Like Rizal, I wonder who’s the next person to read this entry, and when would that be. Perhaps in the next hour, perhaps the next day, or perhaps, in a year’s time.
SSEAYP was a very special experience for me, because it created an artificial community of existence above and beyond our ordinary lives. One ceases to be oneself on board the ship, or even before that, as we all form a new identity and awareness of self the moment SSEAYP goes into full swing on the day we left Singapore. As the flight took off, we stripped bare of our past selves, and entered into the liminal stage noted by Turner where we are not yet what we would be, nor what we once were.
On board the flight, aside from the apparent excitement from everyone, lurks also certain tension.
Tokyo was beautiful. We behaved like country pumpkins who got into the city for the first time, and kids who have never been so far away from home with only their friends by their side. From the first bento dinner to the first night out wandering the streets of Tokyo, we were full of awe and freshness of the mind. We behaved like birds out of cages, running about, taking photos and disappearing into the crowds only to be found by other SPYs after a while thanks to the very uniformed jackets we had on. Decorum, SPYs! You are wearing a jacket with your country flag! =P
Then there were the home stays and youth conferences. Many of us had experienced onsen and open shower in Japan, which had been completely pampering especially since I went to Ehime, the prefecture known for its hot springs. I still recall everyone praying not to have his/her home stay in Tokyo, because there’s this prevailing thought that doing so would be completely boring, touristy and unauthentically Japanese. There was also a rumour going around that the later the alphabetical order of your SG group, the further your homestay prefecture would be. Me, I just wished to stay somewhere really rural, near the rice fields, or the mountains, so that I could either live like a farmer’s wife or a samurai’s. Either way, to be domesticated in a very Japanese way was my objective.
Alas, my experience has been very different. I was treated like an honourable guest everywhere I went, the Japanese youths I met at the prefecture were extremely friendly and warm towards me and so are my homestay parents. The only remotely Japanese thing I experienced was to cycle around the area and on one of the longest bridge in Matsuyama on a beautifully sunny and cool day. After which, we went to make mochi from the freshly steamed rice and oranges. You could still see the steam rising from the mochi as we took turns to ‘hammer’ them into dough-like things (excuse my lack of a better word).
Up till this point, I think I should stop, because it sounds just too trivial to be recorded down like a grocery list.
Whatever happened during the 53 days of SSEAYP are definitely unforgettable.
They said that what happens in SSEAYP stays in SSEAYP. And many things do. However, more often than not, what happened in SSEAYP left behind a trail for the PYs to pick up in the days after SSEAYP. Friendships continue via facebook most of the times, and love, well love! They either end with happily ever after, to be continued or lingered on with a tinge of bittersweet nostalgia.
It’s not uncommon to find PYs visiting each other in the weeks, months or even years following the programme. We have hosted quite a number of PYs thus far. While other PYs visit, our own PYs are scattered around, busy with their own work and lives.
Everytime I chance upon a photograph or a song from the SSEAYP days, I would helplessly stop momentarily whatever I was doing to recollect those moments, before sealing the moment with a forceful smile and a sigh. It’s not that the moment’s anything remotely regrettable, but that the moment’s regrettably transient and any effort on my part to capture it through reliving the moment only makes it all the more distant. And so I relive the memory time and again, with the hope to hold on to the experience, only to realize that with each replay of the scene, I lose some detail, replacing them with my own idealism. At the end of several replays, I lose sight of the original moment. That is why I avoid replaying them these days, because I am trying to hold on whatever’s left of the ephemeral beauty of my SSEAYP experience.
I am like Alice, and SSEAYP is like the wonderland which I stumbled upon in a strangely realistic dream of mine. In this dream, you experience all sorts of magical and eye-opening things, meet all kinds of people with very diverse idiosyncrasies. You go through everything unscathed. At the end of the journey, you sort of just wake up from this with only symbolic tokens that proved not much to others of what you actually went through, but meant much more than what you could ever experience again in your life. That is SSEAYP. My very own wonderland.
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