This month I’d planned to write about the place in Singapore in my life, yet it seems, on reflection, too big a topic to handle for now. Summer is fading early in Vancouver: it’s a little cooler, cloudy, with occasional rain. Squirrels are beginning to store nuts away, and the horse chestnuts are swelling in their sheaths. One or two vine maples in Stanley Park are already turning red. National Day in Singapore came and went, and for some reason this year I felt more distant from it, from the memes and the songs, and even events such as the National Day Rally speech by the Prime Minister, which I used to parse eagerly for news of new policies. It’s now over six years since I left my job at NUS, and this year, my change in citizenship has made me feel further away from both the institution and country as they are now, living more in the past, and less able to comment meaningfully on current events.

 In the last month I finished the final revisions of my article on S. Rajaratnam’s London years for Modern Asian Studies. It’s good to complete it, and of course there is always more work that could be done. Only a couple of weeks ago I discovered online records of a student conference he attended before the War in a local archive catalogue in the UK. I contacted the archivist, and am working out a way of obtaining the records. There are more leads to follow up when I’m in London. Yet unless something very unexpected turns up, I’ve reached a natural limit to the topic. There are other elements of the life that intrigue me, of course – the journalism in Singapore before 1959, and then period after 1988, when Raja’s critiques of elements of Singapore’s developmental modernity came briefly to the fore, before the forgetting of dementia. There are possibilities for further exploration, then, but they need a pause before I carry on. 

For the moment, though, I’m also caught in a cycle of revising the stories of Heaven Has Eyes for a new edition, and adding new ones: it’s pleasurable, but I also that aching feeling that I’d like to leave the past behind, write something new. Something curious occurs when I am revising the stories, the earliest of which were written almost twenty years ago. I’m conscious of two forms of distance. The stories themselves are of the past, with associated technologies: in the oldest, “September Ghosts,” the protagonist, in Vancouver, communicates with friends in Singapore entirely by email, since social media has not yet been invented. At the same time, I’m also distant from this self of twenty, or even ten years ago. When you continue in the same job for thirty years, you’re often unaware of the gradual changes that happen in your life. If a sudden break comes, such as retirement, or a change of residence – or both – you’re compelled to look back, and realise the transformations you’ve gone through. Part of me feels that if I undertake a new project, whether academic, creative, or some blend of the two, I should perhaps root it more firmly in Canada, even if it will still carry the traces of Singapore. There are new realities here for me: I can vote in the provincial election in October, the first time I’ve been eligible to vote in any country for thirty years. And yet there’s still that persistent sense of not quite being able to mark out a space in Vancouver, that feeling of exile I wrote about in an earlier post, an exile from deep friendships marked by physical distance, but also from some of the doxologies of contemporary academic thought, and its associated performances of selfhood.

At such times, I often search for metaphors, and these often come back to connections to the land on which I’m living. In Canada, you can’t think of the land at all without memories of dispossession and violence, the forcible moving of First Nations peoples into reserves that were then whittled down or taken away. When we ride in Stanley Park around the sea wall, before we come to Brockton Point, there’s a lavender bush just on the right of the cycle path, a remnant from a cottage garden that reminds us people lived in what is now the park for generations before they were removed. Times are changing, perhaps. On the South end of Burrard Bridge the towers of Sen̓áḵw are rising, on a small parcel of the land taken from the Squamish Nation that has now been returned. The history of violence is part of a larger history of extraction: the trees on the North Shore look beautiful and the natural world pristine, but they are almost all second growth, a century or more after the mountains were logged. In places you can see iron chains which the trees have grown around and over, the remnants of flumes, trucks, or steam donkeys. Many hiking paths follow old logging roads or the line of railways used to haul the timber out. 

Given, this, it was with some curiosity that we learned, for the first time in the thirty-five years since I first visited Vancouver, that there were substantial stands of old growth forest on the North Shore. The website of the Old Growth Conservancy Society gives more details of the huge trees that remained unlogged until the 1990s, and were then saved from being cut down to construct a golf course. We went on two tours into the area led by OGCS members, walking among huge trees that were part of a landscape of trees of different ages. For all their great size, our guide told us, their roots were relatively shallow, and they might fall over in a storm. The canopy would open up, bringing light, and new seedlings would grow out of the decaying wood, either growing upwards towards the gap, or spreading out in an umbrella-like shape if the opening above them closed. Many of the yellow cedars we saw were culturally marked, with scars where first nations peoples had removed strips of bark hundreds of years ago, taking only a small strip so that the tree would continue to live and grow. The forest, in contrast to the second growth on its borders, with its trees of uniform sizes, was in a constant cycle of transformation, its floor uneven and spongy with loam, so that we had to walk with care, especially when we looked at the pillars of great trees going up far beyond our sight. 

There’s a metaphor here, not so much to do with writing, which I found in our visit to the old Hainan Village up Thomson Road in Singapore, but perhaps to do with history, and my place in it. You want to be rooted, and yet you’re really part of a cycle of continuous change. In Singapore, everyone I knew was from families of migrants from elsewhere. My own father and mother came from distinctive regional cultures in Britain, but their own histories were marked by migration. With my father once, one long evening in the years before he died, I traced his family back online, on ancestry.co.uk. He was from a village outside a market town in Yorkshire, on the edge of the Dales, but the family had only arrived there recently, crossing the Pennines from Lancashire, and an industrial town. We followed generations back to the early 1800s, until records ran out. That was the time of the early Industrial Revolution, in which this branch of my family moved from the land into the city. And so, perhaps, these forms of displacement themselves are part of a much longer story, even if technology has accelerated them. In rewriting one of the short stories this month, I used the metaphor of a machine and found, as I do when the process of writing takes over, that it began to subtly change, from something mechanical to a series of connections that were almost organic, like a network of branches or roots that in turn became insubstantial, and regrew in a different form. And then I thought of Marx, and those changes and transformations in nineteenth-century Europe. All that is solid melts into air.