Renovations

In addition to all of the changes taking place this year, my father and I have found ourselves quite imprudently embarking on a re-modeling project on our family home. What started out as a casual suggestion (“Let’s just re-plaster the living room ceilings...”) has now evolved into a total paradigm shift in habitat.

My bedroom, once modest in size, accommodating a queen-sized bed, built-in wardrobe and a door to a small shared en-suite bathroom, has now invaded the unsuspecting smaller guest bedroom, breaking down the walls and claiming the territory for its own.

My father’s bedroom, the second floor family area, the kitchen, the first floor living room and dining room are all in a state of flux, with boxes and furniture accumulated over years and postings by my parents piled haphazardly on top of each other, and everything uniformly veiled in a thick layer of dust. Indonesian workers come and go as they please, taking with them smashed up concrete and unwanted furniture, and bringing in shiny new tiles and fresh coats of paint.

In preparing my bedroom for the impending invasion, I found myself faced with assessing the state of all of my wordly, and not-so-wordly, belongings. It’s only when you are forced to gather together all of your material possessions that you realize how little you really need to get by in the world, and how the rest just weighs you down.

(If we are what we own, I am, in essence, 2 parts clothes, 1 part books.)

In an effort to downsize and simplify, I forced myself to go through every article of clothing I owned to decide what to pack and what to give away. As I yanked the clothes off hangers, sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor while folding things and packing them away into the Keep and Trash boxes, I thought about how personal clothes are to a person, and how every piece I owned was inexorably tied back to a specific memory – some more vivid than others.

Like the black sixties inspired satin dress I wore on my 26th birthday to some then it club off Heritage Row; as I twirled around in that dress on the dance floor, intoxicated by youth and booze, surrounded by so many old and new friends, I remember feeling so lucky and loved, and believing that the world was truly my own oyster for the shucking.

There’s the first expensive suit I bought and wore to my interview at my current workplace, long, black and serious. I had nervously rubbed my palms on my new trousers repeatedly as I waited in the holding room, hoping not to greet the interviewer with a clammy handshake.

The worn and faded red linen skirt I wore to the beach in Kuantan on the first weekend getaway A and I took, just a week after we first met. I remember hitching up the skirt and holding his hand as we tentatively waded into the water, not knowing or really caring where we were headed to, but just feeling deliriously, combustibly happy to be together.

A hideous patchwork top I have never worn that Azalea and Ahmad convinced me to buy at some small Bangsar boutique on some random hot Saturday afternoon the three of us spent on the Telawi streets several years ago, shopping, eating, and gossiping over coffee.

The countless button down work shirts my mother never failed to buy and bring back for me during her visits back to KL, even when I stopped asking, and even when I stopped wearing shirts to work.

Suffice to say, the process took longer than expected, being unprepared for the emotional catharsis evidently involved in shedding three quarters of one’s wardrobe. The Indonesian workers were less than impressed, watching me sob into a ratty old (Class of '99, from my Senior year in high school) t-shirt on my bedroom floor as they waited patiently outside my door to break down the walls.

After packing everything away into boxes, I have learnt that I can very easily get by, having done so in the past 2 months, with living out of a large suitcase, consisting of a capsule wardrobe, my iPad, a few books, toiletries, some pieces of jewelry and everything else stuffed into my large Downtown tote that I’ve been lugging with me from home, to work, to Hong Kong and Jakarta and back.

Discovering this truth is both gratifying and confusing, for though it is a relief to know that one is not so explicitly tied to material possessions, why is one still compelled to continue to buy, consume and accumulate? The whole process has made me re-think my consumption patterns.

So much of what I buy is tied to some emotional need or space that needs to be filled, rather than a real, inherent, functional need. And judging from the amount of things I’ve been able to ruthlessly discard in this process, its safe to say that any happiness or novelty enjoyed in the acquisition of such material thing is often short lived. This revelation is something I hope to keep in mind the next time I whip out my credit card.

As Charles Dickens says, change begets change and for now, life remains positively ephemeral.