Our secret history

I’ve used this quote before. And I’m doing it again because I don’t have any­thing else at hand that describes bet­ter what I feel right now.

I was quite pleased to find out last night that a let­ter I wrote to some­one I fell in love with ages ago was still being kept. Why keep all your old love let­ters? Because. See above quote. And read this.

Same rea­son why we should doc­u­ment, nar­rate and jour­nalise other things.

There is an espe­cially des­per­ate need to do this in Sin­ga­pore, because our past is being erased so effi­ciently (try get­ting 8 day old Straits Times arti­cles online), and I’ve been think­ing that maybe that’s why there are so many of us who feel so alien­ated in our own coun­try. I think there are very few peo­ple around my age who can say the house/flat they lived in for the first three years of their lives is still standing.

The other thing that pre­cip­i­tated this warm-fuzzy-serious sen­ti­ment was another con­ver­sa­tion I had where I remem­bered I didn’t speak Eng­lish for the first five years of my life, stayed in a house on Pasir Pan­jang Road, across from a beach that had a jetty, and where fish­ing boats would come in daily and unload their catch for fish­mon­gers who set up shop down the road. I’ve kept notes on and off:

The shop­houses on the cor­ner of Pasir Pan­jang and Clementi Road are still there, but the beach is now part of the PSA, stretch­ing beyond the West Coast High­way and how many kilo­me­tres before you can even smell the sea.

The same sea which my father threat­ened to throw me into when I had a fight with Grandma. (And he really looked like he was gonna do it when he put me in a wicker bas­ket and car­ried me across the road to the beach.)

The car park at Cold Stor­age Orchard Road, where Cen­tre­point is now. There was a Milk Bar out front, where we’d pester my mother to buy us milk­shakes after gro­cery shop­ping. We’d drink our shakes and then throw up in the car after, because the the road back home was a wind­ing two-lane deal, from Orchard, to Napier to Hol­land to Clementi to Pasir Pan­jang Road.

The grand old air­port at Paya Lebar. Where the depar­tures and arrivals were two sep­a­rate build­ings, and where they had sign­boards telling male vis­i­tors to keep their hair­cuts neat and short. And where I fell off the air­plane steps board­ing my first air­plane jour­ney and where I bumped my head as a result.

There are more notes but there are also many of us who can make a much more coher­ent his­tory of all the things around them. And many of you are blog­ging. I’d like for you to keep doing it and get around this con­temptible pol­icy of deny­ing us easy access to our history.

Now, read that quote again.