I've read a good number of local fiction- Catherine Lim, Dave Chua, Philip Jeyaratnam- and hardly has it been that I've wanted to thump the head of their characters.
I wanted to thump the head of Wing- the hero of Heartland- this time.
He was remarkably tiresome.
He was so tiresome, so draggy, so self-deprecating and so annoying that had he been a real person I'd have given him a good shake by the shoulders, and yelled at him to wake the bloody fool up.
So what if you were a student at Raffles JC and stayed at the housing estate just a short walk away from school? So what if you never really knew your father and were raised single-handedly by your mother? And so what if you were on a different financial par with Chloe the pretty girl whom you had a crush on in school?
Was it a sin if you didn't drive a car to come pick Chloe up? Was it a sin if you couldn't afford expensive dates, or that she dressed up for dates whilst you did not? Was it a sin if you just were on a different calibre with others?
Why then, did you not know what you wanted to do? Why, then, was it that you didn't care where you were going, had no idea what direction you could take, didn't pursue anything, and simply took the languid, slack route through school and life? If, even your friends Audrey and the other guy, knew what they wanted, and pursued it for themselves, why did you not know what was it you desired?
You, with the General Paper lectures, and notes from Economics tutorials, was it so d*** hard to figure out what to do with your life? You had the education, you had the opportunities, you had the exposure. Why was it then that you had no ambition or no purpose other than to finish school, go to army and then see how afterward?
Was it because your girlfriend didn't know how to talk to your mum? Was it because she didn't speak Mandarin very well? Was it because you felt you lacked the opportunities that your other friends had? Or was it simply because you felt you were a loser amongst the elite of the school and thereby would not amount to anything no matter how hard you tried?
What a waste of a space in Raffles JC, I say!
To be honest, the author never mentioned the name of the JC. Neither did he mention the name of the housing estate. But how many top three JCs are there in Singapore which are located within a private residential estate and have a housing board estate within walking distance from it?
I'm not sure about the other junior colleges, but from the description of the estate, the proximity to Holland Village, the Buona Vista MRT and the mention of the hawker center, I can only think of one- Raffles JC, which at one time used to be somewhere around the Mt. Sinai residential estate yet was within walking distance to the Ghim Moh housing estate.
It helps, of course, that I used to work at a place near Ghim Moh.
Otherwise I might not have known.
Still, readers of my age would find Heartland a nostalgic read. Heartland- for even if the author hadn't mentioned Far East Plaza or some other place familiar to us 80s kids, there were enough descriptive clues in the book to pinpoint the place anyway.
I guess that's what literature is all about.
It isn't only about the characters or the story arc.
It is also about the setting, the society, the heritage, the life, the living, and everything that is present at that moment in time.
We don't usually realize it then, and we may not even realize it immediately after, but if you are reading Heartland today, and can remember a time when there was no ION but a park behind the Orchard MRT Station where the Filipino domestic workers used to hang out on Sundays, yes, I am sure you will feel it too.