forty light years away

If I'd been born in 1947 in another world, I would have watched stardust 50s in amazement and mary-janes. Adults dancing to Frank Sinatra, girls going mad over Elvis' pelvis, gleaming grammophones, nina simone. When the 60s hit, I would have been 13. The Beatles would have been a kaleidoscopic explosion in my pubescent life. I would have saved every penny to buy their records, discovered Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, cried for Simon and Garfunkel, admired Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. I would have been 20 the year Sgt. Pepper was released, and 23 by the end of the decade. I'm not sure where I would have been. And if it was Singapore I was born in, I would have listened to my records from home in a kampong, tried to explain the english lyrics to my parents (if we shift back a couple of generations they may have spoken mainly hokkien and mandarin), cycled into town to buy records, and gone to sewing school, daydreaming with every
stitch. The songs of August 1965 would have been I've Just Seen A Face and Majulah Singapura. A camera would have been a piece of magic. In the Summer of Love, we may have had to leave our kampong for expressway-construction and move into queenstown, where we could go to Queenstown Cinema for late-night new movies, and a television to watch man's voyage to the moon.
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What are we doing in 2010?