Isolation and connection in a wired world

A few hours after I bought my first computer in 1994, I wanted to throw it off my balcony.

I came around eventually and learned to love the damn thing. In fact, I became a bit of a tech geek, if a lightweight one. But I was still held back by the instinct I had on that night in 1994 – that this technology was opening the floodgates on my privacy, and would paradoxically make me feel more isolated while increasing my contact with the world.

The first I'd heard of the internet in earnest was one morning in the last week of December, 1993. Woken by my radio-alarm, the host of CBC Radio's Early Edition was doing some segment on the year's most overused words and phrases. Number one on that list struck me as odd: "information superhighway". If this eight-syllable mouthful had been so overused, why had I never heard it? After all, I worked at the CBC, and the chatter of the AM network was yammering at my desk all day.

At work, even in the pre-internet days, IBM units were a staple on every desk. Word processing on DOS-based green-on-black screens is a faint memory, but we did have what we called e-mail. At the time, it was an internal system that CBC offices used for sending scheduling requests to other locations, connected by the broadcaster's satellite network. 

In those days I swore I'd never let a computer into my home. They epitomized the office. The hideous bulk of a monitor, keyboard, printer and CPU was, to me, just an impractical, impersonal and very expensive typewriter. I wanted these things in my apartment just as much as I desired filing cabinets and fluorescent lighting in my living room.

There was a moment when computers really started changing not just the landscape of the office, but people's perceptions and behaviour. That moment was Windows 3.1. Before Windows, the desktop computer was merely a tool. An imposing one, sure. One that began to define an era. But it didn't change how we thought about work itself or the people we did business with. 

Then one day, the little nerds from IT were sent through the building to install Windows on every computer. They had good reason; they could foresee the future, but they did a lousy job explaining it to us. All Windows did for me was take away some straightforward DOS commands and simple programs and turn them into something unnecessarily complicated. Although I came to love Windows over time, in those first few days it was disorienting and alien.

Here's what was different: Windows changed our mental and visual landscape. I would walk into an office to discuss a matter (or waste time) with a colleague and find myself overly distracted by the hypnotic laser show of the screensaver. It was creepy and unnecessarily ubiquitous. In every office, every control room, every corner, I found myself surrounded by flying windows, starfields and colourful geometric lines wrapping themselves into Escher-like eternity. It was agitating. Why couldn't the screens just go blank?

Then there were the games. Everyone was playing solitaire at work. Pre-Windows, if anyone had brought in a deck of cards and started playing games at their desks, it would have been considered antisocial at best, a firing offence at worst. The way Windows made slacking off acceptable (and officially sanctioned; management did nothing to wipe the games off the hard drives) was disturbing. Eventually I had my own vice: Minesweeper. It started as an occasional break and became an addiction. I asked our IT guy to remove the games from my computer for the sake of my productivity. He checked with my boss, Judy, who came to me and said that I shouldn't be mucking about with the integrity of the corporate hardware. So the games stayed. No one was the least bit bothered that I admitted to playing video games instead of working. Oddly, I was considered peculiar for trying to do something about it.

Then there was this "information superhighway" thing that was fast becoming the talk of the town. The media, thankfully, soon dropped the polysyllabic superlative and just started calling it the internet.

The first time I saw the gears of the internet cranking in action was at a little apartment-warming party in a friend-of-a-friend's West End pad. At some point in the evening, a giggling little group formed around the Marc's Compaq. Oh god, I thought to myself, he's got one of those useless computers. Showoff. He probably just uses it to make shopping lists and impress friends by printing out letters on his dot-matrix. I was my usual cynical self ... until I saw what they were doing.

The gang were logged into the Rainbow BBS, a local bulletin-board service that local gay men would dial into to chat. Although this was the Windows 3.1 era, the dial-up BBS was still a DOS-based white-on-blue screen. This was also before scanners were commonplace, and years before the first digital camera. It was a novelty to actually have a digitized photo on a hard drive at that time; impressive were those who did have a photo of themselves to share (if they could figure out how to send them via DOS commands). So this early chatroom was not even a window, but basic text typed on a screen, sent to another user by typing in a command:

Everyone was hovering over Marc as he sat perched at his Compaq. Those behind him shouted commands while captivated by the monochrome list of nicknames:

"Send TwinkBuddy a message!" ... "Find out where he is!" … "Tell him to come over!" …. "Ask what he looks like." 

I had no use for a computer in my home – until it became a tool for meeting guys. My new custom-built 486 with 420 megabyte hard-drive and 8 megs of RAM was on my desk in short order.

Within minutes of hooking it all up, I'd phoned the Rainbow BBS and bought credits, which would tick down at a penny per minute. I dialled in, listened to the beeps and moans of my internal modem for the first time, and there I was. Although a BBS was not the internet per se, the Rainbow BBS offered a limited internet portal on its menu with primitive access to newsgroups and such. No web browser at this stage, but I did have my first email address.

I had numerous chats going that night, and I have a clear memory of the little blips my sound card emanated every time a new line of chat appeared. I have no recollection of what we all typed to each other. Probably just general small talk as we were all likely enraptured by this newfound ability to connect with other strangers from our home desktops.

When I finally mustered the resolve to break my hours-long engagement with the blue screen and go to bed, a sense of dread overcame me. What just happened in my apartment was alien and bizarre. One moment I had several people in my home – not physically, but virtually, itself a new phenomenon. Then I flick a switch and they're gone. My "guests" were never physically present, but their clatter of activity rattled through my head as I laid in bed. I didn't particularly invite them in, nor did they trespass, but I felt both a sense of violation and a sense that I did something horribly antisocial by turning them off. Who were they, these phantoms? I looked at the silhouette of my new contraption, how utilitarian and ugly the tube monitor and keyboard looked on my desk, how the computer sat there as the perfect metaphor for the way it hogged too much space in my apartment as it would in my life, eventually erasing a host of tactile experiences.

