After twenty years in the tropics, and then the first winter of my life — during which parts of my body that had never been deprived of sunshine were then obscured for half a year — my skin is now sweating on a truly transcendental scale. I am throwing my body around, the initial despair falling away to a diabolic ecstasy, as the best rapper alive, JPEGMAFIA, performs with the power of a conduit, leading the youth with his every pause, his every cry. “Promise I will never go blonde like Kanye”, I rap along with Peggy at the top of my lungs, as I have every one of the few hundred times I’ve heard it since the tenth grade, “hold up, promise I will never go blonde like Kanye?”, even though we both love Kanye. I look behind me and see a circle opening and fear moves my body closer to the source, while ravenous white boys with torn clothes rush to the center of collision. I get so close I swear Peggy raps “REBOUND!” directly to me, before jumping up and spurring the crowd further into his own Clockwork Orange, vellocet and all. The room goes dark as the airy keyboards of “Free the Frail” resound, and the crowd sings along, “don’t rely on the strength of my instincts”, with so much soul that my heretic metaphors may be redeemed.
I‘m dying of thirst as bouncers throw water bottles into the crowd, which we sip from like its communion. Just last night I was watching Phoebe Bridgers perform on a beach, singing along to the album I had listened to on repeat in the most alienated year of my life, the same Punisher now released into the open air as catharsis without floodgates. I think the live saxophone on “Savior Complex” hits an inexplicable spot and I am smiling so wide. Dusk is in full colour, and I catch my partner crying to “Sidelines” as Phoebe sings, “until you came into my life, gave me something to lose,” and I cry too. I finally get to see “I Know the End” live, guitar shredding and screaming and all. I miss the communal scream because I am too busy filming, but it’s okay. I cannot believe this is my life.
In a matter of hours, I am on a 16-hour flight returning to that loosely defined place called home for my very first time. I am watching C’mon C’mon and bawl every five minutes. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix plays a journalist that interviews kids in different cities. He asks questions like, “what do you think the future will be like?” or “if your parents were your kids, what would you teach them?” I respond to the film in an instinctive, human way that reminds me of the reason why I love art, while the other passengers watch each of the eight Spiderman movies available. I wish I hadn’t thought that last part. I feel like the art that has liberated me, that has given me the emotional vocabulary to process my experiences, has also alienated me. I respond to the film because I am sensitive to art, or maybe just because I am sensitive.
I think I am especially fragile on this flight because going home feels like an undoing. When I moved for the first time in my life, being in the air opened the floodgates within me, overwhelming me so completely that I felt I was drowning. When I landed I was liberated into an unbridled optimism that was soon dispelled by the realisation that some locals were not too happy about my being here, one even going so far as to complain that “the West [was turning] into Asia”, and the rest were only mildly enthusiastic. But I also found those particular rooms, instants, memories, that belonged purely to me and in which I could call home. I found someone that rendered the fragile spoonful of green seawater of my life into jade. Someone with whom I wasn’t constantly having to obscure some part of myself, reduce one trauma to make it a digestible anecdote, expand a fragment of myself into an entire facade.
I am in Kuantan, laying down on a rock as I sink into the sound of a waterfall. I think that I haven’t felt this consumed by nature in a while, especially since moving to a country where nature can only be admired momentarily, and for the most part is instead a force to be reckoned with. I want to lay down here forever, as water rushes for an eternity and a day, as trees sway gently and birds flock back and forth. I would lay like this forever if my bare skin would not soon be burning in the same glorious sunlight it basks in.
When my friends and I started reading Yukio Mishima in high school, we had a joke between us, which in retrospect was rather morbid, that the sheer poetry of a certain part of nature would deem it beautiful enough to commit seppuku in. Perhaps this is one of those places.
My family and I are on a road trip, our first vacation together in three years. My father and my older sister take turns at traversing the vast Malaysian roads, my younger sister laughs through the anecdotes she articulates, we bicker over the aux chord before settling on the common denominator that is the Beatles, we look out for durian stalls by the road at the behest of my mother. Malaysian seafood carries with it similarities to the Indonesian seafood my parents have had a lifetime of immersion in, and so they highlight the nuances in their preferences. I am merely overwhelmed by flavours I have been deprived of in the last year of cooking for myself in the West, their full colour washing over me in ecstasy.
Just an hour after crossing the border, I am having 麻辣香锅 with one of my best friends, as we try our best to encapsulate and convey the past year of our bifurcated personal histories. We sit on Orchard Road, conversing about everything from Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous to intergenerational conflict, which are perhaps the same thing, from Dosteovsky’s Crime and Punishment to the fear of being mid, which are also perhaps the same thing. We talk about our parents and how their Faiths were realised in the impossibility of how life turned out for them, our tumbling into the West and inevitable disillusionment with that notion, decolonisation. We talk until the last train arrives, and my eyes water on my way home because I just don’t have friends like him in Toronto.
There’s a scene in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where the protagonist lowers himself into a well. He falls asleep, wakes up in a sweat, catches glimmers of sunlight and stars, falls asleep. An inexplicable amount of time later, he realises the rope he used to lower himself into the well has disappeared.
To have two conceptions of home feel at odds with each another is to be split in half. Sometimes that tension renders my mental image of one of them into that well, other times inexplicable warmth renders it into the glimmers of sunlight and stars.
Gao Xingjian’s “Soul Mountain” felt to me like a pivotal moment in my informal endeavour of decolonising myself through art. It is the first book I read written in my mother tongue, although it was through an English translation. Every other chapter is written in second person, the characters are presences rather than names, vaguely defined pronouns that converse with one another in folktales either invented or unearthed from the land they are on, mythologized recollections of their own lives and trauma. Amidst the cubism of Gao’s prose are moments of transcendence, anecdotes from ancient China that parallel violence of the Cultural Revolution so gracefully, passing thoughts that encapsulate solitary experiences so perfectly.
One such thought that struck me was the speaker’s assertion on the impossibility of conceiving the bustling city one was raised in as the “hometown of your heart”, for in that city only a “particular place… room.. corner… instant” belongs purely to one’s self, and thus that memory bears the full responsibility of preserving one’s existence. Gao also uses the most beautiful depiction of human transience I have ever read:
“…in this vast ocean of humanity, you are at most only a spoonful of green seawater, insignificant and fragile.”
I don’t mind that my spoonful of green seawater is fleeting. I have learnt to love it despite its transience, even conceive it to be a spoonful of jade. There are hands grabbing at it to stabilise it in pursuit of eternity. Maybe they do not know that in doing so, they are melting my spoonful of jade back into a spoonful of green saltwater, and slowly tipping it over.
