Laetitia Keok is a poet, writer, & English Literature student from Singapore. Her work has appeared in Vagabond City Lit, Tongue Tied Magazine & elsewhere.
Memorabilia
Shanghai is so much like Singapore—another cityscape brimming with new beginnings.
You step out of a six-hour flight into a world that still seems unchanged, your entire life stuffed into a single luggage that spills out onto the carpeted floor of the new place. Years later you will realise that every uprooting was a kind of violence, years later you will not know how to fit the fragments together, but for now, you are eight and in a new country and it is almost exciting.
For now, this has to be home.
You live in 徐家汇, on the 16th floor. There is a window overlooking the carpark, from which you squint to look at every car’s plate number. There is another window that overlooks nothing. There is a painting that you decide looks like a dog (before you learnt what abstract was), and a hallway light that goes out every two weeks. When you forget the access card to the building, you press your face to the glass door until the old lady with three dogs lets you in. It is a place you do not bother to remember, or even to photograph. Only years later will you recognise the dull ache of a fading memory, scrambling for an image that no longer exists.
Now though, you stumble only over explaining the difference between mee kiat and mee pok to a noodle store owner, who ends up not having either. You hunt supermarket aisles with your mother for tau kee and kangkong, memorising their Mandarin variations.
Does a place become a home, simply by way of inhabiting it?
Your mother says: we look just like locals until we open our mouths, and for months you are afraid to speak—to tell the truth of your unbelonging. Between mouthfuls of chicken rice at a “Singaporean restaurant”, you catch the eyes of strangers who speak unapologetic Singlish—faster lah, oi don’t anyhow—and you love them for that.
You savour every reminder of Singapore like a spreading warmth: ready-to-cook laksa paste, bak kut teh spice sachets that your grandmother sent over.
There are still things you have not unpacked, relics from another life, untouched by the Shanghai air.
*
Shanghai is surprising.
外滩 is more beautiful than you’d thought it would be. At night, you cannot stop staring at the streetlights glistening in the river’s reflection. You are dazzled by 东方明珠塔, a tower with an apex so sharp, it could pierce the sky—your first taste of invincible. You walk from end to boundless end, counting your steps, then losing count.
You are fascinated by this place you are learning to call home. By 美罗城—the mall in a crystal ball. By the huge Christmas tree outside of 港汇广场 with the sign that translates to DANGER DO NOT TOUCH. By the shophouses of 田子坊 that you will soon learn to tell apart. By the way the word 巨鹿路 rolls off your tongue—Giant Deer Street, you say to your mother. By your new 羽绒服—a striking red down jacket for the winter. By the club-house with a pool where you almost learnt to swim. By the episodes of 喜羊羊与灰太狼 that you now watch with your sister.
Everything is grand and endearing. You have never seen a billboard, and have to be dragged across the road as you stare at one.
At your new international school, there is a trampoline and a playground and a field with earthworms you will soon dangle in front of your new friends. There is a monkey bar where you learn to skip first, one bar, then two, bringing home fresh blisters on your hands. You learn Korean curse words, and algebra and how to light a Bunsen burner. You write your first poem and earn a badge for it. You get in trouble, and wish to leave. In the end, you are glad you had stayed. You start learning to play the 二胡, even though you’d wanted to learn the 笛子, really. Years later it will be the one thing from Shanghai that still belongs to you.
When it snows, you can see it from the canteen window. You are told that it rarely snows in Shanghai. The field, snowed over, is beautiful.
You now have a best friend here in Shanghai and a best friend back in Singapore. Your best friend in Shanghai has a best friend in Hong Kong. All your friends in Shanghai have friends somewhere else in the world. It is the way things are. You think it’s cool, but your best friend in Singapore thinks she has too many other friends in Singapore, for a friend like you who is from Singapore, but in Shanghai.
You and your best friend in Shanghai do not talk about departures.
*
The day you leave, you marvel at how quickly a place can become a home, and then at how quickly it has to stop being one. But you do not cry, you are not sad.
When you close your eyes, you can still picture everything: the way back to the apartment, the garden downstairs, stuffing your hand into the gap above the letterbox to get the mail, screaming at a classmate to 闭嘴—shut up. When you close your eyes, you are playing basketball with your friends. You are spending recess with your best friend in the school library. You are sneaking out of class to meet your sister in the toilet. You are zig-zagging through mazes of school buses to pass notes to the boy you like, who also happens to be the boy who likes you. You are spending bus rides home learning the careless sweeps of his handwriting and the careful folds of notebook paper.
You do not think you will ever forget. You do not think you will miss what you will always remember. Years later you will close your eyes to a painful emptiness and you will cry, then.
It is always like this. You love people you will miss for the rest of your life.
*
It is seven years later, when you see him again, but there is something about the night that makes you think that no time has passed. But you are not in Shanghai, you are in a café in Korea, sharing three hours with someone who could almost pass for a stranger now. When he hugs you, you are breathless with familiarity, wondering where all the time had gone.
You talk about friends you have not seen in years and people you no longer know. He tells you about his life now, and you tell him about yours, but mostly you just talk about the past. It is at once comforting and devastating.
You look at this boy you knew from another life, whom you liked so much, giddy with sadness.
*
We are in a train station and I do not want this end. It is good to see you. I am still shy, and you are still funny in the way that makes me jealous. You are still so smart, and you are holding me with a gaze so tender, it could break my heart.
There is so much I can say that also means so little. The old campus that no longer exists, the duck of your head when you are told to get out of the class, the duck of mine when you catch my eye. I am thinking of all the times we couldn’t have wished to stay—when you left to see your sick grandfather, when I left without looking back.
We are leaving again.
I want to ask you: how do we gather all this leaving and make a life out of it? But we already have.
*
Back in a city punctured by absence, I awaken to koel song, to the sound of rain ushering in monsoon season. I picture the soft morning hue draping over the feet of the people I love so much, and the sun rising along the skylines of the cities I love so much.
Goodbye in Chinese also means see you again.
I salt my knees, holding distance to the light, tracing the point where one lifetime ends and another begins. There is a heart heavy with forgetting, tender as memory.
再见—goodbye, 再见—see you again.