I wanted to smash the whole thing. I wanted it and all the ghosts it came with out of my home.

Despite these feelings, I embraced the technology. I taught myself HTML script and hoarded as much pirated software as I could find – MS Office, Photoshop, Adobe Professional, Cool Edit, HTML Pro (to this day, I have not paid for a single program). Suddenly I was taking on freelance work from home, building some of CBC Vancouver's first websites for a few of the radio programs I was affiliated with. A decade later, I would be a magazine editor and publisher, an occupation I never would have risen to without the technical proficiency that has served me well over the last 20 years.

But the haunting feeling from that first night with the internet has never left. While I have enthusiastically embraced many aspects of social technology, I feel more isolated and disadvantaged by a new world that bestows lopsided advantages to extroverts. Socially, people who put themselves out there on Facebook are more likely to be included in events. Those who promote and brag about themselves on Linkedin are better positioned for good jobs.

And dating has become harder. Those first lines of text I saw being typed into the internet -- in that gay hookup chat room -- seemed like a gift. No more trawling through drunks and party boys in seedy gay clubs. No more would I have to pray for a fluke encounter with someone respectable at a book store or coffee shop. But, counter-intuitively, the orgiastic menu of guys on Grindr, Manhunt, Gaydar, Fridae and Gay.com, among others, has only made the gay community more picky. Yes, a decent-looking and relatively intelligent guy has just clicked you a wink, but why settle for him when there are just so many goddamn more hot guys to pick from? Back when it was harder for gay men to meet each other, they were more thankful to connect with someone sharp, smart and loyal. Now there is the false promise of the Perfect 10 waiting in the next pop-up window.

I suspect the same mentality goes for the job market. Where a good job may have once garnered 10 or 20 applications from keeners who made a point of walking to a particular company and looking at the job board, nowadays HR departments are inundated with hundreds of resumes for any given position. The days of the old-fashioned follow-up call are gone. Call an HR rep nowadays and you'll hear, "How did you get this number?"

To get noticed in the wired world, whether for jobs or romance, you better know how to market yourself. There was once a day when introverts were either on equal or better footing as the extroverts, as modesty used to be equated with discretion and cooperativeness. Today, in a world where online marketing is key in a multitude of professions, being brash is no longer seen as arrogance but as confidence and knowingness. As for me, I have reluctantly given in to Linkedin, a site with no privacy controls worth mentioning. An introvert by nature, I don't care to open up a significant portion of my life history to anyone who Googles my name. I'm not one of those who care to be found by the girl who sat beside me in 9th-grade Math. As a desperate job-hunter, though, it seems a necessity. But even so, my profile probably does me a disservice. A prospective employer will be able to jump to a host of conclusions when they discover that I have far fewer connections than most, and my resume is instantly comparable to a multitude of others that make me look like an underachiever by contrast. 

This new paradigm makes it easier for narcissists to thrive, both socially and in the job market, and this new norm (set mostly by Facebook) makes a certain level of narcissistic behaviour – a level that would have been repellent pre-internet – feel normal to those who aren't self-centred by nature.

I'm not completely down on Facebook. The biggest change I've noticed in my own life is the number of people I'm able to maintain friendships with. Of course, not all 130 people on my Facebook are "near and dear", but in the pre-internet days we'd rarely have meaningful exchanges with acquaintances. Today, my acquaintances and I know more about each other than normally possible, and on occasion I'm surprised by the fleeting connections we make. One time in Singapore I made an online gripe about how often I had to move because of landlords selling their flats right after I moved in. Someone I met briefly at a party a few months earlier alerted me (via Facebook) to a vacancy at his friend's apartment, and from there close friendships formed with my new landlords. Other times, people I have not seen in years have made insightful comments about things I post, or I've become aware of interesting points of view from their own status updates. In all, there are more people in my life who I'm glad to know. Pre-internet, these types of acquaintances would vanish permanently from our lives, having made no impact.

So I'm not completely alienated by technology. The bad comes with the good. But where technology has improved our lives, it's also lowered our standards. There was a time in the 1980s and 1990s when digital technology was seen as leading us toward perfection. Compact discs gave us "perfect" sound quality to replace the fragile sounds of the vinyl LP, DVDs allowed us to construct our own home theatres, and we waited with great anticipation for high-def TV to give us that perfect cinema experience in our living rooms.

Today, despite all our great innovations, everyone seems content to be entertained by feebly-encoded MP3s, crappy phone cameras without proper light meters, low-res movie downloads, and watching sitcoms on YouTube while hunched over a desk. Phone conversations frequently consist of, "Can you hear me now? Let me call you back. Sorry, dropped call." The half-second time lag in mobile phone calls results in repeated talking over one another and confusion as to who speaks next. And then there's Skype, which renders most conversations useless. "You're all distorted, I can't hear you. Now the picture's frozen. Are you there? Let me call you back." Such heights of inferiority would have been objectionable 20 years ago, but somehow Microsoft, Apple and Google have made it all quite palatable. 

We've also become accustomed to a certain amount of invasiveness. When I signed up on Linkedin, it "suggested" I make contact with a list of people that included individuals I hadn't been in touch with for several years -- people I had actually forgotten about. How did Linkedin know that I knew these people? Did it access my email without my consent? If so, why didn't it "suggest" people who I'd had more recent contact with? On Facebook, I find I have occasional access to strangers' photos, even though they're marked as "friends only"; makes me wonder who's looking at my private albums. But I've learned to roll with it and just shrug, because I'm too exhausted to get upset over every weird and creepy breach that I face on the net. The alternative is to unplug and go off the grid completely.

