What a difference, a day makes.
What more a year. It is really amazing how it feels like little has changed when so many things have changed in reality over the course of 2007.
Like how I am only writing this review of the past year 20 days into 2008, when I used to write my annual reflections over a 10-day period in the run up to New Year’s Eve.
I guess this has a lot to do with how this past New Year's felt like just like any other day for me. While it used to mean a lot to me, moving into 2008 a few weeks ago was almost nondescript for me.
Maybe it has got to do with growing older and not needing any more excuses to party, but I think it has got more to do with how I am in a phase of my life that is spanning more than a year of my life.
Contrary to everything a new year represents, it feels like I am still in the middle of something that defies the logic of the calendar year – quarter-life crisis, year-4 ennui, senioritis, epistemological crisis, whatever.
I tried making a list of top-10 moments in 2007, but I realised I did not have enough of such moments to make 10 last year. Instead, it felt more like a sequence of events leading up to my first trip to the States in July and the fallout that was historically contingent on it.
So maybe my three-week jaunt to Virginia and New York takes top billing in 2007, but I think the key theme in my life this past year has been the un-cluttering of my perennial state of busyness to allow change to finally occur in my life.
For this realisation however, I am rather indebted to a most unlikely source – a recurring TV interview with Singapore thespian Tan Kheng Hwa on Hallmark.
She talked about her mid life crisis where she suddenly lost interest in everything she was doing, became easily irritable and became difficult to be with, making things difficult for her family, in particular.
So, she decided to take a year off to travel and do nothing.
She realised at the end of it that she was allowing change to occur because she was creating space for it to occur by doing "nothing" – and she believes this resultant increased personal knowledge has empowered her to live a more fulfilled and fuller life in whatever time she has left.
WOW.
Suddenly, everything made sense. That indefinite "sabbatical" from all the "doing" that was supposed to have happened when I stepped down from church youth ministry in 2005 has not really happened.
Instead of doing "nothing", I started the Campus Observer and went nearly went mental running around trying to juggle managing the newspaper and my studies, while holding my life together.
Thank goodness I didn't try to also vice-chair the VCF arts faculty ministry at the same time when Fam asked – otherwise, I would have really died.
But old habits die hard.
When the time came for the new VCF exco to be elected in May for AY 07/08 last year, I decided to run, then decided not to, and then changed my mind again literally at the last minute, about going on exco.
What precipitated that decision was a mad rush in May and June.
I had to read a lot to prepare to go to Bangkok end May to do a feasibility study for my intended thesis topic on post-coup Thai politics that eventually didn't materialise.
On top of that, VCF exco commitments included an intense 4-day exco planning retreat, countless other meetings and a VCF leaders planning camp one day after I came back from 4 days in Bangkok.
And get this – after all of that, I still managed to squeeze in 4 weeks clocking an unpaid internship at the local bureau of The Associated Press before I left for the States end June.
I thought it would be good to give my resume some variety to boost my application for the graduate program at the Columbia Journalism School later.
I was to have continued after I came back from America, but the KL-based chief, apparently had to let me go because the head office in NY was not comfortable with the legal ambiguities that came with free labour, particularly in a press environment as repressed and controlled as it is in Singapore.
I have my doubts over his reasons because I felt he might have been using that as an excuse to get rid of me since I was not exactly doing very well. I felt I lacked the professional competence and confidence that a journalism major student would have. I made some errors as a result, which were not exactly forgiven.
I had my misforgivings about that and the overall work climate in that small office, but I also understood that it was probably entirely circumstantial. They were shorthanded when I was there and had severe budget constraints, which was apparently why they could not pay me.
But I did learn some new things about the intangible and practical aspects of doing journalism in Singapore and it was probably all I could have gleamed from such a short period.
And I also probably should not have told him how relieved I was when he told me he had to let me go, because I was all muddled up post-America and had half the mind to stop – because as DL said, I should have been more savvy and let him feel like he owes me something, if he really meant what he said.
So yeah, what happened in America?
In a nutshell, I had a lot of fun, drank a little too much than I probably should, liked people I probably should not have liked, got overly enthralled by the novelty of the first visit to America and subsequently got too enamoured with the free-ness present in American society.
I was enchanted by not so much America, but by the very real prospects of getting out of claustrophobic Singapore and living and working there for a bit after graduation.
