a place just right

A few years ago, i had a brief involvement with the Yellow Ribbon Project, and after that, with Prison Fellowship Singapore. i was trying to find a place to use my writing, and the bleeding-heart-wimpy-liberal in me felt that the rehabilitation of ex-inmates was something i both believed in and wanted to contribute to. The Yellow Ribbon volunteerism didn't last very long - it felt to me like they didn't really need writers as they already had their own publicity / media people, and there was nothing i could contribute that they really lacked. The PFI thing didn't work out either - for other reasons. They did need writers - but at the time things were crazy-busy for me at work and my students needed my attention far more than PFI needed writers, there were other things going on in my life, the friend i'd wanted to work with on the project changed her mind before we even started and i was left to venture into it alone, i felt that it would demand more energy and time than i could give at that point... etc etc. In other words, it just felt like it was not my calling to be working with them at the time.
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i've always wanted to use my writing for something bigger than writing, for something bigger than myself. Anything less than that seemed, still seems, self-serving, self-indulgent. So i tried doing that for a while - writing for church and parachurch organsations, NGOs, social service agencies. i avoided literary writing. Even at the time, the whole thing felt like a desperate, flailing attempt to make my writing count, to make my life count, in a way that i judged to be valuable. In other words - to justify my existence in terms dictated by conventions of church and society that i had adopted without any honest and genuine assessment of where my gifts and aptitudes lay. But after some time, i realised that that kind of writing could be done easily and probably far better by other people. i encountered obstacle after obstacle - it felt as if i was always butting my head against some brick wall or other - and the sense of being totally alone in the effort didn't help either. And to be totally honest, that kind of writing bored and frustrated me - i wasn't as sold on the whole project as i wanted to be. Eventually, the combination of life circumstances and personal exhaustion made me give up altogether. So i hunkered down and tried to concentrate on teaching.
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How i eventually came (back) to literary writing - i guess can only be called grace. At the risk of... mythologising... the whole thing, i can say in all honesty that the whole process seems to me to have been gift, something given that i didn't need to chase after in the way i had tried (unsuccessfully) to chase after other things. It started with a decision to attend a literary launch in November 2010 - the first such event i'd attended for a long time - and the buzz i felt while hearing our local writers talk about their work made me feel alive for the first time in years. After that i thought - Anything that makes you feel alive has to be a good thing. So i started writing, got feedback from people who told me how my writing spoke to them, wrote some more, signed up for an online course, received encouragement and constructive critical comments, found good mentors, got more responses, signed up for an Arvon...
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And so here i am. Writing. Trying to write. Caring about words - the way i have always cared but for a long time didn't want to acknowledge. Coming to terms with the power of literature, as well as its limitations. Trying to keep alive the conviction that literary writing has value that cannot be measured in terms of tangible benefits. Trying to make work that is true and beautiful. Trying to stay faithful to the task, and to the One who has given it.
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from the east (part 3)

4 days into the trip, i found myself thinking in Chinese for the first time in my life. The thoughts even came in a slight Beijing accent. Simple words, nothing complicated. But it was odd enough for me to notice.
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Going to Beijing with a Chinese-speaking tour group full of aunties and uncles meant that, for the first time in my life, all day-to-day life was conducted in Chinese, and i was slightly surprised at how easy it was for me to adapt. However, i realised very quickly what a gulf there is, linguistically and culturally, between Singaporean Chinese and mainland Chinese. Each time a local guide other than Xiaoma took over the group, it became almost impossible for me to follow what she (always a she) was saying - the Chinese was too difficult for me. Apparently, Xiaoma consistently dumbed down his Chinese when speaking to us - i did notice that he used very simple, everyday words instead of the sophisticated, idiom-laden lexicon his other compatriots employed.
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i came away from the trip, feeling anew how far removed i am from my ethnic heritage. Case in point: Chinese history. All that i know of China's imperial past comes from the TV programmes i watched when i was back in school, and it took me some time to disentangle the lineages of the various famous (or infamous) emperors, figure out which dynasty came first... Not an ignorance i am proud of. The most i can say in my defence is that i've never been that interested in royal history - whether Chinese or European - but still, that didn't stop me from feeling a bit of a fraud, especially since the tour leaders so obviously assumed that everyone would be knowledgeable about at least the basics of China's past.
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One thing that i did connect with, however, was the Chinese painting and calligraphy we saw at Tianjin's New Cultural Street (新文化街). My dad was an avid collector, and i grew up surrounded by the elegant austerity of traditional Chinese art - so simple yet so eloquent in its forms and lines. So it turned out that the time i spent in the art galleries / shops at Tianjin gave me my only experience of 'feeling at home' during the whole of this trip back to my ancestral home-country.
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And really, i don't want to be feeling at home in China. Much as i gripe about Singapore, there are things about this place that i feel proud of. Almost fifty years have passed since the political turmoil of the pre-Independence years - and Chinese Singaporeans no longer look to China as the motherland in the way our forefathers did in the first half of the 20th century. The Singapore government may be trying to strengthen our ties with China for economic and political reasons, but i think that individual Chinese Singaporeans will each have to figure out for themselves the best way to engage with China (or perhaps the first question is whether to engage with China at all). For me, i suspect that the engagement will be via art and culture, and even then, how deep that engagement will turn out to be, remains to be discovered.

