Friday, October 1, 2010
Went back to my old HDB today at night. It was a very strange bittersweet feeling. Most of the residents had moved out and only a few (we only spotted about three in 13 levels) were left. It was like reliving a dream of the past - we'd moved out when I was 3 or 4 years old.
It was strange walking down 13 levels, seeing locked doors and black windows. The place seemed to be swarming with old memories of children playing along the corridors, with housewives chatting to each other while they watered their plants, with old people wasting away - cooped up in their homes watching the same programs over and over again. But there was nothing left, no one left. Only shadows of the past, empty shells of the people who once lived there infested the place. Seeing all the doors being of different styles only served to remind of the type of people who once lived there, but were now gone. The empty lifts remained open, waiting for people who would never come.
I got the strangest feeling from walking past a door saying "恭喜发财，万事如意"...
We went to the playground where I used to play as a child after kindergarten ended each day. The pelican and the tortoise and the hare were still there, but my favourite swings were gone. The deserted atmosphere of the whole place, with the empty stand for the swings, made me feel like there was a huge gaping hole in my heart. There was a brown cat which came over and started rubbing herself on my legs and I was feeling flattered before it went over to a short wall and started rubbing itself briefly on it and my mum pointed out it probably had bugs. Only then did we realise it was pregnant. But when we were leaving, the cat simply looked at us (without rubbing itself on the wall), so maybe the disappearance of the residents, the growing up of the children who used to pat the cats so lovingly, made her lonely and whenever a human came she'd go up to them it would rub itself on them, yearning for their touch. It was yet another strange thing to look back at the deserted playground with the (pregnant) cat staring back at us, and with the knowledge that life was about to be born in such a lifeless place filled with ghosts of the past and none of the living.
Saw a staircase which brought back an old, lovingly-cared-for memory of stroking a cat lying on the steps.
All these will probably be gone the next time I come back, replaced by shining, industrialized, cosmopolitan condominiums.
Such is the way of society.
