Searching for "home"

I woke up in cold sweat on Sunday morning only four hours after I went to bed after a second night out in a row and feeling slightly hungover from the accumulated effects of alcohol. I hardly dream of Singapore these days, but this time, it was the prospect of going back to work as soon as August that completely terrified me.

It felt so real like the last time, except that it was much more pleasant the last time round. Nothing can quite compete with the pleasant aroma and taste of the wantan noodles at Clementi Central and chicken rice so easily and cheaply available anywhere in Singapore.

But these two "same, same but different" episodes encapsulate the reality of how I regard Singapore. If pleasant memories of Singapore, the one and only place I've ever really lived in before New York, only involved friends, family and food, should I begin to question where "home" for me is? If home is where the heart is, then I am not sure where that is at this point in my life.

Singapore ain't perfect, but let's face it, it's my comfort zone: everything's familiar, even the government. You can predict to a T how and how those Men-In-White are going to react in any situation. But home should never be premised on an economistic logic that systematically excludes. Home is where unconditional love abounds and where one should be free to be him or herself. Community and the individual are not polarities, rather a community is a collection of strong, shaped individuals.

I left because I craved the freedom to be an individual yet have my diversity embraced as a member of society. But the flip side of this freedom and diversity in America ain't pretty. I am a minority here, and for the better part of my fall semester, I spent it being indignant that people generalized me as being Asian. Hell, I am Chinese and Singaporean. What do you mean "Asian" anyway? I hated New York because life was a bloody frenzy here and I didn't have any of those deep friendships I had in Singapore. Deep down inside, I knew it was a side effect of my initial assimilation angst and would end the moment I get used to things.

And I was right. After spending my entire winter break grappling with my loneliest Christmas ever, I felt like I came out of it knowing myself better. I knew that whenever this period of my life in New York ends, I will always look back on my time in Columbia and New York as the time where I took the first steps towards being an adult by shedding the remnants of my adolescence.

In February, when the temperatures got milder and spring beckoned, a new dawn beckoned. What I'd thought impossible at one stage, happened: I realized I was beginning to love New York as I was sitting at the dingy benches outside Borders at Penn Station, catching up with Mou-sie before he left for Israel and Germany.

Still, America's not perfect. Latent racism is rampant. New York is the big time and it's so hard to get a placement/job here. And it's certainly not helping that America is the epicenter of the worst recession in 30 years. And when you consider how newspapers have been dying even before Wall Street crashed last September, you'll get an idea how difficult it is for me to stay, even if I want to. I still don't think I made any real friends here, save for one or two people, but these things take time, so I would just have to bid my time here.

Going to DC over the weekend before spring break ended helped. Seeing Doug again was really nice. It was a familiar face and I really missed the intelligent and deep conversations I used to have with him. More importantly, DC gave me a sense of "home" that I have never gotten from being in New York or Singapore at all. I've been to DC three times now, but I realized after this time round that I always left feeling more at "home" in America's capital than ever.

I can't quite explain it. It could be that it's Politics Central at this point and it's appealing to the very depths of my soul as a budding political and economic reporter. Maybe it's the presence of people I already know in the city. But all those job/internship/second year in school rejections have also helped shaped what I want to do: American domestic and foreign policy reporting, particularly its impact on people around the world. I figured it would be good to start in DC and know my beat cold first.

But those unexplained vibes and feelings remain hypothetical for now. There's still the task of getting a job. I am not talking as much about each and every application now, not because it's an active choice but mainly because I am too tired of telling people the bad news. I figured if I don't tell anybody about applying to places, I won't have to tell them I got rejected.

Whatever it is, things changed somewhat after the weekend DC trip. The week after, I found out I got selected for an internship with BBC in New York, starting immediately. At my first shift three weeks ago, everything made sense: that I just need to abide in His time, that all things happen for His reason.

I am really enjoying myself working at a place I've always dreamt of working at since I started copying the news readers on the World Service over radio when I was 10. But mostly, I found it thrilling I was doing "real" reporting again, for a "real" global audience. It was at that moment I realized I am quite over J School, that my rejection from the MA program ain't a bad thing, that I just needed to start work, soon.

Which is why I am being rather zen about my job search now. Although I haven't gotten any positive news on the job front despite being very aggressively sending applications after applications out, somehow I know something will work out. But in the process, I have almost sidelined school work in the last few weeks, pissing some of my friends off. At the same time, I am also trying not to think too much about it and fret because I know the paid offer will come through. Even the visa issues would sort itself out, I hope.