Graduate studies immediately became a viable way I could do that.
And on hindsight, it was my fear of not being able to be admitted to the journalism programs I was eyeing, made me want to make “contingency” plans by looking at possible sociology Phd programs.
And as it is consistent with my nature, I went ballistic with my preparation – and got myself into another muddle in the process. It was not until I totally bombed my GREs that obliterated this sociology Phd option in America that I fully appreciated the full nuances of Prof Chua chastising me for being in such a rush to get there.
Thinking that Thailand was an area I was still interested in pursuing, Prof Chua told me that it is more important to be prepared for long-term study, which in this case required language study and empirical knowledge. My subsequent unsuccessful application to the NUS Southeast Asian Studies Programme was mainly at his advice.
My time in the States also exposed my thing for Thailand to be nothing more than a mere fad.
I think I have been too indoctrinated by the whole good Christian thing of "having a heart" for a certain country for missions. And as the fiasco in Thai politics unfolded itself, one thing led to another and before I knew it, I thought I wanted to study it and "had a heart" (in Christian-speak) for the country.
The coup in September 2006 appealed to the political being in me, but I also realised my initial notion that Thailand is a freer country is somewhat flawed and a knee-jerk reaction to the lack of political freedoms in Singapore. Thailand therefore represented an unreal political panacea for me.
That Thailand eventually occupied this position was also entirely due to a mix of chance and coincidence since everything happened as I made firm friends out of bunch of Thai folks at a regional Christian students’ conference I attended in the summer of 2005, before my internship at ST and needed an excuse to go visit them annually.
Being away in the States made me question this commitment since I had to also spent time mastering Thai in order to pursue in-depth study of the country’s politics and society. I found myself unable to account for this, and without another topic, the Phd plan also unravelled.
The GRE failure also played a part in helping me realise that I did not fancy a life in academe so soon.
It was reinforced largely by my experience in the first semester of my honours-year when I had 5 essays due in a one-week time frame. I truly felt like an essay-churning machine and did not like how mechanical research and writing became for me.
I also felt out of my depth in a sociology class, albeit a graduate one, for the first time in my life this semester. Maybe I enrolled on Everyday Life because I was blinded by my respect for Prof Chua, but I felt like I had reached a plateau in my intellectual development.
My disenchantment with the academics can also be partially attributed to my bad choice of modules, in particular social statistics, which was chosen based on the flawed premised of a trajectory of a sociology Phd future in the States.
In fact, this also showed up my tendency to look too much towards a trajectory of the future, at the expense of the present. That I suffered so much during social statistics was perhaps my own doing.
It is therefore perhaps no surprise I bombed the first semester, with a string of Bs. While my GPA did go down slightly for the first time in my undergraduate life, I am quite relieved I am still relatively safe within the second-upper honours range.
But school also became a chore for me for other reasons.
Leaving America was made very difficult also because I kindda liked somebody in my time at Charlottesville. I made a choice, however, to not do anything about it and it made me really sad that nothing could come out of it.
But that I was free to make this choice dawned upon me. That this notion of free-ness is endemically incompatible with the Christian notions of freedom I have come to know over the years triggered a spiritual downward spiral that got me questioning the foundations of my faith. I thought I might have been clinically depressed at one stage.
Yet this was not something new to me.
Events in America merely served to trigger the erstwhile latent questions that I have yet to resolve for myself because I had been too busy to deal with them. It was worsened by the fact that for the first time in my life, I actually liked somebody on the strength of their character and not just physical appearances.
Just as I thought I was recovering from my American-induced malaise though, I drifted unconsciously into liking another person in school. It was a case of “same, same but different” and I spent much of the final semester feeling sorry for myself and wondering if I should just stop fighting.
It was not until the unfortunate deaths of the five Singapore national dragon-boaters in Cambodia in November last year that jolted me from my spiral.
Reading how Reuben Kee and how he lived his life so richly reminded a little of how I used to be and how it could be if only I identified a focus. I felt guilty how I had looked to death (not suicide) for a convenient end to my problems when these talented and able-bodied people had their lives tragically taken away from them.
Another post-American thing that happened was the decision to resign from the VCF exco.
