Tianni on Love: Coming Home

As far back as I can recall, I’ve always been trying to escape where I was, to go to where I wasn’t. In the years before the maturity for realizing this on my own, the travels took place in the form of an untameable wandering mind (much to the detriment of school report cards). During elementary school, I often rushed back from classes to flop onto my bedroom floor, still in uniform, to continue the narrative of a previous day’s daydream, a favorite theme being running free through the wilderness as a wild-haired Pocahontas.



Taking off from Singapore China Airport

So the minute I could escape the constant watchfulness that comes with living with conservative Asian parents, I took off. It started small, with jaunts across the Causeway. Limited by tight student budgets, college friends and I would cycle hundreds of kilometres up Malaysia’s beautiful west coast or sleep on remote eastern islands in rat-infested beach huts. For some years, I dated a guy with my same measure of wanderlust and together we explored the ruins of the Acropolis, trekked over mountains to ancient Machu Picchu, and walked through a deserted Belfast hours before a bomb exploded. One birthday during my early twenties, I shivered with a girlfriend inside a hovel with no bed or running water on the Nepal-Tibet border. Six days later, we rolled into Lhasa in a truck we’d hitched a ride on at 4,000 meters, heads throbbing from the altitude and deliriously belting out Tibetan songs with the driver.



Conquering the Great Wall

By the time I left for a year of study in Canada, I had satiated my crazed appetite for adventure and paradoxically yearned for something more permanent. Merely passing through a country could no longer satisfy me. Sure, everywhere I went, I learned at least the local parlance for the toilet, and how to knock prices lower on souvenirs. I religiously avoided tourist traps and swore by dog-eared Lonely Planet bibles.

But at the end of each trip I was still a tourist with nothing more than snapshots to show. I longed to immerse in foreign cultures, to live the lives of locals and go through their daily grind -- of jostling with peak-hour commuters on public transport, grabbing a midday bite with the local lunchtime crowd, or idling a weekend away at an inconspicuous neighborhood joint with nothing but a book and anonymity for company. Perhaps, I thought, in this way something from each country will rub off permanently on me.

While I had never once stopped to contemplate my own roots and what it meant to be a Singaporean out in the world during my day-tripping days, over the years of working and living abroad, I have found myself repeatedly confronted with the question of my own cultural identity.

At film school in Toronto, classmates were surprised I spoke English, told me how “cute” my accent was and took me to an exhibition on China’s communist past hoping I could somehow do a simultaneous translation while shedding light on the country’s history. I had to explain that while yes, I was ethnically Chinese, I was really more comfortable speaking English, my accent sounded as “cute” to their ears as theirs to mine, and no, I couldn’t read half of the Chinese descriptions on the exhibits.



Exhibit of love for the motherland ahead of China’s 60th anniversary

In Bangkok, during crazy morning dashes to catch the train to work, I often found myself silently swearing as I tried to overtake maddeningly relaxed Thai commuters who blocked my path as I took double steps up moving escalators. Unlike the Singaporeans I knew who saw escalators as an aid to speed up already burning paces, I was frustrated by laid-back Thais who actually had the good sense to use an escalator the way it’s meant to be used – as a tool to reduce work done.



A Singapore flavour to the 2006 Thai anti-government protests



Thai flag caught in a tropical storm

In Taiwan, it was my femininity as a woman, more specifically a Singaporean female with a typically independent and assertive streak, that was called into question when I found myself quite out of my league among immaculately groomed Taipei women who, with their skilful manipulation of cloying vocal chords, had men eating out of their manicured snow-white hands.

Moving between multicultural newsrooms in different countries, I've also become aware of the fact that as a Singaporean with my pseudo-Western outlook on the world yet distinctly Asian appearance and upbringing, I was right smack in the middle of a cultural netherworld. Not only do we not have the gung ho optimism of the North Americans or possess their global cultural currency, Singaporeans are also not quite Asian like our neighbors. Used to a system that runs strictly by the law, we sorely lack the shrewdness or savvy of the Chinese who have from young navigated a complex lawless universe. Used to clockwork efficiency, we come to demand the same from others and end up much too blunt and straight-shooting for the taste of more laid back Asians like Thais. By the same measure, our ignorance of and impatience with the intricacies of diplomacy make us appear hopelessly rude to faultlessly polite Japanese. Making this disconnect even wider, we speak English that doesn't sound very much like English to unaccustomed ears, and our grasp of our second language (in my case Chinese) is at best, rudimentary, and at worst, jarring to the ears.

Far from being the 'global citizen' I've fancied myself to be, one who could blend effortlessly into the backdrop of any culture I chose to be part of, I've found that outside of Singapore, I inhabit a rather unique space, one that doesn't really identify with any age-old civilization nor to the Western hegemony of current times. It is one that, quite simply put, is just Singaporean.

This burgeoning awareness of my national identity was fed with each trip I made back home. Among local friends, I found I did not have to consciously ee-nun-cee-ate every word I spoke, lest my listeners did not comprehend me, nor did I have to explain the back stories to personal anecdotes I told. With fellow Singaporeans, especially those with a shared history, I could literally just launch and take off, confident of having a common cultural starting point. I became aware of just how at home I actually felt, back at home.

Let me first confess. I’ve always been one of those who snicker at the overly conscious scores of heart-tugging Singapore National Day songs. Throw a whole bunch of people together and get them to sing along to rousing chords and my bet is, everyone is going to shed at least a few tears and feel patriotic emotions they may not even possess. But recently, I’ve found myself eagerly craning to see through the plane’s tiny windows when flying home on visits.



Touching down at Changi: the feeling of home

And invariably, just as the island’s eastern shoreline appears with its familiar clusters of high-rise HDB flats, interspersed with the careful rows of urban greenery, the first strains of a Kit Chan song will begin its refrain in my ears. “This is home, truly….”