Are we taking our roots that seriously after all ?
For people who decided to leave everything behind and migrated their whole life to a country like Singapore, I have always wondered how they look back at the good and the bad in their home land. To certain extent, we develop a sense of bias when discussing about the reasons to stay or leave, lacking clarity on the objective of our efforts put.
Our roots tell us that even after a long time of drifting around, we should probably return back to where we belong. It’s like the old saying that birds come back to their nests after searching for food everywhere. Our friends, family and more importantly, the culture, the food, the roosting nests where we grew up. It all beckons us to come back. However, for majority of people, the moment they step out of their home land, everything changes, whether they like it or not, whether they realise it or not. The seemingly perfect foreign lands with all their gold and glory; the opportunity of meeting people from all over the world; the sense of independence and freedom away from home; the urge to prove ourselves in creating value which is rewarded much better as compared to our home land — These are dazzling and for most of us in the beginning it opens up a new plethora of opportunities. We even swear that one day we will be someone great and bring it all back to our land and be someone even greater there. Oh what a great spectacle it would be to show it off to people back home, of what I have become.
But the world works in different ways most of time. The moment when we are planning all this, at that very moment when everything is changing around us without we noticing; our fate has been predestined and more likely than not, we are not going to return. Everything that was left behind feels like it is not calling me back, and it suddenly feels like there is no way that we are going to be back to how all it has started. It’s sad… Soon we discover that we are distancing ourselves to the possibility to go back and also to our roots. And suddenly this new alien place starts to feel more like the roots, it starts becoming our DNA.
After several years of settling in the foreign land, we start hanging out with bunch of friends from different countries. They are similar to we, and most of them may never go back to their hometown. When we start talking to them, we want to defend our roots, after all this while. We emphasize how much we miss the home cooked food, the great conversations and drunk parties with our close friends, the cosiness in the chit-chat with families and most importantly the ease to make things work out the way we want. It’s touching. But how about the future? Does anyone really have a plan about the future? Most of them respond that they don’t know yet, but probably they will go back to their homeland after some more years of working experiences and start off a family back home or if they already have a family then just back to live or retire at where they came from. Deep down in their mind even they are wondering, how it would be possible to go back to their homeland after all this while, seeing a world that’s completely different, yet seems appealing. They are lost, just like we. Over a period of time. The foreign landscape, culture and people, seeps into our body and mind, and partly, our soul. Without realising it, we have become someone that is foreign to our homeland itself, and chances are, we will never be able to return back.
Are we in some form being upgraded? Are we aware of us drifting away from our roots? Are we even going to teach our children about things that came off our roots? We probably only know the answers deep down inside. I believe everyone who has left their homeland chasing after better security and higher form of satisfaction are answering these question in their own ways.
Eventually, when the last moment of wandering in the middle of our homeland’s cross road seems to be so long ago, we forget that’s where we had begun, we forget that’s where it triggered the first sense of our happiness and the purest form of joy, a sense of belonging. All of sudden, they all seemed irrelevant to our present well-being and pursuit of greater success. We melt those roots to adapt in the foreign land, in exchange for the admiration, sparkling neon and high-rise building which once upon a time promised us the things that will make us someone great.
We know we will never be able to go back. When the outside world seems all wonderful and full of thrills and we start to wonder and look out the window in a dreadful afternoon class, it is now the outside world for us to have a glimpse whenever our bustling life and busy schedule allows…
P.S: For several years, I have always had the same dream that linked to my childhood memories, under the backdrop of my hometown. It preserved the best memories I had with my childhood friends and probably says a lot about the joy I had with them, without any preconditions. We were all belonging to the same place, and to certain extent, sharing the same roots. Later on, our paths separated from one another, and the definition of our roots became blurred. I wonder if there is one day we all come back to the same playground we were cycling on and what we will say to each other in knowing each of our future being completely sucked into a different vacuum, and me, I am going to be so far away from home… I will say, in that specific space-time, I will say: the outside world will never offer us the equivalent quality of joy and happiness as compared to this moment, this moment together with all of us. I am sorry that I will have to discontinue in creating memories with we, but we will forever remain the purest and sweetest joy I had and nothing in this world could take it away from me.
It is when the love was innocent and sweet that we thought we can take over the whole world.
To answer the question as titled-I don’t believe we all had taken our roots seriously. Roots are nothing spectacular if not for the memories generated thereon. Roots later on became a reason for us to judge people’s characters and excuse their wrongdoing. We survive, abandon and rediscover our roots. Roots can be savage that it doesn’t manifest any kindness when we were made to exile, that we are only most welcome back when we are powerful and wealthy. Roots are our own nostalgic dream and have nothing to do with what it offers to we. We are compelled to thrive in the outside world alone because of our roots, sometimes it turns out to be a continual creation of bonding and sometimes it is just a mere tragic. So rather, we say to werself, maybe I have no roots at all.
Overall, for most of the migrants and families that chose to live abroad, roots can often be moulded to fit their geography and it is continually evolving from generation to generation.