"children ten years old wake and find themselves here, discover themselves to haev been here all along; is that sad? they wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest of from drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. they know the neighbourhood, theyc an read and write english, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an errily familiar life already well under way." annie dillard - an american childhood

it saddens me that much of what i read about singapore literature is majorly despondency and a longing for what is out there. when i read autobiographies and stories of protaganists describing their homelands and towns with great pride and rememberance, tracing their histories back a hundred, thousand years, myths, legends and all, i think back about my own childhood and realise i had a great time despite not having them rivers, lakes or castles or romanticised tragical pasts. maybe i can't really boast about my void deck singaporean history, because i didn't grow up staying in public housing, but i certainly can go on and on about my beautiful greenmeadows, perhaps with as much happiness as new yorkers are flushed with pride about their city.