First Loves

i was thirteen and freshly-weaned from a staple of enid blyton, and grazing for books to read. this sense of loss and wandering only became clearer in retrospect. i remember chancing upon a row of christopher pike novels in the school library and immediately took to the books' characters who themselves were teenagers. but otherwise i was (and am) not a fan of mystery/horror/thriller trash.

one of the wonders of a library shelving real books (so too a bookshop, for that matter), apart from that the books could be loaned for free or a small fee, is that one never knows what one would find, even if one doesn't know what to look for in the first place. and indeed, not knowing what one seeks sometimes leads to surprises, discoveries, and for the better. booklovers, like don juan, would always find a beauty on the shelf.

it was during one of those aimless wanderings i came upon a novel, First Loves, by a local author, philip jeyaretnam. just like a teenager, i felt the protagonist Ah Leong's emotions, yet without being fully aware of it still. just like a child poring over an illustrated storybook, vaguely following the story and conjuring up imaginings only a child with near-non-existent conceptions of the physical world can. i was after all, just stepping into the beginning of the beginning of adulthood.

the things we read once upon a time sometimes come to rest at the end of our consciousness, not as forgotten relics or aimless dust, but as returning motifs of particular scenes, specific sensibilities, that subconsciously steer our base emotions, from which physical actions are wrought upon. the opening lines of First loves is one such, and in the many passing years after, there have been numerous times i walked home in rusted evenings and thought of Ah Leong:

Evening brought the breeze, channelled by the concrete blocks, blowing across Singapore. Evening set the birds chattering, as if desperate for one last word before narkness silenced them. Evening bought light, flooding the corridors of the concrete blocks and lining the roads. The daytime of tinted windows and air-conditioning was giving way to the night-time of flourescent tubes and halogen headlights. White then red flashed the cars speeding past on the road outside Ah Leong's window.

Across the country televisions were coming on and video cassette recorders plugged in. Husbands greeted wives and changed channels. Children greeted mothers and clamoured for dinner. Ah Leong stood at the window and looked out, trying to fix all Singapore in his gaze. ...
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my reading, like the mind that guides and feeds on it, has matured and developed in seriousness (though the greatest spurt by far was in the last three years - as always i'm a late-bloomer, if ever), and literature has become my religion of sorts (if we refer to writers as creators not unlike gods, then it is not too hyperbolic a metaphor). and First Loves is a rare gem of local literature. the zeitgeist is captured lightly yet surely, and Ah Leong is a quintessential singaporean male teenager finishing school, enlisting into national service, drawing his first pay cheque, falling into his first love ... i've re-read it some three, four, times, at different stages of my life, and each time i take in an overlooked detail, i take with me a new sensibility, and re-connect with it; each time i marvel at my sendipitous find in that humble school library. and along with that musing returns memories of evenings of various colour, memories of myself as the naive young boy who was always in a drifting dreamworld of his own.