The Return
When I stopped running away and started finding beauty in the everyday - as told through four stories and a dream
Three months after moving to Porto, while my longer-term residency status in Portugal remained pending, I found myself having to leave and return, for almost a month, to two of my previous home cities.
London — where I had most recently moved from, and Singapore — home to family and childhood friends, where I was born and grew up.
In the days leading up to the planned return, I was a puddle of emotions and tears.
Specifically, those un-nameable emotions associated with making the outer and inner journeys from a very new home to a very old home.
With being unable to say for sure whether my return was a visit or a homecoming. Or neither.
With being unable to say for sure how or why it should matter, either way.
Specifically, those particular types of tears that come with facing a return to the very old homes I had moved myself away from, as a way of escaping what I no longer wished to bear.
Old homes that, at the same time, continued to extend a too-easy familiarity and comfort I had difficulty admitting to myself that I missed, because it squidged up our relationship, from a neat black and white, to a mess of grey.
That grey puddle I stood cold in, facing a return that encompassed all of this.
Cold, because at that moment, I didn’t know where the cold was blowing in from.
Cold, because that was my sensation of the liminal space — of being already uprooted, but not yet able to truly sink roots into new soil — of being already adrift in the crosswinds, but not yet able to witness the full blooming of the dreams that I had flown away in pursuit of.
And yet despite all of that, I was — am — already a different person.
I was a different person, returning to somewhat familiar places with the same names they’d had when I’d left.
I was a different person, unable to return to the person I had been before leaving.
And because of that, could any return that I made to any place ever be a true return?
Dream
(where the ending is a beginning)
One way I become aware of being a different person is through observing my relationship to the dreams that I have.
Once upon a time, my biggest dreams were about leaving.
Leaving to explore the world, in search of a place where I could know I belonged, not only on paper, but more importantly, in spirit.
Also, once upon a time, my biggest dreams were about staying.
Staying on somewhere in the world that spoke to my heart, to make my home in that place where I felt so strongly that I could belong, in spirit. Yet so many of these places, I would find, proved difficult for me to belong to, on paper.
In the space between those once upon a times, I spent most of the time doing what I could, in all the different ways I could, to try and make those dreams come true.
While going after my dreams, I felt I had to avoid being in some places.
These were places where I struggled to comprehend the meaning of who I was, the meaning of life.
These were places where I struggled to find and see beauty around and within me, in the ways that I was looking for it.
These were places where, once upon a time, when I looked around me, I saw and felt nets being put over my dreams.
〰️
One of these places was a place where, on paper, I belonged, by virtue of being born there — the first place I ever had a reason to belong to.
It was also the first place I ever escaped from, in pursuit of a dream to find another place, one where I felt I could belong more, somehow.
As I came to learn, feeling that I did not belong hurt a little bit less when that feeling surfaced in a place where I wasn’t expected to belong in the first place, as based on the way that I look and what my papers said.
In contrast to the different shades of pain that came from feeling unable to belong in a place and among people where I was expected by everyone to belong.
And so that was what I escaped to chase after — that feeling of hurting just a little bit less.
〰️
On my latest return, for the twentieth time in my life, to this first place I ever had reason to belong to, I slowly came to discover that something was different.
The difference didn’t have a name, but it had colours, sounds, scents, textures and tastes.
It came to me as a symphony of little moments of beauty, of shadow dancing with light, each beaming in its own way with the rhyme of wonder and aliveness.
Dim Sum Morning
You would only notice the sign to the tea house if you looked up.
The little bell on the door tinkled as we pushed it open.
Upstairs, there was a beautiful work of art on the wall that brought together Chinese calligraphy, poetry, brush painting, and ceramics.
The calligraphy read, 茶韵 (Cha Yun), the Rhyme of Tea.
The character 韵 (yun, rhyme) is composed of the characters, 音 (yin, sound) and 匀 (yun, to balance, make even).
Rhyme is the balance of sound.
I thought how special it was that this character for rhyme forms part of my Chinese name, 思韵 (Si Yun), which means the Contemplation of Rhyme.
The Chinese name given to a child is one that carries generations of the family’s blessings, hopes and wishes for the child.
I thought about how, when I was born, my parents and grand-uncle had spent the next 40 days (the full duration of time permitted before a newborn baby’s name had to be officially registered and printed in a birth certificate) pouring their hearts into contemplating, deliberating, discussing and deciding what my Chinese name would be.
And how all that their hearts carried poured like clear, spring water into my name.
The poem in the art work caught my eyes —
A cup of tea
holds the flavours of life’s ups and downs, we float and we sink
An ordinary heart
holds the written creation of thousands upon thousands of worlds
For the next four and a half hours, my best friend from childhood and I sat in the tea house, bathed in gentle swirling tea clouds of nostalgia, memories, laughter and also sighs, dreams and hopes for the future.
On the day of my flight leaving Singapore, she sent me a message —
“I was just reflecting the other day how interesting and special it is that we drive each other crazy sometimes, but for some reason, have managed to stick together for like 25 years and counting.
