by Tan Chu Chze
Saying goodbye sucks. It’s difficult and uncomfortable, mostly because I never really know what to say. What do you say to someone you probably will never see again?
That’s the source of my discomfort. Not the fact I want to say goodbye to a virtual entity, but the feeling that I probably won’t see “The Middle Ground” as we know it now again.
Yah yah yah okay very sentimental, very nostalgic and Millennial. But it does suck to say goodbye with such finality. Even if it is not my first time.
I still remember how it all started. It must have been mid 2012, when I was in my second year in NUS, living in Tembusu College. Much like Jin Yao, I had vague ambitions of “being a better writer“, except my ambitions were more vague and I was dabbling in various forms of writing.
That year, Bertha started her stint in Tembusu College as a journalist-in-residence. Journalist? Writing? Some bells rang. Another teaching staff in the college thought – hey I know this guy who likes writing and Bertha knows how to do it. They should meet.
So our first encounter was in Starbucks. I was tasked to write profiles of the teaching staff, part of a bigger project to revamp the college website. Bertha was supposed to help me. However, what became of that project is now lost to me, and I don’t think it was ever completed.
Instead, Bertha did what Bertha knows best. She told me to gather other undergrads who were interested in writing or current affairs, then she got us to report college events, like the Forums hosted by Prof Tommy Koh.
These reports were published on the college website… and I wasn’t sure who was reading them. But these little exercises in reporting were important, because it sparked something in Bertha: “I have a great idea,” Bertha said to me one morning meeting. It was too early for me to have any ideas of my own, so I listened. “Why are we writing for Tembusu College only? Why not involve ALL of Utown? We can call it Utown Sound.”
It was to be an online magazine of sorts, reporting events in Utown under categories like “sound bites”, “heart beats” and “echo chamber”. I was sold on the puns alone. Bertha was very excited and said we’d meet again.
However, Bertha’s excitement took a crescendo and Utown Sound was quickly diminished. “We are thinking too small,” she said, “Too small. Why stop at Utown? We need to think bigger – why not all of Singapore?”
I don’t know how else to explain it: that was how Breakfast Network was born. Within a week Bertha already had a mock up for the website, and somebody to run the backend server stuff. She was going to call this and this ex-journalist and writer and photographer to come on board as editors, contributors – the works. We had undergrad interns – myself joining as one of them – and more pun-ny categories to make up for the ones we lost with Utown Sound.
It was magnificent to be in the thick of Breakfast Network unravelling.
We ran the kitchen for a good year, serving our readings bite-sized news summaries and chef-special opinion pieces. (No, we did NOT cook up stories.)
And then, as the story goes, we closed.
The climate then was very different from the one Middle Ground now faces. Predominantly, I think the Breakfast Network team was uncertain. In a fell swoop, media regulations suddenly changed, and nobody was sure enough of its implications. We were hesitant, and closing seemed the wiser option.
Yet, closing turned out not to be a completely bad, if not sad, idea after all. Because we closed, we found how out we had a readership who liked us enough to help bring The Middle Ground to life. We had the time to re-organise, and reconsolidate. We could come back with clearer roles, a sharper vision, and precaution.
Of one the most significant changes came in the way writers were engaged. Conceptually, The Middle Ground was designed to accommodate as many different voices as possible. We had the power poets, Felix and Joshua. We had a Singlish Guru, Gwee. We had Brenda, Jin Yao, Daniel, Yen Feng, and so many more.
As for me, I wrote the Word of the Days. Even though it was Bertha’s idea, it was a column that really allowed me to explore my own writing while contributing to the mix.
Writing the Word of the Day was a delicious puzzle. Bertha, or one of the editors, would tag me on Facebook or drop me a message: How about this word? I would then tap into my google skills and my actually-not-that-useless-after-all linguistics knowledge from university, and weave together a story about the happenings in the news from the perspective of a word.
There were two main challenges: One was to keep pace with the news and figure out my ‘puzzle’ as fast as my tortoise brain could. If it took me too long to solve it, my article would not be relevant to the current flow of affairs.
The other challenge was to deliver a part GP part vocabulary lesson without sounding like a stuffy English teacher. I always thought my column name “Word of the Day” was never sexy enough, so I mostly overcompensated with many puns. How well I fared is really up to you to judge, but I did enjoy writing for you, and I hope it was at least informative and sometimes entertaining.
The one thing I treasure from The Middle Ground is the experience of writing for it. If it were not for this set up, I doubt I would have ever written such bizarre news and language articles, much less have the gumption to imagine it on my own.
If I could speak on behalf of the other contributors, The Middle Ground was always true to its name. It gave us the space to be our quirky selves and speak in our own voices, respond in our own views, to the stranger things that happen around us every day. Yes, the rules and guidelines and helpful prompts from the editors were there too, but they always worked in favour of protecting diversity of perspective.
It’s a difficult line to thread, and one that I give props to our editors for having done well. Looking back, I think I have grown as a writer. I’ve learnt to be careful of the claims I read, and more so of the claims I make. I’ve learnt to ask questions when I think them. I’ve learnt to write from what I know, and not what I presume like a fuddy duddy. I’ve learnt to consider others’ viewpoints, wholeheartedly, and respond to them respectfully.
These ideas capture for me what it is like to belong to a middle ground. It’s not always consensus or agreement, but a lot of open talking and listening. So even though I haven’t been able to write as much this year, I am still learning and I hope to keep this understanding with me.
Now that The Middle Ground website is closing, I pray that The Middle Ground idea lives on. I imagine it to leave us much like how our friends and family leave when we tell them “goodbye”: For the moment, it is just going on a journey somewhere we don’t know, and one day it will be back. It may not even be a news site when we meet again. But we could bump into each other in the small talk on the street. Perhaps it will pop up on the next comment thread on Facebook.
Where ever it goes, I hope there will always be a space for us to share our thoughts, thoughtfully. I hope to remember that, and to pass that on.
But for now, zai jian. And may God be with ye.
Featured image by Pixabay user T_ushar.
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