Court published the first written judgment in Asia that protected a non-fungible token (NFT). It was a case involving one of the more famous NFTs, a Bored Ape, and in it, the Singapore Courts acknowledged that NFTs can properly be regarded as property. Cryptobros and a Discord of NFT art collectors throughout the island breathed a collective sigh of relief at the recognition of their investment as real property.
Both digital and traditional Singapore artists are pushing boundaries and working hard. And these efforts have been recognised by independent, international bodies. I paraphrase the television show franchise and declare, Singapore Has Talent, and these talents deserve to be appreciated.
In 2014, I hopped on a train to the old Hougang bus interchange for the 100 Bands Music Festival. Beyond the eponymous 100 indie music acts that were scheduled to play, there were also booths for food and merchandise. One of the visual artists exhibiting at the music festival was selling limited prints of her work, including a piece she had created as the album cover for the debut EP of post-prog rock band, 7nightsatsea. Today, that same original work by Allison M Low, “Warboat”, goes for SGD1,431 on her Australia gallery’s website. Back in that heaving, humid bus depot festival of 2014, I bought three of Allison’s prints for less than 10 per cent of that, purely because I thought they were cool.
If there is a non-braggy point to this anecdote, it isn’t (just) that diamond-handing the art pieces for nine years has got me an on-paper 10-times return. Granted, what I bought is a limited edition print and what she’s now selling is the original. I bought the pieces because I liked them and have genuinely loved being around them all this time, even as I moved from my parents’ place to my own. Do I get a small frisson every time I see the artist’s name in the media and the public sphere, knowing she’s on the ascent? Yes. It’s nice knowing an international art gallery is managing her and a growing chunk of the world agrees with my subjective art preferences. But more than that, it’s gratifying to know that my 2014 decision to invest even a tiny amount in a specific artist has turned out to be a “sound” investment. Most importantly, I still think the pieces are cool.
Art creation is not free, so stop being cheap. The next time you go to a bar and make a song request, send the band a tip. The next time you forward your friend a TikTok or a reel, follow the creator and subscribe to their Patreon. While you’re waiting for your little man to walk forward on the screen to get you on the Taylor Swift registration list, take a moment to browse all the other live events that are happening in Singapore; round up the friend group and attend a show. Or go to a gallery or watch a recital. Whatever you choose, please pay for the pleasure of enjoying the fruits of the artist’s labour. There are so many ways for consumers to make like @boticellibimbo’s clients and make a direct and immediate cash contribution to your local arts scene. Pick the one that works best for you and invest in the creative and cultural scene you want to have. Creators are standing by to make money moves.
“I’ll have the fried kway teow please,” I said as slowly as I could manage, in the stifling tropical heat of the hawker centre, eager to have my first taste of Singapore’s trademark cuisine.
“What you want ah?” came the sharp, and to my unattuned ears, completely indecipherable reply.
This was not going well.
As the line started to build up steadily behind me, I assumed that simply by speaking louder, I could make myself better understood.
“Fried kwaaay teow,” emphasising the “a” sound in what would prove to be a futile attempt to enunciate what was otherwise unpronounceable to me.
The matronly proprietor of the fried noodle shop, growing increasingly irate, shot me back a quizzical look.
“Eh, you want popiah (a Singaporean radish-filled wrap dish) go over there, you can see I have a lot of customers here or not?”
My lunch companion, by now unable to stifle her laughter at my inability to order the iconic dish, decided to step in, “Aunty, two char kway teow, no chilli, eat here.”
“Ah, why your friend don’t say? He ang moh or what? But he don’t look ang moh leh.”
Before I could express my indignation, my lunch companion dragged me aside as others in line for the rice noodle-based delicacy shot me evil glances for holding it up.
“What was that all about?” I protested.
“Aiyah, nothing lah. Your accent lah. The poor lady can’t understand a word you’re saying.”
“What accent? My accent is not that bad.”
“Are you kidding? I’d say the number of locals who can understand you are in the minority.”
“But I spoke English and I was told that’s the lingua franca of Singapore.”
“It’s not what you say that’s a problem, it’s how you say it. It’s your accent.”
Having just arrived in Singapore after most of a life spent growing up in Daytona Beach, Florida, I was determined to assimilate in a way I never quite had been able to in America.
After all, growing up as one of only two Asian kids in a small town on Florida’s Atlantic coast, I was for the first time in my life, surrounded by people who looked like me, surely, I would want to sound like them too.
