I’m back in Singapore again in this peripatetic year in which residency requirements have sent me back and forth across the Pacific. After a few weeks, as always, it seems as though I’ve never been away. Our HDB estate has gone through repainting, and our block has been transformed from a palette of greys, creams and browns to a bolder series of blues. Beyond that, little has changed: the hill in the morning with its mist over a hidden lake, the sky full of swiftlets in the evening, dipping and spooling between the tall housing blocks, the coffee shop downstairs, and wakes and weddings alternating in the void deck below.
Despite this movement, I’m feeling very much at peace. Three things, perhaps, have come together in my life, for a brief period at least. The first is the joy of discovering a wonderful new writer. In this case it’s Richard Wagamese, whose books have a habit of turning unexpectedly in my life: in the recommended reading section of my branch library in Vancouver, and then on the shelves of second-hand bookstores just when I’m looking for something new. So far, I’ve only read Wagamese’s last unfinished novel Starlight, and one of his most celebrated works, Medicine Walk, which features some of the same characters at an earlier stage of their lives. The novels are set in small towns or farms in the British Columbia interior, and many of the themes are drawn from Wagamese’s own life: reconnecting with fathers, rediscovering indigeneity, surviving trauma, and making a healing connection with the land. They describe a world that intersects with mine but that I, as an urbanite in Vancouver who travels within the province for leisure, will never fully enter. Apart from their strong and beautiful exploration of human and nonhuman connections to the natural world, I like how the novels acknowledge and explore trauma and then move through it, not to an easy end goal of forgiveness or reconciliation but through an ongoing, unfinished process of reconciling.
The second element in my life has been coming back to teaching again, for a moment, almost eight years since I taught my last university class. In the meantime I’m facilitated groups working on memoir and life review, given online lectures and conference presentations, and yet I haven’t taught literature. This year at Singapore Writers Festival, in addition to facilitating a panel, I also organised a workshop on writing historical fiction with Sharmini Aphrodite. I trailed this in my last post, and especially a strategy we developed in which we had participants bring their own archival objects, describe them, and place them in a narrative. The workshop went well, and, as always when I co-teach, there’s that sense of two perspectives being much better than one, of how your co-teacher can pick up on something you’ve missed or not quite explained, and elaborate, and then, a few minutes later, you can return the favour.
What I was struck by most, though, how I felt I was really teaching, rather than facilitating, for the first time in years. In my counselling training, I learned to let go of the notion of a lesson plan, to move in a way that was guided by the person I was in conversation with. In group work, the dynamic is different, but there’s still a sense in which my groups aren’t teaching, that their content develops mostly in the moment in response to others. The workshop, in contrast, had a lesson plan: introductions, some mini-lecture moments, a series of exercises that we worked through, and then a sharing of resources at the end. The challenge was pacing: to keep a goal in mind, to give space for things to happen, and then to nip and tuck so we got through to the conclusion. What surprised me was how well I could do this, and how much I enjoyed it; how deep my tacit knowledge of archival work has become over the years, and how easy it is to share.
The third element of these last few weeks has been final work on the new version of my short story collection, Heaven Has Eyes, to be published in January with Gaudy Boy in New York. I’ve finished with various rounds of revisions, but there are ongoing things to prepare for various launch events in Boston, New York, and Vancouver in late January and early February. Somehow this, and perhaps also attending some of the Singapore Writers Festival panels, has brought me back into the world of writing. I’m working on a couple of projects, and feel newly energised to follow them through.
When I want to take a day for writing and research in Singapore, I’ll often go to ISEAS library. I’ll catch the direct bus early in the morning from my estate and do the office work of checking emails and WhatsApp messages during the fifty-minute ride. I’ll walk across NUS campus, and eat breakfast at the Deck, on the site of the old Arts Canteen. As I get older I eat less and take less sugar, and the kopi and nasi lemak I used to eat in the Engineering Canteen has now been replaced by a cai bao and kopi c kosong. If I get timing right, I’ll swim at the NUSS Guild House before the library opens.
Walking across NUS campus involves memories of the past, of the old Engineering Canteen where the Techno Edge is now, and, especially Block ADM, the Old Administrative Building, where AS 8 is now, next to the library. When I search for something from thirty years ago it’s often a small discovery: those last traces of brick pathways between the buildings, not yet covered over in concrete or tile. These walks have often been tinged with regret for me: I’m an outsider now with no access to the library or the staff lounge, although some ghost in my phone still tries at times to connect me to the NUSStaff server. I think, perhaps, of what might have been if I’d continued in an academic career that would still not be over: my tenured contract would have expired in June 2027. And yet this time, perhaps for the first time, following one of those red brick paths, I realised that I had absolutely no regrets.