This is why, about four years after assimilating the rest of society, the smartphone is something I have not bought into. For all of the benefits served up by iPhones and Androids, I get a sinking feeling that they're re-wiring our brains even further to make shorter attention spans and lower standards even more satisfactory. Even without a smartphone, I've already felt how technology has changed the way my own mind functions. There have been times when reading a book or magazine, I come across a word I don't know and there's a brief moment of perplexity while my brain tries to Google the Oxford dictionary. I've also found myself on my way to job interviews without having written down the exact address or directions, subconsciously feeling like I can Google-Map it along the way. I could just give in and get one of the damn things, but every time I pick up an iPhone it feels like a homing device for the Borg. 

But being a smartphone refusnik only adds to my sense of isolation, confirming a pattern that started with that first night in 1994 when I used the internet for the first time – a cycle of heightened connection with the world followed by a greater sense of remoteness. I can contact friends all around the world by email, Facebook, Linkedin, MSN, Skype, G-chat and a phone with both text and talk capabilities, and yet I feel behind the times because everyone's moved on to Whatsapp and Viber. Tourists stop me in the street and ask for a photo; they hand me an iPhone with no buttons, and I don't know what to do with the thing. There was a time when we made fun of old people who couldn't program the clocks on their VCRs. Now I look at what everyone's doing on their iPhones and I just see a big flashing 12:00.

There is absolutely no doubt that the tech innovations of the last decade have permanently changed the way the way we function, communicate and connect. What I lament about the new paradigm is that it's starting to cement what should be passing fads into the permanent groundwork of our culture. There is no earthly reason why I need to let the world know that I'm at Starbucks, and then post an Instagram photo of my latte on Facebook to prove it. But not joining the rest of the world in doing it – not even having the ability to do it – makes me feel like the luddite I thought I'd never be.

You Can Go Home Again (*with conditions)

"He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out -- through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused. Each thing he learned was so simple and obvious, once he grasped it, that he wondered why he had not always known it."

– Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again, 1940

“You can’t go home again.” The first of many times that I heard that particular phrase spoken to me, I had been walking through the backstreets of Shanghai with my editor. I’d been in China only a few weeks and it was my first time working in a foreign country. I had been doing a magazine internship as a bit of a lark, also hoping it would look good on my CV back in Vancouver.

I hadn’t invested anything significant for this journey. I held my apartment back home, and I was taking a leave of absence from my job, so that was waiting for me too. But according to my editor, as he enquired about my visa status and talked about my future in Shanghai, I couldn’t go home again. Really?

Although I was familiar with this little cliché, I obviously didn’t comprehend its deeper connotations. In the most superficial way, I took it to mean something along the lines of: The more time you spend away from home, the deeper your roots become in another place. You’ve made long-term friends, invested time in a job, maybe own a business or a home, or have a family. You don’t just walk away from that.

What I didn’t get was that the adage came from a 1940 Thomas Wolfe novel with a more profound subtext. I would only begin to identify with its meaning a few years later.

But at this time, the job offer for a senior editorial position was serious, and I had no real understanding how much the offer – regardless of whether or not I accepted it –  would affect my ability to adjust to life back home thereafter.

I had set about this little overseas jaunt with some triviality – a “holiday-plus.” Most people doing these types of internships did so with long-term ambitions. I was just looking for some adventure to distract me from some mid-life anxieties.

To my disadvantage, though, I approached this exploit as a detached outsider, like the existentialist of an Albert Camus story, believing it possible to experience extraordinary things and not be changed by them. I considered the job offer, but I couldn’t move away from Vancouver; mostly because my mother was entering the last stage of her life, but also because I didn’t want my life to be too affected by the enchanting things I had intentionally laid in front of me. To others, such as my editor (and those who witnessed similar patterns in my subsequent years in Asia), it may have looked like I was creating opportunity only to scoff at it, as if somehow my life was already special enough. The reality, though, to pull another quote from the Wolfe novel: “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

I was trying to avoid what happened to my brother when he went to Tokyo in the 1980s to teach English. Initially hoping to pay off his student debt in short order and nothing more, five years later he returned to Canada (with a wife), couldn’t get a decent career off the ground, and returned to Japan pursue work that paid him his worth, eventually becoming a tenured university professor. One more gamble back to Canada a few years on (this time with kids), and his age and over-qualifications became barriers to finding work that would sustain his family. Back to Japan he went, for good.

So I knew better than to take work in a foreign city and get stuck. You plant roots, get settled into a certain life, and before you know it … “You can’t go home again.”

As my editor mouthed those words, I thought, "It's only been two months. Come on, are you serious?"

How little I knew.

By the time I reported back to my government job in Vancouver, so much had changed. The long version of that story involves union reps and a re-written job description that was not to my liking. I was reduced from case management (the part the union didn’t like) to answering phones and filing. The clients I served now thought of me as “not a team player” for my refusal/inability to perform the job as they were used to, so conflict ensued. And I was moved to the reception desk as an amelioration.

What I left behind was the opportunity to be a senior editor in Shanghai; what I returned to was a reception job. Even if my job hadn't changed, it would have been difficult to remain at that banal desk until retirement knowing what I abandoned in Shanghai. 

When you create new opportunity for yourself, you can’t walk away from it and return to the same point where you left. The opportunity you ignore becomes a void, and like a black hole that alters the universe around it, that void changes the reality of the world you return to.

