I could not stop crying on that first flight. I kept thinking about my mother. I had a row to myself and my seat mates were wet tissues, wet masks, mucus and tears. On the second flight a full-capacity plane made fuller by the living ghost of a pandemic, housing the fulness of the Asian diaspora, stopped my tears, and stopped me from sleeping too. I landed and spent six hours in customs and immigration, where it was custom for us immigrants to sit, for our feet were already tired from broadening our respective diasporas, and our own personal histories. I finally entered the open air to the embrace of my older sister, whose footsteps I was bound to follow, and was hauled into a car that zoomed me into the city that I would fall in love in, and fall in and out of love with. I was overwhelmed by the space between buildings, and struggling to find a reference point I did not have, I proclaimed it to be “like Indonesia”.
My first month abroad reopened a childlike wonder in myself I had not experienced for a while. I was excited to wake up early each day and take on this city, as much to see the Niagara Falls as to buy my first winter jacket. A piece of me lit up every time a stranger went out of their way to complement the sweater of another stranger who happened to be myself, and in the outlet store where I bought my first pair of winter boots I stood in awe as my sister engaged in this amiable ritual too.
I bought my partner and I matching house plants the first night we met. Meeting her was magical, she was a new city in herself. I was enamoured by the smallness of her hand in mine, the reverb of her laugh. We found a sauce packet for my favourite dish, 麻辣香锅, we chopped up ingredients and rekindled the ritual of a communal bowl. We would soon start some rituals of our own: buying each other flowers, trying out recipes from home together, heading to the gym before sunrise. Small acts that faithfully and continually reproduced the wonder of Tolstoy’s “huge, harmonious whole”.
I have not had the time to sit down and write like this in a while. I have been tired. A year ago I had the time to write memoirs for hours, to sit in coffee shops and read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to go to therapy. I don’t know where the time went — my solitude has morphed into independence, and the time it takes to map my emotions to pretty words goes to meal prepping, half-days in the library, trudging through the snow. My existentialism can only concern future employment, anything deeper must be content to bubble beneath the surface.
I am taking my first English Literature class in two years. We are studying the Romantics, and Wordsworth’s oedipal rebellion against the Neoclassical Age is a call for the direct rather than the periphrastic, for “melancholy recollected in tranquility”. Half a year, another lockdown, the advent of Canadian right-wing populism and a death in the family later, perhaps it is time to recollect my melancholy.
The first person to comment on my lack of an accent was an immigration officer. The second, third, and fourth person to remark on this was an Asian who grew up in Canada. It became a weekly ritual, in which I would respond amiably to “why don’t you have an accent?” with “I went to an international school,” and contemplate something more vindictive in retrospect.
“Why don’t you just go to university in Indonesia?” Well, I never lived there. “Aren’t international fees like really expensive?” Yes, I guess so. Please, please ask me another question in that vein. I love having to explain my existence. “Sometimes when they speak I have no idea what they’re saying,” proffers one. “I would love to have a Singaporean accent, it sounds so cool when they talk,” fetishises another.
I have a complicated relationship with the subsection of my diaspora that is of my own generation, but came here before me. But I weep for them. I weep for the wrestling they must’ve had with the complicated case of their own identities in those alabaster classrooms and cafeterias, the heartbreaking resentment they must’ve been forced to hold in their own hearts for their own blood. So when the freshman who declared that he couldn’t comprehend the Singaporean accent told me proudly that he watched “all the North American sports,” I scoffed first, and pitied later.
I have found pockets of home here. At the advent of my first autumn, my partner and I took a train to Oshawa to visit her grandparents for my first Thanksgiving dinner. The warmth this family showed me broke their rainy suburbia in half, and it was as if the gorgeous, beaming sun of the morning after was the result of their wills alone. The sunlight turned all the fall colours into stained glass, rendering the apple farm we visited, the night we spent discussing our favourite films, the life stories my partner’s grandparents recollected to me in their living room, the food trucks we ate poutine out of, the electric carriages we saw on the hilly roads, my partner and her sister falling asleep in the car, into the cherished tableaus of my memory.
