Anthology
of an
Ordinary Life

by Lawrence Tan

Spring of 2006

Prologue

In a conversation with an old schoolmate of mine regarding his trip to China, he described certain places that are so remote, that time seems to slow down to a crawl and most of the ancient ways of life still prevail. These communities are mostly self-sufficient; the people are happy without much ambition and rarely need to travel to the world outside, just like their ancestors hundreds of years ago. Furthermore, thanks to their remote locations, these communities have so far succeeded in avoiding the frontal impact of the annual double-digit economic growth of the country. On one evening along the riverbank that runs through the city, my schoolmate witnessed a group of men bellowing out a few verses of a folk song, to which a few girls on a balcony across the small street started to sing in reply. This went on for a while. I can only imagine how beautiful that would sound! I cannot remember if I have ever seen such happy people myself.

Despite this happy story, I am having a little trouble trying to picture how someone could live an entire life in one place or even be born and die of old age in the same house. In my mind, when these people look back in time, they would not recall much because there was not much to remember. Admittedly, these rather uneventful lives could have occurred more often in the pockets of peaceful periods in human history.

At my age, just the mere thought of looking back at my life and failing to see anything but a blur of a number of forgotten years should have disturbed and frightened me deeply. However, that did not happen to me, and I believe that it did not happen to my generation; most of us have been affected and scarred by tragedies and sufferings caused directly or indirectly by the war—the Vietnam War that is. Most of us who survived have plenty of stories to tell. Even though my stories seem to be unique and indeed the mosaic of my life, from a further perspective they are merely a few small pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of my generation. Within that context, my stories are just those of an ordinary life.

I have always treasured my past—the good and the bad times. I always have in me nostalgic feelings for things that I once possessed. I have the sustaining feelings of longing for a certain time, a certain place and the characters that had been intertwined in my life in the distant past. As time goes by, my memory starts to fail me of the smaller details of things, like a disintegrating photograph weathered through time. I am sure someday there will be nothing left but just a blur in my mind. A certain smell or a familiar tune or melody can bring my heart instantly back to that lost time and place. All I have to do then is to close my eyes… I like to communicate and to share beautiful things. After all, when I leave this world, these very same thoughts that I am trying communicate are the only things that are really worth anything. For these very reasons, I try to carefully package these images and feelings and keep them as close to me as I can and bring them along with me for the rest of my journey. I have recorded some of the more significant events of my life, will record more as time permits, and will put them together like a scrapbook in the following pages.

Although some of these fragments of memoirs seem to have a chronological sequence, they are intentionally scattered and mixed with other independent dissertations and poems. As with this collection itself, not all the pieces that appear in it necessarily have a beginning or an end. In fact, I hope that after one finishes reading these pages, the images will seem to blur together as if one was waking up from a long dream with the feelings still lingering. As for me, I would not want the melodies interrupted, nor would I want to be awakened from my dreams.