Within short time, I quit the government job and left Vancouver for Singapore, a city I adored from previous visits. As much as that city agreed with me, I also fell in love with the feeling of self-reinvention. Here is where I was going to cast off my demons and construct a new life on my own terms. If the declined job offer in Shanghai had haunted me, then this was my chance for a do-over. Not just a chance to work abroad on my own terms, but to one day return to Vancouver right and proper with exceptional work experience and colourful stories.

In other words, I hadn’t learned my lesson. The mistake wasn't going abroad, but thinking that some kind of normal return was possible. If I had to see something a thousand times to see it once, well, this was the second time out of a thousand.

After finding some degree of success in Singapore, I returned home, lured by my infatuation with the memory of the life once lived and the obsession of finding it once again. This time, having no apartment of my own, I crashed with a friend and continued living out of a suitcase for a few months while I looked for jobs that existed only in the haze of reminiscence. It wasn’t that I didn’t recognize my city so much, as that I didn’t recognize myself, the person I had become, in this city. I chalked up my troubles to a bad economy and perhaps not having spent enough time abroad. So I went back to Singapore, baited again by memory of the life I had and the fantasy of what life could be. I intended to stay several years. I lasted ten months. To complicate matters, I believed that a short stay in another country would buffer my memories of the two homes and exhaust my desire for worldly adventures. So there was a three-month study period in Taipei. Now I had three places that felt like home, all of them homes I “could not go back” to each time I left.

The significance of the Wolfe novel was starting to sink in. The story's protagonist is a writer from a small town who leaves his backwater to find fame as an acclaimed author, moving through exotic and unreserved social circles in New York, Paris and Berlin. Longing for normal life once again, he returns to his picket-fence hometown in America, only to find himself despised by his neighbours for his barely disguised portrayal of their lives in his fiction, and unable to find a sense of belonging in his birthplace after having re-invented himself as a man of the world.

The penny dropped. “You Can’t Go Home Again” is not merely about getting stuck in a place far from home. To quote from the book: “You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." At its essence, the novel is an elucidation of what we in contemporary society call “reverse culture shock”. Most damning, Wikipedia suggests “the phrase is sometimes spoken to mean that you can’t return to your place of origin without being deemed a failure.”

My friends told me that I was courageous to live abroad, but the real courage comes in returning home to a place that has shrunk in perspective to your growth, and may force you to deny the experiences that shaped you into a better person. I found this to be quite literal when employment agencies told me to take my overseas experience off my CV, as it made me look either overqualified or irrelevant; if this is how it goes, why did I leave, why did I come back?

But as much as I’d like to see myself as a better, stronger person for having found new lives in foreign countries, there are aspects of the odyssey that held an unwanted mirror up to my faults and failings. Having been back home for over a year, alternating between looking for work and avoiding looking for work, I can’t help but think of all I could have done with the past 16 months. Not many people have the opportunity to take a year or more off work. Those who fantasize about such freedom imagine all the wonderful things they’d achieve, all the hobbies and dreams they’d pursue.

I look back and think of the stories I could have written, the articles I could have freelanced, the business I could have started, the courses I could have enrolled in, or how I could have just not come home at all and enjoyed the success I found in whatever given place. But my failure to fill this time with anything meaningful has revealed me to be a person of much less ambition and creativity than I was overseas. Either my time abroad made me into a larger person that no longer has a place back home, or perhaps I was always too small a person to survive away from home. There's a case to made for either leaving and never returning, or never leaving home in the first place. It’s a harsh insight, but one that makes me feel that, for this particular thing, I have now seen it a thousand times, and now in its entirety.

This isn’t the home I left. Whether I stay here or go abroad once again, I have to mourn the loss of the home that once was and move forward – whether it's here or elsewhere – to a new place and a new life, uncoloured by nostalgia and expectations. 

Courage or Cowardice? Why Some People Leave Home

Written in March 2009, while I was living in Singapore. My thoughts here are still germane to my life as I ponder whether to leave Canada again (and permanently) for a more sustainable life abroad. What takes more courage -- to start life anew among a foreign culture, or to make the hard choices and sacrifices demanded by my home country to stay here?

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I have been reading a book written by a Brit who's been living in China the past 15 years or so. He founded That's Shanghai and That's Beijing magazines, was locked out of his business by the Chinese government, lost his fortune, was banned from publishing in the country, and today runs a restaurant in the remote mountain village of Moganshan.

There is a passage near the end of his book that rings true for me:

"I am often asked what am I doing here, why did I come to China in the first place. It is a standard question from friends in the UK. Long-term China hands who know something of my story ask me the more awkward one: Why are you *still* here? Good questions. Why leave home, friends, family, the familiar environment and lifestyle that brought you up, that your education prepared you for, and take off to live in an alien country and culture? And China of all places, a particularly alien country and culture that outsiders have been struggling to understand and adapt to without success for centuries? In the UK, people say how brave I am. You are the brave ones, I should be saying. You had the guts to stay at home, to make a life there and make something out of it. It takes far more courage to compete for jobs, pay for a house and mortgage, save for your retirement, deal with awkward relatives, and participate in a democracy. You are far braver than I am. I'm escaping all that, dodging my responsibilities, fleeing a life that I thought I couldn't cope with. In fact, I am a coward. That's why I'm in China."

Mark Kitto, from China Cuckoo (North American title is Chasing China)

That passage stirred some feelings. On the one hand, I examine my strong temptation to return to Vancouver now, and I don't see anything courageous about it. I think it would be a mistake, but it feels like the easy choice.

