I’m making a briefer blog post this month than usual, partly because I’m in the last two weeks of a very intensive summer class, and also because I’m aware that what I should write about – something about Vancouver and Singapore, systemic racism and racial privilege, and Singapore, brought up by the recent worldwide protests after George Floyd’s death, and the perceptible uptick in anti-Asian racism here — still remains

Next week I start back at UBC again. My classes in the summer will be online, and I’ve loaded up on the number of credits, figuring that restrictions on travel are likely to persist here for some time. Spring has come and moved to what feels like early summer. The leaves are on the trees, even on the old Crimean linden outside our balcony, which is covered in moss, and

What a difference a month makes! When I made my last post on this blog, a month ago, I was looking forward to finishing my first regular academic year at UBC, and having the luxury to look back, and to see how far I’d come in this change of life. The two semesters of the normal academic year are now almost over, and I’m just about to attend my last

Early March now, and the beginnings of Spring. The first cherry blossoms on the trees, and even magnolias starting too open, surely too early. I also feel that I’m able to open up a little too, to get a greater sense of what I’m doing in the program at UBC, and how I place myself socially and politically in relation to it. I’ve been struggling for intellectual engagement since I

I’ve been here before. That point that you get to at a certain time in your studies, where in one way you are confident you can make your way forward. I’m coping quite well in my classes: I can write assignments that get me through fairly effortlessly, and I’m also trying to push myself to do more than just get by. At times I feel I’m doing well in practice:

I found coming back to Vancouver from Singapore quite an adjustment. The same, persistent rain, but now over twenty degrees colder. We’re past the winter solstice, but my new January 4.30 pm classes still begin in darkness, a contrast from September, when they finished just in time for sunset as I cycled back. I was talking to a friend last week, and saying that Singapore and Canada are still incommensurable

The semester’s over. We had a final week of classes, and then the rush to hand in the last assignments. The weather in Vancouver’s turned colder now, and there is snow on the mountains. In the week before I flew to Singapore, I thought of going up Grouse Mountain, snowshoeing up to the top of Dam Mountain in the landscape softened, suddenly melted into lumpy white. In those first few

The Remembrance Day holiday has brought me a welcome break from the increasing pressure of the end of a semester. But I’ve always had mixed feelings about the act of commemoration it involves. As a child, I can remember standing during a minute of silence in school each year at the exact time of the Armistice that ended the First World War, and also my mother encouraging us to buy

It’s been an unusual Fall. Last year, when we moved into our apartment in the West End, it was dry and sunny. Vancouver in general doesn’t have the spectacular red leaves of the East Coast: most of the big trees are conifers, and stay green all year. But the West End is an exception, laid out in the nineteenth century as a residential area, each roadway a chain wide, and

What were my first two weeks in the programme like? I thought of an image for my feelings at the end of my second class, on Wednesday afternoon. We’d finished a little early, with a visit to the PRTC, the Psychoeducational Research and Training Centre that’s temporarily housed in one of the older buildings on the UBC Campus. And for the first time, we did some role playing. Two of