I found coming back to Vancouver from Singapore quite an adjustment. The same, persistent rain, but now over twenty degrees colder. We’re past the winter solstice, but my new January 4.30 pm classes still begin in darkness, a contrast from September, when they finished just in time for sunset as I cycled back. I was talking to a friend last week, and saying that Singapore and Canada are still incommensurable to me: I have two lives that do not yet add up to a whole. In Singapore, I’m still a scholar and a writer. In Vancouver I’m a student and a volunteer counsellor. In other places, I get to choose. This Sunday I’ll be in Seattle at the Modern Language Association Convention, on a panel about Southeast Asian Writers in Diaspora. When I come back to Singapore in June, and give a paper at a conference there, I’ll also not be bringing anything from my present studies with me. If the conference paper I gave in Singapore in early December, about two Singaporean memoirs of schizophrenia, seemed to be the beginning of a bridge between the world of counselling and literary studies, between Singapore as place and the knowledge I have gained in Canada, it now looks, in a retrospective glance something of a dead end. It’s an intellectual shortcut, simply looking at what I’m studying now through a literary studies lens, rather than rethinking the basis for such research, and the the problematic elements of literary studies that I now feel I would like to leave behind.

That said, I’m also feeling the beginnings of greater changes, as if things are moving beneath the surface – those tectonic plates out in the Pacific off Vancouver Island, that periodically slip a little, just enough to cause minor tremors. In part this comes from having a chance to sit back and review my learning, and the way that it is not just about cognition but also embodiment. In the vacation I met up with one of my teachers to review a video of my counselling practice, and I also completed a further assignment, in which I transcribed a video of an intervention I made with a classmate acting as client. In reviewing these files, I found that I was no longer focusing on those small behavioural tics that gave me acute embarrassment, but pulling back to see a larger picture. As always with me, there’s a mantra I have to remember, which I’d often use with my students, but is also something I need to say to myself continually: less is more. In an essay, a narrow topic through which you can see the world is better than a broad one that you cannot possibly do justice to. In teaching a discussion class, you learn not to talk, but to wait, to draw out students with questions, not to be afraid of silence. In counselling it’s the same struggle for me. I am much too eager to get through to an insight that is only just, surely, below my client’s horizon. I lean forward. It’s as if, I tell my teacher, my client is straining to lay an egg and I want to help get it out. Much better to be less urgent, more patient. Less anxiety, less excitement on my part opens up spaces. Easy to say, difficult to do. Less is more.

In this semester, too, the classes seem to be more aligned with my values: I don’t feel I’m going to be resisting the scientism of much of what I encountered last semester, those contradictory nods made towards culture and society without the change of methodology surely had to accompany any such acknowledgement. One of my new courses is in Qualitative Research in Education: from the syllabus it’s philosophically inflected and socially engaged, making questions about the subjects, objects, and social place of research at its very core. The other class, in Group Counselling, is very meta: one of its central principles is that as a class we are a group, and that we can learn a great deal by observing ourselves. The assignments either promote personal reflection on past and present groups I’ve belonged to, encourage action research, or develop skills. In both classes, I can draw on what I already know, but then move further. Literary studies is a form of qualitative research or more properly, as our teacher insists, interpretive and critical research — in its critical reading of texts, and much of the philosophical basis of the Qualitative Research course is familiar to me. Yet the course also opens up questions I have been asking myself. What are the ethics of such research? Who is it for, and who does it benefit? Are there new ways in which the phenomenological reading of experience through literary texts can be brought together with notions of the collective and the social? The Group Counselling also invites me to look backward at my own teaching practices, both inside and outside the classroom, and forward to projects that I might pursue, combining psychoeducation and counselling.

Last semester I felt that I was often playing in a sandbox. I was beginning my learning journey, and was genuinely puzzled by the limitations of what I encountered. At the same time, I was conscious of the need to suspend judgment — except in a few limit cases such as the collectivistic/individualistic cultural distinction – so that I opened myself up to learn. This semester, I am beginning to feel that there are ways in which I can work through the knowledge I am acquiring, to begin to reach some more genuine form of synthesis, but also to open up complex questions. By April, when the rain has hopefully diminished if not entirely stopped, I hope to see things more clearly.