5
SINGAPORE
Asia wanes. We have been here three months and the air is constant: hot, sticky, garlicky. I rummage through my pack again and again for my tank tops and shorts, wonder why I’ve bothered packing jeans and a pullover. On our last day in Chiang Mai, we visit a local clinic for yellow fever shots so we can enter Africa in six weeks. I am ready for new sounds, new smells, but Thailand gives way to Singapore, a few more days in Asia.
It is 90°F in Singapore, year-round. There are two seasons: dry and rainy.
Part of Singapore’s lure is its airport. Changi Airport is regularly voted the best airport in the world by travelers, a destination on its own. There are free movie theaters, swimming pools, art stations, video game portals, nature paths in outdoor gardens, world-class playgrounds, a butterfly sanctuary, and sleeping rooms. A staff of thirteen gardeners tends to the five hundred species of plants, including seven hundred rare orchids. The airport’s website lists the best places to take a selfie during your layover. Because of the airport—and this is no overstatement—I want to go to Singapore.
Truth be told, though, I am admittedly weary of Asia’s cacophony, of the crowds and lights clamoring for attention. There are a few blessed pockets of quiet I’ve found throughout the continent, but they’re hard to find, and they’re outnumbered by the resonant masses of people and cities. I miss the monastery.
The five of us play in the airport for a few hours after we land. The kids zip down slides and Kyle and I sip coffee, share our eagerness with each other—in three days, we will set foot on a new continent.
Asia lays the groundwork for our year of travel, and it has not been easy. We are Westerners, and certain social mores feel familiar to us: queuing in line, assuming the store hours are the same as those printed on the door’s sign, leaving strangers alone in their parenting choices. It has been good for our sea legs to swim in these waters, but we are ready to float for a little while. I want to catch my breath. I want to be in the West.
We leave the airport for our weekend home—a hostel—and catch another taxi. I haven’t stayed in a hostel in over a decade, the last of which I slept in a large group bedroom in Dublin, Ireland, where I was witness to unsavory acts best left unsaid. It would have never occurred to me to bring children to a hostel until a friend suggested I try one out if I couldn’t find a guesthouse. We would barely be in Singapore, and it felt lavish to spend money on an entire house when we were about to head to the most expensive country of our trip. There are family-friendly hostels, my friend said.
Our bare-bones room is listed as “family-style,” which means there are enough beds for six people, most of whom would be strangers if we were traveling solo or as a couple. As a family of five, odds are slim one extra traveler would knock on our door, and we are willing to pay for the extra bed if that were to happen. We rent our blankets and pillows from the front desk, along with towels for our clan, grabbing only three because they’re five dollars apiece per night, and we take the elevator to our floor. Even the hostels are skinny high-rises in Asia.
Kyle unlocks the door. The room is a brilliant white with naked concrete walls. Air ducts cut through the ceiling, but it is otherwise a cube of minimalism—white beds to match our white linens, white desk and chair, white window frame. There are two sets of bunk beds with curtains around each bed to create individual minirooms. One set is twin and the other is queen, leaving almost no walking space between our sleeping quarters and private bathroom. The room feels more like one giant bed with occasional juts of concrete sliced through to divide sleeping arrangements. The air duct sighs, then exhales cold air with a loud hum that morphs into a noise that matches the white walls. I can no longer hear Asia outside. I look out our window and see the throng of traffic below. These are the most comfortable beds we have had thus far, and I sleep hard and dreamless.
In the morning, we play bus roulette, see where the wind takes us. Our phone apps tell us where to go, and we hop on a city bus and get off at Fort Canning Park. The highest elevation in central Singapore, it rises not quite two hundred feet above sea level. It is a green respite in a neat and tidy concrete city full of old trees and nineteenth-century cannons, fortified walls, and Gothic gates, a reminder that Singapore was once a European occupation. Though we’ve already walked miles and miles throughout Asia, we spend the morning walking even more, pretending this park is a forest. The kids play games through the sally ports, hidden doors in the forts that once allowed spies to come and go undetected. We watch older couples speed walk down the paths in matching jogging suits.
For lunch, we find a nearby café called Eat Play Love, where families dine on Western food and then afterward, children make crafts at the community art table while parents sip cocktails and coffee. Our kids glue cardboard, use scissors, and wind yarn around their fingers for the first time in three months.
Lunch takes hours, and afterward, I sense the need for a serious break. I’m trembling, weak, overstimulated. We take a bus and head back to our hostel for mandatory quiet time, where everyone in the family is required to stay on their beds with curtains drawn and do whatever they want so long as they don’t talk. It’s mildly successful. At the end of the hour, my head still spins, my muscles ache, and the kids are all talking at the same time in an echoey concrete room with no rugs or art to cut the reverberation. I feel my insides spiraling downward, wonder if my outsides will soon follow suit. I am swimming in cacophony.
Kyle is cut from different fabric than I. For twelve years, we’ve traveled together, worked side by side on business projects, and run a household together. But we are very different people. I like to think of myself as flexible, that I’m good at going where the wind blows, but when I need to adapt to unsavory conditions that test my senses, my body and brain overload.
Kyle, however, is the epitome of adaptability. He makes small talk with taxi drivers as they take convoluted routes and tell about their family exploits. He lets people wrangle for priority in front of him as he queues in line, because why fight it—this is simply how it is done in their culture. He deals with a sensory overload of flashing sights, pungent smells, and dissonant sounds because, well, it’s Asia. That’s what one does when traveling in Asia. Kyle is the masterful cross-cultural explorer. He also knows me better than anyone, and knows when I am about to shatter.
“Kids, let’s go out. Tsh, you stay here,” Kyle says. Right now, there aren’t eight more beautiful words in the English language.
Kyle is the parent who pushes our kids to try hard, new, risky things. He’s confident in his conviction that the heavy backpack is good for our six-year-old son’s muscle tone, no matter how much Reed flails in theatrical fatigue every time we walk through an airport. He doesn’t flinch from the symphony of childish whining during hours of wandering foreign metro systems. Kyle is the parent to meander through Singapore sans agenda with the three kids.
I insert earbuds, start my sleep playlist, turn down the lights, and read a book. Twenty minutes later, I strap on my eye mask and take a long nap, hugging the white linens and spreading out starfish-style on the queen-size mattress.
Several hours later, Kyle returns with coffee. It’s instant, and it’s from the hostel’s break room, but it is caffeinated, and that’s what matters right now. He is the yang to my yin. He anticipates my needs, my moods. I thank God that we met on a dirt road in a Kosovar village fifteen years ago.
Outside, the sun sets, and we pack our bags for the ninth time in three months. Finn asks if we can keep his construction paper and cardboard creations from lunch yesterday. They’re cumbersome and oversized, too big for any of our packs. I hesitate.
“Yes, we can keep them,” Kyle says.
The next day, we board a plane to Australia. We shoulder our packs, each carrying our weight. Kyle carries an extra paper bag, one containing masterpieces of crayon and cotton ball.
Lambent lights peddle in lines and squares
Hawking janky batteries and meat-on-sticks,
Some still writhing in final gulps of life.
I tread in a sea of dark-headed waves
With noodle dough jump rope swung between men,
Thwapping in cadence to calls and crows.
Playthings rat-a-tat on wilted boxes, mine for eight quai.
The melon, the meat, the additive music
Pulses me onward, sagacity my sails.
As for me, coruscate shops and sales pale
To earthy mettle, sullied soles, and raw, sticky-still bark.
Light wanes behind me.
Onward.