by May Seah
“Adjonis Keh is Derek Zoolander meets Chua En Lai. May Seah has the kind of wonderfully off-kilter brain that’s common in people who work in the media/ entertainment industry, and she translates all that wonky brain juice into a witty, hilarious story. A funny addition to the repertoire of Singaporean fiction, and in the author, a very welcome voice in the pantheon of up-and-coming Singaporean writers.”
SUFFIAN HAKIM, author of The Minorities
“Do not read on public transport. This quirky little tale will trigger fits of giggles that may draw glares of disapproval from fellow commuters. Be warned.”
SEBASTIAN SIM, award-winning author of The Riot Act
Copyright © 2019 by May Seah
Author photo by Joanne Goh. Used with permission.
Cover design by Victoria Lee.
All rights reserved
Published in Singapore by Epigram Books
shop.epigrambooks.sg
Published with the support of
NATIONAL LIBRARY BOARD, SINGAPORE CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
NAME(S): Seah, May, 1985–
TITLE: The movie that no one saw / May Seah.
DESCRIPTION: First edition. | Singapore : Epigram Books, 2019.
IDENTIFIER: OCN 1090531805
ISBN: 978-981-48-4514-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-981-48-4515-1 (ebook)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Actors—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction.
CLASSIFICATION: DDC S823—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
First edition, May 2019.
ALSO FROM THE EPIGRAM BOOKS FICTION PRIZE
WINNER
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FINALISTS
The Lights That Find Us by Anittha Thanabalan
Beng Beng Revolution by Lu Huiyi
2017
The Riot Act by Sebastian Sim (winner)
Sofia and the Utopia Machine by Judith Huang
9th of August by Andre Yeo
Nimita’s Place by Akshita Nanda
If It Were Up to Mrs Dada by Carissa Foo
18 Walls by Teo Xue Shen
Band Eight by Tham Cheng-E
2016
The Gatekeeper by Nuraliah Norasid (winner)
State of Emergency by Jeremy Tiang
Fox Fire Girl by O Thiam Chin
Surrogate Protocol by Tham Cheng-E
Lieutenant Kurosawa’s Errand Boy by Warran Kalasegaran
The Last Immigrant by Lau Siew Mei
Lion Boy and Drummer Girl by Pauline Loh
2015
Now That It’s Over by O Thiam Chin (winner)
Sugarbread by Balli Kaur Jaswal
Let’s Give It Up for Gimme Lao! by Sebastian Sim
Death of a Perm Sec by Wong Souk Yee
Annabelle Thong by Imran Hashim
Kappa Quartet by Daryl Qilin Yam
Altered Straits by Kevin Martens Wong
For my parents, Peter and Jennifer—
forced to read my “books” since I was a child
“Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental,” read the wisp of paper that fell out of his fortune cookie at his grandmother’s birthday dinner, the year that he turned sixteen.
“Mine says, ‘You will meet a tall, dark and handsome man,’” his grandmother said, squinting through her reading glasses. “I love these kitschy restaurants.” She chuckled conspiratorially to him over the boisterous surround-sound tinkling of porcelain tableware, looking up to survey the hall decorated with carved-wood wall hangings and pink and orange lanterns. “Oh, there he is already! That waiter coming out with my longevity cake.” She reached for the last prawn fritter with her chopsticks. “Does yours predict fame and fortune, dear?”
“No,” he replied, sitting back in his skirted chair. “I’m not sure if this restaurant puts its fortune cookies through quality control.” He was awash with mild indignation at the rank incompetence of this particular fortune cookie, which, tasked with only one job to do, had spewed a disclaimer in place of a prophecy.
“Never mind, dear.” His grandmother slipped a red packet stuffed with cash into his hand. “It’s my birthday, so you have to listen to me— take it. You’ ll always have my blessing, fortune or no fortune.”
“Thanks, Grandma.” He brushed crumbs from his fingers, then pushed the uneaten cookie aside in favour of the mango and pomelo sago, as the bow-tied waiter placed a towering platter of longevity buns on the lazy Susan; the heavy plate clattered onto the glass, and the background prattle of his relatives swelled into a birthday song.
It was nearly ten years later, after he became a full-time film and television actor, that he recalled the incident with a jolt, and the unfortunate fortune received vindication.
1
When Adjonis Keh first started out in television, his acting had been abysmal. He knew this not as a judgement that had been published by newspaper critics, but as a character flaw within himself: even as a child, he had always been relegated to non-speaking supporting parts, usually equine or ovine, in school plays.
In his first professional role, acting in a costumed superhero series, he had flubbed one of his lines upwards of thirty times. He had never been a stutterer, but as the Aubergine Ranger, he just could not succeed in sending the phrase, “Our productivity levels have been falling since 3.30pm” through his purplish-red helmet. He still recalled the pickling sensation of his brain, tongue and lips struggling to complete a task that became increasingly Sisyphean, while everyone on set checked their watches and clucked their tongues in exasperation. After that scene, the script was revised so that the Aubergine Ranger was instead more of the strong, silent type.
