Who Do You Aspire To Be?

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here.

I was going to write about the neighborhood petition I saw in the East Village on Sunday. A public park is to be renovated and, as part of its renovation, its twelve-foot fence will be lowered to four feet. Residents of the gentrified village are petitioning for the fence to remain twelve-foot high to keep "the park safe for children." I never thought I would see Trump's wall at the heart of supposedly liberal New York.

I was going to write about an on-line petition posted by the homophobic Facebook group Singaporeans Defending Marriage and Family. A school has adopted Mark Haddon's award-winning novel A Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time for supplementary reading. The haters want the book banned for its "foul and blasphemous language." Unable to appreciate the book's sensitive depiction of a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome, the book burners are the true vulgarians.

Instead of writing about either petition, I will write about a beautiful memorial service held for a colleague on Monday, who jumped from her apartment to her death. Ruth Helman was an inspiring history teacher to generations of students at my school. While upholding exacting standards for thinking and writing, she always had a soft spot for the quietly struggling student. Again and again the memorial service alluded to her love for teaching, as well as her love for Chekhov and Turgenev, for Handel, for French food and her "adopted" French family. For Ruth, culture was a lived experience, mobile and hybrid. From the first, I aspired to be like Ruth, in her passion and knowledge of her field, in her considered and precise manner of speaking. I left the service still aspiring to be like her.

Jee Leong Koh
December 12, 2019

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