I am beginning to realize I should actually enjoy the process of my search for "home" rather than be so obsessed about finding out exactly where my actual "home" is. At the end of it, any "home" is really just a shell. It could be stuffed with things from all over the place, but I just need to get used to how "home" is not just where the heart is, but what the shell contains.

Delaying the inevitable?

I was sitting at the student lounge in the Journalism School talking to Holly at about three this afternoon when Laura whispered into my right ear while standing behind me. "I didn't get in. The MA," she said. "They rejected me."

I looked at her, then jumped to my feet and rushed to the nearest computer terminal, leaving Holly to continue her conversation with Laurie without me. Laura and I had applied to continue with a second one-year degree in specialized journalism. I had been waiting for their admission decision for weeks.

But it was not to be. The announcement was stark. I had gotten the same bland, automated rejection letter. I felt my world literally turn dark at that moment. All my plans were going to shreds, I felt my head spinning big time. Why? After the ton of rejections from everywhere else, this rejection was especially hard to take - even my own school was rejecting my application to specialize in business and economic reporting.

It's easy to just blame the economy or descend into a self pity fest, but my mind was a blank. I was just too shocked to know how to react or what to think. I walked home after that because I just didn't feel well enough to be seen in public at that point. I had only had that sinking feeling twice before - when my best friend Gerald died in 2000 and when somebody stole my $1000 bill from my bag in school the year before.

I went home and typed an email out notifying my primary circle of friends and my teachers who wrote those recommendations for me. As I laid on my bed and stared at the ceiling afterwards, I got reminded of those hunches of the last few days, especially with each successive rejection.

If with every door closed means there would be another one open farther down the road, then could it be that God is hearing what I really wanted to be doing? To just take some time off, travel and rest before starting work - but that would mean wasting the professional amplitude coming to Columbia was meant to do for me, especially if I wanted to work in America.

Doing the MA made so much sense in every single way. Buying me time, and better prepare me to do the job of a business and economic journalist while I sit out the recession and prepare a second assault at the biggies, The Wall Street Journal and Reuters in particular.

I also wanted a second chance at living the New York life. My first year has been so far plagued with so much assimilation and identity related issues I almost feel as if I needed to come here for personal development, for that space away from my mother to grow up, as much as I needed to come here for professional development. I also wanted to travel around the States more.

But who was I kidding. Nic was right: staying for another year is merely delaying the inevitable of going out there in a difficult market and be a real journalist. The MA might make all the human sense in the world, but it's probably not the right thing for me to do right now. Maybe it's also a sign to tell me to stop wasting time, get out there and report...and then go back to school to do the MBA, Law or International Affairs/MPP degree if I so desire. I could see this rejection as quickening that eventuality and pushing me out of the only comfort zone I've come to know, school.

I guess if nothing crops up between now and graduation, I could still do the travelling thing first. I would probably take two months out to travel across the country and do the California summer road trip I have always meant to take, maybe even taking in parts of Canada at that. And then I am going to make a swing through parts of South America.

I still haven't done my graduate trip thing, so maybe this is it. But I don't know anymore. I am still hoping to get a gig somewhere in America for a year at least. But there is also a real chance I would be back in Singapore sooner than I thought I would, defeated in one sense, but triumphant in another.

Reliving the furnace of 2008

Change and 2008 seem to go pretty much hand in hand. There's Barack Obama and his presidential election campaign, and then there was the day that Wall Street died, killing the world's market along with it. Some things, however, don't change, and that's how central America is, to the equlibrium of the world, no matter how much people theorize about its demise.

But still, there seems to be some kind of a epochal shift even as an unusual number of famous personalities also died. Even the financial crisis is seen as an opportunity to reform the erroneous belief in the power of the market, as if it is entirely capable of working itself out like a human being.

The same can be said of my life. But for me, I think the last few years in college built up to the seismic explosion that was 2008 for me. But more importantly, despite everything, I am able to say, for the first time in my life, that the past year has been great. 2008 was great for many reasons, but it was only great because it was so rough and I emerged from it wiser and hopefully, knowing a little better.

AL told me something very refreshing yesterday, when I was just lamenting the length of time I've been out of "ministry" since I stepped out 3-4 years ago. The great people in the Bible, she said, all had very short but very high impact "ministry" time -- more crucially, she pointed to the long processes of moulding and character building that was integral to their being and serving as their basis for their actions.

While it allayed any anxiety about returning to ministry for me, that also totally put my year in perspective. 2008 was a very definitive year for me because I felt I was thrown into the furnace to be moulded. It was a lot of pain, as I stuttered from one crisis to another as things came to a head in my graduation year and with everything about moving to New York.

