"I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known"
Yesterday, I spent almost the entire day in Jurong West public library reading Plato's Republic, and my miserable record was having gone through just 140 pages, or the first five books.
It was totally a shock to me that a public library in Singapore could actually become so crowded during the weekend. From about noon, not only were all the seats taken, but even on the floor sat groups of three or four students doing their homework and lonely readers burying their heads in books. Later I was to be reduced to be one of them - and I assure you that sitting on the ground and leaning against cement wall was not the best position to read The Republic, even though it wasn't Benjamin Jowett's translation, which was unfortunately the one that I first read several years ago.
In any case, seven hours of reading was not to be unpunctuated by toilet and/or meal/cigarette breaks, and therefore I walked in and out of the library several times. I noticed this PRC-looking guy in his early 30s sitting on an area not far from the toilets on the third floor of the library, and he sat there alone almost the entire day too, only to disappear after dinner time. In the morning and early afternoon, he was reading a Chinese language tabloid, but did not look very engaged with the reading. Around dinner time, when I passed by him again, he was eating a self-packed dinner, while playing loudly some very mainland-China sounding pop song with his--I can tell--shanzhai mobile phone. He didn't have very much of a facial expression - in fact I would say he was totally blank, just eating the dinner from transparent bento boxes, on the floor, with the Chinese music coming out from his mobile phone. But, looking at him, tears suddenly filled my eyes. It was, of course, the pathetic tears of self pity, as I felt, at the sight of him on the floor, eating alone and listening to music, that I have seen my very self.
My guess is that he is what in Singapore is called a 'guest worker', or temporary immigrant worker. Sunday is perhaps his only day off in a week, and he is alone, so he sits on the floor in a public library, seeing, I'm sure as he does, busy families, student couples, noisy children passing him by. Many would have thought that his playing music loud was bad manners and annoying, though where he sat was outside the glass wall bounded library area.
We are not really different... We are going through very much the same thing in our totally unrelated and non-intersecting lives. In a place which is not home, all by oneself, fighting and struggling at the moment, hoping to make life a little bit better in the future. That, of course, is the heroic narrative. The reality for him, let me guess, is that there is little he can do on a Sunday, as he does not have money, that's why he is here to make it. Neither does he know many people here, and perhaps he hasn't made friends from the workplace - who knows, his workmates might be indian or Bangladeshi guest workers with whom he cannot converse, or even Chinese people from different parts of China. He has nowhere to spend his Sunday - I suppose his dormitory is not very comfortable either. So he finds the public library, a space that belongs to ostensibly everyone. There is free air-conditioning here, you see, and it's much easier to pass a day's time - at least he doesn't need to sweat. He doesn't want to read anything serious - after a week of what must be quite tiring work. He knew he'd be hungry at meal times, so he had brought packed meals, to be eaten while playing music that comforts him - those music had been in his phone before he came here. They travelled with him to Singapore. They were memories and comforts from home....
As for my reality: university libraries don't open on Sundays, and where I live - a room rented from a local family - has no aircon either. I have been working for an entire week too...Two weeks in fact! since I arrived in Singapore....read articles to revise an article draft, and then read for writing another piece. I'm tired too, but I can't rest, as I have set myself the task of reading for a module on literary theory on weekends- they have to be finished with in the weekend, they mustn't interfere with my main work, but I want to learn literary theory too. I couldn't help falling asleep at one point in the afternoon on the sofa in the library, but after that I gorged on a super thick sweet kopi and carried on with Socrates's unending discourse.
We are just the same, really, the two of us. Working reasonably hard, hoping life will turn better one day, meanwhile compromising to get whatever little bit of comfort that is within our reach: he by listening to music from motherland, I by inhaling cigarette smoke and hearing the familiar sounds of British accented English from the BBC world service. We are doing substantively different things, but I can recognise myself when I see him sitting on the floor, bearing whatever life means. Our days, this ordinary Sunday spent in a community library in the west part of Singapore, are negligible drops in the deluge of human history; but we each, in our dogged naivety and doomed optimism, believe that we are walking towards our dream goals.
"I walk this empty street
On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams"
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