I aspired to be a detective. It was a joint aspiration with my best friend at that time, who was also my cousin and lived across from me. We both bought 'The Usborne Detective's Handbook' and came up with missions. The most memorable involved an elaborate afternoon of frying cubed potatoes, getting my siblings to eat them with their fingers and then smearing their fingers on a glass panelled sliding door for us to dust with talcum powder. The powder, brush and a notebook fit in our matching Detective Kits, plastic and brightly coloured, it was all very important business. We were missing a trench coat though and I lusted after one I saw in a Burberry storefront. But we live in Singapore, where it is mostly warm and humid throughout the year, and wearing a coat would be the most conspicuous thing to do.
Today I am an artist and an arts administrator. I think it was the dramatic feeling of being a caricature detective that I liked. Cleaning up clumpy talcum powder, wiping down the crime scene and convincing my sisters to continue their criminal careers was also challenging so we resigned. But maybe if I had lived somewhere where I could wear a trench coat things would be different...
I aspired to be a detective. It was a joint aspiration with my best friend at that time, who was also my cousin and lived across from me. We both bought 'The Usborne Detective's Handbook' and came up with missions. The most memorable involved an elaborate afternoon of frying cubed potatoes, getting my siblings to eat them with their fingers and then smearing their fingers on a glass panelled sliding door for us to dust with talcum powder. The powder, brush and a notebook fit in our matching Detective Kits, plastic and brightly coloured, it was all very important business. We were missing a trench coat though and I lusted after one I saw in a Burberry storefront. But we live in Singapore, where it is mostly warm and humid throughout the year, and wearing a coat would be the most conspicuous thing to do.
Today I am an artist and an arts administrator. I think it was the dramatic feeling of being a caricature detective that I liked. Cleaning up clumpy talcum powder, wiping down the crime scene and convincing my sisters to continue their criminal careers was also challenging so we resigned. But maybe if I had lived somewhere where I could wear a trench coat things would be different...