He felt as if that debacle had been immortalised in urban legend within the industry, but really, no one remembered it except himself. He was merely another good-looking kid in an endless string of wet-behind-the-ears rookies.
To his surprise, he was swiftly cast in the next production, the young-love romance Flowerbudlets of Springtimeness. He remembered thinking that the title was rich, considering Singapore’s equatorial climate, but he was a new actor at the bottom of the food chain; even the junior make-up artist’s opinion counted for more than his did.
His acting had been shit in that show, too. Playing a lovelorn twenty-two-year-old glassblower whose poorly-thought-through suicide attempt was foiled by his uninterested love interest’s schizophrenic twin sister, he had channelled all his personal brushes with unrequited love into the role, concentrating so hard on feeling every emotion that he thought he was going to have an aneurysm at the end of every take.
It didn’t work. The tears, even when real, looked fake; he cringed along with the director as they watched the playback; this particular director took every chance to hint snidely that Keh’s right to exist on set—nay, on this earth—had been earned only by his looks.
Amongst his peers in the industry, this was considered the ultimate slur. But because he had come into his looks suddenly, he really didn’t have a problem admitting that his face had indeed gotten him the job and enabled him to remain gainfully employed.
As an only child, he had been scrawny in build and average in intelligence, so he was never noticed much, even by his parents. His blooming came late, but when it eventually arrived, it delivered in a big way. Almost overnight, he found himself with broad shoulders, comely features and hair so well-behaved you could trust it to bring your daughter home before midnight.
This happened sometime during the period when, having n
o vocational inclinations whatsoever, he’d elected to go into accounting, which simply happened to be the first in the menu of alphabetically-listed study courses. As an added bonus, it was a career path calculated to cause no offense to his middle-class parents.
But it was while he was on a student exchange programme in Tianjin that a fateful incident occurred. He’d gone on a hiking trip to the north with some friends just before the programme ended, and a few weeks after he returned home, he took ill. Because the disease-carrying species of tick that had formed an attachment to his right heel was not indigenous to Singapore, it was a long time before his condition was correctly diagnosed; by then, severe complications had set in, rendering a seemingly innocuous affliction life-threatening.
He was given five months to live.
Keh went through all the stages: denial, anger, et cetera. Like any young person, he had never really subscribed to the concept of his own personal mortality. To be old one day seemed as impossible as dying when one was not yet twenty.
When those around him started quietly mourning, their solicitation and their neediness began to affect him. Soon, death was no longer an abstract; it was an inevitability to become accustomed to. In fact, it did not take him very long to make his peace with it. A world without him in it would still go on, he realised.
He prepared for his death by buying a stack of in-advance Mother’s Day cards, giving away all his PlayStation games and planning the playlist for his funeral. He stayed up later and later at night, wanting to extend consciousness for as long as possible. At first, he spent the nights writing in a diary. Expressing his ideas in words did not come naturally to him, but leaving a journal behind somehow felt like the thing to do if you wanted to exit this world with an appropriate sense of pathos. It was the sort of stuff that your friends would upload and circulate on Facebook after you’d died, and resurface every year on your death anniversary.
So, he filled numerous pages of an exercise book, slowly and laboriously, with his innermost thoughts, feelings and reflections. But a few weeks later, when he read what he’d written, he was mildly stunned by how utterly boring his life was; he felt his own mind wandering while perusing his journal.
So he watched movies in his bedroom instead and spent the rest of his nights immersing himself in worlds of adventure, intrigue, romance, horror, fantasy and animated anthropomorphic animals. Night after night passed with Humphrey Bogart and Robert De Niro and Stephen Chow and many others for company. The television was almost never turned off as he spent hours lying in his bed, staring trance-like at the enlivened screen, for months on end.
His eyes were constantly bleary and red-rimmed. Friends, scratching their heads for something to say, commended his courage and told him he was an inspiration. He knew they’d rather remember him as such after he was gone, and so he only thanked them for coming to see him.
As his five-month expiry date approached, he was ready.
But the fifth month came and went. And then he started to get better.
There was an embarrassing sense of the anticlimactic, even as the doctors told him he should rejoice in his medical miracle. But mostly, and overwhelmingly, he felt at a loss. The certainty of having no future had been unceremoniously ripped from him, and he now felt adrift. He genuinely did not know what to do with all this life that had been bestowed upon him.
Restored to perfect health, he spent nearly a year at home doing nothing, paralysed by the unlimited possibilities of a fresh start. Without having completed his tertiary education, he had no certificate of qualification. And, having expended his energy on an existential crisis, he had neither the inclination nor the motivation to go back to school or look for employment. It was like he’d been reborn, naked and alone and shivering, armed with no defences and cosmically redundant.
It was around this time that he realised he was having trouble looking at screens.
It started out as a niggling feeling of irritation in his eyes whenever he was absorbed in his computer for too long, but soon developed into a chronic condition.
