The Weight of Yesterday

I remember walking through the backstreets of George Town with an old man named Mr. Tan. He pointed to a crumbling shophouse, its paint peeling like sunburned skin, and told me he had been born in the room above the kitchen. Beside it, a glass-and-steel tower was rising, its crane hovering like a giant insect over the terracotta tiles. He didn’t seem angry about the change. He just sighed and said that cities are like people; they have to grow, but they shouldn’t forget the shape of their own childhood. We stood there for a long time, watching the sunlight hit the old brick while the shadows of the new world stretched long and cold across the pavement. It is a strange thing, how we live in the tension between what we have built and what we are building. We are always caught between the comfort of the familiar and the inevitable pull of the future. Do you ever feel like a ghost in your own neighborhood?

Siew Bee Lim has captured this exact feeling of transition in her work titled A Small Lane. It perfectly illustrates that quiet, heavy space where the past and the present meet. Does this scene remind you of a place you once called home?