On the other hand, I can understand how "staying home" would have been courageous too. In some ways, landing in Singapore and finding a good career-type job was easy. Staying put in Vancouver, in a job I hated, one that would have made me a typist and file clerk until retirement, would have been more challenging than fleeing to another country.

I skipped university altogether and took the short-term gain of earning money for those four years instead of racking up student debt. It gave me a great jump-start at saving money and living independently through my twenties, but I paid the price in my thirties when my degree-holding peers bypassed me in the queue for promotions. To get that career-job at this stage of life would have entailed going back to school for four years for my bachelor's degree (but then, who would hire a 43-year-old grad) or starting my own business. Instead, I fled to Singapore. And if things didn't work out here, there's always China. As I learned in Shanghai two years ago, anybody who speaks English and has a bit of moxie can do anything in China.

So, lately I have been thinking about courage and wondering if I have enough of it to do what's right for me. At the moment, life is feeling incredibly difficult -- difficult to make friends, difficult to find satisfaction with my job, difficult to settle in one apartment for more than 6 months (I will be moving in June, the fifth time in 18 months due to finicky landlords), difficult to see what's in my future three months from now -- so staying in Singapore feels like the courageous choice. But something tells me that I'm luckier than I realise. So, here I will try to stay.

Linguistic bullying: How we assert cultural superiority through our use of English

How many times have we looked down upon Americans because they drop the u from favour and colour, or reverse the re in centre and metre, not to mention their complete bastardization of manoeuvre and cheque. In my formative years, it was common for English teachers to take an occasional swipe at Americans for their corruption of our mother tongue, to ensure that we proper Canadians adhered to our British roots and not be influenced by the degradation of our language as perpetrated by the US media.

Interestingly, though, the same teachers who smugly admonished the Americans for their labors and theaters also blithely ignored the UK spellings of pedeatrics, aeroplane, tyre, ageing, travelling – not to mention all those -ise suffixes that unwittingly became -ize. So much for our proud British linguistic heritage. Seems the Americans got some things right, but that would be very un-Canadian to admit.

In Singapore, I found myself on the opposite end of the linguistic taunting.

In one of my first editing gigs, I found our writers were consistently writing "speak to" or "talk to" rather than "speak with" or "talk with". The introduction of an interview would read something like, "I sat down with the artist over coffee to talk to him about his work," or "I spoke to the British High Commissioner about his new posting."

Now, there’s nothing egregiously wrong with speak to. In many cases it can be interchangeable with speak with. In these specific cases, though, I often changed to to with because speak with implies a dialogue, while speak to implies one person doing most of the talking, usually in admonishment.

My senior editor noticed my changes and had a talk to me about it. "I’ve noticed you keep changing 'speak to' to 'speak with'. I don't understand why."

I gave my explanation. And I assured her that if she didn’t want me to make those changes in her articles, if she said that it was her personal style, I would have been fine with it. It’s not the kind of matter that the average reader would notice, anyway; editors are far more sensitive to tone.

But it went one huge step further. "The British never say speak with or talk with. You Canadians have been too influenced by those lazy Americans."

Now, wait a minute. Someone just asserted some kind of cultural superiority here and just disparaged two other nationalities in the process.

This wasn't the first time I experienced something like this in one of my overseas offices. Here I was in British-influenced Singapore, dealing with British-educated South African editors -- basically facing the prestige of British English as fixed upon three continents -- and, well, I, the puny, Ahmercunized Canadian was trampled and shushed pretty damn quick in any debate over language usage.

"Seriously?" I shouldn’t have challenged her, but I was dumbfounded by what I was hearing. "Why would the Brits never say they spoke with somebody? How can that possibly be incorrect?" Perhaps it could be confused with the concept of speaking with a characteristic – "He spoke with confidence." Then again, you can walk with a person and walk with confidence at the same time, so...

No clear explanation emerged. Her only retort was, “It would make any British person bristle to hear that.” And thus, speak with was banished from our magazine, permanently.

I thought this might have been the peculiar wont of this particular editor, but no. Friends of mine who were educated by the British in Singapore and China, I discovered, were taught the same nonsensical rule, all in the name of the Brits holding a monopoly on proper English; anyone who speaks differently surely must have been influenced by a lesser culture. (And to digress, the British habit of referring to a sports team, musical group or corporation in plural – “Microsoft are a large company” – is another pet peeve of mine. It’s the kind of adulteration I’d expect from, well, Americans.)

When my editor informed me of this apparently age-old rule of Most Proper British English, I just had to look it up for myself. Apparently, though, from my research, the British authors of some of the English language’s finest literature couldn't agree less:

Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Edwin Drood: I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in full openness I ought to have said when you first talked with me on this subject.

The Old Curiosity Shop: “You are better?” said the child, stopping to speak with him.

William Shakespeare

Troilus and Cressida: We come to speak with him; and you shall not sin.

Coriolanus: Men. I am an officer of state, and come to speak with Coriolanus.

Twelfth Night: I told him you were sick; he takes on him to understand so much, and therefore comes to speak with you.

Oscar Wilde, Salome

SALOME: What a strange voice. I would speak with him.

FIRST SOLDIER. I fear it may not be, Princess. The Tetrarch does not suffer any one to speak with him. He has even forbidden the high priest to speak with him.

SALOME: I desire to speak with him.

Christopher Marlowe

Faustus: I’ll speak with him now, or I’ll break his glass windows about his ears.

Emily Bronte

Shirley: I talked with the other ladies as well as I could, but still I looked at her.

