Something strange happened to me on my last full day in Singapore on this visit. I’d been back for two weeks, giving talks at the University and at schools as part of Words Go Round, acting as an external examiner for Singapore University of Social Sciences, attending events, and catching up with friends. Before I returned, I was concerned that I might feel disconnected: I’d as someone living a different life, no longer comfortable inhabiting an identity that no longer quite fitted the person whom I had become. And yet everything after I arrived seemed effortless. I stayed with an old friend in an old house in Upper Thomson. In the mornings and the evenings we’d sit and talk, with the breeze coming through the windows and fan turning above us, her Cavalier King Charles spaniel approaching us with mournful curiosity from time to time, and then settling down and falling asleep. In the day time I’d go out into the heat, catch a bus by the Community Centre, or walk through the Shunfu HDB estate to Marymount MRT, onwards to my next appointment.

On this last full day, then, I was meeting a good friend in the Botanic Gardens for lunch. I’ve formed a ritual in the last few visits to Singapore. From the bus stop, or from the MRT, I walk back down Bukit Timah Road, and then up the hill, the slow curve of road that leads up to what is now the Bukit Timah Campus of the National University of Singapore. And, doing so, I re-enact my first walk up the same road, in August 1994, when I first came to Singapore to live, walking up from the Novotel Orchid Hotel to my first academic job at what was then the National Institute of Education. On each occasion I mark what has changed. An entry barrier for parked cars. Then a large blue sign, almost a billboard, mapping out the University’s Mission Statement, its Vision, and its Values. A heritage path now snakes up between the trees, with signs explaining the history of the campus. Halfway up are four cream plastic-coated letters, each almost as tall as I am, spelling out #NUS. The Oei Ting Ham Building seems from the outside much the same, restored to the glory of the1960s, its concrete fins and screen repainted. The interior is now very different from when I first arrived. The warren of administrative offices has been replaced with a spacious foyer, with study tables and soft brown leather and stainless steel sofa chairs. Students chatter quietly in all accents apart from Singaporean ones. And then, at this moment, my handphone came briefly to life, connecting to the university network and prompting me to enter a password I no longer knew, reminding me of how my life had changed.

It’s easy to meditate on these changes. The university has become more corporate over the last twenty-five years, more conscious of framing its history in a particular way, and also a less distinctively Singaporean intellectual space. The Lower Quadrangle is barer, one of the two great trees now cut down, and the other looking sickly. On this visit rainwater and mould had started to stain the upper walls of the Manasseh Meyer Building, and books and papers had begun to accumulate behind the discoloured windows of the glassed-in verandahs of the Federal Building. Time for another renovation, surely, that would scrub the campus clean yet again.

And yet I wasn’t struck by this, but by something else. I came down the stairs at the back of the Federal Building, thinking to cut along the road that led behind the Raffles Building and thus work my way down to the entrance to the Botanic Gardens. The road had ceased to exist. The Botanic Gardens had taken over this section of campus, blocking if off with a hedge that hid a fence. The slope of the hill had been remade and planted with new tress, and the staff houses that had been there since the 1920s demolished. Even the concrete curb had been relaid, so there was no hint of where the road had started. And yet it had been there, a natural short cut from the Upper Quadrangle to the Raffles Building, a route I must have taken most days during the five years I was at NIE. A few years after the renovation, and the trees had already grown tall. For a moment I was completely confused. And then I accepted the obvious.: the geography of the campus had changed. I had to walk down the main road to the Raffles Building, twice as far without the shortcut, on a narrow footpath, dodging passers-by, and keeping the fence on my left.

This sense of the continual erasure of the past, of course, is a condition we’ve all lived with in Singapore. The Novotel Orchid Hotel, where I first stayed, has long been demolished, as has the HDB estate in Hillview where we spent the first ten years of our married life. Coming back after a year away, I noticed new buildings by the PIE, a new block of apartments on Upper Thomson where the Longhouse used to be. One of the first talks I attended was the book launch of They Told Us to Move, reflections by residents, volunteers, and academics, on lived experiences of residents transition from the Dakota Crescent rental flats, built by the Singapore Improvement Trust in the late 1950s, to new flats at Cassia Crescent. On one of my trips to schools, I stopped by the Dakota Estate, and was surprised to find it still there, empty, the grass still trimmed, but the staircases of the blocks sealed by locked iron grilles. I’ve included a few photographs I took at the end of this post. These silent, cleared spaces, waiting for a transformation that may take years to come, are also part of Singapore landscapes. After our old estate at Hillview was demolished, the land sat empty for some years, flat platforms of earth that were grassed over, like some ancient archaeological site, before the present mall and condos were constructed. And next to us, still vacant today, was an empty green space that used to house the Queen Elizabeth Estate.

My confusion, however, was something more personal than this. When you move on, when you leave a profession and its associated knowledge behind, and when you leave a country, even if only temporarily, all that is familiar begins to slip away. You don’t notice this at first: everything seems very much as it was. You feel you still know as much as you always did, but you gradually cease to know in so precise a way. Or perhaps you come to know in a different way. In a coffee shop, a week later, I talked with another friend about a creative project. He should look in archives, I said. He laughed, and said, but you are the archive. If so, I said, I’m surely a very disorganised archive, even with the prosthesis of my hard drive, on which I’ve stored three decades of reading and knowledge. Or perhaps I had become an archive I myself did not know how to read, but that was, strangely, legible to others In those very rich conversations I had at universities and schools, and over meals with former students and colleagues, I had a sense that what I was offering now was not so much the concrete knowledge I could offer in the past, but the prospect of a way of being in the world.

I found my friend in the Botanic Gardens. We lunched, and then walked the paths, also much changed since I last walked there. Places were familiar: the swan lake, the orchid garden, the gravity-defying sculpture of a girl on a swing. At other times I was lost, but she guided me. And I’m thinking now, back in Canada after two long flights, that these disappointments later in life, these blocked pathways where the road ahead vanishes, are also opportunities: they are invitations to become lost.