Faith Ho, Singapore
A narrative account of childhood interactions and nature in Singapore. A response inspired by Esther Vincent Xueming’s personal essay “The Field”.
There is no field in my childhood.
I remember things in blocks: concrete, jungle, garden. I play at the playground downstairs; soft rubber flooring, hard metal poles. The swing is painted cobalt blue, the slide fire-engine red, the tunnel cyber yellow. To the right of the playground is a small maze, well-trimmed hedges drawing clear-cut lines to dead ends, or to the end. Looking at it now, it seems miniscule, but I remember the days when it seemed just about my height; I could peer over the leaves if I tiptoed. Sometimes I would play with my friends, laughing as they chased me through the hedge, ducking down to avoid being detected. The stray branches of the neatly kept hedge would brush against my legs, my arms, but I wouldn’t mind—it was part of it.
Instead of fields, there were manicured trees and paths. I remember things not in stills but in movement, glimpsed through the blur of the car window: buildings, buildings, trees, trees, buildings, trees. Sometimes my family and I would pile into a car and take a ride to the other side of the country, that impossibly faraway place called “the West”. (For the longest time, I thought that anything far away was “the West”. I had little idea of space as a child, only the sense of endless time spent fidgeting in the car.) There I would see the familiar HDB blocks and malls and MRT stations interspersed with green shrubs give way to the unfamiliar sight of endless rows of trees, contained at the sides of the roads but bursting like forests of their own, on top of green slopes or just next to the road.
That was not to say that there were no experiences of nature. There is a reservoir near my home; I would sometimes walk there with my family, treading the pebbled path and staring out into the large expanse of water. The catchment in this reservoir is entirely man-made, a huge water body that was painstakingly carved out of the earth. I heard it used to be a sand quarry, but then the waves rose up and swallowed up the sand, and then lapsed into peace, patiently waiting. That’s how I imagine it. Or it could be that it was merely a gaping hole, and the sky decided to fill it with water; clouds piled upon each other, unleashing tears to seal up the cracks in the earth.
Now it’s just a flat body of water, ringed with trees, a slope on one side. I would go for picnics with my family there sometimes, lying on the grass and staring up at the night sky. There would be no stars; I could never see any.
It was only a thin ring of path and trees; when I walked there I could see buses and cars zooming past, through the gaps in the trees. Sometimes a loud truck would go by, and I could hear the screeching of its tires, the exhaustion of its exhaust. It was strange, that sudden dissonance of city-sound meeting man-made nature.
Sometimes we would venture further into the island. Only on weekends. After my father would spend a week in his air-conditioned office in the CBD area, he would loosen his tie and announce that it was time to “go for some exercise”. In the early morning or in the evening, we would pile back into the car (sometimes with bicycles, sometimes without), past the blurred landscape, and reach a park: usually Botanic Gardens, or else East Coast Park, or even Bukit Timah Hill. We would spray mosquito repellent, apply copious amounts of sunblock and argue over who would carry the water bottles. The walk would be long; I’d spend most of the time talking to my brother, inventing games and stories to distract from the tedium of the walk and the soreness of our legs. We would get our monthly dose of nature; sweaty and gross, we’d grab dinner at a shop nearby, and go back into the car, and back to the concrete blocks that contained our home.
My father liked to go to different places. When Gardens by the Bay opened, we made a trip there. We took my grandmother to see the Flower Dome, where she could marvel at the sheer number of flowers, many times the size of the small paradise she cultivated on her balcony. We would visit different spaces for the fun of it: Hort Park; Kranji; once, the boardwalk in Pulau Ubin.
I think of trees like Impressionist paintings: the individual leaves make no imprint in my mind, and neither do I picture disparate brushstrokes; rather, it’s an effect of random abundance, unclear boundaries. I cannot picture how the sky is framed against the individual leaf, but I can picture the tree, distinct from its surroundings and one in itself.
It is quite unlike my impression of nature: the distinction between the weekday concrete and manicured greenery of school, home, shops, and the occasional weekend park visit. I can see the reservoir from my window, but it remains there, behind this panel of glass, ringed in by a fence of trees.
It exists, it is there, but it is no more a part of me than I am part of it. There is no field, no memory of a field, just fragmented memories of various shades of green. I only keep with me blurred impressions of trees, grass, crickets, sandy paths, waves, sunlight filtered through leaves.
Some mornings, the birds wake me up outside my window. I cannot see them, only hear the sound of their incessant chirping. They do not know I exist, or that I know of their existence. Unknowing, they continue to sing.
Faith Ho is a JC student in Singapore. She has a lot of fun discovering words and reading others’ works. When her fingers aren’t completely dead from writing school essays, she attempts to translate her thoughts into coherence and do a bit of creative writing herself.
