Motion Sickness

The road to where I live is long. To get there I must pass through a small, quiet playground from the bus stop, a little alley along a drain, and traverse two smaller housing estates. At the bus stop, I felt impatient, though I was not in a hurry. A little girl chewed on a sugared doughnut, and her grandmother carried her furry schoolbag while stroking her hair. A young schoolboy ran out into the middle of the road, and yelled to his mother, ‘Ma-mee! No car!’ He ran back to the bus stop and flashed us all a cheeky grin. A boy had died a few years ago along this very road: he had been jaywalking. The mother looked weary and dishevelled as her son ran back onto the main road and waved his arms in glee.

‘You want to die, is it? Get back here!’ his mother yelled. ‘I didn’t buy insurance, you know!’ I wondered if I could somehow insure my body against its reactions to moving away from Singapore and then returning. It was reacting in strange ways: I felt dizzy, nauseated, on the verge of a potent fever. I could be on a Mass Rapid Transport train, and the speed would send my head spinning. The shopping centres made me claustrophobic; sometimes, even my favourite foods at kopitiams (coffee shops) made me sick to the stomach. Walking around Ang Mo Kio central or Orchard Road made my head hot and my mind a blank. Though restless, I felt drained of energy and grew attached to longer hours of sleep. There might be an injection for this homecoming sickness. If we could pop anti-malaria tablets to build up our immune system against the disease before we set off on our tropical vacations, I was positive there must be some sort of a pill I could take for this sense of displacement.

At first I thought it must be the weather: I was very warm but unable to perspire. My body could not expel the heat trapped within, and it felt stifling. It made me think of fish swimming inside a very small jar of murky water. It was understandable that my body sensed I was back in Singapore: I was eating different foods now. Meepok (noodles) instead of cereal for breakfast; zi char (rice with side dishes) and not canned tuna for lunch. Even coffee and tea was different: kopi had the sweet smell and comfort taste of condensed milk; teh tarik (tea made with condensed milk) was ‘pulled’ to froth cup by cup instead of relying on a barista’s steaming wand. My skin used to peel and crack in the dry Australian air, but was now healthily moist in Singapore’s humidity.

Places smelled addictively the same and reminded my body where I was, lest I forgot: the small grocer’s shop in my neighbourhood smelled of fresh local kaya bread and glossy magazines; the MRT carriages smelled of mixed perfume, perspiration, take-away hawker food and the tropical rain. I soon found myself humming to songs that used to haunt my childhood in Singapore: from Faye Wong to Bananarama’s ‘Guilty’, to the score from Les Miserables, which my mother always played in the car.

I took a taxi to the doctor’s the next day.

I used to take the trams or walk everywhere in Melbourne city. Everything seemed so close and accessible. Here, I had become dependent on taxis, being somehow too impatient for the already efficient buses and trains. I had also developed a fear of buses and trains. It was inexplicable how I often found myself on the wrong MRT line, heading in the direction that propelled me further from my destination. For some time I felt that the bus company had a conspiracy against me: they redirected my familiar bus route one week without my knowledge. I ended up waiting for the same bus 70 for an hour, thinking: I got stood up by a bus. As I was being driven around the city-island, I begun to notice how green the roads were, and how they resembled a jungle of sorts. The island was littered with huge rainforest trees and palm trees that hid the people from the sky, or rather, the sky from its people.

‘Go where?’ asked my driver.

The car radio was tuned to Gold 90FM, which played oldies. Singapore had an old soul but a new, botoxed face. She was keeping up with the times, eager to be like her peers who were forward-looking. But, as a columnist in the daily paper ironically or aptly named Today observed, Singapore really belongs to the 1980s. Wednesday nights are ladies’ nights, when the nightclub Zouk is most packed due to the popularity of its ‘Mambo’ nights where people of all ages groove enthusiastically to corny disco music. It is silly, fun and, above all, liberating to live in the past so wholly and loudly. Shopping malls and hotel lobbies play heartbreaking love songs from the eighties and early nineties. Singapore must come across as being heartbroken and rejected; a pining lover.

‘So-and-so clinic, please, uncle,’ I said.

‘We don’t go by CTE, okay? They’ve got ERP,’ he explained.

‘Okay, but quickly.’ I haven’t learned to drive, and didn’t know much about highways, except that they were designed so people could get to where they were headed more quickly. The irony was that highways in cities were mostly jammed with too many people heading in the same direction.

‘Miss, you got visit the museum or not?’

‘Which one?’ For a small, young country in its mid-forties, we had too many museums. It made us seem sentimental, nostalgic, with a penchant for all things historic and ancient. The truth, however, was that we had fallen in love with the future, and needed to tuck the past away in storage, in order to make space for the new.

‘The new one, national museum ah.’

‘Oh, the one near Plaza Singapura.’

‘Ya, very interesting, have one exhibition on old hawker food, like kok-kok mee.’* I thought of my grandmother, who had called me the day I landed, and insisted on making traditional Chinese soon kuehs for me: steamed rice cakes filled with radish and minced meat. I did not have the heart to tell her that I never liked these kuehs, would rather eat an egg sandwich; also, that I no longer ate meat.

Later, the doctor enquired about my discomfort. He took my heart rate.

‘I’ve got a sore throat, think it’s going to get worse.’

‘Open your mouth and say “Ah”,’ he said.

I did as he asked. ‘Ahhhh! It hurts when I speak.’

‘Then don’t talk so much the next few days, okay?’

