Born Wanderlust

On being an expat in Singapore

I attended a photography exhibition event last night held by some of my previous colleagues. It was a night of flowing drinks, great pictures and interesting catch-up conversations. While I was rubbing shoulders with these people, I noticed two very interesting things that kept occurring.

The first was the popular photograph choices. Everyone I spoke to seemed to be gravitating towards the ones that display Singapore’s more ‘ghetto’ and charmingly annoying quirks. The hawker center uncles, the fish market bossy lady, the minuscule grandma pushing a grocery shopping trolley across the road. These were charming, not because of the images itself purely, I think, but because it represented a stark contrast to what we’re used to seeing. It kicks the glossy, pretentious Singapore image in the ass. 

The second was the comments made while discussing these photos. More than once I found myself sipping my cold beer and bantering over a picture with expat guys. One guy, Chris, says that he wants the fish market picture because it’s what he wants to remember Singapore as when he leaves the country. Not the towering, impending concrete jungle, but the small things you see during a Sunday walk. Another guy tells me he’s definitely getting the trolley grandma photo because it’s an image so quirky, he’d love to bring it back home to display so his less traveled friends could ooh and ahh over his scintillating Asian living experience. 

I started noticing how the majority of these guys were telling me, albeit subtly, that they plan to leave Singapore in the next few years. These pictures were going to be memorabilias from a place they once called home, even though not so fondly. Which brings me to my useless banter of the day - how Singapore is such a transitory country.

To many expats, Singapore is a mistress. It’s glamorous, it’s flashy, it can boost your status, it’s fast-paced, its something you can brag about later in life. But no one wants to take Singapore by the hand and whisper it sweet nothings, let alone settle down and commit to it for life. No, siree. After three or four major Facebook album pictures of the observations of life here, we begin to grow lethargic. When all that’s new has been discovered so easily, it no longer leaves an air of mystery. A mistress only thrives when mystery and excitement exist - without it, she starts to leave a bitter taste. One starts painfully longing for the comforts of home, or even the thrill of new and better mistresses to meet. For countries that seem to promise a long term commitment, one you can really fall in love with. 

There really isn’t a point to all this - except to let out my thoughts to words. But as a expat female living in Singapore myself, I’ve surprised myself for enduring this mistress for so long. The only things that keeps me going is the fact that I’ve got my eyes set on some I can perhaps settle down with. And that being here is a stepping stone for me to finally end up there. :)

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More than this

Synthetic happiness. Did you know what that is? I didn’t either until today when I watched a TED talk by a guy named Dan Gilbert. And that talk was called, surprise surprise, “Why are we happy?”

For someone who’s been constantly in pursuit of happiness (face it, who isn’t?), I pressed the play button and waited for it to blow me away. So was I? Not particularly. I mean, sure I learnt a new term - ‘synthetic happiness’. Which, in a nutshell, means humans are able to feel happy in any given situation as long as they accept they cannot change the circumstances or have no other choice. Gilbert presented a case where a paraplegic was just as happy as a lottery winner - because he learnt to deal with his condition and make the best of it. Also because there is no un-doing or alternative to being paraplegic, he simply is. Or in India, couples who are in arranged marriages prove to be very happy with their situation.

Which brings me to why I wasn’t blown away after watching the whole talk. Granted, he was only given 20 minutes to give this long speech so he probably didn’t have much time to expand or discuss some pressing issues in detail. Such as why very many of us have lost our ability to produce synthetic happiness. 

We live in such an exposed world. At any given day, I would be receiving hundreds and maybe thousands of information. When I watch TV or a movie I learn shitloads about other cultures that I probably wouldn’t have known otherwise. I mean let’s face it, watching shows like Sex and the City makes you realize that sex is extremely casual and disposable in some parts of the world. Reading books like Eat Pray Love makes you realize that you have to travel the world in order to find what really makes you happy. Hanging out with people from different countries - French, Turkish, Indians - makes you realize that each culture have different values, where one might be taboo in one country yet be perfectly acceptable in another.  The world seems a wide one for me - I learn and absorb and am presented with multiple versions of realities everyday. Therein lies the problem of choice.

