tomorrow's memento

i've been going back to my family home to pack up my things. having moved house four times, many things, especially those from my childhood, have been thrown away, lost, or passed somewhere on. while ploughing through my belongings, as one would do for a loved one deceased, i was glad to have held on to some things and not thrown them away. like the locked drawer choked with letters and cards, some dating back to my early teens, from pen-pals, past loves, future loves, friends, loved ones all.

there was this aerogramme my uncle sent when he was studying abroad, exhorting his thirteen year-old nephew - me - to be more responsible and be more concerned about his parents now that i was a young adult. he left when i was in primary one, and i remember the huge turn-out at the airport, with my aunts and uncles hugging him and tearing and all. then there would be the monthly aerogrammes, sometimes he wrote to me, which i would reply, possibly in my kiddy-scrawl and spelling errors. whenever he called home everyone in the family would get very excited and hushing everyone up and rushing to speak to him. when he finally returned after some seven or eight years, i was already mid-teens, gradually segueing back into the 'typical quiet and conservative asian family' relationship he wrote about in that aerogramme. along the way he's also slipped back into the normalcy of singaporean life, gotten married, lost his american accent and ponytail, and when we celebrated his forty-ninth birthday during a recent christmas gathering, i wished i had kept those early letters.

then there were my old photographs, marking time over the years, recording changes, the different and increasing circle of friends, as well as the ones i'd always known and who'd always been by my side. having seen one another since the we were kids, in our innocence, in our exuberant, if reckless youth, it's difficult to see that year after year, years have passed, just by, just like that.

I had lunch with my dad a few weeks ago in the city, and dinner with him yesterday. when he was my age, at twenty-eight, his eldest child - me - had just celebrated his first birthday. now he's fifty-five, not old by standards of old-age, but soon, i suppose. the crows-feet and worry-lines are appearing, the softening of the skin and his irises glacial. he's always been a very quiet man, and i've inherited this reticent trait. i remember how when i was three, he used to carry me on his shoulders and run along the beach at changi, his favourite haunt since his teenage days. i remember the rides on his scooter along the expressway where i would stand in front, bracing the wind. there're the smurf toys he used to bring home after work, and there was this huge, sudden slap across my face because i was running late for school and still dilly-dallying. then there were the movies where he would ask me, after it had ended and we were walking out of the theatre, "how was it?" and there were the many meals together. he was a good dad, but there were always the silence, not of animosity or awkwardness or indifference, but a comfortable kind of silence, quite easy, quite warm. as i grew older, the conversations began to flow more easily. maybe there're more things to talk about - work, money matters, family matters, me, him. it was an indication of my maturity. talking to my own father as if he were a friend makes me feel like a father myself, makes me feel i've really grown up, and that he's grown old, and that one day he'd be gone, and then me along.

what would happen to these things then - these old letters and cards and photographs, faded receipts and movie ticket stubs, my first bottle of cologne, printed-out emails, letters of acceptance from the various universities, school essays, expired membership cards for assorted establishments and institutions, magazine cut-outs and faye wong memorabilia of those crazed days - all these in a big cardboard box with my name on top, what would happen to these precious things, these mementos of and from my youth, once upon a time?

i don't know. they would most likely be buried or cremated along with me, immolating a lifetime of memories. perhaps a loved one would hold on to, if not all, then some of it, creating from it new stories. or some such. i cant really dictate terms from my grave. but i do know that in the intervening years should i re-open this box to reminisce over these accoutrements, trying to relive old - and young - days, i would invariably chide myself for not keeping enough.
___

Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Sonnet 19, Shakespeare

in a year like this

What gave them this joy?
What made cold and hungry people so sure that another year could only be better?

- Jeanette Winterson, The Passion
___

in a year like this that unfolded so placidly, almost inevitably, it's hard to pinpoint defining moments. it's probably the first time in my life that i feel my age, and by that i mean i am beginning to feel aged. more than once i'd pressed my fingers into my cheeks to try to remember how quite taut it still feels, though i'm sure to forget as i live on. i'm not afraid of growing old; i welcome it; i look forward to being in my 50s, 60s, 70s, maybe even my 80s, and peering back at how this life has turned out, for better or not. but i'm at this prime age of twenty-eight, my imminent physical disintegration should be the stuff of fantasy.

when i was twenty-two and diagnosed with cancer, i didn't have much an idea what it really meant - not the illness, but the nature and the consequences of being such afflicted. one is at the mercy of nature's unpredictable nature, so to speak, and medical science can only know and do so much. i was in the operating theatre for nine hours, and i often wondered if death was like the moment before the general anesthetic kicked in through the oxygen mask, when then, all consciousness stopped, like one had stepped off a cliff and lay suspended mid-air, and simply time-stopped-suspended, unconsciousness and darkness and nothingness, and nothingness, until one hears a faraway voice repeating gently, 'jack, your operation's over.' what had gone on in the time between? do i now know what death feels like? maybe.

