no place like home

singaporean flag

Home is a curious concept. What is home exactly? Is it the place where you hang your hat? Or maybe where your heart is? According to de Botton, at least, home seems to be the place where one is suffused with painful familiarity that mutates into ennui.

Singapore is a country that believes very firmly in progress and growth. Particularly since our past was nothing much to speak of, history is often relegated to the status of an afterthought or for the sake of tourism. Physically, the manifestation of this mindset shows itself in the incessant building going on the country, as buildings and houses barely ten years old are constantly being torn down to make way for newer, more modern ones. Subsequently, every time I go home for the holidays, I always feel slightly dislocated; in the midst of things that should seem so familiar, there’s always something to jar me into the realization that things have changed, and I wasn’t around to see it.

Yet even with the sense of alienation, I invariably feel bored and claustrophobic within a couple of weeks of having been in Singapore. Having bridged the gap between third world fishing village and first world economy in record time, Singapore is extremely focused on the financial frontier, at the great expense of everything else, particularly the arts. Furthermore, being barely more than wide, there is literally nowhere to go in Singapore nor anything to do. As such, less and less time is needed each time I’m back to make me feel an intense urge to leave the island and I’m afraid that one day I will feel absolutely no impetus to return to Singapore.

The end result of all of this is simply a sense that I don’t really belong anywhere in the world. For convenience’s sake, I still refer to Singapore as home, but the word is rapidly losing the heartwarming connotation it’s meant to have in abundance. How is it possible for a person to feel so bored in a place so unsettlingly foreign?