Remember my CLEO magazine-Coke Zero interview and photoshoot?

I thought the photo made me look like I was actually really high up on the wall.

But I was only about one metre off the ground. Haha.

We were at SAFRA Yishun, the place where I had my first rock-climbing experience.

I was really excited about getting to climb rocks again, so I was a bit disappointed that they only needed me to climb a few steps.

What happened was that because this wall was a little challenging for me, my belayer (also a rock-climbing instructor), decided to demo the route for me. He went on the wall himself and showed me where to step on.

When he got into the position where you see me in the photo, the CLEO crew said, “That’s it! We want that position.”

So, for the next two hours, they shot me in that position endlessly, only tweaking the lighting and camera angle as well as small shifts in my body, head and expression, every so often.

Of course, I didn’t stay on the wall for two hours. After a series of shots, I got to come down and rest while the crew looked over what they’d shot to determine what they needed to change. So it was up and down, up and down.

Even though I didn’t get to climb higher, it was still fun.

Although very, very hot.

I think I tanned two shades darker after the two hours. And I had sunblock on.

To get the shine on my body, the makeup artist first rubbed some oil on. Then it was sprays of water at every break. He also had to wipe sweat off my face every so often, heh.

Did I mention it was really hot?

But I guess the sunny weather was great for lighting.

During the breaks, I chatted with Nanny Wen (who was acting as my manager and personal photographer) and my belayer (can’t remember his name). He was the one who told us about the Sport Climbing course which Nanny Wen and I eventually took up.

In that course, we learnt how to belay, use the safety equipment and climb more efficiently, so we can go climb rocks together now without having to hire belayers.

Anyway, the shoot was over way before I expected. Disappointing, as I said, cos I wanted to climb somemore. Haha.

Oh well. Here are more photos for your viewing pleasure!

Getting makeup and hair done while being interviewed:

Putting on my climbing shoes:

Gearing up for safety:

Setting up the camera:

Hooking the belay device on. Ready to climb!

Shoot starts!

Crew checking the shots:

Taking a break:

Spraying water:

End of shoot and a rewarding cold drink!

I really wanted to blog the last two days, but I was bedridden and could only do very simple things on my phone, like plurk and read e-mails periodically.

If you haven’t been following my plurks or tweets or facebook, then let’s just say that on Friday, I was bedridden thanks to my overenthusiastic friends celebrating my birthday on Thursday night. And Saturday, I was kept in bed by a major stiff neck and strong painkillers which also gave me gastritis despite antacids.

I’m a bit better now so I managed to get this scanned. It’s a special interview by CLEO magazine and Coke Zero (now out in CLEO August issue). I’ll share behind-the-scenes photos after I’ve fully recovered!

(Click picture to enlarge.)

Okay, I’ve posted my interview on YouTube. (Read about the trauma I went through for this.)

It’s not as bad as I expected, thanks to clever editing by MediaCorp, but I could have done better, really.

I only appear for 30 seconds, answering two questions. I said more at the recording, but maybe those were so bad they couldn’t include them. :P I seriously can’t remember. When I’m undergoing traumatic events, my brain kind of goes into a daze and stops functioning. Haha.

Anyway, the video here:

How amazing is it that, out of the three minutes of clip, YouTube has chosen to freeze this very particular retarded expression of mine to be the video thumbnail!

(Yeah I know it usually takes the mid-point of the video. Just my luck! T_T Or maybe I look retarded all throughout anyway cos I was struggling so much with my words.)

Oh, and you can hear that my voice is a little hoarse, right? I was still recovering from laryngitis on that day!

Anyway, after watching that, please go pledge your support for POCC! It’s a good cause! Don’t let my bad Mandarin fool you! :)

My Mandarin has never been as bad as it is now. I mean, it has always been bad — I was a chronic F9 case in school — but it’s really bad now, if you can imagine anything worse than F9.

