The Beginning: A Relocation Journey

(Milford Sound, New Zealand, 2022)

How serendipitous is it that the moment I thought about journalling Chinh and my relocation to Germany—originally picked up a notebook, turned to the first page and scoffed to myself, “What am I? A luddite?”, turned to my iMac, typed in WordPress on Chrome and auto logged in with the login details saved—I find that the last post I posted on here is about my impending relocation to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. That was 2015.

Fast forward eight years, Chinh and I survived Vietnam for two years, got tired of it, returned to Singapore, got married, bought a house and weathered Covid-19.

Today, as we enter the second month of 2023, we have been having increasingly serious conversations about burnout, the rat race and the implications of life in Singapore. I had just spent the first week of my 6-month sabbatical nursing a bad cold, finishing a scarf I started in 2017 and catching up with friends I neglected during the past few months of mayhem. Chinh, on the other hand, spent the week by having a colossally awful time at work.

In a span of two days over the weekend, after two in-depth conversations with three of our closest friends, Chinh solidified his hopes of us moving back to Germany. Timeline was still pretty vague but we knew we wanted to work towards moving back in 1-2 years.

However, yesterday, this changed. I had sought him out by the pool of the club after a particularly gruelling yoga class and found him having yet another in-depth conversation with our German friend Mike. When they hung up, we talked. Under parasols heaving with the weight of pelting rain, we laid fresh plans about our relocation. We set timelines, drew up pros and cons lists, aired our deepest concerns and established clear action points.

Project Relocation is set to take flight. We will be relocating in Q2 2024.

Captain Trepidation, over and out.

Captain Foolhardy Sets Foot in Saigon

[DISCLAIMER: Sappy post ahead]

Hello strange little blog of mine,

For some funny reason, I tend to find myself compelled to update this space in the dead of night (yes, I’m such a grandma now that midnight is considered “in the dead of night” to me). This has but one agenda and that is to act as a sounding board for all the changes that’s about to unfold and catapult me out of my comfort zone and into the city of scooters zipping lawlessly in and out of invisible lanes, shouty people and piping hot pho.

I’m about to move to Ho Chi Minh.

When Chinh first approached the subject of me moving with him, I went, “Hell yeah, let’s go.” I didn’t miss a beat. After all, not many people get the opportunity to experience a life abroad, right? And here I am presented with the golden goose of an experience of a lifetime. But as the days went whizzing by (I feel like its especially worse for us in monthly publishing because we’re constantly working towards a deadline for the following month that it feels like the days catch up with us ridiculously quickly but… I digress), I found my apprehension building up like a simmering volcano that can’t make up its goddamn mind. Should I erupt or return to a sleepy dormancy? Hmm… Decisions, decisions.

If you know me, you’ll know that I absolutely detest not having a plan of sorts. I do not enjoy getting into instances whereby I am not aware of what might be the outcome. I do not like not knowing. So the biggest challenge of moving to Vietnam is trying to accept the fact that I have abso-fucking-lutely no idea what to expect. I have zilch idea if I’m going to make friends there, get a job, acclimitise to the culture, find a studio I like to continue my yoga practice, or even build a social life. And it’s the uncertainty that’s killing me. Am I worried? Hell yeah, I’m worried.

An emotional turmoil has been bubbling beneath my faux calm exterior for the past couple of weeks. Before I know it, I will have to say goodbye to Emma, friends, family, the stray cats around my neighbourhood and the familiarity that 25 years of citizenship has bolstered me with. I am terrified. But for some reason today, when I took a glance at the calendar on my desk at work and realise that I essentially have barely a month more in Singapore before I find myself, two luggages and possibly 60kg of shit on a plane to Vietnam, I achieved some kind of odd zen-like revelation – the kind Elite Daily would approve of.

[This is the sappy part]

Dangling from a twine-and-clothespin photo clothesline and sitting next to said desk calendar was a card that came with the flowers Chinh sent to my office when I came back from my press trip to Hong Kong last year.

It dawned on me that I am not alone.

I realised that despite all the uncertainty and apprehension, I am tremendously excited to embark on a journey of the unknown with this guy I met on Tinder barely a year back. Is it crazy? Sure. Am I out of my mind? Possibly. But it’s been a ridiculously surreal 10 months that I’ve had with Chinh. I’ve fielded the question time and time again from the concerned and the more-kaypoh-than-concerned and yes, we have been together for an awfully short period of time and no, we’re not about to get married prior to the move. Things with Chinh just feels right. If I believed in astrology, I would’ve attributed our relationship to our stars aligning. Unfortunately, I don’t so we’re just going to have to leave it to the very unromantic theory that we just fit. Somehow, despite the polar ends on our debates on homosexuality and views on marriage, we fit. We smoothen out each other’s stubborn rough edges and buff the good bits to a shine. 

To many, uprooting a life to move to another country for a person you met barely a year ago may be a stupid decision but the stubborn streak in me likes to think it’s some kind of courageous. I’m about to join the league of the stupidly courageous and that’s that.

