I've always loved the sciences as far as I can remember. I remember when my parents got me my first encyclopedia that utilized Disney characters to describe just a small subset of the general knowledge there was available for a 4 year-old, I was overly estatic. I would read the encyclopedia over and over again until I could memorize scientific facts and regurgitate on the spot. I didn't really care so much for the colourful and familiar Disney characters though that did play some part in stoking my interest, which is pretty odd for a 4 year-old to behave I guess. Years gone by and my parents decided to up the ante a bit by getting me another set of encyclopedia, this time utilizing the characters from the Peanuts comic strip. Again, I didn't really care so much for the colourful Peanuts characters but I reread the encyclopedia from front to back and spitting out even more scientific facts about the world we live in (and in the solar system).
At some point my parents might have felt annoyed because I was bugging them with a lot of "Did you know that...?" facts from these two sets of encyclopedias. And somewhere down the line, they probably began to worry about me not having any artistic ability whatsoever, or at the very least an appreciation of it. I was too fixated on science. So they slowed down my craving for more and more information and started me on the path of cultivating some sort of artistic expression in me. For most Malaysians/Singaporeans, this means one thing. Piano lessons. I didn't really make it that far in my piano lessons (less than 5 months if I remember correctly), I kinda enjoyed it but was pretty lazy in practicing although according to my piano teacher, I seem to get away with it. On a side note, I've heard many many stories about how fierce piano teachers are to their students in their posture, style etc. but I have like the nicest piano teacher ever. Perhaps I could have gone further had I not take her for granted.
There were many other attempts in installing the arts in my brain, most of which failed. There was this very VERY futile attempt in sending me to an art class. I hated it for two reasons, I had to miss my Saturday morning cartoons and I felt so lost in the class because everyone was painting well while I barely had a pencil line on my paper. I barely made any friends in that class and after lamenting how I really didn't want to go my mom finally let me off. My sister on the other hand, thrived in that area. She easily whoop everyone's asses in the art class. Digressing again, there was another bad attempt at learning languages. Again for most Malaysian/Singaporean Chinese, it's of course Mandarin. For me, there's also my mother tongue, Hokkien. I actually enjoyed learning them until I lost interest because the teachers either became very useless or that they themselves lost interest.
So there we have it. 18 years of my life not knowing music, art and languages. I didn't mind it then although it's a pain when your friends start switching to Chinese and not knowing a single thing. But other than that, I didn't care.
Then in a remarkable turn of events, I started getting into those. Only this time the mode of learning was drastically different. I started learning music, another language and more recently some sense of artistic expression.
At 18, I picked up the bass because I loved jazz and I knew that it was fundamental to jazz music. So the opportunity presented itself and I took it up. My bass teacher was pretty good but the difference between him and all the other teachers was that he taught me the technicality of bass playing. I soaked it up like a sponge, just that my motor skills couldn't keep up with the technical information coming in my brain. I didn't realize it then but he pretty much taught me everything I knew now in 2 months because the technical explanations stuck with me and it made soooo much sense.
At 19, I picked up Japanese because a friend asked me and I just said yes. It was probably due to my interest in anime that I said yes. So I went for classes. Compared to Mandarin, Japanese made a lot of sense to me and it is remarkably technical. There are very few exceptions to grammar rules (unlike English) and there's almost a formula for constructing sentences once you break things down. Again, I soaked up everything and before I knew it, I'm just one step to being averagely fluent in Japanese. If you read Japanese outside the context of anime/manga, the language is utterly beautiful and expressive. You can describe a lot in a haiku written in English because of the nature of the English language, but a haiku written in Japanese is more profound and using less words.
At 24, my ex-housemate "brainwashed" me to take up photography. My dad has always had the latest camera gear and frequently shoot. He tried to explain the fundamentals of photography but failed. Once the rise of DSLRs started, I shunned it completely. Once I had been brainwashed, I started shooting. It took awhile before I started developing my own constructs on what I think photography should be like. Then I started shooting on film, more likely because of the "brainwashing" by my ex-housemate =P And all of the sudden, my own artistic expression starts to surface and I'm liking every minute of it. I got into photography because there were a lot of aspects that boil down to technique and technical aspects of the fundamentals. With that, photography made sense to me. The funny thing is that after knowing all of these things, I cringe at my dad's photo-taking skills. So. Painful. To. Look. At.
I always thought I am a pure, hardcore science person. Which in some sense is still true. I like the reasoning that comes with science. Science has always been about applying specific sets of technical details to the world around us but it's this same love of technicalities that made me learn the arts as well. This might be strange for some people but this makes a lot of sense. The downside is that, after only picking these things up so late in life (relatively), I have to fight harder in order to do something that is second nature to a lot of the friends that I have now, be it photography, music or language. Also (and this is the one that will hurt me the most) I will have to admit that there are some things I will never be able to comprehend or replicate no matter how hard I try. Because technicalities can only bring you so far. Unless you are, so to speak, wired to process art, no amount of algorithmic techniques can fully reproduce pure brain-fueled inspired artistic power. And that sucks.
It is also interesting to note, that the biggest expansion in my knowledge and understanding of the arts come from the downfall since my attempt at a Phd. I lost the opportunity to be at the pinnacle of technical achievement, to be at the forefront of science but gained an understanding of the arts that I never knew when I was a kid growing up with my encyclopedias. Worth the trade? Perhaps. Is God teaching me something here? Too soon to tell. Is it a coincidence that the timing of such lessons in art matches my halt in my forte of science? I think not.
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