志异 Draft by Drama box december 2013 (english) | Page 16

16
f e at u r e
m e m o r y x s p ac e
dr af t vo l 2 is su e 2

Dear S,
When I was in university, my
professor showed us a prose
by Mainland Chinese writer Yu
Qiuyu ‘The Stillness in Situ’.
It went like this:

“I'd been to a place, as
mysterious as a myth, as
abstract as a dream. A lot
of Singaporeans, even though
they have lived here for a
long time, do not know of
this place — and they were
surprised when I told them
about it. It was Mr Han Tan
Juan who brought me there… ”

On this tiny island, we are all
too familiar with the evertransitioning landscape. Liang
Wern Fook once wrote a song

Travelling from East Coast to
West, denouncing the too-rapid
development of Singapore. There
is a particularly poignant line:

“thousands of people /
awoke after a slumber /
and are unable to ?nd traces
of their fathers' childhood”

It is no surprise then that
there is a growing sense of
anxiety among this generation
of Singaporeans. In this
increasingly unfamiliar
The place Yu was referring to
landscape, it is not only
was the Japanese Cemetery Park
impossible to retrace the
near Yio Chu Kang. None of my
childhood of past generations —
classmates had heard of that
even our own childhood is
place either. Should the
cemetery park one day be exhumed disappearing quickly. That
is why a lot of ‘memorial
and destroyed in the name of
development, it is possible that websites’ such as Remember
no one would bat an eyelid, for Singapore, Yesterday.sg, and
Good Morning Yesterday are
this is a ‘small’ memory that
created to collect pictures
belongs only to a few, and is
of old places, and to document
not part of the larger,
writings that describe the
collective ‘Singapore memory’.
Singapore that is no longer.
My dear S, I wonder
My dear S, the interesting
if memories can b H?[??Y?[??X??]Y[[?Y\?\?]?X???[??????[XX?H^B???Y?H\??Y?H?[YK?B?\?K????]??X?YH?]?\?H?HX?H?XZ?H?]B??[??Y[[?Y\?\?\??H??][?\?[??H????\?H?[??H?\??[??[??XB?[??[B?[???B????[\????]?X??[????[?\?]?]?[??B??[?\?\?]ZX??