HOME

When I was a small boy, I used to go to the a riverside street in the afternoon with my friends. That street was later on rebuilt to be one of the most beautiful street in Vietnam. But in the past, the pavements along the riverside was ruined with the many stretches of the hand-rail stolen. When it was low tide, we would find a place on the bank without the hand-rail and the pavement was not so high from the river bed below to jump down. There were a lot of huge stones covered with dead oysters so we had to climb carefully over these stones to a blank spot covered in sand. There were pieces of carton box, food trashes and some time some dead thing scattered all over the river bed. We loved digging our hand into the small holes in the sand to catch the little crabs living inside. Or we may tried to throw pieces of pebble to the river to see whose pebble can jump the furthest. I used to cheat by throwing pieces of glass instead; they were flat and smooth and easier to hold so they seem make the most steps on the water's surface. When we are tired, we would look at the opposite bank. The other side of my city used to be like slum. We used take a ferry to get to the other side before a new bridge was built when I was in grade 3. There were many houses, or actually they looked more like tents. Those houses were made up carton pieces, toles, water bottles and anything that the people there can put a hand, binded together. Those tents stood on wooden poles and protruded out haphazardly out of the river bank. Whenever I looked at those houses, I found my home so rich.

So once I asked my mom what grade is our house. In Vietnam they usually call a house 1st grade, 2nd grade, 3rd grade or 4th grade. "Our house is first grade, right, mom?" I thought that since the houses at the slum must be of grade 4, my house was definitely level 4. My mother laughed and said, "No. Our house is the 4th grade" (I did not know that the houses at the slum were "out of the league").

I did not really understand why my mother thinks so low 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 in the middle of his lesson,my father asked me to turn on the water tap into an empty metal bucket before flushing the toilet so that the students might think that someone is washing clothes. And I must not make any noise while squatting on the toilet bowl. My father used a long wooden stick taken out from an old door to use as a ruler. Now and then I would tell him "Dad, there are mouse". And my father would give me the stick. I would stand on a stool on my bed and poked the plastic panels covering below the toles (those plastic panels below the toles are common in Vietnam, they are used as insulator, but mouses make their home there as well). The mouses would break into a turmoil. I could not see but from the furious screeching and rambling, I could imagine the mouses banging into each other above me. Now and then a daring or stupid mouse would run across us while we were eating. My father would quickly order me and my brother. "Get met the stick, close the doors". So we were all in the living room to catch the mouse. The only door opened is the front door to the garden because we did not want the mouse to go crazy and run across our food. My father would bend down and put the stick into the gap below the wardrobe. I would then be standing on top of my study table with a lid in my hands (we use this big lid with a lot of holes to cover our foods from flies). I would be cheering, laughing and pointing my brother around to ambush the mouse. I was quite afraid of mouse than, so I sood on the table and threw the lid down when it ran across below me. Usually the mouse would not get to the front door . My father would jump after the mouse and whacked it with his stick, or sometimes he would kick the running mouse. (he is a "professional mouse catcher". My father lived in the countryside during his childhood in the North during the Vietnam war. His friends and he would catch mouses and grilled them. He did not eat, though). During the raining season, which usually last for 3 months in my city, with 5 or 6 storms during that period. The water would leak down from the roof over my living room, falling down on a metal pot that my parents place under the leaking spot. I used to like the raining season because if the storm is bad enough, we don't have school. I love hearing the "tink .. tink ... tink" sound of the water drop on the pot at night. When the sound of the rain outside becomes louder, the "tinks" would become faster. My parents would wake up now and then at night to empty the pot. There was this huge crack near the front door of our house, from the side of the door to the roof. When it rains, the water would leak down from the roof and the water would soak the wall around the crack. I loved touching to feel the cool wet wall. Before the rain, there would be a lot of ants coming out from the crack, follow the door's grooces and disappear into the garden. I used to wipe the invisible path of the ants and see how the ants would scramble at the wiped out path. But a few ants will wander across the wiped out path and smell the aroma on the other side. The ants would always find their way home no matter how big the gap I made. My mom would sometimes allow me to "shower in the rain". My brother and I would strip off out clothes, naked and ran into our small yard. I would play with a soccer ball with him there. The ball moved in a funny way because it would got trapped in a puddle on the ground. When I'm tired, I would stick out my tongue and started spinning at a spot, looking up with my knitted brows, trying to look at the falling drops. When surround started revolving so fast, I would sit on the ground with my tongue sticking out and tried to drink the rainwater.

When I was in grade 5, our old house is renovated. Once when I visit the house when it is under construction. I love the view of the house. Although there are scaffolds and cements and sand piles all over the floor, I like my parents' room without the windows. It was in the afternoon and the dusk's light filled up the room. The light blends so nicely with the bricks' red color. When my parents planned for the house, I told them to have a lot of windows. Big windows so that the light and the wind can come into the room. I sat on the bare edge of one of those windows, with the roughness of the brick and the cement ticking my bottoms. I loved siting there, looked at the trees, the top so near to me now and felt the wind blowing around me. Soon after that when the windows panes are put on (no matter how I tried to tell my father not to), I could not get that scene anymore. I felt so natural and free when I sat on the windows' edge there. That unfinished room was the most beautiful room that I have ever seen.

