2015, USA
my dreams are long and run like epics. they keep coming back, years after the last, creating by erasing. memory always one false step behind history, history always emerging one real second too early.
this sofa— indiscretions, disgust, attempts, lies, the staircase, that fucking phone. what's going to happen to the garden? the deck will rot—a house a house what about the house, the old one's going to burn i dreamt it, i did—
*
I am losing my familiar places. Lately I am constantly bemused, floating and trying to put roots where there is no soil. It’s regretful how I used to take stability for granted, even scorned it. Intent on 'finding myself', I flung my body into the furthest countries possible. It didn’t matter where, as long as I left home and all the sad realities of illness far behind. Now traveling makes my heart ache, and I feel emptier than ever when, suitcase at the ready, I make the call for a taxi to take me to the airport yet again.
I am losing my familiar places. My childhood home is now a mausoleum, a stagnant shrine to what used to be. Mummy’s ashes lie lonely in a coffined house with a dying garden and singing wind chimes. If I go back to Singapore now, I will stay in a new apartment Daddy is renting. One I have never seen. An alien land, a facade of home unembarrassed of being the simulacrum it is. My sister sent me a video tour of the place. I see the space I will sleep. I see the space I will eat. I see the sea out the window. I will live there the next time I return, a ghostly anticipation of 'home'. We have another mausoleum, this one with no urn. An apartment in Penang Daddy bought for Mummy that she never got to use. We stay there one or two nights a year, unhurried and sad. I have dreams of not being able to find my way home, walking around my neighborhood in the dark trying to get my bearings. I have dreams of Limau Purut on fire. We have one month to vacate our studio in New York. We need to find residence in Boston.
I am losing my familiar places. My family is based on love and uncovered lies. Geographically dispersed, we meet, we Skype, we communicate. I am leaving my therapist. Who will I talk to now? Who can I run from?
My home is now a cat and a man.
January 2021
Yesterday was moving day. I spent the whole day unpacking. The house is still a giant mess, but it has finally been moved into. Last night was the first time in close to a year that we slept on our bed, packed and shipped from Boston. Mixed feelings— although this is supposed to be a ‘new start’, some things remain overwhelmingly the same.
Some teething issues: uneasy transplants, symbols of adjustment problems? Plugging cables into outlets with incompatible voltages— short-circuiting expensive things: Beng short-circuited the piano, and I short-circuited the standing desk. Pop! a mist of smoke from the power unit.
I have asked Mei, carefully, if she would like to merge our books on the bookshelf. I said, over-eagerly, that it’d be “symbolic”. We now have multiples of everything—2 of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, 2 of Chris Ware’s Building Stories, multiple copies of Freud's essays, 2 of C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, 2 of Haresh Sharma’s play Off Center, 3 litter boxes, 3 can openers, 3 Le Creuset silicon spatulas. A life patched together, co-existence in bricolage.
I am relearning how to live with my sister, especially now that I have a husband and kid in tow. I am learning how to not intrude on her privacy, or ask intrusive questions, to let her live her life without feeling assailed by well-meaning but interfering intentions. Am I too loud, is my laughter too harsh? Does Quinn's crying wake her up at night?
Learning the sounds of a new washing machine, the logic behind the electronic tune.
The study is airy and I can hear wind chimes and distant construction. In the morning, when the sky was still dark, birds were already trilling, formless creatures in the twilight.
*
I am creating a new morning routine in this familiar house. Come down. Turn on foyer and study lights. Put Obi back into his room and shut cat door. Open french doors. Sit on swing and look at the sky lightening which, in a delightful coincidence, happens in the direction the swing is facing.
I smelled the air—that wet, heavy smell of dawn. I listened to the birds, a chorus from far away, a loud trill—one, two—from nearby. I watched small wisps of clouds drifting by in the pre-dawn sky, and thought “they are making way for day”— leisurely, unhurriedly, a kind of cosmic purposefulness, unfolding with quiet industriousness. The streetlamp is different from my memories; it is now brown, cast-iron, 'industrial minimalist'. Someone from the house opposite took out the trash, then left (for market?) The breeze carressed my body, and sitting there on the old swing set, I sought, “Mummy?” Spending time with her, back in this house.
Now that we are all moved in, and have cleaned and handed over the rental in Flamingo Valley, there is a sense of things settling. That all we have to do now is the slow, steady work of making a home. It’s a funny feeling, I told my grandma— making a new home within an old one.
*
Moving back into Limau Purut means I am learning to live with the memories of place. Where I’m writing now, on my desk in the study, our parents would read the newspaper every morning. Quinn now sleeps in Mei's old room. The coolness of the marble floor. Visiting the playgrounds of my childhood. How many years have I lain on this parquet floor? I find myself reaching for Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Richard McGuire’s Here, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space.
Karen Green: “It’s hard to remember tender things tenderly.”
*
I sat in the garden at dawn, and saw a bat fly low and hang in our rafters.
In the past, bats would roost in the rafters of the outdoor patio. Our father welcomed them, and said they were symbols of good luck—‘bat’ (蝠) in Mandarin sounds like ‘fortune’ (福). Our domestic helpers, however, who had to clean up the bat guano, were often exasperated with them. The games cabinet of our childhood also had bat motifs on them. We thought that the bats no longer had a place to roost once we converted the outdoor patio into a study, walling off the space with glass panels.