Fall reading week was ushered in by the news of my grandmother’s hospitalisation. I went to bed on Saturday night anticipating my first real rest of the semester, I woke up on Sunday morning to the news that she had had a bad fall and was in the ICU with bleeding in her brain. Knowing that a surgery was already risky, notwithstanding the necessity of cutting open her skull and the fact that she was 85, we knew it was only a matter of time. She was on a ventilator, and the doctor said that the next 2–3 days would be crucial.
All my responsibilities, rituals and routines are nothing before the immovable fact of death. My sister and I contemplated dropping our lives here and going back to Singapore. In Singapore my family could only visit her for 30 minutes a day because of COVID restrictions. Her children in Indonesia couldn’t visit her because of travel restrictions. So when my Dad went to the hospital every day of the week of his 51st birthday, he brought us with him on a WhatsApp call; my aunts would weep and apologise for not being there, and we would all plead to God through the phone to heal her.
When I was about to leave Singapore my grandmother would ask me to come back quickly, but I was too busy packing my luggages to even respond. Over my past year at home I had bought her lunch everyday, and I was there when she woke up and when she fell asleep. I was her constant, but I had yet to connect with her in the way I had wanted to.
I was her constant, and then I wasn’t there. When I woke up late on Sunday mornings to call my parents, she was almost always already sleeping. On the rare occasion that she was awake and my Dad did hand her the phone, she wouldn’t recognise me, and I would struggle to find words to say. My parents told me that she would often ask them when I was coming home. In the days before her fall and hospitalisation she would speak of seeing our grandfather again. The thought that my leaving was what untethered her breaks me in half.
I left a church service to cry in the bathroom and found my sister doing the same. I listened to A Crow Looked At Me on repeat, unconscious of when the album ended and began again. I hosted a screening of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives for some friends and said that I loved the serenity with which the film captured dying — a strong contrast to cinema’s typically dramatic portrayals — but I did not reveal the fact of my grandmother. I found it hard to complete the assignments I had due week after. My partner and I went to Toronto islands and stared at the sunset for a long time. We listened to How to Disappear Completely in the dark and cried together.
In the third grade, when my cousins left Singapore after visiting us, you found me crying in a corner of my room. I did not know what I was feeling, but it seemed to be familiar to you. You gave me perfect words that affirmed to me instantly that everything would be okay. It’s so hard going back to school while holding your absence inside me. I find myself drifting into the garden of Gethsemane, kicking myself for not being more patient with you, for stupidly telling myself that next year would be the year I overcame our language barrier and asked you about the life you had lived thus far. I miss you dearly, I miss the way you would always offer your meal to others first, under the guise of “kebanyakan, nanti gabisa habis” (it’s too much, I won’t be able to finish) , I miss your smile and your voice, the cat sounds you would make and the swans you would fashion out of Ferrero Rocher wrappers, how much you cared for us and about us in your own way.
The first day it snowed I could not stop smiling. White pellets bounced off of my jacket leaving no trace. Winter does not care for demarcations between road and sidewalk, it simply starts and accumulates, everywhere. I adored its ambivalence, being able to step my boot into its thickness, to observe the hole I had formed and see only a mirage of it minutes later.
To experience three quarters of a full cycle of seasons for the first time has been mesmerising. It has made me newly conscious of my smallness before this world. It has also made me miss home, that strange island where it is summer all year, where a friend remarked to me that the absence of seasons made his memories blur together, and instead he leaned on music to demarcate his personal history.
For Chinese New Year, I joined a WhatsApp call with my extended family. They described dreams they had had of my grandmother, and my grandmother calling on them to go somewhere with her was a recurring motif. My aunt told us that on the day of my grandmother’s hospitalisation, she observed a cat outside her house. (“She used to make cat sounds,” she reminds us.) When my parents and my younger sister went back to Indonesia for the funeral, she saw the same cat waiting at their house, leaving once they parked the car. “It’s like she was taking care of the house for them,” my aunt posited.
My own dream of my grandmother is as follows: she is in my room in Toronto, looking at the pictures of family and friends from home on my wall. She smiles as she gazes, then turns to me and says, “c’mon, let’s go.”
I’ve printed more pictures since I dreamed this dream. The figures and places captured are immortalised on my wall, as they are in my memory. I hold them in my heart, and I keep moving forwards.
