You wake up everyday and work from Monday to Friday, and often, Saturday too. If you finish work early, you and your partner go to your parents’ place for dinner and see your child for a few hours. If you work late, you buy a packet of char kway teow from the hawker centre but eat it at home because it’s too warm to eat there. You’re not crazy about the job but you know that if you keep at it, you can afford a car in 3 years’ time, and in 5 years’ time, buy a condo close to the primary school you want to send your kid to. Your conversations with people are either for the purpose of networking, work, or for familial obligations you cannot avoid. On weekends, you play golf with your friends at your country club or watch a movie with your partner. Once a year, you go on a ten day vacation to New York, London, or Paris, and when your children are big enough, Disneyland.
Alternatively, you wake up and you have no idea what is going to happen today, tomorrow, 6 months or a year later. Ironically, because of this uncertainty, all possibilities exist for you. You can be the Prime Minister of Singapore, you can make a movie, you can cook a meal you have never cooked before, eat at a place you have never eaten before, you can color your hair red, you can skip instead of walk, you can volunteer at the school you have always wanted to volunteer at, you can write a book, or you can have a baby even though you don’t have a maid. You have conversations with people who set your heart palpitating and your mind on fire. Your weekday is not so different from your weekend because everyday you are thinking, creating, and more important, imagining.
I've abandoned the Singapore Dream a few years ago when I decided to leave to come here, much to the dismay of my family. And there hasn't been a time when I've had the chance to meet anyone in my extended family that I wasn't asked - when are you coming back to Singapore? As for my mum, needless to say, she'd ask me that question at every opportunity. However, much as I tried to explain the reason why I don't want to go back (I might in the future - I don't know), it fell on deaf ears, for which I perhaps have to bear half the responsbility due to my very inarticulate ramblings on why being abroad is better despite the occasional angst & loneliness.
But now I've finally found the missing jigsaw pieces to my mosaic feelings - in Joyceln's words, so beautifully expressed, so simple but reflecting (almost) everything that I feel about not wanting the Singapore Dream - the Singapore plan actually if you really look at it like Colin Goh did.
What dream am I pursuing now? Seriously, I've no idea. But maybe it doesn't really matter does it, as long as it's a dream?
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