The Professor: But whether she read to me, or talked with me; whether she teased…

Agatha Christie

The Mysterious Mr. Quin: “It is such a long time since I have talked with anyone…”

Death on the Nile: “Will you come and speak with Mr. Doyle, please, Monsieur Poirot...”

P.D. James

The Lighthouse: Dalgliesh said, “I shall, of course, need to speak with everyone individually, apart from meeting them all in the library.”

Innocent Blood: It was time he took a day off, time too that he walked and talked with another human being.

D.H. Lawrence

Women in Love: Halliday went out into the corridor to speak with him.

Sons and Lovers: My brother will be awfully pleased to talk with you.

The Story of Marraige: and that night he talked with Frieda for a long time

Harold Pinter

The Homecoming: where she had met Kyogo Moriya for the first time and talked with him

All I can conclude is that someone at some point in time self-invented a new rule and called it British just so that expatriates could go forth into the world with yet one more example of how every other nation gets English wrong.

But I don’t mean to pound on the Brits. As I pointed out earlier, Canadians can be just as guilty of this habit. When you look deeper into the origins of these linguistic rules, the root is not always in the culture, but in organizations (such as influential school boards and publishers) that have had one or two people enforce their own preference as an in-house rule that then filters through the culture at large.

This article from the New York Times gives one of the best demonstrations of just how this happens: Beware of Grammarians Who Rule by Whim (NYT, Dec 2008)

Singapore: It's All Good News

I wrote this in March, 2009, for what I intended as the first post in a blog about Singapore life. I didn't start the blog because I realized that much of what I had to say about Singapore was in this disparaging vein, and I didn't feel like pissing off my friends, my employer, or the ministry that granted my work permit (this is the kind of writing that finds foreigners suddenly not getting their visas renewed for unexplained reasons). I could have posted it anonymously, but given how much I knocked others for being critics without faces or guts, I didn't want to be one myself. In the end, I succumbed to the same self-censorship that I lambasted in this piece. In retrospect, I wish I had done more writing like this and posted it while in Singapore, but an additional disincentive was some kind of intellectual anaesthetic in the city's air that made me too docile and content. There are, of course, lots of happy topics to blog about in Singapore, but they'd been covered to death by expats. I didn't want to be the 4,009th amateur to blog about food, sunshine, and shopping malls.

Singapore: It's All Good News

A populace that allows itself to be too tightly controlled finds itself drained of creative significance.

Despite having worked in the Singapore media market for almost two years, I still start my day reading the Canadian news. The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail are my first daily ports of call. Vancouver's Georgia Straight is still my "local" paper. I also frequently hit The Guardian and CNN. Sometimes I watch CBC's The National online. Never do I pick up a paper in Singapore. Sure, The Straits Times is usually lying around the office, but once I've scanned the headlines, I've consumed all I need to know for the day about my adopted home.

Why? Singapore is an ostensibly free country with an ostensibly free press. Compared with media owned and controlled by authoritarian states -- China's for example -- the major papers of Singapore have the gloss and texture of the most informative American or European periodical. But Singapore's major papers and TV networks are, ultimately, owned and controlled, not without interference, by the government. Unlike in China, the media here are not required to submit their works to government censors before publication or broadcast. Anyone is free to publish whatever they wish, so long as they are willing to suffer the repercussions when the government or the courts are offended. It is then that publishing licenses are known to be suspended or withdrawn, or writers put at risk of demotions or terminations, with causes never specified. Fear of the government's wrath guarantees an uncritical press offering a daily string of "good news" headlines and one-sided stories. Newspapers from neighbouring Malaysia are banned to protect the delicate population from being exposed to potential criticism of Singapore's undertakings.

My first job in Singapore was with a current affairs periodical that was relatively new to the market, a blend of The New Yorker and GQ with a dash of The Economist. Such a publication had been rare up to now, for reasons that are as much political as cultural. Analysis and opinion of issues related to local governance risks attracting unwanted attention from officials. On the rare occasion when that boundary is breached, citizens don't lap it up; instead they feel embarrassed for the poor sods who just put their careers on the line. When I have questioned this thinking with acquaintances, suggesting that they should be grateful for the occasional offering of free thought, they give me a gentle reminder: "You're not in the West. Respect our Asian values." In other words, it's okay to have an opinion, as long as you keep it to yourself. Though, I suspect this value is not particularly Asian, as you’d find many Japanese, Taiwanese, or Thai (to name but a few) being unafraid to take political stances.

Our magazine set about to engage Singaporeans on a broad range of subjects and heighten tolerance for open discourse. During a relaxed office party one night, I made a modest proposal to the general manager. "Wouldn't it be great," I said, "if we could get this magazine into bookstores in some other major cities -- Hong Kong, Tokyo, London, LA, New York." The idea being, if I can pick up The New Yorker or The Economist here, and if we're in their leagues, shouldn't we be available in the same cities as their readership? The GM was dismissive. "Err, you don't understand, there's no point. It's not our market." I pressed the argument that it could be vital to establish our title as a leading voice on affairs in Asia-Pacific, given the breadth of regional issues we covered. Alas, I was "too idealistic."

But, I learned, Singapore has no voice on its own affairs, let alone the world's -- and it doesn't want one. As I carefully observed past editions of the monthly, it became apparent that they had fallen into the trap that the government set for all local media: Print only flattering stories about Singapore, don't comment too much on the local government, and emphasize the discord and instability of surrounding Southeast Asian countries. The content tended to portray Singapore's neighbours as third-world backwaters run by crackpots. The intent was not to make Singapore look flawless in comparison, but that was the result of the self-censorship. So, the GM was right after all. Our magazine fell just short of measuring up to the substance of the international magazines that inspired us. Alas, the magazine lasted about one year and the company folded.

