Singathology
Page 17
Unforgettable School
In the end, we all grow up.
I started teaching; many of my older colleagues were Nantah graduates. There was sorrow there, but even more nostalgia and yearning.
Theirs was the nostalgia, and mine the longing.
Nanyang Childcare
Even before I started working at Nantah’s Institute of Education, I would bring Xiaoxi and Xunxun every day to the childcare centre on the little hill in Yunnan Garden.
Each day, we would drive down the road beneath tropical rain trees, their branches intertwined like clasped fingers, arriving at the school gate with Pan Shou’s calligraphy inscribed upon it. Right on time, my children would start yelling: Daddy’s school, Daddy’s school.
Finally, there came a day when I told them, Yes, this is Daddy’s school, it’s called Nantah. Xiaoxi showed off: I recognised the character tah.
Yes, I smiled, that’s tah.
But I still don’t know nan.
You’ll learn it later on. Soon enough, soon enough.
If you really want to learn to recognise that nan character, it might still be very difficult and take a lot of time. Better wait till you’re grown up!
Twice a day, as we passed the gates and I heard my children shouting “Nantah, Nantah”, I felt oddly moved with a wave of longing for the past. Yes, whether it’s Nantah or Nanyang Technological University, I think of it with fondness.
Yes, Nantah, we’ve returned, in the year-end rains, in the midst of hills and trees, graceful even when drenched.
Goodbye for Now, Nantah
Before I’d formed a deep relationship with Nantah, it was time to part.
On a secondment, I left the remote Western district and returned to the Southern Central region.
Nantah, at a distance, was the chirping of birds, the awe-inspiring majesty of the forest. All that was graceful continued to be graceful, and all that was shy, still shy.
And still I long for that landscape, that historical landscape, the landscape of Nantah.
And still I yearn for, have always been searching for, that university of the humanities.
Southern Central Land
We started building in the Southern Central region, using the site of a recently closed primary school.
We had initially rejected it at a glance and all but settled on the even more central Ang Mo Kio but were dissuaded by the even more expensive renovations, the even more complicated engineering work that would be needed.
Fortunately, circumstances made the decision for us, and practical considerations replaced first impressions. Abandoning Ang Mo Kio and settling in the old Ghim Moh district in the Southern Central Region, we established the first venture into this part of the country of Chinese-language Singaporean education, an independent institution operating under the Nantah name.
Yes, from the starting point of an abandoned primary school, we wanted to take the name of Nantah and walk towards the world.
Greatness of the University
From historical times, the role of the university, apart from discovering, analysing, and transmitting knowledge, has been its vast significance for the individual, society, and country and even for the past and future.
Our emotions for Nantah run deep, whether in big things or small, and this has nothing to do with how large the Nantah Lake is, whether the memorial arch has been moved, if we have zoomed up the ranks to become the highest-placed Asian institution in international university rankings, or if the campus makes it onto lists of the fifteen most beautiful in the world.
The greatness of Nantah,
Comes from the heart of the south,
Because this small patch of land, Singapore,
Once yearned for, pined for the most high, most vast school in the south
And each of the small individuals contained within it
Each weak yet steadfast voice
Each strong will that insisted on climbing higher
With the poise of grassroots
That would not stir even if Mount Tai collapsed before them
The enormous strength
Displayed here.
A House Tells Its Story
BY LEE TZU PHENG
Matter of fact I have been more than
half a century the home they had
grown up in, and seen births,
weddings, wakes, and other gatherings,
friends and neighbours, family
take part. These events
were not always the ones
they had designed, many times
I heard voices in the living room
discussing matters not in their control,
and guests staying late, but
leaving with the closure
I had come to recognise in
people’s tones: a certain lifting,
a certain calm. The echoes
sometimes stayed, drawing their
memories like shifting shades
of light and dark, sounds that
carried through or stayed
in the rooms where my windows
were left open. They made the air,
the colour and spirit of my spaces
friendly; in time became to our delight
the character of home.
History both makes and takes away.
Years have come and gone,
wearing out the floors and furniture,
and now, almost as if some
unwelcome ghost had taken residence
the voices speak what even I
cannot make out; familiar echoes
seemingly have stilled.
My roof has begun to leak,
my hinges creak, and overnight
it seems, I am not sure that
I that was so long their home
will stand another week, or month,
or year. Worse: their housekeeper,
never quite reliable, of late
has grown more stubborn and less
credible, holding views that
show a dimming vision, that deny
my structure’s crumbling,
worn by hidden rot and ravaged
through misuse. Allowed to trample
through my rooms, property-hunters,
an alien horde, mere visitors,
no matter how long they lingered.
The housekeeper’s plan to grow
a reputation for grand gestures,
gives licence to accommodate
swarms, uncaring of the cost.