the following year my younger sister was involved in a car accident. she and her friend was crossing the road when a van beat the red light. her friend survived and my sister did not. what had she been thinking in the seconds, minutes, hours, days before her final moment? probably just as how everyone else bumps through life in a sorta auto-pilot way, with thoughts of life and death far away on far opposite ends. but she did laugh a lot and was a cheerful, kindhearted kid who brought joy to people around her. do i know how death feels like? maybe. when someone you love dies, there can be hundreds and thousands of words to describe that feeling and all of them combined would still be inaccurate and inadequate.

when mortality wages it's war so near it's difficult to be jolly and jaunty. events like these turned me taciturn and circumspect, and it's not an entirely bad outcome, though sometimes i admire how people could smile so readily, party so hard, their souls not a crack of worry. sometimes i admire how people have it so easy. sometimes i remind myself not to be too cynical. and sometimes i am thankful for what i have, and look forward to another morning.

a placid, uneventful 2007 has in itself been a blessed one - i had an immensely rewarding time teaching, and there've been my friends, family, loved ones all. there is another year that has come, hopefully it would be a good one too.

have a merriest new year.

wireless souls for sale

i sold off my 3 year-old thinkpad to a secondhand shop this afternoon. it's as if a dear friend had died, and it's all a little saddening. i bought it while in uni and it wrote my thesis (where would footnotes be without this humble gadget?); and then and after, the myriad of trials and computations i've subjected it to, it has come to be closer than a friend (it even talks to and smiles at my friends).

but a macbook has come along (though i'd intended to get an Xseries thinkpad), and while i'm still getting used to host of new functions and meanderings, i'm beginning to like it. it's such a loaded concession, an acquired taste of sorts on the one hand, and i-don't-actually-know-why-i-like-it-but-i-seem-to-do on the other. i hope i'll continue to like it, and most importantly, i hope there'll be no problem!

i don't understand technology. it's meant to convenience our lives, it's meant to relieve us of our daily and physical drudgeries by making everything smaller, quicker, easier, and cheaper. yet, we spend more time with it solving and resolving problems - much of which created by itself no less, we spend more money buying the various electronica and spend even more money upgrading and buying even more of them. we amass these cheaper and faster gadgets more and more, at faster and faster rates, and end up with lesser money and even lesser time. handwritten letters, arguably personal histories and amateur artworks are near-extinct, even though everyone i know delights immensely and ineffably in receiving such scrolls. now our emails live as long as we remember our passwords - that is, not very long.

sometime ago i contemplated cutting myself off from this frenzied, technological conspiracy - cancel my phone and internet lines, use no more computers, and just get by with pen and paper. perhaps one day...

and till then, i fear for the things i love - poring through the morning papers, it's sounds like the sounds of rustling leaves; books thick with creamy pages and pages of wonderful prose and another world; letters lovingly-crafted, folded and sealed, received two weeks late and kept forever. what would the world be like when a heartbreak is nothing more but a harddisk crash, reformattable, disposable?
__

Across the gate, your face. You can't come any further. I have to go through. The latch is light. Yes, open it. It was not difficult.

Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.

- Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods.

love letter for myself

early december night, and cars and people no longer haunt the streets. the streets glint with after-rain, the dark wraps round me like an overcoat. i walk through the quiet and the cold, past one streetlamp after another, midsky aureoles of orange glow through my restless gaze, reluming the darkness in-between. i feel tender. silence rises and falls, footpaces slow, heartbeats soften, i feel all tender. has it been a year already. innocent nights like this tarry between endless possibilities and one rejection. has it been a year already. that one rejection breaks into a million coloured pieces, the pieces pierce and sear, the night broken. what is one year amidst eternal time, when one time, it all will end? i walk on. in such light, what is the cold when you can watch the rain fall? i walk on. what are teardrops when there are books of laughter?

i walk on my wound.

what is one love when you can love another stranger.

hello from chiang mai

it's not that i don't wanna update but for the past 2 weeks each time i remember and try and update the blogger website doesnt budge from the sign-in page.

and for the last 2 weeks i've been in the northern part of thailand, either hanging around or going places. lazy languid days that i've love-hate sentiments toward; and i kinda miss the books in my room.

it's hard to be by myself here, which was the main reason why i came here - it's almost impossible to have some peace and quiet in singapore. but chiang mai's afflicted with the bane of almost every developing (if not developed) city - chaotic traffic and its generous fumes and noise. it's the exceptional hospitality and friendliness and politeness of the thai people that's making my stay here bearable, and traffic smog notwithstanding, still a less frustrating affair than being in singapore.

p.s. i'll post pics of my US and thailand trips when i get back. i know i know, i promised the aussie trip pics way back in june and they're still nowhere posted. been very busy in school but that's over now.

welcome back o slacker me.