“There’s this episode in Gray’s Anatomy where Meredith and Christina reference this concept of my person. Maybe that’s what we are for each other.”
I thought about the people I could spend four and a half hours with, sitting in a tea house, savouring dim sum and enjoying continuous brews from a shared pot of tea, feeling like time was a river that flowed always, and we are on this river, sat together in a boat that we learn how to love.
The next sip of tea was especially fragrant to me.
When we stepped outside, I looked up at the sky.
It was the same sky as on the day I was born.
Coffee Afternoon
After the doorbell was rung, it took some time for someone to come to the door.
I was told to be prepared that she would probably no longer be able to recognize me.
The door opened, and that turned out to be true.
But she did remember me, factually, as the daughter of my father.
I carefully handed over the brilliantly red Korean strawberries that my dad and I had picked up at the supermarket.
She smiled, at the strawberries, and at us.
An aroma wafted its way over to us from the kitchen.
Her husband was brewing artisanal roasted coffee on a Japanese siphon he had bought after careful research.
He showed the equipment to us with pride.
I admired it all, and found myself holding back my astoundment.
In the years of enforced small talk at social gatherings we had no choice but to be in together, I had automatically placed them, together with the others in those gatherings, under the category of “Nothing in Common, Really”.
And now here we were together in their home, sitting around their dining table, connected in that moment by our common interest in coffee.
My visit had only come about because while out for lunch a couple of hours before, my dad and I had bumped into her husband.
I’d heard she had recently had brain surgery. I said I hoped he was doing ok.
He said it was hard to tell, these days.
They had had to sell their previous home to pay for her treatment.
She’s been on medication after her surgery, he tells me. Each pill is $380. We have a subsidy, so each pill becomes $280. She has to take one pill every day.
The coffee finished brewing.
See how you like it, he said. I haven’t fully figured out the balance of water to coffee yet.
We sat around the table, warm cups in our hands.
I loved the coffee, and said so.
She had a story to tell me about the moment in which she found out about her condition, just before she was slated for a significant promotion at work.
She had the story, but she was missing some of the words. Now and then, she looked to her husband to find the words.
And each time, he would try out different words with her, together searching for and finding the words she wanted for her story.
On each time, with each word, looking at her with sincere interest, with tenderness, with love.
I’m sorry, she’s told you the story five times now, but it’s important to her — she thinks about it a lot, he tells me.
I watched them, the mist in my eyes mingling with the steam from my coffee.
Time seemed to stand still.
I felt an inexplicable, profound sense of peace and calm.
I felt my whole being’s response to witnessing a moment that, I’ve learnt after all this time, is one that I live for.
And, it seemed, it was the same for them.
Salt Breeze Evening
Once we stepped out of the car, we smelt the sea.
That was a surprise to me.
It was not a smell I’m familiar with when I’m in Singapore (our island’s nickname, after all, is the “air-conditioned nation1”).
We were facing the Strait of Johor, one of the straits around Singapore that connects eventually into the South China Sea, together with the Strait of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca.
Malacca, where my maternal grandmother was born, is somewhere I’ve always dreamed of visiting.
My parents and maternal grandparents were all born in different parts of a country that was collectively known as Malaysia, before Singapore’s independence and separation from Malaysia.
I’ve often thought it ironic that I’ve explored almost all the continents of the world, but have spent hardly any time in the country neighbouring the one where I was born — the country which my own country used to be a part of.
But, I figured, there’s a time for everything.
It looked like there was going to be an hour and a half wait (at least) for the rustic waterside café we had arrived at to have dinner.
My mum and I took a walk to the water’s edge.
I’d like to visit Malacca some time, I said to my mum. Let’s go together.
Oh yes, did you know the Portuguese used to be in Malacca? Before the Dutch and the British, my mum was telling me.
I had no idea about this unexpected connection between my newest country of residence and my grandmother’s place of birth, which I wondered why I had never visited.
A few days ago, while admiring the traditional Peranakan tiles decorating the exterior walls of a Peranakan restaurant I was at for lunch, I had been struck again by how much aesthetic and emotional resonance I had found between these traditional Peranakan tiles of Singapore and Malacca2, and the Portuguese azulejos.
Was there an invisible thread somehow that had led me to making my new home in Portugal?
I remembered the Chinese tea ceremony I had been to in London, the day before flying back to Singapore.
On my third bowl of Liu Bao (六堡, Six Fortresses) tea, I connected with a knowing that I was living in Portugal because there were things the land had to teach me.
That was the second tea ceremony I had ever sat in.
During the first tea ceremony, at the same place in London back in the summer of 2023, I had a profound experience of feeling my grandmother, who had never had the chance to travel out of East Asia in her lifetime, being present with me, as a part of the sky, trees, air and earth I could see and feel around me in that moment.
Gone, but perhaps, not lost.
I felt love and a deep sense of peace and interconnectedness with the sky, trees, air and earth around me.
I had always wished Mama could visit me in London. And now she could — she had — after all.
I had this strange sense, which at the same time felt completely natural, that being able to experience this tea ceremony, in this way, at this place, on this day in 2023, was the reason why I had moved to London in 2010 and lived there for 13 and a half years.