Like when you mould metal into shape, it was not until I got out of the high "temperatures" of the furnace called journalism school that I realized, when I am all chilled out and solidified, that I realized the changes that has occurred with me.

So stay with me as I recount the furnace that was 2008 for me. It's bound to carry on into 2009 and beyond, but this time round, my top moments/events is weaved in a multiplicity of narratives, that incorporates the reasons why they were significant for me. I am also moving away from ranking their importance because I think they were all part of an autopoietic process for me.

Wrapping up 26 years

My pre-Columbia part of the year was dominated by the huge hangover from 2007, mainly because I was moving into my final semester as an undergraduate, and was battling the same demons that have come back to haunt with me a vengeance. I spent much of December 2007 locking myself up at home, preparing my application to Columbia and just basically being anti-social, feeling sorry for myself.

It was not until the combination of the deaths of the 5 national dragonboaters at the end of 2007 and Heath Ledger's accidental death from an overdose on Jan. 24, 2008 that I emerged from the malaise. Like Heath, I was having sleepless nights. Like him, I took a combination of sleeping pills and drank more than I usually did. Unlike him, I didn't take them in amounts he did. Unlike him, I didn't die.


STILL, even though I stopped, I lacked an impetus to live purposefully - until I went on my first USP Global Program trip to Boston and Tufts University in Feb. 2008, where I was the first international delegations to the annual EPIIC Symposium. Last year's Global Poverty and Inequality theme reinvigorated me and gave me my second wind. It was the perfect antidote to senioritis and all the combination of afflictions I was subjected to back then.

More crucially, being at EPIIC helped me recapture my sense of idealism about wanting to save the world from itself. It recaptured for me, those moments that led to my founding of Campus Observer in 2006. 2 solid friendships emerged from that trip to Tufts. Strangely enough, I barely talked to both DM and DG when I was there. Such is the power of facebook and furious g-chatting.

Tufts also precipitated the chance to go on my first photojournalism expedition to Cambodia in June, which was a precious first overseas reporting experience that showed up my journalistic deficiencies for all its worth. I am grateful for the opportunity because all the mistakes I made, helped set the stage for my time in Columbia. Those mistakes and questions I didn't get answered in Siem Reap guided my class options in a very tangible way.

That visit to Tufts also confirmed my growing interest in International Relations, and cemented my regret at not following my instincts as a freshman, and going with a political science major. This also guided my decision to go on my second, and last USP Global Program trip with the EU-ASEAN Summer Program in May. That was a 2-week trip covering Jakarta, Bangkok and Brussels and was a comparative study of the two international organizations. Needless to say, that also being my first time in Europe, I learnt heaps.


BUT THAT trip to Tufts also came on the heels of a very important chance meeting with Will, then a top editor with a niche foreign policy magazine. This happened at a special dialogue session in late January between NUS Arts Faculty students and a bunch of visiting American journalists. To think I almost didn't make the session. I was a last minute addition after my friends who were the original picks threw my name into the hat when they needed replacements.

Over lunch, I happened to sit beside Will, not knowing who he was. But once we started talking, I realized I was speaking to somebody whose career path I want to possibly emulate. It also helped I really enjoyed talking to him, and the advice he gave me about J-School and all, resonated deeply with me.

We met twice subsequently, once in DC on the second leg of that Tufts trip and another time in Singapore, when we met at The Fullerton in late April as I agonized about taking up the Columbia offer, because of the debt burden I would incur. He told me I was going to regret it in future if I realized how turning down Columbia compromised my career. Besides, he added, the amount of debt is more than manageable.


WITH THAT decision to come to J-School, it also meant I gave up, perhaps forever, the idea of pursuing a Phd and the life of an academic researcher. Three practical occurrences made it easier for me to decide - my bombed out GRE scores, the lack of a plausible research area/topic and my desire to be read by a wider audience.

My honours thesis experience also contributed to the decision. As I realized towards the end how my thesis was going nowhere but I still had to persist and follow through, I realized the parochiality of my thesis topic was simply the result of my restless energy within me, a desire for political action, in the widest sense of the world.

At the end, I felt my thesis read like my personal indictment of LKY and how he systematically got rid of his political opponents, rather than an objective piece of academic work that seeks to explore how that empirical reality can lead to an extension of a pre-existing body of work or theory.

My supervisor would insist there were other reasons, like how I interrupted my work schedule with my trip to Tufts, but that trip helped nurture a vision of what I wanted to do with my life, after I graduate. Besides, I wouldn't have known that FS interview would not have gotten me anything new until I actually conducted it, as I did in Cambridge, MA over the course of my time in Boston as well.