Assimilation is in many ways a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, new emigres are often eager to adapt to the ways of their adoptive countries, but on the other hand, there’s a part of each and every one of us that clings to our identities, a concept that’s becoming increasingly plastic given greater global mobility.
Growing up as an Asian kid in a predominantly white town, I remember ladies coming up to me in the local Ponderosa and asking to touch my hair because it was so shiny and black.
Naturally, I took no offense to it at the time, there were certainly benefits to being the local Asian curiosity (such as an extra-large scoop of vanilla at the ice cream parlour).
Nor would I take offense when kindly strangers told my mother, “Your son speaks such good English!” as if I was some freak of nature.
I would always manage a, “You’re not too bad yourself lady,” before my mother would embarrassingly pull me away.
And perhaps more significantly, when I opened my mouth to speak, I sounded like everyone else in Daytona Beach.
Given how I had grown up in Daytona Beach instead of being a transplant like my parents were, my thick southern accent was a function of prolonged exposure to other Floridians, for whom any other accent would have been inscrutable.
Yet it was this very ability to assimilate in America that would prove to be an Achilles heel on my return to Asia—no one could really understand me (not that I could fully understand them either).
Undeterred, I tried my best to shake off my southern drawl and pepper my speech with suitable local colloquialisms, when a German friend one day remarked to me, “You’re pretty good at code-switching!”
“Code-switching? What’s that?”
As it turns out, code-switching is something many of us do, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
Whether it’s an attempt to sound more Singaporean so I could sample local dishes with minimal fuss, or a Singaporean trying to sound more anglicised, outside of America and other countries where English is the native tongue, most people code-switch.
Since the concept of codeswitching was brought to my attention all those years ago, I’ve grown more conscious of it and noted those who tend not to at all.
Americans would never attempt to change their accents, whereas I have noted countless Singaporeans and others from Asia try to sound more “American” or “British” when speaking with their white friends as if they wouldn’t be able to understand them otherwise.
And while it may be true the Singaporean accent can be impenetrable at times, does codeswitching to sound more American or British actually take away from the Singaporean identity?
Surely there aren’t a lot of Americans trying to sound like Singaporean people speaking English (although there are far more American children trying to sound Australian thanks to the hit animated series Bluey).
Recently there was a small furore when American mothers, concerned their children were starting to sound like the Australian-accented Bluey from the animated series, suggested an Americanised version of the cartoon be created, as if there was something objectionable about the Australian accent.
The concern as it turns out, wasn’t so much that kids would behave like Australians, Bluey is a very wholesome cartoon, but rather they would sound more like Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter.
This is why it may not be a bad idea to introduce the concept of code-switching.
To be fair, actors do it all the time—whether to play a character from a different country or even from a different era, code-switching is to acting what butter is to bread.
With the progress of time, I’ve come to accept the necessity of code-switching.
When I return to America, I return to sounding like an American, and while I remain in Singapore, I try my darnedest to sound Singaporean, neither of which I feel diminishes either my Americanness or my Singaporean-ness.
We live in a globalised world where accents are a feature, not a bug.
An accent, whether organic or adopted, can help assimilation for the speaker and also the listener.
And while an adopted accent can be jarring on the ears of a native speaker at times, the recipient should appreciate the effort being made at code-switching.
In a world where we increasingly choose the people, places, culture and histories we most identify with, surely it is within our grasp to also select the accents we most associate with as well?
So, here’s to code-switching for those who can do it. And for those who haven’t tried it, I highly recommend it.
Just don’t forget to switch back from time to time y’all.
This is not a promo for a TV show or film.
Features with actors are usually about film or TV projects but the current strikes in Hollywood may inevitably be putting the kibosh on many future cover stories. Daniel Wu can’t talk about his recent media productions but he can talk about everything else, even the strikes and why they’re occurring.
“It’s a repeat of what happened on Spotify several years ago,” Wu says. Just before he jumped onto our Zoom interview, he was organising his residual checks. For all the projects that he had worked on, the shows that are on streaming pay pennies on the dollar. “You put your music on Spotify and you get a penny for 1,000 plays. The creator gets almost nothing back for their content. Musicians can make that money back by touring but not actors. There are no other avenues for us to earn a living except when we make films or TV shows. That’s what is at stake at the moment, hence the strikes.”
