It was an act made on the spur of the moment. Around the stroke of midnight on Chinese New Year’s 年初一1, my friend and I decided to stroll through the Central Business District in our Vietnamese tunics later in the day, visiting the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple, and Thian Hock Keng. The former because we FOMO2, while the latter because we did not want to be ‘basic B’s. The PR had been following her New Year’s traditions ever since she was still in the old country. ‘Ê, mai t muốn đi chùa3,’ she texted. We had been batchmates since our days at our gifted high school. That school-based scholarship was why we were in Singapore in the first place. ‘Can’t wish u Chúc mừng năm mới4 yet tho, lol,’ she continued, ‘Tết5’s in one hour’s time back home.’
It’s always like this, time in Vietnam one hour behind. Ever since the brief semester breaks of Upper Secondary and Junior College, to go back to Vietnam was to go back in time. I became a ghost in what seemingly was ‘my home’, haunted by memories of a past before Secondary Three. This has all become a periodic ritual, to float past a familiar tube house in a Saigon hamlet, a familiar grandmother retiring before her TV in a Southwestern town, an old bistro deliciously named ‘Angry Noodles’ selling hu tieu6 broth, and a government gifted high school the palimpsest of a Lasallian institution… My curated Vietnam boxed up in a time capsule far removed from the one that breathes and grows with each moment, running at a pace of its own now I find difficult to catch up, when I was but keeping my sampan buoyant by the shores of an island across the sea. It seemed that all I could do was float. All the while, my mind had been warping in and out of memory lane and reality. So I closed my eyes. For once, I stopped cutting through imagined possibilities, achieved and regretted possibilities, alternative possibilities. I let the currents of the South China Sea carried me above its briny foam. I may have made a prayer to Mazu.
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Here was Telok Ayer, once a bay of water. Nearby, acrylic pigments traced impressionist forms of sampans, packed like wooden sardines freshly imported from a Southern Chinese province. Dry brush 飞白7 technique brought to the boats to life down to their wooden graininess, as they bobbed on the similarly 飞白 waters. The river shimmered in pointillist streaks, stretched out towards the blueprinted future. Skyscrapers of orange and lilac drew near. The MBS was a jade blue celestial palace, and its white lotus the ArtScience museum.
I stood there by the wall art, like a newly added bas-relief upon the mural. Time and history were collapsed by the mind of its artist. Time froze for the procession of Mazu, the Hokkien guardian at sea. Her golden parasols were hoisted by migrant men in their dated garbs. Their tongues fashioned foreign praises to the goddess, knighting her into their own pantheon of protectors. Among the crowd of figures, our knee-length tunics and turbaned hair would fit right in this rojak8 scene. We walked, facing their direction. Perhaps we were just another group of people flowing in confluence with the river down by a bay dried by washes of time. The river’s eyes peered up from its depths. Against the glaring sun, blurry and dark our two figures would be, like bronze sculptures, unnamed, years into the future. Our tunics’ panels suspended in the wind.
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I told my friend I envied her sometimes. I could only imagine feeling secure in one’s own belonging to both places, to know one’s routes on the motorbike like one would know those of SBS buses, or to be able to catch up at one’s form-class reunion of that gifted high school like it was all just yesterday just the way one immediately bonds with other locals in the hostel. I told her, maybe I should have just filled in that ICA9 form since J1, maybe I should have convinced family members back in Bến Tre10 why the next two years would be worthwhile who believed in a meritocracy that doesn’t see legal identity labels, and that I consumed too much diasporic media… My dear ‘you’s, whoever you are. How many credentials do I need inked on my tongue, my face, my brain to be trusted enough to enter your spaces? How do I convince you that I want to be the best of both worlds without having to bear that badge of fickleness spelling ‘Transient’? Is it through my most grievous fault to unknowingly simulate your prosody, to ask questions, to be here, or to leave on my own accord? Then again, do I even have to explain myself in the first place?
‘Nah… what do you mean,’ my friend replied, ‘don’t overthink too much—take your time, be chill.’ While I appreciated her baffled yet assuring smile in the midst of a mouthful of bakkwa, I couldn’t deny how beyond the mural lay a mixed-media bricolage—a performance art where ebbs and flows of unforeseen circumstances were the only algorithm that propelled our participation. Here was a shophouse revamped to host a halal Japanese ramen restaurant, just as a lady in Burmese sarong speaking Jinghpaw11 on her phone hurried towards an MRT lift. Meanwhile, a few miles away lay a dimly lit air-conditioned Thai massage parlour right next to a steamy sizzling moo-kratha restaurant all within the time capsule of a damp old mall, or that small alleyway leading up to a secret library and gathering space for writers of all shapes and colours, faiths and fates.
