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March 19, 2024
From a late night Mastodon thread about homesickness.
Two years before I moved to the United States, I wrote something called ‘things I will miss when I have to leave Southeast Asia (because I am queer)’. I predicted that I would be deeply homesick, not for Singapore specifically, but for the entire region.
Even though I was born in Singapore, I lived many years in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
What I could not predict: that even watching videos of people in YouTube documentaries about Southeast Asia, the birdsong is enough to make me bawl.
I have such a deep affection for and attachment to that part of the world. The weather makes sense to me. The languages make sense to me. And oh my god I miss the food.
I’ve been lucky to have such a deep familiarity with so much of it. I went to a hippie run shop in SF the other day and they played ‘mor lam’ on their record player.
It instantly brought me back to long overnight bus rides through Thailand with my mother.
In San Francisco, there’s a neighborhood called the Tenderloin. Looking it up on the Internet will tell you it’s the worst place in the world; apparently a literal war zone.
I live there. There are Thai people, Lao people, Vietnamese people. I walk my dog in my batik pajamas and sandals, just like I would back home. There’s fresh galangal in the grocery store. Sometimes a Vietnamese uncle goes fishing and I’m invited to pick some fish, with other Vietnamese aunties.
Sometimes people ask me why I don’t live in a nicer neighborhood. But I struggle to think of how any neighborhood where I can’t buy fresh galangal, speak my languages, get free soy milk, buy the only tofu I find acceptably good, is possibly nicer in any conceivable way
But mostly I am afraid that if I move, my yearning for home will give way to a bigger hole in my soul. Leaving Southeast Asia is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
My neighbors go to the food pantry every day. They don’t have money. They came here on a scary boat ride, all those decades ago. The trauma of war and that journey still haunts them in many visible ways. They also insist on giving me vegetables that they get from the food pantry. I tell them I am not poor and I feel bad about taking free food. They laugh and say, they just want to give me something. I am the only young person who still speaks to them in their language. They like that about me.
With the benefits of community also comes the downsides. My neighbors nag at me as though they are my relatives. Don’t order food. It’s expensive. Get a house in Hayward. It’s cheaper. I help them set alarms on their phones so they can wake up to get into a shuttle to go to a temple in San Jose for Tết. They are surprised that I don’t know many traditions, like being vegetarian on the 1st day of lunar new year.
I don’t know how to say, ‘my evangelical Christian upbringing robbed me of my cultural traditions’, in either Vietnamese or Teochew or Cantonese.
Every Vietnamese American old person who speaks to me asks me, ‘why did you come here? Isn’t your country better? Cleaner?’
I also don’t know how to say ‘my country doesn’t accept me because of who I love, so I am here’. In any of the languages that I know. Which is, quite a few.
September 6, 2023
An updated, updated guide to the H1-B1 visa process for Singaporeans.
Singaporean citizens (and Chileans) are eligible for the H1-B1, a unique work visa of the US that was negotiated as part of a free trade agreement in 2004. There are 5400 visas set aside for Singaporeans, and 1400 for Chile. From what I know about the program, the 5400 number has never been fully utilized.
Singaporeans who are interested in coming to work in the US should consider a H1-B1. The other main work visa program, H-1B, requires a lottery program and it is getting harder to find sponsorship for companies that want to sponsor foreigners. Many companies simply don't want to spend the money on the H-1B program when they don't know if you'll get it, or when you can start
In this regard, Singaporeans have a bit of a leg up: only other countries like Canada and Australia have similar programs open to them, that are different / more straightforward from the standard H-1B.
The H1-B1 program is so simplified and it is much, much cheaper than the H-1B program. I've been able to get a job, set up an appointment (at the US embassy in Singapore), get my visa within a couple of days, and go back to the US to start or resume a job.
What are the positive aspects of the H1-B1 visa?
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Not many employers know about this possibility, so very often when you hear about 'no visa sponsorship' they usually mean 'no H-1B sponsorship'. Very often, if you reach out to them (especially through a personal connection) to say that you have access to a different type of visa that is much cheaper, more straightforward, easier and faster to get, and that you know how to get it, that can open some doors. In my experience, companies are still willing to interview or hear you out if you mention that; versus automatic rejections at times if you state that you need a new H-1B visa sponsorship.
It's also very fast, cheap and easy to get. I have not heard of Singaporeans getting rejected for it (though I have heard of cases of some foreign-born Singaporeans getting additional scrutiny). It also appears to be easy to renew multiple times, as long as you have not filed for any green card or other paperwork that might make you ineligible for the H1-B1. For example, if you went to the US, found someone to marry, and then filed for a spousal visa, you probably don't qualify for the H1-B1 anymore.
The speed, cheapness and ease of getting this visa is why it is my recommendation for any Singaporean who is coming to the US to work. Especially if you don't know if you actually want to make the move, simplifying the visa situation will make it easier.
- Exceptions apply. If you work for a company that also has a US presence, consider getting the L-1 visa instead. This is especially true if you have a spouse. It is, at this point, not easy / possible for a spouse of a H1-B1 visa holder to work in the US (not without having filed for a green card and getting approval, which is a whole other thing). Whereas spouses of L-1 visa holders can apply for work authorization.
What are the downsides of the H1-B1?
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For one, it is a non-immigrant visa, unlike a H-1B. If you have plans to apply for a green card, definitely try for a H-1B. However, many Singaporeans I know have also come first on the H1-B1, then tried for the H-1B lottery, then switched to it; if not, they can always get another H1-B1 visa.
Secondly, it is valid for a shorter period of time. It is for 18 months. On arriving in the US, you get stamped in for just 12 months; you have to leave and return to the US to get the remainder of the 18 months.
This was not a problem for me as I anticipated that I would want to go home to see my family, and country where I have deep and strong ties, every 12 months anyway.
The short visa validity can cause some logistical issues. For example, I still don't have my drivers' license, partly out of my Singaporean apathy to car driving, partly because every time I get around to the DMV my visa is about to expire. It made no sense to get a driver's license that would expire in a few months (or weeks, last time I tried to get a driver's license), so I've just sort of kicked that can down the road. It doesn't really matter to me whether I can drive or not. It may, if you live elsewhere in the US with less public transit.
Also, if you have a spouse who would like to work, it is not possible for them to work if you have a H1-B1. Consider a L-1 instead, or other visa type if this is important.
How do I get a H1-B1 visa and work in the US?
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- Make sure you are a Singaporean (or Chilean) citizen
- Apply for a job, get the job
- Get your immigration attorneys to file for a LCA with the Department of Labor. You must have this document certified by the Department of Labor and sent back to you and you must have this in person with you at the US embassy when you go for your appointment. In my experience this has taken around 7 business days to be certified
- While waiting for the LCA to be certified, start your DS-160 application. Some advice: expect to take a few days to complete the application. Write down the application number, and your security question. Get your passport photo ready as a digital file in a square format and make sure it is resized to under 240kb, and in jpg format (photo requirements here).
- Give yourself plenty of time to fill in the DS-160 form, especially if you are a first-timer. Save it constantly. You have 30 days to complete it. If you think you'll take more than 30 days, return to the application with the application number and security question, and save it or fill in more questions.
- Once you have completed the DS-160 form and submitted it, and have your LCA in hand, go to this page and select non-immigrant visa. If you have an immigrant visa, you probably know what you're doing and you can make your own choices from here. Click login, then new user. Create your account. This UStraveldocs account is what will let you schedule embassy appointments and decide how you get your visa delivered or picked up in the country you're applying in. The DS-160 form was a state department thing. You need to do both, but the USTraveldocs part is almost always the last step. And the first time I did it, I didn't know what to do or where to go after I submitted my DS-160!
- There are some quirks with this USTravelDocs step, so listen closely (and also seek out updated information as this process is likely to change more to meet local conditions, than the DS-160 or LCA process).
- Once you have logged in to US Travel Docs, click New Application / Schedule Appointment. It will prompt you to fill out your passport information. If you have a spouse or children with a H4 visa, you also add them here.
- Go through all the screens and fill in the information that only you know (your passport number, expiry date, visa type).
- This part is the most important. At some point in the application it will ask you for: Petitioner's Name, Receipt Number, Start Date and End Date. This is confusing and your US immigration attorney is likely to also not know what to do with this. From other posts written by others, I learned: these fields are kind of silly and no one knows what the right answers are / it doesn't really matter, but you have to fill in something anyway. Here's what's always worked for me.
- Petitioner's name: I put my employer, which is the City and County of San Francisco
- Start Date: I use the start date on my certified LCA
- End Date: I use the end date on my certified LCA
- Receipt Number: (This is different from receipt number elsewhere in this process. It is a dummy number. The only answer that works is this: ABC1234567890 (thanks to Ashley Lim for figuring this out)
- Finally, it will ask you how you want to collect / pick up / have your visa delivered. I always pick Chinatown, but I've been told by people at the US embassy that the fastest way to get your visa back is to select the Aramex at Changi South location, which is available as a 'paid dropoff/pickup'. This location is very far for me, so I almost never do this unless I have a very tight turnaround on my travel plans. I think it's something like a whole day faster than the Chinatown location. Otherwise, I prefer to do Chinatown as it's easier for me to go there, and also easier for me to get food afterwards. I am Singaporean, after all.
- On the last screen, you will be prompted to make payment. At the time of writing (September 2023) the options are: VFS Cash / Debit, or Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). VFS is a global company that many embassies outsource their visa work to around the world. EFT means 'bank transfer', as many Singaporeans will be aware of. VFS Cash/ Debit means 'go to the VFS office in Anson Road and pay it at the counter', which is far less convenient than 'log in to DBS banking and make payment'. When you click on either option, you will get the amount to pay in SGD, and a receipt number.
- If you select EFT, save the page PDF and copy down the SGD amount AND the receipt number.
- Log in to your Singapore internet banking and set up a new payee. The payee name is VFS Singapore, the beneficiary bank is DBS, and the payee's account number is (and this is very important) YOUR RECEIPT NUMBER. Your receipt number functions as a virtual account number so they can match your payment to your application. If you don't have a Singapore bank account but are applying out of Singapore, you will probably have to go to VFS on Anson Road, or get a Singapore friend to do it for you.
- Once you have completed your payment, wait until 12pm the next business day in Singapore to return to the USTravelDocs page and add in the receipt number from the payment slip you got, to complete the process. If you try to do it any earlier, you won't be able to proceed. It will just say 'transaction not found'.
Special note about H1-B1 visa for Singaporeans and their non-Singaporean or same-sex spouses
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While the H1-B1 visa is only for Singaporeans, your spouse and children don't have to be. This means that if you, like me, are queer and married, your marriage is recognized as long as you have a marriage certificate from a country that performs it.
If you are a same-sex couple that is interested in moving to the US, feel free to email me at adrianna [at] jefritan.com and I can help answer any queer-specific questions you might have.
Should I move to the US? There are guns and stuff!
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That's entirely a question for you to answer. As a queer Singaporean, I needed to go somewhere that would give me and my non-Singaporean wife a place to live. We looked everywhere, and the US (California in particular) was still the place that gave us the things that we needed. It also welcomed us with very open arms. We are thankful. But it's not for everyone, certainly.
Anyway, the advice I always tell young Singaporeans is that you don't have to think about this move as a permanent one. You can always go home. Which is a luxury, I've learned, especially in speaking with immigrants from other countries here. The idea that I can return to a country that's my own, without much change to my physical standard of living, is a luxury. Whether or not I can be fully queer and married in Singapore is a whole other thing. For now, I am living the life, and enjoying every moment of it (even if I cry once a week about how much I miss Singapore).
June 9, 2023
With my wife Sabrena in the Paris metro in 2022
1993: I am 8 years old. I am a scared little autistic girl who felt in my bones that there was something strange about me. Was it my obsessive, hyper-fixation on the things that interested me? My intense feelings? Or that I felt I had to lie every time the other girls shared the lists of 'boys they liked'? I often felt like a child who had so much to say, but no words at all. The words that people used with very young female children did not feel right. 'What boy do you like?' 'What kind of man do you think you'll marry?' 'When you grow up and have a family...'
None of that ever felt right. I didn't have the words. Instead, I said things like 'I will never marry!' Which made people laugh. Of course you will, they said, you will meet a nice boy and you will marry him. 'I don't like boys!' That made people laugh even more. No one believes what children have to say unless they fit a script. I didn't have any of the right scripts.
I did not know any queer people; the only time I ever heard about gay folks or trans folks was on the media, in a derogatory manner. I was about to use the Internet for the first time, and that would change my (whole) life. The first thing I do when I go on the Internet is to look up whether or not women lived together abroad. I find a lot of information about not telling anyone in the military that you are queer. I go on IRC and message a stranger and ask, 'how does it work?'
I don't feel guilty in church the next day. I just feel like I know the biggest secret of the universe, like there's a name for people like me, other than pervert. But I worry about the logistics. How will I find a wife? I imagined I would have to fall off the face of the universe and disappear forever to even do that.
I spend the next six years at school writing stories about stowing away, disappearing off the face of the universe, sneaking off to start a new life as someone else.
2003: I am 18 years old. I have dated both boys and girls. Sometimes, at the same time. I give myself an arbitrary deadline. I want to decide at the end of high school which I prefer. I know that 'bi' exists and that's what I thought I was, but it didn't feel like me. I decide I want to start university with.. certainty. All I know is that boys are straightforward and easy, and girls are not. I know deep down I never choose the easy, because that rarely interests me, and I know I am at the fork in the road where nothing is going to be easy from now on.
2013: I am 28 years old. I have a 4 year old dog, Cookie. We live in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. My first long term girlfriend got her for me, or with me, I'm not sure. 'If we ever break up you're going to have to take her,' she says. I have just been diagnosed with a terrible autoimmune disease, and she has to drive me and Cookie 350 kilometers to take me home. I've had to move home after years of 'gallivanting' all around the world, as my family would say, and I am learning to be at home and be at peace for the first time. I am out. I am going to live in Singapore for the first time as an out queer adult and single person. I am alternately sick and alternately learning how to be single again. I am sicker than I think. I go out with a different woman every week and I feel like I can be more openly queer at home than I ever imagined, but I also feel an impending doom: I was tired.
Tired of running the race with a potato sack tied to my foot). Tired, generally. I do the unthinkable: I move out of my parents' home within months of getting back. You're not supposed to do that until you marry (a man). "You don't want to be here when I am dating all these women, do you?" I imagine myself saying. I think I say something to that effect, but dialed back. I am always dialed back at home. I can be 'a gay', but I should be proper. I can be 'a lesbian', but I should be successful. As long as I am successful, people are fine with me being queer and autistic. But it should always be in that order. I am reckless with the hearts of the women who apparently love me in this time, because I don't feel like I deserve to be loved.
2023: I am 38 years old. I now live in San Francisco with my wife, Sabrena. Our dog Cookie is 14 years old. Mila, the large tortoiseshell cat we adopted when we got here, is 17. I have the queerest, most autistic life I can imagine, here. Three days into Pride month, I've already met and spent time with mostly queer people. They have lives, careers, families. Like me, they also came here from somewhere else to live their queerest, and sometimes most autistic, lives. From Montana. From Sarawak. From Singapore. From Taiwan. From China. For many people like us, California is a refuge. I have been here for five years now. It makes me sad that a country where neither of us have citizenship recognized our marriage, and gave us the ability to exist, survive and thrive, in spite of our sexuality, when our own countries tell us we are broken. And I am proud that our state gives us the opportunity to live our lives, as our most queer, most autistic selves.
But when I brush up against elements of my old life, I am annoyed. I don't believe I should wait for gay men to have their rights first and then advocate for other's. I don't believe trans people should wait their turn in line to stop being discriminated against, especially in this time of trans genocide. I don't find it acceptable to have government officer shout that my marriage is not recognized in Singapore when just last year I helped to review a form for another government that said Person A and Person B instead of "Husband" and "Wife". Friends from home say I am now too loud, too American, too... different. It's probably true. I no longer have it in me to allow another person, institution, organization or government to pretend that I should not exist. I don't have it in me to be okay with not having any rights anymore, either.
We're here and we're queer, we're also very autistic (which is related) and we are very tired. I am very glad, however, that I did not have to disappear off the face of the universe to find a wife. Take that, 1993.
