Ah Meng RIP

Gong Hai Fat Choy to all who are reading this. The official public holiday for Chinese New Year has come and is thankfully gone and we are now getting back to work, though as tradition has it, things will probably be slow this time of the week.

Anyway, the Year of the Rat started out relatively well on the personal front and on the scale of global politics, things went as well as one can expect them to. Americans whinned about how they were not in a recession and mean Chinese were lending them too much money and evil Arabs were keeping prices of oil high but only in delated US dollars. In Singapore, however, things were a little interesting. With a budget round the corner, the nation decided to stop, and pay respects to departed old lady. What's particularly interesting was the fact that the old lady was non other than Ah Meng, a 48-year old (which is very old in Animal Years) Orang-u-Tan.

The fact that 4000 people turned out at the Zoo to pay respects to an ape, is a heart warming tale. It does wonders for my faith in Singaporeans - we are, beneth our money minded, grouchy, crude, ungracious and hypocritical exteriors - just humans, with the capablity of showing emotions that are good as well as bad.

Ah Meng was more than just an Ape. In a nation that has only been independent for 42-years, Ah Meng was a symbol of something good. Ah Meng was someone that we grew up with. She was part and parcel of every Singaporean family - mine included- for quite sometime. I remember the name Ah Meng as a kid and one of the fondest childhood memories I have was of Tara's birthday part in the Zoo with Ah Meng, and a limur called Jay Jay. I think Tara could not have been more than 4 at the time. That memory was so powerful that we made our mother build a story-book world around us, with Ah Meng as one of the leading characters.

I thnk that as we all got older and caught up in the cynicism of daily life, Ah Meng remained as a symbol of something good and innocent in all of us. The Grand Old Lady of the Zoo (Though with a name like Ah Meng, most of us thought she was a guy) was simple in her out look on life and she remained happy with the simple pleasures of life while the rest of us needed to invent reasons to buy goods to make us happy.

I have not been to the Zoo for many years. I think the last time I went was to a friend's wedding but even then I was far away from the animal enclosure. But that didn't mean that I didn't have my childhood facination with Ah Meng. This simple Ape lived a life that was enough to make us in the so called higher status of the evolutionary change, and for that I will miss her.