It made no difference whether it was a television screen, computer screen, mobile phone screen or electronic display—he could no longer look at any screen for longer than a minute or two without his vision blurring, nausea setting in and an acute sense of discomfort bordering on pain. Even non-reflecting movie screens produced this effect.
The doctors tried to explain it as a result of the fervent and excessive hours he had spent watching television while he was ill, but since no definitive signs of nerve or retina damage could be found, they weren’t sure how to treat the condition, apart from prescribing sessions of vision therapy that might go on for years but ultimately prove futile.
However, for someone who had been led to the edge of the grave and then frogmarched straight back in the direction from whence he came, this barely registered as a concern, any more than sinusitis or snoring would have. Keh simply avoided staring at screens for extended periods of time. Of course, this meant that he could no longer watch television—but strangely, he found that any desire to do so had been drained out of him.
It was also around this time that the talent scout spotted him, walking home from the convenience store on a sweltering day while sucking on a calamansi popsicle.
“You have such good bone structure,” said the scout, a nonde-script man conspicuously missing a beret or any other stereotypical hallmarks of movie-making, his eyes scanning Keh intensely. “Really quite a good-looking face. And, most importantly, you’ve got height. Come in for an audition. It’s just a formality. We really, really need new talent. I’ll sign you right away.”
“I can’t act,” Keh replied, shifting from foot to foot.
The talent scout scoffed in amusement. “That doesn’t matter at all. What’s your name?”
“Adjonis Keh.”
“And I’m Hercules Jay. What’s your real name?”
“The ‘d’ in ‘Adjonis’ is silent.” He licked a dribble of melted ice off his thumb. “You can call me Jon if you like. My friends do.”
The talent scout was quiet for a moment, then said, “It’s perfect.”
Not having any discernible skills, Keh took the path that had been unexpectedly thrust upon him. Signing a contract to become a full-time actor, he realised, wasn’t a bad career choice. As an artiste in Moving Talkies Pictures’ stable, he was paid a regular salary by the film studio to appear in the dramas and movies that they churned out at a dizzying pace, which satisfied his parents with the knowledge that, at the very least, their son would no longer be a freeloader.
In interviews with journalists, he was often asked what he would have been if he hadn’t chosen the acting profession, and he decided that “ridge-backed marsupial conservationist” would be his story and he was sticking to it. In reality, he eventually came to realise that he didn’t believe in alternate universes. He grew more and more certain that there could never have been any life for him other than the one in which he inhabited the multiple lives of people who didn’t exist.
His good looks and inoffensive personality resulted in approval by the media, who put him on their cover spreads and profiled him in their interviews. Each feature conferred more legitimacy upon him and consequently, his popularity skyrocketed among both the female and male public, who voted in favour of his dreamy eyes and perfect hair.
Of course, he wasn’t the most handsome of all the actors in the company’s employ. A good number of his peers outclassed him in that respect. But what people often didn’t realise was that it was more useful to have vague good looks than to have stunning good looks. Keh’s most bankable quality was that he had such an open face that anyone could project anything of themselves onto him. That was what got him cast in role after role, in spite of his hollow acting.
It wasn’t that he didn’t try. To play a destitute opium addict in a historical drama, he had tried to go Method, eating only gruel with the occasional pork rib and sleeping shirtless on the hard floor of
his bedroom every night. He would go out with only a few coins in his pocket and walk everywhere in a pair of old flip-flops until they fell apart. He also attempted to purchase narcotics from a dealer he had found online, but quickly realised the envelope contained instead a blend of Horlicks and prickly heat powder.
Even total immersion in a given character didn’t make his acting better. Every scene was a struggle to emote and took much longer than it should; the directors always moved on to the next scene because they were running out of time, not because they had a perfect take. He went home every night in the deep cricket-quiet hours feeling like a fraud.
Then, one day, he became a real fraud when he suddenly discovered the only character he could play well: that of an actor. Quite by chance, he had stumbled upon the key that made everything click into place.
The next time he walked onto set, telling himself he was playing an actor tasked to play the particular character they had assigned him, his on-screen performance was pitch-perfect—full of magnetically-charged presence; sufficiently dramatic yet subtle; brimming with emotion, yet nuanced, as if he were bravely fighting to hold back tides of inexpressible yearning.
He did this for one day, then the next, and the day after, mentally putting on his actor persona when he arrived in the morning for hair and make-up and doffing it when the last “Cut!” of the day was called. To learn his lines, he convinced himself that he was playing an actor learning his lines. Even between takes, if any of the crew spoke to him, he’d respond from the point of view of his persona. As long as he was on set, even during the breaks, he never broke the character of “Actor”.
He did all this with such success that the more he practised, the more confident he grew. Subsequently, he always secretly pretended he was an actor acting whatever part they gave him.
The awards started rolling in.
2
His favourite scenes were mealtime scenes. This was not because he enjoyed getting paid to eat for hours on end—he was not overly interested in food—but because he would set himself the challenge of making sure every one of his characters ate in a distinct fashion.
