First Return

The plaza above Tanjong Pagar Station at sunset, looking towards Capital Tower, DBS Tower One and the CPF Buliding. See - Sydney again. Incidentally, I'm only using a camera phone. 3.2 megapixels. But the pictures that come out are quite good because, firstly, it's a CyberShot phone, and secondly, I edit the pictures with the Gimp. There is no magic here - just technique.

Anyway, was going to write about how the weekend was blessedly aimless. This was supposed to be a post about how long it has been since I last experienced such a total control of my own time, in which I could do anything I liked, with few or no reprecussions for my subsequent days. I was intending to describe how I was able to watch a lot of TV, including two documentaries on astronomy and astrophysics, which were my first loves, and how I even took the time to watch the extended version of HP5 (it made a lot more sense than the one I saw in theatres, but of course, it still can't compare to the experience of actually reading the book. 5 still stands as my favourite HP instalment; it's good fun). The post would have ended with a reflection on how nice it was to return to a sort of child-state, in which actions had no reactions, and no harm could come to anyone around you.

But then, two things happened today. The first was that I saw a really long clip on the Sichuan earthquake on CNN in the morning. Somehow, the network had managed to get footage shot during the earthquake, not by an amateur, but by a television crew who happened to be in the area. It was harrowing, and painfully graphic. And to see an entire nation bowed for three minutes of mourning, with sirens and horns wailing and wailing - there are few images as powerful as that.

I had been aware that the earthquake had happened. Last week, during the RJGE reunion, one of my friends had said that her own brother had been in China when that quake struck, but had slept through it. I replied that his having slept through it was a good thing. But though that second-hand connection to a peripheral quake victim via my friend was more direct than the connection afforded by the TV screen, it was the images on TV that really drove home the magnitude of the disaster. As I had said to my kids in school before, news makes you sympathise with things that have nothing to do with you, sometimes fallaciously, so you end up supporting a faction in the Palestinian issue, for example, without understanding the dynamics behind it fully. But now and again, the news puts out images that use that emotive power sensitively, like in that piece on the earthquake. The victims of such a tragedy should receive our sympathy. We should feel something when we see those dust-covered and broken bodies. It would be inhuman to dismiss them offhand.

And so, the Sichuan earthquake has been on my mind since morning. I had a strong urge to write something on the earthquake, but that idea quickly died because it was rightly identified as being too presumptious, like me trying to write about starving to death. Then I wanted to write a poem on the experience of watching that clip, and it isn't often at all that I want to write a poem. But that died quickly too, since I realised that my poetry abilities were too raw and insufficient to portray the meanings I wanted to portray. So, another short story will probably come out of this. But it will, of course, take time.

The second thing was that the first reunion of this summer took place over dinner today. The first of my people overseas have started to return, and managed to hook up with one of them tonight. Over Turkish fare, we let our conversations wander across recent experience, across the work we find ourselves doing now, what we were doing just before, and what our present work portends for our future careers. We also talked about literature: books, plays, films, the lot, one proceeding the other in free association. It's not that I don't often get the chance to talk literature; definitely, Joel, JY, Conan and Ihui are more than up to that task. But these conversations at reunions, tempered by months of distance, have a certain urgency and intensity that is hard to replicate in any other situation.

Last year, the meetings with my people returning from overseas were also largely similar: long, slow, intense conversations spanning any and all subjects that we can think of. Partly it's because we hadn't had the chance to talk face to face for a long while; and partly, it's also because of the awareness that we were also talking to make up for the coming absence. We were talking as if talking were a form of deposit into the account of our friendship, to tide us through the subsequent and iminent months of want.

Seeing my people again is, to me, of utmost importance. There are many relationships here that I want to try my best to maintain. Even if the auxiliary and superficial material that gave our relationships their texture were to be lost, the core connection must be maintained; the extra baggage originates from the core, and can be reconstructed in new, interesting forms. But once the core is lost, it is very hard to recapture the circumstances that can give birth to it again, because memory gets in the way.

But talking to them, simply talking like that again, is delightful in and of itself. It is an unfettering of experiences; not only do they tell me about life elsewhere and thus afford me something of a glimpse into the future after August, but I increasingly find that I also have things to contribute to their experience. Two years ago, on the verge of their departures, I had thought that I would be passing through a period of experiential drought, for what could I experience here, left behind as I was, that could rival the new and wonderful things that awaited them in the wider world? But it has since turned out that, for one, the wider world resembles Singapore more than I imagined (thankfully, as well as disturbingly), and also that Singapore, being part of the wider world, necessarily imbibes and provides some of the wider world's charms and allure. So the disparity between our experiences becomes an asset to exploit rather than a mark of inferiority on my part. My experience was different, but not necessarily worse, than theirs. And I find myself happily a party to this celebration of differences, based on a common link, rather than just being a listener thirsting for any respite, however temporary, from this dearth of experiences.

The long wait ended with the Army experience. These eight months of 2008 then constitute a sort of short wait. I am still waiting to begin, but the wait is no longer fearsome or a source of despair.