After the Rain: A Queer Rupturing of Ideology
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We had finished having dinner that evening and were walking from the hawker centre to the car, my mother, my two younger sisters and I. We may even have been hand-in-hand, the four of us, because otherwise I don’t know how all these years later I still remember us striding in tandem when my youngest sister yanked us back. She was four years-old or so. “Snail!” she pointed to the ground, wet from the rain earlier. My parents sometimes defaulted to Changi Village Hawker Centre for dinner when my mother did not have time to cook. It was a quick ten-minute drive from where we lived, on the eastern end of the city-state, and there was a stall that sold Hong Kong-style beef hor fun with bitter gourd and black beans fried to a satisfying wok hei, which literally translates to “breath of the wok,” the ultimate barometer of a good stir-fried dish for the Cantonese and us Chinese in the Straits. Rain is a given in a tropical island such as Singapore, although in my mind’s eye Changi was simply a wet area, or maybe I had spent one too many an evening there cycling for shelter during a sudden storm. Anyone who sets foot in Singapore enters through Changi, via the eponymous airport. But this quadrant of the diamond-shaped island is also host to its oldest and largest prison, military bases, and industrial complexes both related and unrelated to the aviation business. This meant ample road widths and scarce traffic after working hours, perfect for cycling aimlessly, airplanes searing through the sky above.
After rainfall, the already humid air thickens; you’d be drenched in moisture even if you managed to find shelter. I looked down at the reddish-tiled ground, laden with black mold and fresh rainwater. Under the streetlamps I saw the snail, the common variety of garden snail that emerges everywhere from virtually nowhere after the rain. We all saw it, slimily trailing itself to who-knows-where. The thing about creatures like snails is that without things such as legs they move steplessly, as if by the sheer force of being they are able to will the movement of their entire body as one, shell inclusive. Perpetual motion that escapes our fleeting human eye. And then my middle sister, standing next to the youngest one, lifted her knee up high and in one fell swoop stomped on the little creature, now but a gelatinous, calcium-speckled smear. If we had been holding hands at that point I probably let go. I kept walking, more shocked than I was heartbroken for the life of the snail. Shocked that she saw a living thing and her impulse was simply to make it un-living. The youngest sister, somewhere amongst us four, began to cry inconsolably.
Our parents gave not much of a response to this violent murder, at least not one that I remember. I was around the age of nine and I don’t think any of us brought this incident up ever since.
**
The first time my middle sister lashed out at my partner and I, she did so with a nastiness that was deliberate even more than it was profane. That morning, it had been about a couple of months since we had met. I wanted to call my sisters on FaceTime to break the news.
I should have known better, but I was overzealous, and giddily in love. Proud, even. They were both barely out of university (they are less than two years apart, and I am four years older than the middle one) and therefore yet to be thrown into the vortex of life, but all that had somehow slipped past me as I gleefully announced I had met someone, he whom I wished to spend every minute with. More crucially, I slid past the fact that we barely ever conversed on a personal level. Living in different countries, our correspondence could be assumed to be familial at its most intimate—held almost entirely on a Whatsapp group chat in which meal/pet/vacation photos were traded, prudent reminders that we each had our own lives, our own circles of relationships that were not up for tête-à-têtes, just FYI. To convey the joy in my heart, the miracle I couldn’t believe was occurring to me, would have anyways been like attempting to catch the wind with a fishing net.
“I’m staying the summer with him, in LA,” I said, to give some context to where I was calling from. I don’t remember who said what first—there wasn’t much said. The screen was split in two, each sister in their own little rectangle masking their mouths with their hands, as if inhaling what I was saying would be death. When they caught their breaths they exhaled monosyllabic utterances like what, no, he?
“... Yeah, wanna say hi?” I proposed, sheepishly. I knew telling them that I was in love with a man was going to throw them off. What happened to being a lesbian, they’d question, even without saying those words. They didn’t—they didn’t say those words, but the questioning, as discharged from the mouth of my middle sister, was as brazen as balls of fire to be put out, not answered.
“Guys fucking suck, what the hell, Dai?” she snapped fiercely. Dai is short for dai-ga-jie, Cantonese for big sister. English was the language mainly spoken in our household, with short phrases and half-sentences of Mandarin and Cantonese circulating only in verbatim, to address one another, to refer to food items, or specific actions like laying the dining table with newspapers in place of tablecloths (pou-bou-zi). One day, my youngest sister called out to me by saying “Dai,” which cuts off at simply, “big.” It is a strange name to go by, but I had never heard of anyone else being called this, so I was silently pleased with it.
