Daylight 02

The rollercoaster period from 11 to 20 is always the most turbulent and out-of-control time in anyone's life. I spent it learning that the world could be a very cruel place, a wonderful place, a place of abandonment and desire, a place to weave webs and to be entrapped in the snares of others. I learnt too many things, and yet, perhaps too few.

It was in this age that the Moorcock Introductory became real to me. What I call the Moorcock Introductory is found in books written by Michael Moorcock, one of the pioneers of the New Wave SF movement. It reads like this:

In those days there were oceans of light and cities in the skies and wild flying beasts of bronze. There were herds of crimson cattle that roared and were taller than castles. There were shrill, viridian things that haunted bleak rivers. It was a time of gods manifesting themselves upon our world in all her aspects; a time of giants who walked on water; of mindless sprites and misshapen creatures who could be summoned by an ill-considered thought but driven away only on pain of some fearful sacrifice; of magics, phantasms, unstable nature, impossible events, insane paradoxes, dreams come true, dreams gone awry, of nightmares assuming reality.

It was a rich time and a dark time.

And so it was that I began and ended my second decade, immersed in learning that the world which seemed real was not at all the world which really existed.

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Here is my second decade.

I completed my primary education as the eldest sibling of three. At this time, looking at myself with 'sober judgement', I realised that I was the least prepossessing of the three, and that apart from a treacherously well-trained mind, I was probably the least intelligent as well. This was not a cause for discontent or envy, but it did affect my positioning. If you are unsure of your raw talent or ability to charm, you had better develop what talent you have.

And so I did. I took up the study of the life sciences and everything else I could study which I was certain the education system wouldn't provide in timely fashion. I began to read a dozen books or more a week; sometimes, that many a day. My mother complained that reading in dim light would ruin my eyes; I countered by saying that dim light never hurt anyone's eyes but strong light had been known to blind.

But my motivation was not to crush my 'rivals', although it might have seemed so. My motivation was something people still find hard to understand: each of us has rare abilities, although perhaps not granted in large measure – mine was the ability to process information in large chunks and come up with something useful. It was like playing with derivatives on the intellectual stock market. My favourite poem was Eliot's Prufrock:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous...

The year was 1979, and I was making myself into a one-man think-tank.

The 1980s began with me entering secondary school. Life was turned on its head in many ways. Chess players who had been serious rivals in primary school at the inter-school tournaments were now classmates and team-mates. Old rivalries were shelved and new ones made. And in that year, Dad decided we would all go back to the fenlands for a long break. My education never really recovered from that. Already weird, disjointed, and self-motivated in eccentric ways, it became even more incompatible with the national education system.

I remember my brother producing little bound volumes on the pre-revolution Russian monarchy and other abstruse topics. He was only nine. I was discovering miniatures wargaming and the delights of building your own computer. I took up courses in self-defence (with weapons and without), economics, pottery, metalworking; I was forced also to play rugby in the dead of winter and shower in ice-cold water afterwards. It was a lunatic time. After a year had passed, I had gained 10 cm of height and about 22 kg of mass. It was amazing.

Returning to Singapore was really traumatic. It was no longer possible for me to use my brain in its most natural way; rather, I had to work at compartmentalising knowledge and presenting it for the sake of examinations. This was not wholly bad – it taught me self-discipline and gave me the capacity to endure self-abuse. I spent a lot more time in church, and worked hard at reading through the Bible and what other people thought about it. These were fruitful years; I learnt that if you trained under conditions of firm discipline and a heavy load, you could learn a kind of dangerous single-mindedness which had many useful applications.

1984 came, and with it the dawning realisation that Orwell had been right about the philosophy and technology, but not the history. It was pretty obvious that Orwell's world was with us, but that enough good things remained for it not to be that obvious. I enjoyed the 1980s because I transited my adolescence in those years, but like many exciting and interesting feats of daring and bare survival, it is not something I would do again.

I became a pawn of the state on 17 December 1985. For the next few years, I learned all I could about modern warfare as a private soldier and then a specialist. Dad had sown the seeds in my first decade with his never-ending supply of West Point manuals and wargaming materials. Now they bore odd fruit. I began to help people simulate actual war, I learned skills of distraction, deception, and diversion. If I hadn't become a teacher, I might have tried to sign up for the long-term military plan.

