Somewhere In Between
Arch Ramesh
Runner-up in 2021 Biographical Story Contest
©
Copyright 2021 by Arch Ramesh
|
Photo by Bna Ignacio on Unsplash |
It
was a sweltering morning like many, where my iced latte was the
reprieve from the overbearing equatorial sun making its appearance
between sky-dusting buildings. I was parked at my favorite coffee
shop in the island city-state I had made my home right in time for
the pandemic. Despite their overpriced latte and avocado toast menu
that overtly catered to the expatriate crowd, I kept returning to
this coffee shop for people-watching on Monday mornings when the
world woke up groggily from the weekend. I’d sit on the front
patio facing the street and onto another coffee shop, one catering to
locals who could live without the ambiance generated by Helvetica
lettering and an acoustic pop playlist. The sun would beat fire down
the street between us, and unlike other tropical milieu, the air in
Singapore would always smell scrubbed. As the seats around me started
filling up, I would sit among faces, mostly white, and look onto
faces across the street, not white. We sipped on our iced Americanas
washing down forkfuls of banana bread. Across the street, they sipped
their scalding Kopis between bites of sweet kaya toast and runny
peppered eggs.
Walking
down streets like these, debating between the two-dollar fresh juice
at the local hawker center or the eight-dollar bottled juice at the
retro-chic juice shack, I always found myself in
between these
Singaporean contrasts. Unfazed, I swerved down the scrubbed alleyways
in search of something that fit. Indian by origin, American by
design, I had always found myself trapped in the space in between the
two words...and worlds. I had immigrated to America
as a
teenager, just in time to start my junior year at a small preparatory
school in the South, clueless of how vastly different it would be
from the New York City images that limn America in the movies. When I
finally became a naturalized citizen and filled out job applications
by checking the Asian-American box, I felt a gnaw in my stomach
knowing that square never felt like home. Perhaps a return to Asia
was the answer, I told myself, now away from the South, and watching
Trump get elected into office from my San Francisco blue bubble. And
so I packed my bags, and as the Kincaid fire screamed into the skies
through Northern California in late October of 2019, I left,
momentarily lightened off my identity wars in a way you only can when
you hold your breath between an inhale and exhale. That moment in
between letting go of the old and taking in the new.
Little
did I know what newness was in store for me. I
hardly expected
to work from my dining table for the better part of 2020. I wasn’t
planning to spend my birthday that year on Zoom or use my studio
apartment as my dance studio. I certainly didn’t expect to find
out how Singapore would handle a global pandemic. In April of 2020,
the Singaporean government, renowned for banning chewing gum,
declared a lockdown that made it a fineable offense for me to meet
anyone for almost three months. After my flirtation with solitary
confinement, I was set free with government mandates on masks, and
edicts on how many people we could interact with. It started with
groups of five in late June, getting to eight in December only to go
back down to two in June of 2021. I would learn how specific
Singaporean rules could be, as they modulated music amplitude in
dining establishments as a virus mitigation tactic.
To
be fair, I didn’t expect to find out how America would handle a
global pandemic either. I laughed at the memes in March of 2020 that
downplayed the virus as nothing to sneeze about and then watched as
armed lockdown protestors stormed the governor’s building in
Michigan. I scrolled through more memes, as masking and vaccines
became politicized, in part leading to the storming of the Capitol
building on January sixth. My reaction was something in between
embarrassment - try explaining this behavior to non-Americans - and
bewilderment. I was perplexed at the vast divide, physical and
ideological, across the ocean. Craving the American freedoms so
obsessively protected by the Constitution swirled with the
Singaporean meticulousness that strove for harmony, I found myself
floating somewhere in that ocean.
On
May 26 of 2020, six months into living in Singapore, and four weeks
into my social deprivation experiment, I scrolled through devastating
videos of a police knee on George Floyd’s neck and felt my
breath catch in my own. I felt the entirety of my own immigrant
struggles to belong from the minute I set foot in the American South
rise in my throat. I watched George flail and felt my heart harden
against the country that treated people with the wrong skin color
like unwelcome guests. “This,” I told myself as I sat on
my isolation couch, “is why I left.” Even under the
government’s watchful eye, I felt so righteous being in this
280-square-mile country where commingled ethnic Chinese, Malay, and
Indian communities avoided civil strife. Down the street from the
expat-swarming high-rise I occupied, was an opulent Hokkein temple,
striking in tangerine lanterns celebrating fifteen days of Chinese
New Year. Adjacent to the incense-laden temple was an unassuming
mosque, easy to miss from the peeling walls outside, but for signs
that say “Women here” and “Men here”. Across
from the holy place was a barbeque joint, popular with locals and
foreigners alike, who sat awaiting their pork rib orders sipping
yellow beer from glasses bedazzled with condensation. The
juxtaposition of rituals on this one street, echoed in the alleyways
of the country you could walk across in a day, and was perhaps why,
despite being an outsider, I felt like I made sense here. Somewhere
in between the contrasts, my hyphenated identity found a home.
