Above your vision

I have been observing the landscape, the people, the sights here in our country more attentively ever since exchange results were released and there is two weeks to make a choice. Almost everything inevitably turns into a comparison, from the orange-blue shuttle buses here; I wonder what colours they use there, to the red cloths drapped in shopping centres, they don’t celebrate Chinese New Year there, and Singaporeans sitting down stirring black coffee in transparent kopitiam cups, they probably drink Starbucks and that’s it.

I had dinner at a hawker centre tonight and I was looking at the ceiling, which was a blackish-brown from accumulated dirt. I never gave any attention to ceilings until a few years back because it is unnatural to be staring up all the time. But I remember one night at a Chinese wedding dinner, I was bored to death because weddings in hotels have become rituals, photographs outside, couple parades inside, same speech all the time, same thank yous and tired yam sengs always. I was also starving because six of the eight or ten course dinner was always seafood, it has become some sort of tradition, the food, the setting, the place, the same soy sauce smell. I remembered thinking if you closed your eyes and forgot about the people, or the couple, all weddings would be the same. In my absolute boredom, I began studying the interiors of the hotel, the whiteness of the pillars, the intricate carvings, the ceilings that stretched so high and are so clean, I wondered how they managed to clean it, who supports the very tall ladder, who climbs up, what cleaning equipments they used. And tonight, when I saw that the ceilings were dirty, I thought that is how it ought to be, more personal, more natural, less perfect.