It’s a complicated affair and it’ll take more than a cover story to break it all down but here it is, in a nutshell: the Writers Guild of America (WGA)—a union that represents screenwriters working in Hollywood—is striking because residual deals from streaming platforms (Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+) are below acceptable living wages. There’s also the contention about the use of AI to replace writers.
The WGA strike coincided with the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strike. Again, this is due to unfair streaming residuals and the replication of their likeness without compensation via AI. These combined strikes have postponed this year’s Emmys; productions for, both current and future projects, were shuttered; films and TV shows that were already made were adjourned to later dates. Todd Holmes, an entertainment industry management professor at Cal State Northridge, based his calculation on the last WGA strike in 2007 and estimated that it might cause a USD3 billion dent in California’s economy.
While Wu may not be vocal on his social media platform (“I don’t talk about too much about the strikes on IG because everyone else has already said what’s needed to be said.”) but he is very much a union man.
“I’m totally for the strike, even though it’s a bummer that we can’t work now. But this is too important for the whole industry to shape what the future is going to be for everyone.”
With the ongoing strikes, you’d think that Wu would have loads of downtime.
You’d be wrong.
Before the pandemic took a stranglehold on the world, the actor, Sung Kung—he of the resurrected Han from Fast and the Furious franchise—Brendan McGrath and Wu formed Student Driver. It’s a lifestyle brand that hypes all the positives of car culture; a tongue-in-cheek take on the student drivers in America—recognisable by the yellow caution sticker on the back of their cars. It’s a jab at the noob-ness of a tire tyro but it’s also the label’s philosophy that no matter how experienced or good you are, you’re always learning. That essentially, you are a student.
Kang and Wu realised that they could leverage their celebrity to promote Student Driver. “It wasn’t for any narcissistic reason,” Wu quickly adds. “If you look at our IG accounts, we’re trying to show what we’re into and what we’re passionate about. We wanted to inspire people and use Student Driver as a place to gather like-minded people.
"You put your music on Spotify and you get a penny for 1,000 plays. The creator gets almost nothing back for their content. Musicians can make that money back by touring but not actors. There are no
other avenues for us to earn a living except when we make films or TV shows. That's what is at stake at the moment, hence the strikes."
It became a meeting place for car enthusiasts from all over; a crossroads where racers mingle with designers, mechanics and the like. “Student Driver became much bigger than just selling stuff,” Wu says. “It became a community where we are learning from one another.”
Wu always wanted to have his own line of merch but there was never a compelling reason for him to do so. He didn’t want to see things happen for the sake of it happening.
Take his only directorial project. Titled, The Heavenly Kings, it was a mockumentary about the Cantopop industry in Hong Kong. But it wasn’t enough to cover a fictional band for the film, it had to feel real. So, Wu created a fake boyband called ALIVE with Terence Yin, Andrew Lin and Conroy Chan. For the next 18 months, Wu orchestrated press tours, live shows and even released an EP, all the while directing the film.
No one, aside from the main cast and close collaborators, knew about the project. Not even the press, a majority that felt betrayed when the truth was disclosed after the film’s release. For their efforts, The Heavenly Kings garnered Wu a Best New Director award at the 26th Hong Kong Film Awards.
“I think directing is one of my strengths,” says Wu. “I think that came from my architecture background; I look at the bigger picture instead of just focusing on one part as an actor.”
Celebrity and being an actor are often mistakenly conflated. One can lead to the other but each occupies their own space. Wu never set out to be a celebrity but he never set out to be an actor either. In 1997, he travelled to Hong Kong, wanting to witness the country’s handover to China. At his sister’s suggestion, Wu took up modelling and months later, the director Yonfan saw Wu in a clothing ad and wanted him to star in his film, Bishonen.
Have you ever loved something so much that you don’t want to ruin it by interacting with it? That was Wu’s reasoning for turning down the role. “I love movies so much that I don’t want to screw it up with my acting.”
But Yonfa pursued and eroded Wu’s apprehension. Bishonen afforded many liberties to Wu in film and TV. With an impressive oeuvre of films under his belt, Wu still finds the fame that comes with being an actor strange.
That’s why he still keeps in touch with his best friend Ian Urban. Since 12, Wu and Urban have been thick as thieves. “He was a big part of my formative years,” Wu says. “Keeping him and people like him in my life, helps me stay grounded. Reminds me of where I came from.”
