Following The Wrong God Home

I'd recently unearthed an old blog entry from three years back. That was a defining year of my life, a year when I realised that dreams really don't come true...

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Followed the Wrong God Home?
December 20, 2006

I’d always loved to read… and today, sick in bed, I started to read Catherine Lim’s new novel, "Following the Wrong God Home".

Late last year, I bumped into her, Catherine Lim, at Orchard Cineleisure as we were waiting to see the same movie - Perhaps Love. Unabashed, I walked up to say hi, introduced myself and told her how much I’d loved her works - from the Song of Silver Frond to the Bondmaid, Her imagination, vivid descriptions and how intricately she’d weave the lives of her characters together in every story - though the concept of how a man and a woman can fall in love in three meetings is beyond me.

Following the Wrong God Home struck a chord in me and if you are a woman, around my age, at the crossroads of your life, it would reach out to you as well. Yin Ling, a young graduate was torn between marrying Vincent Chee, a rising political star and an idealistic American lecturer, Ben. She’s torn between love and debt as coming from a poor family, Vincent had provided for her and for her family, making their lives in a small flat as confortable as possible with gifts of air-conditioning, standing fan, etc etc. He’d even paid for her old servant’s hefty medical bills. While Ben, the American lecturer, vocal and a rebel was on the verge of being sacked by the University.

Any girl in the right frame of mind would agree that Vincent is the right choice. Which girl would be mad enough to say no to a life where everything is provided for, where she can then focus on bringing up a family and live a life where she doesn’t have to worry about the rising cost of living?

But of course, following one’s heart and listening to one’s mind is very different. For by following the heart, it allows one to feel every beat, every soar and dip in emotions, one can even hear the heart sing sometimes. Listening to logic is perhaps, like listening to rhetoric - doing what’s deemed correct but perhaps not what makes the heart happy.

Which is right? Which is wrong? I have no idea. For most days, I bury myself in a flurry of work and social activities, just so that I do not think and perhaps try my best not to feel. But it is not easy, when you are stuck in bed, like me today, with a book and a night full of dreams and imageries from the past and wondering where everyone’s gone, how everything’s changed and realising that time has passed, so quickly, without me knowing…

In retrospect, I think I have always followed my heart but perhaps at life’s crossroads, I should perhaps follow my logic - but in the story’s context, am I following the right God?

"The four chambers of the heart were meant to serve the different needs: two to beat to necessity’s tempo, two to love’s"

- Following the Wrong God Home, C. Lim