“When you were a child,” my mother recounted with much pride, “You could do frog jumps up a long flight of stairs in the park with no trouble, but the boys struggled.”

It was already evening by the time I arrived. People were streaming down the hill. Could the temple already be closed? This was my last chance, I knew, though also my second chance.

It’s Friday night, and I am sitting in a beautiful hotel room in Manila. The window looks out to a modernized nightscape, and I could see Shangri-la Hotel in a distance. The Conan O’Brien Show is playing on the television and the audience is laughing at a punch-line I did not catch.

Boy meets girl. Girls meets boy. Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy.

“Your family will be ruined!” exclaimed the boy’s best friend, when he confessed his love for the girl, for the first time.

Coming home to Singapore provided some reverse culture shock. As quickly as my skin grew more accustomed to the Singapore sun, my ears also gradually got used to the Singlish permeating public space. Which is to say, not very quickly.

“I’m a taxi driver in Calcutta…I’m a taxi driver in Calcutta…” my drivers’ tape deck sang out in a creepily chirpy voice, as my cab sped solo on an empty expressway to the Shanghai Pudong International Airport.