Split
When I was back in Singapore, I went for dinner with an old acquaintance. For many years, he studied abroad, and we’d slowly lost contact. So when he asked me out, I thought it was curious, but didn’t think too much about it.
We were halfway through dinner and quite drunk. We had gone through all the regular conversational topics: the weather, friends from back in the day, bitching about the pandemic. Still, I wondered what the point of our dinner was. Then he asked about my return to Singapore, how I felt about my MFA being so rudely interrupted. It was a question everyone had; I got ready to dispense my prepared spiel. But before I could say anything, he turned to me and continued: Do you feel like you’re split in two? And that no one else knows that they’re only looking at half of a whole?
Immediately I understood the purpose of our meeting. He was desperately lonely. After living abroad and developing a whole different aspect of his personality for years, he had made a choice to come home to take over his family’s business. He had seen the potential of an alternate life open before him and turned away willingly. But he had not expected that a choice you were not coerced into could still leave you reeling with loss.
It’s something a lot of international students experience. I can’t speak for other cultures, of course, so I’ll tell you about Singapore. Singapore is small, to the point of emotional claustrophobia. It’s not just geography. We live in a society where everyone knows everyone’s mother, where behaviour and attitudes are tightly governed by a fog of social pressures. So there is a strong sense of wanting to escape abroad. Wherever “abroad” is. And some people do. They leave for education or work, and the more idealistic ones flee without a concrete plan, cruising simply on unstructured hope.
But for all that talk, they almost always return. Yes, there are visa, job, money complications. But it’s not only circumstance. It’s also duty. People forget that no matter how resentful you are of home, a heart cannot be so cleanly cleaved in two. I know, even as I forge a life in America, that I too will return. Even as I find everything I ever wanted here in terms of writing and fulfilment, love for my family beckons. I don’t want to miss out on my sisters’ milestones, I want to be there for the stupid, spontaneous jokes with my friends. I love my parents deeply, and want to quibble and argue and cry and laugh with them. I am aware that that time is fast and finite, and I know that every moment I choose for myself brings me away from them. When they say, come home soon, I reply yes, and mean it.
And yet there are things I have yet to do here, that can only be done here, that I want to do here. Thus I remain in this state of limbo. Every day, I make a million tiny choices that tug me this way and that. Eventually, I know, I’ll make a definitive choice. But till then, I tread water.
What happens when I do choose? When I settle down in one place and time? Does the other Jemimah, the one with her own set of dreams, disappointments, routines, and relationships, simply evaporate? Which version of myself am I willing to give up? Which version of myself can I kiss and tuck away, putting her on a back shelf, thanking her for the good times, the memories, the person we were and the dreams we shared?
It is not, to be clear, simply geography. Places change, landmarks corrode, businesses bloom and decay. But places have souls, hearts. It’s the precise combination of how the identity of that place coincides with the person you are, at the specific point in your life, that creates a version of you who has a sense of self-regard and potential that is different and unique, if only infinitesimally. Any shift — be it in yourself, your circumstance, your living environment, the status of the place you’re attached to — can change this, can jolt your sense of self, and open up an aching void of loss. An injury to a place you’re in hurts you too. Every choice you make brings you closer to one version of yourself, and abandons another.
And what if the choice wasn’t even yours?
There has been a lot of talk of home in the last few years. Land, who it belongs to, to whom it should be returned. Contracts unfurled, documents pored over, see, this is what the law says, this is our right, yes, perhaps you feel a way about it, but too bad.
For people far removed from these situations, it’s easy to feel detached. Often, I hear them say, well, but that’s the way it is. I get that you have feelings about borders, about national disputes, but what are you going to do. Global politics is bigger than you and me. Better to accept how things are, and make the best of it. No point getting upset.
As if a land’s fracture has no emotional repercussions! As if a word can be swapped for another, sovereignty and nationality altered with a dash of a pen, its impact staying only on the page. Just three hours from Singapore, a country reckons with its sovereignty, has done so for years. How far away does one have to be to claim no culpability? Is it possible to feel detached when one directly benefits from the economic repercussions of another state’s struggle? Where does the line between one’s heart and pragmatism lie? But when I point this out, the same people who bemoan the potential of their own dislocated youths say, yes, sure, in a perfect world nobody’s feelings would get hurt. They track the stock market on their phones and say, without looking up, this is the real world. One must be realistic.
The people who say this to me are smart and educated, wiser than me. In conversation with them I feel naïve. Yes, maybe they’re right. Maybe a deep, personal ache isn’t quantifiable in the face of laws and rights. Maybe I was a fool to compare one loneliness to another; maybe, as my friend suggests, it’s better to stick to what I know. But if a person can leave home and feel heartbroken at the selves that have emerged that they must now choose between, how much more painful it must be, I wonder, to have those selves involuntarily amputated. To be told, it’s too bad, this is how it is.
