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It’s the end of the year, and as 2010 approaches, it is the time for change.

I’ve done the unwise - leaving my job at the Ministry of Education without first securing another, but somewhere in my heart I know that it is the right thing to do. It is both the fleeing from the inevitable apathy that comes with dogmatically sticking to a set routine, and the embracing of possibilities.

And all I have at hand are a set of vague plans.

As with any plan, there is a need to pray, and ultimately the surrender of our plans and submission to God’s. Guess I’ll come clean and say that I don’t know what He has in store for me either.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

This resonates so, so much, and so deeply.

It’s odd that two separate parts of my past would converge in Monterey last week.

===

There was a young boy once who would show up every now and then at the basketball court. He was chubby, and being a few years younger than the rest of the guys, considerably shorter. Not one of the regulars of this particular court, he didn’t get to play very much and would just shoot the ball around on his own.

He kept doing that until one day he wasn’t so short anymore (still a little chubby though), and we asked him to join us. The time and effort he had put in shooting the ball all that time paid off - he certainly had more game than many of us.

I never knew his name, until many years later when Cheryl brought him to church.

His name is Leon, and I remembered the relentless work ethic he brought to the courts so many years before.

I also noticed that he was now taller than me.

===

20 years ago I was entrusted with taking care of a young girl over the course of a 4 day church camp. I was supposed to write letters of encouragement to her, pin it up on a huge notice board without revealing who I was. I don’t remember what we wrote each other, but I do remember it being deep and heartfelt.

Over the years I have seen her transform from a little girl who wore frilly victorian-styled dresses to the amazing woman before us. Though the years and geographic proximity would render us more distant, I have always felt entrusted with her well-being, albeit through thought or prayer.

It was until she brought Leon to church when I realised that this imaginary role now belonged to him. I remember my initial reaction being one of relief. This boy would definitely try his darndest.

I’ve been creating the website for Teachers’ Day for the last few years. It’s a site to celebrate Teachers’ Day in Singapore, which falls on the 1st of September. We’d normally invite the public to write short notes to the teachers who have touched their lives in one way or another.

As part of system testing, I’d always write to Mr. Ng, who taught me English Literature in secondary school. I’ve not been able to find Mr. Ng, not on Google or Facebook, not on MOE’s internal staff directory. I hoped that he’d eventually read my short messages and get back to me.

Because he was a really special teacher to me.

When all other teachers were exasperated beyond belief at my disinclination (to put it mildly) towards the doing of assigned homework, Mr. Ng took time to converse with me, person to person. I loved literature, but always found writing down answers on a piece of paper the most inefficient way to expand the mind. It was during my many conversations with Mr. Ng that I found a fellow journeyman who hadn’t lost the awe and wonder that came with reading wonderfully written lines. We spoke about Shakespeare and about life; and he never did ask me to hand in his homework.

It is an intimate relationship when you know someone by the pieces of text they hold dearest in their hearts. Mr. Ng’s favourite poem was “Convergence of the twain” by Thomas Hardy. Its cadence and the build up towards the impending collision between the Titanic and the iceberg appealed to him, he said.

It strikes me deeply that I’ll never have the chance to tell him how wonderful he was to me.

This year, like the other years, I built the Teachers’ Day website and launched my first dedication message via Twitter. I received an email hours later from a friend, who also happened to be many years my junior in secondary school, asking whether or not I had known that Mr. Ng had passed on a few years back.

The finality of it all sunk in. I was at a wedding dinner when I read the email, and everything went about in a blur. The one thought that kept coming back was: “I missed it.” I should have said thanks earlier. I should have spent more time with the people that matter. I shouldn’t have procrastinated.

Like the poem, we all see this coming, for all our relationships. It’s what you do between the first line and the last line that matters.

It’s been a crazy past few weeks, thanks in large part to the AWARE saga and the H1N1 virus. Add to that 1 year-old Caleb’s experimentation into alternative sleep patterns and milestones at work, you’ve got yourself an involuntary blogging hiatus.

In the midst of all this, it has dawned on me that it is time for change. It was out of a deep desire to gather myself and retool for the future that I applied to Medill’s Masters Programme in Journalism. The letter of admission on my table, and I am forced to think hard now that the deadline fast approaches.

