2001-03-17 – 14:50:19
Dear Singapore,
You’re going to be 35 this year. You were born in 1965, which is the same year that you became an orphan. So every year we celebrate your birthday and also–the anniversary of a separation.
This is an image I can’t seem to get out of my mind: a birthday for the orphan. Teachers and classmates surround the orphan boy, sing him a song, and ask him to make a wish. It is the same wish that he has made every single year. Then he blows out the candles, they clap, and he sinks his knife into the cake. Because he is the birthday boy, they let him have the rose-shaped biscuits. He goes to bed with the smell of chocolate cream on his fingers. But what comes after that? What is the meaning of his birthday? Why does his presence in this world also have to coincide with the absence of those who brought him into it?
Maybe you think that I’m looking too far ahead. Why can’t I live just for the present? Why should my eyes be permanently aimed like cannonballs into the fortress wall of the future?
But isn’t that what you’ve taught me to do?
I was born in 1977, which is 12 years after you. According to the Chinese calendar, this would make the both of us snakes. The Chinese supposedly don’t like to have snake babies. I can only guess why: snakes are venomous, they are predatory, they are bad omens. They also shed their skins.
But no animal sheds its skin like you. The generation before mine was the last to see the National Theatre. My generation’s gift to the next is the rubble of the National Library. I could name many more casualties of your developmental frenzy: Van Kleef Aquarium, Chinatown, Kampung Wak Hassan, Capitol Cinema, Noah’s Ark, Sungei Buloh, Pulau Ubin. My inheritance is a legacy of collective amnesia.
I am a snake child too. And sometimes I feel like shedding this skin. Or rather, seven layers of skin: There is one with a permanent sheen of sweat, a souvenir from the current heatwave. There is one with cane marks. There is one where a patch is still burning with the memory of a touch. There is one dye-stained with the green of my army uniform. One tattooed with my I/C number. An iridescent one, coming from pure blue mornings when everything became abundantly clear, the hieroglyphs of clouds spelling out all I needed to know. And finally one bruised by nights when I was dreaming of inhabiting another life.
I went to KL some time last year, and it felt like home. I met all kinds of people involved in all kinds of activities committed to the enlargement of civil space: environmental activists, AIDS activists, people who run women’s shelters and small presses. How easy it would be a few years down the road to shed this skin of my citizenship and begin anew in a place like KL, where the people do not have to continually, helplessly witness spectacles of loss.
But the skin is not a garment. And whatever lacerations inflicted on it, I cannot peel it off and discard it like a tattered rag. The skin must heal, scars must purse their lips, ulcers close their eyes, scabs brushed off crumb by crumb. But healing takes time. And time for you is a luxury.
What I want from you, Singapore, is the recognition that you run the risk of being unrecognisable. Maybe it is economic necessity that propels your constant facelifts. But I don’t want you to shrug off successive incarnations like split-second sleights-of-hand. When you break my heart, Singapore, I don’t want it replaced with a new one, beating to the synchronous rhythm of the Singapore Heartbeat. I want the fracture to close up and heal, however long it takes.
Now I want to return to the orphan boy. Like you and me, he is a snake child too. On the night of his birthday, he lies in his bed and slips into a dream. He sees his parents, who are sitting under a tree. But in his dream he is a snake. He slithers up to his parents and in an outpouring of affection, coils around their bodies. He thinks, like him, that they will be able to shed their skins and return, rejuvenated, for another round of caresses. But they are crying, touching the red welts on each other’s bodies. They run away, and he is alone. Again.
On National Day, Singapore, you will embrace me in your python loops, and the blood will rush into my eyes, exploding in fireworks, and my strangled throat will break into song. But what about the marks you leave behind?
This is what I imagine: after a night of costumed bodies and showers of fire, a melancholy kind of dawn. Silent, except for the sound of brooms raking the ground, drink cans rolling down stadium steps. Black bags of rainbow-coloured confetti. Folded parachutes. Blisters from tight-fitting shoes. Flags dragged back into HDB flats like August laundry from the September rain.
Singapore, give me time to catch my breath. Give me time to examine the sheath of broken skin you have left behind in my hands as you slipped away. And you will return next year, the same snake, but with a different skin, while I can only remain the same. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if you came back to this same spot, to shower me with your reptilian love, only to find–that I am no longer here.
I just want to strike this one bargain with you. You stay the same for me, and I will stay behind for you.
I will stay.
Love,