Taking to the road–by which I mean letting the road take you–changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.
– Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road
In the early nineteen-sixties, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him: “Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life.”
– James Wood, “Helen Garner’s Savage Self-Scrutiny,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2016 issue
With apologies to Helen Garner, bullshit preambles are a fact of my writing. By the time I actually hit publish on this post, it will be six months from my arrival in Singapore. Yet Singapore is the place I’ve written about the least. It’s frankly less fun than reflecting on a trip, and also more difficult to paint with a broad brush because, well, I live here. My relationship to Singapore is reflected in the ways I’ve envisioned writing about it over the months: a flinty “Disneyland with the Death Penalty” revisited (I fear linking, just Google it), then not at all, then maybe as a mediation on how much I miss New York, then as a judicious pro-con listing.
Here’s where I’ve landed: “a typical day in the life.” I have a deep love for reading about other people’s mundane daily existence, from a bottomless appetite for memoirs to religious readings of New York Magazine‘s Food Diary series and The New York Times‘s Sunday Routine column. Inevitable disclaimer: there’s really no such thing as a “typical” day for me lately. Five-odd months of working from home as a freelancer was recently interrupted with a two-month contract working at a local contemporary art space. This spring, I’m hoping to split the difference as a part-time in-house consultant, while continuing independent work.
In Singapore, the sun rises at 7 am and sets at 7 pm, every day, all year round. I do not miss the winter days of waking up in the pitch dark. If I’m working from home, my commute is just walking a few steps to my desk. After 10 years of the NYC subway, this is the ultimate luxury. After some emails, I try to motivate for an early workout. We live in a towering condo with a gym and two pools, so there really isn’t an excuse, even though cardio is hell in this humidity. (Yes, even indoors with A/C blasting. I swear you can still feel it.) I’ve run outside exactly three times since moving here, and I say this as someone who ran outside three times a week for a decade. On the bright side, I’ve rediscovered a love of swimming. Plus, laps are over in 20 minutes! There’s also a great local yoga studio which is walking distance. “Hot yoga” means windows open and two towels.
Morning is also usually my time to talk to family and friends, when it’s evening back in the states. Early Skype sessions or calls back to NY for work are often on the agenda as well. If I’m going to the Centre for Contemporary Art, I hop on a double-decker bus for a 20-minute ride to Gillman Barracks, an arts cluster in an old army barracks that is still surrounded by deep jungle. Experience has taught me to keep an eye out for monkeys and cockatoos in the starfruit trees, and snakes and monitor lizards on the ground. I’m truly not in Brooklyn anymore.
During the day, the heat can be stifling and unrelenting, punctuated by violent downpours. Rain can be preferable, as the sun is so strong here on the equator that I break out in hives in direct light. I’m talking melt-your-nail polish, permanent-sweat-moustache, call-a-cab-three-blocks-from-home strong. I now own a sunbrella. I find the extremity and sameness of the weather to be mind-numbing, but I try to use it to my advantage during the day: At home, I crank the A/C, pull the shades, and power through at my desk. I’ll often make myself lunch to avoid going out in the heat, but if I’m feeling restless, I’ll walk to an Australian cafe for a salad and iced long black. At the CCA, I’ll walk with my co-workers to a neighborhood hawker centre, the indoor/outdoor grouping of home-style food stalls that is probably the greatest feature of this wee city-state.
I’m a morning person, but I love the evenings here. The sunsets are often beautiful and colorful, reminding me that I live in the tropics. It’s finally cool enough to run an errand, take a walk, or just sit out on our terrace, the redeeming feature of our flat. Our place is tiny: yes, smaller than our Brooklyn apartment, and almost the same price. Cooking dinner is an exercise in frustration in our doll-sized kitchen, with ingredients that are never quite the same. We have a rice cooker which we make good use of, but I usually cook Western food… it’s easy to go out for really good Asian, after all! Weeknights on the couch with Netflix look pretty much the same as they did in New York, except the wine is more expensive and we often have work calls after 10pm.
Weekends are for being a tourist in our own city, or for getting the hell out of Dodge. Many expats follow the “three weekend” rule, which means you aim to never be in Singapore for more than three weekends in a row. As obnoxious as that sounds, if you can find a cheap flight out (and there are many for under $100 USD, round-trip, on any given day) to an affordable destination (pretty much anywhere but Hong Kong), you’re probably going to spend the same amount of money as a couple of nights out in the Red Dot. Alcohol is astronomically expensive here, as are sit-down restaurants. Entertainment skews family-friendly (the zoo, parks, gardens) if you can even stand to be outside, and indoor activities are mall-centric. It’s not all bad, we’ve been to a decent music festival, done some sweaty jungle hikes, and love the local art-house cinema. But when you can fly for an hour and be on the beach in Thailand with a 50 cent beer… well, you’d be looking at flights, too. An interesting third option is taking the ferry somewhere, either to one of Singapore’s tiny southern islands or to Bintan or Batam, Indonesia.
Yes, it’s clean. I once saw a old man in a public park frown at a stick on the sidewalk, then pick it up and throw it in a trash bin. Yes, it’s safe. You can spot unlocked bikes leaning against fences, covered in rust. Yes, its unceasingly earnest boosterism can bring out the cynic in anyone, much less someone from New Jersey. I mean, I find Andrew’s California cheeriness a bit much to take. Yes, it’s a place of deep and dark contradictions, where you cannot sell gum but you can sell sex.
However, just when I feel my blood boil over every bewildering bit of bureaucracy, self-promotion, inscrutable acronym, the fact that I’m an XL in clothing, or exasperating front-page news story about a turtle crossing the road that obfuscates any actual discussion of current events, Singapore has a way of reminding you that it is still a jungle island in Asia. There are hornbills and cobras and crocodiles and pythons. I order iced tea by saying auntie, teh-o kosong peng. Tropical fruits are abundant and fantastic. Beer is drunk with ice.
In the end, I could never say that it’s my favorite city or my home. But I feel pretty lucky to be an observer and a long-term visitor. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go swim outside in the sunshine.
I know, I’m terribly behind on travel writing. But I promise I have a few drafts in the works, and I also just posted an album of up-to-date travel photographs on Facebook. Up next on the blog: southern Vietnam and Siem Reap, Cambodia, which might be my favorite two trips. Then Langkawi, Malaysia and a biggie: Myanmar. And here are the Q1 and early Q2 travel plans…
- late January (Chinese New Year): Bintan, Indonesia
- mid February: Penang, Malaysia
- late February: Vientiane and Luang Prabang, Laos
- mid March: Krabi, Thailand
- late March: BACK TO BALI
- mid April: Cebu, Philippines
- Early May: triumphant return visit to California, New Jersey, and New York
one degree north 