Reading and literature has been a long-lasting hobby of mine, a lover whose embrace my heart leads me back to every time I needed a new perspective on life. I would sit on the floor in my room as a kid, reading as the sun went down. I would go to compulsory lit class in my first two years of Secondary School with a book that we weren’t discussing about, perched on the edge of my table. If you ask me now what the greatest regret of my life was, it would be not pursuing literature. I picked up science like it’s a shiny seashell gleaming from the sand, dreaming of a day where I would save lives through medicine or nutrition, while the one type of seashell that I’ve always loved remained buried. Tides washed over it, the earth turned day and night shadows casting. I walked past it barefoot, picked it up, put it back down.
Only recently, in the past year or so then I’ve begun to seriously start reading again with a steadier mind and an even steadier heart. I’ve never critically examined a book, studied it so thoroughly that the words jump off the page, run and tire themselves out. It’s a blessing yet a curse, I want to do that, to look at the many nuances and meanings layered in between the sentences. I have the mental capacity to do that now since I’ve quit social media, the recording the number of books I’ve read, posting photos, catching up with brands and people I admire done soullessly.
My upbringing and the quick way my thumb slides across glass on my phone made me feel so far away. It’s like being in a daze for years and the heat starts to get hotter, rain starts to get heavier, seeds start to germinate into sky high trees yet I’m still sleeping. And then I’m waking up and I don’t know about anything, especially the literature landscape in this tiny island state. I know there is a community here of those who love knowledge and literature as much as I do but it’s all a haze to me, a stunning place that I have not yet ventured into. There are incredible writers who are just as Singaporean as me but I have never yet read any novel written by one. I’m not sure if it’s only me but I typically cast my gaze outward, to cultures and stories not of my own. But I’ve learnt, everything crushed into recent years like time had infinitely sped up, that nothing will be as poignant to me as reading about my own country and people who look like me, yellow skin, raven hair, brown eyes as brown as un-milked coffee.
I am hesitant to call myself a writer, like how I’m hesitant to call myself a photographer. It could be true that I have an affinity for both. Words and photos come alive in my hands and my brain and I see them so clearly. Nevertheless, it’s uncomfortable to me if I were to be labelled a writer or a photographer or a graphic designer (my day job). I don’t want to be one thing and nothing else.
All of these aside, if say I were to put on my writers’ hat for a moment, I would love to write something, anything about Singapore. I grew up incredibly sheltered, seeing through a narrow scope that marines use to peer out of the water from a submarine. However, the undercurrents and our way of living seeps into my very bones every time I take a walk with my camera along the heartlands and districts where its history permeates the architecture. I might be sleeping, eyes so still that death wanted to come for me but I wasn’t dead. I could see and hear and feel and talk.
There are many, many things I do not know about my country, embarrassing to say as a Singaporean. I’m tired of being embarrassed, I want to know. There is a resolve brewing in me to open my mind about Singapore, this land that I have inhabited for the past 23 years of my life. I want to dig my hands into the ground and connect with my land, my home through literature, words, feelings, photos, design, everything.