It was something I felt I needed to do because the muddled spiritual state did not permit me to be part of the spiritual leadership of VCF. It was a massive decision, but as soon as I arrived in Singapore after the 23-hour plane ride from JFK, I knew it had to be done.
Besides I was actually afraid of coming home because I realised I gotten myself into too many things and would not have the time to deal with the issues that has reared its ugly head in the States. I felt that if I would really fall by the wayside if I did not actually heed this call to actualise the whole “sabbatical” thing this time round.
For the first time in four years, I also skipped the VCF Anntic camp. I had taken a semester off all things VCF for a semester because I felt I needed time away from the Christian community on campus to just let things be for a while.
So this was just an extension of that decision. I spent December finishing some research assistant work and mulling over the solitary graduate application I eventually submitted.
Two other events were rather significant in 2007 – the one-week fieldtrip to Cambodia for the heritage class in the mid-term recess and finally handing over the reins of Campus Observer to BL in mid-December.
Effecting the change to my duration of service for CO on my Facebook account felt so surreal and was my way of giving my tenure a dimension of finality. It felt bitter-sweet to be finally letting go of something that has been such an intense part of my life and brought me so much pain and joy for the last year and a half.
The numerous working relationships I had within the CO team, particularly with Noelle and Aaron, will remain something very special and would probably never be replicated anywhere else ever again. I also learnt a great deal about journalism and I am tremendously grateful to Dr P, who inspired me to imagine beyond my current circumstance.
The Cambodian trip was also great because it made me human again.The poverty really affected me a great deal and injected some much-needed perspective in my worldview.
But it was mainly the company that I was grateful for - for those drinking nights, nonsense antics and conversations on the long bus rides with Mr Peng, Weijie, Maria, Huishan, Jeanne, Nyd, Shane, Ben, Danielle, Joyce, Gabe Fu, Seah and many others. Politics of Heritage was the only class that kept me sane last semester.
Last year was also the time when I finally ended my 7-year search for mentors.
I am eternally thankful for my church cell leaders, Gerry and his wife, Page for being there, for always pulling me back in while giving me space to grow and the adult attention that even my parents never gave me.
So here, I am. 20 days into 2008, unsure about a lot of things, but also somewhat okay with being in this state of limbo at the same time.
I do not know what I am going to be doing post-graduation if my application to Columbia Journalism School does not come through. I am not sure if I will go on with Masters at NUS Sociology if they do make me an offer. I also haven't a clue how the many things I said here, are going to resolve themselves.
But I do know I am feeling quite fatigued and I could maybe do with some time away from academics, doing some journalistic work somewhere, even right here in Singapore – but in a place I can negotiate my resistance to the status quo.
I increasingly want my work to have a greater impact on people, rather than just have my academic work read and appreciated by a select and niche community. Besides, I do not think I am inventive enough for that currently. Maybe I would be – after acquiring some street creed as a journalist.
But at least, I guess I have some form of clarity of what is going on, and while things are very much works in progress and I do not know how long this is going to take, I am pretty sure 2008 is going to be a year of rebuilding as I pick up the pieces.
There are also going to be massive decisions to make in the course of this year. But I think I will get to it when I get to it. I am actually secretly happy I am finding it pointless to fret when I can do nothing about it right now. Things should however, get clearer in April or something.
Right now, I just want to do what I have to do for this semester, and do it well. Like my thesis, my choice of two sociology honours classes. I just want to finish my four undergraduate years as well as I possibly can. Other things can wait, for now.
xxx
While I started out claiming I don't have enough moments to form a top-10 list like in previous years, I guess I wrote such a long article because I didn't want to reduce my life to an event-based existence.
But in so doing, I run a risk of creating too artificial a narrative of my life story in 2007, which I hope you realise I have avoided because there are a lot of layers and things that occurred have usually been an uneasy cacophony of different schemas.
Thank you for reading this long, and for bothering this much about my life, or for just simply being a voyeur. =)
What more a year. It is really amazing how it feels like little has changed when so many things have changed in reality over the course of 2007.
Like how I am only writing this review of the past year 20 days into 2008, when I used to write my annual reflections over a 10-day period in the run up to New Year’s Eve.
I guess this has a lot to do with how this past New Year's felt like just like any other day for me. While it used to mean a lot to me, moving into 2008 a few weeks ago was almost nondescript for me.
