i really want to write this. i had two sips of coke and now i really cant sleep. in the midst of trying, and in vain, thoughts swirl my mind and sleeping seems secondary, i want to write this down.
i thought of singapore. not the flashing-neon-lights singapore, but of residential areas like bukit batok, jurong east and ang mo kio. i’ve had this thought at the back of my mind for some time now, ever since my friends gasped when they got to know i was born in singapore and lived there in my early days. it’s hardly worth mentioning, and i was a little surprised at my friends’ reaction, millions of people were born there, what’s with the exclamation marks?
then that thought reached a junction and made a turn. i started to try to recall the really early days i was there. three? four? i simply cant remember ever scurrying up a car (or a bus or a taxi) and that two hours long journey to this town, the day we officially moved here. i have no recollection of it altogether. but i remember there was once, out of the blue in later days of my childhood, i remembered familiar snippets of my days in singapore and a pang of nostalgia ran through my heart.
it was just snapshots of smelly round-buttoned double-doors tiny lifts that every alternate floors were able to access and the rest would have to use the stairs to get to the nearest available number on the lifts. sharp edges of the narrow steps. and how mama (that’s my grandmother) brought me along with her to pasar, we boarded buses, and bought tickets through the big rectangle machine with a lot of unlabeled buttons and rounded corners that would give out little pieces of white tickets with dimmed printings on it. it showed the date, the time, the smrt logo and words that didnt make sense to me.
unfamiliar familiarity of me running up the grass patches of apartments. at the time of my sudden recollection of my early childhood in later days, i was merely a very young kid but the reason i felt so much sadden by it was because i realized that i used to know my way back home… i regard it as home. even though the days were brief, memories of the three room flat is still rather vivid up here. *points to brain*
i still know my way when i close my eyes and picture the whole place. i dont know what has become of it now or who are the tenants but when i think of it, the past lights up and it’s still day time. mama had clothes hung up to dry at the far end of the kitchen area near the windows. the living room is very wide and there’s a tv at the corner, a sofa beside it and lots of scribbles on the walls, done by the chubby hands of eugene and i. i just laughed, i accidentally combined the current self and the baby i was, seventeen year old teenager went ‘geez i understand babies need to learn to write and all that but… no paper?’ and the two, perhaps three or maybe four year old silent with that look of bewilderment on her face and underneath that expression, the brain was racing and making most of every logic and every common sense the baby mind would allow. there were the two rooms opposite each other. and in between, i cant recall if it was a storeroom or if it was just a blank wall, but on it there was a poster of ABCs with sea-green colored borders. you open the front door and you can see every room every wall and every thing in the little place.
and i remember forum. the place mum sent eugene for english lessons for a short while. this place only came in mind twice. the first time was a long time ago when we had already moved to malaysia and we went back to singapore and past it by. the second time was a few days ago when mum brought my cousins and i to singapore on christmas eve, our car moving along the orchard road area and she pointed out that big sun with funky “mane”. sorry dont know what the thing around sun is called.
i dont claim to know singapore well or feel above anyone to be singaborean (haha geddit? singapore + born). i think it’s a really stupid thing to feel anything about where you were born because it’s not like you had any choice man. to me singapore is really just another country. it’s just that, all that i wrote above is my singapore. the one that lives within me that isnt a country, a skyscraper whatever ding dong, but a home.