Where Home is, Truly.

* This post was meant to be posted on National Day, 9 August 2010, but was postponed because Wai Jia has had a series of 4 tests to study for which only ended today!

**Disclaimer: This post may be offensive to some.


When I was younger and more naive, I used to think one could be whatever one's heart felt one was. But I've come to see, some things can't be changed. And perhaps, they're better left so.

You see, even though I've grown up here almost all my life, live in the heartlands, eat rojak, speak Singlish, breathe efficiency, and exude the typically Singaporean-brand style of pragmatism, I don't own a pink identification card, and nothing but a citizenship conversion will ever change that.

As a child, I never felt the difference- after all, my entire family were, still are, permanent residents. When I was a toddler, my mother would play national day songs on the cassette tape player before putting me to bed every night, even though we all belonged to a different country. In primary school, I sang the national anthem, went to the national day parades. Because I was head prefect, I had to lead the entire school in reciting the national pledge, too. Till today, I support local artistes, especially local theatre.

But the difference becomes more apparent as one grows older. So what's your nationality? People ask.

And then I find myself straddled between two lands, struggling between lost and found. I am lost in limbo because I do not know. Does my nationality matter if I do not feel at home back there, since I moved here when I was less than a year old? Back there where my neighbours get robbed on a regular basis? Back there where there is a goverment which isn't democratic and is prejudiced against my race such that it is close to impossible to studying medicine on a meritocratic basis? Back there, where I do not feel I am at home at all. Do I tell you that is my country?

Back in my home country, my relatives laugh at how I've been sold to Singapore. I have not lived there for so long. So long. Since my grandma passed away, I've had even less reason to return.

Yet, no matter how much I feel at home here, I can never truly call it my own. Even though all the places I know, all the places I identify with, all the memories I have are all in this tiny place. But once upon a time, I used to. I used to say Singapore is my home. I used to know all the national day songs by heart. I used to hang the flag up with pride from my balcony. But people pointed at the colour of my identity card and joked. They still do.

This is not your country.

Even though I've grown up here all my life. Even though I think my blood is Singaporean. Even though there's possibly no where else on earth I could call home.

Yet, it's a joke. But then, why? I become confused, because why is he/she more Singaporean than me when he/she has only just obtained citizenship? Is it because he has been imported to join our, no sorry, your national team? Is it because she will benefit you and bring my, no sorry, your nation glory?

So is this about the colour of the card I carry.

When I am overseas and people ask me where I'm from, I tell them, I'm from Singapore. I tell them without batting an eyelash. I tell them with pride. This is my home.

But how my heart broke that day when someone said, "Wow, Singapore. I've heard so much about it. It's a model for so many countries. But why did your government choose to build a casino? Why the Integrated Resort with a casino at its centre? It just didn't seem to fit with your nation's image. Why?"

Then I became ashamed. Because my answer was, I don't know. I don't know why we, no sorry, you are building a multi-million resort comprising a six-star hotel, a dazzling waterfront view, an entertainment hub, an amusement park, next to a building which destroys not only families, but individual lives. I don't know why we, sorry you, have prophylactically established the National Council of Problem Gambling to tackle "any future issues". I pass by that plot of land when I go to school. And my heart sinks.

This is my country. This is not your country.

Who's taking ownership now? Who's taking whose away.

This is my home. Why are you destroying it. This is my country. Why are you stemming its economic growth.

That day at the immigration office, I was stunned when they told me I couldn't apply for citizenship. I've lived here all my life. I have a good track record. I am going to be one of your doctors. Their reason was, in black and white, your parents aren't citizens and you aren't working yet. Refer to the pink form. Period. Come again next year.

This is not your country.

Monday was National Day. We, final year medical students, were up to our ears in work. I had 4 tests this week. But my best friend and I sat on my rooftop garden anyways watching fireworks, celebrating Singapore's 45th birthday.

Then it struck me. As the specks of light bloomed into flames in the inky blanket of sky, it struck me.

This is not my country. And neither is the place which declares so on my passport.

My greatest lesson learnt this year has been to cling loosely to all things. My injury taught me to cling loosely to my possessions; my illness taught me to cling loosely to my earthly body. Finally, what I feel to be God's latest assignment to me for 2012 has taught me... to cling loosely to my home, to my country. Because you just never know when He might call, where He may call you to. Perhaps, it was all part of His plan to feel like I never did belong.

The missionaries I met often told me, "When you start work, be careful, don't buy a car. When you find a boyfriend, be careful, don't marry him and buy a house in your home country. Once you've settled your car and your house in your country, you can forget about leaving. It would have become too much of your home for you to want to leave for another place where God's work might be waiting for you. You'll then say, 'God's work for me is here, at home.' And no one will stop you either. So be careful."

It was at that moment when the incandescence of the neon-coloured fireworks melted into the thick blackness of the night sky that I understood, that truly, I don't belong here. And for good reason, too. Because I don't know where God might point me to in future- Africa, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, America- who knows. And one day when He calls, I hope never to be caught in a situation where I may have to turn my back and say, "I'm sorry God, but you can't take me away from Home. There's just too much for me to leave behind, too much."

Which is partially why I think He allowed my hip to break. It helped me to see that truly, one cannot and must not cling too tightly to possessions, or hobbies, or even, friends and family.

