Immortalised in copper

Real art endures the ravages of time. My one and only copper tooling masterpiece resides in the ground floor washroom of my parents' home in Singapore. I had all but forgotten it, had Karen McGregor not passed a comment when she visited 58 Grove Drive in September,

"Alicia, don’t tell me that that’s the copper tooling from primary school!"

I held my tongue. To confess would be an admission of supreme uncoolness, as a willing captive to the salad –and by now long gone- days of youth. To say nothing would be to deny the toil that my eleven year old fingers had suffered, for the sake of art.

While my primary school classmates had sagely chosen designs which either captured the zeitgeist of teenagehood or with much more personal relevance – Janelle for instance, immortalised her name in italicised Comic Sans in the burnished 1 foot by 1.5 foot copper sheet – I was somehow intrigued by the Gaugain-esque option of topless Balinese ladies ferrying baskets of fish to the market. Topless being the operative word … the flaccid, goggle-eyed fish were of peripheral interest to me.

Madam Wong, our severely victimised Primary 4 Chinese teacher, was unwittingly reincarnated as our Primary 5 Art teacher. During her rounds in class, while checking on our progress with the etching of images onto the copper sheets, she nodded approvingly at the artists-in-the-making, but discreetly cast her gaze away from my risqué and scandalous endeavour.

When we graduated to the tooling stage of creating the 3D effect however, Mdm Wong's righteous aesthetic sense outweighed her guarded modesty and she intervened to rescue my figures from twiggy forms and lopsided breasts. She was especially fervent about the nipple detailing, which I had apparently mangled with my oversized and overly blunt wooden shaping tool. She used a far more precise instrument for this delicate procedure, the nurturing nib of a ball point pen.

So Karen, yes, that is my handiwork which has cunningly slipped itself into the cardboard boxes each time my family has moved. And it would only be fair to attribute its enduring charm and biological accuracy to the Wong who made it all right.