When the home was finished, I also inherited the "legendary metal horse" from my brother. His friends called my brother's bike that way.It was a gift sent from my aunt in East Germany as a present for my brother (he was born in 1986). My mother used to ride it, then my brother. The bike looks strangely bare since my father stripped off all the its lights, dynamo and the back seat. He said otherwise "those petty thefts would steal them". But I think no one would touch such an old bike and my father did that just to make sure that my brother, and later I, cannot fetch a girl (if someone actually wants to sit on that). The bike was so big that when I was in grade 6, I need to jump down from the seat to get off the bike. Now and then the brake strings would be torn and I forgot to replace. To slow down the bike, I would put the bottom of my sandals to the front tire (its mud cover had fallen off when my brother used the bike). All my left sandal and slipper had a "brake groove" for that reason. Sometimes I would put my food between the wheel's sticks and the bike would stop immediately. The motorbikes and bikes in my city did not go so fast so I could ride my bike without my brake for a few weeks. The bike was one of the thing I miss the most when I think about my secondary school days. I love riding the bike along the empty streets to my school. Most of the people should be sleeping or resting at noon in Vietnam (apart students going to school) and the streets were empty and quiet. In the summer. I love riding under the shades of the phoenix trees while their red flowers falling slowly, swirling in the air.

When I was fifteen, I went to study in Singapore. My third home was my room in the boarding school. The room was for 4 people, each one has a share of a corner of the room. My room back in Vietnam was nearly three times the size of the room in boarding school. I could crawl on the floor in the room, papers and color powder placed around me. I could move from one corner to another to start a new painting. When I want to draw, I would need to squeeze the stuffs just nicely in the rectangle bounded by my bed, the wall, my table and my roommate's wardrobe. And I would have to bend my knee, put the canvas on my thighs to paint. I did not know beforehand that I would miss my parents so much. My bed was next to the windows. Whenever I happened to forget to close the windows, my whole bed and pillows would get soaking wet when there was a heavy rain. I miss my father's nagging when it rained: he had to close the windows when he came home from work and found me so engrossed in the computer game that I forgot to close my windows upstairs. I remember the times when I fell sick and lying alone, staring at the rotation 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 can play soccer everyday. We used to play on the school's hockey turf because it was quite soft so we can play barefooted. Sometimes the rain would become so hard that we could hardly see things around. But it was very fun sliding on the turf because the water makes the sliding painless. I love playing soccer in the rain. I remember the first time I played soccer under the rain at the turf, I was crying. The water drops on my spectacles would cover my red eyes. Everyone had their face twisted so that the water on the forehead would not get into the eyes. The rain felt so warm. I was sticking out my tongue and laughing. It was the fist time I felt so happy in Singapore.

I joined a school event when I was in secondary school in Singapore. We were divided into groups to survey this block of apartments of low-income people to see which apartment are in the low condition to be renovated. It was the first time I went to such a place. From the outside, I would never expect the block to be in such a bad state. When I came to Singapore, before that time, I have only see a shiny Singapore with the glamorous Durian Theater, the skyscrapers in the Central Business Districts and the neat and clean streets. I had always assumed that all the houses in Singapore would be so modern and beautiful.

One time I was in a community project at a community center of a low-income block. Until then, I thought of Singapore as having "no poor people" (or at least the poor people I saw were so much better than the poverty standard 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's at a pretty good condition. But inside was old one-room apartments. When I walked along the poorly lit and narrow corridors, I actually felt as if there would be a hand lunging out of one of the barred doors to squeeze my throat. A room would be piled with random hoarded stuffs that stunk with a mixture of smells of mold and rotten foods. There were bed bugs and insects under some of the mattress.

The community center where we actually worked, although small, was at a decent state. We were there to organize game and talk to the elderly people, or basically do anything to keep them accompanied. I could not play Mahjong and I could not speak Cantonese or Hokkien with the old people there. But at the end I found a Chinese woman of her sixties who could speak English. So every time I came to the center, she was the only person I talk to while my friends organized games for the rest of the people. I could not pronounce her Chinese name correctly so I always called her Auntie instead. I found it quite strange that she could hardly remember me every time I came. One day Auntie told me, with an apologetic tone, that she had dementia. She got a heart attack before that partially paralyzed one side of her body and that explained why she could only stutter words very slowly. I once asked her where husband was because I saw the ring on her hand. She said he passed away a few years before that. I asked her whether she had children. She said they were all in Australia and could visit her once or twice a year. I was quite uneasy knowing that she still had relatives. All the while I had thought she was alone, but I did not ask her more about her children.

I was still struggling with English back then. I would always say things like "I need to come to school now" before parting someone. So once I told Auntie that I would not see her the next week because I will leave for a class trip the following weekend, and I would only "go back home the week after that". Auntie was a bit puzzled and asked why I go back to Vietnam at the middle of the term. I said I mean I will be back to Singapore.

Auntie placed her hand slightly on my hand and said with a smile "You use "come" and not "go". Here's your home"