Introduction

 

Hi! I’m currently a postgraduate research student at the Department of Geography in Durham University. In this blog post, I introduce myself, the reason why this blog was started, and why it is called ‘messy and happenstance’.

Migrant & Geographer

I was born in Hong Kong, but I migrated to Singapore when I was just three and became a Singapore citizen a couple of years ago. I’ve spent most of my life in Singapore, having grown up in the little red dot and graduated from the National University of Singapore with a major in Geography.

I begin with this introduction to emphasise two aspects of my identity – as a migrant, and as a geographer. These two aspects greatly shape the way I see, experience and approach life. As such, emphasising these two aspects are important to you, my readers (if any), because they are the reasons why I began this personal blog. I want to write about various topics I’m interested in, and much of what informs my interests, writing and thinking, are these two identities.

As a migrant who moved to Singapore at an age before my consciousness developed, my sense of belonging treaded a unique path. Perhaps many migrants would speak about feeling loss or homesickness and needing to find ways to connect to the place they migrated to. It was the opposite for me – I grew up feeling and being culturally Singaporean.  It was only later in Primary School, when my consciousness was more developed, that I began understanding my identity as a migrant, along with the institutional and financial challenges my family and I had to face establishing life in Singapore.

For a long time, I struggled to reconcile my identity. I was, in many ways, entirely Singaporean – except in status, and that difference carried real consequences for my family and I. At the same time, I also wanted to maintain my connection with Hong Kong, where my roots lie.

I share this because these experiences, and the dissonance of a “backward” sense of belonging, helped me develop empathy and understanding for others and their own struggles with their identities. I don’t seek to romanticise my struggles nor to overstate their significance, but they have nevertheless moulded me into someone I am content to be today. As such, my identity as a migrant may surface when I write on topics related to belonging, identity, and the making of the self.

As for Geography, it is my lifeblood and the discipline that brings colour to my life. Growing up, I’ve gave my all to my studies (typical Asian student I suppose) and in doing so, nurtured a love for learning. Listening in class and submitting assignments went from being a bore and a chore, to a quest of training the brain and becoming more knowledgeable. It helped me look at myself reflexively, and to analyse and understand the world more. Geography, however, is the discipline that opened my eyes to the various ways disparate parts of the world become stitched together through uneven and unequal relations. It helped me critically interrogate my physical environment and see that the landscape in front of me isn’t just what I see, but what I can’t see. For example, a simple public housing building in Singapore isn’t just the building and the people dwelling in it, but is also the product of a network of various infrastructures and actors (e.g. Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority, contractors, waste, plumbing and electrical technologies) that had to work together to bring the landscape in front of me to fruition. It is a discipline that has sensitised me to my environment, showing me how space is central to the way we view, construct and respond to the world we live in.

Why I started this Blog

But the wider reason for beginning this blog is because I want to improve my writing and flow of thoughts. I want to make sense of my thoughts, and sharpen my ability to communicate them precisely. To do so, I need practice – not just to put down words that are a stream of thoughts, but to practice the drafting and re-drafting of a passage at hand, and to make a structured narrative. This practise of translating my inner voice to words on my laptop screen, stringing the words together into coherent sentences, and (re)structuring them into paragraphs that flow linearly, is useful for organising the often-chaotic rush of many thoughts that flood my mind. Admittedly, I can do this without a public blog, but writing with an audience in mind (even if little and imaginative) forces me to properly craft a narrative instead of writing nonsense. Indeed, this blog will not necessarily take the writing style of a journal article or have an academic tone. However, the blog nevertheless could help to improve the way I write and think.

Messy & Happenstance?

Finally, I would like to address the title of my blog. I titled it messy and happenstance because despite my best efforts to write and produce well-structured blog posts, I am confident that there will be slippages in my writing, be it typos or grammatical errors. It will be messy at times, and blogs will happen to come out with no sort of schedule. Who knows, this may be something I abandon in the future, or there will be no audience for this blog beyond my social circle. But if you are here and reading, then I hope that the blog posts give you food for thought, and that there is perhaps some record of becoming – of how my writing (and myself) continuously develops.

P.S. With the advent of ChatGPT, I have seen many instances where pieces are quickly deemed as written by AI once em dashes are present. I am pleased to say that I have used em dashes for as long as I can remember.