I’m back in Singapore again, and feeling, despite my transitions in Canada, very much at home. Often in movement between continents I find that there’s a day or two when you haven’t quite adjusted, and when you see with a kind of double vision. This time we flew direct, on the sixteen-hour Air Canada flight. We arrived at eight in the morning and tried, successfully, to stay up all day until we finally went to bed at eight in the evening. In the first week I had no jet lag at all, and slept better than in Vancouver. And then, walking to the MRT, the coffee shop or the eating house, catching the bus, your body somehow leads you: you fall into automatic gestures and rhythms of life that you’ve paused for six months, but then begin again effortlessly.

One thing that was different this year is that we were suddenly immersed in Singapore Writers Festival. I ran into friends there, but also many former undergraduate students of mine, whose life stories have diverged from each other after graduation, but who still retain and interest – and often active involvement — in literature and the arts. This made me think about perhaps one of the most gratifying elements of university life: my experience teaching and supervising undergraduate students. I’m perhaps lucky that I retired early, because I do find that colleagues who continue teaching into their sixties often complain to me about their students’ lack of commitment. I never found that. I spent a long time giving feedback to students on essays, trying to balance criticism with encouragement, and writing a final summative letter to each student; I do remember how as I got older the task of doing this became more and more burdensome. But mostly teaching undergraduate was a joy. Here were young adults just starting out in independent lives, curious, learning, forming opinions. And with literary studies it was always interesting to see differing responses to the texts I taught that came from new experiences of affective and intellectual growth. Here there was always something genuinely new. It’s also gratifying – and perhaps slightly undeserved – that my former students remember me and my classes with affection because I was part of this process of self-discovery for them, at a time when life was lived with intensity and the self being sketched out in broad brushstrokes.

At SWF, then, former students will often approach me and introduce themselves. It’s wonderful to talk, but I also find myself at times struggling, in dialogue with them, to remember faces and names. Within the confines of the classroom I made a point of learning students’ names very quickly, but over the years they slip away. I’ve always had a poor memory, and it hasn’t got better with age. I’m reading Chinese again, but the characters and phrases I learn each day very rarely stick long term. In the last few years, I’ve also come to realise that in terms of perception I live with something that resembles prosopagnosia, or face blindness, even though I’ve not been formally diagnosed. Last year in Vancouver, I was sitting in a café talking to a friend. A man of about my age was sitting at the next table, quietly smiling, eating his breakfast and drinking coffee. There seemed to be something familiar about not so much his face, but the way he sat and moved his limbs. It wasn’t until I was heading home that I checked my phone, saw a text, and realised that he was a fellow volunteer who I’d spent over a year working alongside at an NGO, often quite closely, a decade ago. Of course I rushed to apologise to him, and explain, and we had coffee afterwards and joked about what had happened. But it’s hard not so see this inability to recognise others as some kind of personal failing: I should, after all, remember people who I cared about and cared for me, and I’d no doubt be distressed if someone who I’d worked with closely failed to recognise me. Looking back, I now think that this challenge of recognition has always been present for me. At the National Institute of Education, and then at the National University of Singapore, I remember being particularly grateful to students who had a particularly quirky dress sense, or those who dyed their hair in a particular way, because I found them easy to remember and recognize.

When I meet former students, then, and they come forward to introduce themselves, I’m very happy and gratified to see them, but there’s also a moment of delayed cognition. There are, of course, many students who I do remember, who I worked closely with, and whom I can name at once. There’s also a group of students whom I have some memory of and who, if I’m prompted by them, I can recall, albeit faintly. And there are others who I do not remember at all in the moment. With age, there’s also the problem of slower processing power, if I can put it that way, so there’s often a slight delay while I rack my brains for clues. This is often, I think, marked by a blank or puzzled expression on my face, until things settle down. And then conversations begin – we catch up, often fleetingly, as we rush between sessions. If we are in the bookstore – a particularly fertile place for chance meetings—we have a little longer to talk. With my interest in life stories I’m always very curious about the path the person I’m talking to has taken, the place of the undergraduate classroom in this path, and their ongoing interest in reading and a life of the mind. And then, after a few minutes, the conversation is over, and we move on. I’m left with a wistful mixture of feelings. Happiness: it’s wonderful that our work in the classroom did make a difference to you, that I’ve played a small part in that process of self-reflection and growth that persists until this day. Regret: this is a brief conversation, and I would have liked to have a longer one. A faint embarrassment: I don’t like being the centre of attention. Of these emotions, though, happiness is by far the most prominent. In retirement, after changes in life, and especially when the world seems to be a crazy place, you do wonder about purpose and the shape of your life: what you did, and what difference it made. 

When I first became interested in auto/biography studies almost thirty years ago, one of the early concepts I found useful was Paul John Eakin’s notion of relational selves; the idea that identity wasn’t formed in splendid isolation, but that selfhood emerged through relationships with others. I’m happy that relationally I have been part of other selves, and glad now how this is revealed to me in later life: these meetings with former students also further develop an evolving sense I have of being in the world. I often write this blog as a form of meditation, without really seeking an audience, or knowing who might read it. But if you, reader, are a former student of mine and you see me by chance, do approach me, and don’t be too surprised by that momentary absence of recognition on my face. The affective ties are there, even if cognitive processes now move a little more slowly.