And somewhere within this tableaux, two Vietnamese undergraduates studying in Singapore caught a public bus from UTown to Chinatown. During the day, they discarded pennies into blessing cups at Buddha Tooth, then discarded dollars for melon milk (that tasted more milk and less melon) at Chinatown’s 7-Eleven. For lunch, they ate Prosperity Burgers with sweet chilli sauce at McDonalds, then ate in the outfits for their own New Year photoshoots. They made a detour into Channel News Asia afterwards, dropping by a hawker centre to drink kopi siew dai inside a TV screen, served by a lady who overshared about how she used to “sell flowers” in a KTV before she became a part-time Computer Science student in NUS—that was, until she finally met her husband via Ah Lim’s 越南新娘12 office. The woman was in a flowing form-fitting Vietnamese tunic with hems so long she nearly tripped with grace upon the greasy floor. She flitted back and forth between English and some language that they couldn’t identify as being Thai-accented Cantonese or Singlish-accented Vietnamese. I think at this point we were just hallucinating, though I doubt it was from the coffee. These two students needed a blessed break, so their afternoon was spent ringing the bell at Thian Hock Keng’s wishing well for well wishes, and catching a Hokkien puppet show just outside. To enjoy the show after a while was to see it as a cải lương hồ quảng, a Chinoiserie Southern Vietnamese theatre, in the minds of the two Southern Vietnamese people who, in the minds of spectators at this Singapore bricolage, are peculiarly Chinoiserie.
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In the evening, my friend decided to have dinner with her boyfriend, who booked out for his Chinese New Year celebration. He was our batchmate who also finished Junior College just the year before. This has been the time of year when I would think about how I hadn’t been celebrating Tet at my grandmother’s house for the past couple of years, while my old Junior College friends, whether locals or foreigners, scholars or not, were all having their lunar new year celebrations with their own family. At least that is before many of them left for university in other countries. Same goes for my old high school friends in Vietnam, whose whereabouts are now unknown to me, as much as how my whereabouts might have become unknown to them. Perhaps it was the same anywhere, anytime. Things were merely unfolding the way you knew they would some time ago.
Wind blew through the channels of Telok Ayer. I stretched out my arm, and hitched a ride back. My chiffon tunic’s panels flapped like sails. I looked down. Below me, waves of the wind flowed through islands and lands, currents sprawled over one field of marbled green and blue. I dropped back on campus. I changed out, and got dinner. I still thought about that field beneath my feet as I munched my cai png13.
1 ‘年初一’ (nian zhu yi) refers to the 1st day of a New Year (based on the lunar calendar)
2 ‘FOMO’ is the abbreviation of the slang phrase ‘Fear of Missing Out’.
3 translates to ‘Hey, I want to visit temple(s)’ from Vietnamese.
4 translates to ‘Happy new year’ from Vietnamese.
5 ‘Tết’ is the Vietnamese lunar new year.
6 ‘hủ tiếu’ is a Southern Vietnamese noodle soup, with influences from Chinese-Cambodians.
7 ‘飞白’ (fei bai) or ‘flying white’ refers to the dry brush technique that enables brush calligraphers to create expressive streaky strokes.
8 ‘rojak’ is Malay/Singlish for ‘mixed’, in Singapore it’s referred to a salad of fruits and vegetables that is tossed with a sweet and sour sauce composing of shrimp paste, sugar, and lime
9 ‘ICA’ stands for ‘Immigration and Checkpoints Authority’.
10 ‘Ben Tre’ (‘Bến Tre’ in Vietnamese) is a Southwestern Vietnamese hometown.
11 ‘Jinghpaw’ is a language spoken in the Kachin state of Myanmar, where a number of Burmese foreign workers based in Singapore come from.
12 ‘越南新娘’ (yue nan xin niang) or ‘New brides of Vietnam’ refers to offices offering matchmaking services to Vietnamese women and Singaporean men.
13 ‘cai png’ or ‘economic rice’ refers to generally affordable stalls in Singapore hawker centres or canteens, selling rice with various choices of meats and vegetables to choose from.