My second decade ended while I was still in the armed forces. It was a wonderful time. People think that being in the military means loss of comfort and freedom. I think that's only true if you go in with false expectations. It can mean, as it did to me, independence and learning how to stand up for what is right under extreme pressure. It means learning how to reject a cigarette or sell a Bible while not looking like a total wuss. And at the end of it, it meant self-respect and personal bearing that nobody could take away.

It also meant that I emerged libertarian in political philosophy and a free-trader in economic philosophy. What a decade!

Daylight 01

It is the moment of the greatest fatigue of all my first forty years; it is the moment of exultation in which I am reminded that forty is both a period and the end of tribulation, a period and the end to youth. I am not old today. I am older than young, but not old. This is the beginning of my prime.

Frequently, my heart sings with Harry Belafonte, "Come, Mr Tally-man, tally me banana / Daylight come and I wanna go home..." This world is a temporal and temporary lodging; it is not my eternal home. But there are still bananas to pluck, stacks to build, renegade overseers to chastise and reproach. I am only a humble banana-man.

"This is my story, this is my song, praising my Saviour all the day long."

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Here is my first decade.

I was born in a little university town in East Anglia, a former swamp and breeding-place for odd fish and flies. The nearest water source was a muddy rivulet so shallow that it could be navigated by anything waterborne piloted by a man with a pole. I had odd neighbours – the man who blew things up and picked glass out of his own flesh for decades, the man who rewrote the history of time. It inured me to the awe of things intellectual. I was a year old. I would eventually return for a small slice of my education.

My brother was born some years later. I distinctly recall asking my father, "When will he be old enough to play with?" My father, with characteristic wisdom, replied, "Do you really want him to be old enough?" My father was the youngest in his family. I always wondered what he really meant by that, and was never brave enough to ask. My brother was the bright one, and also the noisy one. This has always been true.

When I was six and a bit, I went to school. Before that, desultory attempts had been made to entrench my backside in a playschool or other medieval torture-house. I defeated all such attempts by the simple device of falling ill and spreading plagues around each time I went. I ended up being largely home-schooled, which was true even when I got to high school.

Education had always been highly-regarded in my family. My venerable grand-aunties were trained pharmacists; grandfather was a scholar and a physician who could diagnose just by observation and acute listening (both to the patient and to the patient's body). My other grandparents were teachers with radical pedagogical methods; I will never forget my maternal grandfather's teaching machines and shelves of books all designed to help a person teach himself, and my maternal grandmother was able to infuse the word 'learn' (as in 'you WILL learn') with such trenchant force that neurons automatically aligned in military order when she spoke. It was a given that everyone ought to go to university, and I (naïve and very young) didn't realise how unusual that was.

I suffered in my first year at school. I had a second language, Mandarin, that nobody spoke – at home, we had many Chinese dialects, Malay, English, but none of that peculiarly harsh administrative tongue. I failed in the first semester and got an A in every final examination thereafter till the end of primary school. My granduncle the savant laughed and said, "Right now, three-quarters of all the people can't speak Mandarin at all; I can't do it myself. But when I'm done, 80% will speak some of it."

I was ten years old when they decided they would sell the land. It was terrible to see the broken hulk of the house, the devastation and ruin that followed as my childhood self-destructed. I have photos. I seldom look at them. They are taking too long to fade. It was the year that my father bought me my first encyclopaedia, a small five-volume set that seemed enormous. I treasured it then, and still do although it is now somewhat out of date. I began to study alchemy, and learnt the Mendeleevian model of the elements by heart. And it was then that I knew I would teach it some day.

My sister was born that year, early and purplish-red. Mother was fine one evening, helping with the preparations for Lunar New Year celebrations. That night, she was taken away while I lay sleeping. Dad told me to get back to sleep; everything was OK and Mum was off to the hospital. I woke and went to school, and after school my grandfather accosted me with the news that I had a sister. It was the year that I saw Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher drag the unwilling Harrison Ford into battle against the Death Star. It was a great year. And I was only ten.