I finished my Financial Accounting exam yesterday - there is a really high chance that I am going to flunk the module. Nonetheless, after the hysteric fit I (almost) threw yesterday after the paper, I managed to sit down this morning and go through all the personal paperwork that has piled up over the past two weeks when all of it was shoved aside in favour of my sorry attempt to balance my work commitments and my exam revision. Right now, I am back in the office looking through all the unfulfilled work commitments that accumulated over my one and half days of leave. Sheez..After answering some e-mails, and preparing my To-Do List for the week, I can't help but surf over to my favourite website - www.fanfiction.net - for some light relief. To my surprise, I found a very good story based on Calvin & Hobbes - http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2048837/1/ - it is a story about growing up, about how as you get older, you forget your dreams, your fantasies, the whole wonder of being alive and in the world. Go and read it.

I was at the City Chinese Orchestra concert at Victoria Concert Hall yesterday evening. It was amazing - there were so many oh-so-familiar-but-the-name-is-just-unrecollectable faces around. When I looked at the list of performers, the converse was true - there were so many oh-so-familiar-but-the-face-is-unrecollectable names. While enjoying the music, my mind was filled with images of long-gone places and memories of events that had long slumbered in the recesses of my mind. City Chinese Orchestra is made up, largely, of the alumni of Dunman High School Chinese Orchestra.

I always remember Dunman High - it was where I spent four long years as a student, and a place that I have a love-hate relationship with. For me, Dunman High is this old, rather run-down but very atmospheric place at Dunman Road. Every Saturday, as I approach the entrance of the school in the morning, the very first sound I'll hear is the suo-na (Chinese trumpet) practising the scales, with the trilling melody of the dizi (Chinese flutes) as an accompaniment. As I step into the school compound, my ears will start to pick up the plucking and trilling tunes from the pipa, the zhongran, liu-qin and the yang-qin. In the distance, I'll hear the shouted commands of the uniformed groups in the huge combined volleyball / basketball courts, the click-click-click sounds made by the NPCC students as they run from one place to another, the laughter of students playing volleyball. And opening the heavy wooden doors to the music room (one of the few air-conditioned rooms in the school), I'll be greeted with a blast of strings as my erhu comrades jammed, tuned up their instruments, practised etc. On the other side of the courts, in the warm brick compound that used to belong to Dunman Secondary School, students from the Chinese Drama Society are practising their calligraphy in one of the classrooms on the ground flour while other members discuss their scripts in the CDS Room. Members of St. Johns in their white uniforms are practising their drills at the car-park.

I remember plastering the back of the classroom with mahjong paper and painting street scenes, dragons, Chinese characters for "Spring" as part of the Chinese New Year decorations. I recall staying back in the afternoon with my classmates making lanterns for Mid-Autumn and then walking around the basket-ball and volleyball courts admiring everyone's handiwork (lit by light-bulbs). I remembered how we embarked on a massive campaign to sandpaper the surface of our dirty and scratched school-tables, and to clean them with toothbrushes and toothpaste (I wonder what we were thinking at that time). I recall the friendly rivalry between classes, the laughter, the ghost-stories, the fun we had. I remember the tense preparations for the DHS Chinese Orchestra annual concerts, when even Sundays were spent practising in school. And of course, who can forget Qiu-shen, undoubtedly an institution of DHS if there is ever one. This is the face of the Dunman High that I, to a certain extent, love.

Of course there are bad memories as well, memories that surfaced during yesterday's concert - the things that I would have done differently in hind-sight, the humiliations, the hurt, the pain. I cannot subscribe to the philosophy that one should remember the past only to the extent that it brings one pleasure - but for now, let's tuck those memories in another dark recess of the mind...

My closest friends are from Dunman High - Joanne, Xiuling, Qinwei, Kaixian - and I still keep in touch occasionally with some others - Keyang, Yijing, Zhen Qiang, Yewei, Xiufang. What happened to rest who I used to be so close to? What is Minghui, Dingxi, Jinming and Huimin doing now? Where is Zihan, Eleanor, Xiaowei, Peihua and Sharon? Did Tommy, Zijing, May and Jessica ever come back to Singapore? How's Tianfa and Guohui and Houyang doing? All have us have gone down different paths pursuing different dreams - if we were told, eleven years ago, what we will be like today, how many of us will believe it, how many will find it incredible?

In my fourth year, Dunman High shifted from Dunman Road to spanking new buildings at Tanjong Rhu. I did not like the new building - it was too new, too clinical, and too small. I have not much memories of the place. And Dunman High is moving again! Has it really been 10 years since we left Dunman Road for Tanjong Rhu? And have things changed so much that the school has to be re-developed to accommodate the changes? I suddenly feel so old...

It is way more interesting here however, because this time round, there is a subject matter - the Asia Civilisations Museum - how the artifacts are to be presented, how these relate to Singapore, how the story is to be told. And the last point is perhaps the most crucial to those of us sitting in the overcrowded ACE Space in the ACM Armenian Street that rainy afternoon - assuming we complete our training, we are supposed to be weekend volunteer guides bringing visitors around the museum. Many of them will probably be Singaporeans, and of these, a significant number will be aware of the ways in which history can be twisted and turned toward political ends - does the term "National Education" rings a bell?

I always thought that it is vital that the artifacts displayed at a museum have some kind of link to the country that it is located. I was extremely bemused when I was at the Vatican City some years ago and one of the first exhibits I saw upon entering the museum was Egyptian mummies! I don't recall the Vatican City as being a colonial power exerting sway over the Middle East - what has Egyptian mummies got anything to do with the Vatican which has its own incredible history of political intrigues and its own justly-renowned collection of artworks?

So that brings us back to the original question - how are we to tell a story about the exhibits in the Asian Civilisations Museum that is nonetheless a Singaporean story, and I do not mean to use the term "Singapore story" in the National Education sense of nation building, immigrants coming to Singapore to make it their home blab blab blab. I mean it more as in how the exhibits reflect who we are, why it makes sense for these artifacts to be housed in a museum in Singapore rather than say France or South Africa or Russia. And I guess we have to look a bit deeper into this issue and ask - whose story are we telling? The story of the great men of Singapore history, the stories of the faceless immigrants who came here seeking to make some cash and go home, the stories of Western politicians? Whose stories are we telling and why?

And I think that ACM is not just about the great men, but about most of us - ordinary people who will never in the ordinary course of things appear as anything more than a statistic in the government papers or some professional papers. It is about the civilisations that we came from - not just the mother-lode - i.e. traditional Chinese, India or whatever but also how these aspects of these cultures adapt themselves to the trends of that time - traditional artistry modified to suit foreign taste, beliefs that diverge from the mainstream due to long segregation, the assimilation of practices from other cultures, tribes. And while none of my ancestors, to the best of my knowledge, had ever worn the imperial dragon robes, or carried a miniature qur'an with them for protection or blessings, or sailed the seven seas for gold, god and glory, all these form a part of me and made me who I am today - it explains why I live in a Chinese-dominated city-state in a Malay-dominated region. It explains why chicken and fish are two of the most popularly consumed meat in Singapore despite the Chinese fondness for pork. It even explains why memories of my secondary school days are forever tainted with images of me slouched over pages and pages of Chinese phrases to be memorised. In other words, the ACM is not about events that ocurred, for example, Singapore's development as a port but more about the background in which these events occurred, e.g. how the people who made Singapore into a leading port lived and died - their beliefs, their life-style, their hopes, their dreams and their fears.