Mother Nature's Slap Goodbye

I'm from New England, no matter where I've lived or worked I've always felt an affinity for the weather of north eastern coast of the United States. And like a parting wave, New England has decided to bid me farewell with its usual sweet nostalgic grace... and for those that are not native to this area such grace appears as freezing rain coupled with howling wind that can make trees snap like toothpicks and flood warnings inundating the nightly news.

Its my last weekend in Philadelphia, trapped inside due to the storm and left with my family, which leaves me with a twinge of sorrow coupled with a growing desire to throttle my younger siblings. Now I know, that's a terrible thing to say about one's siblings but all in all their attempts to understand my move to another country are often colored by the usual American preconceptions.

My brother asks me "So is Singapore a democracy or is it like China?" So I answer that "Yep, just like America", Singapore is a democracy with a Parliament, President and Prime Minster. But when I get to the fact that for most of its history independent of the United Kingdom it has been dominated by a single large party, the People's Action Party, his response is that knowing smirk that so many Americans love to gleam when they suddenly come to their own conclusion that their country is better than someone else's. "So its not really a 'democracy' then."

You can hear my growl of frustration, can't you?

My sister on the other hand, she's more hung up on the fact that gum is technically illegal in Singapore. We've told her about the culture, the food, the history and even though she's a teacher herself, she keeps erupting with new schemes to smuggle in tons or the sticky, bubble blowing goodness with startling originality and my growing concern.

My father treats it a bit like an adventure, he listens and says he wants to visit which is a good thing. My mother... she tends to get weepy as our flight date arrives and shamefully I try to change the subject to anything but us leaving when she's in the room.

But the one person that actually surprised me, who really made an effort that while carrying a tiny twinkle of disapproval but a startling interest to learn everything she could about my future home was my grandmother. When I arrived last Thursday for lunch at her house with vegetable lasagna on the table (I gag, I hate the stuff but will never tell her that!) and instead of giving me the usual topics of conversation most of my family has brought up when I tell them we are moving... "Do they have cell phones and the internet?"... "Can they speak English?"... "Is the food weird?"... she actually had spent the day at the local library (Yes, they still have those) finding every book she could on Singapore. Well a local town library only had three books but by God she had read them all and prepared talking points and questions she wanted to ask me. We ended up spending nearly three hours Googling pictures and videos of Singapore so she could see the island as much as possible without having to leave her warm, well lived in town house and garden she swears that without here attention daily just seems to fall apart.

Too say I was proud of the woman is a absolute failure of words to describe what I felt at that point.

But that about sums up my two weeks home in Philadelphia with my family, running left and right trying to convince them that Singapore is no different than here, that yes it is thousands of miles away but I have always been fascinated by the number of similarities, paralleled and quirks our two countries share.

I guess right now, as I've laid out my travel books the same way I did with my text books in college, with biggest in the middle, smallest on the outside, highlighter in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other, I've been trying hour over hour... fine its been 20-minutes... to immerse myself in all things Singapore before I leave.

One of those in particular I've found to be the most informative is not the travel books, the reports I read on the US Embassy website for Singapore. It actually was a children's book my boyfriend and I got in a care bag during the 2012 Singapore Day in New York.

Yes it is a little on the heavy-handed side trying to entice people to come back to Singapore (the country has a concerning brain-drain going on against a influx of foreign immigrants) but seriously, it was the easy book a found that detailed out some really interesting facts about the history and culture of Singapore.

Did you know the Samsui women of China held a special place in the history of the construction, largely coming from China in the late 1930s to work in construction and were best known for the distinctive red hats and black scarfs they always wore. A woman construction worker, that was unheard of in that era and the Samsui ladies actually had to take a vow never to marry in order to work abroad and almost all of them actually kept it! Could you image having to leave your homeland to work abroad in order to support your family at home, but the catch was you could never marry or even fall in love. You can see the ironic parallels in my own reason to move to Singapore, leaving to follow the the guy I love but with the hope of a job to accompany that once I arrive.

A trek through the wilderness

A chilly gust of wind caressed my cheeks, as if to bid farewell to an extended winter. The rays of sunlight that streamed through the still bare branches above my head provided a little comfort. I wrapped my jacket tighter around me and hurried after Ang Moh and his golden retriever Bailey. As we walked in the backwoods of Cork Creek Park I heard a rustling in the distance and spied five white-tailed deer prancing through the long grass about 10 m away.

My mind wandered to Singapore, and I imagined that I was trekking along the unpaved paths at Bukit Timah Hill, and through the secondary rainforests at Mandai. As I imagined the mosquitoes buzzing in my ears trying to break through my defenses, and the rivers of sweat pouring down my face, I remembered why I never took leisurely strolls like this in the Singapore jungles.

Of the top things that I would miss the most about the U.S., the great outdoors would rank fourth (after burgers, Mexican food and Netflix). The open expanses that stretch as far as the eye can see, fields not earmarked for new condo developments, and animals that roam free – like the five deer I saw in the woods. Okay, maybe Cork Creek Park is not the wilderness, and as I’m constantly reminded by Ang Moh and his family, Yardley, Pennsylvania is not the country… It’s apparently a suburb of Philadelphia. But to a city-boy like me, being in proximity to farms, cows and horses is as country as the Magnificent Seven, West Virginia and the Blue Ridge mountains.

In an attempt to see as much of the U.S. of A. as I can in the next 3 weeks, yesterday, Ang Moh, HTC (a Singaporean friend living in New York City who had come to the suburbs for a visit) and I explored Peddler’s Village and New Hope – a collection of quaint artisanal shops. Peddler’s Village seemed a little more planned-out and reminded me a little of Singapore and the deliberate urban planning that goes into developing cultural enclaves like Chinatown, and Little India. New Hope, seemed like a more organic settlement (the first settlers arrived in the 18^th century), and vaguely reminded me of Haji Lane and Arab Street with its vintage clothing and artisanal shops. Most of the shops were closed – it was a Tuesday afternoon and still chilly out, but I could imagine the town coming to life in the summer with families picnicking on the banks of the Delaware River and groups of teenagers piling into the ice cream parlors.

As I make my rounds to bid a fond farewell to the country that I’ve called home for 4 years, I look forward to re-discovering the new and sexy Singapore 2.0 as described in this WSJ article. I’ve always been a glass-half-full type of guy and am excited to return to the motherland and be part of its continued transformation. We don’t have the suburbs in Singapore but we have our heartlands. And I truly believe that as a society, Singapore is on the cusp of a cultural awakening, and at a critical existential moment in our journey as a nation. Where blind trust was once placed in the hands of the ruling government party, there is a palpable shift in the winds as more courageous Singaporeans take on the unfamiliar burden of ownership and responsibility for the future of our country.