April 25, 2023
Some thoughts on being a gaysian immigrant to California

Two weeks ago, I helped to plan and organize a Lunar New Year dinner for 120 queer and trans Asian people. It's a tradition that has been around for as long as I've been alive: the annual APIQWTC Banquet.
Despite its mouthful of a name (much easier if you read it as API CUTESY Banquet), it was an event that left me feeling extremely raw and emotional at the end of it.
I could not identify why exactly.
Could it be that these events—large format Chinese dinners I've only experienced in the context of societal rejection—were usually events I hated, events that were milestones I can never have because I was gay in a country that had not fully accepted it? I was never going to have the large Chinese wedding dinner. Even if I think those are horrible, it would have been nice to have known that was open to me.
Or they'd be a celebration of some kind of matriarch or patriarch, the sort of thing where your same sex or trans partner was often excluded from, unless things were Very Serious and they had already graduated into the Don't Ask, Don't Tell territory. At some point, people get old and it becomes possible to welcome same sex partners into these events: when you're old enough that you're thoroughly de-sexualized, is my guess.
But there's more, beyond mere social acceptance and the idea that it's possible to have a good time, I keep coming around to the thought: if I had been to such an event, if I had known these people, when I was a teenager struggling with my feelings and my identity, my life would have been different. Visibility in the media is important, and I already didn't really have that back then; but visibility in the form of knowing that it's possible to grow old, screw up, fall in love, get divorced, have children, or not, organize community events and be an advocate, or not, all of that would have been powerful visual indicators to me that it's possible to have any kind of life. That you're going to have a life at all.
Instead, growing up mainly among an older generation that was largely forced into the closet—and I do have strong memories of going to gay bars for the first time as a teenager that had just come of age, and seeing police raids rounding up gay men for 'vice', more than once—where the only people I knew to be gay or queer for sure were the advocates who were willing to put themselves out there to fight for our rights, document our stories, to tell our homophobic society that we exist. Those people served a purpose and they fought bravely. But I did not always want to be an activist. Even though eventually, I guess I sort of did.
By simply refusing to pretend to be straight, at some point I found myself thrust into a position of hypervisiblity in the queer community in Singapore. I did not want to be that person. I simply wanted to write about the heartbreak I had endured as a teenager: I was just the queer equivalent of a teenager anywhere Live-Journaling her heartbreak. But by not changing the pronouns of the person who had apparently broken my heart, I became, I suppose, a queer activist.
I did not know any queer couples or families until I was well into my early 20s. Other than the women I dated, and let's be frank, we were a mess, with no template or model or idea of what any of this was going to become. Information about queer people came into Singapore like a trickle: there were the gender studies books at Borders bookstore, the 'are they or aren't they' gay-guessing games of trying to figure out which celebrities were queer women (hint: it was mostly Angelina Jolie, at that time), I didn't really know what it meant to be queer. And I think I was already an extremely well-connected teenager for my time. (For a time, I ran a queer DVD lending library; I'd distribute movies and documentaries to other queer teens in my high school and elsewhere.)
I did not know what it meant to be a queer adult.
I had no idea what it meant to be in a committed relationship. Or what it meant to not be in one. I didn't know what my life was going to be. It was all a big blank, other than 'I guess I will have to go live overseas some day'. Even though Singapore has, anecdotally, a fairly large queer population, information about queerness is still suppressed by the state. We are still not allowed to see, for example, a reality TV show of a gay couple having their house revamped. It would be against the rules: you simply can't portray queer people in a non-negative manner.
So when I found myself surrounded by a hundred dancing Asian queer aunties, and a few other peers and younger people, I was mad.
I was mad to not have been exposed to the idea that I too, can some day be a dancing Chinese auntie in my 60s, prancing about on stage singing Teresa Teng songs at a karaoke in Oakland. I was mad that I never got to see people like M and her partner, an older interracial East- and South Asian couple, like Sabrena and I: with their children babbling about in several languages, the way it might look for us if we decided to have children some day.
Most of all, I was mad to know that this life wasn't possible for me back home. Not by a long stretch. I hardly knew many queer people in my mid 20s, and I definitely did not know that hundreds of queer people above the age of 60 existed. Nor did I have the chance to meet them in a multi-generational setting, the way I did here.
At the event, I met many people who were also immigrants from Southeast Asia like me. The first decade was hard, they said. They had to figure out how to exist in the US, and it was also at a time when the US didn't even have the laws it now does for same sex marriage. Many of them wouldn't have been able to move here or stay on here even if they had American spouses: not until Edith Windsor did us all a favor and defeated the Defense of Marriage Act, and enabled same sex marriage and other rights at the federal level.
In that regard, I have it a touch easier. I came here for a high paid tech job, I came here when California is already one of the easiest places to live in the world for a queer person, and I was able to bring my spouse with me. But some days are harder than others. Like many of these aunties, I am dealing with my first decade blues: does it ever get better? Why did I give up my life of privileges and comforts in Singapore for.. America? Unlike many other immigrants, I did not come here for economic or material improvements. I came here for far more abstract things, like 'my rights', but also for very concrete things like, 'my wife and I need a third country that recognizes our marriage so that we can actually live together somewhere, anywhere.'

A few months ago, I saw this image again: it was an image of Singaporean and Malaysian queer elders in what is clearly San Francisco, in 1993. I reached out to a few of them in the photo to ask: what was your life like? What did you struggle with? What's your life like now? Many of them said the same thing: the first couple of years are very, very hard. Some days you wonder if you will ever truly feel at home here. But, they said, we now have wives and lives, and that's more than we could have expected of our lives in Singapore and Malaysia.
Wives and lives. I have that too, but I also have had far less time than them in California. I still have one foot in the door; I am still not totally removed from existing in a space where I've had to hide myself, and my life. Even the most hyper-visible ways of being queer back home are just standard, everyday ways here.
One of them said, my wife is organizing this banquet, why don't you get involved? And so I did. I still don't have the answers, but I think I am starting to have the inkling of an idea.
I think it looks like dancing on stage at a Chinese restaurant singing a Teresa Teng song. I think it could be carrying an infant babbling in three languages. I think it might be nice to have the ability to work with younger Asian queer immigrants 25 years from now, who will hopefully have an easier time than all of us did. I think it could be fun. I think I have a life ahead of me of queer joy that I can celebrate.
I can be anyone I want to be. I did not always know that.
(Photo taken on a Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II, shot on Kodak 5222 film, self-developed in Rodinal 1+50 at ISO 800, and scanned on Plustek 8200i. For more film photography shenanigans, check out my film photo blog)
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Almost 50 years ago, a drag queen named Tessie started feeding the homeless in the Tenderloin and so many decades later the tradition continues. I was grateful to be able to volunteer this past Easter at one of the Tenderloin Tessie events.
Every Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas, the organization puts out a massive event feeding hot food to anyone who needs it. Not everyone who came was homeless, all who wanted a hot meal were welcome. Many immigrant families also came and I think, the opportunity to feed your entire family good food and have fun entertainment is always welcome, regardless of your financial situation.
I was very impressed with the values that the organizers imparted to the volunteers. Treat everyone with respect, seat them at the table, provide table service, make sure that people have what they need and that they go home with things that will help.
The line started on the street, on Geary and Franklin.
There were also free haircuts to be had.
There was also free clothing, very neatly organized by gender and size.
The venue was wonderful and light-filled.
We also handed out gift bags with some essential items.
It's a wonderful initiative. I'm going to keep going back to volunteer when I can.
All photos taken on Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II with Fuji Superia 400, self developed with Cinestill C41 kit. Scanned with Plustek 8200i and Negative Lab Pro.
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There's a curious shop on a street I walk past daily, that makes it look like we're in the '60s. It sells vintage magazines and other memorabilia. It also has vintage theatrical programs and erotica.
I thought it would be a nice shot to take photo of a retro magazine store with my retro camera. So here's a shot of The Magazine, taken with my 60 year old camera.
Leica M3, 50mm Summilux, Ektar 100. Processed by the Darkroom in San Clemente, Orange County
December 31, 2022
My friend Javad Tizmaghz, an excellent photographer and even better woodworker, took our photos for our wedding.
It's important to note that queer marriage is not recognized in our home countries.
We took these photos, and then we went to Auckland, New Zealand, for the actual ceremony.
It was only fitting that these photos were taken in the woods near Bukit Timah, where the old railway line connected both of our cities. It was also a place of refuge and safety for me, as I frequently went there as a child to walk and spend time in nature. Even today, when I go home, I still try to go to that area frequently.
Which one looks like film and which one looks digital?
She was telling me a joke.
Walking along the railway tracks that connected our cities.
July 6, 2022
Two days after the Supreme Court of the United States took this country backwards, with one of the more extreme justices stating that he wished to also examine the constitutional right to same-sex marriage and contraception, I found myself having the same conversation over and over.
As a newly arrived foreigner, not yet an immigrant, what are my options?
It is natural to map injustice to your personal situation, to see how exactly something impacts you. If it is no longer a constitutional right to be in a same sex marriage, then I cannot be here. I cannot be here. A same sex marriage between two foreigners would have no immigration or other rights; I literally cannot live in a country like that. We are not there yet, though we may be.
Fight or flight kicks in. You look for the exit. If you have a powerful passport, like I do, you have many exits.
It becomes unbearable to listen to the naysayers. Not the people who are working behind the scenes to wreak havoc on others'—no, we should not be listening to those people anyway—but to the people who witness each injustice, and instead of being alarmed or upset, spend all of their energy being upset at our reaction to injustice instead. It won't be that way. It's not so bad. Things are fine. Calm down.
I am never calming down.
I am not leaving either.
This is not a story about how it's important to stay and make the change. The individualistic concept of making change on your own fails to consider the overall systemic power imbalance at play, the same one that breathed life into injustice and turned them into policy.
For many Americans with the privilege to go elsewhere and start anew, whether it's because of jobs that let them work remotely, or because they have documented ancestry in countries that are now able to provide them with second or third passports, leaving is very much a personal decision. If you can manage it, seeing the world outside the US is always rewarding.
Yet as someone who has left multiple countries and homes in search of the next, I will simply say that being far from the problems of home is not the same as those problems not existing. Removing yourself from the epicenter is essential at times to regroup and reframe. Problems compound. No matter how faraway you are, you know they are there. If you have the privilege of deciding that you will never have problems again, that's good for you, too.
What's more likely is you will go somewhere that's simply five years behind the US on the authoritarian timeline. I have no desire to uproot my life to go live somewhere I never wanted to live in, where I am going to be even further from any ability to resist injustice because of linguistic or cultural distance. This is my home, too.
Many methods of resistance are closed to me as a foreigner in this country. While on a visa, I simply cannot risk street protests or deep organizing, knowing that law enforcement and federal authorities do not look too kindly on foreigners who are involved in these things. Nor do they have to, because I don't have the same rights as an American citizen or long term permanent resident.
Writing about the injustice as it happens is one thing I can do. But it is not enough. Not for me. I want to interrogate why they happen, who was responsible, how we can roll it back or fight back. I am inspired by the writers who have been writing about the worst actors of our generation: fascists, authoritarians, misogynists and terrorists of all stripes and inclinations. From Hindutva to Tigray and the Donbas, our world today would be unrecogizable to the young person who traveled through pre-war Syria, pre-housing crisis United States, in 2008, like I did. There was the world before. The one I was told would go on and on forever: forever growth, and forever peace. Now I'm old enough say: growth and peace for whom exactly?
It is important to grieve the end of that era. The post-Cold War era of growth and development at all costs is on its last legs. Everyday in my neighborhood in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, I see the people who lost. Vestiges of their past lives: their expensive camping gear now houses them permanently on the streets, instead of once or twice a year in California's campgrounds. The backpacks that carry everything they own. Four years in this country, all of it in San Francisco, and I am reminded of how desperately alone one can feel here. One misstep, one mistake, a series of unfortunate events, and you are on your own.
That's why I think it would be radical for an individual to build community where they live, and to help everyone thrive. Especially if they are people who are least like you. Not to think of it as charity, because that would be crass, but as an overwhelming need to be the connective tissue that can help heal the scars of the broken world that we we live in. Maybe I have privilege today, as a tech worker with a powerful passport and a disposable income, today I can help to literally feed the hungry. Even when if I don't have those privileges—because existing in this country is so fraught with anxiety about how one mistake or illness can take everything away from you—it would still be an overwhelming duty as a human being to work to improve conditions for the people around me.
I want to bear witness, by writing about the world, particularly about the injustice that authoritarianism and religious fascism is going to cause in the US, in India and in Singapore. But I also want to reduce suffering and cause no harm. That's what my new commitment to Buddhism is helping me understand: every world at every moment in time is endless suffering. The most radical act you can do is to know that you are empowered. Sometimes that means you can help chip away at removing the causes of suffering; but most times, just knowing that you have the power to name and note an injustice is more power than the abusers want you to have.
Right this moment, by writing this, I am committing myself to the work of leaving a better world than the one I existed in.
Figuring out how exactly I'm going to do that is part of the work.
May 21, 2021
In 2018 I decided to leave my home country of Singapore even though I once thought I would lead my queer adult life here because it was not a bad one. I decided to leave because I had met the woman I would marry, and there was simply no path for us to lead the sort of life we wanted in both of our home countries.
Being queer in Singapore is strange because on some level, it's one of the better places to be queer in Asia. And on many other fronts, while it isn't quite the worst, it's also.. not at all fun.
Some time between 2012 (when I returned to Singapore) and 2018 (when I left again) civil society, and the state of queerness in the country, had a certain amount of momentum that made me feel cautiously optimistic. I am now of the opinion that that moment has passed.
The 'fun' bits about being queer here are:
- If you have a certain amount of money and class privilege, your life will be virtually indistinguishable from any other queer life you might lead in a major Western city
- If you have a partner who is either a professional in the right industries, or also a Singaporean or someone who has the right to reside here regardless of your marital status or sexual orientation, you will have a pretty decent life
- If you are important enough and your partner has the 'right background', there are 'case-by-case' ways to continue to lead a life in Singapore in important jobs and special privileges
- Homophobia exists at all levels of society but is virtually invisible in the upper echelons of English-speaking, cosmopolitan, world-traveling, Bali-on-the-weekends Singaporean and Singapore expat circles
- Dating opportunities, in terms of quantity and quality, is just as good as most major Western cities
- If your partner is also Singaporean, and you're both above 35, you can technically purchase a subsidized public housing flat together under the Singles Scheme
- The lifestyle is nothing to complain about (but only of course if all of the above apply to you)
The not-so-fun bits:
- All of those things have to apply for it to be fun
- You will have zero legal rights forever
- The state of LGBTQ rights has not only stagnated, it is probably going backwards (significantly)
- Every interaction you have with the state as a queer person is an edge case
One in four heterosexual marriages are between a Singaporean and a non-citizen. We are a city-state, an entrepôt city, a trading post, midway between the world and back. It makes sense that would be the case. There aren't any official numbers, since there's no offical recognition of queer relationships, but an anecdotal guess would rate the share of transnational queer relationships in the LGBTQ world to be even higher than the heterosexual one. We're a global-facing city, after all, and upper-middle class queer Singapore's access to a cosmopolitan dating pool would not be surprising.
This is where the problem begins.
Even though the extent of this country's discussion on queer rights at the moment starts with 'should we repeal a Victorian law against sodomy?' and ends with 'what are the gays going to want next? Marriage?', I have been married for 3 years now. I have been leading a regular life in a society where it is so utterly 'normal' that being a cis lesbian is perceived to be regular and boring and not at all revolutionary in any way. I go anywhere, and old Asian ladies talk excitedly about how cute my wife and I are, and express outrage at why we can't lead a regular life in Singapore, where we want to be.
How does one come back to... this?
I miss, so much, the heat, the humidity, the potential Bali weekend trips, the well-paid tech jobs in senior roles with far, far lower taxes, the quality of housing, the presence of a washer in every apartment, the public transit, the.. the everything. Nobody should ever have to leave home just to be able to be who you are. And yet, for queer people, leaving is not only about visas. It's about a place to catch your breath because you're just been sprinting and jumping over hurdles your entire life, only to find out that everyone else got to the finish line without a potato sack tied to their foot.
Being queer in Singapore is about having a potato sack tied to your foot. Some people, people like me, who have the above-mentioned privilege, think for some time that you can get away with whatever life throws at you because you're used to winning the race anyway. But at some point you wonder why you had to win anything at all.
