In just the blink of an eye, our family has been in Singapore for four months. Our children are in local schools and officially red bean bun eaters.
During this time, the questions we’ve been asked the most is: “Why did you leave the US?” And really, there’s no simple answer because that would mean all about Singapore is good and all about the US is bad, and that’s not true.
When one has children
I moved to the US as a singleton. Two luggages and the belief that I could get myself out of almost any situation. I had lived and worked in the Philippines, Japan and China as an investigative journalist and photographer, and the Americas was the next on my list.
At 25, I was full of confidence. But by the time I held my 2.2kg daughter, I had witnesses city council meetings where leaders screamed at each other, known people who died by accidental and deliberate gunshot, and experienced racism firsthand.
I didn’t want to be my colleague, frozen in fear from the text that said her child’s school was in lockdown due to the suspicion of an active shooter. I didn’t want my child to have to learn how to lock her classroom door with a chair so a shooter couldn’t come in. I didn’t want to have to explain that her father was taken because he “looked like he was behaving suspiciously”.
So, perhaps from the day she was born, we started preparing to move to Singapore.
America the great
There are many things our family misses about America. At the top of the list would be rolling green hills where our family spent many hours with balls and frisbees, front porches where we could turn on the bubble machine or the kids could eat sandwiches on, and bathtubs.
Most Singaporeans take showers, but once you’ve experienced the bliss of taking a hot bath on a cold wintery day, it’s hard to go back.
Nevertheless, can we give up a bathtub for safety? Yes. Will we give up beautiful hills for the knowledge that my husband is almost 100% less likely to be shot? Yes. And what about front porches for the knowledge that I can take my eyes off my daughter for a few minutes and she is 100% less likely to step on a used syringe used by a drug addict? Again, yes.
We still miss the small blisses of life in America that we designed for our family, but if we had to lose just one of us, all of those blisses would be tainted by trauma, just as many families in America carry with them.
Not my covid
Plenty of expats have been frustrated by how difficult it is to travel and reentering Singapore, asking why the government has made it so hard for them to visit family overseas.
Unlike Singapore, where masks are mandated and we willingly allow our movements to be tracked with our TraceTogether tokens, many Americans have taken off their masks. They have grown tired of being cautious and new variants of Covid being discovered. The result is that American has seen over 850,000 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic in 2021 (est 0.26% of population). Singapore has had 847 deaths (est 0.00015% of population).
In recent weeks, our family has known over 40 people who tested positive for covid. Even if without symptoms, they’ve had to isolate, which means lost man-hours. Whole teams have been taken down for testing positive.
In Singapore, everyone is pretty anxious about catching Covid, which means that most people don’t only wear masks, they test themselves for Covid regularly and many now carry travel size tubes of hand sanitiser.
America, we’ll be back
Despite all that is good in Singapore, of course, we are already missing America enough to be thinking of a trip there this year. There’s family there, and space. There will be cold weather, bathtubs and the joy in spending time with loved ones.
It seems that intercontinental families will straddle the world for the rest of their lives, and if there’s one thing that’s clear, as long as there are people to love in a country, we’ll want to spend time there.
