Seek

Today I waited at the NTUC bar with a glass of Glenfiddich 12 years old, wondering for a moment whether my friend had lost his way. Whisky does that—it slows time enough for old doubts to surface. I sat there quietly, the glass warming in my hand, thinking about how friendships stretch across decades, sometimes thinning, sometimes returning with an unexpected density.

We were students of one of the greater schools in Singapore, yet we were neighbourhood children first—products of a very particular time. The late 1970s. Singapore was modernising rapidly, but what we absorbed then was not modernity itself—it was the shadow of Western hegemony. We did not yet understand the world; we only sensed that something powerful lay beyond us, somewhere behind English accents, television screens, and imported songs.

I grew up poor. There was no television at first, and when black-and-white TV finally arrived, it was precious—encased in a wooden cabinet, with a lock. It heated up when left on too long. There was no remote control. Parents decided when it could be opened, what could be watched, and for how long. The world was rationed.

Some neighbours lived differently. Their children listened freely to music, hummed the Bee Gees, watched Popeye the Sailor Man, talked about Bruce Lee as if he were a deity. They spoke of the army with awe—of surviving harsh training, of triumph through endurance. Some families had cars. Some children understood the Western world far better than we did, though their school grades did not always reflect it.

One neighbour eventually migrated to Sydney. He did well there. I was happy for him. When he was still in Singapore, he had failed his class and was retained. I remember his mother accusing me of humiliating her son when I once went over simply to ask him how to learn English. Her reaction stayed with me. It was not anger—it was resentment layered over fear. She seemed to believe the world had cheated her. She was suspicious of everything, envious of others, withdrawn. Her husband shouted often—about her not cooking, not caring for the family while he worked long hours for meagre pay.

Those were hard years. We were all making do with very little. Jobs paid almost nothing. Dreams were fragile, easily crushed by fatigue.

Back then, Seek and I were classmates in Secondary Two. Somehow, we ended up in the last class—not because we lacked intelligence, but because we did not yet understand the system. Our English was weak. I could barely comprehend the accents of our teachers. Everything sounded blurred, as though spoken through water. Yet even then, I was determined to learn, to improve, without sacrificing physical activity or curiosity. It was a confusing time—mentally, culturally, emotionally.

Seek was different from me. Quiet. Reflective. He worked little, smoked, but drank very little. Larry—another classmate—was always puzzled by how Seek sustained himself. The answer, I now see, was simple: Seek lived simply. No excess. No frivolous spending. Few possessions. Always dressed casually, humbly. He did not accumulate. He did not compete.

Larry, on the other hand, possessed an extraordinary power of observation. So sharp that we used to joke he must be CID—Criminal Investigation Department, Singapore’s plainclothes detectives, trained to watch without being seen, to notice what others miss. Larry’s life unfolded unpredictably: Deputy Director in a department, later an Uber rider, then Cisco security, and now—by his own admission—jobless, surviving as a Grab rider.

Life does not unfold like a movie.
There are no clean cuts.
No establishing shots.
No guaranteed narrative arcs.

Only time clarifies what was once obscure—and even then, clarity is partial. Much remains unresolved. And perhaps that is the point.

Who has time to seek the truth of all things?
And even if we found it—would it clarify life?

Truth, I suspect, is not something we grasp and hold. It is more like air slipping between our fingers. Or water. Or mist. Laozi reminds us: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.” Truth resists possession. The moment we claim it, it escapes.

Yet meaning does not vanish because truth is elusive.

Meaning appears in shared whisky at NTUC.
In old friends arriving after delay.
In quiet lives lived without excess.
In laughter that survives confusion, poverty, and disappointment.

As Camus once wrote, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” We may never fully understand the world, but we are not required to. We are only required to live honestly within it.

And perhaps that is the quiet lesson of our generation—those born into scarcity, educated in confusion, raised between tradition and imported dreams:

We learned not to master life,
but to endure it with dignity.

We learned that clarity is rare, but sincerity is enough.
That success is unstable, but composure is enduring.
That truth may be elusive—but kindness, restraint, and perseverance are not.

Tonight, the Glenfiddich tasted smooth. My friend arrived. We drank slowly. We remembered. And for a moment, the past did not burden us—it simply sat beside us, like an old classmate who had finally learned to speak gently.