Urban and Wu lived in the same area so they carpooled to school. They took Spanish (and were failing it as well). They were heavily into the arts. Urban was the reason why Wu got into cars and racing.
That love for cars abated when Wu moved to Hong Kong. The country was never conducive to racing and vehicles were expensive to begin with. “Can you imagine modifying them on top of it?” Wu asks. “And modding is technically illegal there.”
When he returned to the US, the first thing Wu did was tap on Urban, who was a driving coach for the Audi Club, and another family friend, who was an instructor for another track day events group.
They would head to track day events, where Wu would learn how to race on the track. He adapted to it quickly. For the five years that he was back in the States, he did as many track days as he could. Eventually, he climbed to the top 10 per cent of fastest racers on the track.
In the Bay Area, Wu shared a garage with Urban where they built and worked on cars. Down from where they are, is Patrick Ottis Co. that restores vintage Ferraris. Wu and Urban would pass by the garage all the time but they were afraid to enter, “because the cars in there are worth millions, right?” Wu says.
“One day, we were walking by their garage and Tazio [Patrick’s son] was out front and said hi.” They started talking and he gave them a tour of the place. A friendship bloomed over their shared interest in building cars and endless hours at the race track. That soon morphed into a mentorship when Wu learnt to race professionally. Eventually, they embarked on their first endurance racing programme. Committed to a whole season, their first race was a two-hour race at Sonoma Raceway. The next was a night race at Buttonwillow Raceway Park. As soon as darkness blanketed the sky, Wu freaked out. But as he acclimated to the conditions, Wu managed to place third. “The moment I stepped out, I felt this happiness of finishing and not crashing.”
"When I first met him, he was 48 or 49. That was 22 years ago. And now he's 70. To me, the time that my wife and I have been together doesn't seem that long. It zips by. The last 10 years that my daughter has grown, that has gone real fast too."
He credits it to his martial arts training, which he still practises three days a week. Wu likens racing to being on a film set. “The director could be screaming at somebody, things are going slow, they are losing light... You can’t pay attention to that.” He frames it as “finding that calm”. When night falls and the dust kicks up to obstruct your vision, stick to the technique, stay calm and trust yourself to get through the chaos.
For the NASA (National Auto Sport Association) Utah Sunchaser race, Wu had to compete in an LMP3 model, a car that he hadn’t raced the night before. Starting at 6pm, the six-hour race runs until midnight. When Wu was in the driver’s seat, he discovered the headlights were aimed to the right... but all their turns were to the left. He couldn’t see the bends so sometimes he’d swerve too late or too early; driving his car off the track.
It’s almost enough for anyone to throw in the towel but Wu knew his team depended on him. Win or lose, he needed to shake to do better.
If racing on the track is fast, living a life is quicker. Especially, when death is present at the periphery. Wu’s near-death experience with a burst appendix in 2019 was a “wake-up call to live in the moment”. Years later, when he was at his father-in-law’s 70th birthday party, “I did a mental calculation,” Wu says, “when I first met him, he was 48 or 49. That was 22 years ago. And now he’s 70. To me, the time that my wife and I have been together doesn’t seem that long. It zips by. The last 10 years that my daughter has grown, that has gone real fast too.”
That’s why he’s not working as much as he used to. He allocates a certain amount of time per year for work and spends the rest of his time on the things that matter.
Both his parents have passed. Wu posted an image of his father, opining that he would have been 94 this year. I mentioned that he’s almost a spitting image of his dad. “Hopefully my hair stays longer than his,” Wu says jokingly. “I think he went bald in his 20s, so right now, I think I’m doing okay in that department.”
Other than their looks, they also shared a common passion for a fancy family car.
In 1988, Wu’s dad retired and as a gift to himself, decided to purchase a Porsche 911. This felt truly odd to the 14-year-old Wu, as his dad had never been interested in cars and for the frugal family living in Berkeley suburbs, that was an absolute extravagance.
At the car dealership, his dad gave Wu carte blanche to pick out a hue for the exterior (“I picked the weirdest colour because that’s the kind of person I am.”) and Wu asked if they could add a whale-tail spoiler (“A regular 911 doesn’t come with a tail but a 911 Turbo does.”). His dad acquiesced to both suggestions.
The Porsche became a thing that father and son would talk about often. While his dad rarely drove it—and if he did, it was only on the weekends and within speed limits, the car rides spent with him were moments to connect. This experience also cemented his passion for cars.