nyc hello

finally reached this sepulchral city, especially when after a 4hour drive from 5am in the dark dawn from washington dc, the first rush upon entering the city was the skyscrapers revealing even more skyscrapers. a raving madman called me a 'fucking nigger' (he must be colourblind). i love this city.

and i'm buying too many books. i bought 2 additional luggage for them.

and i've got six more days here. help.

hello from vermont

the flight wasn't as bad as my previous long-haul ones, thanks to a short and smooth transit (at frankfurt, whose airport reminds one of being in a communist cell - all black white grey). i could even, immediately upon touching down at JFK, rent a car and start on the road - which is nothing until one remembers that the US do their cars left-way (i.e. the wrong way). so whenever i wanted to signal my turnings i switched on the windscreen-wiper instead, and had the tendency to ever so inadvertently veer to the right. a few times i actually turned into the wrong side of the road. luckily oncoming drivers were either slowing down or stationary or generally forgiving. and i could even do parallel parking. a few times. wow.

anyway, drove up to new haven, checked into the hotel, and went round to yale university to have a look (why else would i want to go to new haven- its otherwise neither new nor haven-ly). but oh, yale, what more can i say?

and then this morning, a pop over to hartford, centre of connecticut, and visited one (yes, one) museum, but it did hold genuine artworks of the old masters. and then back on the road, a brief stopover at smith college (sylvia plath's alma mater), and now at brattleboro, vermont, a really small pass-by town that for some reasons became a mini-mecca of counterculture and aging hippies. i've no complaints coz that means bookshops and coffee, lotsa (as far as the size of the town goes bookshops and coffee, and real bookshops and real coffee. i was in this really quaint oldbookshop and immediately knew i had to buy a john knowles and jamaica kincaid. yes, divine revelations do occur in bookshops.

I'll be in this town for 2 nights and shall enjoy the crucible-esque ambience, and then on to waterbury to visit the ben&jerry's confectionery. lotsa other places to go, i'll update when i can.
___

i see that my verbiage has returned. the wonders of being away from school, away from singapore. the places that i've been to so far - airport, streets, laneways, shops, restaurants, cafes - are so filled with dignified silence, that even with a nasty jetlag i feel at rest.

p.s. my last day at school was, to my relief, uneventful. i was not reduced to a torrent of tears, and no one committed suicide. neither did the school building collapse into ruin. but the students were very sweet - they gave cards, photographs, wrote lil notes of thanks and well-wishes and scrolled them like a testamur (really microscopic ones). one class wrote theirs on a tee-shirt and slipped it over a pink (I.Absolutely.Do.Not.Know.What.That.Means) stuffed bear-or-some-such. i'm truly thankful and grateful of course, and I've read all their messages, little gestures that are more than anything money can get.

It's never farewell

Tomorrow is my last day teaching, and I rather write something about it now than after, what with the vivid and certain hindsight and the heavy sense of closure. One and a half years have seemed decades and decades, and there’re too much to say and too many thoughts. But I certainly leave with the fondest and dearest memories. I’d never put in such consuming energy into my endeavours before in my whole life; and yet I awoke every early morning eager to start the new day. The students have been an immense joy to teach, even if they could be utterly exasperating at times. They certainly have taught and inspired me more than I could ever them, and much as I’ll miss them and think of them often, I look forward to they all growing up and stepping out into this big, big world of life and its all, and scaling great beautiful heights. This part of my life has been nothing short of a precious miracle, and in years and years to come, I’ll always remember a boy who grew up wanting to be a teacher and whose wish eventually did come true.
___











但愿你的眼睛只看得到笑容
但愿你流下每一滴泪都让人感动
但愿你以後每一个梦不会一场空

天上人间如果真值得歌颂
也是因为有你才会变得闹哄哄
天大地大世界比你想像中朦胧
我不忍心再欺哄但愿你听得懂

但愿你会懂该何去何从

-王菲-

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. ...
___

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.

scripts

it's been an exhausting week, eversince that madrush of a tuesday, and the exam scripts came in, and i been marking and marking and marking, clearing up to 40 scripts a day. it's the tedium, it's the indecipherable scribbles, the frustrating grammatical errors, it's what i'm earning my living for, at least for now and another one week. and the scripts have all been marked, on top of filing a report on the students' performance. i'm drained, but satisfied at a hard work well done.

i do love my job.

you shouldn't have doubted my ability and willing ness to complete the work. i gave you my word and you should have taken it and trusted me, because i thought you knew me better. for the past one and a half years i have not put in so much, slogged so hard, stayed back and up so late, spent out of my own pockets, earned such a pittance, only to squander it on a last-minute cop-out. I'd said i would, and i would. i absolutely love what i'm doing and i cant love my job anymore than i do now though i would if i could.

i could be swamped with a million more scripts and they'd be nothing next to your galling doubting countenance.