Back on the Facetime call—it had been a long time since we had a sisterly fight, although that was not what this was. I forgot how rude she could be, how viciously she could sting. Plus, as far as I knew, she had only ever been involved with guys. “Hello,” I said, about to state the obvious, “you have a boyfriend.”
“He’s pansexual,” she retorted. I heard the words, for sure, her voice now raised even more than before. I knew what the term meant, served with such righteousness and flagrancy. He’s pansexual, so he’s given a pass, or rather, she’s given herself a pass—for what? To love whomever she chooses? Can’t I have the same grace?
But perhaps so apparent, and so hollow was the contradiction that it triggered an irrational, volcanic rage in the one who surfaced it. By the time my partner walked into the frame of our half-conversation she was ready to pour that torrent of infernal lava, yelling threats and profanities at him. My youngest sister, bless her, improvised a desperate stream of non-word vowels stretched out to drown out, unsuccessfully, the barrage of hostility from one sister to another.
I put the phone down and saw blood and tears surge into my partner’s face. I saw that it was the first time in his life, as weathered and storied as it had been by the time of our crossing, that someone had encroached on him with a tempestuousness so direct and malicious, all while surpassing any and all information or contact with him. I want to say that he turned to look at me, my face which was in that moment nothing but a thin, fragile crust smelt over a whirring of thoughts and excuses and apologies, but really he looked into the air between us, saying nothing. He walked into the bathroom and took a shower. Showers are after all for rinsing the filth off.
In the days that passed, we spoke little of the encounter, for how much had already been said.
“She did once kill a snail out of nothing,” I said to my partner one day some months later, remembering. I recounted the memory, the rain, the hawker centre, my youngest sister’s cry. As so happens when a person hears her own voice reifying a memory into the present—an image in the archive no longer—I began to see my middle sister only in that light, under the streetlamps, in the cloying post-rain air, the quick, muted crackling of the snail’s shell being crushed underneath her foot.
**
On a late spring afternoon a few months prior, I was having lunch with a coworker outside lunch hour. We were seated by the floor-to-ceiling glass window overlooking the Bosphorus, up close and glamorous. The entire restaurant was empty, save for our table. On it, a spread of mezzes on white palm-sized plates overlaid on white tablecloth; rakı cloudied up our ice-filled glasses.
He noticed something about me that was different, a changed state, he opined, that either I had found God, or I had fallen in love. Both possibilities were equally preposterous: I was never shy about my antagonism towards monotheism (he did say “God,” not spirituality or religion or higher power, etc.), and I was in a relationship going on its seventh year. That I did not balk at his deductive wisdom, so confidently doled out, was a surprise to myself. And yet, I knew his wisdom was well-placed, that I was indeed different. I felt the truth in my throat, and conscious that it would choke me if I did not let it float out, I told him that I had exchanged messages and a few calls, for work, with one of the artists we had recently been introduced to, a musician, but in our conversations I felt a real and profound connection, a friendship. Eyes softened, he replied with a smile, that’s it.
The series of decisions I took after that day remains a prism; I have since told many versions of it and all of them are true. There simply was not one way for me to look at it and reconcile the miracle with the resolute, pure intuition that it was the only path for me. I felt clarified, and I suppose I was walking around with an airyness that I certainly did not possess before. This air beneath my feet that buoyed me into believing I could restart my life, put an end to the relationship that I was in, fly to New York for a conference and see some friends—including the musician, for the first time—and decide to abandon the return flight before having departed. I think I have always known myself to be capable of grand, sudden gestures such as leaving an entire world I had made for myself. At least I liked to believe I was capable of it, only stopping short of creating the opportunity for this character to appear. And now she did, she appeared and then she left.
Why do they call it falling in love? Where is the accident, who trips? Is someone wounded? No matter; what I lived was not love, or at least not merely it. The musician and I met a week after I got to New York. Everything that would happen from that moment on would have already taken place in a latent world that we had invented, secret and pure. This not-merely-love did not consume me, only nourished and expanded, so I became this thing that was boundless and fluid, invulnerable.
It could be, however, that metaphors were formulated towards an eventual synchronicity to reality, and perhaps this was precisely what give metaphors their inherent power, for I did experience some kind of a fall. I began to hear things said to me in a language I didn’t recall being spoken to before. The language of possession, or rather that dispossessed me of my capacity for self-determination. Friends, mostly but not exclusively the male ones, questioned whether I was being scammed or tricked or manipulated, was this man to be trusted?—paternalistic skepticism that felt disingenuous, often dispensed through sophomoric rapid-fire interrogations. During a dinner with my family, a friend I knew from high school happened to be in town, so I invited him to join, to my quick regret. In my partner’s and my presence he wasted no time to ask, turning to my father: “So, what is it like to have another man in the house?”
