To a child dancing in the wind

“Here we are, trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why.”

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
1922 - 2007

You might’ve been there on May 1st of 2006 when the rest of the campus appeared in white to march with Poughkeepsie in protest of Bush’s proposed immigration reform policy. The sun was shining and the school wouldn’t cancel classes for the march, so you emailed your professors to say you wouldn’t be there, because marching in support of the immigrants was important to you. They replied to say they understood, and thought how good it was that you were getting out into the community and fighting for the rights of the oppressed. Lacking the mood for sitting in a stuffy classroom in the middle of the heat wave of the oncoming summer, and not having read your readings for the week, you might’ve thought with relief, how good it was to have a convenient excuse to get out into the sun.

The colour of the day was flooding the lawn in front of the library. Girls took the chance to wear their white summer dresses, your friend used her crutch as a pole to raise her banner. If you’d seen the number of banners and bandanas and flags crying out for their countries and causes in insistence against the Bush regime, you might’ve felt a familiar swell, rising from heart to throat as your schoolmates picked their banners up and raised them high into the air, bracing against the warm summer wind. If you’d been there, you might’ve wanted to sing out loud about how great America was, that people could walk freely in the streets in protest. Then the crowd tapered off into lines of two along the sidewalk, and the voices began to rise in unison with angry shouts of “NO HUMAN IS ILLEGAL,” and you might’ve felt your heart swell again, with what, you weren’t quite sure: with pride, with honour, with passion for what you were fighting for, with patriotism (though it couldn’t be, this isn’t even your country). And even if you weren’t sure what Bush’s exact policy recommendation was, and even if you had never read a word of or wikipedia-ed the proposal, you would still have felt joy in the shouts of unification, “Si, se puede! Si, se puede!” even though you only found out at the day after that it meant “yes, we can,” and you shouted it mostly because you could shout at the top of your lungs in the romantic lilt of a foreign Spanish.

At the end of the day on the way back to campus, someone from the Poughkeepsie community who owned a restaurant stopped you and put her hand over her heart, placed it on your shoulder, and thanked you for your help. You might’ve smiled and put your hand over her shoulder in return, and said, “it was our pleasure,” and walked home feeling like you had finally done something right in the world today.

But in the days following the march, when your voice gone hoarse from shouting began to heal and the white shirt was put away in the closet, when the new Atheist League on campus published a journal called Godlessness, you would not have submitted a piece to counter the voices declaring “God is dead” to share why you believed. Or when the chance came at a meeting to voice unhappiness with certain school policies that you thought needed change, you did not push your point because it received a lukewarm response. And when, in narrative writing class, you spoke against the seeming apathy towards issues of race, and everyone resented you for it, you might’ve crept back into your seat and pushed away from the table and tried to remain inconspicuous for the rest of class. You would have turned away silently and resolved to never speak about it again. You would’ve stopped pursuing the issue. You would’ve kept quiet. You would’ve allowed your aloneness to silence you.

He says, you write poems about what you see: trees, clouds, the streetlamp, and me.

Who would volunteer to live any moment more than once? I might. This morning I smelled rain coming up from the grass and closed my eyes. Suddenly I was 5 again, and your eyes were still alive.

The sky stretched across us at Brighton beach, from boardwalk to sea, and the light on the sand was vaporous. The air chilled, the wind was picking up, and in the weakening light we saw an old man take off his shirt, place it on the rocks, and walk toward the shoreline. There he wiggled his toes and waited for the waves. He bent to reach his feet, and rose up again, stretching his hands toward the sky. And as we were watching him sunlight passed through the spaces in the clouds, and suddenly it had all rolled away, the clouds and the cold and the clammy touch of the water. We were convinced the old man had summoned the blue sky. Sunlight covered us, all shrinking to slivers against our skin. The seagulls sat in droves facing the warm light. We followed suit, sunbathing in December.

I stood on a narrow ridge where the open field meets the bare trees, and I saw two birds. The first one called out softly as it turned and drifted on the wind, while the other one, made of light, slid silently across the surface of the grey sky.

