i used to be able to write full-length essays in chinese

每当我煮面线都会想到小时候爸爸妈妈上班时，我放学后会在阿妈家等爸妈放工后来接我，想到阿妈煮的鸡蛋猪肉面线。面线好吃是好吃，但味道没怎么特别。对我来说呢，它的特别不在于味道，而是在于它含着童年的回忆。阿妈当时候比现在年轻，健康，活力，我去她家的次数也比现在多。I also feel like as a child, there was less pressure or no pressure at all, in being what you are. like you don't think so much about it. nowadays, i'm so conscious about what i should say to ah mah, how to communicate with her with the limited hokkien i can converse in - conversations usually are just asking her how she is, and she'll say she's fine, and she'll ask if i have eaten, and usually the answer is yes, and she'll ask if i want something to eat or drink. i think about the language barrier at times, and how maybe it is a little more specific to singapore - having the younger generations embraced english a lot more, and maybe chinese, but our grandparent's generation mostly still using dialect, that is slowly phasing out. i think about how maybe communication then, isn't limited to words. i feel like much of how i communicate with ah mah is through touch, or how she communicates with me, or expresses her care and love - in her smile, her holding my hand, her asking me to "take care", asking when the next time I'm back in singapore is, how long i am staying, when i leave again. 

being so far away from home, the way my parents or my sister tell me about things happening in the family, is both distant, yet so close. distant in that everyone's lives (obviously) still carry on the way they do, i'm just missing out; close in that i can imagine myself being there when they tell me about things, as though i had never left: sunday night dinners at grandma's, supper with ice-cream/watching a tv show with my dad/mum/sis, saturday mornings waiting for mum to wake up so she can cook us a hearty breakfast, some weekday evenings going out to eat/shop with the fam, dinner tues and thurs night just with dad and the sis cos mum works those nights, dinner mon wed fri altogether, dad always finding snacks to eat right after dinner.

i turn 22 soon, and mum and dad celebrate their 25th anniversary. 

i thought about what i would tell my children/nieces/nephews about my four years in chicago, i remember working at moe, and finding out rachel did her undergrad at kings in london, and it's just weird because it just feels like a separate entity of your 'actual' life in some sense. like a dream or something. everytime i go home, it's like i'm not sure if i was ever away, and when i'm here, it just feels very separate from home. i feel myself in both places, but different separate versions of myself. i feel like friends from home would find the person i am here foreign, and vice versa for my friends here - i am susceptible to fulfilling the demands of what people expect of me - i feel like i always have been. yet, the concept of self is never really that solid is it? i feel like that's constantly changing, and we just do our best to adopt the most authentic version of self that we know how to/ think is necessary.

(不知道自己在干嘛）