Even the neighbours are turning
to watch, holding their breath,
expecting something to give way,
perhaps ceiling or floorboards
dropping; anticipating drama,
eavesdropping for the denouement;
the final chorus of termites
announcing their own demise,
when my last supporting beam
gives way, the curtain comes down,
and the wires chewed up
leave me exposed and naked
to the implacable elements
and other visitations.
Fact of the matter is, they know
generations owned and lived
in me, but some abandoned
tradition and loyalties,
devalued the human cost;
and some of the brightest have lost
heart and gone away, fallen
out with plans that would trade
me for a refurbished place
not even the inhabitants recognise.
In time, new people, perhaps tenants,
may find me worth keeping
as a half-way stop, my fate uncertain.
Pondering time’s lessons
and the ways of a rapacious world,
I am only, and ever have been,
a fragile structure: nonetheless,
I shelter the hope of the family’s
regeneration – to reclaim their home,
and rewrite this story’s ending.
Rented Rooms
BY BOEY KIM CHENG
Outside the kitchen window, the cherry trees lining the street have put out bountiful sprays of pretty pink blossoms almost overnight. Spring is here; the Rodgers and Hart tune starts playing in my head. Across the street, a magpie swoops down from its nest of hatchlings high in a jacaranda tree and scares an elderly Chinese man towing a trolley bag. Last week, I was pecked on the head and have given the magpie’s turf a wide berth since.
“Magpie attack,” I tell Lin.
She ignores me and continues scrubbing the grease stains on the kitchen wall. She is still angry that I have taken out a six-month lease on this dim, shabby apartment, which has the used, laden air of apartments that have suffered many tenancies – a worn palimpsest of ineradicable smells, accumulated traces of lives that have lodged here briefly. The scuffed linoleum floor, the stains, scratches, and pencil doodling on the walls, the paint peeling in corners, and the worn, discoloured green colour and musty odour of the carpet in the hall and rooms are further evidence of a long history of occupation. My wife swears that she can smell stale spices, spilled coconut milk, and curry and decides that the previous tenants were Indians. The whole apartment has a depressed feel to it, from the seventies laminate kitchen to the olive-green carpet and the rust-stained sink and bathtub. It doesn’t get any sun, and fronting the street and being on the ground floor make us feel exposed, vulnerable. I think of the tenants before us, passing transients who have found permanent quarters, a job and house in a suburb elsewhere, and become successfully migrant and resident. And then there are those still in transit, waiting to be admitted to the Australian Dream. Like our neighbours around us, who are mostly recent arrivals. Next door is an Indian family; across from us are a mainland Chinese family and a couple from Iran; and upstairs is a large Fijian family, whose footsteps echo loudly through the ceiling. Years later, owners of a suburban four-bedroom brick house and finally mortgage-free, we will look back with horror, disbelief, and a nostalgic affection, admiration even, for the newly arrived immigrant couple who had chosen to start from scratch.
My wife puts down the green-wool scrub, looks around in dismay, the disgust unmistakable; her misery sends a sharp reproachful stab through me.
“Can’t believe you took the lease,” she says again.
“I’ve told you, it’s the only one they would let me have. It’s crazy, but they asked for my payslip and rental history.”
“What? Like a rental CV?”
“Sort of. Seems common here. For people renting.”
“Not because we are foreigners?”
“No, that has nothing to do with. Don’t think so.”
“Like second-class citizens.”
“What?”
“Haven’t you felt it? Yesterday at the supermarket, the lady who served me wouldn’t even look at me but had a lengthy chat with the customer before. White, of course. Kept me waiting in line for five minutes.”
I want to say that it is going to take time to get used to the way things work or don’t work here. But I have sensed it too. Seeing yourself reflected in their eyes, alien, non-white. You are constantly reminded of it too in the papers. It is, after all, Pauline Hanson’s heyday, the fish-and-chips-store-owner-turned-politician, with a face that seems plastic, her big wide eyes and broad mouth stretched too tight. Her openly xenophobic, racist stance and alarming popularity are an ugly fact staring the non-white migrant in the face.
“It’s cold in here. Not a ray of sun.” The spring day is warming up outside, but the air in the house remains cold. Stale.
“I don’t want the baby born here. It’s going to be awful.” Lin doesn’t say it, but the unspoken weighs on me and becomes a silent wall between us. Back home, she would be assured of family support and would be able to afford good paediatric care with her salary. She has thrown in her lot with me, given up a well-paid albeit stressful job, our cosy apartment, her family, to face an uncertain future. When we quarrel, I can see it in her eyes, what she tries so hard not to say.
“I’ll look for another apartment, once we prove we are good tenants.”
“You mean we have to pass a test to give all this money to rent a crummy place?” She leans back on the IKEA rocking armchair, tired. We have spent the afternoon scouring, scrubbing, clearing the cobwebs, vacuuming.