Today, I was reminded of this fact. We were at a government office trying to get something done, something extremely innocuous that is granted to any heterosexual Singaporean married to a foreigner. While I appreciate that we eventually got things done, every moment is one of debilitating terror. Knowing that what's ahead of you is entirely 'case-by-case', that it depends on the beliefs and the feelings of the people you transact with, wondering if.. perhaps I had shown up as the director of a Singapore company (which I am) and not as the spouse of a foreigner (which I also am), I would have gotten this task done much faster without any questions.
On top of questions, there's also the indignity of having your marital status yelled out loud in several languages, as if they'd never heard of such a thing.
I feel like Schrödinger's Lesbian: I am at once a lesbian and not. I am married, there is no question about it, but that marriage does not exist, at the same time. If I were to be hit by a car tomorrow, and die, not only would my wife not be able to come to collect my body, she would also not receive a single cent from me. My sexual orientation matters, because the state does not want me to be visible or loud about it, but it matters as well, because the state also wants you to believe they are the best society in Asia for someone to be queer in, that there is utterly and totally no discrimination at all.
A few years ago I was interviewed by a local newspaper about my 'unconventional marriage'. Not only was the focus of the story that I was so unconventional we had to leave the country, I spent the entire interview talking about insurance. Insurance excited me greatly. Not only because insurance is essential in healthcare-terrible America, but also because the very boring, blasé act of naming a person you're married to as your next-of-kin is so revolutionary where I'm from. Between the quiet moments of our boring life filled with too much fur in our noses, and the indignity of justifying who we are to bureaucrats who think we don't exist because it doesn't say so in the SOP, I'm quite glad to be going back to boring. And fur. Boring fur and furry bores. But there is not a single moment where I wish I did not have to leave my home for it.
October 7, 2020
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.
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I have spent the last six weeks in Reno. There was a point, at some time in my life, when "six weeks in Reno" was something I would eventually do — to atone for some adolescent sins. The sin of believing, as you're in the thick of massive progress for people like you, that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Growing up queer, I was utterly convinced that I would never, ever, be able to find happiness. That everyone else's happiness was not for me.
At age five, I dreamed up insane plans. I would go away, somewhere, and then I would tell my family that I was going to marry a woman. I would have a baby without them knowing about it. In what universe, in my sheltered, evangelical Chinese-Christian-Singaporean triple-barreled identity was the life I thought I would have, possible? It was not.
My home life and my brain, my romantic life and my body, led a separate existence on two completely different planes. I found it easy to date, but not easy to find what was most important to me: the ability to move, generally, towards the arc of the idea that in some universe, somewhere, I can have a family.
In 2013, when DOMA was struck down, Edith Windsor managed to get, for the rest of us, the ability to call the same-sex partners we've had for decades, our wives and / or our husbands. Edith Windsor and Thea Spyer were with each other for 40 years: when Thea died, Edith was hit with a $363 000 estate tax that she would not have been hit with had she been in a heterosexual marriage. Don't fuck with a grieving lesbian, I think, is the first thing to remember when you're trying to oppose LGBTQ+ rights. She won, and it felt like a victory for five year old me, too.
Somewhere between five and 28, I discovered that I could be quite popular with the women — and I discovered my political bent, much earlier than women discovered me. From the 'gender studies' bookshelves of Borders bookstore, Wheelock Place Singapore, I and dozens of other young queer kids camped out, daily, devouring all of the books we could not afford; reading everything about feminism, at first, then what it would take to biologically and legally have a wife and a child.
At that time, the idea of all of that was as alien to me as the content on the scifi shelves: how, in any universe, was this going to be possible? I kept reading, anyway.
So when Edith Windsor won for us the ultimate right, that I did not imagine possible in my lifetime (for, in all of my fantasies and estimates, being able to marry a woman was something I thought I would do in secret, and / or when I was dying, which is kind of the same thing) — I was ecstatic.
That is where my problems begin.
For in 2013, I was a muck. I was, so to speak, in the throes of a great many bad, terrible, awful decisions. My political self was not separate, then, from my personal self — in some ways, it still isn't. But I had never seen shit. I had, up until that point, had the luxury of only knowing unconditional, selfless, incredible love. My family was intact, and they loved me in spite of my awful decisions. My romantic life, was, hitherto, messy, but largely positive. I thought I knew everything.
I thought, also, that marriage was a political decision; that everything else would follow. How could I have known any differently? The only queer people I knew who had gotten married had gotten married in secret, without ever telling their families, in acts of what seemed like bravery (in hindsight, all of them had extremely religious families), in unions that were never acknowledged by the countries they lived in, the country I call home. I didn't know any better.
164 weeks later, on a papan in Bali
What are your traumas?
What makes you anxious?
What can I do, when you are anxious or upset, to make you feel better?
Why did you do the thing that you did?
Who do you think you will become?
What drives you?
What are you looking for?
How will we deal with you being in Reno, at some point in the future, to undo the thing that you did back when you had a different perspective on life and love?
A woman, a near stranger to me, asked, never once inserting herself into my story. For the first time, I had answers. For the first time, she wanted to listen, and to be a part of my story, in spite of the deadweight I had shackled myself to.
I had 164 weeks to take a good, hard look at how to be better. In that time, I learned that one should never marry a person who tells you they will hurt themselves and others if you didn't. I learned that if you were to ever be in a situation where someone pulls out a tool that can kill you and puts it to your throat, you walk the fuck away. I learned that if substances are involved, you run as fast as you can. I learned that even if I care very much about mental illness, it's not my fucking problem anymore if you try to kill me. I learned that people don't care about violence if a woman does it. I learned that the police don't care about violence if your country is so patriarchal they think it's the same as just two housemates having an argument about a salad. That even when a woman dies, the newspapers are going to call it the murder of a best friend. I learned that as I'm having my life flashing before me, for the first time, that I didn't want to be the dead
best friend.
Thousands of dollars of therapy later, I am here in Reno, Nevada. I spend my days cycling, drinking coffee, cooking. I ran the fastest miles I've ever run since I left school today, and in a way it was like running to freedom, like running to a younger, more innocent me. I ran the miles to the courier service at the airport, I ran to pickup the documents I will soon file, I ran away from it feeling freer and light, like I haven't, in 164 weeks.
On Monday, I will have the luxury of leaving this city with a document with the words, "it has been decreed.." on it. It will be the best piece of paper in my life, more than the college degree I paid a lot of money for. It will be the start of the rest of my life. It will be the erasure of a brief moment in my life where 'love' felt like pain, where 'devotion' felt like a menial chore, where 'keeping the person you're with alive' felt like a lonely, one way street.
The homophobic among you probably think, oh, all queer relationships are like that — but that would be akin to asking you to imagine yourself married to the sort of person you hear nightmares about at Chinese New Year, then congratulate yourself for not marrying. It's like that, but worse.
The cynical among you may be tempted to think, oh, that's what marriage is about — disappointment. But that would be akin to asking you to marry anyone at all, even the best for you, and having you find it a disappointing venture. I don't need to change your mind, and neither do you.
6 weeks later. I've had a crazy, fun time. I've met the best people. I've met the best dogs. Everyone, from the diner lady to the beer shop I go to to the DHL person is incredibly invested in my freedom. There's not been a moment in the last 164 weeks where I haven't thought, what is life? Love? Marriage? Family? And I am incredibly lucky that I have the opportunity to do it all over again, this time — when I know how to ride a bicycle, the bicycle isn't falling apart and threatening to throw me into a ravine, the tandem rider I've got travels at the same speed and doesn't even mind my farts. And we've got the absolute best bicycle that's ever been built. And the best of pretty much everything. She's my best friend, too, and there's no need for air quotes.
June 14, 2016
Gay clubs were for flowers.
Update: I wrote this piece before we learned more about what happened. I'm sorry about misgendering or mis-identifying the victims.
I'm 31 in a few months. Not old, but old enough to remember how coming out was not on Tumblr, it was at Taboo.
I would go with my best friends, all of us so drawn to each other (boys and girls) because we saw a spark of — what was it? We thought it was weirdness at the time — in each other. It was a badge nobody gave us, but we saw on ourselves anyway.
If only someone could have told us: this badge, it is a badge of queerness. Use it well, do not sleep with worthless people, and you'll be okay. One day.
Why did the Orlando shootings reverberate across the world as I knew it — on the walls, timelines, of every queer person I know, and their allies?
The idea of safe spaces, and sanctity, kept coming up. Weird, perhaps to consider something like a sweaty, sweltering gay club sacred. But it was. And will always be.
Even if I never felt like I was of the scene (there was literally nothing for me there), being a woman, outnumbered with my persuasions out-persuaded, it was, in so many ways, where I found myself.
I'm a terrible dancer, but some alcohol with the encouragement of men who don't care about sleeping with me, made gay clubs the only place I felt safe. I didn't have to worry about men, even if I went alone. And most times, I did. In Singapore, in Bangkok, in Helsinki, in every place I have called home or visited for longer than a day. A gay club had always found itself on my itinerary. It was my window into the pulse of the rebels, the misfits, the mostly straight but didn't want to be fag hags I could sometimes persuade.
Most of all, the complete sense of belonging and the unadulterated self. There, I could be myself, long before I could be that person at school, at home, in my places of worship.
When Omar Mateen went into a gay club halfway across the world, spraying bullets and quite literally hunting down gay people, my memories merged into one, as it did for many queer people everywhere. He didn't kill 50 gays in one club, he reached into, placed himself in, and ripped up the safe space we have all found.
But how to explain a safe space to people who have never needed one?
18, venturing out timidly with my best friends. Seeing educators; kissing each other (of the opposite gender) to pretend, badly, that we were all straight.
20, between life milestones, trembling and swooning every time an older women picked me (hahaha, I was very young and very hot; they should have been swooning instead).
More recently in life, being protected and cared for by wonderful gay men in cities all over the world. From Istanbul to Helsinki and San Francisco.
It was not just 50 gay men that Omar Mateen killed.
It was all of us on the dance floor. The veteran gays who go to see friends and dance with them. The young man peeking out from his closet, having to hide his queer clothes in his bag. His career as a hot young stud, vanished. The fag hags who love the gay men they cannot have. The old couples who go because they want to believe they still got it. The amazing dancers. The not so good ones. The long lines for the men's toilets; the lack of one, of the lack of a toilet, for women. The bad vodka. The cheap rum. The smell of leather and sweat. The promise of darkness and kink — but is it really that dark or kinky if you were the one getting it? The camaraderie. The cliquey lesbians who think anyone talking to their girlfriends is infidelity, even when gay men do it. The stolen kisses once outside. The sobering effect of a greasy meal early in the morning when you didn't meet someone interesting or you made the right choices in life. Kebabs and Chinese food. Drunk friends you send home vowing to never let them drink again. The sullen faces that sometimes harbour disgust the moment you walk out of the door knowing you will not be accepted outside.
That's where Omar Mateen took us all. He sprayed his evil bullets into our sanctuary, hiding his last minutes in the toilet of a gay club. Let that sink in for a minute. Possibly the worst homophobe the world has seen since the Holocaust. And he hides out in a gay club toilet before he dies?
All across the world violent acts are performed on minorities every day. Queer people are persecuted. Women are beaten. Trans people are murdered. Immigrants are hunted. Other ethnic and religious groups including atheists are tortured, hated, cussed at. What you think is casual racism, homophobia, transphobia, funny jokes that won't hurt anyone, magnifies with a weapon in its hands.
So if you've ever stopped to say, why are you people demanding your rights? It's a playbook from Western activists wanting to erode our culture! What next, marriage?
Yes. We are demanding to not be massacred. To not be spat on and beaten in Albania. To be not pistol-whipped and left to die on a fence in Wyoming. To be not raped — correctively and incorrectly — in South Africa. To not be kidnapped by your parents and sent to pray the gay away camps, all over the world where evangelical Christians have found money and warped theology. We are here and we are queer. Do not kill us like deer.
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First, meet a girl for the first time on the lawn in front of her house. Sit very closely by each other. Say hello, I'm a poet. What do you do?
When she replies, I'm an entrepreneur. But I also run a charity. Laugh, and give her whisky, the same one that you've been nursing.
She comes and she gives you a cigarette, and it makes you feel like she's looking out for you. But really, she's just gone into her house to meet your mutual friend to ask in all seriousness, so… does she like women… at all?
That friend laughed a little. And did not have an answer.
She went back out to the lawn to give you another cigarette. And a bourbon. Woodford Reserve. So good, so smooth, all 72% corn, 18% rye and 10% malt. There was 10% of her that paused and said, this is a very good idea. There was 18% of you that stopped for a second and thought, what is going on?
There was all 72% of the man sitting across from you, all love and all happiness and all he wants to marry you, now.
She went away. She came back. She went away again. You told her: you are worried about how much you like her. Because you are going to hurt her. She did not believe you. She said she did not care because this was just going to be fun, that she also wasn't ready for anything more.
You believed her.
You met her at a bar when she got home, right after she got off a plane. She waited two hours for you when you sent him off. She was happy to see you. She held your hand, and you said: hey, you're holding my hand. You brought her to the river and showed her your favourite spot. You tried to be chaste. She tried harder. She went away again.
When you saw each other again, it was the end. It was the start of the end of the beginning. But you already told her that.
As though telling someone that you're going to break their heart, makes it any better when you do. As if telling someone all the ways in which you are broken, cuts any less when you cut them.
And then when you have her completely under your spell. Tell her that you love her. Tell her that you care for her. But you care for him more.
You're sorry, you love her so much. But. You asked her, is there a but? After she said she loved you too? She said-pensively-no. But there really was one.
Come over one day and find her worried and afraid, at home, alone. Tell her that you haven't stopped thinking about her. Tell her that you love her. Tell her that you love her so much that when you sleep with him, you can't stop thinking about her.
Then go back to him and tell her, this isn't a competition, Adrianna.
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Dear (your name here),
Imagine for a second that the year is 2000.
Holding hands with your girlfriend in public is either an act of defiance or shame.
The world is years away from The L Word: nobody knows yet that it sucks, that lesbian life does not have to be "like that". (Bette Porter is bad for you; Jenny is worse.) No one has ever met a married queer couple. The idea did not exist. You're supposed to aspire to cohabitation, no kids, and two sets of power suits. But you don't.
You are never going to meet the woman of your dreams at the smoking section of the weekly queer party. Definitely not on the dance floor. They can't hear a single word you're saying, and they don't care. They don't care that you've found your major and the internship of your dreams. They won't even remember your name after they've fucked you (badly).
But it's not 2000, and no one really cares who you hold hands with anymore. Kinda. Sorta. We've made a ton of progress-there are now women married to each other! And you know them, because they write about it on Facebook! Ha!-yet for all the progress in the world, the music never improves at these parties. One day, maybe in 2040, we will have driverless cars and queer clubs which play jazz. I'm putting all my money on the driverless cars.
I just want to tell you that it's ok if you're badly dressed, somewhat awkward, and a bag of nerves. That your nerdy hair cut is OK, too. The makeup you don't have-you can always YouTube it later. Or not. Someone out there likes badly dressed nerdy girls who don't know how to put on makeup. They'll even listen to you talk about linguistics or Burmese history or app development, too. You'll meet her.
It's ok to screw up. It's ok to be messy. Nobody expects you to "grow up" any faster than you should. Your friends who are so 'sorted out'? They're all pretending.
That older woman you love is going to break your heart.
You're going to let her. Often.
That's okay, too. We learn.
Drink good whisky. Toss the vodka orange shit. If you have to drink rum and coke, make sure it's good rum. One day you'll learn that drinking is fun only when it tastes good, and you might even learn to stop just before you are no longer in control of your body, or your thoughts. Two is a good place to start taking stock. Zero if you are driving.
If the booze makes you want to call or text your ex / the love of your life (who doesn't feel the same way anymore, or ever), give your phone to your friends and tell them to never give it back to you until two hours after a sausage McMuffin.
It's okay to use an alias until you're comfortable that the girl you're talking to isn't an axe murderer. With girls, that can take anything from two minutes to never.
Don't stay over unless you want to see her again. Or unless she lives near a cool breakfast place, and it opens early.
