Yet another transition

I'm sitting at Cosi, in one of their big red couches and for once, there is nothing urgent I need to be doing before class. I don't have a paper due in an hour. And I'm not late for some meeting or other. Sometimes, I let life get the better of me like that. Indeed, most of the time I know I do it to myself. I tend to over-commit and get over involved in everything and anything.

But for now, for this hour, I get to sit and nibble at my salad (with gorgonzola, cranberries, pears and grapes, with flatbread) and sip my coffee as the world passes me by. And I think "ah, this is everything I will miss about here." You see, I am going home. Maybe not forever, maybe not even for a long time, but for this summer I am going home.

As always you have to give something up to get something and so for this summer, I am giving up new england and for one summer, I am going to see if I can survive making Singapore my home again. Yes, survive. Home, as always, brings up a complicated mix of nostalgia and trepidation. One summer, would hopefully tell me enough about whether I can do this for good. Give up my yogurt granola parfaits, cooking experiments, long beautiful walks in return for crowds of people, an endless mile of the same shops and a faster pace of life.

8 years, willing or no, makes a place you live in home and leaves more of a mark on you than you leave on it. What has new england left on me? A love of lobster? A sense of independence? Confidence? I pray that at least some of these marks are indelible.

The day before preterm

It is the calm before the storm.

I had a gloriously long vacation of six weeks in Singapore. I was going to use the word home but have been reminded most recently that I have for better or ill spent all of my adult life in New England. All one hundred percent of it. So how do you measure what is home?

Perhaps it is because of this that being in Singapore turns me into a child once again. The girl I am over here to all accounts is an independent, confident, capable young woman. I can earn more than enough to live the way I choose to live, keep house, do well in studies, cook and take care of chores and interact with the world. I can also say this because I am here.

The girl I am in the places I grew up though, once again is a child with all her needs being taken care of. I am cooked for, my laundry is done, and a great many things I have only to ask for. More than that though, whatever I can do here suddenly becomes unimportant and secondary. It is not important what I do, only that I am.

It's great for a vacation but now is the time to readjust to being the former girl. The girl who will order her mind and put her best foot forward, be fiercely independent and yet friendly and capable all at once. It is the start of yet another adventure and at the end of it lies a question. One which I hope the answer will become apparent during these two years.

Can my childhood home also become my adult home? If these two girls meet and join, which one will come to the fore? Can I hold on to who I have become?

I'm not sure I will ever find the answer to these questions or ever stop asking them. Growing up, I knew for sure I didn't fit in in cookie-cutter Singapore with its preset molds for people and careers. I am not done growing up but now I know for sure that I will never fit in 100% anywhere and that cookie-cutter molds or not, I don't have to or want to fit in anywhere.

Leaving Town.

I quit work in a week.

I'll be starting at business school in the fall and coming back to this same old town. A part of me is tired of Boston and my wandering feet would really like me to move somewhere different. But another smaller part of me has grown to love my quiet town masquerading as a city.

Soon, I'll be back for a month and half in a very different sort of city - the place I grew up in. A place I left seven years ago now and never really looked back on. A place that I'm not sure I'll ever fit in again. When kids move from a small town to a big city, upon coming back to the small town, there is a familarity to everything and a kinship to everyone, a web of connections that you don't have in a large city, drawing you in both supporting you and holding you down. Why is it then, that moving from Boston to Singapore feels the same way? Singapore may be the bigger city but maybe because its the town I grew up in, it's even more of a small town than Boston is in terms of mindset of the people.

I've had room to stretch these few years. Room to grow wild and unchecked for a bit. But for the next two months, I suspect I'm going to get sat on and pressed down for a bit. I wish home and being myself weren't so mutually exclusive.

I am a coward. I hide my beliefs at home because it's easier not to argue. It's easier to be something I'm not in order to avoid conflict. In the end, I'm not sure which is the right path. Should I stand up and fight my losing battles with my elders or is it enough that I know that I will not change them and they will not change me and keep the peace?

I lie with my silences. I lie without words everytime I nod and smile and just pretend I don't hear hear the insinuations on marraige, appearance and girls acheving entirely too much for their own good. Sometimes I get scared that if I stay there long enough, I'll start to believe my own quiet lies. It's so much easier to tell myself I can do things when there aren't a million other people telling me I can't.

I am a Singaporean who has abandoned her city. I have evaded any responsibility of contributing back to the land in which I grew up. But like an unwanted child, I don't think I ever fit in in her family. Long before I left her for a place halfway around the world, she had already abandoned me.

Disjointed

Sitting in the taxi going down memorial drive, i was struck with the sudden burst of feeling that "ah, I'm home" even as a wave of homesickness for the places I had just come from hit me.

Home is everywhere and nowhere. Boston is expansive and welcoming. Here I can breathe and grow. But all the freedom in the world can't buy me my family and friends, the culture and world that is the home of my childhood even as that very same culture and family suffocates and confines me.

"Choose!" everything screams at me. Choose. There are so many push factors and so little pull. This is not choosing. This is running away. Left or Right? It feels like I'm picking against the other path.

forever missing

This week's Lexington column in the economist is about immigration policy in the US, a topic I read with particular interest because I'm one of many who came here to study and then decided to stay to work. While the column itself was interesting, one particular quote stuck in my mind - the immigrant's lament: "she has spent the past 25 years missing India and will spend the next 25 missing America".

While the countries mentioned and number of years mentioned are different, that one sentence seemed to sum up my future pretty well. It's one of the reasons why I find it so hard to figure out what I'm doing next, much less what I want to do with my life. Here in America, I pine for the food culture of Singapore and the zen lifestyle of Japan amongst many other little unique things about each society. Living in Japan, I missed the open hearted acceptance of the urbanite American cities. You can't have your cake and eat it too, if only because there's no way to physically live in 3 places at one time.

The road is wide open before me but ironically the crossroads are too many to choose between. And having chosen one path, would I forever wonder what was on the others? I always thought that at some point, I was going to move back to Asia, maybe even Singapore, which for 2/3 of my life I had called home and knew no other. But when I think back to how I felt when I was in Singapore, before I knew that there were other ways of living to miss, all I remember was feeling trapped, unable to breathe.

If I were to go back, would I be able to leave again? Is it easier to live in a gilded cage, if the door to that cage were always open? And if one were to live in that cage, and slowly realize one day that the once open door had shut, would the response be panic or contentment?

These are questions I would need to have my own answers to before I would ever think of moving home.