A lot can change in a year

When I left home with two suitcases and my acceptance letter in hand, I was stepping into uncharted territory, uncertain waters. Would my medical checkup make it in time for my visa processing? How do I pay my tuition fees using this new Giro system? Am I the only one who’s never heard of all these university-specific acronyms before?

But now, as the sun rises in my peripheral for my early morning flight from one home to another, I know I’m not the same me who was jumping for joy opening her admission email. I’ve grown a lot since then. A lot can’t even begin to encapsulate how I’ve waltzed and stumbled through each passing month. How each phase of migration here has come with its own sets of challenges with no clear start or end, if at all. Everything has just progressed progressively. I just progressed progressively through the experiences generated and memories compounded.

Yet, I cannot help but continue to feel static. I catch myself picking at my nails the same way I have ever since I was a kid. I realize I still give up easily when working with people gets tough, practically unbearable. And most glaringly, going home makes me feel like the world has spun without me. The airport has new e-gates, the taho man doesn’t pass by my house anymore, the BreadTalk in Glorietta is gone because of renovations. The Philippines I left behind a year ago has orbited on its own axis, while I operate on another planet’s clock.

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It isn’t a bad thing. It’s just another round of reacclimating to an environment that was once as familiar as the route to school, now looking like a new MRT being built overhead. It’s just visiting my could-have-been university for a mango graham shake and hearing the coño accent I’ve traded in for another to make me more intelligible to the Singaporean aunties and uncles. It’s just coming home to a leased room and not a house. My house.

Everything has changed naturally. The natural cycle of wear and tear and replace. Nothing to be afraid of or feel apprehensive about. But like Theseus’ ship, it becomes a question of how much can be replaced until your home feels foreign, like somewhere you go to for a vacation from your day job, day house, day life.

Some days I get so busy juggling my day-to-day that I don’t miss home, and instead praise the efficient systems of another island city. I pause, backtrack, ashamed. Not because I appreciate the development of one at the expense of the other, although I should feel ashamed. But because I don’t know when “they” became “we.” When my role in the Singaporean narrative started weaving into my own Philippine one. When my idea of home had split into two distinct neighborhoods separated by a three-, sometimes four-hour flight, depending on which country’s airline I take.

On other days, missing home feels as natural as breathing. Feels more natural, even. Not just for the food or the comfort, but for the language I’ve lost fluency in, and the rocky roads that aren’t just ice cream flavors. The sari-sari store I always passed by on the drop-off and pick-up to and from school. Saturdays at Salcedo Market, getting bicho-bicho because it was my childhood favorite. Day trips to Manaoag Church, drinking green mango shakes on the way back. Being stuck in Edsa for two hours because it rained heavily and the traffic lights were overruled by human entities. My high school barkada, whom I unabashedly bother with my silly moments and endless rants, albeit over text now instead of over Bo’s coffee.

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It is all very alien. I am very alien. I am stuck in the in-betweens of an identity crisis. I admire who I am becoming, yet I mourn who I used to be. I enjoy where I am now, yet I am disappointed I do. I am missing home and missing from home. I am still Filipino, but I don’t know for how long. I feel still, but I have been distilled. Distilled from my Chinese origins, still in my Filipino home, yet transported into Singaporean society where I am perceived as the first and never the second.

Because I have neither been Filipino enough to be Filipino, nor Chinese enough to be Chinese. It is in the year I’ve been away that I have become painfully aware of my unbelonging no matter where I inhabit. What am I? What am I meant to be?

I hope my second year away from home will shed more clarity on this question. After all, I’ve changed a lot within one year—have learned and grown and worked to the bone. What more will year two have to offer?

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Kirsten “Nica” Sy, 18, is an international student at Singapore Management University navigating what home means to her.