The disorienting disequilibrium of accessing an institution 15,000 kilometres away from the comfort and safety of my computer screen
I’m starting to feel left behind. My friends have left the country to the likes of Australia, the Philippines, South Korea, the USA, the Singaporean army. I have taken the train to the airport four times in the last month. I have been left here to turn on my computer at 9PM and log off at 2AM and wake up before 7AM for my next tutorial, daily.
During orientation I had the option to follow a schedule written for students in difficult timezones, but I didn’t. I told myself that I would not be an outsider, that I would do my best to assimilate. So I stayed up till 6AM, dragged loosely through virtual tours and online games by the possibility of connection.
When I tell them I live in Singapore they make some remark about distance and time, somehow always mentioning that my timezone is the “polar opposite” of theirs, then proceed to talk to someone they have something in common with, that common ground almost certainly being related to national identity. Just before the sun rose it dawned on me that I wouldn’t be making any real connections for the foreseeable future, that I would always be on the outside looking in. So I started preparing for my first classes, a drop to which all of university would be condensed down to for a while.
I never lived in the country of my national identity, I was the child of an expat in the country I lived in all my life, I will be a foreigner wherever I go to next. In high school I found friends who felt the same way. But they’re all leaving now.
I recently experienced what should have been my first birthday away from home. I had lunch with some friends at an Italian restaurant known for their tortellini, but they didn’t have any left. Halfway through the lunch the life-force my 4 hours and 15 minutes of sleep bestowed upon me was depleted. I couldn’t find the words to slip into conversations and codes that didn’t concern me. We went to an arcade afterwards but I couldn’t find the quick-witted humour and levity to match the kinetic lights and sounds of the claw machines. I just wanted to take my afternoon nap.
On the Sunday after I watched Raging Bull at an independent theatre with four other friends. After the film we indulged in basil minced pork, pandan chicken, green chicken curry, deep fried prawn cakes and kangkung at a restaurant called Beer Thai while discussing whether or not Jake La Motta received the full extent of the retribution he deserved. Afterwards we walked to Haji Lane and had desert and conversation. I had to leave at one point to buy a carton of milk and get home before my curfew. Of those four other friends two have enlisted in the army, one has left for South Korea, and one remains here. I wish I had disregarded my obligations and sat and talked for longer. I wish I never had to get up from that rickety metal chair, that I never finished that lacklustre bowl of vanilla ice cream.
I have trouble perceiving the future as real. With five entire months between finishing high school and starting university the sheer time between now and then solidified the unreality of it all. Now, confined to a city 15,000 km away from the city I am a student in, physical distance and a 12-hour time difference maintains the unreality that an egregious tuition fee refutes.
I am constantly at the precipice of something, even now that I’m well into my first semester. I see that cases are rising in the province I should be in, while my sleep schedule becomes more and more disfigured, and I lose hope. This week I came out okay, but maybe next week will be my downfall.
If I were Sisyphus I would push my boulder up my cliff a few times then just jump off.
This summer I fell newly in love with the country I had lived in for the last 16 years, a country that I had yearned to leave for every one of those years. After being barred from it all for the duration of a two-month long circuit breaker, and branded with the knowledge that in a few months it would no longer occupy the space immediately outside my doorstep, I saw everything with new eyes. I cherished City Hall, the quiet road leading up to Oldham Theatre, the grandeur of the National Gallery and the serenity of The Padang. I was enamoured by Bras Basah, by the dusty second-hand bookstores that faced the National Library, by the alabaster spaces of the National Museum. I spent long hours in Chinatown, indulging in the Mala hotpot at People’s Park far too many times, traversing hot afternoons in pursuit of independent bookstores. Friends and I, friends who are no longer here, cycled through Pulau Ubin and skipped pebbles on a saturnine beach with a view of a floating village that we found by taking the path less travelled and dragging our rented bikes through the mud. We hiked tirelessly through Bukit Timah Nature Reserve and found an endless, open field overlooked by a bronze quarry, and on that field we laid down our bodies before the feet of the ephemeral.
A friend who had once left the country and then came back and this summer left for the final time, said that he would miss the trees. So everyday I was enamoured by the branches that bowed over the pavement outside my apartment. On the way home one day I saw migrant workers laying down under those trees and fell in love with the sunlight that the leaves masked from them, the leaves that masked them from the sunlight, them.
But my love for this country was rooted in an awareness of its fleetingness. Now that it is possible that I may remain here for the next year, alone in my room on my computer at egregious times of the night, it’s all starting to feel hopelessly perennial.
