2023 Christmas story: The old city

By the time you check the travel websites in November, the flight ticket prices are too high to justify a trip home. You practise expressing regret at missing the holiday with your family. I thought I’d be able to make it, you say mournfully into the mirror.

The reflection betrays your relief. It’s not that you don’t want to see them, you just don’t see the point in going home when Christmas is so abundant in your new city – mulled wine in night markets, wreaths on every door.

Growing up, adults always couched living abroad as a means of expanding horizons, but you wanted to pursue the solitude of winter, a shrinking and silencing of the life of Technicolor malls and overlapping crowds that otherwise awaited you. 

“You won’t want to come back,” people usually said to those who left Singapore.

In your case, they looked puzzled and slightly concerned when you mentioned the city’s name. Where? Feeling mildly defensive of your choice, you made jokes that highlighted its sordid history and hostile reputation.

Then you were embarrassingly homesick, weeping at the end of phone calls and taking long rides on a rumbly tram to find authentic spices. Once, you saw a bus unloading a group of Asian tourists and you tailed them for a few blocks, listening to the familiar lilts of their dialogue, even though you didn’t know what they were saying. 

Months passed and you began to develop familiarity with this place. There was that first weekend of snowfall that blanketed the cobblestoned footpaths while you sat curled up at your window, church bells ringing in the distance.

You ventured out to the supermarket that evening and exchanged pleasantries with the clerk so swiftly that you wished the moment had been recorded somehow. You left the store with your shoulders squared against the brittle breeze. 

Your confidence spilled into the chat with your family on the WhatsApp group that evening. Singapore was experiencing overcast days. Your sister mentioned that the school holidays had just begun and her children were cooped up all day indoors because of the cold.

The cold? you replied. All of your muscle memory of shivering through tropical rainstorms had disappeared within weeks of winter in your new city. 

It sounded haughty. You should have known. A certain nonchalance towards cold climates indicated an aloof worldliness that you had observed among your friends who did semesters abroad. You just didn’t think you could punch down from this place, with its bald, black trees and anaemic skies. The buildings squat like crows and the sleet showers feel like bullets. 

Why not return home for a few weeks? Swallow the cost of the ticket, see everybody face to face. Fill your stomach with heavy, oily hawker food and run the soles of your flip-flops thin.

Why stay here? There is something you want to prove to yourself, but it is buried so deep that you can’t find the language for it. You would like to stop thinking about home altogether, but of course it occupies more space in your mind than ever. 

On the family WhatsApp group, you stick to safe topics. Comments and replies give way to videos, then photographs as Christmas approaches.

You see your nephews leaping in a bouncy castle while a gigantic inflatable Santa bobs behind them. You play that video repeatedly, wishing you could spirit them here somehow, to this place of your self-imposed exile.

In the background, your mother twitches a cardigan over her shoulder and your father can be heard calling out, Look at that colourful tree!

You can picture exactly what he is pointing to. As a child, you loved sitting on the top deck of a public bus while the silvery lights of Orchard Road flooded the night skies. It made you giddy and slightly ill, all of that electricity and noise thrumming around you. You left because you were averse to spectacles and replicas – you thought this life here was an authentic one.

You might be right, but it doesn’t stop you from checking the ticket prices again that evening, hoping for a reasonable passage this time.