from the east (part 2)

Before we boarded the river-boat at Long Qing Gorge (龙庆峡), our local guide Xiaoma advised our group to sit together in a block in the same section of the boat, instead of allowing ourselves to get dispersed throughout the boat. His reason? Because visitors to the gorge tend to be local tourists from other parts of China - and according to Xiaoma, they were usually loud, obnoxious, and not very civilised. Or as he put it in Chinese: 他们的素质是不同的. He felt that we wouldn't want to sit next to such people. In other words, he was trying to protect us from the barbarian hordes of his own countrymen.
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i really didn't know what to make of that. On the one hand, i've long since been disabused of any liberal "all people are alike" sensibilities: i believe that all human beings are indeed equal in value, but that value is not founded on talent, intelligence, wealth, looks, or any of the usual measures society uses to quantify a person's worth. i have no qualms about recognising that some people are simply more educated, more cultured, more refined, than others. And stereotypes exist for a reason. Yet i found Xiaoma's very frank, matter-of-fact designation of his fellow countrymen slightly discomfiting.
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Thankfully, the local tourists who joined us on the boat-ride that day were not the loud, loutish country bumpkins we had been warned to expect. Rather, there was a hushed silence as the boat took us through the gorge with its limestone cliffs towering over dark-jade waters. Perhaps even loud loutish country bumpkins know what it means to feel awe in the presence of the sacred. (We did however encounter some of these loud local tourists on another boat-trip we took in central Beijing... So either the limestone landscape was doing its work, or we just got lucky that day.)
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What struck me over the remainder of the trip, though, was that this class consciousness was very much part of our amiable tour-guide's worldview. In fact, he quite happily expounded on his theory of social evolution on one of our long bus-rides, explaining how it would take a few more generations for loutish country-bumpkinish habits like spitting on the streets and poor toilet hygiene to be bred out of the national psyche by education and exposure to the wider world. i wonder how representative he is of other young, educated Chinese nationals. What struck me was the confidence and patience in his voice - he seemed so certain that all China needs is time, and that they have all the time in the world. There was no condemnation or anger at those different from himself - although of course i do realise that he was speaking to us in his capacity as a tour-guide. Perhaps the tone is very different when he's talking to his friends.
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Still, it is clear that China is now a deeply divided society. i wonder how it will negotiate the differences over the years to come, whether the gap between the haves and the have-nots will widen, or whether the Chinese government will somehow miraculously manage the problem so as to move the country towards a more equitable distribution of its now-staggering wealth. It was interesting that Xiaoma didn't seem too concerned about issues of social equity - the assumption seemed to be that it was every man for himself. If that is the case, i can see why a lot of people are not optimistic.
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from the east (part 1)

