Colin Goh and Woo Yen Yen

The following piece was published in the 6 May 2007 edition of the Sunday Times:

Sunday Times 6 May 2007
Home (Away from Home)
by Colin Goh

It was one of those ‘buy 4D’ moments when my editor emailed to say that my column should follow this week’s ‘New Immigrant’ theme.

Because coincidentally, the Wife and I had a new immigrant snoozing on our sofa – this year’s Life! Theatre Best Actress Award-winner Yeo Yann Yann, who also starred in our film, ‘Singapore Dreaming’. ‘Triple Y’, as she’s known on-set, is originally from Malaysia and is now applying for Singapore citizenship – a ‘coup de theatre’ for Singapore, so to speak.

Yann Yann had even come to New York to woo Singaporeans back home as part of the Singapore Day event in Central Park. (Oddly enough, by performing Hokkien getai songs – even though Hokkien and dialects are severely restricted in Singapore’s mass media. Is that false advertising? Maybe not, but I guess it did deliver an authentic Singaporean experience, replete with inattention to irony, so mission accomplished!)

“So how come you’re emigrating?” I asked her. “J.B. very far, meh?”

“In J.B. can do Chinese theatre for a living, meh?” came her eloquent response.

I also posed the same question to several other new immigrants this week, while visiting California for Singapore Dreaming’s West Coast premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival. This time, however, the new immigrants were Singaporeans who had relocated to the US. (I guess one man’s quitter is another man’s stayer.)

They gave pretty much the same response as Yann Yann. The original reasons for coming over were essentially pragmatic – better pay and prospects due to a bigger or more developed market; the feeling that here, they were freer to be themselves because of the more liberal culture or because contextual restrictions had less sway; or because they’d simply met that special someone.

No one said they had come to the US because of the national values or superior leadership (certainly not now anyway, as several took pains to emphasise). Certainly no one bought everything they’d read in the tourism brochures.

When I asked them which country they considered home, there was invariably a pause, even though they all eventually cited the new country. Yann Yann, for instance, said that after years of slogging on the Singapore stage and screen and bonding with her colleagues, she had simply come to regard Singapore as home.

Likewise with the new San Franciscans. Being able to call a new country ‘home’ was never a simple or rational box-ticking exercise – it was more a process of accretion, arriving at an equilibrium between leaving friends, family and familiarity behind, and girding themselves for the uncertainties, both good and bad, that lay ahead.

And emigration never meant complete abandonment of their country of origin either. (Interestingly, a number of them wanted to impress upon me that they only stopped following Singapore news once the Straits Times started charging for accessing their website.) One fellow also said candidly, “Our lives here will always be tied to Singapore. It defines us, even if it’s only through comparison. And of course we’ll always be more upbeat about our new country, even though objectively, it’s probably just as screwed up as the old one. We can’t let those we left behind see that we’re losers, right?” ‘Home’, clearly, is also an exercise in ex post facto justification.

So it made me wonder what an expensive ‘comehoming’ campaign like Singapore Day was actually meant to achieve. Most of the attendees I knew either visited Singapore regularly, or were already headed home anyway. Did it really persuade the hardcore? Could it ever?

And anyway, stoking the notion of home may also be pointless. Last week, I attended an event where various famous writers, including Booker Prize-winner Kiran Desai, and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer shared meditations on the idea of ‘home’. Perhaps the most compelling piece came from Salman Rushdie. Reading an extract from his novel, ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’, he suggests there is in fact, a deep-seated human desire to be free of home, as evidenced by how popular culture in any nation is full of outcasts, journeymen and non-belongers.

In a provocative section, he asks: “What if all of it, home, kinship, the whole enchilada, is just the biggest, most truly global and centuries oldest piece of brainwashing? Suppose it’s only when you dare to let go, that your real life begins?” I suspect there’s some truth in it for not just our new immigrants and far-flung émigrés, but also ourselves.

In accepting our dislocation rather than perpetuating hollow sentimentality, ironically, we may actually see a real bond – a welcome, not to some new country, but to the real world.

Post-script: Thanks to a packed schedule, I didn’t have the time to consolidate my thoughts about Singapore Day. I think Siew Kum Hong’s post was very lucid and thoughtful, though. (We had dinner with Kum Hong and some friends several nights before the event, in a Cantonese eatery in Flushing. Clever dude.) He also quoted me in the piece, though clearly that wasn’t the extent of my experience with the whole shebang. At some point, I’ll write about what we went through, and also about taking Seetoh supermarketing in Queens! Quite the experience!

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