Currently, the Porsche sits in the Petersen Automotive Museum in LA to coincide with Porsche’s 75th anniversary exhibition. “He kept the car really clean,” Wu says. “Even when I took it over 10 years ago, it still looked brand new.” But the automobile on display will be far better purposed when Wu takes it back and takes it out for a drive. “It’s a nice way to memorialise and think about my dad.”
During Covid, when his daughter, Raven, was in primary one, Wu had to oversee her home distance learning. She was enrolled in a Chinese immersion class and Wu underestimated how little she had absorbed from the module than he originally hoped. “I got a little angry and said, how come you don’t know that? As the words came out of my mouth, I could hear my dad’s voice.”
Wu had to pull back, assess the situation with Raven and figure out the right way to go about it. “Having a kid made me re-evaluate how to strike a balance between how I was raised and how I need to raise her. I’m still stern but I usually edit the first thing that comes to mind and try to say them in a better way.
“I don’t want my kid to be scared of me. I don’t want her to be afraid to talk to me, to ask me for advice. My relationship with my dad was better later in life but in my younger days, I’ve never confided in him about anything.”
It’s being judged by his father’s standards that halted Wu from being open. He didn’t think he would understand. Even when Wu started acting, his dad would ask when was he going to get a real job.
"I'm not an expert and I've never tried to present otherwise, which is why I have an issue with people saying, oh, your life is perfect, blah blah… No, I make mistakes everyday. Things that I could be better at and that includes being a father. I'm trying my best. You're not successful all the time but you try to be better."
It wasn’t until many years later that his dad visited and stayed at a 12-hour shoot where Wu was. At the end of his set, his dad patted Wu on the shoulder and simply said, “You work really hard.”
“That was huge to me,” Wu says. “He was finally accepting what I do.” For Wu, parenthood is a progression. “I’d do what my dad never did: apologise. I’ll tell my daughter what I just said was a little too much. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you upset.” His kid might not grow into the person he expects her to be but that’s something that Wu says he has to deal with.
“I’m not an expert and I’ve never tried to present otherwise, which is why I have an issue with people saying, oh, your life is perfect, blah blah… No, I make mistakes every day. Things that I could be better at and that includes being a father. I’m trying my best. You’re not successful all the time but you try to be better.”
Which is such a refreshing thing to hear from a celebrity or actor, whatever. That as a parent, I’m painted less of a monster, and that the world is more forgiving. We have no idea where the finish line is. All of us, on this road of life, trying to get to our destinations; headlights in the dust and darkness.
We may never reach that stage of enlightenment. But we are alive and there is always the prospect of learning from our pasts.
Photography: Kigon Kwak
Fashion Direction: Asri Jasman
Art Direction: Joan Tai
Styling: Jungle Lin
Producer: Yu Guoran at APEX Communications
Production Assistant: Lu Jiang
Executive Producer / Casting Director: Even Yu at APEX Communications
Grooming: David Cox
Lighting Assistant: Kim Minju
Instead of a rooftop shoot that we had planned, we’re indoors at Dune Studios on Water Street. Outside, the weather is every writer’s dream: “It is an ash-streaked sky that portents a downpour.” “Like a warning, steel wool hangs overhead.” “A dishevelled blanket of grey that drifts languidly like detritus in a muddied pond.” A wet weather doth not a good shoot make.
When Joel Kinnaman arrives, the first thing you notice is how large he is. Bigger than life, broad-chested, he sometimes stands astride, like he’s about to break the spirit of a wild stallion. Then, there’s that presence; a sort of aura that’s quiet but still strong-arms you for your attention.
Just as the fashion shoot is about to start, Kinnaman asks if he could put on his own playlist for the shoot. He brings up his Spotify playlist, titled ‘For some of mankind’. "What Becomes of the Brokenhearted" by Jimmy Ruffin plays.
“The playlists are just for fun,” Kinnaman tells me. “I’ve made a playlist for every project that I’ve been in.”
The project that this particular playlist was made for is For All Mankind, now playing on Apple TV+. It’s a show that puts forth the idea: what if America lost the space race to Russia?