Back from China - my first visit in 20 years, and oh how the place has changed. How I have changed.
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20 years ago - i was there on a school trip to Beijing, my first schooltrip and also my first time out of Southeast Asia; and the main reason i went was to be 'cool' and with the 'in' crowd. My friends were all going; in fact, everybody who was anybody was going, and so i had to go too. i spent most of that trip embroiled in schoolgirl politics and worrying about my roommate, who disappeared one evening and was found, many frantic phonecalls later (and this in the pre-mobile-phone era), alone in the dark of the hotel carpark. i can't remember if wrist-cutting was part of the story - but yeah, she was that kind of St Nicks gal. (Note: i'm so glad that somehow, i escaped St Nicks relatively unpoisoned by that crazy environment even though i was surrounded by friends who lived it to the full...)
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This time, accompanying my mum on a Chan Brothers package tour, things felt very different. For one thing, i was intent on learning as much about the place as i could and no longer distracted by trying to be cool (the operative word being 'trying'...); and i had brought with me a whole mind-full of questions that i was looking for answers to. The 20 years of life experience helped too - trying to see a place less as a tourist destination and more as a city where people actually live, requires one to have lived a bit as well. Not that one sees very much of the real city on a package tour. But still. There was something, at least, to work with.
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The first thing that hit me was the poor air quality - the air looked hazy, dusty, and i wondered how much of it was due to pollution, and how much of it was from the remnants of sandstorms drifting in from elsewhere. Our Singaporean tour leader blamed the dust storms, but a quick google search told me that they happen in spring, not autumn. Furthermore, our Beijing tour guide told us about the out-of-control growth in the car population, we experienced the traffic jams firsthand, and media reports corroborate the pollution hypothesis with news about how the Chinese government has been less than honest and upfront in dealing with China's pollution problem. i'm sure under-regulated industrial activity is a significant contributor, together with vehicular exhaust.
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Pollution is a problem so many developing countries face - and Beijing seemed to me like a city powering full-on helter-skelter into Development. The whole city is a mad mish-mash of old and new, rich and poor - i tried but failed to find a pattern to things, saw instead shiny new apartment blocks and shopping centres jammed next to old shops and dilapidated flats. The hotel we stayed in - swanky, ultra-modern and only recently opened - rose into the skyline above squat rows of shops and raw, gaping construction sites. We were told that the pace of life, and the pace of change, is slower in Beijing than in other Chinese cities like Shanghai - a good friend said that Beijing is the Chinese version of Boston (as opposed to, say, New York) - but already i could sense the eagerness, the hunger for progress and change, especially in the young people we came across during our 8-day stay.
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That hunger. It was palpable, something i rarely sense among Singaporeans in Singapore. i can see why the Singapore government is worried about China, why even the US sees China as a threat. It's in the little things (cheesy as that sounds...): the way the hotel staff took their work so seriously, the speed at which they learnt things on the job, the earnestness with which our Beijing tour guide played his role. Case in point: our room got progressively neater and more sensibly arranged as the days progressed - the housekeeping staff were learning fast the best way to do their job. The restaurant staff were equally impressive: i think our group must have been the first big-ish tour group to stay at the hotel - on our first morning there, the wait staff at the breakfast buffet looked clearly wet behind the ears, the waitresses and female kitchen staff didn't even have their hair tied back (OK, i don't know about you, but i don't like finding hair in my food...), the chef manning the egg counter took forever to make my scrambled eggs. But they were all ultra-attentive, eager to please - and by the last day of our stay, had figured out a system to deal with the three big tour-groups which had joined us, had their hair done up in neat ponytails, seemed bustling and efficient and more-or-less together. (And even if they weren't, they managed to look it.)
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Our Beijing guide, Xiaoma (as he asked us to call him) - he was hungry and eager too: you could see it in the respectful solicitude with which he treated the older folks on the tour, doling out tips on how to stay healthy in the Beijing autumn (he seemed so obsessed with health that i did a bit of a double-take when i saw him smoking while waiting for us to finish our lunch - so the health-obsession was not as all-encompassing as it seemed, after all...); the way he talked about life in Beijing, the cost of living, the stress. But there was more than hunger. There was also pride. A good pride - in the way China has made a place for herself on the world stage, in China's rich cultural heritage, going back thousands of years, that the US or UK cannot even begin to rival. A good pride, a good confidence, but also, scary. Who knows where pride and desire will take China in the next 50 years.
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town mouse / country mouse

It's become a bit of a running joke between Y and me - this hypothetical village in a temperate first-world country where we both think i would like to live. I'm sure it must exist somewhere - maybe in a Tuscan valley, by a Norwegian fjord, or in the foothills of the Swiss Alps. Or maybe just by a major traffic roundabout outside a big polluted English city. The idea is, basically - cool weather (or at least weather that is not so ridiculously hot), first-world amenities (i still want my creature comforts), lots of nature not too far away, not too many people, space to just mind your own business (hopefully) while at the same time being held in community with others.
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Singapore is becoming so crowded. i avoid going into the city centre now, simply because the crowds make me feel harassed, swallowed up, less than a person, less than human. i don't like this constant roaring, this grasping after being first in line, this underhumming of fear that i feel - pressed against the crowds pressing in on all sides - as the train speeds through the granite darkness. People are always driven by a mixture of fear and desire - desire for something is often a submerged fear of its opposite - but some cities seem to pulse on one more than the other, and i think Singapore is driven by fear. i am tired of this soul-sapping fear. i want to live in a place where people are not constantly looking over their shoulders, constantly suspicious of their neighbours (and who can blame them?), clinging on to whatever tiny sliver of space they can find and hoping it doesn't get snatched away too soon by all those competing global millions who would come and rob them of their birthright.
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But i don't hate the crowds because they threaten to take away my chance of upward mobility, or because they are competing for some much-coveted job i need to make me feel worthwhile. i'm not one of those looking to stake some claim for themselves on some much-loved personal agenda or project; heck, i don't even want so many of the things this country tells me i should want - all these nice clothes, handbags, shoes, posh food, smartphones, iPads... i just want some quiet, a space to be, some trees and hills to look at, sky to soften the view, maybe a lake, a promise of a lake, somewhere glimmering in the mind's eye, the murmur of surf on the horizon. A place to write, where God feels near at hand and does not have to be chased after as you catch His glory fading and disappearing behind the fifth million visitor to walk through the Changi Airport turnstiles.
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i just want some quiet, some peace, a warm bowl of homemade minestrone soup and some freshly-baked bread, a wooden table with a woven-cane seat, a place to write, to pray, to be.
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empty hands

They say, Listen to your body. My body has been telling me these days: you are at peace. You are rested. And now your hands feel empty, you feel empty-handed. Time to get to work.
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