An Important Announcement

I’m not sure of the best way to tell all of you, so I think I’ll tell the story of how I told B’s parents.

It was lunch time, and the four of us (B, parents, boyfriend) were sitting down to a casual lunch. It was standard fare – both the Singaporean noodles and the chit chat about weekend plans to rest up before taking naps. But I was speaking more from memory than the present, because most of my mind was frantically rehearsing a new script.

I searched in vain for the perfect time, but it was elusive. So finally, just as everyone was getting ready to move the dishes to the kitchen, I decided I had to settle for this final lull.

I cleared my throat and took B’s hand, while my eyes moved from her neck, to my thigh, to my plate.

“Mr. and Mrs. Liu, we have something important we’d like to tell you.”

Mr. Liu couldn’t (made no attempt to?) suppress a guttural and startled “What?!” Mrs. Liu gasped and leaned in from her seat to my left, leaving her face less than a foot from mine. In light of their obvious shock, bordering on horror, I was tempted to reverse course. But at this point a simple “Nevermind” would have not been enough to excuse myself from the table. So I pressed on.

“Well, uh, I know we’ve mentioned this to you before” – because we had – “and so you know that we’ve been considering this for a while.” Mrs. Liu’s breath has quicker on my cheeks.

“And so we’ve been thinking and praying about it, and, uh, we think the timing is right,” I continued. The words lurched from my throat, afraid of the piercing stares they’d meet in the soft glow of the early afternoon.

“We know that it’ll take a lot of work, and a lot of preparation, but we think we’re ready to make that kind of commitment.” I kept searching for more ideas to lengthen my halting preface – perhaps a contrast of the development of marriage in Asian vs. non-Asian countries, from antiquity through the next millennium? – but nothing could keep the inevitable at bay.

I adjusted my grip on B’s hand and looked to her for some sort of encouragement. She looked blank, as in colorless. “So I’ve asked Bea, and she’s accepted.”

By this point the announcement would not sit still any longer, and it just barely squeaked (literally) past every repressive thought that was welling from within. “We’re running the Standard Chartered half marathon.”

It took a moment for everyone to make sense of my faltering voice. And then they breathed. The back legs of her parents’ chairs thumped as they returned to the floor, and they slumped back, eyes half-closed, reveling in the sensation of rescuing mercy.

“So when is the marathon?” B’s mom asked as she straightened up – back to business. We discussed the details of the race and our training regimen. Her dad explained that he could not run such a long distance because of his knees. And then we resumed our afternoon schedule as planned.

Not such big news after all.

Office fun

Few of my American readers have heard of DBS Bank, but it is well-known across Asia. It is the largest bank in Singapore and a leading bank in Hong Kong. (This line comes straight out of its corporate information.) It is also the source of my monthly paychecks. And recently, it has been a consistent villain in HK’s critical – and at times sensationalistic – headlines.

I’m not sure one could find a more challenging start to a career in marketing and communications. Less than two weeks after I signed on permanently with the bank, the financial world began its spectacular unraveling, leaving many DBS (and other HK banks’) customers with worthless Lehman-related investments. Outraged customers blamed the government’s lax regulations and the banks’ mis-selling. Legislators quickly sided with customers (voters), and led protests against the banks. Banks, unable to blame customers, tried to chalk it all up to “the unprecedented financial crisis”. This failed. Now they’re collectively dousing the local wildfires with billions in repayments.

Just as the “Lehman incident” (as we called it) was wrapping up its fifteen minutes of infamy, our senior management in Singapore announced that 900 of the bank’s 15,000 jobs would be cut by the end of November. Though other banks had made similar moves, we seemed to take a large helping of the newspaper negativity because of our prime role in the Lehman debacle and the forward nature in which we made the announcement. Our bedraggled communications team – cut from 7 to 5 because of a resignation and a lay off – was back on the frontlines.

I could reflect for several entries on what (I think) I’ve learned from the last two months, and even venture a few novice opinions, but that may be better left for the non-public domain. The point is that our small team has been in a frenzy, and with the departure of my two closest working partners, I’ve been sprinting to stand still. I entered the corporate world more for learning than a career; God decided to make the best of it by granting me a crash course with a once-in-a-career crisis.

But it’s not all beating back flames. There are times when the wind is blowing favorably and the office is a place to laugh out loud (in amusement or joy, not manic delirium). Here are some examples:

• One of my officemates was planning to vacation with a friend in Japan. I insisted that she bring me something back; she hesitated; I insisted further; she protested, and gave in half-heartedly (we have that kind of relationship). Later that day, I spotted a box of cookies on her desk. I happened to be hungry, so I asked her for one.

“You may have one,” she said. She paused, then looked up. “I bought them from Japan.”
“Really?”
“Yes, it’s from the future, for you,” she said, visibly unburdened.

• On October 30, I got a call from a secretary of one member of the senior management. She’s very kind and soft, though not stereotypically shy.
  

