Stanford Trip Writeup

Prologue.

It has been almost three weeks since my return from Stanford, and I have procrastinated the writing of this essay not only because I have had so much homework to do, but also because I wanted to see if my post-Stanford excitement and enthusiasm was merely temporary.

First, a digression. When I was told that I had won the book prize, I must have seemed very indifferent to the other three persons at the table with me (Mr Huse, Agnes, Shawn). For this I apologise. I grasped the significance of the full effect of the news only later, on the train back alone - it was then and only then that I realised that the award would grant me my first visit to the United States, my first trip so far away alone and without my parents (finally!), my first ever book prize, my first... among many other things. And so, on the afternoon of the 9th of May, I left for the US relatively quietly (I hadn't told many people - only my family and my classmates) feeling excited. But with excitement comes trepidation and anxiety, for excitement is anticipation of the joys of the unknown, accompanying it is its opposite, the anticipation of the fears of the unknown.

I must say that at first it was the anxiety that took hold of me, under the influence of my rather nervous mother. 'Always keep your pouch next to you, there are many thieves in America!' was one of her many warnings, along with the following:

• 'Wear your seatbelt, just in case the plane crashes!'
• 'Bring along thicker clothing, what if it snows?'
• 'Have you taken down all telephone numbers of the possible contacts we have in America? Yes, we do have contacts in America! Remember your auntie's husband's ex-colleague's son's good friend is now working over in Arizona! That's very near California, he can help you if there's an accident!'
• 'Beware of the slums!'

While I do try my best to ensure that my mother's words of caution never get to me, I did step into America feeling that it was not only the Land of the Free, but also the Land of the Muggers, the Land of the Airplane Accidents, the Land of the Evil One, and the Land of the Decadent Females.

Needless to say, my trip went relatively smoothly. I did not encounter any Radical Islamic Terrorists, or even the Devil himself. Of course, I had great hosts to tell me what to do and where not to go, so I suppose that must have been part of the reason why I had such a safe and fun trip.

As with all other things, memory here fails me - either through bias of my own, or through the inaccuracies of the human brain, or through the constant editing and re-editing which I enforce upon them. The French say souvenir, which literally means 'to come up from below' (sous, below, and venir, to come). In this short essay I attempt to bring from below the recollections that I have conveniently shelved in some obscure corner of my mind upon my arrival back in school, in favour of history essays, math tests and the SAT II. Now as I sit at my Macintosh and look at photos, I try my best to translate into words not only what I did during the trip (which is essentially denotative and can be done in less than fifty words) but also what I felt - so this is an opinion piece, with my opinions, mine alone. Sometimes the narrative becomes too opinionated (my opinions usually taking the form of facetious remarks), so bear with me as you, as well as I, struggle through the memory of my ten days.

Arrival

I touched down in the airport at around 8p.m. on the 9th of May (San Francisco time). Upon arrival I was greeted with much disdain and distrust by the airport staff, who took one look at my face (for those of you who have not seen me, I look sixteen even though I turned eighteen in March) and assumed that I was the latest Russian-child-spy-cum-extremist-terrorist and impolitely asked me why I was going to visit Stanford University ('exchange programme' being an unacceptable answer, neither was 'visiting') and, furthermore, demanded why I did not know the exact address of Stanford University (now that is really shocking). So after a great deal of explaining and pretending to be a complete idiot, the immigrations officer finally relented and accepted that I was not part of a global fanatic espionage ring and let me through.

Of course, my immediate reaction was: oh no, the Americans are still at it. And then: hey, they let that Pan-Arabic man through without even asking him anything! But then I figured that it's better to be safe than to be sorry. And the point of this whole anecdote is to show how the mind quickly jumps to cliches to justify itself.

