Will I miss Singapore?

As I make my final countdown to D-day when I will leave Singapore for good, the nostalgic feeling started to creep in.  After all, Singapore is my birth place and I have lived here for almost 5 decades.  I have explored almost every corner of this small island.  I was a scout during my school days and had hiked and camped  around the country.  During my army days, I had trained in remote parts of Singapore, some of which were not open to public. After I came out to work, I was in marketing jobs and had visited clients in industrial estates and posh offices all over Singapore.

I have witnessed the miraculous transformation of Singapore from a messy dirty backward country to a beautiful cosmopolitan garden city.

I grew up in the countryside where our toilet was only a shed with a hole & 2 wooden planks for squatting.  There was no flushing system and the shits just piled up.  We could literally see germs crawling all over the shits and there was certainly no way to avoid the stench unless we were prepared to be suffocated.   My family reared chickens & pigs for living.  Even as young kids, we had to help our parents to feed the chickens, collect the eggs, dispose chicken drops.   We did not have air-condition but were fortunate to have a black & white TV.  Telephone was a luxury.  I could still remember vividly the first time I used a the phone when I was a young boy.  I was so excited and when the line got through, I asked proudly to speak to "Ah Chay (meaning father in hokkien).  My cousin laughed & made fun of me for expecting the person on the other line to know who my Ah Chay was.  I was basically a country bumpkin.

While I did not have the luxury of modern day technologies, I led a spartan but carefree life.   I did not have to worry too much about school works except during exams.  I had so much fun climbing trees, plucking rambutans, picking durians, catching fishes and spiders, kicking football, playing in the rain with paper boats.....etc.  My toys were things like marbles, discarded boxes, matchboxes...etc

Over the last 3-4 decades, Singapore has completely transformed. My children now do not even have the opportunity to see a rambutan tree, a durian tree or even a rubber tree, not to mention to climb a tree.  They would probably not even dare to touch a chicken, not to mention slaughtering one which I am proud to have done as a child.   Their toys are computers and their hobbies are computer games.  They are under tremendous pressure to perform academically.  While they have excelled academically having obtained excellent national examination results and successfully entered one of the top secondary schools in Singapore, I am not sure if that is all that matters in their growing up years.  Somehow I feel that they may have missed a part of their precious childhood life that I had the privilege to go through.

While Singapore is now transformed into a beautiful island state, somehow the feeling is that these are all so artificial.  It is like a facade.   Life seems to revolve round physical and material things.  Perhaps the small island and a growing immigrant population make the place even more congested and stiffing.   The work demand, in the name of excellence and world class standard, is like a pressure cooker without an outlet.  Nobody knows when it will explode.  There is really no time to care, to love or to smell the roses.  Although there is time for coffee, but it is only to help to stimulate the weary mind and get it to over work again.  This is perhaps what progress is all about.

So, I do not think I will miss Singapore, at least not in the short term.  I am escaping and taking a long deserved break with my spouse.  We are looking forward to walk hand-in-hand and enjoy our first autumn in the midst of beautiful falling golden autumn leaves. I hope my children will rediscover a part of their missed childhood.

But I am mindful that one day, we may just want to go back to our roots.........I am certainly not cutting it off.