As real as a mirage: the feelings I am trying to understand

It is going to be one week since I arrived in SF tomorrow. 7 days. One week. FOr some reason my sense of time seems to be a bit loose. Maybe it's jetlag, maybe it's missing home, everything seems elastic, stretchable. I keep thinking of everything in terms of Sing dollars, how everything seems unbelievably expensive, I wonder what time it is in SIngapore and how it would be great to just wander out onto the streets, without all that heavy burden of winter wear and enjoy that permenant summer, the air warm and sweet, tropics. I think of the sound of crickets I hear lying in my bed in afternoons and the creaking lizards at night when I creep downstaris to get a drink of water. How sometimes before a tropical storm I can feel the air heavy and tense the sky grey, masjestic. How I know some places hold certain memories and secrets only shared by the few for whom places have meaning.

I think about you guys. I wonder what you all are doing, are you all going about life as per normal, how we all have a kind of freedom in the place we are so familiar with, not that insecurities of a stranger in a foreign land. Travelling to a new place, always is exciting and the thought of starting a new life breath-taking. I still feel excitement, only sometimes mingled with a longing for home. Because this place is not yet mine. I have no one here except my sister I can truly call mine either. I read the letters you guys gave me again. They make me smile.

Travelling to a new place is like being in a permanent present, the future is not yet envisioned, because everything is so new. The past seems too distant, I must admit sometimes when I get too caught up in the new environment, the past just seem unreal. It is as if, that was another Oi Ying form another time. It can be very liberating, in a rather Buddhist kind of way. A firm ground only of the present and no ties to a past nor illusions of the future. An illusion almost that I have shaken off some unhappy past, or some desires for the future we all feel certain would past when we're in a familiar setting. But then that freedom sometimes hang in balance, sometimes it breaks down, and I feel lost. As if that past became suddenly disjointed, like after some earthquake, the continuity fractured. I still look for signs to speak of a underlying continuity in my life. Letters from you guys, ornaments I took along from my old room, my old blanket--now propety of my sister.

IT is perhaps a lesson on the impermenance of things. It is also lesson on the permanence of things. Chunhui, your letter speaks to my heart, maybe I'm a romantic but I choose to believe that places hold that resonance they preserve memories, but even being divorced from the places, the sights, the smell, the temperature...The vibrations on the strings which form a complex web in our lives still resound. But sometimes it is hard to believe in invisible, untouchable, intangible things--like a dream, a memory. like home--how we often forget it is not the place we are born into but something we build around ourselves, layers upon layers. It takes a cleaning of the slate to remind us that it is created, built by many. And so I miss it, now that I'm a little cold in my Uncle's room thinking of my place, things which give my life meaning. And wondering if it is meaningful to forget ourselves? Our past, is it truly removable? What would make someone choose to cut all those strings--how is it a form of self-discovery or how do people let go of their past and identity and devote themselves to a practise--a way of life which I can barely understand. And do they like me suffer from homesickness? Pastsickness? Identitysickness?