Who Am I?

“Who am I?” was a question lingering in my head since the very moment I had any intellectual ability. Who am I? What makes me me? What makes me a Singaporean? Questions like these are simple yet complicated, straight forward yet amazingly difficult to answer. My identity, my life, my very existence must all be answered in this question. The truth might be frightening, you know it is, but somehow, you want to know, you want to understand; you want to uncover what “I” am.

A very ordinary story of the life of a very ordinary person of this age, the first thing that happens, I wake up to the sound of the alarm clock. A thirty minute bus ride takes me to school. I do not get the idea of going to school and all this stuff; it is not as though I fully enjoy it. But hey, when you ask yourself, you know that there are not a lot of things better to do right? Yeah, so, here I am, in school, with people I would not dare to say friends, yet, putting my self up to this monotonous lifetime. It is tome to go home. Ride on the bus home, and then finish your homework, have your dinner, shower, pack your bag, then sleep. Before I enter my dreams, I often ask myself, “Why did I just do what I did?” You know it sucks, but you do not seem to be able to change it and the best thing of all, it starts all over again tomorrow.

I was asked by a friend, “Have you ever thought about why you are here and why do things turned out the way they do?”

My answer was yes, and he asked again, “Then have you thought about your identity as a Singaporean?

Again my answer was yes. When I asked him why he asked be these questions, he replied that he only wanted to know, nothing much. I thought about these questions and realized, it is not “nothing much”. I questioned myself, “Why do I go to school?” I could not answer. I asked myself, “Why do I abide to rules?” I could not answer. I asked myself, “Why do I behave the way I do?” I still could not answer. “Why am I still here” was the question that made me sick. The concept of life itself is something I could not get. When our ancestors started walking on two feet, they lived to survive. They hunt, protect and multiply. It is do or die for them. What about us? We are no longer required to hunt or survive, which means that we are no longer the ordinary form of life. We are an evolved species with wisdom, which changes everything.
The difference with us and other species is that we have a society that we all belong to, and contribute to. We have lost our original instincts of survival, but we find a sense of belonging to the society, that is made up of everyone around you.

How do people define right and wrong? My answer is through studying the past experiences that they have experienced, or the things that happened in history. This also means that if things were to happen differently, things would also turn out differently. Well, that is common sense after all. Life is the same. What you experience makes you you. It writes and rewrites the rules that define you, and the rules that you live by. These experiences differ from person to person, just like DNA. After all this, what I am trying to say is, your experiences makes up who you are.

Singaporeans were stereotyped as people that are “all work and no play”. Well, it is quite true, but play is a unelectable part of our lives. Yes we go to school everyday, listening to the droning of teachers, yes we have a huge homework load, yes we have a busy schedule, but who in the world dose not? Being Singaporean is not about working and working. There is a reason for everything we do, and the reason for why we work is the fact that we want to progress as an individual, as a community, as a society, as a country. We do everything to the ultimate reason that we want to improve our country. This reasoning explains why we do what we do, and why we abide to rules, as it is all because of the will for the nation to progress. We are a young nation that has gone from nothing to a thriving and modern country in the short time of forty-six years. This is all brought about by the willingness of our past generations to commit to the nation, self improve for the nation, serve our nation and protect our nation, because without Singapore there would not be us, and without us, there would not be Singapore. The nation has gone through many highs and lows throughout the years before independence, merger and then separation, but it is the people, who made this happen. This explains why I have to do the things I do, for continuing the work of our past generations, for the next generation to continue and for them to enjoy and experiencing the things that we did, and probably more. But then, questions like “what makes me me” and ultimately “Who am I” is still unanswered.

These questions go deeper than my identity as a citizen. These questions, well, I cannot answer now. There are two paths that I draw out in front of myself in the quest of knowing who I am. One path tells me that I am another stepping stone of this world’s progress, another stepping stone for our future to be better, another stepping stone for a better Singapore. However, the other path tells me I am a slave of this society, my past and my future, making myself into what the society wants me to be, and preventing me from living the way I want, and constraining me from being the true me…