Life in Singapore: One Year In

A year of slow transitions

A year ago this week, I packed up the last remnants of our possessions in the Boston area and flew to Singapore “for good.” After about a year of pandemic-inflected upheaval, we were finally going to reach our intended steady state.

I spent the first two weeks after I landed in a hotel, which turned out to be perfect timing as we did a bit of renovation of our new home. The day I got out of the government-mandated quarantine, our mattress and a few other items we’d ordered from IKEA arrived, and we officially moved in.

Getting myself physically to Singapore was the easy part. Transitioning my life to Singapore was a gradual process that basically took the whole year.

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The first aspect that I was forced to transition was my diet. In the last few years of living in the US, I had relied heavily on meal replacement Soylent drinks for my breakfasts and lunches. But like many food products, Soylent just isn’t available in Singapore, and the comparable products, which I tried, are far inferior. So I returned to my pre-Soylent breakfasts of moderately sweet cereals, eventually settling on a default of Alpen brand muesli, and ate leftovers from dinner for lunches as I had when staying with Grace’s parents.

On occasion, Grace and I will eat tasty bread we pick up from a variety of bakeries, but this actually caused some tension early on. We both needed to lose the weight we’d gained during the pandemic, and Grace had been so successful in the months we’d been apart that I distinctly noticed when I hugged her after I got out of quarantine. One part of her effort had been cutting out those tasty breads, and I was sad when she didn’t want to share those with me.

Fortunately, she lost the remaining weight she was planning to lose and successfullly concluded that diet. Meanwhile, I actually managed to lose about 20 pounds in my first year here without particularly trying — I think my lifestyle here is just in general a bit healthier than it had been in the States. It helps not living right next to a McDonald’s or a Chipotle.

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Our dinners have been arguably more interesting. We eat most dinners with Grace’s parents, who live just a 3 minutes’ walk away within the same estate. Early in the year, Grace’s mom would cook about 50% of the time; we would cook 20% of the time, and we would eat separately 30% of the time. In recent months, we’ve chosen to cook about twice as frequently (resulting in a 30/40/30 split) in order to continue to expand our repertoire of dishes from around the world.

Just last night, Grace made paella, the Spanish rice dish, for the first time. Other new dishes we’ve made in the past year include Moroccan chicken (aka tagine), shakshuka, jambalaya, bacon and mushroom risotto, and poached salmon with pesto. We’ve also successfully experimented with turning a bunch of our recipes vegetarian, often just replacing chicken with tofu and ground beef with Beyond Meat. These easy and in some cases even taste-improving changes both make our cooking more shareable with vegetarians and make a small difference to the causes they care about.

Grace’s parents enjoying Tater Tot Casserole, one of the dishes we started making with Beyond Meat.

Speaking of sharing, we’ve been steadily filling more and more of our weekends and occasional weekdays with having friends over. Hospitality was a big value of ours in Cambridge, and it still is today, even as the prevailing COVID regulations have limited the number of visitors we can have over, usually to 5, apart from during the Delta wave here, when it was down to just 2.

With the Omicron wave here still on the rise, those restrictions are still in place. The Singapore public wants the return to normalcy to be slow and gradual, but I do anticipate that once this wave is clearly in decline, the government will look to raising that limit. In hopeful anticipation of that day, we visited IKEA on Saturday to get some more folding chairs.

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Those COVID restrictions have definitely made this transition weird, especially socially. By the end of March, I observed that I’d lived in Singapore for a month and still hadn’t met anyone new. That was striking to me given how much of my first month in Cambridge had been focused on meeting new people.

At that point, we were still fully a part of our church, City on a Hill in Somerville, MA, joining the Sunday morning Zoom and our respective Zoom “micro groups.” This long, drawn-out process of leaving CoaH was something I never had anticipated — on previous moves, there was an instantaneous break with my church community, but this one had more endings than Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Grace had said her goodbyes in February 2020 only to rejoin a few weeks later when everthing moved to Zoom. I actually stepped up my involvement in 2020, leading a church-wide politics class and the slides team and serving on the reopening task force, where we figured out how we could safely meet during the pandemic.

So I got another chance to say goodbye physically in February 2021, but I was still integral to the slides team. I’d only just started re-forming the team, and had only just onboarded my eventual successor. I finally was able to step away from that responsibility in December, and when I left the Zoom that Sunday, all the feelings of nearly a decade as a part of that community hit.

The flipside to that transition has been getting progressively more involved with our church here, Redemption Hill Church. The timeline there is also a bit fuzzy for the same reason: We basically decided on attending RHC in March 2020, but waited to fully get involved while we remained at CoaH. In the summer of 2021, as our micro groups wrapped up, we decided to reach out to the leaders of the closest community group to us, Charles and Jeane Lee, and since then have gotten more and move involved in their CG.

