After college, I spent a year in Singapore going to graduate school for economics. I arrived there through some alchemy of not landing a job and having a family friend in my hometown’s Rotary Club—which happened to sponsor international scholarships for graduate school. I chose Singapore primarily because I built a narrative to convince the scholarship committee that pivoted around wanting to study in an Asian tiger economy. And they spoke English in Singapore. And I thought it made me sound more interesting to want to study in Asia rather than Europe.
Apart from my studies, which were rigorous compared to the standards I was accustomed to from undergrad, in Singapore I found time to see a movie every weekend and consume the entire oeuvre of George Orwell, Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O’Rourke (back when Republicans were funny), and Tom Robbins. The former was a symptom of the intense heat in Singapore (I lost 10 pounds while living there simply from walking around and sweating), which produced the instinct to cocoon oneself anywhere there was AC. The latter was a symptom that economics wasn’t my calling.*
Reflecting on how I ended up choosing that particular group of authors—Orwell, Thompson, O’Rourke, and Robbins—the connective tissue seems to be some mix of counterculture and humor and politics, all of which adds up given I was twenty-one and living in a hyper-repressed, authoritarian city-state that had recently banned The Economist for daring to publish something critical about its founding father, Lee Kuan Yew. It didn’t take much to feel rebellious in that setting, and reading that particular set of books must have made me feel, enjoyably, like I was being provocative—never mind that reading is inherently a private act.
I was reminded of my Singaporean reading odyssey recently when, thirty years after my stint in grad school there, I had occasion this year to return to Singapore twice for work. This time the reading material that accompanied me was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Neither was a deliberate choice, but with their respective themes of mental health and homosexuality, both were daring in their time. Singapore, it seems, continues to bring out the unconscious reading rebel in me.
Nostalgia thus triggered, upon return from my latest visit I checked out the audio book of Tom Robbins’ memoir, Tibetan Peach Pie. So far I’ve made it through his childhood in North Carolina and Virginia, which includes a very Robbins-esque foray into joining the literal circus. Despite having not read a certain vice-presidential candidate’s Appalachia memoir, I’m confident Robbins’ is far more entertaining.
My reading year so far has been enlivened by two other artists’ memoirs. First was Scottish poet Don Paterson’s Toy Fights: A Boyhood, in which he writes beautifully and vividly about his childhood. It reminded me of two of my other favorite authors on childhood, Elena Ferrante in My Brilliant Friend and Elizabeth Jane Howard in her Cazalet Chronicle quintet. Despite the fact that Paterson is slightly older than me and grew up in working class Dundee (I grew up in south Florida), I somehow found his memoir completely relatable, as if I had fabricated a whole alternate childhood.
Second was Australian musician Warren Ellis’ Nina Simone’s Gum, which follows the journey of said gum from Ellis’ covert collection of it after a concert in 1999, to a long period of storage wrapped in a towel in a Tower Records bag, to its eventual post-Covid display on a plinth at a museum in Denmark. It illuminates how objects have value in the meaning we create for them, which in this case engendered a chain reaction of enourmous care and attention (read more here). This is not the object fetishization of, say, the luxury watch collector, and helped me explain to myself the meaning we attach to things. There are also some striking reflections on childhood, including an unforgettable surreal vision he and his brother experienced that bookends the story.
Current plans call for my next return visit to Singapore in January of 2025. That gives me a good four months to consider my related reading plans. Whether that’s more nostalgia for youth or immersing myself in a new generation of counterculture, political writers, I’m looking forward to a good book or three to help me kill 30 hours of round-trip flying time.
*Another symptom of my ill fit with a professional life associated with the dismal science was when, during my Singapore grad school year, I went to an interview for an equity analyst position at Goldman Sachs. I recall I was outfitted, sweatily, in a Liz Claiborne navy skirt suit purchased for the occasion, and I was interviewed by a man wearing a blue shirt with French cuffs who asked me what piece of music I would be if I could be any piece of music. In a fit of panic induced by the fact that I had spent the last few months listening on repeat to the then-brand-new Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (sample song title: Fuck and Run), I chose Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Whether it was on the basis of choosing the most popular music used in advertising or some other poorly answered question, I didn’t get the job. I still find men who wear French cuffs suspect.
