Posts Tagged ‘voyage’

These same three men have been helping us renovate since we the days of our first shop. From Johor, they begin their day before dawn, riding over on their motorbikes to work in Singapore as contractors. One of them will be doing this for twenty years soon. They are paid well by the standard of the renovation and repair market, taking home about SGD60 a day, for work between 8am till no later than 7pm or so, before riding back to Johor to begin the next day the same way again. Because they have been treated well, they continue to work for the same company since they first came to work here. I think it is more tiring commuting to work in Singapore than the actual work they do here, but a Singaporean passport is beyond their dream. All three of them are well-skilled, an electrician, with plumbing know-how, and reliable industry experience, honesty and hardworking bones in them. For the work they have been doing, taking the job many Singaporeans either sham or shun, I feel sad they will not be (even considered as ) a part of our country. Not that they want to! But it remains a thing on my mind, how we handle matters of work permit and ‘talent’ citizenship based on wealth, or more dubious still, on supposed profound knowledge or at the other end of the spectrum, cheap labor.

We know that relationships matter. Singapore must look into the records of people who have been traveling and/or working in Singapore for several years, for the simple and undeniable contribution they have served in our country. I have not sought a passport in another country, despite my family urging me, or the allure of foreignness and prospect of discovery in youth. I don’t know if this is because I have lived overseas for a time (and experienced looked upon as a tolerated foreigner), or because I have faith in my country. They joked with me when I arrived in the shop today, asking me if I bought kopi. Later they eat what I buy. I call it banana balls. They call it jemput jemput.

Work is better when one of you has a tail.

One day we were walking San Lang on a windy path before the beach and the next day he found us a shop!

It’s like one day I was a child and the next day the child found me.

Two weeks and our lives have changed forever. I do not believe that there is a time and place for everything (as they say). But I believe that everything has to end, both good and bad things. I don’t really know what I’m saying, but it’s something like this.

Tomorrow we will be packing up the left-behind things into boxes and moving little planets in our new shop. I say that because the place used to be a salon, and everything to be carried or moved weighs a piano or is orbiting in a stance of bigger things to come. Many things no one wants; more things no one knows what to do with. And little us two will be breaking our backs doing everything ourselves once more. So what sustains?

Fearlessness. Forgetfulness.

Yesterday we gave a box of muscle-relief plasters to the old couple next door. The old lady told us her husband has never fallen sick all his life. When illness struck, it was a big one. He is recovering at home now, carrying a ‘water’ bag about. She said her son got them expensive scallops. Plus her old man did not like the taste of common scallops. She also mentioned in passing that those who can study will study; those who cannot cannot. Her eyes can see farther than mine. All the way to what the other neighbors do. As we spoke she peered into our kitchen-factory and asked what the two covered baskets were for. Laundry. No one cares, she beamed.

I keep thinking of the poems I love but nothing comes to mind.
I keep thinking of things I liked seeing as a child
Trapped in a bottle and sold on shelves.
I open my eyes wider and wider
When the light in my head appears to remember or to lack,
I’m not sure anymore, but
You bet I keep on wishing
I have not lost the words forever
If forever means this life after childhood
Because I do not know how ever to remember,
The things that did happen or did not
Only that poems filled up the parts
Meaning has not.

I keep on sleeping everywhere when I get the chance. Being on the road a lot teaches you to cap nap, duck shower, pig eat, and rabbit fuck, because suddenly orderly existential concerns become a spectrum of behavorial colors that never left you since you wore your first pair of adult shoes.

Really kidding about the rabbit part.