I’m back in Vancouver again, with the year just turning, Midsummer now past, and the days now growing imperceptibly shorter. Summer finally arrived, belatedly, in late June just as the solstice came, with that intense dappling of light and shade under the trees in the West End, so that I have to be very cautious on your bicycle at intersections, when shadow suddenly swallows me and hides me from drivers. Roses are out in gardens, many sweet-scented, and the crows, as usual are playing havoc in the linden and maple trees in the street outside our apartment. Our elevator’s working again, after almost two years out of action, and it’s still novel to be able to enter it and be transported, effortlessly and silently, up three storeys. Vancouver’s at its best. Go out to Robson or Denman or Davie streets, the main thoroughfares that mark out three sides of a grid box of main streets around the core of West End, carry onto the beach,and the streets are full of people. If you go into the heart of the neighbourhood, though, under the great trees–maples, lindens, horse chestnuts with spiky sheaths of nuts now swelling, the catalpas with their grooved bark, shield-shaped, light green leaves—and everything slows down. People and dogs–and sometimes even cats–on leashes walk slowly, pause at intersections or a coffee bars. Everything quietens down, so that you can hear the sound of the birds – a persistent chickadee, stuck on three repetitive notes, the cackling of the crows, or the cries of gulls—and often other sounds. Last year, a young woman set up her harp on the corner outside the fire hall at the intersection of Davie and Nicola one evening, and began to play. On the street, and from our apartment, the sound of the harp rose and fell: at times distinct, at others almost on the edge of hearing, more a vibration than a sound.
In returning from our travels, I’ve been thinking again about the three places in the world that I’ve called home for extended periods. England first, in this post, then. We spent time in England again at the beginning and end of our trip. I still, after all these years, have a British passport, and two things still draw me back. One is family and to a lesser degree friends, and this is now often now bound up with remembrance of the past. On out trip this time, we again visited my parents’ grave in the churchyard in Broadstone, Dorset. Unlike last year, it was sunny, and a single rose had grown up just next to the small square stone that marked the place where my parents’ ashes were interred. It hadn’t yet bloomed, but I told one of my father’s old friends about it, and she sent a picture of it in full bloom two weeks later. There was something haunting about this: my father used to buy roses for my mother, and at her funeral, with impeccable timing, he walked forward and placed a single red rose on her coffin. After that, he would buy small pots of red roses each week and place them on her grave. The shop that used to sell them had shut, and this time I could only find a pot of similarly-coloured chrysanthemums. So, unexpectedly, the world provided what we could not.
Broadstone was where I spent my teenage years, waiting to escape to London: I felt trapped there, and always thought of it as somewhere very narrow and conservative, a place that I’d left behind for good when I went to university in London when I was eighteen. So I’m curious about coming back to the village, now, and seeing it in a different light. We didn’t linger long in Broadstone, but continued to Weymouth, a faded Georgian seaside resort at the end of the train line from London that I’d visited with my parents as a child and then once on a daytrip with Vietnamese refugees. We had a B&B on a terrace overlooking the beach and its long curve of shingle and sand, and on our second day there we took a bus up onto the Isle of Portland, and went to Tout Quarry, a remnant of the Portland stone industry that’s now become a sculpture park. There’s a Singapore connection here: Lee Wen and Tang Da Wu visited, and among the many artworks in the quarry there’s an elaborate site-specific sculpture by Han Sai Por. We got lost among the sculptures, the heaps of waste stone, now overgrown, and the passageways between the layers of rock, but finally managed to meet up with Hannah Sofaer of Learningstone.org, and to find out more about her practice and the practices of others associated with the park. Hannah had made a journey to find the source and the context of the materials that she used for sculpture in training in London, and began thinking about societies and ecologies and geology, in both geographical and temporal terms, enabling interdisciplinary scholarly, social and artistic connections to be made. So here was someone who had travelled in a reverse direction than me, from the city to the country, from monumental buildings of Portland stone in London to the site of their extraction.
The second facet of my attachment to England is London, and in particular Bloomsbury. I studied at University College London as an undergraduate, and it’s thus an important site for me, the place I began those early, intense, fumbling explorations of being an independent adult in the world. Since I began doing archival research almost three decades ago, it’s also been a space of knowledge for me. I spend time at the UK National Archives in Kew, and at various London and regional archives, but the British Library, with its newspaper, print, and archival holdings is the place I always come back to when doing research on Singapore. As I’ve written before, much of my research has been on the period of decolonization from the 1940s through into the early 1960s, so I experience Bloomsbury simultaneously at three levels of time: the present, my own past in the early 1980s, and the past of the anticolonial activists at the London School of Economics and elsewhere from the 1930s onwards, the bookstores by the British Museum and Charing Cross Road, the restaurants and cafes where they would meet. This time, during my travels, I was also reading Joseph Andras’s Faraway the Southern Sky, an account of a search for traces of Ho Chi Minh in Paris, through the double time of archival reading and contemporary perambulation, in an able translation by Simon Leser, a literary form that encapsulated part of my own experience in this other capital city that had once been an imperial metropolis.
In what sense, then, am I English? I don’t use the label to describe myself—if pressed on citizenship I’ll use the word “British,” coming from that sense that I had, in the 1980s, of a non-racialised citizenship that also included a now-lost connection to Europe. I still have a British Passport, although I’d certainly have given it up if my applications for Singapore citizenship had gone through. Curiously, in the coming general election in the UK, I’m eligible to vote for the first time, through a change in rules for citizens overseas. I do still follow British politics, and the Guardian and the BBC are two websites that, now that I’ve moved away from social media, I get my general news from, balanced by Apple News for North America, the Tyee for British Columbia, and Today for Singapore. I can connect fairly effortlessly with friends from undergraduate days when we do meet up, even though in between my visits I don’t really keep in touch: my WhatsApp friend group is almost exclusively in Singapore. London’s much more cosmopolitan than the rest of the UK, and at times I can see myself living there. And yet there’s also so much that is wearisome, especially a continued inability to confront and process the imperial past, and an accompanying reaching for nostalgia.
Britishness ultimately is an identity that I can’t quite escape, and that follows me: it’s a label ascribed to me, through accent, by the majority of Canadians I encounter. Yet in Britain itself I don’t feel at home. If I’m in exile there, it’s an exile dual exile of both place and time. I left London in 1984, and I’ve only very rarely been back for more than a few weeks. My mental picture, then, hasn’t quite changed: I almost expect when I turn the corner to find myself back in a London of the 1980s. I’m caught off guard, still, by new presences (the massive redevelopments of King’s Cross and St Pancras stations and their environs), and above all by absences – how public buildings such as the annexe of Camden Town Hall and the St Pancras Library on Euston Road are now private hotels, how the old University of London Student Union building has now been taken over by Birkbeck College. This isn’t nostalgia: it’s simply dissonance. And of course I’ve changed, too, and my life has taken very different paths from the course that I’d have taken if I’d stayed. Often, in conversation with British people, I’ll find that I can hear them, and recognise what they say, but that they can’t quite hear me. And so there’s always a sense of exile in that sense, of being in a place and yet never quite being fully able to be present, of trying to push my way through a screen on which both the events of the past and the lived reality of other worlds are projected. Or perhaps I am fully present, more so than the inhabitants of the city: what see and hear are not projections but ghosts that many who live there habitually have grown accustomed to and ceased to notice.
I’m now in Vancouver, with the days beginning imperceptibly to shorten, but the summer still stretching ahead, in this other place in which I also live with a sense of exile, and to which I suspect I am now beginning to belong.