A couple of weeks ago, I met up with two students from the last batch of undergraduates I taught, in 2017. They were now both out in the world of work, one teaching at junior college and another, after a brief excursion into the private sector, now offering tuition. We met in a tiny café in an HDB block off Waterloo Street, and I got there first, leaving the MRT station in the middle of a sudden rainstorm, pulling out my umbrella and navigating my way through the estate by putting my trust in GPS. The café was deserted, its glass windows misted up. I sat at the central kidney-shaped table, sipped my flat white, and waited. My students arrived, one by one, not quite wet through but at least a little damp, having survived a day’s work. We talked for more than two hours, until I had to run off for a book launch. Each time I come back to Singapore I catch up with a number of former students, mostly those who’ve I supervised for theses or independent study modules. This meeting, though, was different. As undergraduates they’d only taken a single class of mine, and we’d got in touch via social media, when one of them realized that I’d edited Hook and Eye, the book of Singapore short stories that was for many years a set text in schools.

In conversation I realized again something very wonderful about the profession I chose, or rather which chose me. I’ve increasingly felt, and I’m sure I’ve also written before, that since I moved away from the university I’ve come to realize that undergraduate teaching was the most important thing that I did. It was certainly the most immediately gratifying. Facilitate an undergraduate class in literary studies and you come away excited by the different readings of a text that you’ve been exposed to. This was a sharp contrast with administrative work, in which the very qualities that made faculty good researchers often inhibited dialogue and growth. My colleagues were mostly highly cognitive, with finely honed critical skills: many were also out of touch with their emotions, rationalizing actions that were in response to an unacknowledged mood. And several of them also loved to talk. Holding a meeting, one of my senior colleagues remarked acidly, was like herding fleas across a barnyard. I’d leave meetings drained, and I still have an aversion to them today.

Research was definitely much better than doing administrative work. It answered the calling that brought us to the university in the first place – that love of learning, of gaining knowledge, and then bringing different knowledges together in new, exciting configurations. But it was also much more of a slow burn than teaching. In my discipline, researching and writing up a paper was often a very solitary experience that occupied many months. After you’d finished, you’d send the manuscript off to a journal and only hear back several months later. Then there were the readers’ reports to address, and revisions to make, before entering the production process. By the time the article was out, I was gratified, but I was already immersed in a new project.

Teaching’s immediacy, then, was different. As junior faculty, we were often advised by our seniors not to spend too much time on it. After the effort of preparing a new course, it was possible to coast when it was offered again. For some time in mid-career I tried to put a little less into teaching, in order to free up more space for research. Yet I found that when I did this something didn’t quite sit right with me. About ten years ago, my career hit a turning point that would eventually lead me out of the university. My research was very successful, and I was occupying an important administrative post in the University Scholars Programme. Yet I also felt dissatisfied: this was a time in which I became clinically depressed, and when I took a long, two-year leave of absence in Vancouver. I returned refreshed, and renewed a commitment to teaching. From that point on, I did not publish another academic book, although I did write some individual papers that I now consider my most important work, and I published short fiction, both as a writer and as an editor. I made undergraduate teaching the centre of my life again, trying to bring some of what I’d learned in the small classes of the University Scholars Programme into the much larger undergraduate classes. In my last few years of university teaching I divided the classes into smaller sections, even though it took up more teaching time, and I extended the collaboration that I’d done with NGOs and arts organisations in USP modules to ELL modules. Again, this took time, but meeting with my students made me realise that this had been worthwhile.

In the last few years I’ve read several manuscripts of academic books by friends and colleagues, giving suggestions about publication. I’ve been doing similar work with a friend this month. When I do this, and particularly when the book is published, I have complex feelings. I’m delighted for the author, of course, and happy that I could play a small part in the publication. Yet I’d be dishonest if I don’t also sometimes think of how I stopped writing academic books, and what I might have done, so that my delight’s mixed with a faint sense of grief at what I gave up, what might have been. I  was recently going through my old papers and came across my last contract with NUS, before I resigned, and realized that if I hadn’t acted I’d still be there now, and slated to carry on to 2027. When I think of how much I have learned in the last five years, and how many opportunities I’ve had for contemplation, discovery, and working with people very unlike me, I’m very grateful. To take a different path, you sometimes have to give up things that you treasure.

My students, emerging from that rainstorm, made me realise that I can honour the past, but also recognize how much I have changed and how far I have come.