And so to prevent myself from digressing even further: what impressed me most upon touchdown was the weather. Aside from the wonderful temperature (about 18 degrees Celsius) there was something so deliciously crisp in the air, something impalpable - so unlike Singapore, so unlike walking through the clouds of humidity and endless water. There is something in the Californian climate that does not oppress as much as the climate does at the equator. Walking becomes much easier; breathing lightens; the mind sharpens. Wonderful it was just to be there, and despite what many of her detractors say, Stanford students do have an advantage in the weather. As a student later pointed out to me, 'Weather does play an important part in school life. That's why the poor things down at Columbia are so miserable.'

I walked out of the arrival gates to meet my host, Jason Bay, and his friend, Jeremy Lee - both great guys who really tried their best to make my stay as comfortable and as enjoyable as possible - who brought me out to San Mateo for a late dinner. We went to a ramen restaurant. Immediately I was struck by the racial diversity of the area, which is, of course, fantastic. Lack of variety of any kind breeds inwardness, mistrust, and really lousy bone structure. The family next to us was half-Caucasian, half-Japanese, and their children looked like models from a Calvin Klein Kids advertisement.

After dinner we went straight back to Stanford campus. And so, sated from the warm meal, and drowsy in the car, my first memories of Stanford are dark and full of strange shapes, alluring, inviting, shadowy, eluding complete illumination by my mind's eye, and despite attempts to dredge it out of the murky ink-spilt depths, it remains there unfinished, like a half formed shape on a photograph that has been just hung up to dry.

Campus

In my jet-lagged state I spent my first day on campus attending various lectures. Or, for the sake of truth, sleeping through various lectures might be a better phrasing of the sentence. I attended an economics lecture by Lawrence Lau, who has had the dubious distinction of being quoted in Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics. I remember nothing of this lecture except this: an acquaintance of Jason, a Singaporean, waltzed into the room about fifty five minutes late, and waltzed out at the one-hour break. In the second lecture I attended, the Human Behavioural Biology lecture delivered by Professor Sapolsky, I managed to stay awake for quite a long while, almost one and a half hours, falling asleep just after Professor Sapolsky explained the significance of the extrapolation of conclusions on human behaviour from the erratic sexual genitals and sexual behaviour of the hyena.

Between the two lectures I had lunch at Wilbur Dining and came to the conclusion that food in America is much more expensive than it is in Singapore. The remaining days I spent on campus I usually lunched there, amidst the many Singaporeans who study on campus.

While enjoying their hospitality, I found myself questioning their clannishness. Certainly they weren't congregating just because I was there, I don't think. It was then that I understood what E.M. Forster portrayed in his novel A Passage to India, in which the expatriate British become even more British than the British: the Singaporeans at Stanford sort of become more Singaporean than the Singaporean, a notion reinforced by much speaking in Mandarin, Hokkien and other dialects. Yet this is completely understandable - how often we bask in the glow of homey familiarity, and how far from home they were!

Another thing from Passage which I finally understood was E.M. Forster's obsession with the sky. In the first chapter he states that the sky is so large 'because of the prostate earth'. In Stanford the earth is uninterrupted by tall buildings, as it is in Singapore. Consequently the sky seems so much bigger, so much more untempted, so much more fearsome, it is a thing of terrible beauty - how can one stand the openness, the blue unknown? And yet who does not love it, especially when it is so richly and purely blue, a blue deeper than the blue of clear seawater, punctuated by clouds of white whiter than white, and softer than powdered sugar?

Stanford in Spring is beautiful. How transcendently simple to see a field of weeds in bloom, an experience that has often been translated into the metaphysical, and yet how rarely do we see such a thing in Singapore, with her madness and her weather still.

Sky and field aside, the architecture of Stanford is breathtaking - the buildings are Italian-inspired, an amusing anachronistic misplacing - but the red-tiled roofs are so quaintly pretty, as are the ornate arches and walls, and the old fountains. It is so easy to get lost within these walls and these halls, to disappear silently within the silent expanse of the passageway leading off into mute arches, or to shout loudly but find indeed that the sound vanishes as it travels adrift along the quiet corridors...

There is much too much too much to be said about the magnificence of the Stanford campus, a point that shall not be belaboured further. Suffice to say that the pictures speak for themselves , and pictures speak ten thousand words, even more.

