This month, buffeted by an unusually cold and wet monsoon, I’ve again started facilitating the Guided Autobiography group for NUSC alumni that I run each year. It’s something I enjoy doing very much. As a practice, guided autobiography brings together two important pieces my life: psychological practices (in the largest sense of the word) related to care and growth, and processes of writing and reading. As I facilitate the groups, I’ve sometimes chosen to write and share with the other group members over the ten weekly meetings, and at others to simply facilitate, in order to give more time to the group members themselves. This time, I’m purely acting in facilitative mode. In the first writing activity, we explore “branching points,” key turning points in a life where we made a choice, or a choice was made for us, and find retrospectively that that choice influenced our lives. Of course every single moment in time is a branching point, and a transition, but it’s interesting to think of which transitions we remember and which now become key moments in the stories of our lives. In the last week, my partner’s been hospitalised for a hip replacement operation, something fairly routine at our stage of life. But my experience of going to hospital every day, and then caregiving afterwards for those early days of recovery, made me think of two things. The first was my own experiences of hospitalisation, and the hospitalisation of loved ones, experiences you tend to brush away, if you’re lucky and the condition does not return, in your eagerness to carry on with the future story of your life.  The second one was a sobering look forward, and thinking about how this type of visit, these moments of mutual caregiving, will no doubt become more common for both of us in the future as we age.

The branching points theme, though, did prompt me to reflect, even though I’m not writing each week to share with others. In our first meeting we do a visualisation exercise, in which we place ourselves in a doorway from a specific place in our past lives: we enter the scene, become conscious of how we are embodied in this place, see what happens, and then write. One of our group members said that they’d had a choice of doors, and that they’d taken one that seemed less obvious at first. This got me thinking. I’ve been trying to write about my own academic career in Singapore over the past few months, possibly for publication, but also to record a story I’m beginning to forget. In this story I have my key branching points, including my arrival in Singapore in a rainstorm just before National Day in 1994, staying overnight at what was then the Copthorne Orchid Hotel on Bukit Timah Road, and the walking up to the National Institute of Education Campus in the early morning mist, wearing new work clothes that I’d bought the previous week at Eaton’s in Vancouver. I’ve gone over this moment of arrival and the events of the first week mentally time and time again, wringing them for meaning. What if I took another branching point, one that I’ve neglected until now, but which I have a distinct memory of?

After my first semester at NIE, I took a backpacking holiday in November or December 1994, for a couple of weeks to Penang and then on to Langkawi. The Division of Literature and Drama, which I’d joined, was chaotic, presided over by a Head of Department who, with the distance that comes from age, I might generously describe as mercurial. I loved my students, and had begun to establish deep relationships with colleagues and friends that endure to this day. The most important relationship in my life, with my future partner, was also beginning to unfold. I flew to Penang and spent several days there, wandering in George Town and taking buses around the island. I stated in an old Chinese hotel with no air conditioning and wire grilles at the top of the walls of my room so that air could circulate. There was a fast catamaran to Langkawi that I took, but which broke down a few minutes after leaving port. We returned to George Town and, after a delay, were taken by coach to a port on the mainland – I’m guessing now it was Kuala Kedah. I remember waiting on a jetty for the ferry, looking down to the grey mud in the harbour at low tide, and seeing it come alive with the wriggling of mudskippers. In Langkawi itself I used my Lonely Planet guidebook to find the kind of resort I’d stayed at in previous backpacking trips in Southeast Asia, sandwiched between two new luxury resorts. There was a central wooden building, with a bar and an area to read, where basic meals would be served, and then two rows of tiny chalets leading down to the beach. I can still locate the area on a map of the island, although the topography’s changed due to the construction of large, close-gated resorts that was starting when I was there. And the name of the beach is familiar: Pantai Kok.

I must have spent a week in Langkawi during that break, by myself, looking back and forward in my life. One of my neighbours in the different chalets was an Australian man in his sixties who had just lost his wife, and I spent some time talking with him without, I think, providing him with much comfort. I also cut my foot swimming or walking on the beach, and it got infected. I remember visiting a local clinic, and preparing very hard to be able to converse in Malay, which I’d begun to learn in evening classes at NUS. The physician I saw, after queuing up for half an hour, was a Chinese Malaysian who’d studied in Edinburgh, and was grateful for the opportunity to reminisce about his student days. Beyond that, I remember little. The chalets were shaded only by a row of tall palm trees, and were very hot in the middle of the day. It was only a few steps to the beach, though, and you feel asleep to the sigh of the waves and the tinkle of shells and broken corals as each wave came in.

My time in Langkawi was a branching point in the sense that it was my first time since I’d arrived in Singapore that I could pause and reflect on the changes in my life. Looking back now, it was almost exactly half a lifetime ago. I was thirty-two then, and in a few days I will be sixty-three. Until then my life had been a movement out. I’d left a provincial town where I grew up to study as an undergraduate in London, and then, when I graduated in an economic recession, moved further, to America, to China, and Taiwan. I’d returned “home” to the UK that was no longer my home, and touched base, spending most of my time there as a social worker with Vietnamese refugees before leaving again for Canada, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the course of these travels I’d rarely gone back to a place I’d left behind. For the next quarter of a century, I’d follow a movement in. First a move into marriage, into the deepest and most wonderful relationship in my life. Second, a movement into a career that would quite suddenly take hold of me and, through a series of fortunate coincidences, carry my life forward. And in this movement I’d stay in place, in Singapore. I might travel abroad, but I’d always come back. I might take time out through leaves of absences and sabbaticals, but I’d always return to teaching at the university. In this time in Langkawi, then, I stood at a door between two worlds, looking both forward and back, and in many ways relieved to have landed after travelling so long. 

I was walking in the morning with a friend late in January, as we sometimes do, meeting before dawn at the gate of the Botanical Gardens among the runners and other walkers. We talked about a book she was reading about the rise of neoliberalism, that went all the way back to the New Deal to trace a genealogy. It was easy, we agreed, to look back to the past and to periodize it, and to place it in a narrative of cause and effect. It was much more difficult to understand where we are now. Was the rise of Trump and the growing crisis of liberal democracy simply part of a Karl Polanyi-esque double movement that would eventually move back to a strengthened social democracy? Or was it something quite new, upending older certainties, and requiring a different kind of response from the Left? And then, reflecting, I thought that this has also been true of my last seven years of life, outside the university, lived in the thicket of branches of this changing world. Something new has happened, and yet I haven’t quite found that place from which I can look back and look forward, to understand the pattern and the narrative trajectory of the later part of my life, and my continued agency, limited as it is, in this quest for social justice.