Weeks past the solstice, rain lingering day after they day, I gave up on winter, and surrendered to the obstinate sky. To think I almost turned a deaf ear to heaven. This morning, while steaming ba zhang in the kitchen for breakfast, the sky turned grey, and little flecks of snow floated down onto the dying grass. There is a fresh chill in the air like cold water rushing to my lungs.

There was frost crusted on the windscreen that our gloves could not remove. I took off one shoe and hopped on one foot while scraping the ice away. While laughing at me, a pack of geese flew above us in formation, and spontaneously, we both burst into Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings! For a moment we recovered our child voices, a grace we thought we’d lost.

We wanted to cook curry chicken, just like home, but realised after getting back from the supermarket that the most vital ingredient was missing. Without the curry powder we cooked the chicken with a handful of garlic in coconut milk, brewed thick and bubbly in the saucepan. I added potatoes, too much cumin, what turmeric we could find, some coriander, and pinch of cinnamon. Later, serving it to a table of new friends, we laughed at how it failed miserably as curry, but with some prata, laughter, and some wine, even Saratoga felt like home.

We were standing at the tip of a large stretch of rocks splayed out into the ocean. The sun was setting, and twilight glazed the breakwater and the backwash. The tide was rising. A wave broke around the rock and surrounded it. You laughed at your friend getting splashed as he posed for your picture, until a wave broke over you, too. Then it was my turn to laugh, and you chased me, laughing, as we clambered over the mossy rocks in a race towards the shore.

While I am away it seems another world, not this one where your breath charms the air I breathe in sleep. You were gone too long. In Boston, there were yellow leaves in a whirlwind that followed us down the cobbled streets.

I have a memory of me looking through the back window of the school bus, Sec 2 and bleary-eyed, as it trundled through the Oriole Crescent / Lavender / Sixth Avenue area. The radio was in my ear, so I had a soundtrack of something old school (circa 1999) like PM Dawn in my ear. The morning was misty and still murky black in the six AM pre-dawn, but the street lamps, placed at neat intervals, made pockets of road glow burnt orange and yellow. The Lavender neighbourhood has roads that have a way of making themselves seem not-Singapore: some curve and wind up strangely green rolls of gentle hills, others reach deep into the unknown away from the main road, and teeter on the edge of Singaporean jungle, that unknown place of mystery. One particular stretch, connecting one estate to another, was nothing but grass on either side, and a bumpy, undulating road wound and curved around the contours of the (almost negligible) slopes. As we drove through it, I stuck my head up and looked back, and there I saw, on that deserted stretch in the chilly morning air, dancing under a streetlamp, a strange figure, contorting and clicking its heels and shaking its hips. It seemed as if it was dancing forward and chasing after the bus. And there it moved, obscured in part by the mist that hovered across the road, almost completely shadowed, becoming distant as the bus moved away from it. I’m not sure whether it was the morning blankness, or if I was dreaming, if my memory tells me things that did not happen, or if I did indeed see a figure, but there in the puddle that glowed, on an empty road in an unfamiliar Bukit Timah neighbourhood, I knew I saw someone dancing in the morning.

This is the figure of the past. A young girl, nose pressed to the glass of thevehicle she rides every morning, looking silently- longingly out to the unknown, sees someone dancing under what little light it has found. The figure - what is surreal and unknowable to her- dances towards what is known/knowable: her schoolbus, taking her to her premier girls’ school with privileged children from the most privileged backgrounds, the routine process of the every morning, the safe path of a bright future. The girl longs for what is outside her schoolbus-glass cage. Her face is turned towards the past; she faces the road she has just travelled on, looking back - wishing a number of things: To go back. To escape from the routine that propels things forward. To look at the past as if grows further and further away. The spectral presence is a reminder that something else is out there, a realm that is behind her and therefore mysterious; outside of her and therefore Other, not herself and therefore unknowable. Perhaps she is there in all of us: she would like to stay, understand what she does not, and make whole what is fast becoming distant. But already the bus is moving in another direction; it has moved so quickly away that the girl can no longer see the spectre. The bus inevitably propels her into the future to which her back is turned, while the dancing figure grows into another mist in the dark. This figure is what we call nostalgia.