That was not going to be difficult. While at the university in Melbourne I often had to search excruciatingly for things to say. It was strange: in a foreign country, I felt alienated from my body and mind. In the mirror, I looked slightly deformed, or not as I’d remembered; I could not think as I used to, thoughts did not come as easily, and I was less certain of my views and beliefs. As the good doctor scribbled instructions for the nurses who were waiting outside, I told him about my giddy spells. ‘I often feel like I need to puke, too.’

‘Nothing very serious,’ he assured me, smiling. ‘Just a period of adjustment. Must be the weather. Now I’ll just give you some pills to reduce the nausea.’

‘These will cause you to feel drowsy,’ the nurse at the counter later warned me. Oh no, I thought, I’m sleepy enough as it is. But I did as I was told, and slept the following week away. Each time I awoke, I felt like Rip Van Winkle, as if I’ve slept for years and years, and forgot my dreams in deep slumber.

*

The time had come for me to meet my relatives after a year’s absence. I had postponed this visit for too long; my strange illness would not go down well as an excuse this time. I arrived at my aunt’s place, where the extended family gathered. Each relative took my hand and gave me an overall evaluation, a family report-card.

‘Your face is a bit chubbier, but your body’s the same. You look healthy. Good!’ said the oldest uncle, my mother’s brother.

‘You haven’t lost weight,’ mused the youngest aunt aloud suddenly, while we were in the middle of a group discussion. Then she added quickly, ‘But you haven’t gained weight either, I mean.’

‘I thought you would gain weight!’ exclaimed another. ‘You’re still the same, hor.’

I squirmed under their scrutiny, and quickly felt an eating disorder develop in those few hellish minutes. My mother was obsessed with the weight of things, from herself, to vegetables and meat, to porcelain bowls and packed suitcases. So were the rest of my relatives obsessed—and, it seemed, the rest of the people strutting along Orchard Road.

‘Got miss Singapore or not?’ Everyone asked. ‘Got, right? Surely.’ When I was young, my mother used to whack us lightly on the head for saying ‘got’ instead of ‘have’. She would then tease, ‘Got, got, God in heaven la!’ Despite that she still used ‘got’ in place of ‘have’. It was the linguistic rule here: things were not to be had, but gotten, achieved.

‘Zeh zeh, I topped my class in English this year you know,’ my eight-year-old cousin boasted. I used to tutor her before leaving for Melbourne, teaching her to tell the time and reading her tales of The Magic Faraway Tree. I tried to lead her into strange lands of dreams where the folk traded in sweets and tricks instead of grades and coins, but still she chose to climb back down the tree to the world she grew up in.

‘I topped my class in English this year,’ she now addressed her cousin who was the same age but in a different school. ‘What subject did you top the class in?’

The other eight-year-old girl was swinging in the playground, upside down, with her long hair touching the man-made sand in the pit as she swung up and down. ‘Nothing,’ she said nonchalantly.

‘Jie jie, I know how to play Für Elise on the piano now. And I’m teaching kor kor too,’ this girl turned to tell me.

‘Really, that’s nice,’ I said.

‘Ya, the pop version,’ she informed me, in case I had something else in mind.

Later, the cousins all sat around playing cards, the game of bluff. We were not playing by the rules and the boys were, as usual, taking the opportunity to tease the youngest boy.

‘Lex, it’s your turn, oi, Lex!’

‘Who’s Lex?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Oh, that’s his new name,’ one of them told me, pointing to a cousin whose hair was shaped like a sixties Beatle’s.

‘Ya, didn’t you know? He gave himself that name.’ Another whispered loudly: ‘At his age, who would want to be known by a Chinese name? His friends and teachers call him that.’ All the cousins laughed; they called him Lex only in jest, because to them he was always Wei Sheng. An uncle interrupted our game to talk to me. ‘Got miss Singapore or not?’

I suppose I had. Singapore had undergone yet another facelift, and my sister had to translate many new abbreviations (KPE: new highway) and names (Central: new shopping centre). She took me on a mini-tour around our familiar haunts.

‘New Starbucks coming up there,’ she said as she pointed. ‘Thai Express has come here too.’ ‘Oh! That has replaced the old Japanese sushi counter!’ I exclaimed.

‘Really? I don’t remember.’ She frowned slightly. ‘Anyway …’

I had missed it, of course, felt its lack and absence, and longed for the humidity and company. Everything was the same about this country: she was still so eager to please, and so conscious of her youth. Yet it also felt like I might have missed the point, failed to perceive this country accurately somehow. And why did I feel so out of place, so restless, so bored, so nauseated and constantly sleepy?

‘The National Stadium has also been torn down, you know, right?’ my sister reminded me. ‘They held a farewell ceremony …’

We passed the new National Museum. Its new slogan asked me, ‘How would you like to be remembered?’ I wasn’t sure about that; I would be glad if I could only protect myself from forgetting. I made a mental note to ask the pharmacist about that.

‘Look! Pass me your camera. I’ve been meaning to take a picture of the Singapore Flyer …’ my sister exclaimed. That was the London Eye of Singapore, a giant Ferris wheel that went round and round as people watched the other people of the city in boredom. As the taxi passed it by, I felt dizzy again.

Then it hit me: I was now a stranger in two lands; Paul Theroux once warned that it was a result of being away. I felt like a traitor when my thoughts wandered to Melbourne: I found myself missing the things that endeared me to the place—the quirky dress sense, the tram bells, even the piercing Melbourne sun. I then set myself a task: to remember all the things I loved about my country. They might have slipped my mind. She was not to blame; I was. After all, it was not uncommon for things to go missing when one was in the process of moving.