Maybe it has got to do with growing older and not needing any more excuses to party, but I think it has got more to do with how I am in a phase of my life that is spanning more than a year of my life.
Contrary to everything a new year represents, it feels like I am still in the middle of something that defies the logic of the calendar year – quarter-life crisis, year-4 ennui, senioritis, epistemological crisis, whatever.
I tried making a list of top-10 moments in 2007, but I realised I did not have enough of such moments to make 10 last year. Instead, it felt more like a sequence of events leading up to my first trip to the States in July and the fallout that was historically contingent on it.
So maybe my three-week jaunt to Virginia and New York takes top billing in 2007, but I think the key theme in my life this past year has been the un-cluttering of my perennial state of busyness to allow change to finally occur in my life.
For this realisation however, I am rather indebted to a most unlikely source – a recurring TV interview with Singapore thespian Tan Kheng Hwa on Hallmark.
She talked about her mid life crisis where she suddenly lost interest in everything she was doing, became easily irritable and became difficult to be with, making things difficult for her family, in particular.
So, she decided to take a year off to travel and do nothing.
She realised at the end of it that she was allowing change to occur because she was creating space for it to occur by doing "nothing" – and she believes this resultant increased personal knowledge has empowered her to live a more fulfilled and fuller life in whatever time she has left.
WOW.
Suddenly, everything made sense. That indefinite "sabbatical" from all the "doing" that was supposed to have happened when I stepped down from church youth ministry in 2005 has not really happened.
Instead of doing "nothing", I started the Campus Observer and went nearly went mental running around trying to juggle managing the newspaper and my studies, while holding my life together.
Thank goodness I didn't try to also vice-chair the VCF arts faculty ministry at the same time when Fam asked – otherwise, I would have really died.
But old habits die hard.
When the time came for the new VCF exco to be elected in May for AY 07/08 last year, I decided to run, then decided not to, and then changed my mind again literally at the last minute, about going on exco.
What precipitated that decision was a mad rush in May and June.
I had to read a lot to prepare to go to Bangkok end May to do a feasibility study for my intended thesis topic on post-coup Thai politics that eventually didn't materialise.
On top of that, VCF exco commitments included an intense 4-day exco planning retreat, countless other meetings and a VCF leaders planning camp one day after I came back from 4 days in Bangkok.
And get this – after all of that, I still managed to squeeze in 4 weeks clocking an unpaid internship at the local bureau of The Associated Press before I left for the States end June.
I thought it would be good to give my resume some variety to boost my application for the graduate program at the Columbia Journalism School later.
I was to have continued after I came back from America, but the KL-based chief, apparently had to let me go because the head office in NY was not comfortable with the legal ambiguities that came with free labour, particularly in a press environment as repressed and controlled as it is in Singapore.
I have my doubts over his reasons because I felt he might have been using that as an excuse to get rid of me since I was not exactly doing very well. I felt I lacked the professional competence and confidence that a journalism major student would have. I made some errors as a result, which were not exactly forgiven.
I had my misforgivings about that and the overall work climate in that small office, but I also understood that it was probably entirely circumstantial. They were shorthanded when I was there and had severe budget constraints, which was apparently why they could not pay me.
But I did learn some new things about the intangible and practical aspects of doing journalism in Singapore and it was probably all I could have gleamed from such a short period.
And I also probably should not have told him how relieved I was when he told me he had to let me go, because I was all muddled up post-America and had half the mind to stop – because as DL said, I should have been more savvy and let him feel like he owes me something, if he really meant what he said.
So yeah, what happened in America?
In a nutshell, I had a lot of fun, drank a little too much than I probably should, liked people I probably should not have liked, got overly enthralled by the novelty of the first visit to America and subsequently got too enamoured with the free-ness present in American society.
I was enchanted by not so much America, but by the very real prospects of getting out of claustrophobic Singapore and living and working there for a bit after graduation.
Graduate studies immediately became a viable way I could do that.
And on hindsight, it was my fear of not being able to be admitted to the journalism programs I was eyeing, made me want to make “contingency” plans by looking at possible sociology Phd programs.
And as it is consistent with my nature, I went ballistic with my preparation – and got myself into another muddle in the process. It was not until I totally bombed my GREs that obliterated this sociology Phd option in America that I fully appreciated the full nuances of Prof Chua chastising me for being in such a rush to get there.
