Moving Forward

Here is something I sat down to write tonight, as I was struggling to write the lyrics for a song. This thing has been bugging me for a while, I keep thinking I need to write something that deals honestly, but unsentimentally, with the experience of growing up in Singapore. I wanted, initially, to write a series of songs, like a song cycle, maybe, to put together into a mini-musical, but song-writing has never been a talent of mine. Tonight, I thought it'd be easier to flesh out a concept, some sort of story, to fit the songs into, and as I got to writing, this huge chunk of prose began to write itself, and now I have the introduction to something, I don't quite know what, exactly. I've titled the work in progress "Moving Forward" after the title of one of the songs I had written, and I really can't wait to see what this becomes.

I know the prose is a little iffy in spots, I feel like it's too... prosaic, lots of long sentences and stuff, and the language I've kept simple where I can, not overly descriptive, more conversational, because I think that's how I would tell a story if, indeed, I were to tell a story. I hope whoever reads this can offer LOTS of criticism and maybe engage me on the side as to where I'm heading with it. 

Cheers!

_________

Introduction

I am not the sort who tells good stories, I will admit it from the start of this thing, because my life is generally uneventful. Uneventful on an epic scale, by which I mean nothing exciting or tragic or poignant happens in my life that, I figure, wouldn’t happen in mostly anybody else’s life. I won’t, for instance, travel halfway across the world to some remote part of Africa (for work, say, assuming I’m a journalist) and get embroiled in bloody drug wars, and then draw some life-transforming epiphany from an impoverished African girl whose life I save and who, as it turns out, gives me a spiritual re-awakening. No, I am not the contemplative sort.

What I do is grow up in Singapore which, strangely for a country so full of activity, is generally uneventful. We don’t get natural disasters, we don’t go on strike, we don’t get mass-murdering psychopaths (all too often), we don’t generally do anything dramatic that local TV doesn’t think of first. The grand events of our lives as Singaporeans are restricted to things that happen in other parts of the world, which we subsequently pretend we have any involvement in; things like Barack Obama in 2008 or, you know, sex scandals. We’re a sterile bunch, mostly, and our lives tick along uneventfully- school, lunch, school, facebook, clubs, sleep, school, lunch. That’s basically growing up in Singapore, and I’ve been doing it for twenty one years.

My name is Brandon Wong Jian Han, which is a typically Singaporean Chinese name because no one calls me by my Chinese name except for Chinese language teachers, so I’m mostly just Brandon. I would make some deep and intellectual comment about that, but I don’t really care except that my parents thought Brandon would be a nice name and my grandparents thought Jian Han would be a nice name, but even they still call me Blandon, and the mis-pronunciation, I believe, is a cultural quirk, so go chew on that.

Anyway, tangential from whatever I’ve just said, I do happen to have a story to tell. It may not be a story about good or evil, because I frankly find those a little artificial, nor is it a story about loss or tragedy, or madness or sex, but it is a personal story and one that I want to tell before it gets lost when I get too busy finding a job and subsequently become a slave to it in a couple of years. Things like that happen, I see it in books and movies all the time- lost opportunity, lost love, lost stories; and it happens a lot in Singapore, you see it every time you take a train or a bus and see all the stifled people in shirts and ties and business suits and make-up, their faces tell you they’ve lost their stories. When you ask these people how they’ve been, they go, “like that lor”, and what kind of story is that? If you ask me now how my life has been, I’ll go “never been better” and it’s true, I’ve been feeling a lot happier about the way things are now than I have in a long time, and if you bear with me, I think I can get through the why of it without resorting to cheap tricks like sudden deaths and Vietnamese orphans.

This story will begin in 2004, when I turned seventeen, and I have picked 2004 because it was a year where, at least for a relatively uneventful life like mine, there were a couple of important moments. For one, I had just started junior college, which would turn out to be quite a whirl of important memories, and there also came some changes to my family which I think are quite significant.

Mainly, it was that my father, who had spent most of his adult life as a sea-faring Master Mariner (which, at least, was the description my mother told me to write under my dad’s profession on forms), had, in January that year, been offered a desk-bound job at the company as a manager of sorts, and would therefore begin to stay on-shore for good instead of scooting off to sea every four months as had been the trend for the past 30 years. This made us all very happy, ans a little hesitant, having grown up without the typical ever-present father of most happily well-adjusted families. This is not to say we were dysfunctional, of course, because my mother, Mother, who is a nurse and thus a strong woman of impressive fortitude (both physical and mental), had raised us all almost single-handedly since we were little and had instilled in us, though unwittingly through severe parental rhetoric, a pronounced talent for sarcasm and annoying banter, especially seeing as how she, when not being fierce and fearsome, was generally the kind of good-natured, easy to amuse mother you’d associate with women of her short and rotund stature.

‘Us’, hitherto, referred to my twin sister, Valerie, and I who, as with most twins, grew up best friends; we are perfect complements in humour, taste and self-abuse, though I will not hesitate to say that I am clearly smarter. The both of us kept a firm and stoic distance from our older brother, Victor who, at ten years our senior, had fairly little in common with us. He was invariably mean and angsty when we were growing up, the kind of brother who hits his younger siblings and makes them cry and then threatens them with more hitting if they squeal to Mother. By 2004, though, he had mellowed considerably and our relationship was steely and un-interactive, quite like living with, and I borrow liberally from Harry Potter, the family ghoul. At this point in the story, Victor was a writer for a bridal magazine, un-creatively named ‘Weddings’, though he being expressly of the gruff, unsentimental variety, Valerie and I often wondered what he could possibly contribute to the magazine. Of course, we never said this to him.

For all this latent tension, our family was more or less happy, and in 2004, my typical, average, middle class Singaporean Chinese family had begun to even out some of the rough edges of its earlier years- we had just moved into a new house in Tanjong Katong, a 5-room executive HDB apartment we had found on resale at what my mother said, to my father who was somewhere in the Indian Ocean when she sealed the deal, was a great price. Moving out of the old house at Bedok, where we had lived for close to ten years, was imperative by this time, because my mother was convinced that something big and dramatic was needed to help us move beyond the tumult it had seen. Tumult in the familial sense, to us at least, refers to some conflict or another between my parents and Victor. Victor, who inherited my mother’s incredible temper, also had, growing up, a testy relationship with my parents. This was in Victor’s early teens, when Valerie and I were very little, and we would wake up in the middle of the night to sounds of things crashing amidst raised voices, the kinds of sounds that make you angry and afraid just listening to them. One morning, after such a quarrel, we walked into the living room and saw the telephone flung across the room, right through the wooden door of a cabinet.

This is, in a way, the story of that fight, though not entirely, because it is also a story of my family, of myself and the lives of others and how it’s become mad and complicated and wonderful. It is, most importantly, a story about growth, and it starts in 2004.