Jemimah Wei

“From the outside how might our lives have appeared to strangers? I say our, which in June 2015 meant my mother and me, but I could just as easily have been referring to any number of the interchangeable bodies that populated our corner of Bedok. We still lived in the same house I grew up in, but you didn't actually have to see it to know how it looked, nor to understand the number of steps needed to cross from the bed to the bathroom - after all, it was the same prefabricated apartment everyone else lived in, too, organized and replicated within the thousands of high-rise concrete slabs across the country. If you came closer, small things might start to distinguish this neighborhood from the next-you might notice the exercise corner outfitted with new, granulated rubber flooring that stunk under the noonday sun, or realize the HDB flats had gone from blue to beige in the latest five-year paint cycle. But no matter how individual elements blinked in and out of existence, the overall physical character of the neighborhood stayed the same.

In the afternoons, the streets would flood with students released from nearby schools, rushing to various enrichment centers or back to their homes and desks, weaving in their oblivious, rowdy manner around the implements of the neighborhood, among which I counted myself. Perhaps their pace picked up a little as they hurried past me, but they never looked up and into my face. I didn't mind. It had taken me a long time to get to this point, to be able to exist unscrutinized and uninterfered with. To lift the lid of the neighborhood and look more closely at the ordinary lives swarming the earth like ants, to come close to the churning infernos of their minds, would be to realize that the nutty auntie squatting by the drain and tenderly shampooing the roots of a plant she was propagating remained constantly surprised to find herself aged, would be to realize that within the humming fish ball uncle lived the suppressed spirit of an operatic tenor weeping for the stage. How vast the legion of unrealized, contradictory, impractical ghosts crammed within each mortal body was. How it scalded one to look so closely. It was too much. Just thinking about it was enough to make me cry.”
― Jemimah Wei, The Original Daughter