The cold came early this year. It settled into the morning mist, shifting steadily across the quad on 7am Mondays when I pull myself out of bed to tackle the piles of reading sitting on my desk. The Japanese maples, always the first to turn red, have started the chain reaction that will spread like bush fire all across campus in the coming weeks. There’s an excitement to the fall air that they don’t write about in books - they will tell you of decay, death, the slow creep of quiet evenings, but what they don’t tell you about is the crispness to the air that sneaks through the cracks of your windows, and if you place your face against the chilled glass, or take just a moment to look out onto the grass that has crystallized overnight, sometimes, just sometimes, it feels like you could be dancing out there in the wind, with the cold rushing through your lungs like clear water.

When I got here on Friday, they were doing roadworks outside the main entrance again, and my beloved main building was covered in scaffolding, and everything seemed in disarray. Then I stepped onto the Quad and breathed in the smell of the musty red brick buildings and traced the familiar concrete criss-crossing across manicured lawns, and said hello to my favourite Japanese Maples, just turning red under the fading summer heat, and I knew I was back at Vassar.

So after an amazing summer hiatus, here I am again, where the grass sings beneath our feet and the streetlamps glow on windy nights like a quiet serenade. It’s good to be back. And with House Intern, Religious & Spiritual Life Intern and Christian Fellowship Worship responsibilities, a scary academic semester of English seminars and Shakespeare, and the most intensive Rugby season ahead, it looks like Fall 2006 is going to be utter, utter madness. Here’s to all nighters, endless meetings, and perpetual exhaustion!

1) When I was a little kid, I used to go to RGPS in the mornings by the school bus, which was driven by a young man with a huge beer belly and double chin. He would buy us pick n’ mix candy every two weeks, and he got us hooked on those cocacola bottle gummies, which I would cram into my mouth incessantly. I wonder how old he is now, and if he’s married with children of his own who he now can buy pick n’ mix for, and whether he’s still driving school buses around neighbourhoods and buying the kids candy like he did 15 years ago. Strange how some people come into your life and disappear so quickly, but remain so strongly imprinted in our memories, like songs from a forgotten era.

2) I had a pseudo boyfriend once at Faith Methodist Kindergarten. We were partners in line and had to hold hands in between classes, on the way to the playground, and on the way to recess. Everyday when the final bell rang and before he ran for his bus, he would pull me down the stairs with him, stop at the bottom, take my hand, kiss it, and say, “see you tomowow, pahtner!” One day, for no reason, he approached me during playtime along with two large-sized friends, slammed me against a cupboard and started punching me. I was really mad at his sudden betrayal, but I held his two friends at bay by their collars, one in each hand, and then kicked my pseudo-boyfriend really hard in the shin, and then in the stomach. I was crying by the end of it, but so fuming mad that I chased him around the parking lot demanding an apology. He changed partners, and never kissed my hand again. If you think me a feminist maneater, blame pseudo-boyfriend. I do.

3) My first fire drill occurred in primary one. Of course, having no idea what drills were, and frightened by the teachers screaming “FIRE FIRE!!”, I panicked and hurriedly stuffed pencil box, worksheets, sticker book and Enid Blyton book all helter skelter into my backpack, hoisted it on my shoulder, and ran for my life. I was the only one out on the school field with my bag strapped across my shoulders. This embarrassment was surpassed only by my friend Melissa, who had brought out her large lunchbox with her, thinking that the fire alarm was another bell signalling a surprise second recess.

Carved into glass in the Vietnam Veteran’s Plaza on the corner of Broad and Water St:

Dear Mom,

I went to this orphanage the other day and these little kids are pitiful. They sleep on floors and don’t get hardly anything to eat. I want to tell everyone to help them because I may have killed some of their parents and it makes me feel sick to know they have to go on with nothing….

