Infertile

These days when I am at a book, I would turn to the first few pages to read the writer’s credentials, to check out his life neatly summed up in a paragraph. I think of Morrison’s treatment of slavery, Conrad’s critique on colonialism or Coetzee on post apartheid Africa, and I cannot help feeling that there is nothing worthy in my life to be written about. My sanitized and protected Singaporean life, with no wars, no conflict, no suffrage. It is not that I long for something bad to shake my life. I am yearning for an experience, of some kind, I don’t know myself. Perhaps that is why I want to go to Laos, I think I might be touched when I see a landscape so different from our own, or when I witness a lifestyle I have only seen on television screens. I am not charitable; I cannot or am not prepared to dedicate my entire life to humanitarian work. Neither do I think that a single trip to teach English and build a library would change their ways of life in any way. I am hunting for something which I can create an experience out of.

Yet, I am aware that even in this sterile life, there are many experiences which I would not think or write about. It is easy to write about a country’s suffering or a shared common pain and emotion but it is difficult to write about something personalized and individualized.