In the last month I’ve been seeing clients for the first time, in the supervised practicum that my UBC program calls Clinic. COVID restrictions mean that the counselling itself is via Zoom, with clients joining us from their own homes. Our small team of students and supervises assembles at UBC’s Neville Scarfe Building each Thursday morning. We mask up, enter through automatic doors controlled from the front desk, and run through a checklist of questions about our health and our social contacts. Then we take one of the centre’s laptops and each go to a small counselling room, designed in pre-COVID days for two people, for client and counsellor. We connect to a Zoom meeting, discuss plans for the day. And then, a few minutes before the hour, we are assigned to breakout rooms. We sit there, looking at ourselves on the screens. At these moments I try to do a breathing exercise to stay calm. Time ticks on. Our supervisors, controlling entry to the different rooms, take a little time to place each client with each counsellor. And then, suddenly, the client is in my presence, almost as if they have been teleported into the room. I go through a script of asking for consent to record, checking for safety. And then the counselling session begins. We explore together, for fifty minutes. Sometimes after twenty or thirty minutes I feel that the session is not quite going anywhere, but there’s always a structure to the session, almost an aesthetic, that often emerges only at the very end. Afterwards, in my breaks between sessions, I get to observe my classmates counselling. We’ll discuss as a group, and then I’ll get specific feedback from a supervisor. Later, in the course of the week, I’ll return to the centre to watch the recordings of my sessions, looking for what worked and what didn’t work, for details that I missed in the rush of the session, and pointers for improvement.

I’ve never liked seeing myself on video. My voice sounds different than I imagine it, and I’m aware of tics and unconscious gestures I make that might conceivably be endearing, but are more likely to be distracting. What surprises me, however, is that while I have a strong sense of how well the session went for the client, I’m often uncertain about my own performance. In several cases, I thought I had done quite poorly, but received very positive feedback which wasn’t, I think, entirely due to the very Canadian niceness of the team I am part of.  Reviewing the videos of the sessions, I could sense my strengths. Once, conversely, I thought I had performed quite well, and was surprised how, on reviewing the tape, I’d not been fully present for the client, and allowed some habits I thought I’d overcome to come back. I then had a reaction then that I used to have after teaching a bad class. You want to put the session out of your mind, but the experience doesn’t go away. It stays with you, like a distant smell or taste that you’re always aware of, but that you try not to attend to. You procrastinate, your head full of cycling thoughts that you try to escape, but that continually return. You avoid preparing for the next session, because that will bring you into confrontation with these thoughts: that you are too old now to change, that there is something in your character that does not let you fully empathise, that your own life experience is  impossibly different from those of your clients. And yet when you finally confront these thoughts, they melt away . You prepare for the next session, cycle up the hill to UBC on a clear, cold winter’s day. Many trees are almost bare now, the last of the leaves clogging the gutters. At the top of the hill you can look back over the waiting ships in Burrard Inlet and a low bank of fog to the high, glistening buildings of downtown. Behind them, the North Shore mountains flecked with the first now of the year. And then you cycle onward, to the very edge of a continent, lock up your bike, enter the centre again for another round of sessions.

One thing that this act of observing myself makes me conscious of is my foreignness in Canada. I have become used to hearing Canadian voices and so I imagine that my own voice is not so very different. And then I see myself in the video, through the eyes of my classmates and my clients, who read my accent as English and thus read out forty years of my life. Trying to connect with clients, to empathise, I find myself unconsciously reaching back to Singapore. One of my clients is talking about taking Vancouver’s Skytrain, and when I rephrase and reflect back. I find myself saying “MRT,” and correcting myself. At another, I pose a tag question in return: “So he was right, isn’t it?” I’m curious what my clients make of these slips: presumably they think that these too are features of Englishness. And this English identity that is given to me unasked has some advantages: I may possibly seem more distant, but my classmates say my accent is also “cute” and yet “professional.” Perhaps if I were ever to become attached to psychodynamic approaches, to theories of Freud and Jung, I should adopt a German accent, the accent that all those psychotherapists in movies seem to have.

Yet there’s something else about this dislocation. In the last couple of months I’ve had three lectures or panel discussions in Singapore via Zoom. Despite the alienating technology, these feel effortless. I drop into a role, as a scholar or as an author. I meet former students in the audience, discover how they are making their way in their lives. Right now my partner is back in Singapore, serving out her two weeks of quarantine, her SHN, at a hotel. We FaceTime daily: with the rise in COVID cases in Vancouver and the ban on personal interactions, she is the person I talk with the most frequently. I am here: I walk in Stanley Park, under the tall trees, or cycle on the sea wall, but I am not quite here. My social interaction is largely virtual. Space has become strangely inverted. Clients often have their Zoom meetings with us in spaces that are quite intimate — in a bedroom, sitting casually on a couch – spaces into which they would normally invite only close friends. And then there’s also the relentless chatter of WhatsApp and Telegram, those red blisters of new messages that you can’t wait to scratch. I wonder if this condition of intimate distance isn’t one that we all share now, during the pandemic. Will it, I wonder, be something that I look back in puzzlement on in a year’s time? Or is this some new condition of life for me, that I am no longer quite able to settle again? And I think of Kuo Pao Kun’s Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral. 我的家在船上。My home is on a ship,  moving through time, finding a port from time to time, but always in motion, returning to the sea.