SING SOAPS

On Singaporean TV, the hottest new show is called Shooting Stars. The program premiered after the National Day Parade, which is the Singaporean equivalent of beginning after the SuperBowl. I've never watched this program, partly because I don't watch TV too much here and partly because one of my Singaporeans friends told me it was a piece of crap, "Singapore's Baywatch."

Shooting Stars features all of the top performers from the Singapore Idol television competition. So, imagine a soap opera starring Kelly Clarkson, Reuben Studdard, and Clay Aiken, and then decrease the quality of talent a notch and you can get a good picture of the quality of acting featured on this show.

Today, I went to Bukit Meriah to eat Indian food with the tech guy from school. It was while I was riding back on bus 14 and watching the TVMobile screens that I was exposed to the high drama I had until now been missing.

In less that ten minutes of time, I was exposed to only a brief taste of this half hour program. In the time that I watched, a guy had an argument with his dad about becoming a pop star, a girl got raped, another guy stabbed the rapist, and some old guy got hit by a car while trying to change the batteries on his portable CD player. Unfortunately, I didn't get to see the exciting conclusion because the time came for me to get off the bus.

When I got back to the apartment one of my roommates who studies Chinese was watching a Chinese soap opera. In the brief segment I saw of it a woman was asked to leave a shopping mall for breast feeding. As she was leaving, she saw there were several other people leaving for the same reason. She then organized a breast feeding sit-in. An army of mothers marched into the mall and proudly let their children suck from their teats, in a way that was edited for television of course. The final scene had a shopping mall official publicly apologizing to the mothers. The young mothers got their way and could feed their kids whenever they wanted.

Power to the Chinese! Long live melodrama!