Thinking that Thailand was an area I was still interested in pursuing, Prof Chua told me that it is more important to be prepared for long-term study, which in this case required language study and empirical knowledge. My subsequent unsuccessful application to the NUS Southeast Asian Studies Programme was mainly at his advice.
My time in the States also exposed my thing for Thailand to be nothing more than a mere fad.
I think I have been too indoctrinated by the whole good Christian thing of "having a heart" for a certain country for missions. And as the fiasco in Thai politics unfolded itself, one thing led to another and before I knew it, I thought I wanted to study it and "had a heart" (in Christian-speak) for the country.
The coup in September 2006 appealed to the political being in me, but I also realised my initial notion that Thailand is a freer country is somewhat flawed and a knee-jerk reaction to the lack of political freedoms in Singapore. Thailand therefore represented an unreal political panacea for me.
That Thailand eventually occupied this position was also entirely due to a mix of chance and coincidence since everything happened as I made firm friends out of bunch of Thai folks at a regional Christian students’ conference I attended in the summer of 2005, before my internship at ST and needed an excuse to go visit them annually.
Being away in the States made me question this commitment since I had to also spent time mastering Thai in order to pursue in-depth study of the country’s politics and society. I found myself unable to account for this, and without another topic, the Phd plan also unravelled.
The GRE failure also played a part in helping me realise that I did not fancy a life in academe so soon.
It was reinforced largely by my experience in the first semester of my honours-year when I had 5 essays due in a one-week time frame. I truly felt like an essay-churning machine and did not like how mechanical research and writing became for me.
I also felt out of my depth in a sociology class, albeit a graduate one, for the first time in my life this semester. Maybe I enrolled on Everyday Life because I was blinded by my respect for Prof Chua, but I felt like I had reached a plateau in my intellectual development.
My disenchantment with the academics can also be partially attributed to my bad choice of modules, in particular social statistics, which was chosen based on the flawed premised of a trajectory of a sociology Phd future in the States.
In fact, this also showed up my tendency to look too much towards a trajectory of the future, at the expense of the present. That I suffered so much during social statistics was perhaps my own doing.
It is therefore perhaps no surprise I bombed the first semester, with a string of Bs. While my GPA did go down slightly for the first time in my undergraduate life, I am quite relieved I am still relatively safe within the second-upper honours range.
But school also became a chore for me for other reasons.
Leaving America was made very difficult also because I kindda liked somebody in my time at Charlottesville. I made a choice, however, to not do anything about it and it made me really sad that nothing could come out of it.
But that I was free to make this choice dawned upon me. That this notion of free-ness is endemically incompatible with the Christian notions of freedom I have come to know over the years triggered a spiritual downward spiral that got me questioning the foundations of my faith. I thought I might have been clinically depressed at one stage.
Yet this was not something new to me.
Events in America merely served to trigger the erstwhile latent questions that I have yet to resolve for myself because I had been too busy to deal with them. It was worsened by the fact that for the first time in my life, I actually liked somebody on the strength of their character and not just physical appearances.
Just as I thought I was recovering from my American-induced malaise though, I drifted unconsciously into liking another person in school. It was a case of “same, same but different” and I spent much of the final semester feeling sorry for myself and wondering if I should just stop fighting.
It was not until the unfortunate deaths of the five Singapore national dragon-boaters in Cambodia in November last year that jolted me from my spiral.
Reading how Reuben Kee and how he lived his life so richly reminded a little of how I used to be and how it could be if only I identified a focus. I felt guilty how I had looked to death (not suicide) for a convenient end to my problems when these talented and able-bodied people had their lives tragically taken away from them.
Another post-American thing that happened was the decision to resign from the VCF exco.
It was something I felt I needed to do because the muddled spiritual state did not permit me to be part of the spiritual leadership of VCF. It was a massive decision, but as soon as I arrived in Singapore after the 23-hour plane ride from JFK, I knew it had to be done.
Besides I was actually afraid of coming home because I realised I gotten myself into too many things and would not have the time to deal with the issues that has reared its ugly head in the States. I felt that if I would really fall by the wayside if I did not actually heed this call to actualise the whole “sabbatical” thing this time round.
