This site began as a blog of my experiences in life transition, but it’s now morphed into something more. From September 2019 to May 2022, I studied for an MEd in Counselling Psychology at the University of British Columbia. I’d left my position as Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore eighteen months before. When I left NUS I was in my mid fifties, a decade short of the normal retirement age. I’d been feeling dissatisfied with academia for several years, and had tried various strategies to address this, from taking a long leave of absence to a temporary part-time working arrangement which freed me up to do more work outside the university. I still enjoyed many aspects of university life, especially teaching students and doing research. However, I increasingly found that the growing marketization of universities globally meant that the hopes I had of the transformative possibilities of higher education were not being fulfilled. And in an age marked by Modi, Duterte, Trump and others, I began to reflect with greater curiosity about my own processes of learning, the spaces I opened for others, and spaces which it was less easy for me to enter. The more senior I became in my career, and the more I had to take on administrative responsibilities within the university, the less I felt able to question the narrative of how the market spoke through academic life and career success, or to even be able to see or think differently.

Transitions are never complete, and as something ends, so something new begins. After graduating, obtaining Registered Clinical Counsellor status in British Columbia, and spending the first two years of COVID-19 pandemic, I and my partner returned to Singapore, for several months, and I now feel again a sense of home here. As we shuttle between Singapore and Canada over the next few years, I’m looking forward to running Family of Origin and Guided Autobiography groups, which make therapeutic uses of storytelling and narrative logics, while not quite being therapy themselves. I’ve also started a new research project on thinking about the possibilities of writing intellectual history through looking at the life of S. Rajaratnam, Singapore’s first Minister for Culture and then Minister for Foreign Affairs. I’m curious about times in Rajaratnam’s life when he wasn’t constrained by party discipline or governmental positions, and could thus “think big” on issues such as modernity, multiculturalism, class, and race.

This site functions as a record of my scholarship and other writings, and also serves as a contact point if you want to get in touch. It includes some older resources: Wang Gungwu’s Pulse, which might be called the first Malayan poetry collection in English, short stories from the Straits Chinese Magazine, published in Singapore from 1897 to 1907, and some reviews of contemporary Singapore Literature texts that my students at NUS wrote when I taught there. And the blog continues, as I move forward into a future in which scholarship, writing, narrative and counselling intersect. I initially thought of it as a kind of auto-ethnographic record of my life, through monthly blog pages, of a journey between two kinds of knowledges, one critical and the other therapeutic. But, as with all journeys, my path has taken unexpected turns. As I continue to write, I’m more aware of larger themes and possibilities, of the process of ageing, of later life as a space of exploration, and of the many potentialities that my future holds.