Our timing also wasn’t the greatest. After visiting the Lees’ home once, the restrictions tightened and we were back to Zoom. Because they also reached out to us individually, we got to know them and their two kids pretty well, but it would take until we returned to physical gatherings — which we’re now regularly hosting — in November to really get to know most of the other members of our CG.

Some of the members of our CG at our White Elephant Gift Exchange we hosted in December 2021. From left to right: David, me and Grace, Barry, Rachel, Eleanor, and Hazel.

Another key has been our small group’s habit of getting lunch together after church every week. That had also been a CG tradition we relished at CoaH, and just having a second opportunity to spend time with people every week makes a big difference.

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In addition to the opportunity to show hospitality, one reason we choose to host CG is so I can duck away for work meetings immediately afterwards. I’m still working for Kebotix, the startup I joined in 2018 after I graduated from MIT — when the pandemic hit, our entire team went remote, and only the lab portion of our team is back in person. As we’ve adjusted to this new normal, we’ve started hiring accordingly from all over the US and Canada.

At some point in the year, I technically transitioned to working for a third party globalization company with operations in Singapore who contract me out to Kebotix, but this basically just changed how I’m paid. In terms of stock options, Kebotix also graciously allowed me to vest my remaining year-plus all at once before the transition. I’ve been thankful for their generosity and accommodation.

Working with colleagues 12-13 hours behind me has actually been not so bad. I make myself available for meetings every evening roughly from 9pm to 2am, which is currently 8am to 1pm EST (and 9am to 2pm EDT the rest of the year), and I do the rest of my work during the day here in Singapore.

This division of time has actually been a blessing as we’ve grown and my meeting schedule has filled up. By keeping nearly all of my meetings to that block of time, I’m able to focus and do my deeper work during the day.

Given this schedule, I have ended up with two options for when I sleep:

• Monophasic sleep: Sleep ~3-11am, and work in the afternoons.

• Biphasic sleep: Sleep ~3-7am, work in the morning, then sleep ~2-6pm.

Originally, I thought monophasic sleep would be my only option, but at some point in May, I found this just wasn’t working for me. I asked my micro group for prayer specifically on that subject, and just days later, happened to fall into the rhythm of biphasic sleep for the first time. I only later filled in the details to describe exactly what my body was expressing that it wanted, and that’s been my default ever since.

Whichever way I sleep, the other nice thing about this schedule is that it leaves me the time around dinner to spend with Grace and her parents. This wouldn’t be the case if I was only, say 3-10 hours earlier, like a European working for a company in the US. Moreover, I’d essentially have to be nocturnal or wake up super early if I was further east — a 16 hour time difference would make the usual 9am to 5pm into 1am to 9am. The 12-13 hour time difference seems to me like something of a local optimum that I’m happy to have fallen into.

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And we’ve fully taken advantage of that dinner time. Probably my biggest surprise of the year was how much Grace’s parents have gotten into playing nearly our entire collection of board games, from the simple to the moderately strategic.

Not every game has been a hit, but I’ve been impressed with how many have been. There are several they’ve asked to play again and again: Splendor, Lanterns: The Harvest Festival, Isle of Skye, Nertz, and above all, Ticket to Ride.

If you’re familiar with those games, you might notice a theme of set collection, which is actually how we decided to buy Splendor even though I’m not personally the biggest fan. We’ve also generally avoided games with a lot of language, particularly on hidden information like cards — just avoiding mixing up Los Angeles and Las Vegas in Ticket to Ride was a challenge for them. But beyond that, they’ve embraced a wide variety of our light strategy games, which has been a joy to see.

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Apart from my work at Kebotix, arguably the biggest part of my life in the US that I haven’t transitioned away from has been my media consumption. Immediately after my move, I put it all on pause and let the e-mails and podcast episodes accumulate. I was exhausted after the 2020 election and its aftermath and needed a break. But starting in June, I caught all the way back up and have since added even more podcasts and newsletters.

Paying attention to US national politics has been a hobby of mine ever since 2015. I had been excited to share the election season with my then-girlfriend Grace, only to look on in horror as Trump won. I realized that part of the problem had been that roughly centrist voters like me were not well-represented in national politics, and since then have strove to exert whatever such influence I could.

So the majority of my podcast and newsletter consumption has been politics-related: I get newsletters from Matt Yglesias’s Slow Boring, Josh Barro’s Very Serious, Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, Isaac Saul’s Tangle, and Michael and Melissa Wear’s Reclaiming Hope, and I listen to FiveThiryEight Politics, the AND Campaign’s Church Politics Podcast, NYT’s The Daily and The Argument, Yascha Mounck’s The Good Fight, Kmele Foster, Matt Welch and Michael Moynihan’s The Fifth Column, and several newsletters and podcasts from The Bulwark and The Dispatch.