“Can’t believe the agent can let the previous tenants go and lease the place to us with all this mess.” She closes her eyes. I am about to start hoovering the floor but put the vacuum cleaner aside and kneel down next to the chair.
“It takes time,” I say, wiping the teardrops trembling at the corners of her lovely, long-lashed eyes.
“We don’t have that. We are no longer young. Feel it.” She takes my hand and holds it over her stomach. She is in the first trimester and has been feeling her slight bulge for reassurance, listening for signs of occupancy, the little probes and kicks that would announce its tenant. I don’t feel anything but leave my hand there.
“Little Joey,” I say. Last week, we went to the Featherdale Wildlife Park, and the sight of the babies in the pouches brought a tender, maternal look on my wife’s face. It is the only time that she has been happy since arriving last week.
“Don’t call it that. May be a girl.”
Then I think I feel something, a faint movement, like a little nudge. I put my ear against silky skin of her stomach. Amidst the rumbling noises, I can pick out a faint heartbeat, a distant signal from a life that is arriving, that has followed us from our place of birth to this alien life in a western suburb of Sydney. Through deep space, through galactic clouds where memory mingles with forgetting, I hear the little probes, the knocking that at its source must be a loud, urgent cry to be let out, or in, to our world.
***
I stayed with Alex when I arrived in mid-winter. Four years ago, he had migrated here with his wife and had encouraged me to take the step. We were part of a disaffected, listless bunch at university, hating the smallness of the country, the autocratic ways of the government, and our not-so-bright outlook, a few guys who were passionate about literature but who saw no use of it in the real world.
The house was in Mt. Colah, a northern suburb at the edge of the Kuringai National Park. I slept in a room at the back of the house; against one wall were stacks of LPs that Alex had been collecting, mostly jazz and folk rock that he loved. He hunted for these at Vinnies and second-hand music stores on Pitt Street in the city. The next room was filled to the rafters with boxes and crates that were still unopened, belongings from a previous life, as if Alex had known that they wouldn’t live in the house for long. He was still in shock. His wife had just left him for an Aussie man. They had only been living in this house for about a year when it happened.
That month with Alex was a bad start to my new life Down Under. He was bitter, already disillusioned with his adopted country, reviling the blokey culture, the talk of mateship, fair dinkum, and the man who had stolen his wife. Back home, he drew a handsome salary. Now he was doing odd jobs: newspaper delivery, shifts at a local newsagent and the supermarket, and even gardening. He was contemplating doing a course in information technology.
“It’s a really racist country, you know. It’s all a façade, the smiles, the fair dinkum. Deep down, they hate you for coming here and taking their jobs,” Alex would begin his tirade at the end of each day, his face taut and grim. After letting it out, he would take off his gold-rimmed glasses, rub his eyes, and lean back on the sofa.
“Soon as they see your name on the CV, they chuck your application out. I’ve sent out dozens, and not a single interview. And you can forget about teaching white kids English. They don’t even recognise your teaching qualifications.”
Once I couldn’t resist asking, “Why don’t you go back? It’s not too late, you know. You are still a citizen.”
“To what? When I left, I said I was never going to return if I could help it
. I said goodbye for good. Not zaijien, but goodbye forever. I can’t live there, not after what happened. Can’t return without her. The bitch.”
We moved the glasses and bottle of wine to the backyard and sat on the deckchairs. From the hi-fi set turntable, Billie Holiday sang “I Cover the Waterfront”. It was a late recording that Alex had picked up just that morning from the local Vinnies. The voice was coarse, fragile, struggling at times to hold the notes and chords, but it had a stirring poignancy to it that touched us more deeply than the early recordings.
It was the tail end of winter, the air still cold, but the edge was gone. The house sat at the end of a peaceful cul-de-sac that backed onto the bush, and, from the deck, we could see miles and miles of bush all the way to the horizon. It was easy to forget the houses and families in the streets around, the lives going on quietly behind the doors and lit windows. It was easy to forget the place we came from, the crowded skyline, the incessant construction and crowds, the noise, the little island state where it had become impossible to find solitude, where the sky was smoky, clouded, nothing like this awesome, stupendous night sky, so liberally sprinkled with stars. To be able to trace the Southern Cross, the Orion, Mars, Venus, and Jupiter, the velvet-soft belt of the Milky Way: that seemed like good enough reason for being here. Back home, you couldn’t see much, only faint glints. You had to get out to the islands to see the tropical night sky.
“Remember that night in Tekong? When we first talked? It was the first time I really saw a starry night.”
We were sitting on the high steps of the obstacle course just a block away from the barracks. It was the end of our first week at the Pulau Tekong Basic Military Training camp. Initially, we were to be confined to the island for the first two weeks, to reinforce the rite of passage and separation from family, from the mainland, to drill it into us that we belonged to the army now and had to earn the right to return to the mainland and civilian world. But a chickenpox outbreak in the second week meant quarantine and a further week of isolation.