Jams

We first went to Manila on a spontaneous mission trip. We went back five more times because of Jams.

He was a clean-cut fresh graduate with hip black specs and a laptop sticker that said, "Don't do it." Seated on the bare floor of the Pandacan sambahay with music on, he was a magnet for the kids. When he walked through the park, they ran after him and flung him high-fives. They followed him down Jesus Street like he was the Pied Piper. So did we.

His soft voice made us lean in. His eyes peeked out from above his glasses like a sad owl, always pleading. In his gruff whisper he told us of his graphic design, his silkscreened t-shirts, his skate ministry. For the first time I felt that there was a divine purpose for my design training. We made plans to return. I texted all my friends and we raised money for a desktop computer, printer and Adobe Suite. On our second trip to Manila, we slept on the floor of the livelihood office beside this computer, which the nanays had sewn a cover for. We held design workshops and computer training for youths from all over Manila.

He texted me photos when the boys had printed new t-shirts. He texted me when there was trouble logging on to Adobe. He texted me in tears when a fire flattened their block in Welfareville--photos of their sewing machines lying dead in rubble, computer and printer destroyed.

Our next trip found us standing on this fire-razed ground, wordless at seeing the once-overcrowded slum now burned to nothing. People were pointing numbly at land they couldn't buy back, greeting each other with tired pats on the back. Jams said the fire had been started by the government, and the proof was that the mayor had evacuated before it started. He said it sadly but without anger, with those gentle owl eyes.

We met his skater boys at midnight at the park. They were artists, musicians and reggae-loving rebels, and we were talking about Jesus on a street curb. They had followed Jams to our Art camp and up the mountains for relief missions. Whenever Jams picked up a guitar, they stretched out around him like alley cats and crooned in Bob Marley rasps, "Every little thing's gonna be alright!" We asked them what kind of things made them sad, expecting to hear about the fire that had destroyed many of their homes. "Girls, heartbreak," they said.

A couple of years passed while I gave birth to Theo and we made plans to move to Manila for short-term missions. We hear that something broke in Jams in those years. 

One of the married men in the community he served had started an affair with his little sister. Jams wanted to call the police on him, but the man's mother begged him not to. Frustrated by the absence of justice and his leaders' inaction, he left the people he once loved and asked to be sent to Samar, a disaster-stricken village flung as far into the wild as he could go. 

So when we were finally living in Manila, he was not there. We grew close to his girlfriend and their circle, and we talked of him so often at our parties that he ascended to the status of a legend.

The legend returned six months later as a gaunt hippie, with naturally-seeded dreads in his hair and a wispy beard, preaching the gospel of mushrooms. They made him calm, he said, and more creative. Packets of this "medicine of nature" lay in his pocket, which he ate throughout the day while doodling strange flowers. He had self-tattooed the chemical structure of mushrooms on his limbs. These hallucinogens had been his defence up in the mountains, immunising him against grief and anger. He talked to me of activism, of standing up against authority and false structures, of living a money-free life. He started painting objects wrapped in bandages, from cats to vaginas--his attempt to depict a world healed. His skater boys followed him all the way. 

I listened to him speak in that old winsome softness, but I could see that the Jams we'd known was gone. The undertone of everything he did now was an unfamiliar anger. His softness was a thin veil for a heart hardened to defiance. He whispered tensions against his mentors and leaders, and convinced his circle that church should be held at home in simplicity, not in fancy clothes and fancy buildings. He was the proud poor, the resistance, the truth and the way. By Singaporean standards we were by no means rich, but in our last interactions, I had the sad feeling he secretly looked down on us.

We left Manila abruptly when Covid shut the world down, and we never said goodbye to him.

January 11, 2022 was the day I found out I was pregnant with Reia. 

That was also the day I woke up to multiple messages from Jams's girlfriend. He had suddenly collapsed with a blood clot in his brain. He had then spent too long at the ER, waiting for a transfer to a hospital that had the facilities for surgery. 

"Ate, Jams is gone."

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In my mind, we are standing together on the fire-flattened ground of Welfareville. The rubble is white hot under the sun, and we have lost all our efforts to build something good together. What took it away? A world rigged to be broken from the start.

But this time I would tell you this will all be rebuilt. You are right, our hope should not lie in great men or money. But the bandages you tried to give the world were also too frail for these wounds. You left us suddenly, but where did you go? I hold on to a hope that you found yourself in Jesus's arms, where sorrow ceases not as a hallucination but as touchable truth, and where every anger, every question, finds silence in a full-stop.

Every little thing's gonna be alright.