Popagandhi

It was the summer of 2004.

I don’t remember things like seasons before 2018 (I did not live somewhere with real seasons until 3 years ago). Unless they had to do with travel. In 2004, I was a college freshman in a school in Singapore that was also the only one at the time which followed American semesters, terminology, and that conferred you with things like summa cum laude when you graduated. Accordingly, we were also the only school that used things like, “summer”, “spring”, “fall”, “winter”.

Summer of every year in college was glorious. I knew it at the time, probably, but maybe didn’t know exactly: all four summers would be the best days of my life. Just endless amounts of time to not-study, for I was not a very good student (my undiagnosed autism and ADHD then made it very difficult for me to stay engaged)), and unlimited amounts of time to really just do whatever the hell I wanted.

Like many students in Singapore, it had always been an ambition of mine to study abroad. I wanted to live and study somewhere with... seasons. In hindsight, I probably just wanted the space and bandwidth to figure out things like ‘am I gay’, ’can I do certain things recreationally’, ‘is there a path beyond let’s marry some man at 25 and have babies and live in a HDB flat’, and I probably wanted those things more than I wanted to study abroad.

The realities of a middle class life in Singapore set in quite quickly. The deal I struck with my folks was: ”If I stay and study in Singapore (the economically sensible thing), I guess I can... travel... regionally... with the tens of thousands of dollars that you’d be saving?” (They said yes, but that I still had to pay for those things myself. Years of studying amongst real-life Crazy Rich Asians did not leave me with a reasonable understanding of money.)

Much later, some family friends remarked at Chinese New Year: Mr and Mrs Tan, isn’t it marvelous that you allowed your daughter the space to go out and see the world? To which, they laughed: there is no allowing or disallowing with her. She’s so strong-willed, our options with her have always been: ok do what you think is best. Just remember to tell us about it. As soon as you can.

(Thanks mum, dad! If you’re familiar at all with Singapore, you’ll know that that’s... exceedingly rare. I feel extraordinarily lucky.)

And so I worked two to three jobs all through college in order to fund that life. It helped that I loved a good deal so I made it my goal to get the best prices on everything. If I had $100 in my bank account that was me going off to a nearby country for two weeks. It also helped that I was fine with—perhaps even saw it as a teaching moment, or a story to be written about ten years later—that I really wasn’t bothered by things like creature comforts. I was also not bothered by creatures. $2 rooms in Kolkata and $5 beds in Bangkok. Those felt more free than the small bedroom in a high-rise building I grew up in. Now that I’m a little older, I know those felt liberating because those were different from the comforts I grew up with, that I could always return to. They were novelties. They were stories to tell.

I hope I have better stories to tell now.

—-

In the summer of 2004, I woke up every morning and I got into a little boat. I paddled aimlessly. I tried not to knock my head with the oar. My ex, bless her soul, did most of the paddling. We walked around from bed to beach to estuary lazily with all the time in the world. Of college kids who had April to August to do whatever they wanted. Most of our peers were doing internships, chasing good jobs: I wanted to row boats badly and wear not too much clothing for as long as I could.

The plan was hazy. We would get up from bed a few days from now, whenever we felt like it, and head for Cambodia. We would take several modes of transportation from the beach towards the mainland, where we would board a minibus for a town named Trat. Then we would find a motorbike taxi, and we would tell them to head to the border. There, we would disembark from the motorbike taxi, and then we would find a car, any car, headed for Phnom Penh. That trip involved an overnight stay in a small Cambodian town. We weren’t fazed by it, but we weren’t prepared either. Especially not with the minimal clothing that was the ethos of my travel at the time.

On arriving in this small Cambodian border town, we checked in to a room in a wooden structure that had seen better days. Our budget was $2, so we couldn’t complain. As with all such huts in Southeast Asia, the highlight of the room was the dirty and dusty mosquito net. It’ll only be one night, I told myself.

As we walked around the small Cambodian town the main people we saw who were not working in the hotels, who were not pedaling autorickshaws, were older men from a certain continent with clear persuasions of the nature that would lead them into criminal trouble back home. Being as sheltered as we were, we felt relatively carefree and perhaps even safe. After all, we were... almost 20. We were expired goods for the men who came to this town.

As a person on the spectrum, the true nature of the things that I saw and the sticky situations that I may have been in only revealed themselves later when I was already detached from that moment. Ah, so that’s... what it was. I mention this because I have been frequently guilty of saying that I never ran into any trouble traveling solo; perhaps I was truly lucky. Perhaps I, as an autistic person who has a complete inability to read new social situations, just didn’t see what was right there. This episode comes back to me sometimes as I think of the leering men who said things to me like, I can no longer be with western women, they don’t know how to treat men and they are not attractive. At that time, I simply did not have the context. I certainly found it weird and strange, but today I would have the tools and the experience to have found... disgust, perhaps.

