修炼爱情—JJ Lin: The Backstory

In Dec 1997, a 16-year-old JJ Lin—or Wayne Lim, as he was known then—was surprised to learn that his photographs were found among the wreckage in the wake of the SilkAir suicide crash. They were photographs he had given a church friend. She had said that she liked him, but he didn’t feel for her that way, although they remained friends. She brought his photos with her on that trip, and she had died in the crash, she and her parents. During his Sec 4 graduation ceremony, his form teacher passed him an envelope from the girl’s aunt. They contained the pictures, with scratches on them; when he took them out, he could still smell the fuel mixed with seawater.

For his album “Stories Untold”, he decided to revisit this moment of his life. It wasn’t something he talked about much, as he didn’t know how to grieve back then. He’s talked about this story in a few interviews since then, and the last few seconds of this song’s music video mentions the victims of the incident, and his friend, Chue Fern. 

Anyway, this incident, and his story, was also written about in the papers. The article appeared in The Straits Times, 28 Dec 1997. I’ve always wanted to read the article but it isn’t accessible online; it’s in the twilight zone between old digitised copies available in NewspaperSG, and more recent news articles archived by AsiaOne / other news websites. Today I had to use the microfilm for work, so I took the opportunity to dig up this article, too. Here it is:

(xiu lian ai qing / Practice Love)