But a few days before moving in, our contractor found five baby bats roosting in the rafters at the side of the house. Our father was overjoyed. He kept saying, “You guys are so lucky,” and “Limau Purut is so lucky.” The fact that it was five was also significant— 五福 means the Five Blessings: longevity (寿), wealth (富), health and peace (康宁), love of virtue (修好德), and a peaceful death in old age. There are other interpretations of the Five Blessings: another source says the last three are: prosperity in work and society (贵), peace and happiness (安乐), and fertility (子孙众多).
I hadn’t been aware of all these significations of fortune. Dare I believe we will be happy here? Dare I believe in omens, in signs and premonitions again? How frightening to want to believe that we can build a happy life here, when life has been barren for so long. I saw a bat this morning— can I expect happiness and joy today?
J lent me her copy of Signs, which I couldn't bring myself to read.
February 2021
Proust, at the beginning of Remembrance of Things Past: “But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sounds of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mama. In reality their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet about me that I hear them anew...”
This morning, for the first time since moving back, I also recalled—with a jolt— this house as the place Mum’s wake had been held. Ah yes, this was where the coffin had been. This was where I screamed and had to be held. This is where Ah Kong sat. Normally a reticent man, he poured his heart out to strangers he just met, his heart broken, daughter gone.
*
Re-read my underlines and highlights from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and I am thinking about how Limau Purut is “physically inscribed” in me. The way we close the french doors, the sound of the windows being closed, the heaviness of my steps as I pad up and down the staircase. The neighbor’s grating, unpleasant voice. How I still keep looking for the black sun clock by the front door that isn’t there anymore. The soft roar of a car pulling into the driveway.
March 2021
Am re-reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, a little a day, usually every morning.
And now— how terrifying— I have reached the second chasm of a chapter, “Time Passes”. This chapter once ruined me, made me numbly write an essay titled "On Not Close Reading" for a Close Reading class. How awful that the dinner scene is over, how, I know, I know— that now, from here on, time will pass, the cruelty of it— Mrs. Ramsay will die, (Mr. Ramsay stumbling in the dark, crying, "perished! alone!"), the house that housed and loved all of them will be abandoned, fall into disrepair, the groaning echo—
*
I have finished “Time Passes”.
Memories of Limau Purut lying cold and shuttered. The sorrow of the dark, the unbearable stillness of the air, the intolerable knowing, one quiet evening when I crept in, with T, to retrieve a forgotten yoga mat, that “this is no longer a home— the house Mummy loved, now houses no one. We have all abandoned it, we have all abandoned her”. The garden overrun. The lights not working. The furniture, the pillows, they all still— no one has touched them for years. How dare they appear as they did in happier times. How dare the house look exactly the same, only now— "perished! alone!" The shriek of the silence. In the unholy dark, T held my hand. She pulled me out, both of us shaking.
Gratefulness, for our uncle's family, for throwing open the doors, letting light in, having children run around, the aroma of cooking filling the dank air.
May 2021
I took a break from writing and shovelled compost into house plants with old, nutrient-deficient soil. There is a sweetness and warmth in tending to the house and garden, bit by bit. I cannot stop admiring the hanging pot with the heartleaf philodendron we put up.
In his timeless Poetics of Space, Bachelard speaks of the motto a mollusk must have: “one must live to build one’s house, and not build one’s house to live in.”
*
Two nights ago, I dreamt that we had another undiscovered house that our parents had purchased but hardly used. I travelled there myself, getting reassurances from dream-Mei, who had visited before. Travelling to the house was nostalgic, even though I knew I didn't remember it. It was in the East, some alternate dreamscape of Kew Drive and Kew Gardens. When I arrived, I walked through this house that was ours-but not-mine, waiting for recognition to hit, instead feeling a mix of quiet alienation and daringly— a lively, proprietary eye, “What can I improve? What can I do here?”
*
Working on the garden, I think that I am “making a home”. I look around, and I see that here would be a good place for some hanging art, here— some dried flowers. Let’s repot this plant over there. Too messy here, need to find some kind of system for the kitchen sauces. Let’s tidy up this palm tree, clear dead fronds, cut some fruits. Move soil here, there. Ah, another pebble. Into the bucket. Need to wash all the pebbles. Maybe some ornaments here. Opening the windows and doors in the morning— a gentle delight. The air of dawn enters the house; how to describe this feeling? The house wakes up, the frames that are its eyes open up; my family lives here, a new day has arrived, and yes we will go out to greet it together, the house and us. Quinn flits around the garden, brandishing the broom, pushing the swing, picking up seeds and throwing them into soil, watching intently for growth. Mei, tired and harried, eats something at the table grim-faced, then brightens, “is this cumin?” Beng sits at his desk, intent on his computer, Beng lies on the cool marble floor, eyes closed; escaping. I peel the skin off a dragonfruit to reveal the lurid purple inside. Quinn bawls, climbing down the stairs; “I want mama comfort me!” Beng bends over the drain, sweeping detritus and sediment while I unhappily scoop them out, we commiserate; a joyless task, this house! Latin music from Mei’s room; ebullient. Who left the ceiling fans on?
If one of us is out at night, the lanterns by the front gates blaze through the gloom, brave beacons for anyone stumbling home.