Almost the same

I’m feeling a little sick today. The flu bug nabbed me even after my arsenal of health supplements. Due to the onset of winter, my classmates have all been falling ill in batches. Catherine, the German girl who sits next to me, was sneezing and sniffing, and I must’ve caught it from her. The kangaroo has been ill, too.

This morning, I could barely crawl out of bed to make it to class. Being the kiasu student that I am, I wanted to take down all the hints from the sensei on what will come out for the final exam.

But after battling through fits of sleepiness and body aches in class, I’m finally home….and sleepless. I shovelled in some pasta for dinner and lay down snug in two duvets. The kangaroo is out with his colleague celebrating nen bou ku — a ritual when you say farewell to the past year over dinner and drinks. Friends, relatives and companies all indulge in this at this time of the year. In Tokyo, the restaurants are all booked out and the last trains are packed to the max.

Anyway, before I take a hot shower and embark on some studious cramming, I just wanted to write about my little discovery today. I buzzed an ex-colleague of mine (two jobs ago) who relocated to Stuttgart, Germany earlier this year. Just curious to see how she is and flex some of my broken Deutsch, we actually had a great chinwag.

In April she got married to a German guy whom she met six years ago who was in Singapore for a six-month internship. They kept in touch but things only got serious three or four years ago. After a marathon stretch of long distance love, they decided to close the gap.

Like me, she’s taking German lessons. She’s finding it tough looking for a job in Stuttgart because of the language barrier. “Are you ever homesick?” she asked. She’s looking forward to going home for a couple of weeks come March. She doesn’t know any Singaporeans but has two Malaysian friends. “Just make do lah,” she quipped upon revealing these newfound friends have kids and are quite “aunty”. She wistfully commented she wished she had friends to go out to dinner and have a drink or two. We compared notes on finding Asian food, how it is like making friends from scratch and we joked that we have to be housewives because we don’t even qualify to work in the nearby 7 Eleven.

This is just a small encounter but it warmed my heart on this cold, rainy evening by myself. There are women like me who seem, on the outset, to have “given it all up” for a boy in our lives. But it’s not such a big self-sacrificial gesture that is doomed in domestic boredom.

My friend in Hong Kong, whose girlfriend is moving there to be with him after five years of being in different countries, asked me once: “Did your friends and family give you a hard time about moving and quitting your job?” I replied: “Yes, most of them did.” He was like: “Don’t care about what they say. You’ve got so many years to be tied down to a proper job.” And went on to tell me about the “shit” his girlfriend went through when she took a six-month hiatus to be with him on his US stint. I doubt both of them sweated over this much at all because they had a blast travelling all over North America.

I just want to come out and say that those of us who did move countries probably made the most independent decision they could have for themselves and their relationships. I’ve encountered several people who look upon my situation in horror, doubt or worry — but it’s not! We’re discovering a new country and challenges outside our comfort zone, plus being with our favouritest person. Life may seem uncertain without a job, but aren’t they like boomerangs — they may be gone now, but they’ll come around again.

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