Saigon, here I come. Captain Foolhardy reporting for duty.

End of the Four-Month Hiatus

Some of the photos developed from the disposable camera I brought with me to Bangkok two years back

I am extremely ashamed about my four-month-long disappearance. I assure you, whoever you may be that’s still reading this that I am still quite alive. My social media presence, apart from Instagram, may have gone a tad off the grid but I reckon it’s time I get back to writing for myself.

I like to think that i’ve matured as a writer and thus, have evolved a smidgen from where I last left this little blog off. I was tempted to start afresh again, which I sorta did, with the change of URL, but have decided to retain the hodgepodge of topics I’ve covered throughout the past year. I’m still not entirely sure about the direction this funny little blog of mine is headed but here’s to embracing the intricate beauty of uncertainty (the wise saying is coincidentally the awesome tattoo of a friend’s).

To serve as a reminder to myself as well as a little nugget of what’s to come, here are some posts I’m dreaming up.

• Seeing that I’ve been to Hong Kong numerous times, for both work and leisure, I’m going to do a round-up of some of my favourite eats in the wonderful Cantonese land
• My trip to Myanmar – Bagan and Mandalay circa July 2014. Boy am I late. Or I might just combine that update along with my upcoming trip to Yangon and Bagan with Nik and Jasmine
• A little round-up of my favourite street art in the city and perhaps my two-cents on the local street art culture
• My second up-coming trip to Taiwan – Taipei, Hualien and Kaohsiung – with the boyfriend. The boyfriend has left most of the planning to me so brace yourselves for an army of food photos

‘Till then, Auf Wiedersehen!

A Movie a Week: The Intouchables (2012)

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I’ve been watching tons of movies since I started going out with Chinh. Dude watches shitloads of movies. But I’m not complaining because we have pretty similar tastes in movies. Netflix FTW. So the latest one we caught was The Intouchables, an easily digestable heart-warming French comedy-drama.

It didn’t make it into my list of favourites but it was pretty decent IMO; much less can be said about some of the Hollywood Blockbusters hogging the cinemas of late. I appreciated the subtle story-telling of The Intouchables. It felt unpretentious and zealous. I’ll like to shake the hands of the directors (Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano) for giving the audience the benefit of doubt that we’re not mind-numbingly dumb. Hallelujah.

The casting was pretty immaculate, with Driss (played by Omar Sy) stealing the show. That dude is a natural badass with a ridiculously contagious laughter. His character is an easy one to like. The scene when Driss started poking fun at the opera singer dressed as a tree? Hilarious. And although Philippe (played by François Cluzet) is a character that can potentially turned insufferable very quickly, he didn’t. I liked that the writers didn’t overdramatise the fact that Philippe is a quadriplegic. Instead, they chose to focus on the positivity of the friendship between the two most unlikeliest of men. It’s not a life-changing movie by any means but it is a movie worth a watch for the simple fact that it makes you feel good. I didn’t roll my eyes once. At Chinh, maybe. But not at the movie. 😀 Oh, and did I mention that the music scores were composed by Ludovico Einaudi? Sold.

August Recap

“Don’t sweat the small stuff”

 Yes, I am well aware of my month-long absence from this little space. Hence, here’s my half-assed attempt at doing an August Recap with some visual aid.

August pushed past me and sped on, leaving me trailing behind in a cloud of dust. Before I knew it, it was already September. Our thickest issue has printed, A-Listers finale coming up next Friday and my mom turns 50. What the fuck do you give a 50-year-old woman? I am so screwed.

August also spawned a handful of changes in my personal life but I’m not quite sure how to talk about shit in my life without going into too much detail (yeh, I’m still trying to find the comfortable balance of sharing sufficiently) so I reckon doing it in point-form would be the easiest.

This August I,

1. Met someone whose managed to put butterflies back into my tummy. It’s been four years since I last felt that way and I have to say that so far it’s been comfortable, seamless, and ridiculously good but at the same time, extremely unsettling.
2. Worked on a pretty inspirational story for August Man. I got to write a story on Sylvia Lee, the Director of EmancipAsia, the organisation I mentioned in my previous post that’s dedicated to raising awareness for human trafficking in Singapore. I also got to interview and feature Allan Lim, the CEO of ComCrop, a social enterprise who donates 20 percent of their crops to Willing Hearts, an NGO who prepares meals for the underprivileged. I love talking to people like Sylvia and Allan. Their stories warm the very cockles of my heart.
3. Finally got to check out Sebastian Salgado’s Genesis photography exhibition at the National Museum of Singapore and it absolutely blew me away. My only regret was not going for a second time (it ran until the end of August)
4. Finished Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (more on that another day) and started on Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon which is proving to be an emotional read, given the fact that I already know the ending from when we studied the short story version in school. Ugh.
5. I realised that what the adults said about the future growing crystal clear as you age, is bullshit and that “Don’t sweat the Small Stuff” is really the best advice an adult could’ve given me.

Also, you will never be able to find all the answers to your questions. Sometimes you just have to wing it.