Among the multitude of thoughts floating about randomly in my head:

• The cost of the the programme: pretty much my life-savings
• The need for education: I’m interested in new media journalism rather than old-school print, and a lot of it could be learned doing rather than studying
• Believe it or not, the fact that Medill requires me to use a Windows machine. The community I’ve been a part of: the designers, coders, great communicators are predominantly Apple people. I’m a little shaken that content at Medill is tied to a platform
• Medill is a top-notch journalism programme and maybe part of me seeks that validation as it would open doors to the established media giants now seeking to reinvent themselves
• But that would mean relocating. I see so much potential for Singapore to grow, to come into her own as a mature society, and I want to be a part of that.
• Sometimes I feel that the best way to do that is actually outside of the government, although being inside has many benefits as well.
• Maybe I am a journalist. I am in love with storytelling and the exploration of issues.

I don’t know what exactly it is I have to do, except that I’ve never been comfortable with routine. Like muscles, jobs, roles and their players need to be broken and rebuilt to grow stronger.

I need suggestions. You guys got any?

Dearest Anne and Caleb,

The year was 2003 and Aunty Min and I were students in Tucson, Arizona. In the evening, I drove to the mountains to photograph the sunset, as I often did, while Aunty Min caught back-to-back episodes of “Friends”.

The skies were a flat grey - terrible conditions for a sunset - and it was threatening to rain. Were it not for the narrow mountain roads that made it hard for me to turn back, I wouldn’t have driven all the way to Gates Pass.

Every evening, the carpark at Gates Pass would be 3/4 filled, with families hiking up the trails and couples snuggling up the side of the mountain waiting for sunset. I was the only one there this evening, and it didn’t look as it I was going to see any sunset at all due to the very thick cloud cover. I took a short hike up to the vantage point, looked around a bit and headed back to the car.

“Wasted trip”, I thought to myself.

As I started the engine, the skies glowed a most unreal blue. I grabbed my camera, ran out and took photos from the parking lot.

Like Shawn Colvin’s song goes, “I never saw blue like that before”.

In my opinion, the main impediment stopping Singaporeans of this generation from making a similar breakthrough to that of our forebears (LKY’s generation) is our obsession with competition. Singapore’s particular idiosyncrasy is that if you look closely enough, we care less about winning than about making the other party lose. Point is, the obsession with making the other person lose is driving us apeshit crazy.

A Singaporean will go to an expensive buffet. Rather than enjoying the good food and ambience, his first inclination is to “attack” the high-ticket items in order to justify the money he’s paying for the buffet. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t like oysters, or prefers cod to crab. He does it so that the establishment doesn’t win, without for a second realising that his arrangement renders both parties losers.

What I’m trying to define here is an extension of the popular Singaporean adjective “kiasu”, which denotes a fear of losing. We’ve actually gone one-up, I feel. Not only must we not lose, the other person / organisation / government / country must be made to lose.

But in the words of the ephemerally-famous Jon Stewart, “this is not a [expletive] game”. Working on a win-lose model restricts us immensely. While it served to move us from third-world status to first-world, it is incompatible with any possible evolution towards a higher form of society. There is no noble cause in obsessive competition, no moral lessons or goodwill. There is only the raw animal instinct for survival, and we will stay at this base level if we continue the way we are - content to snap at everybody else and at each other, always bemoaning the fact that someone has it better than us. More money. More happiness. More.

We have missed the forest for the trees. We are failing to see that we have plenty, and with it a responsibility to help those who do not have as much. In this time of need, let us redefine ourselves as a people of action, willing to do what is right at our own expense, rather than waiting for the phantom hand of government to right all wrongs while we snipe from our armchairs.

I think we’ve come along far enough, at least economically, to realise that no one needs to lose. It would be an utter shame for people to be in desperate need while collectively we have so much.

And so it was without fanfare I enter my 32nd year of being. Well, no fanfare except for the dozens and dozens of birthday wishes on Facebook, my colleagues singing happy birthday during a division meeting and my family showing up at my office cubicle while I was at said meeting. Ok, so maybe there was a little fanfare. Faith always drums it up, making every birthday amazing.

I sit at a peculiar crossroads. Many of my peers have left Singapore, some for work and many more to study. Graduate school is the mid-life crisis antidote of choice these days, and I wonder if heading back to an academic environment will do me some good.

