49!

Happy birthday Singapore! Only one more to the big 50!

This year's National Day Parade was great, fantastic performances all around. Last year I was stuck in a hotel room in Canberra without an Internet connection and missed the parade. I'd forgotten how stirring it is, watching the sheer energy of both the spectators and performers. For a short period of time, you truly feel connected with the rest of the country.

Brief digression here. I'd always felt something of an outsider. I'm not from one of the four main races of Singapore. My parents were both immigrants. Yet I don't belong to my supposed motherland either - I wasn't born there, I can barely construct a sentence my mother tongue, I don't identify with the typical attitudes of that nation. Perhaps that I why I cling so fiercely to the idea of being Singaporean. It is what I know, better than anything else. I speak fluent Singlish. I know most of the community songs. I can explain in excruciating detail what Total Defence is - I have the gold badge to prove it. I've spent most of my life here, and during the short periods of time I was elsewhere, I wasn't convinced that those were better places to live. Sure, perhaps I didn't quite fit as Singaporean in the beginning, but I am one now. And my hypothetical future children won't have problems fitting in. They'll be citizens of this country, through and through.

So, here's to Singapore. For a bit of nostalgia, the video below shows some images which would be familiar to my five year old self, and to anyone else who grew up here during the nineties.