“Ryan, I have a silly question,” she said.
"No problem, those are my favorite kind.”
“Uh, ok.” Pause. “Which day is Halloween?”
"Halloween is tomorrow, Joey.” (Joey is an office lady, not a baby kangaroo).
"Oh…so will kids come to my house asking for candy tonight or tomorrow?”
Suppressing a giggle: “They should come tomorrow.”
“Oh thank you thank you. I knew you’d be the right person to ask!”

• In Hong Kong, most people choose their English names. In the bank alone, I’ve discovered some excellent pairings of Western given names with Chinese family names. For example:

a. Lone Lee. (Poor fellow. Is he married?)
b. Human Lu. (She’d have an especially crappy time in England.)
c. Zero Shum. (My personal favorite, because the ‘h’ in her last name is virtually silent. I bet she’s an economist who invents games.)

On missing mandates

On three separate occasions over the last couple weeks I have eaten in the exclusive company of men. I haven’t had this since July, and doing so felt like I had found another lung on a smoggy day.

Hong Kong has surrounded me with women. I work in a field (marketing and communications) where the corporate world has been especially accepting of women. Before I joined, our department was one of two in the bank without a y-chromosome; that honor now lies solely with the Secretariat. In addition, DBS (my employer) seems to be quite progressive when it comes to gender in its hiring and promotion practices (especially for a bank). My boss, and her boss, and both of her bosses are all women (these include the head of our department and the Hong Kong CEO).

In addition, one of the main reasons I moved to Hong Kong was to see what God had in store for my relationship with B. I’ve naturally tended to spend most of my free time with her. (I can think of no girl so willing to spend time with me, let alone one as pretty as she; I want to make the best of it while it lasts.)

The female world is not completely foreign to me. In high school, a majority of my friends were girls, largely because I found them easier to talk to, and because I was attracted to some of them (or their friends). My experience has prepared me to approach my current circumstances with traces of both empathy and dispassionate understanding, though I would hardly say I’m a model for either. I have at least survived the following situations, though they are not the toughest of them:

• A couple weeks ago, one of my colleagues’ ex-boyfriends was in town with his newborn child, so after lunch we went clothes shopping for a baby whose age and gender we didn’t know. I picked out both items that she ended up buying.
• The other day my boss offered to treat me to lunch, and bought me a McDonald’s Happy Meal. She was in a determined search for the complete set of current Happy Meal toys, which are fashioned after a Japanese comic book character, and needed two to complete her set. The lousy finger foods just made me hungrier.
• This same boss has taken to addressing me as “dear” in her emails. After sending these emails, she walks over to my desk and verbally recites them.
• At least three colleagues have commented on my hair(cut). The head of our department asked if I was having a bad hair day when I wasn’t.
• Sometimes B cries when I hug her. She claims it’s because I “break down her defenses”, but I wonder at how euphemistic that may be. I have started wearing more deodorant.
  

Women are truly marvelous creatures, and I am quite glad that they deem me worthy of their time and presence. To be honest, I’m not sure whether I’d rather work in an office of all men or all women. For example, at lunch this past Friday, they spent lots of time jabbering away while letting me (with no male rivals) clean up the leftovers. On a more serious note, I’ve found an openness to talk about heart issues and the Gospel with many female colleagues that I can’t imagine broaching with men in the workplace. And, of course, I’m certainly glad to be dating a female. I am just now beginning to appreciate the richness of studying Scripture, singing, and praying with B, and all the femininity she brings to it.

But I need men. College introduced me to the inimitable joy of shared manhood, and revealed the parts of my heart and life that had been woefully underdeveloped in high school without a strong network of males. Now that I am in danger of slipping into this kind of disrepair, God has begun to lure me out with a hint of the sweetness of guy time (and some helpful paradigm-shifting via Eldredge’s Way of the Wild Heart). At the meals I mentioned in the first paragraph, the conversations themselves weren’t spectacular – but they were a start. We bantered about tennis, family, careers, girls, computers, isolation, etc. But most importantly, the usual pressure of inter-gender dynamics was replaced by the positive testosterone feedback loop of jovial man time.

Of the three manly meals, the richest was a nearly 4-hour ordeal with a fellow DBS employee named John. John traveled far out of his way to introduce me to a notable hot pot buffet that I never would have found on my own. We found that our sisters troubled us with similar mood swings and that our girlfriends both live inconveniently far away. We drank beer, and ordered about 25 plates of meat. After he let slip that some of his male colleagues get together to play basketball after work, I nearly forced myself into their next game. It was a wonderful date.

As we were parting ways, I jokingly asked if his girlfriend (actually, fiancée) would be jealous about our evening.

“No,” he said. “I treat her much better.” Lucky girl.

I laughed aloud. “Ok, well, we should do this again then.”

“Sure, any time, let me know,” he said, and then disappeared down the steps into the train station.

And that’s how I think things should be. His woman will get his best, but he’ll need some good men to help him give it.