Love,
Dan
6 Sep 66

Dear Aunt Fannie,

This morning one of my men turned to me and pointed at a plant with soft red flowers and said: “That is the first plant I have seen today which didn’t have thorns on it.” The plant and the hill upon which it grew was also representative of Vietnam…It is a country of thorns and cuts, of guns and marauding, of little hope and of great failure, yet in the midst of it all, a beautiful thought, gesture, and even person can arise among it waving bravely at death. Some day this hill will be burned by napalm, and the red flower will crackle up and die among the thorns. So what was the use of living and being a beauty among the beasts, if it must, in the end, die because of them, and with them? You are what you are, what you are. Whether you believe in God, fate, or the crumbling cookie elements are so mixed in a being that make him what he is: his salvation from the thorns around him lies in the fact that he existed at all, in his very own personality….The flower will always live in the memory of a Marine, but even if we had never gone on that hill, it would still be a soft, red, thornless flower growing among the cutting, scratching plants, and that in itself is its own reward.

Love, Sandy
1st Marine Division, Chu Lai
20 Oct 66

Dear Debby,

I often ponder over our petty misunderstandings of the past while dreaming of the future….Surely, it is not good to dwell on such things; but the heartaches we shared, and my failings as a husband, hang heavily on my heart. I can only hope and pray that you harbor few regrets over the many long years you’ve wasted waiting for me. I’ll make it all up to you someday Debby I swear. When I return , you will find me older, wiser and far more capable of being the husband you deserve. Please keep faith in me, darling.

Alan
25 Jun 70

Air Force Maj. Edward Alan Brudno, assigned to the 68th Tactical Fighter Squadron, was shot down over North Vietnam on 18 October 1965. He spent 7-1/2 years as a prisoner of war before being repatriated in 1973. Debby, his wife, notes that he had wanted to become an astronaut and was told he’d first need experience as a pilot. He joined the Air Force. On 3 June 1973, four months after his release from captivity and one day before he was to turn 33, Alan Brudno took his life.

What worries me about War is, when survivors tell their stories, will people believe them? Will they want to hear about death and destruction, and about people killing people, or will they want to forget the whole thing ever happened?

I lost the zipper of my winter jacket in Devon. It’s somewhere along the slope up to Haytor now, lying in a granite crevice; a clear one-inch plastic zipper that says kenneth cole active in green along the side. I wonder how much rain has fallen on that ground, or how many tour buses have trundled up that road past the grazing ponies and emerging grass, and who will one day walk past that same spot and see my zipper and pick it up, and wonder who it belonged to - like was she a girl with a happy life, and did she have curls in her hair, and what did she feel as she stood on top of haytor looking at the moors stretching out in every direction?

I peeled off a scab from an old rugby wound in Paris. It’s swirling now, on a damp pavement somewhere perhaps along the Rue de Rivoli, circling with others of its kind, rolling with the bitter wind that in one long breath will roll out beyond the street and into the alleyways, filling broken street lamps with empty air. It’s out there somewhere, my little scab, circling the country forever in a great sweep, framing our boundaries in black dust. I wonder when it will return to the earth and return to nothingness.

When I was 7, my grandmother gave me a porcelain bracelet. It was an ornate china blue, and had tiny flowers painted into it, and a thin gold outline plated into the side. I wore it for 3 weeks and never took it off, not even in the shower. It reminded me, I think, of the old world, the one I saw in my grandmother and longed for, the old world of lotus soup and night markets along Battery road. Then one day my dad brought Clarence and I to a little street fair in the void deck next to ours, and bought us helium balloons. I remember the exact spot where we were walking back with them, when my brother took the bracelet off my wrist and tied it to his balloons, just to see if it would weigh them down. The balloons held for a while, bouncing tentatively on the ground, my bracelet clinking lightly as it hit the tarmac. Then suddenly, before I could reach for them, the balloons broke free from gravity and rose into the air, taking my bracelet with it. I remember jumping for the bracelet, reaching as far upward as I could to retrieve my prized possession, and I remember the balloons merrily taking it away with them, bumping steadily towards the arch of blue above us. I remember feeling for the first time that irretrievable feeling of loss. For weeks after that, I kept dreaming about where my bracelet was. Did the balloons pop and rush downwards in Simei, or did they fly all the way across to Indonesia before landing, or was it lying in pieces in the grass, just a block away? And who would find it and keep the pieces to themselves, and hoard them in a drawer, tinkering with the pieces of blue sea and flowers? Who would hold my broken pieces in their hands?

