A Red Thread

Simeon Neo

Upon writing this essay, I came face to face with an identity crisis that brought me back to five years ago, when twenty-year-old me first stepped out of the Perth Airport at midnight. The cool winter air kissed my sun-tanned skin with a surprisingly sweet, icy sting. My skin, having only known the sweat, heat, and humidity of Singapore’s equatorial weather, lapped up the refreshing cold.

All I knew then was that this foreign land, with its pitch-black sky and endless expanse, was to be my new home. 

I have lived in only two homes in my life. Just as I have lived in only two places in my life. My parents bought our first home in Perth within just five minutes of viewing it. They drooled at the open-spaced backyard (a part of the Singaporean dream), now filled with dragon fruit trees, apple trees, plum, pineapple, and blueberry after months of clearing the mountainous sand hill left behind from years of neglect. My siblings and I now have our own bedrooms where we each lived our separate lives until the call for dinner brings us together for the first time in the day.

At first, I tried decorating my bedroom with polaroids, souvenirs from friends, and a purple hand-made scrapbook I had received as a farewell gift. I thought it might help me feel more at home.

Years on, I still wake up in the mornings thinking that I’m back in the HDB apartment of my childhood. 

‘Home’ is a word that forms thickly on my tongue. With difficulty I spit it out, blood dripping down my chin (metaphorically, of course). Since coming to Boorloo (Perth), I have always felt like a split self, broken apart. Over the years, parts of me have eased its way into my new home, weaving itself through new memories sprouting from this land where I’m now living and breathing. 

I once went back to our old apartment in Singapore to pick up some letters that had been mailed over before we officially changed our mailing address. Strolling through the familiar corridor aisle that led to the apartment unit was both a nostalgic and bizarre experience. What was once swept clean by my peculiar mother and lined with potted plants and futile attempts at a mini herb garden, was now crowded with bicycles that lapped over each other in a pile of rubber wheels and metal. Gone are the potted plants of aloe vera, pandan, and rose. I think about how, if my mother were to see this, she would click her tongue in disapproval, spewing disgust at how ‘messy’ the corridor was.

The feeling of knocking on the door of your childhood home is one, as I would imagine, like meeting your ex again after a breakup. As my heart thumped against my chest, the heavy wooden door creaked open to reveal the tenant who hastily shoved the stack of letters in my hands before closing it shut. And just like that, the moment was gone.

But it was not before I got a quick glimpse of the living room. A side table placed against the wall between the TV room and the helper’s bedroom, just as it was when we left. A thick wave of familiarity swept over me, and I pushed those feelings down just in case I started to cry.  

In the process of writing this essay, of finding my own connection to Boorloo, I find myself questioning where it is that I call my home. I have begun to think of Boorloo home as merely the four walls of my bedroom. The illusory landscape of Boorloo as a wallpaper plastered in the background of my life.  What then, is my connection to Boorloo, apart from the physical? Perhaps the other half of my heart had never left. It tugged at the rest of my body from across the sea. A red thread that links me to my place of birth; apart, but never to be cut.

In her personal essay, ‘Candy’, Singaporean writer and editor, Esther Vincent Xueming, writes,

After moving out, I experienced a sensation of fragmentation that I never felt before. An unreal sense of existing in two separate places, of belonging and not belonging wholly to each space. It is something I find hard to put into words, this sense of being split up into two selves, belonging at once to two distinct places. And then, knowing that these two places exist for you, and in spite of you. Home as a blur, undefined region.

Fragmentation. The word I had been searching for in the last five years. Turning to poetry instead to articulate the constant breaking down of the self. Perhaps, words alone cannot demonstrate fully the fragmentation that gripped my body. A rock that tripped me up when I’m not looking, or a worm wriggling into my brain in the middle of the night to whisper what home was supposed to feel like, look like, sound like. 

The home in my pre-Boorloo memories is no longer there. A shell of an apartment, a building that still stands but will eventually be returned after 99 years. The memories within have become remnants. An apartment that no longer holds space for me and my family, but houses a group of migrants, like myself, finding their place in a foreign land. 

Here, in the 7-4-7 m2 house that my parents have made their home, I find my connection to Boorloo. I don’t like gardening, so I can’t use it as a metaphor about planting my roots. Or is that the key to seeing this land as my new home? Perhaps, it is only until I have plunged my hands into its soil can my two selves be restored. And what of the red thread that links me back to my birthplace? That too, might stay. Two places that exist for me and in spite of me. Home as a blur; undefined region.