That night was over relatively quickly. The next morning, we climbed into an old Toyota Camry that was bound for Phnom-Penh.

Five other people climbed in.

[To be continued..]

Before I came to this country I led a very different life.

My luggage was never unpacked. My passport was tethered to my body. My weeks often began with breakfasts in Yangon on Mondays and ended with drinks on Jakarta rooftop bars on Fridays. On weekends, I might retreat into a Balinese forest alone or return home.

Home was one of Asia’s most expensive cities. At least, it was where I paid rent and where I have the largest number of relations of all kinds. Home didn’t feel like home since I was never home for more than three days at a time, from the moment I graduated from college. I could never buy a gym membership anywhere. I simply didn’t know where I would... be.

My life here is quite different.

I have not left my neighborhood much in the past year. The longest trips I have taken have been occasional bicycle trips across the Golden Gate Bridge, where I sometimes like to cycle to my favorite bakery and then put my bike on a bus home (just say no to the hills of Sausalito). So many people are writing stories about how other countries are doing pandemics differently. This is mine, except I stayed on and am in it for the long haul, fully cognizant of all of the ‘benefits’ I am missing out on.

My friends are having brunch and cocktails back home and I know in my bones that would be me, if I was in Singapore right now, too. Because I am bougie like that and I know it.

But I am not at brunch. I am huddled at home, like I have, every night this year. My dog is asleep next to me, farting ceaselessly. I have canceled all holiday plans. We are not going anywhere.

During the work days, I work with a team of thirty something brilliant and kind individuals who, together, are trying to make a difference for the city we love during this difficult time. At nights, I put on an apron and trudge to an empty kitchen near my home to churn, literally, batch after batch of ice cream so that I can bring some joy to people in real time.

It feels like exactly where I need to be.

It wasn’t always an easy feeling, though. In conversations with therapists I have learned that the inability to make plans for the future, any future, is causing everyone all kinds of anxiety. For international folks like us with our lives strewn all over the world, it has been a special kind of logistical challenge. When will we ever see our families again? In all these countries?

Back in March just before shelter-in-place came upon us, we already knew the extent of the damage of this virus from news from Asian cities. We semi-seriously considered waiting out the pandemic in Singapore, where a good healthcare system and mollycoddling levels of government support seemed like a good idea. From rumblings from an assortment of compatriots I gathered that nonstop flights might end from San Francisco; that if we went home now, things will be safe; that you really don’t want to be stuck here in this country with its impossible healthcare system and not have any help figuring out something so unprecedented.

Occasionally, I dial in to Zoom conversations hosted for Singaporeans on the west coast. They always kick off these meetings by sharing latest stats. We marvel at the numbers. We laugh at the charts that are made showing how we have significantly less confidence in the American government’s handling of this pandemic compared to our own. We run through the numbers of how many of us have decided to weather it in Singapore or hunker down here in the Bay Area.

Somehow, those of us with not entirely clean cut Singaporean lives are hunkering down. Our partners cannot return with us. Our children cannot. I continue to be frustrated by the inability to plan for the future in any form. So I churn more ice cream.

If I were in Singapore, I would be at brunch. I would be checking in to all the locations I visit throughout the day with the app that every citizen has access to. I might be walking down a quiet residential street like my parents were when I called them a few days ago, and the biggest concern of my day might be that I paid too much ($5) for a bowl of fishball noodles.

But before I get to brunch, I would have to find my way to Los Angeles, the closest city where I can still get on a plane home. I would only be able to board the Singapore Airlines plane if I had my bright red passport, which I do, but that my wife does not. On entering the plane, probably in business class (as I would have upgraded with the miles I have studiously collected over the years), I would sink into the leather seat and feel relieved when I am given a copy of the Straits Times by a person who can pronounce my last name the way it is supposed to be pronounced (Tanh, not tan as in what the President does to get his famous orange color). I would sleep for the entirety of the sixteen hours, because I sleep like the dead in both economy and business class (and at the back of a boat or upper bunk of a train). I would land and I would hear the familiar sounds of Singlish, Malay and Hokkien at the precise moment the plane doors open onto the aerobridge.

Heat and Hokkien always hits me like a wave. I would scan my passport and then be whisked to a five star hotel where I would be strictly quarantined, before I can be released back into the world. Then, depending on the outcome of my tests, I would either be eating fishball noodles with my parents, or declared an ‘imported’ case by state media.

I will not be at brunch for a long, long time.