When we have too many choices, we’ll feel dissatisfied with the one we’ve chosen. Why did I pick this career when I could do all these other things? Why am I seeing this person when there are multiple others interested? Why am I living in this country I’m not particularly fond of when the world is your oyster? Why? Why? Why?

I went to Cambodia last year and I quad biked through a small rural village under the sun. As I passed by their primitive means of living, the one thing that struck me was how happy they are. Yes, they build their shack on dirt, they have to do manual labor under the sun everyday, and they probably have never experienced the luxuries of the city. Yet because they know no better, they find themselves in a small world where things are as good as they can be. And as they flash their grins at me with small shouts of ‘hello! hello!’, I can’t help but feel truly envious. 

So what I’ve gathered is that, yes, we’re receiving more amounts of information faster than ever before. What happens in Beirut one second reaches Singapore via Twitter about 3 seconds later. We now know, learn, and are driven more intensely than ever before. In many ways, it’s arguably making us more intelligent creatures. But in a very fundamental way, it’s making us further from the thing we want the most - true happiness. 

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Into the Wild

“Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.” 

Jon Krakauer - Into The Wild

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On ideas and solitude

So today I read a brilliant article on the NYTimes website called The Rise of the New Groupthink. To give you an idea of what it’s about, here’s a small excerpt:

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink… Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted.. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

Scarily enough, I find this so true. I’ve been so exposed to the whole teamwork-spiel we’ve been getting since doing adschool in college and all the way to the open-concept office in the agency I work in. I’ve actually forgotten how much of a lonewolf I could be if I wanted to.

Being the middle child, I’ve always been the drifter in my family. As usual, the eldest gets all the responsibility and the youngest the attention. There wasn’t much placed upon me, and as a result I became the dreamer of our bunch. As a kid, I devoured books like they were my life support; and in turn I started falling in love with creating stories of my own. While my older sister is with my mom at the bank, and my little sister being mollycoddled by the nanny, I huddled in my room and write. And write. And write. Sometimes I sketch too, if it helps the storyline. Some stories I really liked I’d give to my parents, and they’ll tack it up to their wall for a brief period before it falls to the floor and they forget all about it. Other stories remain in my book, full of scribbles of a little girl. Scribbles of imaginative inventions (flying toasters, alien portals, holographic video player), and funny comic strips. 

In high school, I completed a 200 page novel after 6 months of sweating it out in front of my macbook, alone in my locked room. And during art classes, our teacher made it a point for us to always create safe havens, or silos, in class where we feel most inspired.

I agree that the more heads you have, the more extensive a work might be. But I find the best ideas always flickr dimly in your mind at first, and you have to sit there and carefully pull at its string to find out what more is there to it. Once you’ve fully grasped that fragile butterfly, you’re free to hand it to the person next to you to try and make it stronger. 

I guess it’s like one of my creative directors once said, ‘Ideas come from a lonely place.’

I think it’s time I re-learnt to shut the noise of the world out and get lost in my own head. 

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On being 22

Below is a (in no way complete) list of things I’ve learnt about being 22 years young.

1. Responsibilities Suck

Being the double two feels like someone’s pushing you into adulthood without asking if you really wanted to be there in the first place. Suddenly you realize you’re in commute everyday to your job that takes up 120% of your time so you can afford to feed yourself and put a (rented) roof over your head. Sometimes you wake up jolted by an alarm and for the briefest moment you swear you’re still in college.

2. Relationship? The fuck is that?

You feel pretty stuck about your age: you’re not quite as young as a naive 16 year old in terms of expecting disney endings with guys. Yet you’re not even close to nearing the 30 year old mark to feel like your biological clock is ticking and settling down. In other words, it’s a pretty awesome time to be having fun and exploring different people. It’s pretty normal to suddenly find yourself in a fling with an extremely emotional installation artist, or a ridiculously attractive backpacker stranded in a trip he didn’t plan, or a mini celebrity of a middle eastern country. Yes, you do get into relationships hoping for the best, for the future or whatever, but then again it’s no big whoop if they don’t work out. 

