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So this is a space for me to write. Yay.

I dream of family. In the one great constant pillar of my life are my dreams for family.  I’ve always wanted to wake up one Sunday morning and be treated to the ‘traditional’ family life that pop culture has served to us nicely. My partner sitting by the kitchen table shifting through the papers, me pestering my children down for breakfast, a lazy dog slouched obstructively in front of the stairs. Coffee would be slurped, children’s clothing choices nagged and everyone into the car for some quality family time by the beach or in the park.

There are two problems to this though:

1) I don’t live in a 1950s American commercial for stick-proof frying pans. I’m a twenty year-old Chinese man living in Singapore in the year 2013.

       

                      Look how happy kitchenware makes me! - the 1950s

2) I’m gay.

And it seems that so long as I live in Singapore, I’ll never be able to get any of that. But it will be sometime before I leave this repressive island.

It will be some time before I can fly off to the United Kingdom and join my boyfriend there. If I still have a boyfriend to fly to once my National Service finally ends. We’ve been having some problems, all nicely linked back to Singapore and it’s incredibly oppressive society of shallow values and moral panic attacks.

    Come for the vapid materialism,stay for the societal oppression.Uniquely Singapore!

You should my boyfriend hails from a family that uniquely combines the worst of Chinese Confucian conformity with the fire-brand judgement of conservative Christianity, a special soul-crushing mix of restriction and control that did not go very well when he parents found out that he like willies instead of rounders.

But I’m trailing away from my original point.
Wait. What was my original point?

Sigh… I’m just really unhappy right now. My boyfriend of four years and five months is eleven thousand kilometres away, the two of us are suffering some massive problems regarding the dynamics of our relationships and identity crisis that goes with it and I’m stuck in this crappy country stilling serving fifteen more months of National Service.

I want to be happy right now. I want us to be happy together…