What were my first two weeks in the programme like? I thought of an image for my feelings at the end of my second class, on Wednesday afternoon. We’d finished a little early, with a visit to the PRTC, the Psychoeducational Research and Training Centre that’s temporarily housed in one of the older buildings on the UBC Campus. And for the first time, we did some role playing. Two of us, fellow students, in a small, recently refurbished room, the sunlight streaming in the window, and a new carpet or new chair smell. We tried out something very small: a part of the first session when you meet a client, the part at which you explain to them the limits of confidentiality. We did this twice, reversing roles of counsellor and client. And then the professor who was taking the class came in, observed, commented, and asked us if we had further questions. We talked, and then she said we were free to go. So we both went down the battered stairs with their bubbled linoleum, through a glass door, down steps to the plaza outside the book store, with its grand Musqueam qeqən, or post, of a figure holding onto the tail of a double-headed serpent.  Then we said goodbye. My colleague went to look for her car, I to the old Student Union Building – now renamed the Life Building –for my bike for the long ride downhill and over Burrard Bridge to the West End.

Walking across that square, a little before sunset, the ground in shadows now but the tops of the tallest buildings still lit up with honey coloured light, I had a feeling that I’d passed through a transition. An image came to me then that felt right, and that I’ve thought about later. Like passing through an airlock. One of those ones in a space station in a science fiction movie,  which seal very tight, with a hiss of air. Pass through the airlock into a new corridor and you can see where you came from through a window, look back into that curving glass passageway that was your former life. Everything is still there, just as it was. But you are no longer quite part of it. In the year and a half I’ve been here I’d grown used to an easy rhythm of life, at times a little empty, perhaps, but also a time of reflection and of re-establishing relationships. Now, suddenly, this is over.

What have I left behind, in that other passageway? First, simply the luxury of time. I’m trying to contain my studies into three or four days a week, cycling up to UBC early and coming home late. But the business of living is now compressed into the other days, just as it was, of course, when I worked, as many of my fellow students do. Yet having that pause, the longest since I started primary school at five years old, has made me aware of what I am missing now.

Secondly, there’s a change of mental landscape. In down time, you tend to process things: cycling, or walking, or even sitting companionably with your partner in the evening, you are turning thoughts over in your mind. This still happens, but the nature of these thoughts has changed. I’m often thinking now about my coursework, about ethical dilemmas in counselling, or readings I have done or will do about counselling technique. Some of my other thought, about politics, writing, storytelling, Singapore, research that I’m committed to, are crowded out. That’s inevitable, but there is a sense of loss.

Third, and perhaps most painfully, Singapore is beginning to recede. When I first came to Vancouver thirty years ago to start my doctorate, I was still making my way in the world. I was on a voyage out, and I was happy to leave everything that I had left in the UK, China, Taiwan and the US behind, certain that if I wished I could go back to anywhere I had been before. Many of my fellow students, I sense, are at that stage of their own journeys, still on an adventure that has taken them here.  Now, for the first time, I want to hold onto a place, to treasure it, but am unsure how to do so. Singapore in many ways made me who I am. My whole career as a scholar was spent there, all of my marriage, and the vast majority of my adult life. My closest friends apart from my partner are still there and I still cling, tenaciously, to my Singapore PR status, renewing it as far as possible in advance each year.

In one of my readings – I think about attachment theory, and its cultural biases, I came across an interesting formulation that goes something like this: residents want to separate from the society in which they have grown up, while migrants want to attach themselves, to belong. There’s some truth in this, of course. Yet Vancouver is a place where, if you have the privileges of a professional migrant, it’s easy to be comfortable, but much more difficult to belong. One of my classmates whom I talked to felt the same: he had come here from a country that bordered the Mediterranean, then to the United States, to Montreal, and now to here. Somehow he could not attach himself here, as he had been able to before. Was it getting older, we asked each other, or was it something about the nature of the city itself? You come here and its beautiful. The mountains stacked up behind each other in triangles of green and grey, the forests running down into the sea, with a dark lovely even in the overcast days of early Fall. It’s not until something suddenly happens that you look back, and think about what you’ve lost. And then, when you breathe deeply,  you realise how thin the air is in the present, in this bubble of a world.