Instead, I have not cut my hair since January. My dog is so unused to being more than one foot from me that she now wanders to the bathroom if I am there for more than a minute. I am sequestered in my 300 square foot apartment that somehow has space for two humans, two animals, and all of our life’s possessions. My wife has bolted a fold down desk onto a wall. When either of us needs to use the bathroom, we flatten between the chair and the wall, sometimes without appropriate amounts of clothing (usually me). At various points of this pandemic, especially during the combination election and pandemic anxiety weeks, I plot and plan and figure out logistics. I carry bags of laundry to a laundromat at quiet hours, and wish I did research on how there are rarely any washers or dryers inside American apartments.

That is my way of dealing with anxiety. I figure out logistics. Which is an activity that is, in itself, anxiety-inducing. But never mind. I write to the immigration departments of various Caribbean countries. I research golden visas in Taiwan. I look at Estonia. I do all of this first for the animals, and then for us. All the countries that require any amount of animal quarantine are crossed from the world map that is in my mind. So no UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore or Hong Kong. Immigration departments write back and I promise to pay them some time after November 4, 2020. I never do.

I scan the news for information about 45’s latest immigration-busting moves. I realize, for the first time in a while, that we literally have nowhere else to go. I stay up until 7 in the morning to watch a needle tick in one direction or other in an election I cannot vote in. I dabble in more logistics, this time reading in other languages. Reading in my second and third languages will be less anxious, I tell myself, because I won’t understand all of it. It doesn’t work. I freak out again, just in other languages this time.

Seventeen days ago I woke up with needles pointing in not so bad places. I ghost Carribbean immigration officers. My love story with ‘Murica continues. Another tragedy strikes. America crosses 12 million cases; yet more than a million people are expected to fly this week for a holiday that celebrates genocidal activities. 95% of my state is on a 10pm curfew. My city, which has high levels of mask compliance and some levels of official responsibility, might join the rest of the state very soon. Life goes on. All I know is life will not need to be in the Carribbean.

The sun sets at 5pm and I turn on a ten thousand lumen lamp for several hours so I don’t get sad.

From time to time, my wife and I wonder: what will our life be like in Singapore, right now? We think of our beautiful apartment in the forest there. We think of our many brunches. We think of chicken rice. But mostly, we think of how we will not have a life in Singapore at all.

She wouldn’t be allowed in. Right now, because of the pandemic. But also always, because she won’t be allowed to be my wife.

In my younger years, meaning when I was a tween, I became acutely aware that my life would be different. I dated boys because I was supposed to, but whenever they said they loved me or that they wanted to marry me, I just shuddered. I don't like it when men sweat, I told them.

In hindsight, that was a big, red sign. I learned, in quick succession: I don't like it when men sweat. I don't like it when men sweat on me. I don't like the way men smell. I don't like men. Period.

When I was eighteen I felt like I was at a crossroads. "Am I bi? Am I gay? Am I... just a slut?" I could not tell. When you are a teenager, everything is possible. All doors are open. You can live anywhere, be anywhere, sleep with anybody.

And so on and on it went.

Eventually, I did find out: I am lesbian. I am a dyke. I will die on the hill of women-smells and women-sweat forever. I think I found that out when a man asked me to go to IKEA to pick out furniture with him. I told him he was really hot but, I would never go to IKEA with him, or with any man, now and always. It felt far more intimate than whatever we had gotten up to. I don't like man-sweat.

Even with that clarity behind me, I still had no clue what the hell I was supposed to do with that information. I lived in Singapore; I had gone abroad. I had flirted with the idea of going somewhere else. Nothing seemed clear. That sort of clarity, about what I would do and how I would do it, would only come later. (Again, that moment struck me like a thunderbolt, out of nowhere. It just did, and I don't know when it did.)

Yet I clung on to the idea of being thirty five as the day I should have 'figured it out'.

Maybe I did?

I have figured it out, in that I have learned that my sexual orientation, which once defined me as a person, continues to be a political position but it is not the entirety of who I am.

I have figured it out, in that I am married to a woman and we have a dog and a cat, just like I imagined when I was a wee tween, but I came to that very differently as well.

Dating in Singapore was strange, but not unlike being queer in any other major city. I was.. comfortable. I went on a few dates a week. At 35, I feel tired even thinking about the amount of energy I put into dating in my 20s. But it felt like the sort of thing to do a couple of times and get over with.

Love came to me in a way I could have never imagined. I was used to meeting women on the apps, meeting women in queer bars, meeting women everywhere I went, everywhere. But I had not yet done the classic queer woman move: I had not yet dated a woman who had dated the friend of a woman I had dated.

Who knew that would have solved all my problems?

From there, we went: Yishun, to Bali, to Bandung, to Kuala Lumpur, to Jakarta and then to San Francisco.

Our love (and life) here is exciting for the most part. It is also mundane in some ways. Gone are the days when I would stay up till 4 in the morning, excitedly watching soccer or drinking tea or poisoning my body and my brain in some other way. Instead, I run, skip, walk for miles in the beautiful city with my dog, and sleep ten hours a day. It helps.