One night stands are boring. But if you have to, and there are seasons for that kind of thing, you need to be ok with learning to ask and to answer uncomfortable but important questions. It's the right thing to do.
Avoid hyphenated relationships you're not really involved in, like the bubonic plague. They're worse than that. For example, avoid dating your ex-girlfriend's ex-girlfriend. Also avoid accidents: do not sleep with your ex-ex girlfriend's on-off girlfriend. Hyphens are trouble. There are hot, single women out there. You just have to look outside your phone book. No hyphens. No exceptions.
Eventually, you'll learn to identify the toxic ones before they even come close to you, and your heart won't be needlessly broken anymore.
Is there a type you're drawn to? Do they break your heart? Maybe it's the hapless artist whose broken spirit you want to save. You need to let her know she's not going to set your life on fire, just for the heck of it, ever again. Perhaps it's the stoic, powerful women in your life who don't appreciate your struggle for parity. It's ok-you're going to be more powerful than them someday. Without stoicism.
They're going to make you think that it's your fault. It's your fault that you're a slut. It's your fault that there's a string of broken hearts. Sometimes, it is your fault. Own up to them when you can. It might take years before you are sorry enough for everybody. But you tried. And no one cares.
Quite often, you will meet women who want you to travel halfway around the world to prove that you are really into them. They don't mean it. Don't go, unless you have other things to do there. Or unless you have a fire for her which isn't just in your loins.
If she wants to marry him, and still see you on the side, leave.
The world tells you it gets better. It does, and then it doesn't.
People-and this can be family, insurance companies, government bodies-are not going to take your love seriously. Especially if you are a woman who loves another woman. If you are feminine enough, nobody will like your 'rejection' of masculinity. If you are not, nobody will like your 'attempt' to threaten theirs, a threat which you've made just by merely existing. If you are a woman who loves a woman who was not born one, it's going to be that much harder for you. You will not be invisible for much longer.
Your family is much more resilient and loving than you imagine.
Love them back.
Be young. Be queer. Be the nerd that you are. When you get older, it's the algorithms that will get you laid.
July 21, 2014
Call it what you will - if there are some among us in Singapore who fashion ourselves the conservative majority, the silent majority, the moral majority - that line, and its consequent political implementation, is bound to fail. It is not enough to view what we are currently witnessing as a 'culture war', as 'us vs them', or even as a fundamentalist Christian vs secularism issue within a solely Singaporean prism. We need to view this as an extension of a larger, global struggle for rights on the one hand, and for bigotry masquerading as 'religious liberty' on the other, then be appropriately alarmed by what the future holds if this so-called faith-based oppression of minorities goes unchecked.
Like its theological counterparts in other parts of the world, namely the United States' very own 'pro-family' Moral Majority lobby, our evangelicals' are on a march to frantically reclaim the "family" from the "majority" and the "morality" from the "society" they claim to represent. Unfortunately, our very own culture warriors have neither the numbers to form the majority, nor the authenticity of 'morality' whichever way they swing it. On top of Christians forming no more than 18% of the population, the number of Christians of the fundamentalist stripe is even smaller, making them the minority within the minority. These numbers would not be a question at all if they didn't also try to style themselves as the so-called majority whose 'norms' must be accepted as gospel.
To their minds, the imagined enemies are the "LGBT activists" who apparently have "militant agendas". There are calls across the land by their activist pastors to alternately wage "spiritual warfare", or to wear shirts of a certain colour on one specific weekend each year. Their defence, they claim, lies in how "if the minority fights them, they have to fight back, to defend God / home / family / their children / the future / the moral fabric of society".
It is not necessary to establish who started it (even though there is plenty of evidence contrary to their claims). It is sufficient to merely look at some of the 'demands' by the so-called moral police. What do they want?
- to protect their children - and everyone else's children - from the corrupting influence of books with themes they are uncomfortable with (today: gay penguins and alternative families, tomorrow… anything they feel opposed to as well?)
- to pushback the perceived invasion of 'community norms' by a perceived minority (today: LGBT issues, tomorrow… what minority rights will they oppose?)
- to establish faith-based alternatives to 'controversial topics', such as sex education, often at the expense of scientific proof - look at our abstinence-only sex education, for one
- to reinforce the superiority of the 'majority' and its 'norms'. To date I have not yet heard a definition of what either term refers to. Is it a racial majority? Religious majority? Some conflation thereof of a minority within the racial majority which has the majority of socio-economic-political privileges? A reinforcement of the importance of 'family', hetero-normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and the necessary rejection of all other narratives which do not fit the One Man One Woman Two and a Half Children and a HDB Flat Grand Singapore Plan?
- above all, they want the State to affirm their special status as heterosexuals whose 'majority' opinion matters; they have always wanted no less than a theocratic state
It is the last demand which is the most worrisome.
Have Dominionists Hijacked the Christian Conversation in Singapore?
Throughout the entire saga the truly terrifying thing has been to hear again and again, the chest-thumping of the so-called majority. I do not know what they stand for, and 'pro-family' is just highly politicised polemics borrowed whole from the American Right, and we all know how well that's gone. They've run the whole gamut from political action (LoveSingapore's 'write to your MP!' circular) to political hijacking (Lawrence Khong's cornering of former Prime Minister, Goh Chok Tong); to the steeplejacking of secular organisations, to religious outfits masquerading as secular organisations providing scientifically dangerous sex education (Liberty League), the concerted effort to remove books from the National Library -as the hypothetical ground is ceded and Singaporeans, they sense, are becoming more secular and liberal, the louder the chest-thumping gets.
Some well-informed and extremely educated detractors of the LGBT movement (including the downright homophobic and bigoted), justify their oppression and discrimination by saying the more rights the LGBT community receives, the fewer rights the people of faith are going to have. Just as the 'pro-family' lobby here imitates their American counterparts as if by mimicry (no surprise, their theology and world view is exactly the same, and imported whole), what we are witnessing here in Singapore is the leap from outright anti-gay lobbying to the sort of political action which tries to define their bigotry as "religious liberty" (just as it happened here). As the cogs of progress turn, there is bound to be widespread panic among the fundamentalists - Jonathan Rauch describes this group in the United States to be gradually turning towards some form of Social Secession, and I think we see some form of this behaviour here in Singapore as well. This frantic pushback arrives in the form of political action to 'take back' these lost rights of theirs, ostensibly by denying others access to any of their own; as well as in the start of an ideological pontification on what it truly means to be religious and to live in the developed world. We can't take lightly the threat that these fundamentalists pose to our secular society: from withdrawing their children from the school system in order to shield them from the evils of the world, now apparently popular among certain types of evangelicals in Singapore, to actual political action in the form of what we have seen Lawrence Khong try to do - the main struggle Singapore faces today, is who gets to decide, especially in a multi-cultural, multi-religious society such as ours?
The difference between privilege and rights is sometimes a tough one to navigate. When those with a lack of rights, such as the LGBT community (or any other less privileged community in the world), asks for more of what they did not have before, it is said that we are infringing upon the rights of the Majority, the Faithful, or some conflation of the two. The erosion of privilege is not the same as the gaining of rights. The latter arrives at some indeterminate point in each developed society's lifespan, eventually, and this is going to be an interesting 'battle' to watch. Some people like to call it the culture wars. That would indicate there are clearly demarcated camps, but there aren't. There are issues we fight over: abortion, sex education, homosexuality, 'alternative parenting'. But who forms either side of the camps?
It is interesting to note that here in Singapore just as it is in the United States, the clear flag-bearers of the culture wars who take it upon themselves to 'sound the trumpet for spiritual warfare' come from very similar religious backgrounds: they are a minority even within their faith. By and large they come from a group of Dominionists who have around the world emerged among mainline Protestantism as a force to be reckoned with - and one with actionable political aspirations. To summarise present day American-influenced evangelical Protestantism, these Dominionists represented by the likes of Lawrence Khong, Derek Hong and every pastor who has ever 'sounded the trumpet', are Biblical literalists with the sort of theological training which might make raise the eyebrows of some classical theologists and Bible scholars and clergymen. There are also those who belong to the "C3" school of thought, yet those groups seem less interested in the struggles of ideology and more keen to see to the financial development of their congregation (and their own coffers). Lawrence Khong's entire crusade - no, his entire ministry - appears to be based on C Peter Wagner's apostolic movement which has severe theocratic overtones. Like his mentor, he believes the faithful are called to 'retake' seven domains, or the Seven Cultural Mountains, with frightening prospects: Arts/Entertainment, Business, Education, Family, Government, Media, Religion. His wife also seems to believe that God sends HIV as punishment because, gays (screenshot here), though Nina Khong has since deleted her post).
What drives the Dominionists to wage crusades in Singapore, of all places, against perceived slights in a supposed Culture War? The Seven Cultural Mountains are supposed to be moved by Dominionist Christians, everywhere they go. Before the arrival of the end times, they are supposed to exert the Church's influence in all of the above-mentioned fields. A cursory glance at some of the key members of the anti-gay Facebook pages suggests affiliations to churches and groups which preach this line of thought. This is important because whenever their assumptions are challenged, they are quick to claim their opponents are anti-God and anti-Christian and otherwise unfaithful heathens, yet nothing can be further from the truth. There is a difference between opposing an entire faith and theology - and opposing a specific cult-like subset of that faith with demonstrably questionable ethics in political arenas. Today their battle is about homosexuality and 'alternative sexuality'. What will it be tomorrow?
It is important for all other types of Christians to be bold in criticising the political overtures of these cultists with political aspirations. Holding your tongue from politeness, reserving your judgement until it affects you - all of those approaches only serve to distrust your religious moderation, and play into the camps of those who would claim your faith. Even if it does not affect you on a personal level - think about what this means for your faith. Even if you are unsure of where you stand theologically on homosexuality, think about what you feel about using the name of your God to justify the propagation of hatred. You can call that out, at the least.
The Myth of the Rich Gay
Underneath all of this, I suspect there is a strain of homophobia and ignorance entwined with class envy.
A quick scan of the 'debates' people are currently having on the actively anti-gay Facebook pages and groups set up to fight against Pink Dot / propagate the wearing of the shirts of the colour white / establish solidarity against penguin- themed library books, shows a train of thought arise time and again: gays have it good. Gays are rich. Gays go to the gym. Gays are promiscuous. Gays drink. Gays don't have the responsibility of a wife and two kids and family to look after. Gays can do anything they want (because they have money, education and are affluent).
Not only is that line of thinking untrue, it's also dangerous (and somewhat patriarchal). I've also heard some politicians remark, privately, that they don't have to do anything to 'fix housing for gay people because they are rich enough to buy condominiums so they're OK'. Caricatures cannot and should not affect policy-making,
No doubt these people have barely met any real LGBT people, and have believed that the only group that is visible to them - caricatures of limp-wristed and/or well-toned gym-going gay men - are the only ones they are waving their flags against. Not the overweight butch with an over-sized shirt who was beaten up by a group of men for just walking down a street and offending their masculinity by holding her girlfriend's hand. Not the trans-man who lives in fear of being 'found out' when he uses the men's toilet, no matter how long it's been since surgery. Not the straight-acting gay man who hides a part of his identity from a large number of his social contacts and family, because they will never understand and coming out takes just too much courage, something he doesn't have at the moment but may have in the near future. Not the twenty-something year old young man who secretly wants to become a woman, but doesn't fit the bill of someone you would think wants to become a woman (he loves playing football, barbecues and makeup - at the same time). Not the majority of everyone on the LGBTQ spectrum - lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, and un-categorizable - who are really just regular people living in Singapore who have to fight to get ahead at work and in life, find someone incredible to spend their lives with, make decisions on whether they should live 'at home' or 'move out' and struggle to make rent if it's the latter. Sometimes, they even go to the church (or the mosque). And they love your God every bit as much as you do.
Discrimination vs 'Religious Liberty'
I keep coming back to this.
Whenever I read a stupid internet comment saying, 'but gay people are not discriminated against', what am I supposed to feel?
Am I supposed to feel like we've taken one step forward and two steps back, that when companies like Goldman Sachs and Barclays have openly affirmative policies, bigots perceive it to be discrimination against… them?
Am I supposed to feel that as a tax-paying citizen of this country, my value is not worth quite as much as a heterosexual version of myself?
Am I supposed to feel sorry that when I have children in the near future, I don't know what kinds of books people want to keep my own children from - and I don't know what these people would do to them? (Will my children be bullied by intolerant classmates bred by intolerant parents, the kind that tell their kids it is okay to laugh at their classmates who have no fathers?)
There is an underlying rhetoric among the anti-gay lobby: do not rub your sexuality in our faces, and we will not hate you.
On paper, that sounds like a reasonable request. In practice, not only is it not practical, it is also unfair. It is this line of thinking which leads to uproar over openly gay football players kissing their boyfriends (like in the case of NFL player, Michael Sam). Apparently, kissing our partners in a public manner is just too much 'rubbing in your faces', even if heterosexual sporting stars do that all the time. We're also supposed to not host picnics like Pink Dot, because when 26 000 people of varying sexual orientations show up, it means we are being disrespectful to society's norms. As a woman, all of these requests for 'civility' and 'respect' make me nauseous - it is these same requests which dictate that women should never be heard unless she is being respectful, womanly and 'nice enough'. Nobody would ever make that request of someone in a position of any privilege.
Every single day I read the newspapers, the Internet comments, the commentary on all of these topics, and I sigh a little.
The Media Development Authority of Singapore would rather reject a comic book because its eponymous character has a gay best friend who had a gay wedding; ignoring completely that said character had performed a valiant act also to save his best friend from assassination.
The National Library Board, in its flip-flop over gay penguins, sends the message that stories about love take the backseat to the sexualities and identities of who exactly is doing the loving - be it adopted families or gay families.
You can defend your homophobia as much as you like, even pulling the "but I have a gay friend / sibling / relative" card, but at the end of the day know this: your gay friend / sibling / relative has to withhold an important part of who he or she is from you, and you will never truly know him or her - not until you demonstrate a willingness to accept their whole identities (which isn't necessarily the same thing as accepting their sexual expression, though that ought to be a natural progression in any form of acceptance).
According to Singapore mainstream media, we're never just gay, we are "The Gays" and "A Gay". We lead a "gay lifestyle". Today, my gay lifestyle involved waking up too early, kissing my gay girlfriend (thankfully she's gay) goodbye, and boarding my gay plane to go do my gay work to eke out a gay living just like everyone else, gay or not.
I was brought up within a Dominionist church environment, which is why I think I speak out so harshly against it. I refuse to let both my faith and my person be usurped; and most of all I refuse to stand idly by while my secular country is being assaulted by people who claim to speak for the majority.
Sometimes, I ask myself why I live here. I think of all the times I have met gay and lesbian Singaporean couples who have said their farewells to Singapore, not because they wanted to leave, but because they are never going to be able to lead a life they want for themselves. In a way, the bigots are right - we can lead a mostly unrestricted life, which can be comfortable, even meaningful. Yet think about this for a second: what kind of life is it if all you can aspire towards is some form of co-habitation, and a life full of legal grey areas in everything from property to taxes to children? Whenever I speak to these gay Singaporeans abroad, who had tried so hard to make a life for themselves in New York or Stockholm or anywhere the liberal winds blow, there is always a tinge of sadness. If only.
As I get closer to the age where the thoughts of joint ownership of pets and property invade your mind, I too am worried. My gay lifestyle surely does not fit in here; it goes contrary to the 'community norms'. I am worried that we will never take a strong stand against those who wish to impose their values on the rest of us. I am worried that my children will never get to read a book about themselves in their national library. I am worried that the trumpets sounded by those who are quick to claim 'religious liberty' and trample upon the downtrodden, without ever once ceding any of their privileges, will sound louder than the trumpets that sound for justice and equality, as our pledge says.
That as we reinvent ourselves a nation at 50, we will all have planks in our eyes while decrying the splinters in others' shortcomings - yet what room is there for debate when one camp sees itself as the divinely appointed?
As the country turns 50 next year, I turn 30 - significant milestones for country and individual. Everyday I try to do my part in the struggle for justice, in the way I know how - through technology and social activism. Everyday I ask myself why I live here.
