We’ve just passed the vernal equinox, and days in Vancouver are already longer than nights. In the morning, we are woken by birdsong. After several false starts, spring is now firmly with us. Cherry blossoms are blooming, especially the later varieties, the dazzling white Akebono with just a hint of pink, and then buds gathering on Kazans, green with deep pink tips. Ducks and geese are pairing up. Eagles, too, in the skies above. In Stanley Park, the herons are building nests and mating. Beautiful, windy, sunswept days are followed by dark days of relentless rain. When the rain stops, everything sparkles again. The streams in the Park are full, and skunk cabbage has begun to spring up. In the West End, azaleas are opening, and camelia bushes are full of red flowers. People emerge, too, after the winter. Sidewalk cafes are suddenly crowded. Gyms empty out, and runners weave their way around you on the seawall.
I write every year about this change of seasons, partly because after so long in Singapore I still find it new and unexpected, partly simply because of the sense of new life and affirmation it brings. Since stepping down from my academic position eight years ago I’ve had much more time to live in the moment and look around. This isn’t, of course, without a certain uneasiness. The world is in a dark place at the moment, and Canada too often seems to teeter on the brink. The Association of Asian Studies Conference was held here two weeks ago, in the Convention Centre at the foot of Burrard Street. I met up with friends who are still in academic careers, checked out the books display and watched a film, Jimmy Lo’s Give and Take, exploring the lives of a couple who leave Hong Kong to settle in Canada after 2019, and in particular the psychological dimension of migration and exile. Walk a few blocks east from the Convention Centre and Canada Place, past the gentrified streets of Gastown, and you’re in a different world: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, one of the poorest communities in the country, where unhoused residents struggle with widespread drug use and violence.
In making this contrast, I don’t want to simply oppose the academic world to the world outside the academy. They’re interconnected, and I miss the best parts of academic life: teaching, and learning through conversations with people who have deep insight into the way in which our world works – or more frequently, fails to work. I now have too little in my life of the grounded academic critique exemplified by a recent UBC talk by Hilmar Farid, which placed postcolonial Indonesian history within a world historical context that included the breakdown of the current world order in our present moment. Yet moving outside the academy has exposed me to a larger range of conversations and languages. In literary studies in the academy especially, there’s perhaps too great a tendency to concentrate on discursive critique, as if by simply illustrating ideological contradiction banishes it from the world. In my present itinerant ways of working I talk or write less and instead do a lot of listening, and encouraging others to speak or write on their own terms. In my “pretirement,” then, I find it much more difficult than during my working life to tell myself a story of my own heroic resistance, or feel a sense of agency in a continual struggle for social change. I’m more aware how I am part of certain problems as well as solutions. And yet if I have a feeling of being becalmed, this feeling is perhaps more realistic and honest, even if I now acknowledge both the limits of what I can do. I think of new tactical possibilities, even if the overall strategic effect of them seems murkier. Critique still remains important, but I’ve also become curious about telling affirmative stories and assisting others to tell rich and complex stories of their own.
After a beautiful spring day in Vancouver, the rain and the darkness suddenly return. In the last six weeks, I’ve been facilitating a guided autobiography group with participants mostly in their seventies, in contrast to the younger adults I’ve worked with over the last three years. The participants, like me, have been part of academia and also agents in social change in different, uneven ways. One of the participants, in talking of how the group had gone, mentioned how it had been a brave space, rather than a safe space, a space in which different histories were remembered, and futures projected. The next day we cycled in Stanley Park in the rain with two friends who are nearing eighty, and who maintain curiosity, creative practice, and a commitment to social change. At 64, I’m now nearing another transition: in less than a year I’ll cross the final bridge into old age. I’ll be able to start to collect my CPF Life in Singapore; in Vancouver I’ll be eligible for an orange Compass Card, giving me concession rates on public transit. At this time of the year there’s always the sheer wonder of life and of living on, the days lengthening, the leaves finally beginning to come, that rhythm of change and renewal that makes you a little curious why, at a time of so many arrivals, you are beginning to prepare to leave.