This perversion of open dialogue is the country's greatest deficiency. The result is that Singapore, a beautiful city with one of the most livable environments you'll find anywhere, is the world's proverbial dumb blonde -- she's the seductive woman every man desires, but take her out to dinner and she has nothing intelligent to say.

The list of newspapers and media outlets that have been sued -- libel-chilled into silence -- by founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew and his family is exhaustive and includes the Asian Wall Street Journal, Time, The International Herald Tribune, BusinessWeek, The Financial Times and Bloomberg. The Far Eastern Economic Review was ordered to fork over damages so grand that the magazine was unable to pay and thus stopped publishing in Singapore -- an effective ban for the misdeed of quoting an opposition member. In 2004, The Economist paid damages to the prime minister and his family for using the word "nepotism" in an editorial to describe his family's record of receiving prominent government appointments. No media outlet has ever won a case overseen by Singapore's ruling-party-appointed judiciary.

It's also worth noting that the Singapore constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech and assembly has so many conditions attached as to make the freedom redundant. Any gathering of more than five people without a police-issued permit is illegal. While the authorities ignore family barbecues, beach volleyball and pro-government gatherings, permits to assemble in public have been withheld from the opposition, and small gatherings in private spaces to discuss political affairs or screen critical documentaries are often broken up when discovered.

Singapore's ambassador to the USA, Chan Heng Chee, gave this defense of Singapore's heavy-handed approach last year to The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt: "On an aircraft carrier [America], you can be playing soccer in one corner and have jets taking off in another, and the carrier remains stable. In a rowboat [Singapore], it makes sense for everyone to row in the same direction."

That metaphor must be greatly offensive to the Singaporean people, who are highly educated and have no desire to see their country destabilized. Nor do they view their homeland, one of the world's most lucrative economies, as a shoddy rowboat. The fact is, if the opposition were free to air their grievances without fear of persecution or imprisonment (the opposition leader has been jailed twice for stating that the judiciary is not independent), Singaporeans would continue to re-elect the ruling party by wide margins. The people here are proud of the accomplishments of the ruling People’s Action Party and their sound governance. They are not going to be swayed by a cantankerous opposition who are in no shape to govern. [2012 note: the opposition parties have become less cantankerous, more credible, and better admired since I wrote this.]

But let's assume that the Singapore government is justified in limiting its critics and forcing the local media to self-censor. What's the harm, when pretty much the entire population is well looked after and is offered a high quality of life?

What's lost when people are taught to be quiet and never question is that they lose the capacity for self-examination, a trait that bears much of the creative voice. Count the number of important filmmakers and novelists who have emerged from China, for instance. Even that country, with its repressive, dictatorial government, has bred an intellectual class responsible for internationally renowned works of cinema and literature. Jia Zhangke has been called "the most interesting filmmaker around" by the venerable critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, and acclaimed American director Martin Scorcese says that Jia has "redifined cinema." Lou Ye, despite being officially banned from filmmaking, continues to ply his trade and recently won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes for his Spring Fever. Zhang Yimou is known worldwide for great films such as Raise the Red Lantern and dozens more. Other great films by Chinese-born directors include Yi Yi and The Blue Kite, the latter being a critical portrait of family life during China's transition to Communism, a theme that required the film to be smuggled out of China to screen at festivals. Then there is the prolific Chen Kaige, best known for Farewell My Concubine.

Chinese novelists with works published worldwide are numerous, but let me mention two: Eileen Chang, who wrote Lust, Caution (which became a celebrated film by director Ang Lee), and Ma Jian, author of the recent Beijing Coma, a biting look into Chinese politics and the Tiananmen Square massacre.

All of the above-mentioned works are available in the West and have been reviewed by the world's most discerning critics.

And then there are the internationally recognized painters of the Philippines, whose works are often politically charged. By contrast, Singapore bans politically themed art, which only stifles its relevance on the world stage.

Singapore's novelists, filmmakers and other artists are talented and numerous. But I would challenge any professional critic or festival-goer in the West to name just one. That is not to say the works produced in Singapore are not good, just that virtually none has warranted international recognition. (The "small" population of 4.6 million cannot be a factor; Paris has 2.2 million people and no one would doubt that city's global creative influence.)

When you look at the artists mentioned above, here is the difference: They prove the maxim that the personal is political. Even for the Chinese, who are certainly discouraged against speaking their minds, often with force, they somehow find the courage to do so, and in the process, like Filipino painters and other political artists, tell the world something relevant about their lives and their nation. Singaporeans, on the other hand, are too content to risk the comforts of their first-world standard of living. Their novels and films dutifully refrain from socio-political themes that might offend the sensibilities of their government. Many of these works have individual merit, but end up working collectively and unconsciously as propaganda. Like the local press, their appearance of being free and uncensored is just that -- an appearance -- and the result is an artistic community that does not resonate with the world outside its borders.

Not to say there are no films or other artworks that deserve recognition. Singapore Dreaming, for one, is a film that could easily stand with Yasujirô Ozu’s Tokyo Story as an incisive portrait of family life in a particular place and time. Or a more contemporary comparison could be made with Woody Allen’s Manhattan-centric Hannah and Her Sisters, as it deals with the disintegration of the hopes and cultural expectations of each family member until they are lost (and found) in a an emotional catharsis. The matters dealt with in Singapore Dreaming are unique to its inhabitants, and there’s no reason this work shouldn’t be held up as some sort of defining portrait of the nation’s heart, the same way Yi Yi and A City of Sadness are for Taiwan or To Live is for China. But why was Singapore Dreaming not screened at any of the world’s film festivals nor reviewed by any notable critic (according to release dates and reviews on IMDB)? I would hazard a guess that Singapore’s film community does not feel the hunger or need to connect with international audiences, just as the magazine I worked for saw no use going beyond its constrained borders. Singaporeans have just become so conditioned to not being recognized that when they do produce a great work of art, they have no network or institutional knowledge for finding wider distribution.