For the first time in four years, I also skipped the VCF Anntic camp. I had taken a semester off all things VCF for a semester because I felt I needed time away from the Christian community on campus to just let things be for a while.
So this was just an extension of that decision. I spent December finishing some research assistant work and mulling over the solitary graduate application I eventually submitted.
Two other events were rather significant in 2007 – the one-week fieldtrip to Cambodia for the heritage class in the mid-term recess and finally handing over the reins of Campus Observer to BL in mid-December.
Effecting the change to my duration of service for CO on my Facebook account felt so surreal and was my way of giving my tenure a dimension of finality. It felt bitter-sweet to be finally letting go of something that has been such an intense part of my life and brought me so much pain and joy for the last year and a half.
The numerous working relationships I had within the CO team, particularly with Noelle and Aaron, will remain something very special and would probably never be replicated anywhere else ever again. I also learnt a great deal about journalism and I am tremendously grateful to Dr P, who inspired me to imagine beyond my current circumstance.
The Cambodian trip was also great because it made me human again.The poverty really affected me a great deal and injected some much-needed perspective in my worldview.
But it was mainly the company that I was grateful for - for those drinking nights, nonsense antics and conversations on the long bus rides with Mr Peng, Weijie, Maria, Huishan, Jeanne, Nyd, Shane, Ben, Danielle, Joyce, Gabe Fu, Seah and many others. Politics of Heritage was the only class that kept me sane last semester.
Last year was also the time when I finally ended my 7-year search for mentors.
I am eternally thankful for my church cell leaders, Gerry and his wife, Page for being there, for always pulling me back in while giving me space to grow and the adult attention that even my parents never gave me.
So here, I am. 20 days into 2008, unsure about a lot of things, but also somewhat okay with being in this state of limbo at the same time.
I do not know what I am going to be doing post-graduation if my application to Columbia Journalism School does not come through. I am not sure if I will go on with Masters at NUS Sociology if they do make me an offer. I also haven't a clue how the many things I said here, are going to resolve themselves.
But I do know I am feeling quite fatigued and I could maybe do with some time away from academics, doing some journalistic work somewhere, even right here in Singapore – but in a place I can negotiate my resistance to the status quo.
I increasingly want my work to have a greater impact on people, rather than just have my academic work read and appreciated by a select and niche community. Besides, I do not think I am inventive enough for that currently. Maybe I would be – after acquiring some street creed as a journalist.
But at least, I guess I have some form of clarity of what is going on, and while things are very much works in progress and I do not know how long this is going to take, I am pretty sure 2008 is going to be a year of rebuilding as I pick up the pieces.
There are also going to be massive decisions to make in the course of this year. But I think I will get to it when I get to it. I am actually secretly happy I am finding it pointless to fret when I can do nothing about it right now. Things should however, get clearer in April or something.
Right now, I just want to do what I have to do for this semester, and do it well. Like my thesis, my choice of two sociology honours classes. I just want to finish my four undergraduate years as well as I possibly can. Other things can wait, for now.
xxx
While I started out claiming I don't have enough moments to form a top-10 list like in previous years, I guess I wrote such a long article because I didn't want to reduce my life to an event-based existence.
But in so doing, I run a risk of creating too artificial a narrative of my life story in 2007, which I hope you realise I have avoided because there are a lot of layers and things that occurred have usually been an uneasy cacophony of different schemas.
Thank you for reading this long, and for bothering this much about my life, or for just simply being a voyeur. =)
3 comments:
Hey clem, thanks for the read! I suppose it has been a tough year, but may God help to mould you to be the salt of the earth for Him in 08 and beyond. Persevere!
p.s.: now that you are not interested in thailand, can return me my book on thailand? heh..
haha, it's not that i have lost interest in thailand...i am just probably not pursuing academic study in that area yet...btw, i passed your books plus some of mine on thailand to deborah for a bit...she needs some ideas for her SEAsian studies masters thesis...ask her when you see her on your graduate social movements class lor...
thanks clement for sharing! :) Saw how God picked you up and walked with you through last semester! Continue to allow Him to do that and surrender your plans to Him. I've experienced that when you want God to show, He'll be very clear. :) Very very clear. Continue to follow Jesus! See ya in sch brother!
Post a Comment