I have to remind myself that I am here because this is home, and that if we don't stand up to the theocrats, they will be pose a greater threat than any threats of the militant variety. In the struggle for Singapore's next fifty years, it is time to draw a line in the sand and to stand up for secularism, now more than ever. As the global debate on social issues shifts and fundamentalists, of any religion, attempt to shape their concerns as issues of 'religious liberty', it is important to note this: when minorities, whether sexual, racial, ethnic or otherwise, receive more rights, it does not in any way take away from the rights of the so-called 'majority' - those are privileges. If spirited arguments are going to be had on these topics, at least have the gumption to call it what it is: a privilege you are trying to defend, by the majority, for the majority. Then substitute "LGBT" for anything else - women, Muslims, migrant workers - and see how much water that holds.
It's often said that Singapore's next fifty years is going to be an interesting battle, and I agree. Bring out the knuckle-dusters, as the old man would say.
June 27, 2014
Ten years ago the Internet was a different place. Singapore was a different place. While it wasn't exactly the sort of pitchfork-wielding, gay-vilifying environment you would imagine, you certainly did not feel like people understood. You felt, at that time, at odds with large swathes of society, as though it would never accept you. Worst of all, you felt doomed to forever be avoiding the marriage question at Chinese New Year. It did not seem like your Asian relations would ever stop asking you intrusive questions about your personal life, when there was none to share because your chosen pronoun would cause you to be thrown out of the house, ostracised, prayed for, or otherwise politely ignored.
This year, the climate cannot be more different. The hate groups have openly stepped forward to identify themselves. They even have their own colours. Like in the US, and anywhere else this theatre of cultural war is being waged, they've chosen to usurp the word, family, for themselves. No matter.
Each year the dot gets bigger and bigger. Each year the LGBTQ community gains strength in multitudes; and its allies, even more. Each year I see more and more families; each familiar face is not the girl I last slept with in a club, unlike what they think, it is a friend, ally, collaborator, or all around interesting person.
Challenges abound. Hatred reeks. Certain religionists (that's really what they are, and I won't even sully the term religious by associating that with them) desperately hope to roll back the tide. In 20 years I will be happy to never have to hear a squeak from them ever again, for their present struggles against demographic and cultural sea change will seem as bizarre, absurd and archaic as opponents of interracial, inter-religious love a couple of decades ago.
Here are a couple of things I've written in the past decade. My sexuality has been a big and defining part of life; but love itself comes through, above all. Hope to see you at Pink Dot, and say hi if you see me.
P.S. Also, a friend and I are hosting Rabbithole, a brand new party for queer women who like good drinks and older company. 🙂 Come by at Life Is Beautiful, 99 Duxton Road, from 10.30PM on 28 June 2014.
Eight Ages of a Woman
Release
Excavation
Why I Am Still A Feminist
Love, Singapore
The One About Having It All
May 6, 2014
I turn 29 in a couple of months. T-W-E-N-T-Y-N-I-NE. This is doubly a shock because in my head I feel forever young, partly as a function of always having been the youngest person in every single circle I have run in, from friends to career to everything else really. I started blogging when I was 15 — nearly 15 years ago! — at a time when Tripod.com was a hosting provider, content management systems transmitted your passwords in plain text, and leaving a message on a ShoutBox was a valid way of engaging on the Internet.
That young life and everything that encompassed feels as faraway as the era in which I packed 30 Compact Discs to school in a metallic CD holder, and my music skipped — as I skipped — on the way to school through the deserted carpark of my housing estate at six in the morning, every morning. My peers are entrepreneurs and CEOs (being a high-flying lot), my friends are married and/or engaged, my contemporaries have published books, plural, and I show up in magazines occasionally as the Older Role Model For Younger Women. Wow, that's old.
All of that just means it's great fun. It's more fun when you're of age. At least that's how it's been for me. When it seemed dire — sometime around the final year of university, panicking, wondering: what do I do with my life? — when it seemed as though all that life had in store was some dead end office job and an indeterminate life (growing up gay in 1990s Singapore: hard), it's been hard to really envision the sort of life I wanted to carve out for myself. For the most part it was even difficult to articulate what that life would be. At almost-29, having seen a bit of the world, having that much more clarity, I have to say Fuck Yeah, It's Great. Anything is better than the black holes and the black spots that so terrify you when the alternatives aren't immediately obvious.
A hundred and seven weeks ago I left this city (KL) in a mad haste. I didn't know how to ship a puppy three hundred and seventy kilometres back to the city I was born and bred in. I didn't know how to step away from that comfortable but middling life I had built for myself over a couple of years. I didn't know how it was going to be. I'd set up a company at the tender age of twenty three, in an industry I knew nothing about. I learned more in those years than in all my years of education put together; I grew to love the hustle. That hustle was addictive, but I didn't know measure, and I didn't know the upper limits of my ambition and my ability. I got very, very ill. In a way, I had to lose it all in order to be a better person along the way.
I've now carved out a life for myself in the city I grew up in. The city I rebelled against and hated with every inch of my being (it was a much different place, then). It has been surprisingly good for me. Chalk it down to the stability of home and a rock-solid support network I'm lucky to have back here; to the incredible opportunities I get from being here; there's hardly a week which passes without the ability to reinvent myself in any of three or more amazing ways.
A decade ago I was a wimpy teenager with nothing but a half-baked sense of the general direction I wanted to move towards. The hardest part, it felt at the time, was to learn how to leapfrog the various handicaps I felt I had then: the curse of being female, gay, and opinionated. These days all of those things feel like strengths.
In the decade since, I've relentlessly pursued every single one of my goals in life and in love. It hasn't been an easy journey, but at least I can say this: I failed, I stumbled, I felt I could not recover from some of those setbacks; I bounced back, even if it took a very long time in some of them. I've managed to create a life for myself across continents which appears charmed and easy and privileged and opportunistic to some, but which I've worked really hard for.
A few months ago while having a bit of an existential crisis, I'd written in my (paper) journal: I'm ambitious and a perfectionist in my career, so why not in happiness? That's what drives me at the end of it all: the seemingly elusive happiness, defined by you and you alone. It was clear I could never be happy pushing paper behind a desk, so I ran from it. It was evident I could pretend to be happy in the sort of middling arrangement in which I had all of the trappings of comfort but none of the excitement of an inspirational love, so I had to learn to be happy on my own before I could hazard such risks again. I've spent the past hundred and seven weeks figuring stuff out, which is perhaps as self-indulgent as it comes, but I learned I just wasn't ready. You grow up a ton when you have bills and thousands of dollars in taxes to pay for your youthful mistakes.
This is what I do differently now:
- Write clear, concise emails. I wish I knew it earlier, but learning to ask for things clearly and briefly is a life skill.
- Talk about money without feeling weird. I don't know about you, but I used to find it difficult to talk about money. Expected compensation, ballpark estimates, money you will render for a good or a service — maybe girls aren't really brought up to be OK asking for what you think you're worth? I don't know. But ever since learning to do this, things get done faster, and more importantly expectations are met — or not — in a more efficient manner.
- Say no. I believe it's a trait of many a person's younger life that saying no is just the most difficult thing you can do, next to talking about money, often together. A month ago I was at the cusp of a huge career development: I had three major opportunities, each better than the other. At the end of it I realized (a) you already know what the best option is, if you trust your gut (b) but that takes time and experience to learn to trust. I said no to the first two opportunities, and I'm happier for it.
- Having to prove yourself is bullshit. There's a difference between establishing credibility and having to again and again prove your worth — and that's true in business and in love. With age I've also become more comfortable with the big idea of Who I Am and What I Stand for, and it's (related to the previous point) been easier to move towards what you really want as a result. For example, social media contests for popularity in order to Win Something — that's all bullshit. You have better ways to expend your time and energy.
- Pay It Forward. Your mileage may vary, but I truly believe that paying it forward is one of the best things you can do. I run an NGO, organize community events for causes I Give A Shit About, and mentor some younger gay and trans kids because: why wouldn't you? It's so much more fulfilling that way. You get back in spades what you give, and not solely in the monetary sense.
- Give A Shit, Or Don't. This part was hard to figure out. I've had some arguments and lost some friends over this. My version of it: in general, I try to be a nice person, and perhaps succeed at it. But I feel I've come to that point in my life where I'm aware of the limitations — of myself, more than anything else. And when I don't feel like it, or when someone or something has a negative impact on my happiness or that of a loved one's, not giving a shit is the only way I know how to deal with it these days. Anything else — the awkward pretense? the song and dance of adolescent and young adult social niceties? Fuck that. My only rule is if a person or organization or thing has a nett positive effect on the things I care most about — that's great. Life's way too short for people who tire you out and worse still, people who subtract from the world.
- Sleep More. I'm late to the party, but I'm a new convert to the Sleep Is Really Important school of thought. It's related to aging, but damn, it's magic. Not sleeping, however, is toxic. No matter for what ends.
- Do What You Love. I'm not a fan of this pithy statement. It's almost too slick. But there's some truth to it. What I prefer, though, is a combination of that with Change What You Don't. I love a lot of things — aviation, gin, India, travel, and so much more — but I'm not about to run out and eke out a living out of every single one of them. What helps me keep balance (and sanity) is the other part. What bothers me so much that I cannot sit idly by? For now, it's girls' education in India. Xenophobia in Singapore. In a couple of years it might be religious fundamentalism in Singapore. Or something else which will surprise me.
- Learn Something New. It wasn't always so, but of late I've had a strict personal rule. That I should learn something I don't know anything about, whenever it feels like I'm stagnating. Last year, it was diving. And swimming. This month, it's classical guitar and gardening.
- Know Thyself. Then Adjust Accordingly. As I previously mentioned, I set up my own company at age twenty three knowing fuck-all about tech and business. I now know how important it is to have strict accounting and paper-filing standards. When I was ill in KL it felt like the sort of health-related traffic red light which made me stop to take stock of my life, health and my abilities. I have always known I'm not temperamentally suited to conventional employment, yet I did not feel ready enough — financially or mentally, since I was for a long time at that point in my life where I could not even remember passwords or how to populate spreadsheets, so I could not.
Lastly, this: Jump On The Train When It Pulls Into The Station. In my industry there are various ways to convey this. One of it is, when the rocketship arrives, get on and don't ask which seat you're on. The other one is, do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water? In that respect, I've just had my metaphorical train pull up into the station. So I'm going all in.
In a month and a bit, I get to pick up where I left off and call this past 107 weeks officially over. It wasn't possible without a lot of hustling, but here I finally am. I'm starting a new company which combines the two things I Give A Shit most about, tech and female empowerment in Asia. I have a great team, enlightened investors, and nothing to prove this time but to see how far technology can improve lives (tech solutionism? perhaps.) in that part of the world I care the most about. We get started — first in Jakarta, then in Yangon, which also brings me back to how everything comes full circles and all the dots connect if you let it, that I spent the better part of my youth aimlessly wandering around these parts finding things to do. When things happen, you grab them by the bloody balls.
None of this would have been possible if it wasn't for the incredible people in my life, especially my family. They keep me grounded, in all of the best ways. My dad, because he's never once flinched at being the rock of my life; my circle of best friends, because they never let me get too arrogant or too hurt, all at once. Mostly, because I have a home to come back to, in the literal and the figurative sense.
I'm excited to embark on the next phase of my life with the sum of every single goddamn part, and so much more.
February 14, 2014
At 18 I certainly believed I knew everything. I did not know just how much it'd hurt this boy's heart if I told him the inevitable: that I was in love with someone he could never be-a woman. We went to our favourite bar and sat glumly while he tried to drink away his pain and anger.
At that time it felt as though life simply led me into various unforeseen encounters, at turns dramatic and at others explosive, as if I were but a mere spectator. The woman I loved walked into the bar. I stole a glimpse. I could not look away. Even without saying anything at all, he knew it was her.
She met the man she was to marry that evening after I left.
There was a girl I noticed at the campus coffee shop.
I liked her pants. And her hair. It helped that I sat at that coffee shop every day nursing a cigarette because that's what I did when I was young and stupid. She would walk by, and I would try to find out who she was.
Every day we passed each other in that little corridor or at the coffee shop. I don't remember how, but she agreed to come on a date with me.
We went to a place I still go to, then on a 46-day backpacking trip to India. I bravely led the way. By the second week we were at the Taj Mahal. We had waited to see the sunset because I thought it might be good to attempt romantic gestures sometimes. As the sun set over Agra I reached for her hand. She pushed it away.
We broke up at the Taj Mahal, which was fitting because we had also fallen in love at the Angkor Wat. From one wonder to another, she still could not erase the shame she felt from being with a woman. Even in a country where no one knew her name.
The next 30 days were epic and vengeful, full of sadness and train schedules.
The woman I loved four years ago did not marry the man she met at the bar. I may or may not have had anything to do with it.
The truth was that the more I sunk into the sadness, the more I elevated our mythology. It was not the great love which never was. We were not star-crossed lovers. Not only had I not grown from that point, I had even regressed. Waking up with her every morning made me feel I would lose her any time now. I was a little bit older now but really I was still the awestruck girl in my school uniform and my tie, wanting to know how I could punch above my weight because I can, and God she's hot.
We were the cartographers of silence which began with a lie, later snowballing into a mountain of mythology and characters with their own CliffsNotes and paths strewn with sad poetry and despair and sadness.
When you throw yourself at a wall repeatedly, it's okay not to know when to stop, especially if you enjoy feeling sorry for yourself.
But I had adventures to go on and mythology was too heavy to come along for that ride. I threw it away.
I don't dream very much, but that year I had a vivid dream: I dreamed of a tall, slender woman with a soft voice who captivated me completely in that dream. I felt happy in that dream. I was a new person in that dream. I grew to be a better person with this figment of my dream, in my dream.
When I awoke from that dream I was with such a woman barrelling down the River Skrang in Borneo on a hare-brained plan to see tattoos and drink moonshine with the tribal elders of the tattoo artists we knew in the big city. We hit a rock and the river rushed around us as if it wanted to have us whole.
We went places without names on maps. Places without maps. We were apart a lot, but she drove 300 miles to meet me all the time and we travelled tens of thousands of miles together when we could. I ended up travelling tens of thousands of miles each time I needed to see her, which was all the time. We met in Istanbul. We made video postcards about the places we were in without each other, and we sent them to each other every other week.
Eventually we decided it was time to try to steer our way home.
I don't even remember what home means any more. I had wandered a few hundred thousand kilometres, some of it by foot. Mostly by bus, train or taxi. Even boat.
Home was where she was. Some days it was London. Others, it was Kuala Lumpur.
I found a little house I thought we could be happy in, got a dog, and perhaps for a time we were. It feels as faraway as all of my 18-year-old memories.
I don't remember when I stopped trying. I was back at the Taj Mahal again, and everything about that monument still fills me with despair. I'm never going back there ever again. I looked at her. I felt despair. I didn't know how to fix us. I just stopped trying. Or talking. I held her hand on a cold New Year's Eve in Jodhpur. I felt nothing. I kissed her. She did not want to kiss me back. I fell asleep with my back turned, full of anger and secret tears. It had been that way for a while now.
A few months earlier I asked her to marry me. I was met with nervous laughter and panic. In hindsight, it was a bad idea. Everyone knew she would say no.
Except me. Ever the optimist.
The computer says no.
Everybody knows it. But I didn't get the memo. It was always no.
--
I've been thinking a lot about what it means to be a lesbian in this society, and it all comes down to this: other people. It's that I have to automatically assume that all of the following are bonuses, not expectations: having my love recognized for the purposes of property, tax and inheritance; attending a partner's family functions without unnecessary outcry and suspicion; knowing that if I were to be in a medical emergency, my life partner would be legally allowed to make decisions on my behalf. In other words, to even hope for my future life partner to be perceived as anything other than a complete stranger, is going to have to be taken on other people's good faith.
As outsiders, that's all we have to go on: the goodwill of other people. The readiness of other people to stop thinking of us as criminals, sexual deviants and perverts. If I hold hands with a woman I love, I am rubbing it in a conservative society's face and being too declarative about my sexual orientation; if I walk side by side with one, the man who catcalls and makes lewd comments at us bordering on sexual harassment, is just, after all, being a man and is entitled to his opinions about my body and hers.
As for someone who generally feels like there is nothing in the world I cannot do, all I can do is to keep on doing what I do best-live my life as best as I know how, be kind to old people and animals, donate to charity sometimes, avoid premature death-and dream about the day I hope to see in my lifetime: when our lovers will be our equals, and our love as deserving.