At the water’s edge, inhaling the salt breeze, I decided I would be looking more into the history of the Portuguese in Malacca.
And planning that trip to Malacca.
Also, did you know the Portuguese word for Singapore is Singapura, same as the Malay word for Singapore? I told my mum.
I looked up at the sky.
It was still blue, full of strange and beautifully shaped clouds, and the moon had risen.
Look, there’s a plane about to fly through the moon, my mum said.
We watched the plane’s flight together, as it approached the moon, flew into it, and emerged from the other side of the moon.
Wherever the plane was going, I thought, it would be carrying the memory of the moon with it.
Cinema Night
It was raining heavily at the time I needed to leave for the cinema.
I took the opportunity to browse a selection of Japanese umbrellas at Takashimaya, and to buy an umbrella I liked.
When I stepped outside again, ready to meet the rain with my new umbrella, it had stopped raining.
But I had an umbrella I liked.
〰️
One ticket, yeah, said the guy at the box office of The Projector.
He printed and handed me my ticket to that day’s only screening of Perfect Days in the whole of Singapore.
I went into the theatre and found four other women watching the movie solo, like me, and a couple who looked like they were visiting Singapore.
I had an entire row of seats, and more really, to myself. Bliss.
I had been waiting to watch the film for so long now.
I hadn’t found any cinemas for foreign indie films in Porto so far, and even if they existed, I wasn’t yet at a point where I could read subtitles in Portuguese for a film in Japanese.
In the time that I was in Singapore, there was only one screening of the film a day, on certain days, in the entire country.
Today, the stars finally aligned, and I had gotten my ticket.
Before the film started, I picked up my phone to turn it off, and found a message from my younger brother.
It was a picture of a four-tiered, cream white structure on wheels.
Got you this and just finished assembling it. So you have a proper space for all your toiletries whenever you’re home.
Somehow, that made me want to cry.
The film started.
I ate Roti-boy, a satisfyingly buttery coffee bun from Bread Talk that I’d smuggled into the cinema (no external food and drinks).
During the film, I cried three times, unobserved by anyone, and wiped away my own tears.
I decided this was now one of my favourite films of all time.
At the end of the film, I stayed through the credits to listen to the music from the film being played again.
At the end of the credits, this appeared on screen —
Komorebi 木漏れ日
The shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind.
It only exists once, at that moment.
Dream
(where the beginning is an ending)
Later on, I remembered another dream I had.
It was a dream about one day being able to feel at home in my very first home, the home shared by generations of my family, on land that all of us had walked on.
I realized, well this was it.
〰️ 〰️ 〰️
Back at the airport a few days later, with my bags packed to leave Singapore again, I realized that for the first time in my life, I was no longer leaving in order to escape or to run away.
Without being aware of exactly when it happened, I had healed from many deeply-rooted ancient pains, right on the same soil from which they had originally sprung.
I realized they could only be healed by being back on that same soil. Or more correctly, by being back on that same soil after having been on many other different soils, and letting all of them change me.
I had changed, and I was no longer afraid of coming back.
And now, my reason for leaving had also changed — it was not because I was afraid of being in the old place, but because I was curious to see how I could expand and grow in, and be inspired by, a new place.
I wanted to discover what that new place could teach me about my relationship with myself in the present, and also my relationship with the places that had shaped and defined my past.
Dreams aren’t there for us to escape into as a solution to all our problems.
Dreams are there to teach us about ourselves, when we allow ourselves to get to know them, and to act on them, moment to moment, step by step, before the entire dream is clear.
And it came to me — a dream realized, this particular dream of mine I have realized, is a homecoming.
I needed to make this return to discover the taste of my own homecoming — a little bitter, mostly sweeter than expected, yet sometimes also pretty salty.
It’s the same reason, I think, that we try to add just the right amount of sea salt to dark chocolate and burnt caramel, and end up loving their taste best, in just that way.
"Think of Singapore instead as the Air-Conditioned Nation — a society with a unique blend of comfort and central control, where people have mastered their environment, but at the cost of individual autonomy, and at the risk of unsustainability." — from Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited — Essays on Singapore Politics by Cherian George
In Singapore today, the term “Peranakan” generally refers to a person of mixed Chinese and Malay/Indonesian heritage. Many Singapore Peranakans trace their origins to 15th-century Malacca, where their ancestors were thought to be Chinese traders who married local women. From the 1850s to the 1950s, Peranakans were also known as the Straits Chinese, as they were born in the Straits Settlements of Singapore, Malacca and Penang. (Excerpt from the full article from the National Library Board of Singapore)
What a beautiful return, I felt the grief and the loss together with the blessing, the celebration, the surrender to the movements we are asked to make outside of our great plans, and graced with blessing and connection in the process. Thank you for your vulnerability, thank you for reflecting back so much of what has been swimming around within me and that I have struggled to put forth in to the world, thank you for showing up and being your beautiful raw self ❤️
I was so moved by your reflections, Suyin. The details, the mood, the emotions—all perfectly expressed. What gorgeous writing! I also loved your photos.