Hello, USA!

Signs of Life
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read
Rockerfeller Center, NYC

Scattered impressions, 10 days in.

It’s a strange place to be, being neither truly tourist with a fixed end-point to the journey, not truly settled and of a place (insofar as staying three years makes one so). My impressions then are mostly that of tourist, albeit one who also has to open bank accounts and get one’s visa documents inspected. In the few days I’ve been here I’ve had the good fortune of my sister’s company to navigate the big and small things of a new place, so I will miss her as I walk through Harvard Yard.

It’s odd to realise that one’s school is also a tourist spot (A once mentioned being interrupted in his journey to take an exam because a student in sub fusc hurrying on a bicycle is picturesque). Perhaps another way to think about it is to see Harvard Yard as a cradle of expectation and hope: the young teens being introduced to a campus they can aspire to (I heard this being introduced as the “inspiration tour”), younger siblings taking in the intellectual and social possibilities through their older siblings’ experiences. Most of all, the parents and grandparents spending precious moments with their children, that time just tinged with that bit of awe at how far they had come and how much further they could go.

There are fewer MacDonald’s than I thought. I’m not sure what density I was expecting or where I got that impression from.

Being able to zip over to NYC helped me to find language for what I have been seeing (even in a limited way of Harvard/Cambridge, and then of the touristy bits of Boston). My first impressions of Cambridge was that of scale — how things are built, how spread out things are. The bigness is now mentally more manageable because goodness NYC is huge. I understand skyscrapers for maximising land use, but what’s with the double height lobbies and extra large everything? (there’s probably a book on that)

Another instance of mystification. Why is the flag everywhere?

Swimsuit found in Target

The people that make a place lovable: the gentleman who brought his telescope out to JFK Park today so that we could all share in the images of the eclipse, the warmth of D and R of my host family, the joy of meeting J and S of the acid humour and the lovely chill dachshund Coco, Y who cooked for us and V who connected us to begin with, and that student librarian, who shared that it too took her time to settle in to the rhythm of a new country.

All these possibilities, what then will I make of it? This is not a short trip with an end in sight, this is a place that I will in some form be invested in for some time. This past weekend was also when Boston Common saw the “demonstration” in favour of free speech (but only for some). As a Singaporean my first reaction was regarding law and order, but beyond that this is a question of what I consider to be values that describe a home. What is the space I want to help build, and what is the wisdom and knowledge that I will allow myself to bring to that? There are no clear answers, and as my understanding evolves so will my response. An initial commitment: first aid training, so I will have something useful to offer.

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Finding my voice. Will write about faith, futures, observations and vignettes.

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