Ngo Hoang Gia (10S06O)
When I was a small boy, on the other side of my city, across the river, there used to be a slum. We had to take a ferry to get there. There were houses, or more like tents, standing on wooden poles protruding haphazardly out of the river bank. The walls were made of carton pieces, toles, water bottles and anything that the people there can lay their hand on, tied up together.
In Vietnam they a house’s standard is usually categorized from first grade to fourth grade, with the fourth grade the lowest. "Our house is first grade, right, mom?" I once asked my mom. Compared to the houses in the slum, our home was so rich that it must definitely be the first grade. My mother laughed and said, "No. Our house is the 4th grade". Apparently the houses at the slum did not even belong to any category.
I did not understand why my mother thought so lowly of our home. My home was so fun. My father used to teach tuition at home. He had a big white board nailed on the other side of our bathroom. Every time I used the toilet at the middle of his lesson, I must not make noise while squatting on the toilet bowl. My father asked me to turn on the water tap into an empty metal bucket before flushing the toilet. My father used a long straight rim taken out from an old wooden door as a ruler. When I heard noises from the Styrofoam panels on the ceiling in my room, my father gave me the stick. I would stand on a stool on my bed and poked the sheets. That wrought havoc on the mice. I grinned, imagining the mice banging into each other from the furious screeching and rambling above.
The rainy season in Vietnam usually lasts for 3 months or more, with 5 or 6 storms hitting my city. If the storm is bad enough, we did not have school. I would wrap myself in the blanket and enjoyed the serenity of the season. The water leaked from the roof of our living room into a metal pot my parents placed underneath. There was only the flickering flame of the candle, the noise of the rain and the "tink .. tink ... tink" sound of water drop falling on the metal pot. When the rain became heavier, the "tinks" sound would get squeezed into a clinking rhythm on top of the loud clatter of the rain. My mom sometimes allowed me to shower in the rain. My brother and I stripped off our clothes and ran into the small yard and played with a soccer ball. The ball moved in a funny way as it got trapped in the puddles. I stuck out my tongue and started spinning on a spot, looking up with my squinting eyes, trying to look at the falling drops. The surrounding soon revolved so fast that I sat on the ground with my tongue still sticking out, trying to drink the rainwater.
When I was in grade 5, our old house was renovated. Once, I went to check whether the house had the large windows like I asked my father to build. There were scaffolding and cements bags all over the floor of my parents’ room. I could see the sun setting down behind the distant houses. The tangerine light filled the room and blended with the brick’s red. I sat on the bare ledge of the big window that my father had promised me. The wind brought the sweet aroma of ripe apple trees in the garden and mixed with the smell of damp bricks. That was the most beautiful room that I have ever seen.
When the home was finished, I was also bestowed the "legendary metal horse", as my brother called his MIFA bike. It was a gift from my aunt in the East Germany for my brother’s birth in 1986. The bike looked strangely exposed. My father stripped off all its lights, dynamo and the back seat because otherwise "those petty thieves would steal it". But I think my father just wanted to ensure that my brother, and later I, could not pick up a girl (if someone ever wanted to sit on that). The bike was very big. I needed to jump down from the saddle to get off the bike. The brake strings got torn occasionally and I usually forgot to replace them. To slow down the bike, I pressed the bottom of my sandals to the front tire. All my left sandal and slipper had a "brake groove" for that reason. To make an immediate stop, I put the whole foot between the spokes. The bike is one of the things I miss the most when I think of my secondary school days. I used to cycle to school at noon. Most of the people should be sleeping or resting then. The streets were empty and quiet without many vehicles. I loved looking up at the canopy of the phoenix trees while their red flowers falling lazily, swirling in the hot summer air.
When I was fifteen, I went to study in Singapore. My third home was my room in the boarding school. I needed to squeeze the paper, palette and color powders within the rectangle bounded by my bed, the wall, my table and my roommate's wardrobe. I had to bend my knees, put the canvas on my thighs to paint. My bed was next to the windows. I sometimes forgot to close the windows and the whole bed would get soaked when there was a heavy rain. I missed my father's nagging: he had to close the windows whenever he came home from work and found me so engrossed in the computer game that I forgot to close the windows. I remembered the times when I fell sick, and lay alone on the bed, staring at the revolving blades of the fan on the ceiling and could not sleep. I craved for the feeling of my mother's calloused hands on my head.The best thing of staying in boarding school is that I could play soccer all the time. We used to play on the school's hockey turf because the ground was soft enough for our bare feet. It rained a lot in Singapore. Sometimes the rain would become so heavy that we could hardly see things around. I remember the first time I played soccer in the rain at the turf. The veil of water drops on my spectacles hid my red eyes. Everyone had their face wrinkled and covered with water. The rain felt so warm. I was sticking out my tongue and laughing.
One time I joined a project at a community centre in a block of apartments for low-income people. Until then, I thought of Singapore as having "no poor people" (or at least the poor people I saw were far above the level of poverty in Vietnam). There seemed to be only a shiny Singapore with the glamorous Durian Theater, the skyscrapers in the Central Business Districts and the neat and clean streets. But that time I found a different corner of the island. From the outside the block looked like it was at a pretty good condition. But when I walked along the poorly lit and narrow corridors inside, there was a constant feeling that there would be a hand lunging out of the barred doors to grab my throat. The rooms were piled with random hoarded stuffs that stunk like mould growing on rotten food, and bed bugs and insects were making their nests under the mattress.
The community centre where we actually worked, although small, was in a decent state. We were there to organize games, talk to the elderly people and to keep them accompanied. I could not play Mahjong and I could not speak Cantonese or Hokkien, the dialect that the elderly use. In the end I found a Chinese woman in her sixties who could speak English. So I befriended her. I could not pronounce her Chinese name correctly so I always called her Auntie instead. She told me with an apologetic tone that she had dementia. Auntie had suffered a heart attack that partially paralyzed one side of her body. That explained why she could only stutter words very slowly and she would ask me who I am every time I came. I once I saw the ring on her hand and asked where her husband was. He passed away a few years before that and her children were all in Australia, and could visit her once or twice a year. I felt quite uneasy knowing that she still had relatives but I did not ask her more.
I was still struggling with my English language back then. I was always saying things like "I need to come to school now" before parting with someone. One day, I told Auntie that I would leave for a class trip the following weekend, and would only "go back home the week after that". Auntie asked me why I was going back to Vietnam in the middle of the term. I had meant that I will be back in Singapore.
Auntie placed her hand lightly on mine and said with a smile, "You use "come" and not "go". Here's your home."
