It’s that season of migration for us again. Suitcases sit ready in our apartment. Each day I add something to one of them: books, connectors or cables for electronic devices, or clothes that I put in, miss, and then take out again. As I post this we’ll be on our flight, but until then the rhythm of our days continues as normal. I wake either in darkness if I’m off for a day in the archives or library, or later, to sunlight streaming over the hill next to our estate, with swallows circling in the morning air. A couple of weeks ago the rain trees in the forest were in flower, their canopies dusted with creamy gold flowers, and on a walk I found myself saying to a friend that it must be a particular time of the year, and then her gently reminding me that nature doesn’t quite work that way in Singapore. Now they are back to their usual green. Everything’s unchanged. Early in the morning there’s a trace of mist over the lake that was an old granite quarry on the hillside. By the time I drink my coffee, it’s vanished.
Vancouver, of course, does have seasons, even if global climate change is making them fray at the edges. As we begin to prepare to return, I find myself paying more attention to news from there, to photographs of the cherry blossom that seems to have come unseasonably early, or arrangements for the last snowshoeing hikes before the snow melts. The snowpack is much smaller than normal this year, already enough to cause anxiety about drought and fire in the late summer, in particular. We’ll join a rhythm of seasonal that is bound up with new life and then death, and this time we’ll stay long enough, for the first time in three years, to see the leaves turn yellow, red, golden, and then fully fall.
I’ve been having conversations in the last few weeks about senses of in-betweenness, of living in Singapore with the memory of somewhere else. Three of my former students talked about this, on separate meetings, over the last month or so. One had left Singapore for Europe, for a very intensive practice in the arts, and thought she would never return. Having come back though, giving tuition, she feels strangely settled. My other two conversations were with writers, trying to find a space of stillness here, and to negotiate the demands of making a living in a society where saturated with external expectations of success measured in salary, promotions, and consumption. Both talked about periods they’d had studying abroad, and the fact that these were both liberating and limiting. One told me about studying creative writing in a top programme in Europe, finding her professors both incredibly insightful in terms of the writing process, and also limited in knowing anything about the rest of the world, especially Singapore. In a workshop, when discussing speculative fiction she’d written, one participant had asked her whether the piece was a traditional Singaporean folk tale. The other had a similar experience – of being asked, in the United States, to write as an Asian American might, and also of having to continually explain the historical context to her writing.
These conversations made me think about my own place within Singapore. Coming back, having been away, I’m aware of being a little more distant. Partly this is ageing, and not being in the university: I don’t have my finger in quite so many social and intellectual pies, and I don’t quite have the energy to forge new connections that I did before. We live in an HDB flat and I spend almost all my time with Singaporeans, as I always did, but returning after absence I’m more aware of being seen as different, of being racialized, in part because I’m stepping beyond the comfort zone of the workplace to forge new connections. I’ve tended not to write about my own experiences of racialization in Singapore because, as someone who’s racialized as Caucasian (following the descriptor on my IC) or ang moh, or mat saleh, I’m largely privileged. On NUS campus, I can dress very casually, and yet I’m still taken to be a professor. When we went to my MP’s meet-the-people session two years ago, our MP asked us, without prompting, which condo we lived in. This isn’t the kind of racism that foreign workers, or indeed most minoritized Singaporeans, experience. And it’s not really comparable, even, to the experience of Chinese Singaporeans who go to Europe or North America, moving from majority privilege to minoritization. There’s no threat of violence here, and no history of discriminatory discourses against people who look like me: quite the contrary. Perhaps the best way I’ve come across talking about it is Mohsin Hamid’s comment about being an affluent light-skinned man with a Muslim name travelling before September 11 2001: the racialization he experienced was largely an inconvenience, but nothing much more. For me, there’s a momentary irritation when a Singaporean Chinese uncle asks me, slightly aggressively, outside the reading rooms of the National Library, “where are you from?” and I have the presence of mind to reply “Bukit Batok,” and smile.
I don’t want to dwell too long on this awareness of racialization, although I am still curious to think how I might write about my experience in a way that acknowledges privilege and yet also challenges readers. In my current life, this renewed sensitivity is perhaps a symptom rather than a cause. I’ve written before on this blog about my strange inability to grow roots in Vancouver, to really feel part of a place, for the first real time in my life. I’m looking forward to the closeness to the natural world, to a slower pace of life, and of course to connecting with some people who I cherish. My partner and I will trade places: she, not I, will be minoritized. Perhaps our closeness, and our continued enjoyment of each other’s company, means that we don’t need to be so connected to the world outside. There’s also a sense, six years after I left the university, of not really having my pulse on current events; in academia, of others beginning to speak a new language that I don’t fully have access to.
In the background to all of this is the experience of ageing, something that you’re never quite prepared for, and which still ambushes you at times. The results of blood tests, your body not quite conforming to how it should be, those aches and pains after exercise that don’t dissipate as quickly as before, that sudden loss of a word that’s on the tip of your tongue, and which a sympathetic younger person articulates for you, hearing that is not as acute as it used to be, others’ words slurring when there’s any background noise. I still sit with members of an older generation than mine, now in their nineties, looking through family photos. And I meet up with people of my own generation, who are changing in different ways as they age, often struggling with the changes that come in slowing down after a lifetime of work. Counselling has given me two things: an ability to listen better, and a desire to see the good in people and to reflect what I see back to them. I’m quieter than I used to be: I listen, and I watch. I try to do small things to repair the world, but the world still continues on in the same path. In some ways this disengagement’s good. And then you think of Gaza, climate change, the continued tensions between the US and China, of refugees and shut borders. At these times you feel as if you might not be in flight, but rather on a ship without power, helpless, carried by its momentum into the pillar of awaiting bridge.