Another piercing commentary came from a close friend who had never treated my past relationships with women as anything but ordinary, even unexceptional. We were catching up at a café having not seen each other for over a year or so—she lived in Paris and I was scattered wherever I was—and we wanted to know all about the new romances that had occurred to the other in all this missed time. After one particularly long drag of the cigarette she shot me a gaze in a way that held my own captive, and I blanked out. The clinks in the café’s patio continued clinking and the chatter continued chattering while she said something about being in my shoes, if she were me. Something about owing the ex a confession, about going both ways, after all this time. By then I had had enough of friends and family using my current relationship to channel their previously-veiled presumptions about my sexuality, or anyone’s sexuality for that matter. Was I bisexual after all? Pansexual, just like my sister’s boyfriend? Take it from me—a person in love simply is.
As much as I avoided re-labelling myself, entering a relationship with someone of the opposite gender, a man, had exposed me to facets of heteronormativity that I began to realize I did not transcend as a lesbian, only eluded. I was not winning the game, as I had thought before; I was a phantom player kicking around the field on which a whole other game was taking place. My outward queerness—my undercut, my girlfriend, my thumb ring—was an invisibility cape that let me glide through the thorns and embers of patriarchy. Homophobia was all I had to worry about, and although I grew up in ultra-conservative Singapore, I came out around the time the Obama administration legalized same-sex marriage. LGBT was expanding to include QIA+, and the playbook for allyship was being written down to specific gestures for those who had the heart to practice them. My sister was one of my fiercest allies, standing by my side against death threats from conservative relatives. Naturally, I contrast it with her belligerence now, how extreme it was in its liberal rhetoric, how similar in the effect of alienation.
It may be quite unfair to return continuously to my sister’s clearly senseless attacks. Easy enough given how persistent and explicit they were, compared to the spurious if more subtle moralistic attitudes discharged by others. She also made it easy for me because of the pathological way she frames every single event she has come to know or experience through identitarian contraptions, a conversation-ending, managerial demeanor that unveiled since she moved to Australia, where she runs a BIPOC-exclusive bookstore. According to a recent interview, the business exists to “trigger middle-aged white men.” As I tried to quell her scathing voice in my head, I reproached myself for never having truly comprehended the tokenizing strategy of liberal allyship, which begins with self-victimization when deployed by a person from “marginalized communities,” whether BIPOC or LGBTQ+. I had to be in the line of fire to see the substitution of real, human experience with the rhetoric of representation as pseudo-progressive identitarian politics’ most powerful weapon. When questioned of the right to assault my freedom to love, she brandished her boyfriend’s pansexuality to assert her liberal superiority, and in doing so revealed the parasitic allyship that laid inherent in her relationships—at least the relationship with me, before I deviated from my position on the queer spectrum.
There was something more to her behavior that I only understood in yet another exchange a while later. As is often the case with unresolved estrangements, looking upstream and seeing, finally, why a person behaves the way they do may do wonders in tempering the resentment, while extending its roots, making it ultimately implacable.
It was already rare, at this point, having tried our darn hardest to avoid being in the same city, for us to be enclosed within the same walls. This time, she flung an insult towards my partner’s work as a pianist, for what could he contribute apart from playing at hotel lobbies? That such a statement was so utterly superficial and irrelevant had somehow not detracted from the vileness of it being said. An arsenal of so-whats and even-ifs could have been retorted, but instead, in a perfect demonstration of our naivete, my partner and I took my parents out to dinner the following evening. With him by my side, I was ready for battle, to usurp the narrative and receive some corroboration that my sister had surely, by now, gone too far. We were not yet halfway through the meal and I was already reduced to a tearful mess. My father faced my partner with the kind of stare that magically and simultaneously evades eye contact. He shrugged, “she was right to comment like that, what you do is something I don’t understand.” By which he meant to say, he saw no value in my partner’s work—our work—worth defending.
“My outward queerness—my undercut, my girlfriend, my thumb ring—was an invisibility cape that let me glide through the thorns and embers of patriarchy.”
**
On top of being a cosmopolitan, glitzy finance hub-slash-tax haven, Singapore’s climate is evergreen, ever-reliable, ever-safe—it is scorching hot, but too humid for wildfires; it is an island, but far enough from faultlines to be at risk of tsunamis; thunderstorms here never mature into typhoons. Yet even the most imperceptible expatriate would be firmly recalibrated by the visceral intensity of its Southeast Asian geography once encountered with some of the world’s spiciest cuisines while sweat drips down the back of the knees. Bred between a profound existential security and the wild accents of its equatorial islandhood, the median Singaporean exudes a unique and hardy pragmatism. Generation after generation, we don’t bat an eyelid at mosquitoes, monitor lizards and monkeys. One would be hard-pressed to find a Singaporean who employs things such as screen doors to keep insects out—they’re a part of the food chain, one eating another and altogether self-regulated in their inhabitation. If you don’t bother us, we won’t bother you, but rattle a disturbance and see it swatted away into dust: the status quo must prevail.