I was a little upset at the eventual B grade I got for the thesis, but after a while, I decided that it wasn't important. I had accurately predicted all my grades for my final semester, but thankfully, I got the most important part wrong - I thought I would lose my second-upper if I got those litany of B's, but for the first time, I am thankful I suck in math. I retained my second-upper class honours by a whisker.

I ended my undergraduate life badly academically, but I decided it was more important to move on. Closing the NUS chapter of my life felt vaguely strange. It was almost a non-event for me, commencement and all. Maybe I was so tired I couldn't wait for it to finish. But without Joyce and Abs, my final year angst would have been unbearable in the clinical confines of Central Library and the Writing Centre as we wrote our thesis. Reviewing my life in NUS deserves an entry on its own at some point later.


PREPARING to leave for Columbia was an intensely emotional process. I didn't know how long I would be gone for, but a big part of the preparation had to do with my Mom and the family. I have written a lot about this, but I felt I needed to wrap things up before I go. I wanted to "sort" a lot of things out before I left, but I quickly realized I merely wanted to resolve things for myself - when it is definitely not the time yet for others. Forcing the issue made life would merely make life miserable for me. I decided to just at least bring things to a close.

The church cell group, led by my mentors, P and G, remains something that is simply irreplaceable. Their support is something that was so lacking in my time in NYC and something I miss. They prayed for me excessively in the run up to my departure, and once again, I am indebted to P and G for every single thing.


BUT BEFORE leaving for NYC, I decided at the last minute, changing my mind again and again, that I should finally pay KM and JO a visit Down Under. These two were old friends from the previous season of my life, but I thought it would be important to see them and hang out with them for a bit again. I think it was 3-4 years ago that I last did that with them, and it was important I have some form of a closure with them since with this move, I didn't know when I would even see them again.

My one-week holiday in Brisbane was also the only time I travelled without my laptop in 3 years. JO drove me from Brisbane to the Gold Coast and Bryon's Bay at the northern tip of NSW. I had a wonderful time as I was introduced at long last, to the Hope Brisbane church community they have been a part of since moving over to study at UQ a few years ago. My first trip Down Under, but definitely, hopefully, not my last.

On hindsight, I may have travelled too much during the 3-month summer break because I barely spent anytime at home. I went to Jakarta, Bangkok and Brussels for two weeks right after examinations ended, and left for Siem Reap for a week after 3 weeks in between those trips. I went to Brisbane 3 weeks after Siem Reap, and came back a full week before I were to have left for New York. And any time in Singapore was spent meeting friends.


THE ONLY blemish was how I was so tired that I lost my wallet and my cell phone in that final week, after I left both things in the toilet at Breko's Holland Village while waiting to meet my upteenth friend. It was a harrowing rush to get everything replaced before flying off. My parents and sisters castigated me for not spending enough time with the family.

They were right, but at the same time, that was a reflection of how I depended on my friends more when I was growing up, and not my current priorities. Little did I expect the gravity of the situation when I had neither in the Big Apple...

Midway through the Columbia chapter

Many are you are going to think I am crazy, but it is safe to say there was more hate in my love-hate relationship with NYC, at least in the first four months of my time here. Partly because the New York City in my mind and the one I saw in reality were two vastly different visions. I resented how there could be such vast economic and social disparities, the one I see in my Brooklyn beat neighborhood and what little I saw on the Upper East Side.

But mainly because we have just been so busy, it's crazy. I hate the frantic pace life in the Big Apple. Maybe because of its position as America's financial capital, every relationship is so transactional here. But the picture in my head could still change, because I just recently discovered how therapeutic it is for me, to be around Greenwich Village more. In fact, it is likely to change - I just don't know by how much, yet.


AND THEN there was the whole Asian in America thing, how Americans tend to generalize where I come from. "Asian" people is used to refer to people who are vaguely yellow-skinned, like Chinese, Japanese and Korean. And most people find it difficult to understand I am Singaporean-Chinese and don't have Mandarin as my "native" tongue. They also find it difficult to understand how I speak 2 languages, in their opinion, fluently.

Everything in Race and Ethnic class in my undergraduate sociology major, are just popping up everywhere for me. I get typecast because I get sent to cover recent Chinese immigrants just because I speak Mandarin. If I have to write one more gentrification-related story or an immigrant-related one, I will just explode.