January 14, 2014
2009.
"If you are really a lesbian, proveeeeittt! Kiss me NOW!"
A giggly girl shrieked, rather loudly, flapping her long, luscious hair about as well. She also had the Arabic equivalent of a Valley Girl accent.
In most situations, this might have been a proposition to consider.
Except we were in Syria. And I don't like giggly girls who shriek, anywhere in the world.
I fumbled uncomfortably, and looked at the television with all the men, pretending to have taken a sudden interest in Syrian football.
I really do have the strangest experiences on my travels.
"Wanna see something cool?"
Before I could reply or enquire further, S stepped on the accelerator and brought his little Fiat car across five lanes on the road at a deathly angle, chuckling the way only a Russian-Arab person can in the face of extremities. "Damascus," he proclaimed, "is kind of like a real life Grand Theft Auto." I agreed, once I collected my breath.
Everything he took me to confounded me.
"I have a drive-thru liquor store!" - okay.
We stocked up.
"Let's go drinking and dancing! On the mountain!" - okay.
We went.
We go-karted - drunk. I may have crashed.
His friends pulled out an old Nokia phone packed with classic Syrian tunes. All of them were Russian-Arab, the offspring of the Syrian men and the Russian women they married when they studied in the former Soviet Union. For that moment we all linked arms and fell about our sides laughing as we attempted our best impersonations of Arab Village Dancing.
The next spring some of them would be dead.
Stranger experiences followed me everywhere I went in that country.
I found myself in a farmhouse in the outskirts of Damascus, sitting by a large wooden oven in a garden. It had been purpose-built to cater to the roasting (or proasting) tendencies of the proprietor and his Russian-Arab friends.
My mother made this vodka, someone started, from the potatoes in her backyard. It was delicious.
I cured all of this Baltic herring and other fish myself, another Russian in Damascus announced. It was delicious.
Somewhere between eating cured herring and drinking homemade vodka I found myself in the middle of a large field. When I awoke a middle-aged Russian lady of the cougar variety was hovering over me, massaging my back.
But damn if I knew what she was saying for I had herring on my mind.
January 6, 2014
(63 Random Things in 2012)
1. Causeway
I still remember the day you drove me across the Causeway with our dog and all of my life's belongings in your little car. We made that journey many times, usually in the other direction. Singapore to Kuala Lumpur. Happiness, not desperate anger. We were even talking back then.
I held Cookie's paw in my hand while you silently, angrily, stepped on the accelerator and brought me home - to my other life, the one I hadn't known for five years - in record time. Bangsar to Johor in an hour and a half. I used to wait up as you drove your little car to see me, at the start.
In the end, Cookie slept. My laundry basket swayed. Your little car rattled. I wrapped her in our blanket and told her it would be okay. Some day.
2. Brooklyn
If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere; everyone should live in New York at least once in their lives. This city is a city of clichés, but it deserves every single one of them. I rented a crazy/beautiful place where nothing was as it seemed. I was in San Francisco just before, where everyone said I would find the life I wanted, the work I loved, the woman I would fall in love with. But I felt nothing for San Francisco and it felt nothing for me. The moment I walked out of the bus into Manhattan, I knew I had fallen hard: there was poetry in its streets, birdsong in its buildings. Possibilities. New York was a dream, and not a permanent one, not even a very long one I could savour. And yet but she taught me everything I needed to know about being fearless.
3. Cherrapunjee
From the world's wettest place I called you, wanting a glimpse into your life from over there. Over there and up there in the mountains, everywhere but here. You could not let me in but you could not tell me why.
In my younger days I did not know how to straddle my worlds. By day and for most of the year we were just college girls, in love with each other. We went to class. Wrote essays. Went home to our suburban apartments with our families and worried about our GPA. Then I stumbled into a world of an accidental nomadism that pulled me away completely.
In the years to come I would get better at leading multiple existences across different cities around the world. I would have a different life in Dubai, Delhi, Singapore and Bangkok. My life in Bangalore would not be discernible to someone who claimed to love me in Singapore, and eventually I would learn to be okay with that. What I would also get better at: discerning the silent pauses on the phone and the "I'm seeing someone else" crack in your voices, miles away from home. I would get better at not having a home.
But not before I learned the sound of a heart breaking in a monsoon in the world's wettest place could be soothed by the warmth of a real fireplace roasting my fish from the marketplace.
4. Dubai
A fortune teller told me I would meet you, and that you would love me, and that you would - and could - but can't - be one of the great loves of my life. Maybe this person is married. Maybe he's a man?
When I tried to call this desert my home, briefly, you drove me down Sheikh Zayed Road into the old city and it seemed we both knew we had known each other for a long time, even if we had only just met. You and your bald head and your Russian grin and your checkered shirt and the life we would never have. You were my phenomenon of unknown quantities, and I will never know you. Nor you me.
5. Shanghai
I came in the cold to a country I do not like, to see you in a city I do not love, because you had become important to me - unexpectedly. You wanted to know when we first met if I wanted a relationship with you at all, if I wanted to explore alternative arrangements, but if I wasn't ready that was okay too. That's why it worked when it did - even if just for a blip of time on the rest of our lives, we shared moments of brutal honesty and open love. You were, and we were, what we both needed at the time, and yet I could not scale the wall of hurt which had existed before us, one I had no stomach or place to attempt to cross. But for that moment in the French Quarter, when we were eating dumplings, when I was shivering in the cold, none of that mattered except that I was right there with you.
6. Haji Lane
When I was 20, I was a different kid then. I was the sort of kid who wrote things like: "When people kiss in dark alleyways they are usually making promises. When we do, we break a thousand of them, including the ones we have been hanging on to for any semblance of survival." (from "Art & Lies, And")
In hindsight they were not broken promises, they weren't promises at all, and we weren't dying. But at that moment, and for many years before and after, you were all I ever wanted. My kryptonite. We wrote - and we wrote. We rewrote our story repeatedly until it became a myth, but we never found a happy ending, nor in fact any kind of an ending at all. Years later I would sit at that exact spot as an outsider to someone I tried to love with her kryptonite beside her, just marvelling at how life and love comes full circle and the best I can do is walk away from anyone who doesn't want this right now or ever. Or can't.
7. Elsternwick
A week ago you said, "I want to build a nest with you." A week later you wanted to flee it. A lot happened in Melbourne, it's true, but I wanted you to be my greatest adventure and you just did not believe me.
You fell in love with the woman who brought you flowers, who made you the centre of my universe. I brought you flowers until the end. At some point you stopped noticing. Love on its own was never going to be enough, but I didn't believe it was all we had to keep going.
You and me will probably move on quickly enough to never get a chance to think about what really happened there, but as for me I will let my last memory of you be the moment you stepped off the plane, when for a minute you let yourself be there. That was the last glimpse of you I recognised, and the last time you noticed. I wish I never went to Melbourne. There is nothing I like at all about it except the coffee.
September 18, 2013
-
Once or twice in your life, something, or someone, gets under your skin and stays there. Most of the time it's because you have let them. It does not need to be tragic; it can even be, at times, up-lifting. All of the time it changes your life in some big, unalterable way. Then you learn to deal.
Seventy four weeks ago (I only know this because Instagram tells me so) I made a decision about how I wanted to live the next twenty years of my life, and I'm learning everyday that breaking up costs more, the older you get.
ecause at 22, you don't really know what kind of life you want for yourself. The best you can do is learn from what you run away from.
-
Running away used to be my only currency for dealing. These days I over-compensate. Twelve months ago I was in Helsinki going on San Francisco, running away from life and lost love.
I met a girl at a bar after a BDSM street party, and she robbed me.
Only in San Francisco.
-
I was in court today.
Say what you will about the system and its shortcomings, but nowhere else in the world do you get an efficient, fast-moving court system which settles commercial matters: after office hours. So the GDP won't take a hit, I suppose.
74 weeks ago, in running away I also ran away from the filing of company papers.
So I now owe the Singapore government $$$.
-
Some older, wiser people have this to say:
- fuck it
- date widely
- have as much fun as you can
- fuck everything, really.
I'm coming around to the point of view that they are right.
- Life is funny and always, always takes me on these amazing, unexpected journeys.
September 5, 2013
-
Some days ago, a boy I used to date as a wee teenager (yes, a boy!) reached out to me on Facebook. It's funny where we are now: he's now a hotshot international banker, I'm now an international vagrant (I don't really know how else to describe myself), instead of the awkward, school-uniformed boy and girl we once were. I found this episode especially funny because (1) I used to date boys! Which amuses me (2) exactly 14 years have passed since we used to 'go out'; we were 14 when we started going out. These days I am more acutely aware of how much older I am getting, and the fact that Class 95 now plays the songs I grew up with when they play "the classics" doesn't make it any better. In a couple of days we'll probably meet for steak and wine with some mutual friends. He's found some photos of us, circa 1999, and thinks it will be funny to laugh at our younger, hotter selves.
It will.
-
Everyone's getting married. Well, not everyone, but lots of people are. In a couple of weeks my best friend D will walk down the aisle with a really lovely boy, and I will try not to burst out of the tiny green dress I am supposed to wear. The one I still haven't bought. Everything changes, but nothing does — she's still more mature, more put together, more likely to worry about her friend who has been all over the place since we met as adolescents. I've read a lot about what 'growing up' is supposed to mean — the only consistent point everyone's made is, the older you get the less of a flying fuck you give, and you just have your key group of friends who stick by you no matter what.
At the time of writing, D's just texted to slightly threaten emphasize the urgent need for me to do something about my hair so that it isn't in my face in all of her wedding photos, which I actually think was a scenario we must have discussed ten years ago. "YOUR HAIR AH." My hair.
My hair does get in the way.
-
I just downloaded one of those time machine apps which scour your social media networks to show you what you were up to a year, two years, three years ago. It tells me I was staring at a giant fake swan in Hungary, with these Hungarian and Czech developers. We were building something in a house by a lake. We may have gotten a slight case of cabin fever. We went swimming, paddling, and we found a giant swan which was also a boat. We christened her Gloria.
The exact circumstances which got me to this very moment are meandering, long-winded ones. It began in south India, in an autorickshaw, and then to Kuala Lumpur, Bombay, and then to hospitals in Singapore, then to northern Europe, then to KL, Singapore, and then finally to Zamárdi and to this swan we called Gloria.
They were fun times. They taught me that never again should I allow myself to be photographed in a half-wet t-shirt, anywhere in the world.
-
I am acutely aware of just how much change there's been in my life in the past 70+ weeks. I've switched entire cities and countries. I haven't been able to keep myself grounded, in the physical and mental and personal and professional sense. Beyond the appearances of someone who's 'got it figured out', I'm really grappling with the basic questions I never did have to answer before. Where do I want to live? What do I want to achieve? How should I get there?
For the most part, I am 'home' now. The home that I left was the city I was born and brought up in; the home that I came home to late last year, is the one I prefer. It is also the city I now pay rent in. Last week I went up onstage at FORK4 and gave a little talk about my side projects. I met all these incredible people doing great projects, like Dream Syntax, State of Buildings, Another Beautiful Story, and more. A few days later, I went to Pizza X II, the second instalment of a back alley artisan party, with great food and drinks (Spit roast! Karelian pastries! Artisan rum and new growth wines!) and some of the best people in this island.
Then there's stuff like this, and this. It matters a great deal to me to be amongst a people that want to do things. Make something better. It keeps me going.
At times I wonder if I made a mistake when I made the call to stay, but most of the time I am surer than ever that I made the right decision to come home. Because I just haven't been home for a while and I needed to be.
-
I'm writing. I'm dating. One of those is coming along better than the other. At least writing is free. When it comes to dating, and the occasionally terrible, mostly funny in hindsight moments I've had in that field, I am reminded of how one of the smartest people who ever lived once defined insanity to be doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Without going into too much detail: I am done with that.
I am writing a whole lot more, trying to follow some kind of writerly routine. It is working.
When I opened Reminders.app, an app I never use, I found the one Reminder I had on it: remember to tell doc about my memory loss problem. I never remembered to. Something about it captured how weird and heartbreaking that entire period of my life was. The fear of not knowing what was happening to my body or to my mind. The inability to control anything about where my life was going. The heartbreak of losing everything I had. Everything at once. The seeming insanity of having chosen to lose those things of my own accord, but nothing really was.
Life got better, but it will never be the same again. I don't want it to, but I don't want to lose it all again, again. I don't think I will. That would be insane.
August 21, 2013
Also available on Medium.
If you were to meet me on the streets of Singapore, you probably would not peg me for ‘gay’. Apparently, ‘gay woman’ or ‘lesbian’ has to be one or several of the following: short-haired, oddball, butch-like; a flaming dyke. You would expect me to show up in a flannel shirt and in Birkenstock sandals to business meetings. If I am aggressive in them, that’s because I’m an ‘angry lesbian’ who probably doesn’t get enough, and if I’m not, then it’s just such a terrible ‘waste’.
I am not angry. Not nearly enough. My hair reaches my shoulders, and a little more. I am as much of a dyke as you’ll ever meet, but you wouldn’t be able to tell. I may not be a princess — I don’t even know how to paint my nails — but I ‘pass’ for straight. Not because I try or want to, not because I have anything to hide, but because I don’t know how else to style my hair, and this is the only way I’ve ever known to look.
You see, I am a 27 year old lesbian who has always been amused by how much that means to other people, instead of to myself. Classmates and teachers wanted to know, and said so in hushed whispers: “they must be dating.” (I would never assume two large people were dating just because they were both large and walking next to each other, so I do not understand this popular train of thought.)
Men with inquiring minds want to know, always: have I tried a man? If not, perhaps they could help me make an informed decision? Even the Social Development Unit has stopped sending me letters and brochures urging the benefits of marriage and procreation. I am, as you may say, not in a ‘phase’. (I did have a ‘straight phase’ though, but that fad did not last.) In eight years, I may be able to purchase a HDB flat of my own.
In about ten years of gay-ness, I’ve had a two serious relationships, the last which came as close to ‘settling down’ and ‘divorce’ as I may ever get. I have no trouble finding interesting lesbian and bisexual women to go out with in this city, or anywhere else I may be; in Singapore, I have rarely — perhaps never — experienced forthright discrimination in the physical way. But more on that later.
I am out to everybody, and I’d be surprised if anybody really cared (except for the religious). It has never stood in the way of career, money, social standing, power; it is irrelevant to most other parts of my life, but it informs my decisions. I no longer have any religious or conservative friends, for example; I don’t need them in my life. We would fundamentally disagree on everything anyway, from politics to Palestine to Republicans and Democrats and reproductive rights, and my gayness would have nothing to do with their bigotry. My sexual identity is as irrelevant to me as my race (Chinese) and nationality (Singaporean), or the fact that I have a head of rapidly graying hair (hereditary). All of those things are the parts which make up the sum of who I am, but on their own are insignificant — to me.
But I also know my Singaporean lesbian existence is not representative: I am a 27 year old lesbian with opportunities which have exceeded many of my peers’, straight or gay or otherwise. I have the luxury of travelling most of the time on business and leisure. I have the privilege of living on my own in this city — it’s difficult to lead an active dating life while living at home with your parents, like unmarried Singaporeans like us are supposed to do. I have a great day job, an active social life, no kids, no debt; I don’t even have to answer the regular Chinese New Year questions anymore. I have never worked in a place, or with people who cared about the fact that I am an out gay woman. In short, I can do pretty much whatever the hell I want.
Whether or not I can have it all is quite a different thing.
Some people have the rather odd idea that all gay people — men and women — are promiscuous, that we shag like rabbits, that we want nothing more than to get into each other’s pants, and anyone will do.
The lesbian cliché which comes a lot closer to the truth goes something like this: we meet in bookstores / poetry readings / book clubs. On our second date, we move in; we proceed to have a monogamous relationship for the rest of our lives, sometimes resulting in offspring, all the time resulting in cats (and dogs).
The reason why there isn’t, and will never be a lesbian Grindr is you’d have to change all the fields to ‘Looking for: long walks on the beach, someone to adopt a cat with. Available tonight in Pasir Ris — I have a toothbrush, let’s talk about our feelings.’
