The semester’s over. We had a final week of classes, and then the rush to hand in the last assignments. The weather in Vancouver’s turned colder now, and there is snow on the mountains. In the week before I flew to Singapore, I thought of going up Grouse Mountain, snowshoeing up to the top of Dam Mountain in the landscape softened, suddenly melted into lumpy white. In those first few weeks when it’s still not very cold, you find that the surface of the snow has thawed in the daytime, and frozen again overnight, so that it forms a thin brittle layer, like the crust of a meringue: as it bears your full weight you suddenly crunch through it to the powder beneath. But instead I spent a final week in the classroom, or crossing the city, the sky stacked up with grey clouds above me as I cycled, hoping that rain would hold off. My partner was in Singapore already, and we Facetimed or WhatsApped frequently: seeing her was like looking down a deep well, or up, through a skylight, to a different world, full of diffuse, yellow light, a world where there was no need to wrap yourself up in layers of clothes before you went out of the door. 

And then, two days later, I was in that world. Transpacific flights have long ceased to be new to me. The airport in Taoyuan, Taiwan, where I changed planes, never really seems to change. On the flight out to Singapore through Taiwan the transfer times are always tight, and so there’s an anxious wait to go through security screening and a rush to the gate. But otherwise I almost feel as if I enter a magic machine, something like a scanner or a transporter. You enter it. You bring books, buy magazines, watch movies, but still end up bored. Every now and then you check where you are on a map of the earth, a little graphic of a plane in flight inching imperceptibly forward. And then, having crossed the dateline, having missed a day in your life and more, you suddenly arrive in a very different place.

For the first couple of days in Singapore I felt disassociated. A little like the sensation you have in counselling class where you see yourself on video, and the consciousness you then bring into a new session—this is how I must look. I am here, I thought, but not yet quite here: something in me has changed.  Heat prickles the inside of my elbows and knees; at the corner store, I fumble for change, mixing up the old and the new sets of coins in their different sizes, and then remembering that there’s a two-dollar note that saves me from counting out the exact change. And then, one morning, I wake up to find this feeling has vanished. At the coffee shop, I make small talk in something that passes for Mandarin. I eat mee pok, thick with chill and oil, trying half-heartedly to pick out the remaining pieces of lard. A subtle new development here: the vendor has added a few thin slivers of lettuce to the noodles in an unconvincing effort to make the dish more healthy. But then we plan what we might eat on a return visit, watch the construction workers queue up for cai png, read off the gastronomic possibilities of the stall nearby: 鱼头角，菜包，纸包鸡。

            In the evening, we go across the road to the provisions shop. It’s old style, in a shophouse, with refrigerators full of drinks lining the five-foot way, gleaming in the darkness. Outside, the rain is falling in torrents, but after we sheath our umbrellas and enter through a narrow passageway between the counter and shelves, it’s safe and dry. It’s staffed by an Indian couple, surprisingly young for what seems so ancient a shop. The woman sits at the cash register, in a loose, floppy dress, in front of rows of cigarettes and hard liquor. Walk further on into the shop house and you step up into two narrow corridors like tunnels in a mine, lined with shelves of goods. We walk the whole shop in what seems to be almost a ritual for the older relative I am with. She walks slowly, careful with the steps up and down, careful not to fall. At some point we begin to point to things, to tell their stories. Like a memory shop or a treasure house. All the different Chinese medicines, in their packets. Medical balm, the bright colours of the can of which are made to look like Tiger Balm,  which, when you look closer, is a cheaper brand. Rows of tins, or cans: caught between British and American English, I am not sure what to call the. In Chinese it is simpler. 罐头. She picks up one of peanut soup. This brand is good, she says. I used to buy it and heat it up for the children. There are other tins. I pick up the fried dace with black beans from China in its distinctive oval can, with red and yellow labels. I remember this, I tell her, from China in the 1980s. Square containers of luncheon meat, stacked up above us. 

There are UHT boxes of juice on the next shelf, and she wonders for a moment if she should have bought the fresh juice from the refrigerator outside, under the five-foot way. Then squat tins of biscuits, bright, golden, gleaming. At the end of the corridor of shelves, just at the point where we turn to follow the next corridor back, there are cleaning implements:mops, brushes, dustpans, all in bright red plastic. We strokes the bristles of the brushes, notices that they are frayed, do not hold together. I think she is going to say, these are badly made, not cheap, but she wants to buy something. A toilet brush, in blue or pink, that I, being the tallest of us, retrieve from a hook that dangles from the ceiling. It is attached, I note, by a tiny raffia loop, clear in colour. Another thing from childhood. Pink or blue? She hesitates, and choose blue. And then we are off again, between shelves stuffed with soy sauce, some in glass bottles, most in smaller cylindrical bottles of a dull clear plastic. The labels in Malay, Chinese, English. She picks up one she remembers. Tiger Brand. And then puts it back. And then, as we move back towards the front of the shop, we pass Ribena, now both in plastic sachets and in the old, dimpled glass bottles, wrapped in cellophane, gleaming darkly. This takes me further back, to an English childhood. I know the sound of that cellophane when it is unwrapped, but I have not heard it for fifty years. And then, nearer the front, sacks of rice, and fruits and vegetables in wooden trays. A few tired fruits, and then a massive screen subdivided into a lattice-work of CCTV images. There is no place in the shop where you can hide. We pay up, take our purchases in a red plastic bag that I carry, step carefully down into the five-foot way. It is raining heavily, and so, rather than walk out immediately, we wander along the five-foot way, stepping up and down at each shop, each storefront a new texture of concrete, or tile, a new level, until we reach the end of the row of shophouses, where a coffee shop with awning stretches out into the darkness. We take our umbrellas out now, two of which are broken, but are still better than nothing. We wait to cross the road. The cars turn the corner and will not stop. This is different from Vancouver, from that casual Canadian kindness. Here you have to wait until a gap in the traffic before you scuttle across. But the persistence of the rain is the same in the two cities. 

In the next few days I’ll have meals with friends, meetings in which you try to condense the past months into an hour. Sometimes I’ll pause and wonder who is talking, a past self I slip into so easily, or the new person I am becoming. At these times I’ll be suddenly self- conscious: the way I hold my body, the words I choose respond, almost as if this all were being recorded. But that’s for the future. Just for now we step out together, into the darkness and falling rain, the drops heavy, licking our toes and slippers even while our faces remain dry.