While not admiring the environs, I found myself avoiding assiduously the many bicycles that are found on campus. Much to my wry amusement, I discovered that an average of 12 accidents involving bikes occur daily. I did not want to become a statistic. It seems that the Californians have brought into cycling what they have already done with driving - imbue in it some sort of neo-Darwinist survival-of-the-fastest move-it-or-lose-it type of evolutionary competition. Those who are weaker are left behind, even as they lick their wounds of defeat - let alone poor me, without a bike. I felt positively mortified as bicycles whizzed and fizzed past me, barely missing me - as if there were something against pedestrians. As I was to learn the hard way (by almost colliding with overenthusiastic biker), one should never make sudden turns while walking on campus. Instead, one should walk in straight lines. If changes in direction are desired, one should not make them immediately, instead, gently alter bearings by slight gradations. Or look around for bikes and run while the coast is clear.

I sneaked into the Green Library using my host's card, and found myself amazed at the sheer amount of books they have there. Going down into the basement was like venturing into the chthonic depths of hell - shelves upon shelves of books, all black, rise to greet the visitor, illuminated only by a strange and eerie red glow. How apt and ironic indeed, that knowledge should be in such a form! I decided not to stay in the basement, and instead chose a cosy couch beside a huge ceiling-to-floor window in which to snuggle up to finish reading Coetzee's Disgrace and to peer at students walking past in the alien Californian sun, or lying down in the grass that is greener than that of home's.

Some other random lectures I attended, and to them I did not pay much attention (it is plain that I fit right in with many of the students). I disliked, unfortunately, the Asian Literature class, which annoyed me mainly on ideological terms. The teacher was certainly a nice man, and the books they were doing were interesting. What irked me was the composition of the class: mainly Asian. It strikes me as predominantly a minority thing, this labelling, as if it were a self-fulfilling prophecy. The attitude, I extrapolated from the arguments, goes as such: 'I am Asian, I am in the minority, therefore I will need to deconstruct the idea of my race and of the literature that my race has created.' This strikes me as strange: literature sorted not by merit but by category of creator (Asian, African-American, English, Gay or Lesbian, etc) diminishes its significance, and the appreciation of its significance. And the students, perhaps for the sake of living up to the traditional stereotype, seemed to be undergoing some sort of existentialist crisis: 'Why am I Asian? What does it mean to be Asian? What do these books tell me about the hermetic core of being Asian' and so on, as if being in the minority were something exotic. Even those who were not Asian joined in: 'I know that sense of alienation too! I have (insert random discrimination anecdote here)!'

In my opinion, the fact that an author is Asian (or any other race/creed/religion) changes nothing. They must still be subject to the rules of literary critique, or in poet W.H. Auden's test, how the piece of literature works, and what it reveals about the person who wrote it (not the other way around, that is, what the person is revealing, instead, what the work is about). Literature is not psychoanalysis, despite what the deconstructionists tell us.

I seem to have been hijacked by this theme.

I greatly enjoyed another lecture, this time an economics lecture on game theory. I learnt about static games of incomplete information, which looks complicated on the page but not when reasoned out. (Mathematicians like to keep it hard, otherwise they would be out of a job.) I went for this lecture with the head prefect of my secondary one year in Raffles Institution. The last time we spoke we were utter unequals, man and dog. Now we speak as equals. Has it been that long?

The best lecture of my trip was without doubt J.M. Coetzee's lecture on the incompatibility of tourism and culture. (Coetzee lectures at Stanford this coming quarter.) Being Singaporean, it was easy to identify with this theme - our very culture is built upon the uncertain sands of the Singapore Tourism Promotion Board (or have they changed the name to the Singapore Tourism Board, and, at any rate, who gives a damn?), which likes to believe that they can create tradition out of fanciful notions and a few million dollars.

It is here that I would like to stress that the merlion is not a traditional Singaporean myth. To think otherwise would be to buy into the Singapore dream - a dream of commercialised everything, where they package fake legends into a box and sell it as chocolate.