Singapore is a great city for young lesbians like me. There is a large dating scene, at least three lesbian parties a week, there is even the space to live a ‘normal’ life together, perhaps for a while; perhaps after a dramatic reduction of expectations. Because this is where it stops. Once you’re done with the partying, where do you go here? The only life that is known to me to be possible is a life of co-habitation with two dogs and a cat and perhaps a non-legally binding commitment ceremony with your best friends. If you’re really lucky, your parents might come too.
For some, that’s more than enough. The journey of finding someone special is difficult enough, not just for gay people, but for everybody with a pulse.
For others — that never will be enough. We have lost so many of our own, among them our brightest and best, to other cities and countries, and we’ll probably never get them back. When the time came for them to settle down, the idea that the place we call home wants us for nothing more than our pink dollars, perhaps even for our contribution to the fertility rate (with limits), but will not recognize our love, is more than they can bear.
So what I can have, and continue to have, is my young professional’s yuppie lifestyle with dates in amazing restaurants and bars; I can go to these parties, sometimes meet interesting women; I can continue to function as an economically active member of this society, pay my taxes on time and give money to my parents; I can go to Chinese New Year dinners without having to answer to anyone about my marriage plans (they don’t want to know).
I can certainly walk from Raffles Place MRT to Tanjong Pagar without anybody stopping to make a value judgment that I must be lesbian, and therefore something else as well.
What I cannot do, is I cannot walk the same distance with a beautiful woman on my arm, without someone else wanting to know about this terrible waste of a woman, for a woman to be with a woman, and I cannot know for certain that if I were to meet with an accident on this same walk, the beautiful woman who may be my life partner will have any more of a say in my medical and legal future, than any stranger who helps me at the scene or at a hospital.
What I can’t have, therefore, is immaterial. It’s not about the HDB flats I can or cannot buy. It’s that as a lesbian woman in this society, I have to automatically assume that all of the following are bonuses, not expectations: having my love recognized for the purposes of property, tax and inheritance; attending a partner’s family functions without unnecessary outcry and suspicion; knowing that if I were to be in a medical emergency, my life partner would be legally allowed to make decisions on my behalf. In other words, to even hope for my future life partner to be perceived as anything other than a complete stranger, is going to have to be taken on other people’s good faith. As outsiders, that’s all we have to go on: the goodwill of other people. The readiness of other people to stop thinking of us as criminals, sexual deviants and perverts. If I hold hands with a woman I love, I am rubbing it in conservative Singapore’s face and being too declarative about my sexual orientation; if I walk side by side with one, the man who catcalls and makes lewd comments at us bordering on sexual harassment, is just, after all, being a man and entitled to his opinions about my body and hers.
For someone who generally feels like there is nothing in the world I cannot do, all I can do is to keep on doing what I do best — live my life as best as I know how, be kind to old people and animals, donate to charity sometimes, avoid premature death — and dream about the day I hope to see in my lifetime: when our lovers will be as our equals, and our love as deserving.
August 21, 2013
I wrote a small piece for Elle Singapore (Sept 2013) about what it's like to be lesbian in Singapore. Available on the newsstands now, page 147.
Mention to someone in passing that you're lesbian and one or all of the following are bound to happen: intrigue ("tell me more"), surprise ("You don't look it!"), curiosity ("how exactly does it work?"); very often too, the burning question — how do I meet women who are, and they always fumble here, "similarly inclined"?
I always want to say — the same way you meet your boy- and girlfriends, husbands and wives. "We" meet in school, at work, at business events, we sometimes also experiment with online dating (like everyone else), or meet through friends and relations. We meet when we play sports. We meet at religious institutions, support groups, at school camps, we meet at dinner parties or we are introduced by well-meaning friends. Other times, coincidence intervenes: you see each other for the first time, somewhere, and you just know.
All of the above answers are true, and this causes great frustration to those who were hoping to hear about lesbian dating rituals from an alternate universe, far removed from their own. They also can't seem to fathom that you can, quite simply, "just know" (or make a very educated guess). The only secret here is there are many of us.
For gay women, the stereotype of promiscuity and endless partying is as far from lesbian dating realities as it gets.
Sure, I go to the lesbian parties once in a while (there are at least two per week), mostly just for a night out without needing to come up against potential male harassment. When I tell people about lesbian parties they also seem to expect hot women having orgies in the door way. Like everyone else's parties, some parties are fun, others are not. Some people are hot, others are not. There are no orgies. There are just people dancing with each other, chatting up each other, people spectacularly failing at all of the above.
Women seeking out the great loves of their lives across the dance-floor. Never quite finding it. Not too different from any party, really.
What really happens is this: lesbians are the first to want to nest, and be with each other forever and ever. That's why you almost never meet eligible lesbians at a lesbian party — before you can even put on your party clothes, they've already found partners and are at home with their girlfriends, throwing dinner parties, decorating their dog's socks, watching Grey's Anatomy together for the third time and still weeping hopelessly.
Being a single twenty-something of any orientation is hard enough —everyone's getting married, the good ones have been taken, what the hell are you going to do?
Being a single lesbian in your mid-20s in Singapore adds another layer of complexity. Do you move out? Tell your family before or after you've "found someone"? Where will you live, if not in Holland Village or Tiong Bahru, now that rent is so crazy? When will I meet someone who loves Battlestar Galactica? Or get to date someone in this country who hasn't already dated someone else I know (proximity, not promiscuity)?
So many questions, too little time. I am a busy world-travelling young professional who spends most of my time up in the air, and finding someone has been quite low on my list of things to do (other things on it: attain world domination or cult leader status. Buy dog food). So you can imagine how well my dating life is going.
Just the other day I met the first woman to pique my interest in a long time, the traditional way — through a friend. It wasn't expected, it just happened, and like every other kind of date that exists in the universe, straight, gay or otherwise — I don't know yet, I don't want to rush it, I have all these burning questions, I don't know if she likes me, I don't know anything at all.
But if I am really a lesbian cliché after all, by the time you read this she would have moved in, adopted my dog, and I would have faded away from public memory, never to be seen again on Thursdays or Saturdays, for something resembling a century and a half.
July 6, 2012
Singapore's Ministry of Education recently revealed its new sexuality education programme, now called SEd. (Read more about it on: Today Online, MOE's press release, MOE's SEd minisite)
The abstinence-first message was not surprising. The continued insistence on couching the abstinence-first message in majority/minority, mainstream/fringe terms was, especially after 15 000 people showed up in Hong Lim Park this past weekend to express support for ‘the freedom to love'. Even after removing Pink Dot from the fray, it's a little hard to continue accepting the Ministry's insistence that the only ‘majority' that counts is the one that they view through their policymakers' prisms, with no consultation, data, any form of scientific inquiry or poll.
Little else seemed new, but for the introduction of ‘new' elements such as the dangers of social networking. The rest of it may be summed up as such: say no to sex until marriage. No surprises there.
Otherwise, the SEd component that raised the most eyebrows was the rather odd new declaration that "only specially selected teachers whose values align with the ministry's values on sexuality education may teach the Growing Years programme" (link). This was quickly interpreted by the hordes of trolling ‘netizens' (and I say troll in the most endearing way possible) to be: only virgins may teach sexuality education, if unmarried. If married, only those who practised abstinence until marriage can be selected to teach the programme.
If this was already true and in practice prior to news of the revision, which I suspect it well may be (given the Ministry's dogged pursuit of ‘mainstream values'), the fact that they saw it necessary to spell this out unequivocally points at a worrying sign: the Ministry is moving to align itself on what it is not, rather than what it is. In other words: it never, ever wants to find itself in the unenviable position that it was caught in at AWARE-gate in 2009 (chronology, Economist article).
That isn't surprising either.
I'm afraid all this means for our nation is we now have a Ministry of Education that is cowering in fear from (1) unknown, invisible conservative forces who make their demands for mainstream, abstinence-only sexuality education through some unseen magic, but who are definitively in the majority (2) unknown, invisible liberal forces whose demands for comprehensive sexuality education must be quelled, as they are in the minority.
How much longer before the cookie crumbles?
The Ministry has limited options. One, continue to sweep everything under the carpet and stick its metaphorical fingers into its metaphorical ears, and tell itself it'll all be okay. Two, take a side. No matter which side it is, it will be ugly. Three, have the moral gumption to look beyond the limited prism of its Guidance Branch and talk to its own teachers in the field about what's going on out there. Word on the street is the teachers (especially the younger teachers) have their hands tied: every so often, a young gay kid (usually depressed) comes to them seeking help, and there is nothing they can do to help them in a professional capacity because they're not in the right department, qualified to speak on the matter, or allowed to step over the line where they can acknowledge their gayness and tell them it'll be okay. It's not like these teachers don't know how to handle the matter — they have gay friends, or are gay themselves, not that they'd ever say so, because they can't.
Abstinence has not worked anywhere. What makes the Ministry think it can make it work here?
Through this announcement, the Ministry hopes to avoid fire from all sides, but instead barrels itself further into an unenviable position. By hardly making a stand, it will never be conservative enough for our conservatives, and never progressive enough for those of us who would like to see change.
Until the Ministry can elucidate further on the following points, this project is doomed: what is the long list of mainstream values? It keeps referring to mainstream values, but keeps us guessing. It's clear what sort of stand the Ministry of Education wants to take on this matter. Why won't they come out and say so? That their long list of mainstream values revolve around heterosexuality and abstinence? By being vague about the very thing that is meant to be the cornerstone of their programme, they're not doing themselves any favours. What are these mainstream values and by what measure are the specially selected teachers… selected for these values?
I will watch this story unfold with much anxiety, with just five questions:
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What exactly are the mainstream values that the Ministry requires its teachers to have, and on what basis and characteristics are these teachers selected? Who makes the final decision to select them in every school?
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How are the (at least ten) ‘specially-selected and MOE-trained teachers' selected and trained? Parents in particular will appreciate having the contents of the special training curriculum shared with them, such that they may be kept aware of the latest developments in their students' knowledge of sexuality education.
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Who are the 12 external vendors which have been approved for this year, and in what way will they provide supplementary programmes? Parents ought to be kept aware of the types of activities that are available, and be clearly informed if and when these vendors have any direct or indirect religious affiliations.
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How are ‘fringe cases' handled? As with any other form of education, certain students may require special attention and education. Are these specially-trained teachers equipped to provide access to a further set of comprehensive sexuality education information and materials on demand, or provide access to educators who can?
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How will the specially-trained teachers in each school be assessed? Who will they report to, at school and at the Ministry? What are the KPIs?
March 15, 2006
Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This is from 2006. It has also been republished in print in GASPP, A Gay Anthology of Singapore Poetry and Prose.
I am still a feminist because I am no longer ashamed of saying I am one. I have grown tired for apologizing for so many of the things I am: for being liberal, lesbian, anti-Bush and anti-war, a Christian that hates the fundamentalists. Anymore to apologize for, and I may have to apologize for being Chinese.
I was feminist before I was lesbian. I was feminist before I was liberal. I was feminist before I knew feminism had become synonymous with ‘bra burning’ and ‘aggressive’ (I like my bras too much, and I prefer to be passive-aggressive). I was feminist the moment I was acutely aware that being a girl meant there were many things I could not do, and so much more I was expected to.
The first feminist I knew was my father, who taught me I must never bow to the demands of any man, and must never let any man suppress my intellect or free will. He must have known I was a feminist from the time I was 4, when, I did not believe the distribution of potato chips was fair and equal, and demanded he demonstrate by bringing out actual weighing scales, that I had as much as my male brothers and cousins.
In primary school, I was an avid soccer player. About as good as the boys, the boys told me. I played every recess time and after school, every day. I was the midfielder with stamina, who was fast as well and was everywhere and anywhere on the pitch at all times. Good enough, that the boys thought nothing of inserting me into their ambitious tournament plans for the next few years: we were a team. I started the first match in the tournament with the brand new soccer boots I paid for myself. At half time, the referee — his name was Mr Azman — said I couldn’t play, ever again. Even though this was an informal tournament in school, with no rulebook or precedents, he said that’s just the way it is: no girls allowed.
By the time I was 18, I thought I already had a pretty good grip on the “girl” issue. During one class debate, a member of the opposition made a disparaging remark about how sometimes rape victims “were just asking for it”. Livid, I made a comment which led him to say: “Let’s go outside, I’ll show you how good it is to be raped.” This same person is on his way to becoming a lawyer, and I fear.
I’m turning 21 this year and while I don’t play soccer anymore, as a photographer I’m told “they want guys, because they look more like photographers”, as a Mac Evangelist in retail I’m told they “want to consult the guys”, even though I know as much. Guys still hit on my girlfriend in front of me because I evidently don’t count and I’m not the real thing; if I’m opinionated, I’m being either aggressive or emotional, and if I’m stoic, I’m heartless.
As a member of the majority race and male, you may not believe it when I say that sexism is alive and well, because you have never encountered it. You see female managers and female CEOs, females in positions above you, and you fear for your male superiority. What you don’t see is the sacrifice only women are made to make when they choose career, how they could be similarly qualified and similarly excellent or better leaders, yet climb slower and earn less, how if they are assertive they are aggressive female bosses, how if they are not then they are ineffectual leaders and submissive. What you don’t see is how she had to fight hard for most things that come easily to you.
As a member of the majority race and male, you sat next to me in school today at the library cafe, talking about how your girlfriend is not as loud as pornstars when you “fuck her”, wondering if that’s because “she doesn’t know how to express her pleasure”, then your friends all started talking about blowjobs and said in no unclear terms, that the world revolves around “your cocks”.
I will continue to be a feminist until the day my classmates are not seen as objects, whose pleasure is necessarily held up against porn industry ideals, until the day their pleasure is not dictated by the selfish dicks they date.
As a member of the majority race and male, you fathered one of my closest friends. When your daughter complained to you that she used to be touched inappropriately by your friend’s son, when your daughter discussed with you the topic of male infidelity, you laughed and said, “We’re men, we’re like that.”
I will continue to be a feminist until the day every father stands up for their daughter’s rights, the way my father does.
As a member of the majority race and male, everything you might be culpable for is “because she asked for it.” Can’t have children? She must be infertile. Want to use condoms? Only if she pays for it. She doesn’t seem to like sex with you? There must be something wrong with her. Pregnant? She sleeps around. Sex video spreads on the internet? It’s her morals. Lesbian? They haven’t met the right man, and you just might be the one.
I will continue to be a feminist until the day my friends’ fathers stop explaining away their affairs based upon what their wives supposedly lack.
So when you say, those feminists, in the same breath as those nazis, those communists, those crazy bra burning women, you need to know that the object of our hatred is never men — it is what some men do to us.
I will continue to be a feminist until the day my uncle in the flesh and blood stops being an asshole, and his immigrant wife is not afraid to divorce him and press charges.
I will continue to be a feminist until it is realized that while it is best for every child to have his mother and father, if the father is a dangerous man he has to be kept away from her beautiful young children before he does any permanent damage.
I will continue to be a feminist until it is realized the existence of many good men does not mean it is irrelevant to be a feminist. They are our fathers, our boyfriends and husbands, our sons. All it takes is just one man, that isn’t good, to destroy the lives of too many women around the world, and among us now.
This is why I will remain a feminist, I’m not apologetic for it, I won’t burn my bra, I don’t hate you, and no, you can’t watch either.
January 8, 2006
Reposting stuff I like from the archives. This one's from 2006.
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There is this picture of us back when we were even younger; snapshot circa 2004. 3 years after the start of our life together. If pictures could tell a tale this was the tale of us on the page just after ‘happy together’, though there you were, still assuring, still composed, still my best friend. Any casual observer might have waved it off as yet another happy boy and girl in love, as it was for a time, but by this time I had already gone. Walked out of that door to build a new life for myself, and pieces for you to pick upon.
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There is no picture of us, for you made me destroy them long ago. The digital equivalent of the primitive act of shredding, however, cannot possibly shred those which persist with no tangible traces. On that couch which wasn’t ours, in an apartment which wasn’t ours, in a time which never was ours, I had a smile which I don’t think could have ever been mine, and a lover who never was. Everyone’s a thief, so everything we had was stolen, though did you really have to take the heart, too? I watched you walk away, as you always do, with no tears but that scrap of paper in my pocket which read: I have always loved you. But.
