Popagandhi

With two major celebrations this week, I can’t help but be introspective and start wondering: they’ve got Diwali to celebrate, and Hari Raya. There’s a genuine form of celebration going on. I don’t think I’ve ever known what it’s like to celebrate anything of that sort.

Born Chinese, one might expect me to demonstrate enough zeal regarding Chinese New Year at best, and grudging acceptance of the symbolism and et cetera at worst. I don’t feel any of that. I don’t remember ever having actively observed the Chinese New Year, save all the usual trappings: reunion dinner (and for what? This isn’t China, we don’t have relatives falling over themselves in trains and buses to reunite at home; they take an easy drive, we have a steamboat dinner and continue with the rest of our lives). Visitation of relatives, with “visitation” a word I associate instantly with “visitation by ghosts, spirits, the likes”; a requirement which unfailingly makes me recall Oscar Wilde’s “relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die”. As we speak I am cracking my head thinking of ways in which I can get away from the next Chinese New Year (as of this moment, it will probably be by immersing myself in Banteay Srei and the Rulous group of Angkor temples to catch up on what I missed this year). Because it’s become nothing but tedium and public holidays.

Born Chinese and Christian, one might expect me to have adopted Easter or Christmas as my main celebrations instead. They aren’t. Unlike those old, big Christian families with enough people to share turkeys with, the four of us among our mostly Taoist/ Buddhist/ atheist relations observe it in name, evidently. I’m as glad for the resurrection and the birth as the next believer, but I am positive I will be feeling more “celebratory” and introspective over the end of the Muslim fasting month in a day’s time, than I ever was at any of the last twenty Christmases.

Talking to an old friend who, all other things being equal, seems to be in a situation the reverse of mine: having flown the nest from 17, first to Norway and then to New York, who feels in two minds regarding her time in The First World, and missing home � makes me think about how I’m in two minds regarding my time at home, as it is, and my almost definite departure, within years. Individual freedom and all the intellectual masturbation there, intellectual numbness here (at least, compared to her college experience). Both with their own caveats, and us not knowing which we like better.

I can’t help but think long and hard, and not liking what I see: I feel like I have no anchor. Nationality, race, religion, these don’t do it for me. I’ve long felt a sense of displacement, in being here but “not really”. In being “there” but not really either. In being local, in every sense of the word, yet proficient only in a language that technically shouldn’t be mine (English), laughably terrible at a language that should (Mandarin), too incomprehensibly obsessed by the array of unrelated languages which pique my interest (Bengali, Korean, Thai, Malay, Arabic). Yet as “heartland” as the next person, who feels a sense of genuine anger and amusement by the elite spawn of elite society I schooled with, people who have never taken a public bus, never eaten in a hawker centre, never spoken in a dialect, never known a single person who does, who have lived here all their lives and not known what “mee pok” is (they really do exist).

I’m someone who, while travelling, finds there is more to talk about with people who don’t look like me, but constantly has to laugh off being spoken to in Thai or the Khmer. “You Thai same same!” They always laugh. Who, on a bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, is shocked to understand the conversations of the Teochew Cambodians around me, and accurately pinpoint which accent belongs to which part of America or England or Europe, at the back of the bus. Who secretly detests Lonely Planet guidebooks just because under “International Telephone Calls” and “Getting There” they have sections for all parts of the Western world but nothing for where I’m from; yet they tell you to fly through Singapore if you’re coming from Australia. Who suspects the one thing separating me from the student on his gap year spending Euros freely in Asia, is how he can’t eat spicy food and I can.

On my travels I feel as if, while I supposedly backpack, I’m not really very different from that packaged tour crowd I purportedly mock. People on that trail are mostly self-satisfied, clueless, and come out knowing next to nothing about the country they just paid $796 (twin sharing, 2 to go) for. On my trail, people are mostly self-satisfied, clueless, and come out knowing next to nothing about the country they just spent a total of $79.60 in (mostly went to Beer Lao). Yet I can sit down to talk about music, American politics, civil rights, with any of these people on their around the world travels; with an American girl who’s here for a few days; than I ever could with any of my cousins, and relations, who think me a “potato” and are genuinely shocked to see me reading a Chinese book or listening to David Tao.

I don’t know where to begin describing how I feel whenever greeted with a genuinely impressed, but still patronizing “Wow! You speak perfect English!” or “You speak better English than most people I know at home!” My answers are different everytime and I don’t know if it’s right to thank them. I’ve been to English-speaking schools all my life. My family speaks English. I write, published, occasionally. And then in some places I still have to submit certification to say I have sufficient knowledge of English, in order to go to school or to work? The only parallel I can think of, is in how a man once told me (incidentally, this happens to be the man who authors most Tamil textbooks for schools in Singapore), if he were to go to Mumbai, he would be as linguistically handicapped as I would be. And that Mumbaikars might feel more hostility towards him, and more hospitality towards me, because he was their own but then not entirely.

Even the home I imagined I had in the gay community is now one I flee happily from. Chinese and Christian. Once devout christian, now unremittingly gay. Gay and monogamous. Mr Singhan’s “their own but not entirely”.

The legendary Tshirt/guesthouse on the travellers’ circuit, is the one saying “Same Same But Different”. In December I will make my way into Northern Laos travelling aboard a slow boat with no toilet for 2 nights, and coming home when I feel like it. Last December I was aboard a bus across Bengal making my way into a hill station which was the summer outpost to the British, from where tea is good and abundant. I went forth, I celebrated the nativity among the people of the world, but I didn’t quite spread the good news.

Evidently, festivities get to me, in a big way. I will be away this Christmas, and next Chinese New Year. Just because I can.