旧作新贴

看完辜鸿铭的The Spirit of the Chinese People，又重读了E. B. White的Here Is New York，燃起一股用英文写作的冲动，却想不出写些什么。想起以前在高中的Div课，每个礼拜都还要交一篇文章，题目自拟，NIPM还会仔细地把每一篇都复印下来保存，然后加上大段大段的评语。进了大学，写的都是些很technical的小论文，不再有写随笔散文的机会了。

贴一篇自己以前写过的文章。希望以后有时间能写点英文文章。

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Home

I remember reading Edward Said's autobiography Out of Place a few years ago, and am increasingly finding a parallel in my own life. Said stressed his sense of and rootlessness, of living "between worlds", being born an Arab Christian living in a mainly Western community in Egypt.

While the cultural discrepency that I had to overcome in my earlier life and this stage is, compared with Said, much smaller, that sense of loneliness and homelessness is nevertheless very real. The five years that I spent in Singapore was a pretty good bridging period for my movement from the East to West: in those years I learnt English, had access to mainstream Western media, and became aware of Western ways of thinking and communication. And all these achieved when I was still in an environment that is very much Chinese or Confucian in character. But even so the impact, the feeling of "other-ness", was still great. Although I was not alone --- my whole family was there too --- and we lived financially a quite comfortable life, I never felt that I have any real connections with the place that I lived. The people around me spoke the same language and looked the same, but it would not take more than two lines of conversation for anyone to find out that I am not a native Singaporean. Such feeling was particularly strong in the first to years, when I was simply ignorant of most of the favourite topics of conversation. And that was probably true for my family too. We had not many friends in Singapore, and those that we often corresponded to were also mainly Chinese nationals or expatriates, whose mobility impeded the possibility of forming any long term friendships. The five Chinese new years we spent there were particularly boring and lonely: there was always just the four of us having "reunion" dinners in a restaurant that was always crowded and noisy --- in contrast to the big family gatherings we always had before. "Home" therefore becomes a strange and difficult word to understand when I was in Singapore: in one sense my home was in Singapore, for my parents and sister were there with me, and there is a place that I could go back to everyday. But yet I could not, in a higher sense, call that my home. That place did not belong to us, and that "home" was too lonely.

Home becomes even more remote when I came to England alone, staying in a boarding house rather than with my family. But that in a way is a much smaller transition than I had gone through in Singapore. The real sense of homelessness is not felt when I am in England, because I always know that this is not a place that I can ever call "home" and find recognition and a sense of belonging. I have expected the difference, the awkwardness, of myself in an unfamiliar part of the world. The bigger shock and uncomfort is that, just when I have barely got myself used to the lifestyle and ways of living in foreign lands, I began feeling increasingly awkward and "out of place" in my own country. In a primary school classmate gathering last year, I noticed how different I a person have become compared with all my classmates. I was just like them when I was with them, but now I see an almost insurmountable difference between me and them. I was at first surprised by how little my friends had changed over the years; and then I realised that it was really how much I have changed. But in a way I envy them: they are the common people, the mainstream of our society, the master. I could have been one of them. But now I am a homeless vagrant, in a foreign land, belonging to a social group called "ethnic minority", --- a group that may no longer have to put up with discriminations and prejudices, but still have to work extra hard for recognition.

Home is really a place we can be at ease to do what we desire for, and a place where we are familiar to. That sense of familiarity is lost when one spends too much time living in different places outside his real home. That would perhaps bring him unique experiences and a different view to all matters, and therefore more interesting and valuable to societies; but yet the feeling of being left out and out of place wherever one goes is really quite hard to overcome.