071201, 1906hr, illinois time.

i was clearing my drawers just now - sort of a ritual to cleanse my environment to make it more condusive for studying, i guess. and i found some chinese essays i wrote the past 2 years i'm here in uiuc. i wrote most of them out of my own personal emotions - homesickness, lovelessness, depression, mostly. so though i won't call them my best works, as i read them, i felt quite shaken. the intensity of my feelings then weren't very well captured in my words, because my chinese isn't as good as before anymore. but just a little taste of how i felt. through these simple words of mine. wow. very intimate words that i'm glad i wrote. not something i can express in english, definitely. for me, english has always been the weaker language of the two.

i used to love writing chinese essays, and apparently i was quite good at it too. but i wasn't good enough. i always felt i was an undeserving inadequate writer, though i did win a couple of prizes, and my chinese teachers loved me. i have friends who write really well too, and whenever i read their works, i feel quite ashamed of mine, because mine tend to be really simple, and truth be told, i'm not a very inventive or creative writer. over summer, the GEP finally published a collection of essays by GEP students - a book i was promised by my teacher for years now, and still hasn't received, by the way. i had 3 essays in that book, most of which were competition entries. one of them, was made up of segments that consisted of 2 or 3 sentences, each segment separated by a row of astericks. i was obviously not flowing in my thoughts then. heh.

my essays were short, simply worded, and usually not very explicit in what i was talking about. i never understood why my teachers liked my essays so much, but as i reread what i wrote those years ago [one of my friends got hold of that essay collection and lent it to me], i saw something in the old me that i didn't realise was there. i had a melancholic yet innocent sense of reality. the essays with 2-3-sentence-segments? the competition topic was just a pile of empty soft drink cans. i wrote about a rich city businessman returning to his hometown with soft drinks to distribute to the village kids. one of the village boys lost out in the scruffle for a can, and got inspired to work hard for fortune, to achieve what the businessman achieved. eventually, he made it, but in the process, he forgot what he was really after. he concentrated on just making his fortune, and forgot about his hometown. he eventually got old, and then he remembered. but by then, it was already too late. he couldn't return to his hometown anymore, and the only he could hold on to, was an empty soft drink can. how did a kid like me come up with a story like that? the loss of one's roots, the symbolic emptiness of a can. the feeling of loss and regret. and i wrote all that within the 2 or 3 hours of competition time. man, i didn't know i was such a smart kid.

i actually had fantasies of becoming a writer. or a journalist. but i gave up the latter after i tried just a little of it working as a student reporter for the newspapers. i wanted to become a writer, because it was such a free and liberating occupation. i was reading the works of san mao, and she had a very romantic sense of the world, i was quite inspired. but i didn't like what i was reading, in the local chinese authors, and to my horror, i found myself writing like these authors. i was very dissatisfied with myself.

after my 'O' levels, i was tempted to enrol in the chinese elective program in my junior college. all my chinese teachers encouraged me to do that, they were very unhappy with my decision to stick to biology instead. so many reasons for my decision then. because a more realistic ambition of mine was to study medicine. because i didn't want to follow my brother's footsteps. because i didn't want to get trapped into studying journalism eventually. because i didn't think i was good enough.

and now, i feel even worse. i feel even more inadequate than before, in expressing myself in this language i love. darn. sigh, i have to read more when i go back to singapore. i promise.