The Long Camp

I’m typing this from inside the room I’ve rented to live in for the weekdays; there is no Internet, so my only available entertainment is playing games or listening to music or watching videos; I almost think I’ll revive my NaNoWriMo project one month early. Still, working is more enervating than I’d expected and so I’m taking my time acclimatising to the different living schedule. After all, I’ve got another twenty to thirty years, maybe even forty if I’m amazingly long-lived, of this sort of thing to go through.

I suppose it’s safe to say life now is decidedly different from how it was in Singapore; oddly enough, I find myself even more dependent on other people now than I was. There I had very little preventing me from, say, going off to lunch at one end of Singapore and having dinner at the other end, having wandered my way through the intervening distance through the evening; now I find that if I want to go to lunch at all I need to ask for help. In fact I find myself less free than I had thought; perhaps it is because of my natural instinct to swaddle myself with commitments and promises; perhaps it is simply the circumstances I find myself in.

They’re not all bad, of course. In fact a lot about my circumstances is good; but ‘tis the natural habit to focus on the flies in the ointment, and such is my tendency these days. But I shall start by telling you the past few days of my life, in which a lot has happened—not necessarily interesting telling or reading, but important enough to me to warrant recording.

So you already know that I was learning from my cousin to drive, and practicing under his guidance at driving to regions nearby the ancestral home—which means regions not farther than about half an hour away from it by car, though with errands and everything else factored in, one of those runs took nearly three hours of driving, and left my passengers very worried for my safety (though also suitably impressed at my speed of learning and improvement). I didn’t think very much of their worry, being more in a hurry to get better at driving and prepare to move and start work than anything else. These usually consisted of a lot of worried and frantic praying and discussing possible options with people over Skype and emailing my soon-to-be superiors; but by Friday things seemed to have fallen into place, more or less.

On Thursday I had finally given up hope of living with co-workers and thus commuting back and forth by carpool, and so made some phone calls and sent some emails, and amazingly rapidly established a house-viewing on Friday evening, during which the landlord was established to be the son of the ex-headmaster of the primary school that my eldest cousin had attended; the room was seen and pronounced more than satisfactory, and it was decided that I would move in on Sunday night and collect keys and pay the rent and deposit on that day, and so forth, so Friday night I was quite buoyant.

My driving was established on Sunday morning to be good enough to go on most nearby roads without heavy assistance, apart from a tendency to not stop at junctions and to forget to signal before turning—which still weren’t too bad, given that I always remembered to do them once reminded. But in the afternoon I was suddenly besieged by three aunts and my grandmother and my paternal uncle, who had conferred amongst themselves and decreed that I was not going to drive up to work because it was unsafe and full of crime, and if I went up there in my car (it’s 17 years old, registered in a different state, and rather large) it was sure to be stolen regardless of how careful I was, or nails and broken glass would be sprinkled in my path while motorcycles raced up beside me and slashed my tires and the drivers emptied shotgun shells into my windows while kidnapping me. And all of this was entirely unpreventable through any amount of carefulness on my part; so the only thing to do (said they) was to stay home and call up and say so sorry for the amazingly late notice, but I wasn’t going to work unless they could provide me with armoured transport in which my safety was completely assured.

(I rather got the drift that they were more worried about the car than about me, given how much they talked about how precious the car was to my father and how horrible it would be to have to repair it or if it were lost.)

At any rate it was very frustrating trying to reassure them and being confronted with speeches of “if they want to hire you so badly they should just give you a car!” which I thought rather went against the whole “cars get stolen in minutes” speech… At any rate the upshot was that my cousin would send me up, and I arranged (saying the car was unavailable, which was true) for a colleague to transport me from the factory to the rented place and back; and so Sunday ended with me safely installed in my new surroundings, still dissatisfied at having learned to drive and apparently arbitrarily prevented from the end goal of all that learning—and so suddenly, and without any chance of negotiation at all either.

Monday morning I became a white-collar worker, and so far it’s been a good experience; I’m learning plenty about the job, and everybody’s friendly even if they do rib me a bit about being the youngest in the company and on my first ever job, too; I still think I want to drive up here eventually, sometime in the next month or so—if not then I’ll put some money together and go get myself a decent second-hand car, or else I’ll get a bike and then I’ll become very healthy indeed, though I’ll need a poncho in case of rain. I just worry that the family’s strange and rather unreasonable (I think) fear of me being in the city will last much too long.

At the moment, though, I’ll just learn all I can and work as much as I can and during the weekends I’ll try to find some way to persuade them that the car is just as safe with me as it would be locked away with them.