It’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves since the start of the project. I found one person’s perspective here. Well written. Can’t seem to figure out who the author is though. Here’s an excerpt of it:
To me what really endures is the opposite of national pride, what my friend Yakov referred endearing too as “local or neighborhood” pride – it’s the small diorama of everyday life which all of us are so familiar with. The little people who we come across day in and day out – the prata man who just knows I just like it crispy & crusty. The tea aunty who always makes it a point to ladle an extra scoop of sugar because she knows I have a sweet tooth. The girl next door who always manages a friendly smile because she knows that will make my day. The distant memory of my youth during NS, when I looked into the face of a boy officer who I just knew was as scared as me. We were lost and flailing yet, we were in it together, through thick and thin – and that was all that really mattered – it’s the small stuff that always sticks to me whenever I conjure the word “home”: what I call the “neighborhood pride” stuff where one person just rubs against another and it leaves enough residue to say, I am as much a part of you are a part of me and all that just adds up to make up a place where a man nurtures his sense of place and belonging to a community –that I guess is home, for me at least.
I am a Asian, Catholic, Chinese, a Singaporean, ACS boy who hails for the South and I live in a street where old people still call me “Ah Tee” and still expect me paint their rusty gates for $1 and a glass of Ribena, while they spend the evenings reminiscing about the past – and I am proud to belong to all these small little fragments of memories which really don’t add up too much – only they are very much part my identity as they are part of who I am before, now and probably tomorrow.
Craving out a place one called “home” is a way of making sense of where we are in relation to the broader community: a means of even validating the condition of what it means to be human: to the people we have known, to the events which have shaped our lives, and to shared memory. I am reminded when a sense of belonging is absent, our humanity diminishes and this is often followed by a sense of estrangement.
Here are a couple more entries about home:
