THE CITIZEN
My life: an anthology of defeat. I was born on December 8, 1980, the day John Lennon died. The year Lee Kuan Yew led the PAP to win all 75 seats in the election. The year democracy died in Asia. My mother was a school teacher at Anglo Chinese School. My father, the principal of East View Primary . They met when they were both teaching at Nan Chiau High, my mother specialising in English, my Father, Mathematics. They got divorced soon after she moved to ACS -- don’t ask me why -- I have been speculating about this since I was 7 years old. I suppose I will never know the reasons for the split, other than the escalating arguments that started at a frequency of once a month, and then ramping up to an almost daily affair. Nothing special, as broken families go -- a broken child, a broken mind, unleashed upon a broken world.
I was a Raffles Junior College graduate, on the fast track to be a minister, so my mother is fond is saying, but my predilection for honour, the truth and the soul, ironically instilled by my alma mater, caused me to rebel: on a fast track to medical school, where I dropped out and decided to become a journalist at the New Paper -- a through line to, if not truth, the closest approximation to it (as an aside, any of you readers who feel that the Straits Times comes closer to the truth than The New Paper may stop reading, I have no respect for you, or your kind. I command thee: Return to your echo chamber of government sycophancy, zombies!). Every day, I would meet the masses, educated to within an inch of their lives, parroting the bliss of ignorance afforded by the government, while others’ minds break into rampancy -- home stabbings, alcoholism, loan sharks, phone scams, overcrowded HDB flats, cockroach infestations, counterfeit NTUC vouchers, malfunctioning cars, bankruptcy by public transport, poisoned bak kut teh, michelin-starred prawn noodles, discomfiture at the commercialisation of singlish, void deck prostitution rings, lonely geriatric grandmothers in debt to dangerous ice habits...just the detritus of a society rushing through the motions of progress.
Online, I feverishly write of the things lost. I tell people of the world beyond the real, of the conspiracy of Chinese privilege and the flow of capital to the hands of the least deserving. My community like a swarm of worker bees in hives of concrete, emblazoned with rainbows and pastels and the ever ubiquitous Singapore flag; a scar that tears across my heart. And I suffer in tropical heat, from the wounds of an indifferent world where the soul lies buried and trapped in the raintrees and bougainvilleas and angsana, planted in regular intervals along spotless roads and trapped in manicured dispays of silently screaming vegetation, the city within the garden, or the garden within the city: who cares?