To Be or Not to Be, can liddat?

Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Derek Walcott, A Far Cry from Africa

My first language was Cantonese. The Chinese dialect sounds like home to me: percussion of steps on our HDB flat’s tiled floor; chatter of adults conversing in the background; sizzle of dinner in the wok. When I started primary school, however, I put it aside to fit in because “Cantonese is not cool, everybody speaks English”. As such the extent of my Cantonese vocabulary is embarrassingly limited to bad pronunciations of 我係食飯 (I want to eat) and 我想要瞓覺 (I want to sleep).

I feel like the least Singaporean Singaporean in Singapore. I stumble ordering caifan, forget the meaning of buay tahan. My mother tongue is a ghost in my throat, phantom limbs of a childhood whose entire world was a country younger than my father. I stick out like a sore thumb culturally, though that’s a post for another time.

But here in San Francisco, I’ve never felt more Singaporean. Even more than the time when, as a foreign student at Cornell, my American literature professor interrogated me for cheating because I didn’t “talk like [I] wrote”. My expensive degree did not fix my bad grammar, I find it hard to speak up about my feelings, and it boggles my mind that people fkn sue the government. It takes effort to enunciate American-ly but I remember how my freshman roommate could not understand me when I first started college, so I soldier on.

I have an accent at home (yet “home”, I say) and I have an accent here. Camouflaged in flat a’s and appropriate podcasts, how many planks can I swap out before I Ship of Theseus myself?

Somehow, I have become defined by the distance between me and from the rest. If identity is what keeps “me” discrete and distinct from “you”, then there a “not-me” is required for “me” to exist. This isn’t a new story; we fashion enemies out of differences to justify the -ism de jour. I think the people who most fervently fixate on an Other to rail against are the ones who are most desperate for a sense of belonging. In a way, I have Othered myself, and sometimes I wonder what part of me is artifice.

But what is identity? In Personal Identity, Derek Parfit challenges this idea of a discrete self. He asks: if your brain is split and each hemisphere is transplanted (successfully) into separate bodies, do “you” survive as one, both, or neither? And if you re-merge them, is that the same “you” on the other side? He argues that identity is not one-to-one, but a continuum shaped by connectedness between psychological states.

If I say, “It will not be me, but one of my future selves,” I do not imply that I will be that future self. He is one of my later selves, and I am one of his earlier selves. There is no underlying person who we both are.

It reminds me of The Other, where Borges writes about meeting his younger self, and how they are strangers to each other.

Beneath our conversation, the conversation of two men of miscellaneous readings and diverse tastes, I realized that we would not find common ground. We were too different, yet too alike…Each of us was almost a caricature of the other.

The point is that my name is Legion, for we are many. As Amartya Sen wrote in Identity and Violence, it is the collection of un-MECE identities that makes us. The great violence of our age is “miniaturization” by collapsing people into a single dimension (emphasis mine):

…the main hope of harmony in our troubled world lies in the plurality of our identities, which cut across each other and work against sharp divisions around one single hardened line of vehement division that allegedly cannot be resisted. Our shared humanity gets savagely challenged when our differences are narrowed into one devised system of uniquely powerful categorization….

I was talking to a dear friend who also started life with a different language, in her case Hindi (and she is actually fluent in it, unlike my Chinese). She was sharing how she was “bossier” in Hindi, and it reminded me of studies that showed bilinguals may use different parts of their brain based on the language: Dylman & Zakrisson (2022) saw Swedish speakers responding to Big-5 personality test differently when they answered in Swedish or English; Chen & Bond (2010) found Hong Kong Chinese-English bilinguals also show different cultural inclinations depending on the language they were using.

Bergson similarly argues that identity cannot be encapsulated by a snapshot in time. Our identities lie in our durée, the lived experience of time as opposed to an exogenous force. It is a “temporal heterogeneity, in which ‘several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, gradually gain a richer content’”. The past, present, and future are all part of the whole.

So, maybe we are like dissipative structures. It is precisely this flow of states, this persistence of chaos, that sustains the irrational miracle that is us above thermal equilibrium. It’s more than pithy growth mindset quotes, it’s the idea that growth and creative development are fundamental features of consciousness itself.

I am a relatively median lifeform, while you are extreme, all-engulfing madness….You are a violent and irrepressible miracle. The vacuum of cosmos and the stars burning in it are afraid of you.
The Phasmid in Disco Elysium

Dissipative structures require both input and output of energy to maintain its organization. Maybe the way I can reconcile the heap of paradoxes that make me me is by learning how to give. It is not just change, it is not just consumption, but creation that builds who we are.

It is in the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings … The fact that man is capable of action means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each man is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes into the world
Hannah Arendt

There is one more phrase I can still eke out in Cantonese: 我愛你. I love you. Maybe it’s kind of poetic that my natal vocabulary is confined to these very human needs. Eat. Sleep. Love. Maybe that is enough for it to be “authentically” me.

I have lately been obsessed with EPIC: The Musical, a musical rendition of Odysseus’ journey home from the war of Troy. (Fkn 10/10 recommend to listen) Odysseus kills and betrays in his quest to return home. When he finally reunites with his wife Penelope, he is ashamed that he is no longer the man she knew. Penelope however tells him: “I will fall in love with you over and over again / I don’t care how, where, or when / No matter how long it’s been, you’re mine / Don’t tell me you’re not the same person / You’re always my husband.”

Come, love. make me better than I was
Come teach me a kinder way to say my own name
Come knowing I, like everyone, have had my own blood on my hands
Come help me to a gentler truth
Andrea Gibson, Good Light

As much as identity is something that only I can have the final say on, I don’t believe in building in isolation. I am grateful to be surrounded by people who let me be very me. Who have seen all the messy, ugly, painful skeletons and still take me for who I am - was - and will be. No matter what language I speak (or don’t). Here’s a shoutout to my husband, Jose, who has seen the worst of me, and for some crazy reason still fights for me through it all. He believes in me more than I believe in myself and considers me a better person than I am, and because of him I am slowly starting to believe it too.

“Learn to love yourself?” What does that mean? How are we supposed to find something good about ourselves? The whole reason we hate ourselves… is because we can only see the parts we hate. So forcing ourselves to find “good points” feels hollow, like we’re making things up. It’s not like that. That’s not how it works. I think that it’s only when someone says they love you that you’re able to start loving yourself. I think when someone accepts you, that’s when you start feeling like you can forgive yourself a little and start to love yourself.
Fruits Basket (anime adaptation)

So my existential homelessness is my canvas. I belong nowhere, and therefore can belong anywhere. Liddat also can lah.

You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace, This is Water