Singapore Diaries Quotes

I feel the pain of all the hearts crying here. Silence has its own language.

To put the matter bluntly, U.S. soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor showed themselves more stalwart than British imperial forces in Malaya and at Singapore, albeit likewise in a doomed cause. Brigadier Dwight Eisenhower, who had served unhappily under MacArthur a few years earlier, wrote in his diary: “Poor Wainwright! He did the fighting … [MacArthur] got such glory as the public could find … MacArthur’s tirades, to which … I so often listened in Manila … would now sound as silly to the public as they then did to us. But he’s a hero! Yah.” At home in the United States, news commentators squeezed every ounce of glory from Bataan, from skirmishes at sea and manifestations of America’s embryo mobilisation.

Sometimes such hopelessness cannot be described in words. My blood pressure rises in frustration. The mind becomes infected with sadness. Life is a boat without oars. Where we will drop anchor nobody knows. After years of drifting abroad to make the family happy, some will never get satisfaction themselves. Neither is the family pleased. Sometimes it's surreal to watch, an empty book of sighs. If the unwanted pain makes us cry, there's no echo because it's emptiness everywhere. There are no perfect walls, so the scream goes and goes and never comes back. I feel like a stranger to myself. Once again, we start over the daily grind.