One of my favourite things about Singapore life is people watching.
I first discovered this word in the fancy but misleading context of cool girl bloggers who said they liked to sit at cafes and people watch. The introduction of "cafe" instantly adds a transforming dash of glamour--French pastries, sun hats, flowers, and someone picturesquely riding a picturesque bicycle with a basket in front that probably has celery and a baguette inside. And a faint hint of spy movie glamour where the secret agents sit sipping coffee and watching specific entries or people like hawks behind their newspapers and sunglasses. Think the opening scene from The Tourist.
I thought this was a very cool concept but also that it sounded a bit weird to go to a cafe to watch people rather than eat pastries. I mean, I may try to do that one day but I can guarantee I almost certainly will end up distracted by the pastries. Another reason I probably can't make it as a secret agent. Target would have left on a plane for Kazakhstan before I finished admiring and eating my chocolate ganache sponge cake and petit four.
Then I realized that the cafe and pastries were all accessories, people watching was actually something I did all the time, without having to specifically carve out a balmy morning and cute outfit for, without spending a cent on French pastries. Public transport never failed to give me something interesting, as did life in a HDB (Singapore government housing apartment) in the heartlands.
Sometimes it was fashion--an interesting colour combination, a new style I'd never seen before, trying to guess if an nondescript looking ensemble was actually branded from head to toe, someone with a cutting edge or unique sense of style, someone whose outfit suggested their personality and lifestyle. I like to see how much I can surmise about them from their appearance. As an author I'm always doing this the other way around--giving a character an appearance which suits the personality I have in mind for them; it's challenging the other way around, meeting pre-made characters so to speak, and trying to deduce what they are like. You could say I watch too much Sherlock Holmes, or that I'm just a busybody.
Sometimes it's little things that I store away as potential details to include in a story. The way someone turned their head. A cup of yogurt that was someone's hurried breakfast on the way to work. A music choice. The smell of someone's deodorant mixed with someone else's MacDonalds. A phone conversation (and I've overheard both heartbreaking and hilarious ones. I don't consider it eavesdropping if you're right next to the person--sometimes you don't get a choice on whether you want to eavesdrop or not!) A little conversation that strikes up between two people over an empty seat. How one baby could make several strangers on the train friends. The different reactions when the train breaks down. A toy left behind. Someone trying surreptitiously to watch the Kdrama the person next to them is watching without making it too obvious.
Sometimes, just faces--faces which I challenge myself to reproduce in verbal description, and often come up with new ideas or techniques for describing characters with in the process.
Sometimes that one person you somehow feel a strange attraction to, as if you were meant to be good friends, as if you were sure you would like them if you got to know them. Those eyes, they look sympathetic. I think she'd laugh at the same things I would. I feel as if we might get on really well. I remember once watching a little boy do something funny on the bus, and sharing a smile with another commuter who, like me, had witnessed that little incident and couldn't hold back his amusement. For the rest of the ride it felt like we were friends.
There is a part in Marchette Chute's charming book, The Wonderful Winter, which endears her depiction of Shakespeare to me, and which also resonates with me as a writer who finds people one of the most stimulating inspirations:
"It's an interesting thing about loving," said Mr Shakespeare. "It makes you so clever. Gil loves the theater the way you love birds, and he has learnt more about it in three years than the average person could learn in fifty..."
...Robin had a feeling he was going to be impertinent. "What is the thing you love?"
Mr Shakespeare did not take offence. "People," he said. "Like your martins, they have their reasons, and I like to find out what they are. When I read a book or an old play, I can see the people moving around behind the pages waiting for someone to set them free, and that is why I write plays of my own..."
People watching.
Because people are fascinating.