July 7, 2023
One of the things I love about film photography is how it gives me a good sense of my exact feelings at precise moments in time. Depending on the film stock and camera I used, looking at old film photos takes me back in ways that I don't experience with other types of photos I have taken in the past.
I know, for example, from the low light and lack of sharpness in these first few photos that I was just beginning to learn about film photography, and that I frequently used film stock that was not 'right' for the light conditions.
I know from the photo of the bus stop that this is in 2004 exactly, because I have been taking a bus from this bus stop my entire life and can tell from the way the shelter and seats and ads are set up, that it was when I was heading to university. I also know that I was probably late (because no one is waiting here and it's way past rush hour, so I've definitely overslept, again.)
I can tell from this photo of a woman sitting outside a mosque in Little India, Singapore, that this was when I was experimenting with plastic, toy cameras. I came to this area very often for food, and often walked past this mosque.
I know from looking at this photo that it was in the early 00s. This wide open space no longer exists in Singapore. Every inch of open space now has several buildings on it. The tallest building in the background anchors me and lets me know exactly where I was when I took this photo: my cousins lived in that building.
This photo was taken with my first 'real' camera, which was a Nikon F-601 SLR. I used it to take photos on my first 'real' trip abroad, where I traveled to Thailand and Cambodia overland (by bus and taxi and train and motorbike). As part of that trip, I saw some atrocities (Cambodia has a horrible recent history, as demonstrated by the window of Tuol Sleng prison here). I also some great beauty.
Like the gorgeous architecture of the temples of Angkor.
Increasingly, I started to have more and more nice cameras and film things. I also got to go on more trips.
Taiwan was a firm favorite. It was so close, and always so fun. I miss it.
I even have a photographic record of my unfortunate couple of years where I dressed only in hippie pants and sandals. Here, a self-portrait in Melaka, Malaysia.
I feel so lucky to have been able to experience that part of the world and to have called it home, and that I always had my camera(s) with me.
March 12, 2021
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..]
January 16, 2006
What I have noticed about being away, and still can’t shake off, is how mornings in each foreign place are so strikingly different from what one is used to; how different they are from each other — how foreign the word foreign sounds after a while. I like to believe it never hits you you are away until you wake up feeling displaced. Or that you haven’t really made a place your home until waking up comes so naturally and matter-of-factly there is nothing to it; until what was not your bed now feels like yours, and is even adorned with your peculiar smell.
It is brighter, earlier, in some places. Your mind races to make all the connections — back home, comparing, you might have been (1) preparing for school (2) relishing a particularly delicious dream (3) kissing your lover at the crack of dawn. And you think of how, back home, it is similarly bright only at seven. Exactly twenty minutes before flagraising.
Instead of being awoken by an alarm, Vanna’s motorcycle pulling into the front porch, does. He brings with him a motorcycle trailer to ferry us and all our bags to the bus terminal. There was no time to lose. We left Phnom Penh on our third morning, scarcely enough to have completed the tourist circuit in and around the capital — much less enough time to have stocked up on the US$9 cartons of Davidoff cigarettes. There was no time for contraband cigarettes for the Angkor Wat beckoned.
The Mekong Express ambled out of the city, and in the vicinity — as far as the eyes could see — mornings here, meant, baguettes; streets full of them. The more cynical among us say baguettes are only the good that French rule had left to Indochina. Well before noon we are midway there, when I notice for the first time on the road in Southeast and South Asia, that I have not given any thought to the condition of the road I am travelling on; either because the roads have improved, or I am used to them by this time. Instead, I happily recline ten degrees, smash into my neighbour’s lunch, and attempt to enjoy the on-board Khmer “comedy”.
My neighbour, a Khmer-Chinese man, laughs so hard at the ongoings onscreen, culminating into an already creaky seat rocking under his weight, when an effeminate man in the program is paired with a masculine woman. Then in a language I seemed to understand, he describes the hilarity of the situation to his wife, who is only marginally interested.
I shut my eyes and found myself at home in Indochina, somewhere between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap (though before Kompong Thom). Where my mother tongue, Teochew, is widely spoken and even overheard in buses, when other mornings in other places see the same middle-aged men finding humour in the same bad jokes.
I recline another ten degrees, this time smashing into my neighbour’s lap. Curling my thigh around hers, I begin to think: I want every morning to be like this.