In Continuum.

Emerging from the dense forest were graves from the ancient past, one after another, staring out into the passing cars on the expressway like seats in a cinema, all facing the same direction. For those that passes by in their cars or on the buses like myself, the sight of a bunch of roadside graves staring back at you might be a strange and somewhat creepy sight. On my part, however, there almost always is a sense of sadness for those people who used to be part of us, the living. The grass has grown tall around these graves, mosses so overgrown that they have covered the gravestones and the little oval pictures embedded onto the surface. You can still see old incenses sticking out from the ground in front of the graves, and the broken cups that must have held some kind of beverage during traditional Chinese rituals. But then I couldn't help but wonder where were their living family members, where were the people who should have been taking care of them, and if anybody still remembers that they are there next to the expressway, ready to be dug up and removed by the bulldozers waiting nearby.

I was talking to a friend a few nights ago about going over to the States, which has been a topic of interest in my mind for quite some time now. It isn't so much for the idea of going there, but for the fact that I get to leave this country for a few months, and for a good reason at that. Anyway, not everybody shares my enthusiasm of course, and some of them - like the friend I was talking to - had her reservations about going over to a foreign country for over two years and away from her family. She told me a story that I felt to be particularly moving, and it was about a friend of hers that came over to Singapore for his studies. He was very close to his grandmother before he came over, a relationship that I can only imagine because I have never been in a very close relationship with most of my relatives. His grandmother, unfortunately, died a day or two before his final examinations in Singapore, but the family failed to tell him about it because they felt that it'd affect his performance during the paper - fair enough. That was until I heard about him finding out about her death only months after the paper when he returned home from Singapore, and that by itself gave me a little something to think about through the night.

I have been living in Singapore for the better part of my twenty-two years of life. Detached from the life that I could have been living in Taiwan, there are a couple of relationships that could have naturally flourished if my family had not taken the choice of migrating over to this little island at the tip of the Malay Peninsula. In the back of my mind, there has always been a bit of myself that feels somewhat jealous of people who have cousins to talk to, who have nieces to hang out with, or grandparents to hear stories from. I grew up robbed of those experiences, not having much contact with my relatives except for the rare occasions in the past seventeen years when I went back to Taiwan for visits. You can tell from their eyes when you meet them, that whether or not you exist in their lives hardly ever matters to them, and there is almost always a feeling of being treated like I was a guest, or an outsiders, when I really am part of the family by nature, and by blood. There are a couple of normal family-related relationships that I missed over the years, and it gets hard sometimes to know that I have been rid of such precious things in life.

Like the friend of the friend, I too missed the death of my grandparents, or most of them anyway. My grandmother on my father's side is still alive and kicking, marching her way through her nineties and bravely towards the three digits. The other grandparents of mine, unfortunately, have passed away to a better place, and I only attended two of their funerals without actually being there for the most part. I vaguely remember my grandfather's funeral to be honest, perhaps only the times I spent running about with the kids in the neighborhood and away from the funeral itself. I was a little more involved in my grandmother's funeral, but then even then I was only a part of the paper-lily folding team. I spent the rest of the time away from my grandmother's place where the funeral was held, alone by myself or with the cousins who I knew so little of. I was there, but never really there at the same time. I cannot handle death very well, and certainly not events like that. So I swore off funerals, and when it finally happened to my grandfather on my father's side, I refused to go and preferred instead to remain in Singapore. 

Throughout the time, there was an overwhelming emotion that went through my mind, not really because of the death of my relatives but how little, I realized, I felt towards their deaths. I know of people deeply attached to their grandparents, but the same cannot be said about me I am afraid. When the news of their deaths came me, I carried on with my life as per normal, and that deeply disturbed me for some reason. There wasn't even any ounce of effort to pretend that I was fine, because I really was feeling fine. It's complicated, and I can hardly put those emotions into words. That period of time came and went, and most of the people involved in the past have returned to their own respective lives, their jobs, their families, their country. As for me, well, I hardly know when my grandparents died, or where they are buried, or even anything about their deaths really. They say that the measure of a man is by the amount of tears shed on his funeral, but I strongly disagree with that. I say, that the measure of a man is by the amount of people that remembers his death every year. Does that mean, however, that my grandparents are lesser people than others just because I remember Heath Ledger's death and not theirs? I just feel lousy, at times, to know that moving to Singapore has also took away the need to remember anything about my relatives. It is as if, they don't matter anymore. 

During the Qingming Festival, the family members of the deceased would be obliged to pay them a visit at their graves, to give offerings and to clear up their graves a little by trimming the grass or to clean up the tombstones, whatever. It is the tradition of the Chinese, a way to pay respect to the dead, and the same happens every single year to the majority of the Chinese population, and effort on their part to remember their loved ones with the least they can do. The newspapers are reporting of traffic jams up at the Choa Chu Kang area where most of the cemeteries in Singapore are, something which doesn't happen for the most part of the year that's for sure. People rushing into the cemeteries and braving hours of jam just to pay the deceased in their family a visit, but the same cannot be said about those roadside graves that I see on a day to day basis. Nobody cares about them, nobody bothers with the cleaning up of their tombstones very much. Who cares anyway, they are going to be dug up by the authorities soon to make way for a spanking new expressway, and then churned into a furnace to be cremated soon after. Nobody cared about them before, nobody is going to care about them now. It is as if, they don't matter anymore.

I feel bad for not knowing much about my grandparents, not knowing them in life and even in death. They are almost like one of those sad roadside graves, just staring at the vehicles passing by everyday, hoping for someone to stop by the side of the road to just pay them some respect. I am not an overly superstitious person, I do not wholeheartedly by the idea of ghosts and spirits in this world. But it is just the fear of being forgotten that worries me, the way we all disintegrate into the earth sooner or later. Our vulnerabilities scare me to no end, how we are all just flesh, blood and bone despite everything that we can achieve in life. In death, all we can hope for is to have someone in this world who still cares about you, who still remembers. But it is so easy for people to forget, so easy for people to neglect. And when that happens, we just turn into statistics for the country, a death count at the end of the year, an extra space taken up by the side of the road in an already land-constrained country such as Singapore. 

I still think of Stanley once in a while, in fact I think about him more often than I do of my grandparents. Does that make me a bad person, does that make me a horrible grandson? Such questions bug me once in a while, and it makes me feel lesser of a human. I know that in five years, or in ten years, I am always going to remember Stanley in life, and in death. He is not going to be a random statistic to the country, but why can't I say the same about my grandparents? Why don't I know anything about them? I disgust myself sometimes, and perhaps one day I am going to end up in one of those grotesque crematoriums as well, in those tall and eerie towers on a shelf and in an urn, dusty and forgotten. This is me, thinking too much, and too little, at the very same time.