It also helps, I think, that I finally have a job where my interests (doing good things that help people) with my skills (product management and mucking around with software generally) intersect. It truly makes a difference.

Even if I could not have foreseen that we would live in this country at its most vulnerable, in that it has a narcissistic Anti-Christ-like grifter at its helm, our life in its most expensive coastal city is generally... nice.

I stay up some nights trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Maybe it's nice to note that at 35, the things that will confuse me are external, instead of inside my head. Anything can happen in the next couple of days, weeks, months. There are some challenges relating to being a queer transnational couple and work visas and pets and things like that, but I'm still glad we have what we have.

Being able to live for the last two years, as we have, as a queer family with legal recognition (and insurance!), has been more than I imagined. At eighteen, or at any other time. The world goes on. I am a year older.

But this year, I am way better off than any version of 35 I imagined for myself.

Today's headlines:

• Orange is the new bleak
• Surreal orange skies as wildfire smoke blocks sun in Bay Area
• Orange Oakland
• Why does the West Coast's Sky Look Like Literal Hell Right Now?

Today's soundtrack:

• channel ORANGE

I don't have any commentary other than 'oh shit'. So I grabbed my camera and walked around a bit. Everything is weird and I am going to drink tea and stay calm.

I think I'll truly freak out when work stops along Van Ness. Until then, as long as Van Ness goes on, so will I.

Every overseas Singaporean has the same fear: that when we return, we will not know our way home.

Our city builds and tears down much quicker than most other places. Nothing is safe. The price of progress: everyone's memories. No time for nostalgia, or poetry, when we can have... growth.

When I move between worlds, my words and ideas shift.

Apartments. Flats.

Elevators. Lifts.

Use public transit. Take bus and MRT lor.

Nothing ever stays the same.

Jalan Besar, Singapore. 2019. Public housing and transit.

When we return, there are more towers of glass and steel. Like our displaced accents when abroad, moving between Singlish and that of wherever-the-hell-we-live, our country's buildings now look like they want to be a little bit of everything.

I hate those buildings. I hate that waterfall in the airport, I hate the infinity pool on the top of the world, I hate the overwrought fake plastic trees and every single thing in a tourism board glamor shot. Glamour shot.

Instead, I take long walks along the old civic district. There, old buildings, colonial and brutalist, form my happy path. In a way, I love this part of town because it changes, but it stays the same. Hours of riding on the top level of the meandering bus to the ends of the island and back, sometimes ending in a boat ride to an island or more frequently, noodles.

3 A.M. staggers between hostel and Mustafa, my tummy filled with warm naan, kadai chicken and Punjabi uncles giving me lesbian dating advice (Their advice was usually some variation of "always pick the Indian girl").

Wandering every story (floor) of Sim Lim Tower, looking at batteries, wires, cables. My grandfather worked at a dry goods market that is now a nearby field, probably slated for a new apartment (condo) or hotel.

Memories are a leaky, unprofitable thing.

Jalan Besar, Singapore. 2019. Wholesale electronics and late night food.

But I live here now. Somewhere with giant babies holding weapons.

How did I go from a small city to an even smaller one? I'm living car-less in a pandemic (I don't drive, because, I've always had transit), in a seven by seven mile city. So many things are happening in the world, but this country feels... like a lot.

It is a lot. It's a whole lot.

For now, we're strapped in and waiting with bated breath to see what's in store for the next couple of months. As I write this, there's a man furiously banging on cars and cars driving badly and there's another man yelling stupid bitch at the top of his voice at an imaginary person, but they don't scare me as much as the politicians.

We take long walks in every direction.

To to west, we walk by recently gentrified Hayes Valley, with murals and giant babies.

To the east, we sometimes stock up on Asian snacks and all the Indomie we need from Pang Kee in Chinatown. To the north, a range of outdoorsy options. Chrissy Fields, where you'll eventually see the Golden Gate Bridge; the municipal pier, where I've been known to sprint up and down when I feel like I need to run very fast for no reason at all.

Hayes Valley, San Francisco. 2020. Giant baby mural.

Hayes Valley, San Francisco. 2020. Dog and wife waiting for me to be done taking photos with a manual camera.

Unlike where I'm from, this home of mine barely changes. We recently watched footage of Charles Manson's San Francisco days and... so much of the city is the same. The gurus have left Golden Gate Park, and they've moved online to become productivity deities who preach the gospel of four hour work weeks and cryptocurrency.

It's going to be okay.

Hayes Valley, San Francisco. 2020. Wife in yellow dress waiting for me to be done tweaking my camera settings.

May the next roll of the film not leak light. And this country not go completely to the dogs.