Around
the time American streets were choking with pain, fists raised in the
air, no longer willing to expend black lives, and Trump was
tear-gassing protesters to hold an upside-down Bible, the Singapore
Prime Minister gave an impassioned speech about migrant workers who
lived in overstuffed dorms where COVID was rampaging. Speaking on
television to their families back home, he said “It is our duty
to take care of our brothers who have built the Singapore we live
in.” He took a drink from a cup that was mirthfully called the
magic cup because he would switch between English, Chinese, and Malay
in between sips. “I want their families back home to know we
are taking good care of them.” His words pierced me like he was
talking about my own family. Maybe because I did feel a kinship with
the workers I often saw squatting in the shape of the back of a
pickup truck on route to construction sites, where they formed lunch
circles, speaking the language I recognized from summers with my
grandparents in India. I felt a bond only engendered by a common
tongue in a foreign land. But I knew they felt no kinship with me. I
felt the burden of my tech job that afforded me a downtown apartment,
within minutes of the Singapore marina where glittering buildings
reflected in the bay. The workers who built those glasshouses were
then taken back to the island’s eastern corner, tucked away
from sight so visitors would never know where to find them. Dozens of
them were packed into dormitories, colorful from the outside, but
bursting with deprivation on the inside, where viruses wedged in
crevices between bunk beds, rejoicing in the closeness of human flesh
that money can opt you out of. I
knew
these men didn’t feel a kinship with me because my skin was a
few shades lighter than theirs that toiled in the sun, and yet, I
harbored the solidarity in my head as I walked past them and
eavesdropped on their conversations.
My
unrequited relationship with these workers attuned me to
imperceptible grime, because in Singapore when you scratch the
glimmering surfaces, you see the rust. Over a drink with a
Malay-Indian friend who worked at a bar I frequented, he said, “I
see lah, people will move away from me on the train when I sit next
to them,” he paused, “Am I dirty or what?” His
genuine question broke something in me as I looked into his eyes the
color of chestnuts, so open, on skin the color of sand after the
rain. In these eyes, I saw the pain of so many black men murdered on
the streets of America burdened by the wrong skin color, a burden I
skirted because I was somewhere in between. I was an acceptable shade
of brown that didn’t offend the White-American majority or the
Chinese-Singaporean one.
On
July tenth last year, when I got my daily Whatsapp notification from
the Singapore Ministry of Health letting us know we had 191 new COVID
cases, of which the majority were in the foreign worker dormitories,
the country held national elections. There were murmurs that there
was enough dissatisfaction with the ruling party, the People’s
Action Party, that would warrant an unimaginable outcome. The party
that had been in power since independence in 1965 might not retain
its hold. I readied myself for a reality-TV-worthy showdown, having
successfully survived the pandemic thus far without succumbing to
watching a show about tiger owners or soundproof-pod-dating. I was to
be disappointed. That year the opposition party did gain more seats
than ever before (ten out of 93 to be precise) but it was hardly
international news, which the American election four months later
certainly was. I re-entered America in time to turn in my ballot in
person, praying for an outcome that was less devastating than four
years ago, and even less dramatic than the Singaporean election. As
far as I wanted to run from Trump’s America in search of a land
where I belonged, I couldn’t outrace my hope for a better
America where black boys in hoodies wouldn’t be hunted down,
and where I just might feel at home someday.
Perhaps
it was because, by the time that California’s worst fire season
to date was well underway, stories of exclusion fanned flames around
me in the new home I had fled to in an attempt to belong. My fellow
expatriate friend who loved bachata, and had moved from India with
her husband who had a curious obsession with aquariums, recounted her
search for a Singaporean apartment within walking distance to her
dance studio but big enough to hold the aquarium gear her husband
wanted. “You know Chinese landlords just refuse to rent out to
Indian people or say we can’t cook our food in the house; I
mean how can we not cook our food?!”
I
shook my head, feigning shock but well aware of this situation which
I had been warned about by a well-intentioned friend over pancakes
when I first arrived. This friend, a Japanese passport holder, who I
had met at university in North Carolina, and had recently immigrated
to Singapore with her French boyfriend had said, “It might take
you a while to find a place. Chinese landlords won’t rent to
Indians.” Since that conversation, we had many more,
reconciling our Asian origins with our rearing in western societies
with fanciful notions of liberty and justice for all, that seemed out
of reach no matter where in the world we were. I had escaped the fate
of overt racism and signed a lease because of my American passport.
The irony that I never felt accepted as an American where my passport
was issued, but became a shield for me half a world away was not lost
on me. Over the next few months, I would lean into my American-isms,
sounding even more Californian amidst British and French expats,
complaining about the Singaporean martial laws when we got sick of
it, even as we disdainfully looked at our emigrant countries from
afar as they struggled to keep order amidst the crisis.
No
one questioned my identity in Singapore, as I was so used to in
America (“But, where are you really from?”), I
think because they saw me as clearly different from Indians, the
darker ones, who toiled on construction sites or wandered around the
Little India neighborhood. And while I, albeit guiltily, wore my
American identity closer to myself than ever before, there would be
days I would wander into a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Little
India, smother steamed rice cakes (idli) with lentil soup (sambar)
and eat it with my hands off a banana leaf. The waiter would wander
over, asking me in English, “You want more?” to which I
would respond, “Amam, rendu idli kudinge,” holding up two
fingers to signal I wanted two more idlis. The waiter would
unblinkingly refill my banana leaf and walk away, and I would smile
at the lack of follow-up questions. In that moment, I would feel like
I was in the right box, the shape of a banana leaf, where I was
accepted as I was. I hoped for just this feeling for the migrant
worker toiling at the construction site across the street from me,
and for black men walking the streets of America.
Arch
is an Indian-American writer who loves combining her zest for
exploration of the world, and of the self. Growing up across four
countries, and immigrating to the U.S. as a teenager, Arch is
especially interested in exploring issues around identity and
belonging, trying to answer questions she has been plagued by all her
life. Arch calls San Francisco her current home and works in the tech
industry when she’s not writing (and traveling).
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