And then of course there was you. By then so many things seemed so filled with the intent to be lost, that I had come to expect it. I suppose I was always waiting-dreading the time you would whisper goodbye, knowing that it would come someday, somehow, while we were sitting quietly in my room. I expected it, but that didn’t make it any easier. I lost my heart then too. I felt it go, like it had flown into a TA, lost somewhere, lying there bleeding into the burgundy rug. I don’t suppose you’d know it, but there it is now, with my zipper and my scab and my grandmother’s bracelet somewhere lost and irretrievable on this earth, lost and waiting for rescue.

Dear Experiences 2006 committee,

The Vassar Singaporean Students would be happy to set up a booth for
Experiences 2006.

However, I was wondering if you’d allow me to make a suggestion since you
are still in the planning stages of the event:

I remember as a prospective student, that experiences 2003 was a memorable
and fun experience precisely because it was done so informally. I’m not
sure if you went to that fair, but it was in a suntec convention room, and
instead of booths with walls, each university just had a few tables each,
and the atmosphere in the room was an open and comfortable one. It was for
this reason that I felt so comfortable talking to the SSA reps of the
respective schools, who were casually dressed in jeans and casual wear - I
didn’t feel intimidated by them, and their correspondingly casual airs
evoked a much more representative sense of what it seemed an overseas US
student’s experience was like.

I found that Experiences 2005 was hardly the same. We had to dress in
formal attire, our booths were walled on 3 sides and felt like cages, the
whole atmosphere was - to me, and to many others in agreement with me -
clinical, unfriendly, and unwelcoming. Sure, it was professional, but I
think that’s precisely the problem: if the aim of Experiences is to share
our, erhm, Experiences with prospective students, then perhaps the
convention should recreate what it’s like to be in the US/Canada: where,
unlike SIngapore, we AREN’T done in by formalities and structure, where
we AREN’T restricted to dresscodes, where we DON’T have to conform to
professionalism and appearances to impress dignitaries who come to visit.
I remember last year’s Experiences committee stressing that we had to
impress the US-ambassador - or whoever she was - and the media with our
show of professionalism. And kudos to the old committee for doing a great,
professional job …but if my American education has taught me anything,
it’s that the US experience is nothing about pomp and pageantry, and
everything about being unique, diverse, comfortable in your own skin, and
everything else that defies and agitates against the structures that
Singapore has imposed on us for so long.

I’m not trying to go into a critique of Sporean society at all. I’m just
trying to say that sharing our experiences doesnt have to be in a clinically
professional setting, and that such a setting in fact will impede the opportunity
to share our experiences effectively. In other words, let’s try not to be so damn
Singaporean.

So this is really a call to arms (and I’m being deliberately politically
incorrect here) - let’s not be done in by these Singaporean ideas of
presentation and formality, just because we want to make an impression on
the people who matter least. Those who matter most - the students with
whom we want to share our transformational/empowering/humbling/educational
experiences in America - will benefit most strongly from an Experiences
convention that is fun, amiable, comfortable, open, liberal, democratic,
and welcoming.

Not one that’s walled in by white booths and specifications of how many
inches of our walls we have to cover, by stipulations about what we can
and cannot say, by ribbon cutting ceremonies, by declarations of “You have
to go to an ivy league because those are the most prestigious ones” (I’m
sure you agree with me on this one), by students only concerned with
finding out what kind of SAT scores will get them into our universities.
Let’s do something useful with the US/Canadian educations that we have
been so privileged to experience: let’s allow ourselves to live a little.

Regards,
Charmaine