Created and written by Ronald D Moore, the visionary behind the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and Outlander, For All Mankind stars Kinnaman as Edward Baldwin, a NASA astronaut who works alongside Buzz Aldrin (Chris Agos) and Neil Armstrong (Jeff Branson). Kinnaman’s character isn’t based on a particular historical figure, instead he is a composite or a representative of the ‘all-American’ astronauts of that era.
“I’m half-American and half-Swedish,” Kinnaman says. “I’ve lived in Sweden and America so, in a way, I’ve a split identity. My favourite part of the American spirit is not giving up. If they get knocked down, it is a national honour in getting back up and continuing the fight. In reality, when the US got to the moon, it concluded the space race. We didn’t get the continuation in space exploration that everyone was promised.”
Kinnaman is drawn to the science-fiction genre, fantasising of what could have been (though it can be said that the broad field of fiction can also put forward, ‘ what if’). Growing up, he watched the Star Wars movies, he loved the cyberpunk feel when he shot Altered Carbon. He is a fan of Blade Runner due to its dystopian future.
Do you think that sci-fi’s dystopian trope is becoming a reality? Kinnaman muses on that. “We’ve a president who is a national and international embarrassment. He’s immoral, a compulsive liar, a narcissist who doesn’t respect or appreciate democracy. I pray and hope that this nightmare would soon come to an end.
“But I believe we have the potential to overcome this. If we change paths and realign our focus in coming together as a human family, we can solve whatever problems that come our way together.”
This sentiment is echoed in For All Mankind, although the loss wasn’t the be-all and end-all for America. According to Moore, in losing the space race, America ends up the winner in the long run because of the continual effort into space exploration.
“Art can be a little lazy in pointing out the negatives. In many instances, the role that art and the artist play is showing us what’s wrong: that’s important but showcasing the positives is equally important. For All Mankind shows us how we should be operating if we are guided by our better angels.”
Physicist and theoretical biologist, Erwin Schrödinger, came up with a thought experiment. Imagine, if you will, a cat that’s sealed in a box. And inside that box is a device that might or might not kill the cat. Quantum theory states that quantum particles can exist in a superposition of states at the same time. Some even theorise that the quantum particles will collapse to a single state when it’s observed. When applied to Schrödinger’s cat, the feline is both dead and alive until you open the box.
Schrödinger came up with this thought experiment to explain that “misinterpreted simplification of quantum theory can lead to absurd results which don’t match real world quantum physics”. In the real world, it’s absurd that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time.
But one can also see this as an example of how the scientific theory works. Nobody really knows if a theory is right or wrong until it can be tested and proved. It’s like asking someone out on a date, you don’t know if that cute girl or guy will go out with you until you ask; the possibilities of rejection and acceptance remain in co-existence.
That is before you open the box.
Observe: Joel Kinnaman wouldn’t have existed if his father, Steve, had not defected from the US Army. An Indianapolis native, the elder Kinnaman was drafted and stationed in Bangkok, Thailand during the Vietnam War. While he was there, he started spending time with European backpackers, who have a different perspective of the war. A seed was planted. It finally blossomed when he attended a friend’s wedding in Laos. “It turned out that the woman’s family was half Laotian and half Vietnamese,” Kinnaman says. “It was an emotional moment for my dad. He asked himself if these were the people that he was going to kill.”
Still reeling from the love he had witnessed, the elder Kinnaman returned to his base. It was then that he was given the news that he was being reassigned to the battlefront in Vietnam.
In the history of war, the common punishment for desertion is death. According to the US Uniform Code of Military Justice, Article 85, it is meted out “by death of other such punishment as a court-martial may direct”. (Since the Civil War, only one American serviceman was executed for desertion: Private Eddie Slovik in 1945.)
Knowing the penalties for desertion, the elder Kinnaman made the decision that night to leave camp. He hitchhiked his way up into northern Thailand and into Laos. He burned his passport, changed his name and passed off as Canadian. For the next four years, he lived life among the Laotians doing odd jobs. Then, he found out that Sweden grants asylum to Vietnam deserters. Since moving to Sweden, President Jimmy Carter eventually issued an amnesty in 1977. The elder Kinnaman continues to reside in Sweden. After his first marriage ended, he was involved with Bitte, a therapist. This relationship yielded Joel.
“I’ve been working on the script about his life,” Kinnaman says. “The idea would be that I’d play my dad but I’m getting a little old.” It’s a story to be told, one about the dangers of blind patriotism; a tool that’s often exploited by governments. “We need to be critical individuals who should make up our own minds.”