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There is a recent picture I have with her. The sort which makes people cringe and squeal and avert their eyes: oh that’s too sweet. I don’t think I’d ever looked so radiant, or been as photogenic — she does bring out the best of me, it’s true. I’m usually smirking in photographs, never very confident about how I look. Yet in a moment without inhibitions, in a country which didn’t inhibit us, I actually beamed. You could even see the little dance in my eyes. I haven’t had the bad luck to have to do any walking, yet, except on and on.
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[..] but most pictures lie. The moment the shutter is released, so are such lies. Little ones and big ones; classmates you can’t stand wipe off the smiles for posterity and continue being pests. Words, however, are even more dangerous. There is no shutter to depress or release, only floodgates. No freeze frame, only continuously; everlasting and persisting long after the fact. Words just meander on and on like that, once released, there’s no undo, no file to destroy or photo paper to fade off. Margaret Atwood says the only truly honest writing is that which will never be read, not even by yourself — to be honest in writing would require the equivalent of writing with one’s left hand, correction fluid blotting out everything which has already been written, as you continue. Words, as we know, are fatal, which in turn rub off on the person who pens them, making her potentially fatal too. Art and Life may coexist, though if they also co-vary, correlate, and co-habitate then my god we are in trouble. Perhaps this is why, afraid of myself, I turn to other forms of art thinking they could perhaps be less dangerous in these hands, so I could feel as if I continue to operate heavy machinery though more forgivingly so. How was I to know that in a parallel life I could have such art director aspirations? I’m starting to believe I’m a movie. Which is potentially fatal.
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So in one movie there’s this scene with the three of you I love at a table, speaking with each other. I’m thinking my god let me out of here I can’t breathe. In another there’s a scene of a writer at her desk scribbling furiously in illegible longhand, haunted by the scrap of paper in her pocket; I have always… but. The camera pans, we’re at this cafe, more or less like one of the many other cafes we’ve had The Talk in. Bittersweet Comedy? you scribble. I want to reply: comedy only when there is an audience; bittersweet is quite enough for me. When people kiss in dark alleyways they are usually making promises. When we do, we break a thousand of them, including the ones we have been hanging on to for any semblance of survival.
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I can understand why writers may be attracted to each other — it must be wonderful to be written about. I have never been written about, though I have always been writing about. Then I think of Hughes and Plath and.. feel a little better about it. Writers are also a dramatic bunch, and I can’t even handle my own.
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As any good student of the social sciences might, I have fallen into the habit of diagramming and chart-drawing. Clearly labelled axes, arrows indicating strength and direction of relationships, establishing causal relations and so on. So in our chart of inclusionary and exclusionary love, i.e. Us and Them, we have 2 separate diagrams, each labelled family/ religion/ friends, other legitimate, Wanted Things like that. In one, the lines extend to touch every base, there exists the outward pull which initiates the relationship with Such Wanted Things; the area within which forming the total area of everything passionate like desire and sex and understanding, etc. In our chart, then, the axes are rarely ever touched; compared to the full circle/oval of the first, we have this malnourished figure which isn’t sure if it was a triangle or a skinny oval. Desire and sex, etc, The Things Wanted. Never once extending beyond its boundaries to touch the periphery of Everything Else and Ever After.
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Everything Else, Those Things Wanted, Tomorrows and our yesterdays. Full Circle.
December 10, 2005
Reposting stuff from the past. This one from 2005.
There she is, your ex-lover, across the bar and incandescent. Gleaming as she always does, though perhaps now from that diamond ring perched so effortlessly off her slender fingers, which grip the cigarette tightly in other places. You steal a glance. You steal two. You kick yourself for it. When the words “ex” and “lover” come together, you think, they form such a funny word. The prefix usually suffices, “ex” has an air of such finality, such legitimacy, all these things we never were. “Lover”, while being the closest word you can dredge up, comes together with the first with layers upon layers of an intensity now forsaken, a sordid mystery to be recounted, a tinge of regret in some places and the embrace of the new in others.
Beer, whisky, Marlboro Lights. The usual. I used to find the way she held her cigarette, the way she flicked it every so often, incredibly alluring. Now that I’m years past legal I find myself unconsciously recreating her style. I stopped requesting for Exit Music, she admits, mostly because I was afraid Shirlyn might realize.. I keep asking for it. I stopped coming here for the same reason. When, to torture myself, I’d ask for it, and revel in how it was rendered so perfectly, so strangled: we hope.. that you choke.. so perfectly mirroring us. It’s so easy to fall into old habits, you say. A temporary wave of nostalgia. Do you remember how we snogged at the ATM in front of your house/ at the playground/ in the lift, what we were thinking then? We weren’t thinking then. It’s so easy to fall into old habits, I know.
Old lovers, I used to say, are like old wine. (In addition to getting better every year,) You store them away, achingly at first, always knowing it’s the best move. Out of sight but not as much out of mind as desired. At some indeterminate point in the future you take them out, admiringly. Whether or not you partake again… would merely be a matter of choice. And circumstance.
Side-stepping, arm to arm, swaying together across that grass patch. Being this drunk would have been a good excuse a few light years ago. You ask: how many girlfriends have you had? I count with my hands and feet.. yet somehow manage to truthfully say, well, two. I’m drunk and of unsound mind but sober up at the words, ring, flat, wedding. Like a hostage who loves her captor I begin to feel, for the first time, pleased you are the friend I’ve never had, the friend you should have always been. Even if ring and flat and man are everything I could never be.
April 11, 2005
Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from April 2005.
Wherever I go, I am not allowed to forget – how perfectly crisp and displaced my unaccented English is. If there is an accent it is not one you can pin down. To my countrymen it betrays my independent school upbringing, a way of life, perhaps even my inclination towards the ways of the “West”. To all others it is a curious melting pot of diverse manners of speaking, testament to the absorption of diffuse cultures, if we are even able to say clearly what “culture” is, if we even had any control over these points of contact.
In a backpacker’s lodge in Australia one year, the football-mad nationalities gathered around the TV to watch the emotional Manchester United-Liverpool showdown, while the Americans sat in a corner unsure of what to watch out for on the telly. I realized, but not without some shock, that in the event I would ever watch my national team play (and so they did – at the Tiger Cup the next year, to surprise victory), the jersey I would be wearing would be the one on-screen. Red, too.
I said to a visitor once: the best thing about living in this place is the First World living at Second World prices. Everything else is a sort of win some, lose much situation. Our methodology in learning and teaching the Chinese language perhaps betrays far more than we are willing to let it – those characters, if we ever learn them at all, have become meaningless, we learn the broad strokes but not the fine print, we repeat to perfection the art of imitating a model essay under duress by our tuition teachers; those words are hieroglyphics at best, and the best that many of us can do is to attempt to create meaning from these hieroglyphs.
I am never allowed to forget my accent. In English, it is an accent which points not to precise geographic locations, but to imprecise states of mind and imagined affiliations. In the mother tongue, it is the lack of a passable accent that is grating to even my ears. Both have to do with displacement and unsettlement, and neither of them are exactly pleasant.
The district does not sleep tonight. Sonagachi is just waking up, but the streets are already lined with last night’s vomit, uncleared, and the air still reeks of the liquor from every night before for the past years, uncleared. Today’s girls have taken the place of yesterday’s, though, who have either moved on to be the mummy (the lucky ones), or given way to one venereal disease and unwanted childbirth too many.
It is easy to rage when reading about it miles away from the scene – the exploitation! The misery! The violence against women and children! The illegality of human trafficking!
Being here changes all that. The rage is still present but tempered with resignation; even understanding. Some of the girls look as young as 12 – mostly, they are; if not, then they are malnourished and hence look many years younger than their actual age. Most of them are not here by choice. The only people who get to choose are those who had “choice” taken from them in the first place: the ones who, now hundreds of miles away from their homes (in Bangladesh, Nepal, rural parts of India whose village names they never knew, cannot remember, or can never return to again from shame) – these people can choose to stay in, or ship out into the big cities of West Bengal and beyond, where they have no one, whose language they do not even natively speak.
Sonagachi is Kolkata’s red light district – it also happens to be Asia’s largest. Conservative estimates put the number of sex workers in this district alone to be at least 40 000. This number means nothing until you take a walk through it: girls as far as your eyes can see. Some of them reek of alcohol and substances; all of them look resigned.
It wasn’t the fist-clenching, heart-pumping moment I had expected.
Instead, I felt the – what shall I call it – sadness – permeate my body and grip my soul, as my eyes fell to meet their vacuous ones, woman to woman.
It was the moment I had been waiting for all my life, to invoke that trite turn of phrase.
I’d felt her inch closer to me, her arms against mine, as we tried to pretend to be interested in watching the movie, my palm against hers. We lasted about eight minutes. By the ninth, we were kissing breathlessly, bodies against each others’. She was my first as I was hers – it felt nothing like kissing the many boys we’d each had. I remember with precision all which I was thinking as I stepped into her darkened flat: how is it possible that I have only known this person’s last name for a week, and yet feel this.. impossibly close? After. I was lying stomach down, fiddling with my mobile to pretend to have something to do other than swoon.
“When you grow up,” she said. “You’re going to be really scary – impossibly brilliant and sexy. And I’m going to have to try so hard not to want you.”
I was grasping at straws vacillating between my rising enchantment and the crushing despair: that in two hours she had accomplished what it took my men months to, if ever at all – wrap me around like that. And she knew it.
I sat at the edge of the bed, as I would continue to for weeks after, watching her as the orange light fell upon her face, as I would for months after. Her hand in mine for never more than an hour each time. I remember thinking, my God, she’s so goddamn beautiful.
It has been a number of years, but I’m not sure I’m done growing up, or if I’ve even begun to.
March 3, 2005
Where I dig into my archives and repost stuff I like. This one's from 2005.
like the foreign worker who, having spent six days of every week, fifty one weeks of every year, building for a country that is not his, listening to languages that are not his, but whose greatest pleasure comes from talking every Sunday in his native tongue for hours to any relative and friend in Dhaka who will listen, to release his repressed Bengali at a dollar a minute, no matter the cost, who,
like the repressed lesbian kissing her first girl after a string of boyfriends, and is perfunctorily surprised to find she likes it much more, because girls don’t merely stick it in and slop around but take their time with her, and she knows now, from a kiss alone, that irrevocably, and uncontrollably, she has to be, the mystery ends here, no matter the cost, who,
like the seven year old in his first week of school, is afraid of teachers, people he calls monsters, as they are very big and scary and always demand to know if his shoes are white, if his nails are clean, if he’s brought his consent form, like it matters at all, and he finally manages the courage to raise his hand, to ask in a meek voice, if he can go to the toilet, there where he swears to never again take Ryan on in the challenge of drinking three cans of Coke at a go, no matter the cost, who,
like the wage slave on her night out after years in the office, is relieved to find the bar to be the same as when she last left it, in 2001, only that the prices of the drinks have risen proportionately to her income, so has the number of suitors (men and women) taken on an inverse relationship to it, and she realizes she is now 28, though last she checked it was 2001, and once in 2003, so after a few rounds of whisky she gets groovy, at the time of the night where whisky is now called ‘happy juice’, determined to have fun for a change, no matter the cost, who,
like me, is relieved to find release, release from the spell of old, from the bright lights and other excesses, from the daisy chain of ex lovers of ex lovers who are now each other’s new lovers, from the endless chain that swears they love you, truly, really, but not really at all, but now finds greatest pleasure in holding the hand of the one I said I loved yesterday, though I already meant it everyday before yesterday, in sitting here writing, as she sits here sketching, admiring her with the silliness of the first flush of love on my face, knowing that I am, in far too many ways, as a woman reborn, in a motion picture where I provide the words and she the pictures, set to the soundtrack that is ours, and ours alone, and I leave this dangling without a full stop because that’s just the way it is, no matter the cost
January 21, 2005
Blast from the past: digging into my archives and republishing the stuff I like. This was originally from 2004, and reposted again in 2005. And again now.
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It is the universal truth — before any woman, man, boy, or girl, is able to walk, first she must spend time crawling. And so it is here, as well as others, that first she learns the root and the nature of her passion and desire, isolates it, tames it well, calls it by its rightful name. But first, an awakening: coldness gripping her palm, fear and joy overcoming her heart, when she, after strings of boys (and strings of boys’ broken hearts), realizes with a rude shock, everything she had dreamt of for years, thought about in secret, put aside from shame, was here and now and right here, in the cubicle in the cinema in the fluorescent light, and there was nothing shameful about it.
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First the prelude before the climax. Six boys and counting, there is no lack of suitors, there never was and still isn’t, but it just wasn’t the same, it wasn’t quite it, there was something missing. To be sure, they were all excellent specimens of their kind, and yet — to hold a man around his waist and wish his well-toned body softer and more tender, to kiss him and to imagine what it’s like to kiss a woman, feeling increasingly like an imposter the more we make out and the further this spirals: this is not the life I could be content with, this is not the life I could pretend to want.
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I’m decidedly not gay, she says, before announcing this is why we cannot see each other anymore. Well — I’m not either! I chime in, badly wanting to keep her. Or am I? I couldn’t possibly, I thought, having had more men in my short years than some women ever will in their lifetimes. I, too, was prey to the misconception that sexual behaviour and orientation were necessarily one and the same, ignorant of the nuances of human interaction. All I knew then was that I wanted this woman more than anything else I had ever known, and that “gay” was the name other people had for us.
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Going from whispered secrets in darkened stairwells to holding hands with women in the light of day, felt like one very long draw of breath, and even further leap of faith. It was to stare the unnamed persecutor in the eye and to say, I am not ashamed, it is to look gleefully at these men who want us both, and to say, you’re not invited, it was to leave a taxi stand in anger and resolve one night when the white men in front of us want to know where we’re headed (her place) and had the gall to ask if they could come along, it was to claim that very simple act people who don’t know take for granted, that is to hold the hands of a woman is not at all an easy task, no matter if she is the one you love, simply because you look like a woman.
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Settling into the motions of the “R” (Relationship), another set of questions and conflicts arises. Please do not squeeze the toothpaste topdown, can you please lift up the toilet seat? Why? Whom among us pees standing up? Birthdays and anniversaries, breakups of friends and weddings of family; what CDs to leave by the hifi, which CDs to leave in the car. I’m not very much wiser off from when I started, but at least I know now to leave the toilet seat up even if nobody pees standing up, or, failing which, to turn over and go to sleep and to make breakfast in the morning.
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And when it ends, girls cannot, unlike boys and girls, simply cease to be, mostly since close friends and lovers so often overlap in our world. Who takes what, which places you can never visit again, which CDs of yours and household appliances to leave behind in her possession, which to demand back. Yet why do they always remain the first people to run to when another affair fails, and why do they still care as much, all without illusion or pretense? If there was a word for “between friend and lover but never again but more than a friend nonetheless”, I would invent it here. I would be much poorer off without knowing this one group of people known as the gay girl ex. They’re the sweetest people in the world, but only when they’re not busy being malicious to each other, or dating each other.
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Many nights I have stood here by this window in my kitchen, phone in hand, sobbing. Gazing into the distance, not quite sure what the person on the other line is saying anymore, but inserting appropriate “ums” and “yes, buts” at the right points. Last week, I found myself at the same spot, doing the same thing. But this time I was pretty sure, unlike other times, I would hate myself for doing what I tried to if you hadn’t stopped me, and this time I don’t know very much about the future, mine or yours, or ours, and don’t pretend to. But I do know I can’t bear the thought of not having you in my life, as difficult as it is, with or without.
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(this is a story i do not have the means to write because i have not lived it yet, have no clue what it will be, don’t even dare to start on it. this is the part where i say it may be a blank canvas, yes, but at least i know from all these vignettes i’ve had the luck to witness and be part of, these snippets i’ve glimpsed into, it isn’t something to fear. drawing all these vignettes together, weaving them whole, not phenomenally different from what everyone else is doing: just putting the pieces of a puzzle together, finding the pieces which fit, except that in my world — it takes much more effort to hold the hands of the one you love, much more masochism to just keep swimmin’, much more courage to even begin to try to love.)
January 26, 2003
This was published in QLRS in Jan 2003.
I had weighed the burden of desire in my hands
but in yours you weighed reality between your fingers,
half serious even as we tried to kid ourselves
(and others) nothing else quite mattered.
I weigh now the desire of burden in my fingers
but in yours you now weigh illusion between your hands,
half kidding even as we deal with truth
ours as much as others’; nothing else but this matters now.