The second biggest theme of my media consumption has been faith-related content. In addition to Reclaiming Hope, The Church Politics Podcast, and David French and Curtis Chang’s Good Faith (from The Dispatch), I also listen to Phil Vischer and Skye Jethani’s The Holy Post, Christianity Today’s Quick to Listen, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill and The Russell Moore Show, sermons from Matt Chandler’s The Village Church and RHC (two preachers preach per Sunday, so I listen to the other one), and my friend Jeff Liou’s Theology &, and read Tish Harrison Warren’s NYT newsletter and the top stories from RELEVANT.

The other two more minor themes of my media consumption are COVID-19 (Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist, Zeynep Tufekci’s Insight, and Eric Topol’s Ground Truths) and rationality (Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten, Rob Wiblin’s The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Spencer Greenberg’s ClearerThinking.org, and Julia Wise’s Otherwise).

Yes, it’s a lot, which means I have to organize it. For podcasts, I have a four-tiered priority system and almost always start at the top tier. This means that the podcasts in the third and especially fourth tier tend to accumulate. I usually finish the top three tiers every weekend, and end up just skipping some of the podcasts in the fourth tier.

For the newsletters, I filter them into a custom “Reading” label, and then read through them whenever I want to relax, such as before bed. This keeps them from interfering with my regular e-mails and puts them all in one place. I used to have separate labels for each category but that was more complicated than it was worth.

Why do I consume so much media?

Part of my answer is that now I simply enjoy it. Having experimented in the spring with tuning it all out, I found that I missed it. And part of the answer is that the state of political emergency we’ve been in since 2015 has not yet abated.

But most of it is that I had already fully converted my political commentary and discussion to the online space prior to moving to Singapore. I can still write blog posts and comment on Facebook just as easily as in the States. And to the extent that I can offer it, I hope that my experience here in Singapore can do something to dent the American parochialism I decried last week.

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Speaking of sharing Singapore with Americans, by far the highlight of 2021 came at the end of the year, when my parents, brother and sister were able to visit for a couple of weeks. I took time off and didn’t even touch a laptop for almost a week. We played games together, enjoyed local food, and saw all of the major tourist attractions here, often with discounts that Grace and her dad were able to get from work.

My family all together at Cloud Forest in Gardens by the Bay!

Having spent the pandemic growing closer to them through weekly video calls (these days often ending with some Among Us), I was especially excited to show them in person all of the parts of our new life that we had told them about. It was also our best opportunity of the year to show hospitality, as they were staying with us. We rented a bed for my parents in our exercise studio; my brother slept on our day bed in our study; and my sister slept on Grace’s bed in her parents’ apartment.

With the experience of years of family vacations, we planned to go out and do something touristy about every other day, and that turned out to be about the right pace. The rest of the time, we relaxed, ate and played games together.

At the end of their stay, I asked them what surprised them the most about Singapore. They responded that it was hotter, more humid, more crowded and cleaner than they had anticipated. Most of what they’d seen had been inside our apartment, so we were excited to show them what the outside world of Singapore was like.

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Now that I’m more or less as fully transitioned to Singapore as I’ll ever be, what does the next year hold?

First, we’re looking to get more involved in RHC. We’ve already started leading our community group bible studies while we’ve been split location-wise due to capacity restrictions and Charles/Jeane have attended the other group. We’re hoping that we can host even more people soon, and will continue to pour into our relationships there.

We’re also exploring other ways to serve through the church, such as with the youth group or kids’ ministry. The process has been slow, partly because of the pandemic and partly for unrelated coincidental reasons, but we’re hoping to get involved there soon.

We’re planning on starting up a regular board game group as soon as the restrictions ease. We have the space to host and miss the chance to mix together different groups of people we know like we would in Boston. Now that they’re familiar with most of our collection, Grace’s parents would fit right in there.

And again, once those restrictions ease, I’m also hoping to get back into pickup ultimate frisbee. I heard from a friend about a pickup group that was still meeting regularly for 4 on 4 in early 2021, but never got a chance to check them out before the restrictions tightened in the Delta wave. As you can tell, a lot of my hopes are waiting on the Omicron wave to crest, so I’ve gotten back into checking the case numbers multiple times a week.

And finally, I’m hoping to travel again. Working remotely, I can easily extend my visits wherever I can find a place to stay. My parents are already excited about the prospect of taking Grace to Yellowstone some time this summer after her make-up graduation ceremony at MIT in late May.

My first year here in Singapore has been filled with joy, and it’s only looking up from here.