I think I’ve spent a huge part of my life on the train.
I remember sitting on a train with a friend I’m no longer friends with on the way to watch Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still. We were having a conversation about metaphors and allegories in storytelling. I proposed that a dualism was possible, that an element of a story could be simultaneously both literal and symbolic, but it didn’t quite register with him. “Well, take this train for example,” I proffered, “everyone on this train is literally on this train, but I could interpret this train as symbolic of each of us being on our own respective metaphysical journeys.” No, those were not my exact words. But the sentiment was the same.
The screening had sold out, and my friend had not gotten a ticket in advance. I went in first with mine, and found that there were two or three free seats here and there, including one right next to me. So he bought a ticket for Fighting with my Family and snuck into the hall screening Hu Bo’s four-hour debut / swan song on existentialism in modern day China. When the film ended with a picture of the late director, who had taken his life shortly after completing the film, the entire audience clapped and I cried a little.
The film being so long and the story taking place entirely on one day, captured exclusively through elegantly choreographed long-takes, I felt for the first time that I was truly living another person’s experience. In literature, the literal and the symbolic can coexist seamlessly; you can describe an image with figurative language without the trouble of having to visualise that language. In film, especially a film as grounded in realism as An Elephant Sitting Still, it’s not so easy. But there is one form of symbolism retained between literature and film that is in fact amplified, albeit an imposed one. In the audience of a dark room, the images projected on screen are processed through the meshes of each participant’s lived experiences. In this way, the film transcends the boundaries of the frame, and in each mind each narrative beat is transfigured as a clouded variation of one’s own memory, a symbol for one’s own self.
After the screening, I asked my friend what he thought. He said he didn’t feel the four-hour runtime at all, and that it was a great film, but to him it was basically the same as The Great Gatsby which he studied in class. I choked on my water a little. He elaborated that both films boil down to the emptiness of the human condition, or a life without God. He had once told me that he “doesn’t read fiction” because he considers it a waste of time. Metaphors only matter to him for the meaning they obscure.
He got on a bus, I got on a train. We returned to our individual metaphysical journeys.
Yesterday I ventured into the far north-east of Singapore to buy a collection of Agnès Varda DVDs from someone I met on the internet. I’m always willing to travel far distances by train or by bus to buy physical versions of films I could find online for free. In the eleventh grade my father’s company stopped subsidising my school bus fees, so I started taking public transport to and from school everyday, which meant that I was reading everyday. I don’t read very fast, but I do read habitually, which is how I read a lot.
I took the mass rail transit to Punggol with Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon in hand, and then I transferred to the light rail transit. The trains were much smaller, and each platform hosted two directions indicated as either ‘east’ or ‘west’ lighting up on an analogue signboard. Far too many masked commuters rushed into these small carriages. The station I got off at was also rather small. It felt like another country, specifically Japan, or that one early morning in Tsukiji where our travel passes didn’t work and we jumped over the ticket gates. Or perhaps Japan as refracted by Haruki Murakami in that one part of 1Q84 where the protagonist takes a train to the countryside half-lucidly, only realising he’s floating towards his estranged, comatose father when he’s halfway there. But as I advanced further into the neighbourhood, I came across a local supermarket, a 7/11, a Kopitiam, and then cockroaches on the ground of a HDB lobby. I was in Singapore again.
I am indebted to a belief I religiously entertain that if a single bus connects me from one place to another, I am supposed to be there. To acquire this sense of purpose I will walk to a further bus stop, or add 30 minutes to my commute, just so I don’t have to get off one bus and get on another. It doesn’t matter to me. I just want to sit and read and keep moving forward.
