I knew I wanted to become a writer at a very young age of six. I was in Primary One, and my school had one of those big picture books for children that were brought into class. The pictures were bright and colourful and the words were simple, and every once in a while, my teacher would bring it out and show it to the class. We would all read it aloud, and I sat there, marvelling at how the book transformed a class of playful kids into children who were mesmerised by the written word.
“Wow, I want to do that, and I can,” I thought.
I would encounter locally written books by local writers — the pulpy goodness of a True Singapore Ghost Story, the adventures of the Bookworm Gang (which mainly consisted of hanging out at McDonald’s and HDB flats), and discovering that there were local writers in the school library.
It was my teacher reading our my essay in class and my classmate saying it was “magic,” my art teacher being irritated because my art theory essays were better than my coursework, and how I managed to get a consistent almost A grade for nearly every GP essay.
But perhaps it was when I learned to read, sitting in my father’s car while the blur of letters that rushed by suddenly made perfect sense, and that the language I saw was not as alien or difficult as I thought it to be.
Featured image via Enokson