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.

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.

The contents of my fridge.

This morning I looked in my fridge and took a mental catalogue of all that was in it.

For someone who lives alone, I have a terrible food habit - I buy lots of food to fill my fridge and cupboards and end up not eating half of it. Perhaps it's the legacy left from growing up in Singapore where food was the symbol of both prosperity and family, but food for me has always seem to symbolize so much more than just a means to survive. An empty fridge is an incredibly lonely thing.

Today I have - yoghurt (both the drinkable and the little cup kinds)
eggs
dried scallops (sent from home almost a year ago now, good thing they last forever)
chopped up cabbage (ingredient for okonomiyaki later this week)
bacon (I made the most delicious carbonara the other day)
cream (not sure what I'm going to do with this yet.. perhaps a stew?)
green onions
been sprouts (made pad thai yesterday)
gouda cheese (good snack)
shredded parmesan cheese (maybe another batch of carbonara?)
brie cheese (I used this to make pear, bacon and brie sandwiches)
leftover herbal chinese chicken soup
barley tea (I make big pitchers of these and stick them in the fridge)
coconut milk (I made curry last weekend, maybe I'll make nasi lemak)
chrysanthemum tea
black tea
white and mint tea (yes I have a lot of tea, love love love iced tea)
flour tortillas

As much as I miss the food back home, looking at my fridge I wonder if moving home would converesely make me miss other kinds of food. Like good bread, a plentiful variety of good cheese, and ironically Japanese homestyle food. As much as Singapore has amazing food in restaurants, I really think that the everyday grocery stores in Singapore leave much to desire. Grocery store food in Singapore is both not quite fresh enough and kind of boring. Or perhaps I only feel that way because I'm spoiled here by being able to buy what I desire without thinking of the cost. If I were to shop at gourmet supermarkets in Singapore, perhaps I'd feel differently.

I wonder what my life would be like if I were home. It'd be incredibly hard to move back to living wtih my family again after having had the glorious freedom of being my own person here. Worst, I'd have to give up my kitchen. One of my favourite books in the world is Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. I understand the narrator perfectly in that story because giving up my kitchen would be one of the hardest things in the world for me to do.

If I ever had to move home, having my own kitchen would be the best consolation. I've never been able to cook in Singapore because my mum won't let anybody use "her" kitchen. If I had my own kitchen however, in return for the sacrifice of good cheese, amazing fresh vegetables, and exciting ingredients to play with I'd get to experiment with old and new ingredients and ways to use them in Singapore.