Photo credits: Motorgrapher
I met Juvena at a Beyond Expedition event, held just outside their 5 ★ Mongolian Yurt (no really, it has all the stars because I have never, ever seen an air-conditioned yurt in my life after spending some months in central Asia), in the tiniest time frame where two vagabonds could ever hope to meet. Our paths had only a 48-hour window to cross this year, and what an absolutely wonderful thing it did.
Juvena, if you don’t already know her by now (@thewanderingwasp please forgive me if I get facts wrong ) is this damn cool biker chick who rode her Vespa from Singapore to Europe through Pakistan and Iran (and of course 23 other fabulous countries). I’m highlighting Pakistan and Iran because you’d be like “wah, so dangerous” and she’s like “those are some of my favourite countries”. In general, there’s a fantastic correlation between how much bad press a country receives from the West and how f***ing amazing it turns out to be.
Anyway, I digress. Dissonance is not an easy word to unpack, and perhaps it’s not the right word. Perhaps there is no right English word, who knows. We both felt it coming back to Singapore after living on the road (I feel different this year compared to last due to a billion reasons but that’s a different unpacking). Our long conversation had a lot of unspoken established common ground, not just a traveller to traveller, but a Singaporen-woman-in-her-30s-with-a-shit-ton-of-Asian-social-pressures kind of commonalities. Our conversation is probably something I never had with someone else, because how often do you find a Singaporean female setting out to drive or ride around the world for years, living in the wild, meeting random strangers daily and…loving it? Yes all of it, the challenges, the hardships, the pain, the suffering, the absolutely breathtaking beauty, the kindness, the diversity, the workings of different societies and waking up to a different view every day.
How will it ever reconcile with life here?
The dissonance is made more acute because we look like we belong and treated like we do – well until we do something out of the norm like discuss long drop toilets in Mcdonalds until the next table leaned over and announced that they were eating (happened to Juvena and her foreign travel friends but I can totally relate).
It’s being in a place where everything is so well-planned and looked after, from the spacing between the street lamps, to how smooth the roads are, the thoughtful bridges wherever you want to cross the road, the big, clear signage that tells you where you should go. Don’t for a moment think I resent this – I am proud of it and always tell others when on the road how much foresight our leaders have. But – but – both Juvena and I have lived here for over 30 years and we know you just have to look closely and it’s not just signage – signs stacked signs tell you how to behave, what not to do. National parks, Singapore’s only form of nature is hardly what I call wilderness. Our greenery is overlaid with a hundred electrical items, from lamps to Public Warning Signals to CCTV to vending machines and good lord – even robot vacuum cleaners which end up spinning in circles, confused by our form of “wildlife”, the recent chicken invasion. (I can’t help but think if you release chickens anywhere in Africa they will not last two seconds). And don’t get me started on climbing outdoors. Singapore is the over-protective parent who wants all its adult children to bounce around ultra-cushioned play-pens twice the height of the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) – you know – just to be safe.
It is such an invisible thing, but I think the greatest dissonance both Juvena and I have is no longer fitting into to the carefully curated narrative here.
We’ve both have lived the petri-dish life for decades, kept in the so-called ideal conditions socially, physically and mentally to grow us into the “ideal” human beings for Singapore’s economy and future. You know this, being highly encouraged to pursue science and mathematics the moment we can crawl (yes my dear foreign friends, when a Singaporean infant crawls towards a calculator it is hailed as a god-sent and I am not joking). There is only one way to arrive at the right answer in life – the way set by institutions and organizations. There is a method to success and surely, most certainly, if you walk the paved sidewalk filled with signs on where you should and should not go, you will eventually find yourself fulfilled, happy and successful.
I think both of our lives has received so much watering from the world outside that we’ve sprouted into weeds instead of the orchids we were designed to become.
We love how present other humans of the world are. Not hunkered over their mobile phones, attention split over a hundred data-mining apps and floating in the social media black hole looking for validation. We love the real human connection of the now, smiles that crinkle the eyes, the sharing of their lives and physical space and how they take joy in the smallest things. I can’t remember which town this was in the world. In this town, there was a single shopping mall with the only escalator for miles around. The highlight of the local villagers’ day was just to come in and ride this escalator up and down. Yes, both adults and kids alike were grinning from ear to ear as they held on to the railing and moved…for the first time without using their legs!
Have you seen how Singaporeans ride the escalator? I think many of us don’t even realize we are on one anymore. The tense, grim faces of office warriors wishing the escalator would “hurry up already” at Raffles, their frown lines deepening as the person in front got off a second too late, breaking the unspoken rhythmic pace of life. The many shoppers milling around the intricate and intentionally designed maze of malls, using the escalator as an excuse to finally fully disconnect themselves from the present reality, looking at other people’s shinier, emptier lives on social.
Why do we feel especially disconnected here? It’s because this is the one place where people perhaps matter the most to us, where there is still a piece of home. Our friends, family, new friends, ex-colleagues, ex-classmates. We’ve a shared history, so we value the opinions of people we know more. The opinions that often haven’t been influenced yet by a life on the road, so the talk invariably goes back to challenges of a first world country, of working towards a goal post shaped by society here. The very life we are running from. The questions that we get so often, of how can we do such a thing without a giant bank account. And the answer itself is a question – “why are you chasing the money?” that comes from a new reality of living on the road. I spend less travelling than living in Singapore, and my happiness is not dictated by a consumerist game where you can now stack discount codes, cash backs, loyalty points, credit card rebates and in-mall promotions all at once. A place where we are made to feel less to want more.
We are more, but it’s hard to be more in a place where people are never satisfied with what they have.
Dissonance. There’s no right way to unpack the baggage but I think I just flung it open with all the contents strewn all over.