Observe: Kinnaman had his first taste of acting when he was 10. He played Felix Lundström on Storstad, a soap opera that looks at the lives of the residents living in the fictional town of Malmtorget. Back then, Sweden had only two TV channels so even if it’s a secondary or even tertiary role on an ensemble piece, people will recognise you. “I didn’t understand it,” Kinnaman says. “There was something thrilling about being famous but there was something I didn’t like about it either.” His whole experience as a child actor was underwhelming.
In fact, taking a page from ‘history repeating itself ’, observe as Kinnaman could have been a soldier in the Swedish army.
“It was mandatory for the men to be conscripted for a year in the army and it was during my time when the rules for enlistment started to relax,” Kinnaman says. “If you didn’t want to enlist, all you have to do is purposely fail the proficiency tests.”
Alas, Kinnaman was so caught up in the competition that he aced it. His results showed potential to be a company leader. He was enlisted and assigned to an 18-month tour in the Arctic Circle but Kinnaman plum forgot about it. When he moved to Oslo, Norway, to be a bartender, he received a call from his mother, informing him that there was a government notice stating that he was supposed to enlist in three days.
He called the army to tell them that he was no longer in the country. “They said, this is a serious offence and I could get prison time for this. But if I were to write a letter to explain the situation, I could get out of this.” And then he forgot to write the letter. Kinnaman continued working odd jobs but he was always haunted by the thought that if he were ever to be arrested by the police for anything, they might discover his draft dodge from his records and he would be sent to prison.
“I ended up at this fight outside a night club and got taken in by the police.” Kinnaman says. Observe: Kinnaman could have ended up serving his sentence for draft dodging but nothing came of it.
Acting was calling out to him once more. His friend, Gustaf Skarsgård (famously known for his role as Floki in History Channel’s Vikings), was on track to becoming an actor and advised Kinnaman to apply for theatre school. After several applications, Kinnaman finally got into what he describes as “Sweden’s second-best acting school” and would go on to film two movies during his enrolment.
After graduation, he continued acting in Sweden before moving to America. He kept himself busy. He made an appearance in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; starred as Governor Will Conway in House of Cards; made people notice with his portrayal as the homicide detective, Stephen Holder; scored the lead role in the Robocop remake; was cast as Rick Flag in Suicide Squad.
The one genre that Kinnaman can’t seem to appear in is comedy. Yes, he has a stern demeanour but the man is also funny. “Sometimes, Hollywood sees you in a certain way and it’s much easier to get cast for it. And the next is similar to that and so on. I haven’t made an effort to dissuade people’s opinion. The lighter side is probably more me.”
The closest he has gotten to doing comedy is the shooting of the Suicide Squad sequel. Helmed by James Gunn, Kinnaman said in another interview that it feels like he’s “shooting his first comedy”.
“I’ve been around tough people with issues before,” Kinnaman continues. “I’ve had some bad times so those kind of environments were natural to be in. It’s a survival mechanism too. A way for me to cope as I grew up. At the time, you’re figuring out about your identity. I felt insecure, powerless and didn’t know what to do in life.
“It was a period of my life that was pretty negative. But one of the beauties of acting is that those dark periods become a mother lode that you can mine from. Maybe I’ve drawn a little bit too much from it by playing too many tough guys.”
In May 2016, Kinnaman was one of the delegates and personalities from Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Finland and Sweden who was invited to one of President Obama’s final state dinners. Kinnaman, dressed in a sharp tuxedo, attended the dinner with his then-wife, Cleo Wattenström.
He overheard that the Obamas were fans of House of Cards and was looking forward to being introduced to them. At the reception, he and the other representatives stood in a row as President Obama made his way down the line, shaking hands and posing for a photo op. By Kinnaman’s admission, his mind wandered as he imagined what he’d say when President Obama came up to him. “Maybe I’d say, ‘Mr President’, and then he’ll say ‘Governor Conway’, and then we’ll laugh. And we’ll end it with a cool handshake.”
And all of a sudden, the president stood before him and Kinnaman muttered, “Mr President…” There was an awkward pause. Kinnaman would recount that it’s very possible that either the Obamas hadn’t watched the episode that he was in or if they did, his presence made zero impact. Before the silence could prolong, Kinnaman ended with, “thanks… for everything”. President Obama said something along the lines of, “Surely but surely, we cannot lose hope” and Kinnaman was ushered off.
