You don’t need to wonder too long about what’s at the back of my mind when there’s a daily count of the infected, and those who passed. I keep telling myself: it’s a small town, there’s no crowding there, it won’t spread that badly, they’ll be fine, I don’t need to go back, that they are not that old yet, they can take care of each other.
I didn’t want to just leave. When we came to Singapore for the first time when I was twelve, I was immediately in love with all the office towers at Raffles Place. I began drawing them at school, imagining one of my creations breathing among them. Then I set out to prove that I could do it, acing my Physics, and my English exams—since I heard that from an uncle that Singapore was a stickler for the language. I’ve seen those Singaporean TV shows where they frowned upon those who can’t speak properly. I already knew that it’s an unspoken expectation, that they can smell it.
I wanted my slogging through four years of architecture course in KL to mean something. Only last year I found an opening here, an assistant at a second-rate landscape architecture firm. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I knew I was getting close. Soon I would be creating something that’s worth putting on the front page of some magazine or newspaper, or at the very least I’d be designing a newfangled HDB block. I remember I looked at the overwrought curves of all the Zaha Hadid creations. I wanted to bend the world around me just like that. To have others solve my earthly needs, so I can move on to bigger things, so I can have better things.
