In early October, we’re back in Singapore. Arrival this time has felt different from returning last year, on our first trip after two years of absence caused by the COVID pandemic. There hasn’t been that strangeness of the first few days, when you see everything with a defamiliarized double sight. Everything is instantly very familiar, as if we have never left, or as if our HDB flat in Bukit Batok was just a short walk from our apartment on Nelson Street, in Vancouver. On the first morning, I woke at 6.30, just as it was getting light, and went to my study to write. Sounds filtered upwards: the whine of the MRT line, cars passing, and then birdsong from the hill. Then we went downstairs to the coffee shop, ran into a neighbour in the lift lobby, had the first of many conversations in Mandarin catching up on news, and talking about what we did while we were away. It’s only at that time that I began to realize the distance between our two worlds.
On our way back to Singapore this time, we stopped for a week in Taiwan. Apart from a brief night’s stay at a resort in Taoyuan while changing planes about fifteen years ago, I hadn’t been back for thirty years. Taiwan played an important role at two turning points in my life. The first was in 1987, after I’d finished a year’s teaching in Hunan Normal University, in Changsha, China. I was curious about the other side of the strait, and I flew to Taipei from Hong Kong, and spent six months there, teaching, as young foreign travellers did in those days, at 补习班，or cramming schools. I rented a flat by the Youth Park, began to make friends, and thought of staying longer. But then I flew back to the UK, to a different life.
My second time in Taiwan was another, more crucial, point of inflection in my life. When I started my doctorate at UBC in 1989, I was determined to become fluent in Chinese. I audited undergraduate Chinese language classes all the way through to third year level, and then I took a year out of my doctoral studies, and, saving money from my Killam Scholarship, I self-funded a year in Taiwan. I’m not quite sure how I ended up at National Cheng Kung University （国立成功大学）in the south, in Tainan, rather than more prestigious universities in Taipei. The school fees and living costs were cheaper, and there was a promise of one-to-one teaching. There was probably also that wilfulness, that curiosity that’s marked my life about taking an unorthodox route that often leads nowhere, but sometimes succeeds. I returned in September 1992 to a very different Taiwan from the one I’d left only a few years ago. Martial law had been lifted, and democratisation was well underway. In the south, much less Mandarin was spoken, and on the street the language you’d here most often was Taiwanese, or what I’d now call, after years in Singapore, Hokkien. I’d sometimes casually follow undergraduate students speaking Mandarin out of the university gates, practising listening skills, and find that they switched languages just as soon as they left the campus and entered the city streetscape. The year was a difficult one. I came full of enthusiasm, worked hard, but, in my early thirties made only slow progress with the Chinese language: younger friends I made who were studying there started out with less proficiency than my own hard-won ability, but by the middle of the year they had already passed me.
I have many good memories of that year in Tainan: the food, including a Malaysian Chinese restaurant on 大学路, cycling back and forth from the flat I rented, sitting and studying with my tutor by the lake on the 成大campus, proofreading for the institute that was tasked with producing the jet engine’s for Taiwan’s Indigenous Defence Fighter, travelling up into the mountains and even walking across the Southern cross-island highway. Yet it was also marked by a growing anxiety. When I returned to Vancouver it would be to the last year of my doctorate, and the prospect of a job market in which very few of classmates would land tenure track academic positions; as an international student I had additional precarity. Meanwhile, the time for me to become fluent in Chinese was running out. I remember feeling a sense of relief returning to Vancouver in August, and to my classmates in the doctoral programme at UBC and other friends, even though I was conscious that it was also only a temporary home. I didn’t yet accept that my learning had reached a high point, and I’d try, fitfully, to revive my struggle with Chinese over the years, gradually shifting to see this learning, and the Malay classes I took at NUS extension and at the local Community Centre, as more part of a process than a journey fixed on a goal.
We travelled to Tainan via Taiwan’s High Speed Railway, built well after I lived there, and stayed in a hotel that had also been built well after I left Tainan. The Shangri-La Far Eastern is in a high tower next to the back of the railway station on the edge of the 成大 campus, clad in glass, and with a faint resemblance to the skyscrapers of Raffles City. We were upgraded to a room on the 35th floor, with a super king-size bed and a panoramic view over the city to the sea. On the first day there we walked on the campus, to the lake where the Languages Centre used to be located, and where I used to study, and to the new building where the Chinese Language Centre is now housed. Then we watched the sun set over the port and the straits beyond it, and took at taxi to the Dadong Night Market. In the morning I woke early and walked the oldest part of the campus, with its great banyan trees, the grass and the foliage a lush green, past the Doric columns of the old Japanese military barracks and then out, down 大学路，past the site of the library, where I’d read international newspapers. The shops were not yet open, apart from one or two early stall selling the breakfasts we used to eat: 蛋饼 and 吐司– the latter a loan word for toast, which I remember discovering with delight early on in my studies. I thought I might see if I could find my way back to the flat I rented, down a lane with a wall on one side, past a banyan tree and then a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant at a junction, and then down another lane. Yet I couldn’t find the landmarks now. I walked in not so much a circle as a large rectangle, on the broad avenues now beginning to fill up with traffic, and ended up back at the hotel.