What I am about to write somewhat pertains to education, so the standard disclaimer applies: this is solely my view and not that of my employer’s, you know the drill.

The Singapore papers reported recently that Singaporean students were turning away from scholarships that came attached with conditions (in this case being in the employ of the sponsor for a specified number of years) and choosing instead scholarships that came without those conditions.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

In the Straits Times online forums, 2 responses were published:

1. Mr Jason Chiam who wrote that “scholars have a moral obligation to the sponsoring organisation” and;
2. Ms Corinne Hoo who feels disappointed that “today’s youth have little capacity for resilience and perseverance”

In 2000 I enrolled in the University of Arizona. I did not apply for a scholarship of any kind, but they offered me a bond-free scholarship via an email. I replied to ask if there were any conditions attached, specifically a bond of employment. While the details were that I had to maintain certain grades in order to keep the scholarship money going for the whole duration of undergraduate study, there was no bond of any kind. They wrote back, saying they were giving me the scholarship because they believed I could contribute to society after graduation. Not American society. Humankind.

I flew back the moment my undergraduate studies were completed. I made a promise to a girl in Singapore and I did not want to keep her waiting. So I left America and the University of Arizona. I left the people who provided me the most fulfilling phase of my formal education. Even today my heart feels the weight of gratitude towards the university, the country of America and her people. Maybe that is the “moral obligation” Mr Jason Chiam speaks of. Maybe he would consider me an ingrate for returning so soon, but Arizona has never solicited a single cent from me, nor has she made me feel guilty for the unpaid debt.

I decided to pay it forward, hoping to apply myself in the improvement of my home country. As many of you know, I now work for the Ministry of Education, helping her communicate in the increasingly complex spectrum of online media parents and students use today. I have endeavoured to go the extra mile, often engaging in efforts to improve the online communications of the Singapore Government as a whole. This is me paying it forward. Not out of moral obligation or for a fixed term stipulated on a piece of paper. I am driven by the faith shown in me by an organisation and a people not at all related to me.

Jason and Corrine are probably right to point out that some scholars feel entitled to a free education free of responsibility and obligation. But we need to bear in mind that it is a cultural problem not solved by the chains of forced labour.

Scholarships and bonds (I’ll use the term to describe the conditional scholarships) are totally different in nature. The former is crafted with hope and in good faith, the latter carved in the hard letter of the law. The first is a gift, the second a contract.

That our students no longer feel beholden when presented a gift of good faith is a failure on our part. We have not taught them gratitude. We haven’t given them many opportunities to learn. Our purely pragmatic perspective of the world doesn’t allow us to give without expecting anything in return. Our bonds are carefully calculated and embedded with repayment clauses to reduce risk because we view these top students as human capital, not humans. After years of conditioning, many of our children have forgotten the beat of their own heart.

It is all business, and they take what they can.

Moral responsibility isn’t a bond. Perseverance isn’t gritting one’s teeth while in chains. The claustrophobia of being bound to words on a page, signed while barely adolescent, destroys the human spirit. The display of the intrinsic good, human to human, just as the folks of Arizona showed me, will live in me all my life.

That is my bond. And I serve it gladly.

Maybe Faith is right in that there seems to be a need within me to be alone.

Here, thousands of miles away in Tucson, I retrace the steps I took in college while watching videos of Anne and Caleb on Flickr. It has given me time to fully appreciate where God has taken me. His blessings are truly more than anything I could have dreamed up or wanted.

I spent most of yesterday visiting my old haunts in School. Where I watched my first basketball game, my first viewing of a planetary object, my first hail storm…Tucson has been a place of many firsts.

Many things have changed here. The university has become a little more commercial and less bohemian. Classrooms are named after corporate sponsors. Open fields are not entrances to underground computer labs. Again I’m confronted with the reality that things change. Nothing is ever the same.

Dinner with Jonathan Louie last night reminded me of how long I had been gone. Mutual friends have gotten married, some are new parents. Many of moved to other cities. Teenagers I knew have graduated from college. I, too have changed. I’m a husband and a father. I’m coming to grips that I’m a public servant, and it’s time to change what that means, rather than shudder at the thought of what it connotes.

It’s been a good time to rethink things.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies
And all that ‘s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellow’d to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair’d the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

- Lord Byron

Faith got a haircut yesterday. She looks stunning.