Fictions

I liked documentaries a lot and never really like fictions. When I was a kid, I was always hanging out at the history or geography sections of my school library. By primary four, I could almost draw the whole world map based on my memory. Most of it was accurate except African continent, there are just too many small countries around. Of course, I cannot do that anymore. That part of the memory was tested again three weeks ago, when our lecturers wanted us to draw the map of Australia as an after lunch warm up exercise. Noone expected a Singaporean can do that better than a native Australian. Ahem... I even added in Coco Islands and Christmas Island and state capitals on the map .

Another thing I did as a child and this is one of my biggest secret I never told anyone, was to draw maps of cities which are non existent. One of them, so big that it took up the whole living room of my house and that I had to move all the furnitures into the bedrooms. The maps were hand drawn on drawing board paper and pasted together to make a single sheet. Each city is complete with central district, government buildings, institutions, airports and harbours, anything that a metropolitan should have. Soon, I started to plan public transportation and adminstrative zones. Within one year, there were so many cities that it only made sense to have a central government with its own constitutional monarchy and some historical background of each city and the country, which name I shall not say.

This fictional federated country also has its own language, currency, racial composition and armed force. As the whole idea developed, I went on to add neighbouring countries to it. This was something I did in pockets of free time over ten years. At some points, I was so obsessed with completing one part of the city, I could draw till late night and imagine how the cityscape can look like from different angles. At school, I would sketch bits of the city architecture on any piece of paper I got and decide where it stand in the city. The designing went on to the coat of arms of the government institutions and the state flags.

Being a creator of this country probably offered me a chance to escape from the real world and channelled my energy to something else. The last time I worked on the maps was probably after my first year in poly. As I recalled now, it was part of my life and lasted a long long time. I had spent so many hours, standing on top of the maps, drawing lines and naming each road.

I dun do it anymore these days but still keep some of the maps and a few other stuff that formed part of this fictional country. I cannot remember what happened to the largest one but can still name the cities. On the second thought, maybe I do believe in fictions.