He would retell this story when he introduced President Obama at Brilliant Minds, a conference of creative individuals who embody the forward-thinking spirit of Sweden, in June 2019. After the introduction, he returned backstage, where President Obama was waiting for his cue to go up. “He had this huge smile on his face and he said to me, ‘bring it in for a cool handshake.’ We hugged, we talked for about five minutes. He was super friendly. I’ll always remember that moment.”
Kinnaman isn’t shy about his politics. He voiced support for the #metoo movement; he had championed the environmental cause by one of his fellow Swedes, Greta Thunberg; he does not hide his disdain for the Trump administration.
“I think the last UN report stated that we have about eight years to turn back our carbon expenditure into the atmosphere,” Kinnaman says about where we’re heading as a species. “You don’t have to be a prophet to see that the world is heading towards the wrong direction. The oceans are heating up, the glaciers are melting. These natural disasters will be more frequent and that’s gonna lead to more tensions among countries.
“Politically, we’re moving towards a more nativist direction; people are pulling away from international cooperation. There’s the rise in disinformation campaigns, which will threaten democracy.”
But Kinnaman, ever the optimist, still believes in the human spirit, that we can innovate our way out of this quagmire.
Observe: Kinnaman, who was born with pectus excavatum, chose to correct the disorder instead of living with it.
Pectus excavatum is a chest-wall deformity that affects roughly one in 400. Instead of the breastbone being flush against the chest, it sinks in. Measured on a scale called the Haller index, anything above an index of 3.2 is considered severe. Kinnaman’s index was a seven or an eight.
“It’s something that’s survivable,” Kinnaman explains. “But it’s a condition that grows worse over time: your posture becomes worse; your stamina worsens as your heart is not given room to pump. By correcting it you can add years to your life.”
For a condition this severe, doctors had to insert two curved metal bars across his chest. Then the bars are turned to force the chest out and then the bars are wired to his ribs. The operation changed his life for the better. He doesn’t feel self-conscious whenever he removes his top. Six weeks after his surgery, he had to do reshoots for Suicide Squad. It was a fight sequence but Kinnaman sucked it up. “Would you like to feel it?” He asked.
He raised his arm like an invitation. I reached out and felt the spot, where the metal bars are, beneath the fabric and skin.
That’s an interesting party trick, I say. Kinnaman could only chuckle in response.
“It’s funny, if you ask me to say a line from a movie that I’ve been in before, I can’t. Not one line from any movie that I’ve done but I once did a monologue that was one hour and 30 minutes and I knew it by heart after 10 days.”
Kinnaman used to opine that as a Swedish-American, growing up with dual cultures gives him a better perspective of the world but that also left him feeling like he doesn’t belong. He jumps from place to place, leading a nomadic existence.
“But I think,” he says as though he had stumbled upon some great truth a long time back, “I don’t wanna travel so much any more. Home. That’s where I’d like to be. I have two bases: one in Venice, LA and the other, an hour outside Stockholm.
“Growing up, my family didn’t have any money. We lived in this tiny little cottage that was in the middle of the woods. Now, I have this piece of land, where my family lives. This past midsummer was the first midsummer that we all spent together.
“That’s my new happy place.”
Joel Kinnaman looks like a man who has placed the final piece in that mystery of his life. He has stopped worrying about how he’s perceived by the public. He has exorcised people who have “struggled with jealousy, who don’t have a natural inclination towards generosity”. He has zero tolerance against bullshit. He likes how his career is shaping up—aside from Suicide Squad 2, For All Mankind is now filming a second season, and Kinnaman has three films coming out: The Informer; The Sound of Philadelphia and The Secrets We Keep; the last two, he avers, are his best work. “People who have watched me for a long time, it will remind them of my early career and for people who recently followed me, they will see a new side of me.
“I have goals that I’d like to achieve. Actor awards are such bullshit… until you get one. But yeah, that would be great. In future, I’d definitely want to be in a producing role and at some point, I’d like to also direct.
“I’ve said that I’d direct in five years time for about 10 years now.” That might change. His life is still a long and open road ahead.
Schrodinger’s cat posits two states that the creature can be in—dead or alive. But what if there’s a third option. That within the confines of the box, the cat is not there. It’s escaped. Unburdened from the stipulations of a thought experiment, free to do what it wants.
Originally published in the December 2019 issue
