Reflective essay for I have work. Time to go home.

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For this project, I interviewed an individual from a different societal sector about their job experiences since the pandemic. Specifically, I interviewed a physiotherapist for Hospital sounds, a secondary school teacher for Missing Pages and a migrant construction worker for 1.35°N, 108.32°E. 

 

The title of the project has several readings: one is that the speaker is simply tired of work and wants to go home to rest, the second articulates that the speaker is going to go home to do work (since many now work-from-home) and the third takes on a more radical perspective, of knowing that there is incomplete work and yet still plans to rest at home. 

 

Hospital sounds: White prismed Rainbows unprisoned, is a conversation between the healthcare worker and a patient. Associated with death, I find the constant exposure to white in the hospital setting (walls, bedsheets, clothes) draining and stressful. Yet despite an uninspiring setting, the healthcare worker seeks to bring back colours. Hence I found it apt to introduce the metaphor of a prism. I also felt compelled to acknowledge the sun, the light source from which rainbows emanate. Its rhythmic movements, that unfailingly mark the beginning and ending of a day, flows with the idea that mutual support between the worker and the patient is a constant.

 

Missing Pages documents a dialogue between a teacher and a pupil. Exercise-book paper is a physical reminiscence of pre-COVID-19 days. On the next page, as school life disintegrates, so does this sheet of paper. The trails of grey imitate a path of cyclone-driven damage. This was inspired by the teacher’s sharing about how pupils surrounding the COVID-19 positive student were also unable to take O Levels. How devastating it was for parent and child, that a year of hard work amounts to ‘Special Consideration’. Yet as both of student and teacher struggle to accept the new pandemic realities, they also draw strength through healing with each other. Hence the promise: “See you tomorrow, back in school”. 

 

1.35°N, 108.32°E highlights an exchange between a migrant construction worker and an volunteer. The poem begins with tension, reflective of my feelings when a worker asked me multiple times if I was from the MOM. For the phrase I referenced from Gilbert Koh’s Garden City, while Koh seems to be referring to Lee Kuan Yew as the prime architect of Singapore, I use it here however to refer to the migrant workers. I was also surprised by the migrant worker’s knowledge of different places in Singapore. Calling him a ‘foreigner’ would be unjust, to say the least, which is why I misspelled this meaningless word.