I write during the parliamentary election in Singapore, which comes every five years and spans nine days of campaigning. It would have been just over by the time this essay is published. It was an election held on some of the most severely gerrymandered grounds in recent history, one of the countless methods employed to suppress opposition parties in a technocracy whose ruling elite has become increasingly sheltered from accountability and vulnerable to corruption. While global media outlets, fuelled by information obtained from local state-controlled media, ran headlines and opening sentences like Singapore ruling party wins election in landslide, or, In the end, it was not even close, no landslide was ever at risk in the election’s premise. Since the country gained independence six decades ago, only one political party has ever ruled in parliament. The neo-Confucian values embedded in the state’s founding, employed to materialize otherworldly economic progress, perpetuate steadily into the present through the ruling party’s bloodline. Ethos around the units and hierarchies that form society such as filial piety, national unity, meritocracy, and credentialism are enforced through schooling life and a state-controlled information ecosystem. Innately woven into the social fabric of the populace is a deference to authority and a gross distaste for any instance of dissent. This is a parliamentary democracy where holding up a blank cardboard in public constitutes a violation of the Public Order Act, which prohibits any semblance of protest. Naturally, to deride the value of the arts is one of the most emblematic comments that a Singaporean could make.
As it were, with little breathing room for opposition sentiment and without a right to protest, elections occupy the entirety of a citizen’s political participation and awareness. The ruling party’s campaign this election revolved around giving the newly-appointed prime minister a “strong mandate” to pass legislation, playing steadily into the status quo-orthodoxy it has nurtured across generations. Reduced to a matter of administrative efficiency, even elections have become depoliticized. In an era of deepening polarization of political opinions on a global scale, the Overton Window serves as a helpful model for describing the range of ideas that are politically acceptable to a mainstream population. In Singapore, however, the Overton window is not experienced as shifts toward the left or the right, as it typically measures, but a dimension more fundamental and predeterministic: its verticality. Ideas and truths, however kaleidoscopic, are received only through the aperture beneath velvet curtains descending closer and closer to the ground. It is a flattening of what politics means: where even the governance of one’s state is actively depoliticized, the emptying of awareness with regard to ideological overheads is both a prerequisite and an outcome. No wonder, then, that especially those who have the opportunity to move elsewhere are quick to adopt positions of allyship and marginalization based on superficial identity markers—these are positions as hollow as their experience and understanding of politics.
I came out to my family in the middle of my undergraduate studies. Of course, I was certain of my own inclinations much earlier, at around the age of seventeen. I joined football clubs outside school to insert myself in the company of twenty-something year-old lesbians and tomboys, whose gayness seemed so grown-up, grown into, in contrast to my own, then merely a fantasy. When I sat my parents down to tell them that I had a girlfriend a few years later, my father blamed the media. He believed the movies I watched and the books I had been given the liberty to read so freely had impressed upon me an identity that their daughter could not truly have been. I have been spared the I told you so’s, now that I have unwittingly fulfilled my parents’ conservative prophecy about ultimately ending up with a man. But just as only I could have been certain of my own desires, any semblance of shame in never once finding fault with solipsistic allyship can be constructively imposed only by myself. No book made me gayer than I already was. What I confess to is being once captured by utopian liberalism and its mandate of subverting the normative as a moral imperative, no matter how thin the shell of performativity.
“Can queerness be free from being an identity? What else could it be? ”
Can queerness be free from being an identity? What else could it be? Could I un-identify myself from queerness, not in some kind of un-queering, but to free my queerness from its pre-determination as an identity, to be able to determine myself in a more amorphous sense? Could that be queering in the absolute hardest? Paraphrased simply, those were some of the questions that spurred the theories of José Esteban Munõz. And if queerness were a politics of desire, what I desire from my own is far from a badge of honor, a pride-brimmed scar, a cultural weapon to detract from fascist operations, as in the case of Israel’s pinkwashing of its genocidal crimes. Trapped in the oscillating strokes of politics between the unambiguous far-right and neoliberal identitarianism, to experience life with immediacy and honesty feels increasingly out of reach. If I had taken it for granted before, I now innately understand queerness as a point of political awareness and radicalization: the open-ended endeavor of evaluating the beliefs and ideologies that root us, whether those values may be ones given by others or taught to ourselves.
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