Which brings me back to why foreign media is more germane to my life. The dearth of unfettered creative expression in Singapore has left me with little sense of place to connect with. I feel an emotional and personal relationship with the nation, but not an intellectual one. When I visit Borders or Kinokuniya now, when I’m looking for some mental stimulation, I go straight for the magazines I went for at home – The New Yorker and the political pages of Vanity Fair foremost among them. Local media offers nothing comparable. The only magazines that survive in this country are those dedicated to home decor, cars and fashion. 

Artists and journalists raised in an environment with this superficial level of dialogue are also likely to have nothing to say about their country -- and if they do, they keep it to themselves, which is the same as not having an opinion at all.

For the government, that's just the way they like it -- all rowing in the same direction with no destination in mind.

Expat vs. Immigrant

The following article was written at the request of Singapore's daily Today newspaper. One of their section editors contacted me in late 2010 while I had been working at ANZA, asking if I'd be interested in writing about Singapore life from an expatriate perspective. He replied: "I absolutely love the piece. Extremely well written and raising some great points." But later on he said his editor put it on hold, and after that it just died. I can't cite any proof of overt censorship, but my guess is that the paper didn't want to publish anything that would put the wealthy expat population in a bad light. The inability to have this kind of open conversation, I believe, is indicative of an overall problem in Singapore that exists between the local and expat communities. Locals resent expats for a variety of reasons – turning quaint character neighbourhoods into yuppie enclaves, increasing costs of living, using the nation for a few years of quick buck-making while leaving behind nothing but higher rents and shophouses transformed into unaffordable furniture stores. But the establishment media of Singapore seems to have a vested interest in ignoring such divisive issues, while promoting the white culture that is a vital part of bringing money and (sometimes perceived) talent to the island. I thought it was important to have an "ang moh" such as myself touch on the way white people present themselves in Singapore's expat media. Apparently Today didn't find it so vital.

Expat vs. Immigrant

There are few words that I have found as bothersome as the one that labels us whiteys in Singapore – "expat". I intend no offence to expats or those who call themselves such. It is a convenient label that I have taken to using myself on occasion, but the way the phrase is used in Singapore gives me some particular difficulty.

Prior to residing in Singapore, I had no problem with the word. I lived briefly in China and have had six months’ worth of extended stays in Tokyo over the years. In both countries I heard the word "expat" bandied about, but Westerners there also found the word interchangeable with "foreigner" or a host of other terms used to define immigrants.

Yet I wonder why it would be so derogatory to call a Caucasian "foreigner" in Singapore. I suspect there’s still a subconscious tie to the colonial days, and we as a Western community have not entirely accepted the idea that our days of owning the place – and not being foreigners – are over. As such, the word "expat" has taken on myriad connotations relating to race, status and wealth. We must ask why dark-skinned labourers from around the region are "foreign workers" but never expats.

My understanding of "expatriate" is that the emphasis is supposed to be on the "ex". It has always implied, to me, a person who has cut ties with his home country for economic, ideological, or political reasons – and, unlike most Singapore expats, with little intention of returning home. Growing up in Canada during the Vietnam War, my idea of an expatriate was a draft dodger from America who fled his country out of fear or disgust, or a Beatle or Stone who settled abroad to escape UK taxes.

During my experiences in China and Japan, most of the expatriates I met were intellectually curious types who were fed up with the lack of opportunities in their homelands, and had found a new place on the globe that was simply more compatible with their personalities. Many of them had arrived single and settled with a local spouse. In Singapore, though, expats are a more transient bunch than in other Asian countries, often arriving with a family, holding on to property back home, and returning after a few years. There seems to be nothing "ex" about the patriation of most Westerners here.

The way the word "expat" is used in Singapore exemplifies how we use language to convey power, ethnicity and influence, and this is what I find troubling. I was attuned to its usage the first time I saw Expat and Expat Living magazines on the shelves at Borders. With their cover images of affluent white people lazing on tropical beaches and lounging amidst stylish interiors, I had to wonder how these publications made local Singaporeans feel about a certain race coming to their country and demanding nothing less than a life of privilege. I debated if my discomfort was justified or if it was a hang-up I had to get over.

I do not mean to disparage those magazines. I cannot fault them for finding a profitable market and forming legitimate businesses around it. Expat Living is my former employer, and I was once published in Expat, which I found to be a source of some good investigative journalism. At the same time, what does it say about Singapore that such titles don’t exist in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Seoul, Shanghai, or Taipei? Certainly those cities have expats, too – it’s just that the word has different connotations in those places. (It may also say something that not enough of us cared for a magazine called Expat to keep it in business; it folded in January.)

On Expat magazine’s still-existing website, it uses the words "affluent", "well-heeled", and "upscale" to describe a typical expat reader. Expat Living’s advertising card says that its consumers have "high disposable incomes". I find it problematic that the Singaporean usage of "expat" makes it sound like a lifestyle choice rather than a common noun that should describe non-local workers of all incomes and races.

It would be amusing to one day find a new magazine on the racks, one with a cover showing a prosperous white couple enjoying drinks on Dempsey Hill, with a simple, neutral title that applies to us all – Immigrant. After all, that is what we call the Asians who settle in our countries. What makes us so different?