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Thinking as well of how tenuous some of those ties and ideas of home are anyway. My grandparents were born in China; my parents in Singapore. In some way I feel the pull of being a sojourner in search of other pastures is a deeper sense of self and identity than the idea of.. being Singaporean. At most, I’ll always feel forever tied to Southeast Asia, my home for so much of my life. But it could very well have been Malaysia or Thailand or Indonesia or wherever my family might have ended up, and certainly since I’ve lived in all of those countries for a few years at a time too.

I keep saying that functionally I am but a tourist in Singapore now; just one with an exceptionally well curated food list. I never had a life there after university there; I left, returned in fits and spurts, didn’t have normal jobs; led a very carefree and foreign life there when I returned for a brief spell. I lived in a ‘forest’ there and walked around barefoot. I dated women and wrote screeds about the government. It is at once very deeply my home (place, weather, culture) and not (politics, people, conservatism).

This year will be the first time I haven’t gone ‘home’ in 2 years (I used to go a few times a year), and I likely won’t for the next couple of years.

There’s a deep sense of grief and loss that I have been working through, and my parents coming here and then leaving again reminded me of it.

I spoke in non-English languages for a whole month, which was freeing (linguistically) but not (mentally). My non-English languages are the language of love, but also codependence and another time with far less autonomy. When I was a whole other person. The person I am not anymore.