Because Home, like they say, is where the heart is. And if my heart truly belongs to You and You alone, then surely, that's where my citizenship must lay too.

So it's fine, I suppose. It's fine that this is not my country.

Happy 45th Birthday. I love you anyway.

Whenever I am feeling low, I look around me and I know...

-Home, Truly by Kit Chan

a public exhibit at Raffles Place put up by Singapore Polytechnic

celebrating National Day, entitled, "I Dream"

" For our citizenship is in heaven, from which we also eagerly wait..."

- Phil 3:20

"Now therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners,

but fellow citizens with the saints and members

of the household of God..."

-Ephe 2:19

8:22pm.

Most people wouldn't guess if I didn't tell them so. Because while every fibre inside me screams Singaporean, my passport and identity card say otherwise. Born in Malaysia, but growing and living here since 9 months after my birth makes me every bit local as everybody else. Except for my identity documents, that is.

Today is National Day, and I am so thankful to be here.

Singapore isn't perfect. Perhaps, there are too many rules, too many things one can and cannot say about the government; There are too many people in lifts, trains and buildings, and finding a seat on public transport is like striking lottery; Our youth are spoilt, distracted and too wealthy for their own good-myself included. We have made mistakes, and are still making them now- I shudder each time we drive past the integrated resorts which will become a casino hub, and laugh wryly in bemused resignation at how a counselling service for gambling addicts will be set up in response to the architectural monstrosity which will boost our economy but tear apart families, create jobs but destroy characters, bring in tourists but take away our sense of integrity. People fall through the cracks of our healthcare system, however impeccable we claim it is on an international standard, still. We are too pragmatic.

It's true, we aren't perfect.

But we have roofs over our heads, clean water from taps. We have public transport- try that in Nepal. And while we can't provide the best healthcare for every citizen, the economic-cost benefit is just about... there. We don't have large fields and horses and sprawling meadows, but we have nice parks and pretty landscapes. We don't have 4 seasons, but we have lovely weather, nonetheless. We have clean streets, fresh air, a place we can call our own.

I don't know how to sing the national anthem of Malaysia. I have visited the place a number of times, only to feel like an alien in the place, unsafe in the neighbourhood where I was born in, after knowing that a close family friend had been robbed four times in the district. I don't eat durians, the Malaysian national favourite delicacy, and I eat meepok (an Asian noodle dish) with ketchup, the Singaporean way, not dark soy sauce- something which all my Malaysian relatives use as the litmus test to differentiate our loyalties. They cringe and shake their heads in mock disgust.

This morning, a friend met up with me before dawn for an early morning run. And as we ran past the park connectors to the beach and back, adjourning to run in quaint little roads, we marvelled at how clean, pristine and beautiful the scenery was. "I feel so happy today," he said, "it's national day." I felt the same too.

"This is where I hung out when I was a kid," he pointed out. "Me too!" I said, as we talked and jogged past places which mattered to us, which formed a significant part of our identities.

The beach is the place I grew up in, the place where my best friend from childhood and I and his family got drenched in the rain while going to play with mudskippers when we were five. The college we jogged past was the college I attended. The coffeeshop we ran past was the place my father would give me pep talks in while I was going through my emo, angsty adolescence. The train station is where I met people who changed my life, like Grandpa Zhou. The east is where I schooled and played and grew up in most of my life. We jogged past the apartment I stayed in previously, and I mused at the time when I was still in pre-school and my mother would play those catchy national day jingles ("We are Singapore", "Singapura... sunny island, set in the sea...") and lullabies on a cassette player at night before I went to bed. Singapore is the place which gave me an education, gave me a chance at learning medicine through meritocracy, not a bumiputra system. This is the place where I met people who helped me understand who God was, and is.

It's not perfect, I know. But it's where I can call home.

I love the way we are so anal and uptight about cleanliness, among other things, the way we call our elderly "aunties" and "uncles" as if they were our relatives (it is an asian culture), love the way we try so hard to be Uniquely Singapore, and succeed, if only sometimes. We aren't perfect, but I love this place, still.

At 8:22pm tonight, the whole of Singapore will stop whatever they are doing to recite the national pledge, that pledge which I was chosen to recite in primary school on the school stage with a microphone. It's a strange feeling, something I have yet to reconcile with, to be a foreigner in a land you feel you only know to call home and yet can never quite call yourself to be a citizen of. It's strange to have studied and been 'brainwashed' by the history of a place which has bitter roots with your birthplace, of which you know little of. It's a strange feeling too, to know that home in the future may be elsewhere, in a developing country, and not here. I am straddled between two shores and an unknown one, over a precarious river of identity crisis.

But I forget, that perhaps, many of us, too, are foreigners in this world, God's people walking in a godless world, walking on this earth but only transiently, with a piece of eternal heaven in us, the heaven which is to be home for good in the future, just not now. (1 Peter 2:11)

And all at once, I remember, that Home isn't my previous apartment or my present room or the east of Singapore or the Malaysian neighbourhood where I was born in. Home doesn't depend on what my passport says or what I am familiar with. Because homes change with circumstance, and no home but One is truly perfect.

Home is where gratitude for things past, hope for the future, and love for the present is. Home is in the inside place.

Happy 44th birthday, Singapore.

"This is home, truly,

Where I know I must be."

- Home, truly