Graduation entails a strange blurring of worlds I never thought I would meet. Essentially, I've lived two lives, and I'm sure most people at university have gone through this; mine just seemed a slightly more extreme case than most. Life at home, life at uni. It used to be that these two lives were separated by a distance of 3 continents, some fairly large quantities of water, 7 or 8 time zones and an enormous cymbal cacophony of clashing cultures. These seemingly insurmountable barriers crumbled like delicious flaky pastry on an apricot danish a week before my graduation ceremony. By which I don't mean the earth opened up and deposited Singapore on the outskirts of York. I mean my family came to visit. | " My mum's eyes fell on my lip piercing - which I had somehow neglected to mention before" | |
First time in 3 years, that... I was still in the midst of frantic room-tidying when there was a rapping on the front door, at least a clear half-hour before my door had any business being rapped. I opened the door and there my dear parents stood, with my little brother (he's 18, really, but he's still our wee kid to me) kicking pebbles about the driveway. My mum's eyes fell on my lip piercing (which I had somehow neglected to mention before) and there might have been a minor crisis had I not thrown my arms out and given a great joyous shout of family reunion. There's a time and place for sentimentality, and averting minor family crises lend themselves very well to the circumstances. Singapore is a thoroughly modern country that just happens to really like its traditional Asian values. It's very common for one's daughters to attend internationally prestigious universities, less common for them to emerge with multiple facial piercings and a part-time bar job in town. I know I'm not alone in feeling a certain peculiar bridging sensation when family comes to visit, I've heard it from plenty of other students, but I just know I drew the shortest straw on this one. Over lunch (in town along New Street, where I worked), after ordering, my mum said in puzzlement, "You sound like them". Which is somewhat true; I just hadn't thought about it in a while. In fact, somewhere in my first term, I somehow lost the sense of being an international student. Once, in a late night conversation about the demographics of the university population, my mate Rhiannon dreamily remarked that she didn't actually know any international students. There were only two of us in the room at that time. There's this theory (Sapir-Whorf, I believe, but I could be wrong) that the reason why language is so deeply entrenched in our mental perceptions of individuals is that people who do not speak like us are unable to conceptualise like us, and it therefore follows that people who do not think like us, are in fact not like us at all. So it happened that when I approached the bar to pay for our meal, I had a bit of a chat with Dave, my assistant manager, and then asked for the bill for my family. He looked around for a bit. "Which table's that, then, Suzie?" I paused for a bit. "The one with the Chinese family sat around it, Dave." It hadn't really occurred to me before, like it did then, but I suddenly realised just how great a sense of belonging I had in York, despite being born and bred 11 thousand kilometres (seven thousand miles) away to the southeast. This realisation came back to me repeatedly over the next few days, mostly during meals with my family, when I was obliged to observe behavioural paradigms of home-home within the physical context of abroad-home. If that sounds confusing just imagine how it was for me. No less of a fidgety situation was the graduation ceremony itself, having to sit through what my mate Pete, who'd graduated a couple of years before, described with a fearful grimace (as if you'd offered him a nice grilled cat steak) as "the most boring two hours of my life". He said "boring" in a tone which implied the drill bits of the word's verb-form and concomitant misery. It's true that all you see after the fact are lovely shiny pictures and big smiles and squinting in the sun with glasses of Pimms. Until you actually go through a graduation ceremony, you have no concept of the discomfort. The gown flaps around like mad and inflates rather horrifically in the wind. You sort of bounce around campus looking like a greyscale Violet Beauregarde, intermittently being strangled by the hood, on its determined way down your back, and clutching the mortarboard, which is more likely than not fastened in place with scalp-scratching poky hairgrips. You sit in place for a couple of hours in this get-up, not being able to move, because the slippery gown shifts all of a piece and before you know it, it's slithered halfway off your shoulder and one of the enormous and stiff shoulder pads is sticking into your neighbour, who is also undergoing a similar struggle to keep stoically stone-still. Your row is called and everyone stands up and shuffles and readjusts and pats and straightens and tugs and coughs and then you're propelled onto the stage praying and hoping you don't trip up, smile like a madman, shake someone's hand, bumble down the steps and back to your seat holding the proof of your last three years. You allow yourself to feel a tiny pinprick of momentary exultation. You turn around and wave like a kid to your family and your gown falls into complete disarray but that's all right, because you've made it. Cue shiny photos and toothy grins and squinty expressions and glasses of Pimms. Suzanne | 
