Posts tagged "immigration"
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Our visa to green card journey
(A shorter version was originally posted on Mastodon here:) San Francisco as seen from Crissy Field. This is one of my favorite places in the place I now get to call my forever home. In September 2018, my wife and I arrived in the United States to build our new lives. After 7 and a half years of paperwork, visa…
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Interview Waiver Experience for H1-B1 Visa
I've learned a few new things since I last posted about how other Singaporeans can apply for, and receive, the H1-B1 visa. In renewing my visa in Singapore this September, I opted for the new-ish interview waiver process (available since 2021). Although I have never had a rejection, going to the US embassy is always a…
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Merantau Cino
A scan of a film photo of a wooden table in Tretes, Indonesia with light coming in through the window, making it a very atmospheric picture Tretes, Indonesia (link to some photos I took I have been struggling with my feelings on and about immigration. Some time in mid 2023, a woman at a bus stop in San Francisco…
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The Moving Calculus
Some time ago I read a tweet by a queer Singaporean asking why any queer Singaporean would move to San Francisco, citing the following shortcomings (not verbatim): San Francisco used to be a place where queer Singaporeans would move to, for safety reasons, but perhaps those safety reasons aren't that dire anymore San…
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So This Is the New Year
Dream of the Noughties # It feels like we all just woke up from a collective dream. The dream of the '10s, where we gave our content, perhaps even our personalities, away for free to Facebook. No longer. Not only have I cut that toxic company out of my life, I have also started thinking about how web 1.0 got it right:…
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Fresh Off The Boat
When I first moved to America nine months ago, I was perplexed by a never-ending list of things. They were not the 'big' ones, like having to learn a scary new language. We already spoke English. We'd seen enough movies. Our accents, we were told, were non-existent! You sound Californian!!! You have no accent! (Didn't…
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Culture Kitchen 2: Little Myanmar
If you are anything like me, you've walked by Peninsula Plaza all the time and perhaps even entered it when you've needed to buy cameras and stuff. You've probably also wondered about all the wondrous things there. What is the paste they are mixing, what is this delicious-looking food and how can I have some of it, if…
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Why I'm Hosting Culture Kitchen
This is a project which has been on my mind for some time now. We've been planning it for a while. A part of this is a response to a worrying trend of anti-foreigner sentiment (c.f. the responses to a drive to raise funds for victims of last year's Downtown Line accident: here and here). The other part — which I…
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From the Fringe
I've had more thoughts on the anti-white paper protest since the weekend, I'll need to write it down into a slightly longer piece. But here's what I posted on Facebook that got passed around a fair bit. Point is, Singapore is at an interesting stage in our politics and civil society and it's going to take a while to…
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A Public Service
Recently, a friend from Bangalore messaged me on Facebook and asked me for some help. Her family friend, who was not very educated, had paid a lot of money to an agent in Bangalore to get work in Singapore. He had his work permit issued, and was told to leave for Singapore as soon as possible. There was a gap of a…
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#iamsingaporean
Singapore Skyline I am a Singaporean who lives in a series of hash tags. They are: #iamchinese my race, my ethnicity, a language I speak, "mother tongue" classes I struggled with and the colour of my skin #iamasian a vague identity I hold; ‘one of them' in the tribes of Northeast India and I am ‘one of us'…
11 posts tagged "immigration"