A huge part of being a minority in this white-majority country is that it forces you to re-examine your ethnicity. I realized I have been seeing myself as a white boy all this while (mainly because I watch too much American television and have been educated in Western philosophy). It's like here, I suddenly discover I am Chinese and have been grappling with it - for example, I have been youtubing Chinese music and television shows excessively. I used to do these things back in Singapore too, but here, it's a case of absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Curiously though, while I am drawn to "Asia," I don't feel compelled to return to Singapore that soon - although a large part of this re-examining of my identity involved thinking long and hard about what it means to be Singaporean. When I dream of home, it's usually food-related. I miss the familiarity and convenience of home, but most of all, I miss my friends and church back home. I am still searching for what makes Singapore definitively home for me.

At the end of it, I want to reclaim my Chinese-ness, my Singaporean-ness - but on my terms, and not on the terms of the typical American worldview. This could just be initial assimilation blues, but I am pretty sure I will find my way through this soon and be empowered by my unique cultural hybridity. This type of cultural essentialism, I want to remind myself, happens everywhere. I just need to get used to it and get over it, working the situation to my advantage.

But all the angst about democracy and the lack of a free press in Singapore has somewhat dissipated. Not in the sense that I don't care anymore, but being at the J-School has shown me that while these are necessary starting points, they cannot be the only things occupying our mind. Journalists are primarily reporters and writers, we need to get down to doing the dirty work and let our work speak for itself.

Besides, reporting in America and reporting in Singapore both comes with its own set of problems. I have no problems working in Singapore now, but I don't think I am quite done with living and working abroad yet. I want to try living in a Chinese-dominated environment for a bit after Columbia, so we'll see how that works out.


EMPLOYMENT opportunities being in short supply, the school encourages us to network excessively. It got to a point where I had enough of the lack of authenticity in relations that I decided I had enough. I wasn't going to get a job, ever, just by coldly changing name cards and exchanging fake emails.

The way I conducted myself with Will is the way for me. I maintained contact with him not because I wanted a job with him, but because I respected his work and want to learn from him. It may sound like I am being clever with my words, but it is a very crucial difference governing one's attitudes towards networking. You need to be real and authentic, and not be too much of a cold opportunist.

Consequently, it has been very hard to make real friends here. I potentially have a few of them here, but our tight schedules make it really tough to call. I will just have to wait and see how things turn out in the spring semester. The real test would come when we graduate, to see who will continue to keep in active contact.


ONE of the biggest breakthroughs though, is my epic realization that pursuing "greatness" is a futile exercise. If you see the people who were considered "great" in history, you will realize that they didn't start out wanting to be great - they merely went about being excellent at what they were doing. "Greatness" is an arbitrary label imposed by people when your work gets noticed, but it also means that the goal posts get shifted so often. If you keep trying to please other people, you will lose yourself in the process. Better to keep the focus on the quality of one's craft.

This was what happened when I got lost in the whole "new-media-is-important" rhetoric of the journalism school and the mad rush to get a job as well. I got really frustrated I was putting out applications just so that I could get a job, especially since I found out I really have no interest in reporting domestic issues in America. I perform best when I write about things that I care about. I don't know what yet, but I do know it's not in America.


WALKING outside the Museum of Modern Art a few weeks ago, it suddenly dawned upon me that I will look back on my time in NYC as the time I truly shed the baggage of my adolescence and become an adult. The pain of growing up, on hindsight, is something I came here wanting to do, so I should just suck it up and live. Besides, growing up does not mean going at it alone, without God in the picture.

It's halfway through my first-year here, and the plan is to try to do a second, specializing in business and economic reporting - but that is dependent on a full scholarship. I am glad to say right now though, there is more love equalizing the whole love-hate thing I have with the city. I think the key is to get out of my dingy little shoebox room, explore the city more and expand my social circle beyond the journalism school.

My Christmas wouldn't have been that miserable if I had done that earlier, because everybody except for some international students, left for home. Either that, or I shouldn't have been such a stingy bag and bought the ticket home for 2 weeks. I could have done with some gorging of Boon Tiong Kee chicken rice and the wantan mee at Clementi Hawker Centre.

New Year's Eve though was such a contrast because I had DG coming in from Boston. I hung out with him and his bunch of friends at an Asian bistro in Greenwich Village over dinner, drinks and maniacal dancing. It was nice and low key fun. I was just so happy to see him again after I hadn't time to hang out with him when I made that mad dash up to Boston the other time.


I KNOW this entry about the time since I moved to NYC is devoid of events, but more about things I have learnt - which is perhaps reflective of my time here so far. I suspect another list is due when I graduate May 20, so until then, thanks for ploughing through this three-parter.

Happy 2009!