The hotel in Taiwan struck me as a metaphor on two levels. The hotel was run, of course, by a Singapore company, and there was something very Singaporean about it, its creation of a beautiful planned developmental world, cool, divorced from the warm and productive chaos of the streets outside. The height of the hotel, with its view, promoted a certain kind of visuality, what in the 1990s the Ministry of Education would call “helicopter vision.” We could see the whole of the city, or at least a quadrant of it, laid out before us in the sunset, and then again in the dawn. I’d cycled the streets with friends, even making expeditions to the sea — to the beach or the old Dutch fort at Anping — but I never had a sense of how near it was. In the tower of the hotel, then, I was like a planner or a civil servant, with a knowledge that came from vision and detachment: the kind of knowledge that the developmental state celebrated, and that continues now in governmental discourse.
Yet this thought was also part of a larger metaphor, of changes in the world and how they have impacted my own sense of being in the world. When I think back over my life, I often succumb to envisioning it as a process of unfolding, driven by the dynamic of an individual body growing and aging. There’s my relatively sheltered childhood, and then a period of wandering, from age eighteen to thirty-two, which took me all around the world and also eventually gave me a doctorate and the ability to make a living. The third stage of my life is the twenty-five years I spent in Singapore – a happy married life, and also an almost accidental academic career that took off in a way that I still now cannot quite understand. And then, after stepping back from the academic world in the last few years, a new period of wandering in which my direction is uncertain. Yet, of course, as someone who works with others in life writing, I know that life stories are driven not just by internal dynamics, but also by external factors. In that sense, my time in Taiwan came at a significant moment; it was my last time I travelled to somewhere completely new before the coming of the internet and the world wide web changed the way in which we thought of time, space, and belonging.
When I went to Tainan, the world wide web was in its infancy. A few early adopters had email addresses: I did not. I’d return to Vancouver to learn how to use Lynx, an MS-DOS based web program, and to dial up a connection to local online bulletin boards through a telephone modem. It wouldn’t be until I came to Singapore in 1994 that I’d try out my first web browser, Mosaic, visit my first web sites, and be startled as the first image — the gate of the Itsukushima shrine — crystallized very slowly on my screen. In 1992 this was all in the future. I wrote letters to friends in Vancouver and to my parents in the UK: even an international phone call was expensive and saved for emergencies such as my grandfather’s death. Knowledge of my immediate environment was precious: I studied maps to get around, and eagerly sought out what English language material there was about Taiwan. This was the heyday of Lonely Planet guidebooks, carried around thumbed through until the spines started to disintegrate. We moved through the city without a clear vantage point, like small animals in a maze, pausing at everything that we came across, and extracting meaning from it. I read Chinese slowly. The library, with its English-language newspapers, was my only real connection to the outside world. At that time, we had very few sources of knowledge, but those practices of reading, of wringing meaning from what we did have, grounded us. Now I’m overwhelmed by information, from social media, from online web sites, from academic research I can summon with a click of my track pad. I’m now in a high tower, looking out over the world. I read and know far more than I did before, but for the most part much less deeply, just as we saw the shape and contours of the city from our room but not the sensory details of its life.
Turning to the personal again, I wonder whether this distance isn’t also something to do with aging, with now not being quite so present in the current world. When I was preparing to go to Tainan, I found a notebook that I’d kept of my time there. It wasn’t very helpful, mostly full of new vocabulary items and addresses. I also found a short story that I’d written about fifteen years ago about my time in Taiwan, and a love affair there, written when I was exploring writing short fiction and abandoned because I couldn’t make the plot work. It was full of detail, some of which I remembered, and some of which I did not. Reading it again, I was unsure about whether some details were invented in the process of fictionalization, or whether I had simply forgotten them. Now, when I think of that apartment I rented and which I could not find, I remember it partly through that short story: whether rightly or wrongly, it has become one of the layers of my memory, just like the banyan trees from my most recent visit, which I thought I had forgotten, but which I now do remember. Surely.