For a country that works itself to tears, Singapore knows how to have fun. The lights stay on at Clarke Quay even past midnight. The length of the riverside is decked out in bars where locals and foreigners, students and workers and the casual tourists alike drink from the night's offerings all the way to the bottom of the glass. A live band serenades the drinkers. Down the river, a red ferryboat decked out in neon lights saunters across the twinkling water.
It's nearly nearly one am, my first full hour being twenty one. The bartender, a Filipino, as always happy to meet a fellow in this foreign land, offers us another bucket of drinks and declares I cannot return to the hotel sober because it's my birthday. Bottlecaps fly off to the floor. With my numbed mind, I do my best to look like I'm listening to the discussion happening between Sean, Carlo, and the bartender. Something about salaries, and the high standards of living in Singapore. Somehow, I catch a little fact about a single bedroom apartment in the city costing as high as twelve million pesos. I smile, nod my head when I'm summoned into the conversation. Everything else is an approximation.
"That's why I came here," the bartender ends his lengthy piece. Carlo, actually my cousin on my mother's side, and who's been living and working here for more than five months now and earns more than five times my yearly income, nods in agreement. "It's all opportunities here. It's a sacrifice, but you can't gain anything if you're not willing to lose a few along the way."
And then I realize: Carlo and the bartender are convincing me and Sean to move. "There's nothing for us back home," says the bartender. "And home doesn't even want us there anyway."
In the daylight, Singapore is a rigid city. Asphalted sidewalks, towering high-rises built in concrete and glass. Boxy double-deck buses and trains. At night, drunk out of our wits, the asphalt becomes melted rubber, sinking at our every step. We're walking back from Clarke Quay to the hotel, accompanied by small cups of chocolate mudpie ice cream that we bought for four dollars apiece at a nearby 7-Eleven. The stoplights are disembodied stars, and the last buses and very few cars that still race down the road at four am are but streaks of light. Some of the skyscrapers still have their lights on, and on the very top floors I can still make out the figures of solitary men and women watching moments unfold in the city from a hundred meters up.
Carlo is talking about our itinerary. In the morning we're going to Pulau Ubin, a tiny island near the border between Malaysia and Singapore. Then in the evening we're heading to Marina Bay and Gardens By The Bay, to watch the lights shows that are must-sees for any visitor to the city. As we walk, I can feel Singapore opening itself up to me, welcoming me in every street and station that I wish to go. Sean and Carlo continue where they left off from a previous conversation, while I follow right behind them. I'm twenty one, I keep telling myself. I've so long been anxious about this moment. I'm twenty one. And all this time I've been wishing, like Toru from Norwegian Wood, if I couldn't go back to nineteen once I'm done with twenty, because people should just stay forever alternating between those two years. I'm twenty one. In my head, I'm shouting at Singapore's towering buildings and the men and women up in them: I'm twenty one! Look at me, goddamn it, I traveled across the sea to be here, because I'm twenty one! No longer boggled by the size of the world, no longer overwhelmed by the pace of time.
At the next stoplight, I race to press the button that changes the light, and Singapore paid attention.
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