I can do very basic conversations like, say, discussing a shopping trip with the girls, if I’m allowed to pepper my speech with English words.

But ask me to be interviewed in Mandarin, on national TV no less, and I am suddenly struck dumb. I mean that quite literally.

That was actually what happened last week.

I received a call from my manager:

“Channel 8 news wants to do a segment on POCC (Power Over Cervical Cancer) and they’ve requested to interview you in your capacity as POCC ambassador.”

“Um… um… in Mandarin??”

“Yes.”

“My Mandarin is very bad. I can’t do it.”

In the end, I was talked into doing it. I would be given the questions and a list of key terms I would need to use in Manadrin.

On the night before the interview, I received a list of six questions. I typed my answers out in English and attempted to translate it.

It took me an hour to translate just the first two lines because I couldn’t figure out how to structure my sentences correctly. I had about 35 lines to translate.

First: “Cervical cancer kills one to two women every five days.”

The only way I knew how to say it was: “每五天,子宫颈癌杀死一到两个妇女。”

Well, at least my Mandarin is good enough for me to know that THIS IS VERY BAD MANDARIN.

For my non-Chinese readers: What I did was a literal translation almost word for word. But what results in Mandarin raises an imagery more like: “Cervical cancer picks up a chopper and hacks one to two women to death every five days.”

Simply put, very crude.

Here’s another example of my butchery of the Chinese language:

“The earlier people know about this, the more lives we can save.”

My translation: “如果大家越早知道这个消息，就会越少人死。”

If you can read that, you now understand why I rejected the interview right off the bat.

Actually, I wasn’t even aware that my Mandarin had degenerated to this degree. I had eventually agreed to do the interview because I believed if I could prepare my answers beforehand, I would be able to do it.

It was only when I was attempting to translate my answers that I realised my Mandarin is now effectively 87 keys short of a piano.

I finally sent out an SOS on Plurk, Twitter, Facebook. I received lots of good translations for the two sentences above. But no one offered to help me translate all 35 lines of my answers.

Thankfully, I managed to get a friend to help me. By the time I received the two pages of translated answers, it was midnight. The interview was the next day. And I’d only had two hours of sleep the night before so I was rather exhausted by then.

But I had two pages of Chinese to memorise. It wasn’t simply a matter of remembering the points. I had to memorise everything word for word because, if I were to answer in my own words, I would come out with something embarrassingly rubbish like: “POCC 希望会有两万个人去他们的网站支持他们和子宫颈癌打架。”

I didn’t have enough time to memorise everything so I had to wing it and hope I didn’t look too bad.

If you happen to watch Channel 8 news this Sunday, and you see me stuttering on TV and looking quite bimbotic, you know why.

To compound matters, my laryngitis had not totally recovered, so I was still sounding rather hoarse.

Maybe with clever editing, Channel 8 will manage to make me look halfway decent, but I’m not too hopeful about that.

Look, I think my Mandarin is even worse than Ris Low’s English. So that’s why I never laughed at or criticised her. We can’t all be good at everything!

In any case, I think I’d better not accept anymore interviews in Mandarin. Or I’d better go back to Chinese school.

Now I hope I won’t set POCC’s efforts to reach out and save lives back by a millennium because of my disastrous Mandarin.

I mean, I hope people won’t see me on TV and say, “She sucks,” and then not watch the rest of the segment. Lives could be lost because of that!

Seriously. I’d feel really bad!

Anyway, it’s this Sunday (July 11), 10 pm, on Channel 8. I don’t know what time the POCC bit will be aired but it’ll be a short segment. Around five to 10 minutes.

I don’t think I’ll dare to watch myself.

I just received the PDF for my Stuff interview spread, so here’s how I look uncreased.

I have to admit that that looks pretty nice.

The problem is that no one will know except you who are reading my blog now.

Because whoever picks up the magazine from the newsstand and flips it open to my page will see THIS:

Woe is me.

Click here to read the interview.