My souvenirs

27 Dec 2024

I survey my surroundings as the motor hums and the sea sends the occasional saltwater spray. A half-filled plastic bag of kopi o hangs by its green plastic string on a screw, a clear straw tucked inside. Above it, a sign reads "2 PASSENGERS/ 2 CREW", the top left corner chipped off and missing a number, reducing the bumboat's capacity by ten. On the dashboard, some small change is housed in the cut-off bottom half of a plastic water bottle. A wide strip of foam stuffing peeks out from the tear in the fabric of the driver's seat, where an elderly man with a thin frame sits, dressed in a polo tee, shorts and slippers. His skin is tanned and wrinkled, a testament to his years under the sun ferrying passengers back and forth to this island just fifteen minutes away from mainland.

It takes me back—back to my days of youth—to the time when I sought out old and abandoned spaces, to the days when I frequently pondered the passage of time. Once on this island, I had photographed Chinese opera performers in their backstage preparations. Once on this island, I had kayaked for eight hours around its perimeter and pitched a basha and slept under it, falling asleep to forest sounds punctured by the barking of dogs and a strange music we could not identify.

I take in the single-storey buildings with their wood walls and zinc roofs, and the uncles and aunties in their twilight years. "It's a place stuck in time," my husband says of the island and the nearby village on the mainland where we were staying. The village is an outlier—black streaks run down what was once white walls, with no fresh coat of paint given to conceal it; covered in cracks, a stone aeroplane that has seen better days has been allowed to simply exist—it has escaped the clutches of my country's ceaseless quest to modernise and develop.

I observe the elderly rojak seller in her samfu, a jade bangle on her wrist, and I think of Nai Nai and my memories of her. I watch three uncles in their seventies as they bustle around their hawker stall serving up curry png, and I wonder how much time is left before this and many other hawker foods disappear along with this generation. I listen to the conversational exchanges in dialects that I can identify but cannot understand—what more the generations after me? I am witnessing a vanishing population, a dying language and culture, a way of life that is fading away.

Our short stay in that quiet little village was like a soothing balm—respite from the hectic and frantic high-rise city life that is all we know and which we have no choice about. Where the buildings are more rundown than usual, where the bumboats bob on the water as uncles sit around waiting their turn to ferry passengers across, where the pink warty sea cucumbers appear at low tide—where time slows and the old feels fresh and new, and where less seems to be more—it's golden.

Is this what growing up and growing old is like? Because I always find myself back at this point again, wishing I could catch hold of these things fast fading only to find that—

All I have left are my memories.