A Semester of Russian and a Glass of Bulgarian Whiskey

When my company manager informed me that there was going to be a special employee luncheon to celebrate Chinese New Year, I looked forward to it as an opportunity to meet some of my music and dance colleagues. My job involves very little interaction with other teachers as I am constantly shut up in the studio teaching and working with students. But I was rather surprised the next day to find myself sitting at a table compromised entirely of Eastern Europeans and Russians - all communicating in rapid Russian with the occasional English thrown in for my benefit. I would have never imagined that I would be using my one semester of Russian more than my three years of Chinese, but apparently the grand majority of my co-workers speak it better than English.
It was a fascinating community of expats of a variety of ages and professions. Some were pianists, others violinists, others dance teachers like myself. But two stood out amongst them as the most memorable for me.
One character appeared out of the blue and disappeared almost as rapidly. I returned from a trip to the buffet to discover that a rather unkempt looking man - complete with long hair and frazzled greying beard - had availed himself of the seat right accross from mine. He had brought with him an enormous plate piled high with what looked like every possible food from the buffet, and an empty glass. He didn't aknowledge me right away, but instead sat down and pulled out of his backback a glass bottle of some sort of clear liquid. For some reason I didn't think it was water. He proceeded to fill his glass with this unlabeled substance, then holding the glass in one hand he fixed me with an intense stare over the top of his spectacles and asked in heavily accented English:
"Where are you from?"
"The U.S." I replied rather timorously, poking at my watermelon slices like a little girl.
"Oh!" He turned his face away and held up his empty hand, "Then I cannot speak to you!"
Oh dear, I thought, I've offended him just by the sheer act of being American. But I had to ask.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't speak English." He replied in perfect English.
I wasn't sure whether or not to laugh at this response so I mustered a polite smile.
"Cheers!" He said, with a less than cheerful face and holding the glass of miscellaneous liquid up in the air in my general direction. Then he downed the entire glass in one gulp.
He smacked his lips, satisfied, then explained: "Bulgarian whiskey."
My reaction was a tie between admiration and alarm at having just witnessed someone swallowing that much hard liquor so easily and so early (it was noon). He then began the monumental job of working his way through his huge pile of food. He ate the entire plate,and having satisfied his T-Rex sized apetite, stood up, then asked me: "Do you smoke?" and before I could respond, answered his own question with: "Of course you don't smoke, you're American." (I'm unsure of what being American has to do with not smoking.) He then disappeared as quickly as he had come.
Still reeling from the encounter, and in search of some icecream to calm me down, I headed towards the dessert section where I was approached by a beautiful young woman.
"You work for the company as well, don't you?" She asked me.
"Yes! What do you teach?" I asked, even though I could tell that she was most likely a dancer.
"I teach dance." She smiled. "When I first came to Singapore, I was completely alone." She confided in me as we stood by pastry counter. "I was depressed for two months and I didn't know anyone."
I nodded sympathetically.
"I will give you my phone number," she continued, "I don't want the same thing to happen to you."
This sentence startled me. I didn't imagine that her story was going to end that way, I believed I was just lending her a listening ear. But she had known me less than five minutes and was already concerned for me. Back at her table, she passed her phone number to me, then as I got up to leave she gave me a glance filled with such sweet compassion that it nearly broke my heart. I saw the pain reflected from her memories of her first difficult months away from home, but even worse, I saw the reflection of how I seemed to her. I've lived far away from my childhood home for so long, that I've stopped thinking about the fact that I'm alone, or that I'm so many miles away. But in that look I saw that I looked like a young woman, who ocean's away from everything and everyone she knew, was completely and utterly alone in a strange place. For the first time since I arrived, I was enveloped in a feeling of overwhelming despair. I've been an expat my entire life and I'll probably be one until the day I die. But in that moment I realized that it takes an expat to truly understand and empathize with another. And she was the first one who, in all my travels, had managed to do that with a single glance.

Singapore: A Brave New World

"Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised." Romans 4:20

My first impression of Singapore is that it is a place of order. The streets are washed, heavy fines in the 1,000 of dollars are imposed for anything from littering to riding one's bicycle on the sidewalk, and chaos is more than a foreign term here - it simply does not exist. I didn't know enough of the poliitics of Singapore to realize why; my new roommate took me out to lunch upon my arrival and explained to me in candid tones that politics are not generally discussed by locals. "It's a communist government under the guise of a democracy." he explained. The next day, I discovered this to be relatively true when I found myself riding in a car with a new aquaintance. "I'm going to tell you something that I probably shouldn't say," she said in hushed tones, once we were safely in the vehicle, "some people say it is worse than communism here, but if you don't do anything wrong then you will be okay." I somehow sensed this was a warning. "Well it seems to make everything very efficient." I told her politely. "Yes, but you can never run away." This reply caused an omnious sense of dread to settle on me. I had already lived through something similar to this many years ago, I felt unsure of my desire and ability to do it again - no matter how wealthy, globalized, and orderly this country may seem. I feel that perhaps a healthy dose of the unruly chaos of Mexico will be necessary when my vacation time rolls around; this will help counteract this strange sense that I've fallen into a twilight world of mass mind control.
Perhaps it is incorrect to complain: I can see myself living a nice, orderly life here. My apartment lies a two minutes walk from the beach so now every day I can start it off with a morning jog along the coast while smelling the sweet, pungent scent of the greenery and watching the sun rise over the Singapore Strait. I will go to work on an efficient transportation system that is never late. I will never have to go without anything that I need as it is all available in shops that are right at my fingertips. And all of this terrifies me. I came for the adventure and seem to have ended up with the life of a pampered expat. All those years of repeating my mother's advice of: "Hope for the best, expect the worst." is so utterly useless here that I am left confused. I don't believe there is anything that could have prepared me for this. I've fallen into Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" and I'm not quite sure what to do about it. Even I have to laugh at myself when I realize that my biggest complaint is that I'm too comfortable, but being too comfortable makes me uncomfortable in return. I will have to grow accustomed to this feeling - it may persist for the next year or so.