When I left my job at NUS almost nine years ago, I slowly cleared out the books that had accumulated in my office, talking some to the National Library, and using several balikbayan boxes to send the best academic books to colleagues at the University of the Philippines. In both Vancouver and Singapore, we only have one major bookcase, and for a time the shelves of each were relatively bare. Yet books have a habit of multiplying: they almost seem to have bred over the last decade. Despite my habit of ordering books from our local library rather than buying, and despite our frequent forays to the little boxes that serve as neighbourhood libraries in the West End and elsewhere, our bookcases are now stuffed full and more. One further downside of my strategy of ordering books from the local library is that I’m often in a virtual queue, and books arrive erratically. Sometimes it’s feast after famine: five books arrive within a week. At others, as now, books arrive only a few days before I’m due to travel back to Singapore, and I have to abandon my efforts at slow reading and race through them.

One such book, which arrived a couple of days ago, is Wiley Wei-Chuen Ho’s The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street: A Memoir. I’d read an article about it, and a new friend of Taiwanese heritage I’d met on a hike had also mentioned it. It’s the memoir of a life lived largely in Vancouver in the absence of the author’s parents who, unable to find professional work after migrating to Canada, returned to Taiwan. I found the voice of the memoir very engaging, with memories of a childhood, divorce, and continued life tempered by retrospect. I’ve noticed a tendency for many such memoirs I’ve read over recent years to adopt other voices of power that often, paradoxically given their origins, lead away from introspection and vulnerability – critical terminology drawn from academia, for example, or the psych languages that are often now part of the construction of self. In contrast, Astronaut Children clears way terminological clutter go to the heart of a story that seems to have been continually re-narrated by the author over the years, with a growing sense of self-acceptance and curiosity about all the factors – from individual quirks through social scripts to geopolitical events – that shaped lives. 

As I age, I’m also curious about how lives intersect with my own. I first went to Taiwan in 1987, two years before I flew to Vancouver to study for my doctorate. I spent several months in Taipei, teaching English, as many young Europeans and North Americans at various language schools and buxiban （补习班, or after-school tuition centres). I contemplated staying but then decided to fly back to the UK. And then, as I’ve posted before, I took a year-long leave of absence from my doctoral studies to study Mandarin in Taiwan, this time in Tainan, from 1992 to 1993. I’m more intrigued, though, to remember the traces of Taiwan I came across in Vancouver; another perspective on the astronaut children of the book. My closest contacts were with Taiwanese students at UBC, including a language exchange partner who later became a professor at National Tsinghua University in Hsinchu. As a graduate student on a limited budget (I had a four-year scholarship, but I tried to stretch the money over five years to fund my studies in Taiwan) I also offered tuition for undergraduate students, and several were from Taiwan of Hong Kong. In particular I remember one Taiwanese undergraduate who seemed to live by himself in a house in Shaughnessy, complete with a fire-truck red Peugeot that his parents had given him. I can’t remember much about our sessions together in his front room, or even his name or what he studied. I do remember talking to him about his heritage as a Taiwanese, not a 外省人Mainlander, and how he’d been punished for speaking Taiwanese at school. More curiously, I also think about the power dynamics between us. I’d ride across town from Point Grey on my old bike, in those years before there were cycle lanes, from the ramshackle shared house I lived in in Point Grey with four other students. He paid me well, and he was also genuinely curious to learn. I had certain forms of privilege — education, race (paradoxically my Englishness didn’t really matter in this context: Americanness was the prized identity) – but I would never have the ease with wealth that he had.

Now, over thirty years later, I’ve become an astronaut. The metaphor always felt generative to me. An astronaut spends time travelling into space and yet returns to earth. In transpacific journeys, we fly and then we land, but as we do so the notion of home and solid ground shifts. Astronaut Children two of the five siblings make their lives in Canada, while three, along with the parents, return to Taiwan. As they continue to fly across the Pacific, the nature of home, of solid earth changes and then changes again. For me in the last decade, I’ve found this process of landing and reimagining home to be both productive and unsettling. The West End in Vancouver in summer is beautiful. We can walk or cycle everywhere. The tree cover keeps the area cool even in the heat. Friends come to visit and marvel at the beauty of our little apartment, with its solid wood beams and balcony reaching out into the leaves of our linden tree. In those last few days I don’t want to leave. 

Then we fly. For a day or two there’s that double sight. This time, I was struck by the greyness of Singapore, after days with no rain, and a certain tension, even in the airport, people rushing around much more quickly than Vancouver. The bareness of our HDB estate. Yet look around and there are strange parallels. Down in our void deck in Bukit Batok we also have a neighbourhood library where I can deposit and exchange books, although it is marked by a big sign indicating “free books”. In Vancouver, we’re members of West End Seniors’ Network, which operates out of a restored but still slightly shabby late nineteenth century mansion on Barclay Street. In Singapore, when we return, we reconnect with the FRCS Active Ageing Centre, housed in sparkling rooms in the void deck of a nearby block. WESN’s a little messy – there is a monthly newsletter, with a list of events and volunteering opportunities that you have to scan through and cross-reference with your own calendar. You have to call to book, or search around online. Programmes stop and start and start again, often through uncertain funding. FRCS, in contrast, have an app which, once you’re in, gives you access to everything. I’m still waiting to have all my details scanned in, but the promised land awaits. On the one hand the friction in dealing with WESN, the need to go in person or pick up a phone, offers richer possibilities for informal social connections. And yet when we return to Vancouver I’ll be frustrated by how much more effort everything takes.

How I occupy space, and how I am seen, also differs. In Vancouver, wearing Patagonia and Arcteryx and MEC clothing, my difference is invisible: my foreignness only becomes apparent when I open my mouth. In Singapore, especially in the HDB heartland, people are often surprised by what has come in the door. My blue IC, retained in an annual struggle with ICA that’s now beginning again, here operates as a kind of talisman, giving me entry: we begin to talk and difference often recedes.

So perhaps being an astronaut isn’t so much about landing, but being permanently in flight. As you age, you become a little more weary with the world: its noise, how it intrudes on quiet. You quite like the vacuum of space. And then of course you realise that you’re not alone up there. Everyone has something of this sense of unbelonging, whether by choice, or more frequently because of force. You reach out to your closest friends, realising that this is perhaps the most important experience that you share. That, and the love of books.