3. Everybody is a Flight Risk

Everyone at this stage is just coming into their own, and everyone is trying out or feeling out what the fuck they are doing. Which means people come and go all the time. You fall in love with someone, he lands a double digit job across the world. You make a best friend out of someone, she has to go save the whales in Japan. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to be cliche and say ‘everybody fucking leaves me.’ No, because you do the leaving too. Lots of leaving. And when you do, even though it hurts, it’ll feel like the most natural thing in the world.

4. What-else-is-out-there Syndrome

I’m pretty sure this is one’s a Gen Y affliction. How many times have you thought, okay I quite like what I’m doing for a living, but I’m sure there’s something else I can do just as well? I mean, honestly I love my job. I love being in the creative industry and working to the pressure of having to be imaginative all the time. But you can’t help thinking how many millions of jobs there are in this world, and one or two of which might actually be more fulfilling. It’s scary when you start having this Syndrome, because no one likes to feel they’re in the wrong peg. Yet you can’t help but think - ‘my god I would kill to be a travel journalist.’ And what’s even scarier (in a good way, though), is that we’ve got many more decades to live and try it all out. 

5. Old enough to know better, young enough to do it anyway

Yeah, you will find yourself throwing up and passing out at a lamppost on a bridge at a road in Chinatown with some girl’s lipstick on your chest and a nerd’s number scrawled on your arm. Yes, you will find yourself blowing all of your salary on a 6-day trip to a Mediterranean island you can hardly afford just because you feel like you need a visual break. Yeah, you will find yourself dating all the wrong people who feel so right. The best part is you can be excused - and even excuse yourself. Because when you know the future holds mortgages, crying kids and hating the in-laws; waking up hungover with your friends all around your insane mess of a room can seem like the best thing in the world.

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A small ode to 2011

2011 was one hell of a year.

I made lots of mistakes, made big decisions, fell in and out of relationships, made awesome new friends, met old friends, learnt a new language, learnt new cultures, travelled to 5 different countries, landed myself a couple of awards, a new job, and partied so hard I swear I was making up for lost teenage years. 

If there was one thing I really learnt, it’s that following what my heart wants and ignoring my head is a pretty damn stupid thing to do. But out of that stupidity comes glory, comes happiness, and as always, crazy fucking memories I’d trade for nothing else in this world.

I have no regrets.

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How it all began

Wanderlust is a word I discovered last year. It means a strong and irresistible desire to travel the world. It’s a condition I suffer, day in and day out. 

Growing up in a well-to-do family, my parents had pretty much flown me around to most of the world since I could speak. My dad is a firm believer that travel broadens the mind, and yes, even though I hardly had a mind of my own at 6 years old, I still remember being lost in a hotel in Hawaii with chicken pox. Or learning how to eat Fondue in Switzerland when I was 8. But as most kids, I saw these travels as mere family holidays. And as I grew into puberty, I despised my parents for forcibly shipping me to another continent during the holidays when I could have spent the time partying with my friends. Or something to that effect.

So how did I discover this extreme wanderlust? Strangely enough, it was in college. I started dating a guy who was an absolute firecracker in every sense of the word. He was passionate, full of life, he knew his place in the world, adventurous, energetic, and best of all, completely into me. He took me on roadtrips, trips I don’t think I could even forget even if you tried to hack into my brain’s hard drive and permanently trash it. As we whizzed down foreign roads, trekked steep hills, laid down on harbors and parks, watched seals sound each other out during sunset… I realized I was feeling the most intense emotion of happiness. And at the time I thought it was because I was in love with this amazing guy. 

A few years later I pack my bags and step into a plane to a country I’ve randomly chosen to travel to alone (a story I’ll elaborate in later posts) - and I was swept by the same intense emotion of happiness. That’s when it hit me - this feeling, it’s mine. I knew I would work as hard as I can, endure hundreds of forms and embassies, just so I can continue packing my bag and landing in a different place. A place where no one knows my name. A place where I’m completely and utterly free of commitments, responsibilities, or status. A place where I meet awesome new people that I would otherwise would never have met if I had stayed put.

This blog won’t always be about my travels - but I just thought I’d make this my first post in honor of its name. And perhaps in honor of that person who’s no longer in my life, and have no idea how much of an impact he’s made in my life.

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serious post travel