The Santo Discovery
And the world once again proved itself to be incredibly small.
Along the way from Taichung into Nantou/ Sun-moon Lake, I made what was possibly one of the most amazing discoveries in my 4 years in NUS.
And it all started from an innocent question to Cindy: 'So is Santo from Jakarta?'
'No, he's from Aceh.'
What followed was a kind of a conversation you hardly ever get; the kind mingled with shock, surprise, tears, joy, strength and weakness. All at once.
You see, some of you know that when I was in Year 1, I went to Banda Aceh with a certain organisation to help out with some tsunami relief work. We worked mainly with the orphans and with the distribution of some simple sponsored food supplies. In the process of our work, we visited a Chinese temple in Aceh. I remember it was one of the few places in Aceh offering refuge and shelter to the displaced Chinese community, and I remember Hobbit and Jacq-jacq cutting cucumbers to make pickles for the lunch meal of the residents there.
What began as an innocent visit was to become a deep life lesson for me in reflecting about the power of hope. I saw a man who lived in the temple, and he had come to collect his lunch at about 2pm; it was after the lunch hour already. He scooped his rice and some of the dishes out of the big basins that the temple used to contain the food for the residents, and proceeded to sit down and partake his lunch. It was the way he ate his lunch that struck me so deeply. For most people, when we eat, we eat because we need the energy to continue to do what we are intending to do next. But this man, he ate with a listless look on his face, and the look in his eyes told me that he had nothing more to look forward to after his lunch of rice and some simple cucumbers.
I knew, at that instant, that he must have lost someone precious. And he did. He recounted the story of how he had lost his wife to the waves. The reason was simple enough: he said he didn't hold on to her hand tight enough. But oh, the emotion behind it, no words could ever express. How do you express the grief of losing your most beloved one in something as limited as words? Is language truly limitless as our secondary school literature teachers would have us believe? Or is there a depth in each of us human beings that language will never come close to reflecting?
His story stuck in my mind, as did his face. That day, I learnt how important hope is to sustaining a human being. His story stuck too, because of its simplicity and its complexity all mingled together.
In the process of speaking to us, this uncle revealed to us that his son was also studying in NUS, majoring in Chemistry, and said that we could look him up when we got back to Singapore. Which we didn't.
At this point, you can probably guess the remainder of the storyline.
That uncle's son.... is Cindy's boyfriend...
Stories compared, details tallied. And at that moment, it felt as if the world was so small again. And I felt human again for that short little while. My participation in listening to the suffering of that one man didn't feel distant and irrelevant anymore, but so close and so gripping.
Cindy allowed her tears to flow, and I could only look out of the bus window in stunned silence.
It wasn't that far a possibility for me to find him, to be honest. But I didn't expect to find him so close by, and such a long time later. In fact, I even saw him at Changi when we landed from Taiwan.
Somehow, Cindy and I had become deeper friends because of this strange, unexpected connection.
We had become human, again.
Along the way from Taichung into Nantou/ Sun-moon Lake, I made what was possibly one of the most amazing discoveries in my 4 years in NUS.
And it all started from an innocent question to Cindy: 'So is Santo from Jakarta?'
'No, he's from Aceh.'
What followed was a kind of a conversation you hardly ever get; the kind mingled with shock, surprise, tears, joy, strength and weakness. All at once.
You see, some of you know that when I was in Year 1, I went to Banda Aceh with a certain organisation to help out with some tsunami relief work. We worked mainly with the orphans and with the distribution of some simple sponsored food supplies. In the process of our work, we visited a Chinese temple in Aceh. I remember it was one of the few places in Aceh offering refuge and shelter to the displaced Chinese community, and I remember Hobbit and Jacq-jacq cutting cucumbers to make pickles for the lunch meal of the residents there.
What began as an innocent visit was to become a deep life lesson for me in reflecting about the power of hope. I saw a man who lived in the temple, and he had come to collect his lunch at about 2pm; it was after the lunch hour already. He scooped his rice and some of the dishes out of the big basins that the temple used to contain the food for the residents, and proceeded to sit down and partake his lunch. It was the way he ate his lunch that struck me so deeply. For most people, when we eat, we eat because we need the energy to continue to do what we are intending to do next. But this man, he ate with a listless look on his face, and the look in his eyes told me that he had nothing more to look forward to after his lunch of rice and some simple cucumbers.
I knew, at that instant, that he must have lost someone precious. And he did. He recounted the story of how he had lost his wife to the waves. The reason was simple enough: he said he didn't hold on to her hand tight enough. But oh, the emotion behind it, no words could ever express. How do you express the grief of losing your most beloved one in something as limited as words? Is language truly limitless as our secondary school literature teachers would have us believe? Or is there a depth in each of us human beings that language will never come close to reflecting?
His story stuck in my mind, as did his face. That day, I learnt how important hope is to sustaining a human being. His story stuck too, because of its simplicity and its complexity all mingled together.
In the process of speaking to us, this uncle revealed to us that his son was also studying in NUS, majoring in Chemistry, and said that we could look him up when we got back to Singapore. Which we didn't.
At this point, you can probably guess the remainder of the storyline.
That uncle's son.... is Cindy's boyfriend...
Stories compared, details tallied. And at that moment, it felt as if the world was so small again. And I felt human again for that short little while. My participation in listening to the suffering of that one man didn't feel distant and irrelevant anymore, but so close and so gripping.
Cindy allowed her tears to flow, and I could only look out of the bus window in stunned silence.
It wasn't that far a possibility for me to find him, to be honest. But I didn't expect to find him so close by, and such a long time later. In fact, I even saw him at Changi when we landed from Taiwan.
Somehow, Cindy and I had become deeper friends because of this strange, unexpected connection.
We had become human, again.
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