Calling Home is a series of articles dedicated to cherishing the memories made when away from home, and the people who make them. In Part 6/6, Terence Wang wonders about roads taken, and ones that lie ahead.
A slight scowl of annoyance must have crossed over my face as the ear-piercing screech emitted from my bicycle’s front disc brake, which cut my (admittedly dangerously high) acceleration enough to avoid the creaky red truck (which had no business being in this neighbourhood anyway) passing a few inches too close for comfort on my right. Damn that truck. Damn my brakes too.
But to be fair, I’d abandoned my bike so long, it was probably getting rusty anyway. Not coincidentally, so was I.
Wiping the little layer of sand sprayed across my face (I’m looking at you, you stupid truck), I straightened my bike, put a firm foot on the left pedal and continued forward. Down the wide road with the park on my right and semi-detached houses on the left, deeper into the scattered, and arguably more interesting, lanes of the continuously expanding housing estate that was Taman Impian. My home territory.
Except that, in a way, it wasn't. Not anymore.
As I cycled idly through the rows upon rows of terraced houses, both big and small, old and new, avoiding the considerable amount of traffic that had built itself up over the years, an expected sense of familiarity floated through me. This was, after all, the place in which I had spent the better part of my first fifteen years of existence. Cycling to tuition with neighbours when I was still little more than a kid, and planning all sorts of mischief afterwards. Secret trips to my friends’ homes at that same age of naivety, often when I should have been doing something more ‘productive’. Jogging the streets during the fringes of dusk and night. Many of my high-adrenaline moments, if far from all, were formed throughout the years of living in this idle neighbourhood.
But at the same time, a new, uncomfortable feeling of detachment was starting to arise within me. I recognised all these places that I was passing, and the memories that came with them, but I felt like I didn’t belong. It was like talking to an old friend, one that you hadn’t met in awhile - you two know each other, and you’re both soon chatting and laughing as if it were still the good old days. But it isn’t the good old days any more, and deep down, both of you feel it. Somewhere in between, an invisible wall is building up, brick by brick. It’s still thin and insignificant, but it’s there, where it never existed before. You don’t like it, not one bit. You also know that things will never be the same.
Here, in my own territory, that wall is building. Brick by brick.
“So what happened?”
“Well, basically I got lost...but I eventually got to an MRT station, and it was straight to home from there.”
“Home?” my mentor teacher laughed. “Home not back in Penang meh?” I was dumbstruck. He left without waiting for an answer, but I continued to sit straight up on my single, worn-out bed, still speechless. I didn’t have an answer.
Home is where the heart is, they say. But what makes a home? Is home the place you come from, where your earliest memories are? Or is home where you stay now, where your life story continues onwards? Is home the familiar and the known, where you can lie safely in the bubble of good ole’ friends and family? Or is home your little refuge from the new and the strange, the starting point to your new experiences in an alien world, once foreign in itself, but over time becoming your anchor of sanity?
As I passed another cyclist, our glances locked, which instantly turned into looks of wait-a-minute-I-know-who-you-are! We both pulled hard on our brake levers, me again wincing at the brake-screeching that resulted. “Hey,” I offered. “When did you come home?” he asked in familiar Penang-flavoured Mandarin. He was one of my few remaining neighbourhood-friends, most of which having moved to plusher, newer housing estates. “Not too long ago.” “Come on, let’s go for a ride. I’m not in a hurry to go anywhere, anyway.”
And so we rode, and we talked. About my old school, about living in Singapore, and about everything in between (though not literally, for it is universally agreed among Penangites that there is nothing really worth mentioning in between these two locations anyway). “Is Singapore as tough as they say it is?” “Is Form 4 as tough as they say it is?” I countered with a laugh. That was basically how it went: we chatted, we laughed a little. But things were not the same, not what they used to be. As we said our short goodbyes, I knew that I had taken a tiny step past the proverbial line.
It is, in the grand scheme of things, a tiny, inconsequential line, one among many others that I will cross time and time again throughout the rest of my life, like everyone else. But it was also a silent reminder that some of the things that I hold dear were merely temporary, soon to be washed away and replaced by the new. I’m standing on that line now, with a foot-and-a-half tepidly on one side, and the remainder still left behind on the other. Behind me, was a life of a lazy suburban kid living out his busy, yet paradoxically slow-paced life, with wide-eyed dreams stretching further than the moon, in which anything and everything could be possible, ‘if you just use your imagination’ as that purple dinosaur so aptly put it. In front, lay a life in the Olympic-sized pool of seven million people, in a tiny hostel room with two crazy juniors who spare me no mercy about my lack of depth in the mysterious study of Chinese ‘codewords’. (Guys, if you’re reading this, you’re both awesome...but I hate you.)
It’s a line that is optional as much as it is compulsory, with the positives and negatives that come with either choice. It’s a line that sometimes makes us ponder the point of it all, that makes us think about the validity behind these reasons that we so often give ourselves, just to push us on one side or the other. Do we really want all this? Or is it all just because it’s supposedly ‘good for us’?
It’s a line where one life ends, and a new one begins. Right now, though, I’m stuck, smack in between.
Words by Terence Wang
Picture by LH Isurgranddad
With this, we wrap up the 'Calling Home' series. The Suburban KID team would like to sincerely thank all the contributors to the series, and we hope you enjoyed reading it.
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