My own childhood was vivid with myth and legend, personages and ghosts. Less vivid were distant stories kept alive only by the primary school textbooks, Sang Nila Utama; Badang; the tale of why Bukit Merah is merah, red; Radin Mas. More vivid were the ones told by Malay neighbours and exchanged in school, in hushed voices: the horrific story of pontianak, a woman dead in childbirth, whose head was positioned back to front on her body, whose spirit inhabited a banana tree, who killed men and could be scared off by the breasts of a woman, a reminder of her own inadequacies. The toyol, the fiendish foetus-ghost, kept by a bomol, medicine man or witch doctor, or indeed both, to do his bidding. The hantu tetek, the breast-ghost, a variation perhaps on the pontianak, she killed by suffocating and smothering men with her tactile breasts. Or remnants of the Second World War, the idea that beautiful Sentosa was once Pulau Blakang Mati, Island of Back-Death, so named because the Japanese had invaded Singapore from the same undefended island, all her guns were pointed in the other direction, towards Malaya. The house at Kent Ridge, a colonial remnant at which supposedly many prisoners of war were killed. Or the Changi Hospital, in whose proximity I live today, in which many patients never received the treatment that they were supposed to be given, now unclean with the filth of death and decay. Even the internalised stories of my grandmother's experience of the War, the deictic deployed in the description of it made it even more real - 'there, at where Orchard road began, there my own mother, your own great-grandmother, a terrible woman she was, used to bring us to see the decapitated heads of the innocent, blackened with the rot of death'; 'I was made to rub my face in charcoal so that I would look ugly, and the Japanese men would not take me away', and so on.

The merlion does not feature at all.

And that is why I feel outraged, as no doubt Coetzee was outraged, at the commercialisation of culture, that clever but false thinking that somehow culture may be repackaged and sold by the bottle. The evidence points otherwise - why do many Singaporeans seek a better life somewhere else? Merely it is because they do not feel rooted to Singapore, and with good reason. A government cannot expect its citizens to take themselves seriously, and by themselves I refer to the cultural nation, to the chains that bind us and yoke us together, shared experience, when its citizens are taught from a young age that culture is worthless advertising trash, which may be engineered or got rid of instantly, a sort of cultural eugenics, as if the social eugenics weren't already enough.

I feel cheapened each time a merlion can-opener, or a merlion box of Belgian Chocolates, is bought, and all Singaporeans should too. It may sell better than a pontianak fountain pen, or a hantu cookie cutter, but each time one is sold we disinvest in our children's heritage, and their children's children, and so on and so forth. Myth and legend and the stories that are patrimony are rarely happily-ever-after affairs, nor are they simple parables. They are more than that, they transcend these simple definitions, and are almost always sordid affairs: history and prehistory, fact and fiction, reality and unreality merge together with too much blood and violence in one hand, and repressed sex in the other. That is why culture is important, any culture which is simplistic and uncomplicated is not much of a culture at all - and to wipe away the pontianaks, the hantus, the Sang Nila Utamas, the memory of war and its ghosts is to deny that we have ever had a culture, and to devalue, denigrate, and demean whatever it is that we share.

I managed to weasel in two minutes of speaking with Coetzee (two whole minutes! And I shall add a few more exclamation marks for good measure!!!!!!) and got his autograph, and felt inspired.

The lecture was the academic highlight of my trip there. Non-academics-wise, I did manage to get someone to drive me to the Dish, which was wonderful, to say the least. I quite nearly died, for two reasons - the first was because the weather was so beautiful, I could've just wept there beatifically. The second was that it was late by the time we got there; halfway across the route we had to take a 'shortcut'. The Singaporean who brought me there did not, unfortunately, know what this 'shortcut' entailed - cuts, wild animals, horrible grass, stones, rocks, poisonous weeds, etc. And so through the undergrowth we trekked, until a gigantic flat concrete circle rose to view.

Curious, I asked what it was. Apparently, it was a satellite, one of the larger ones around the dish, blocked off typically from anyone at all. It was a satellite at which they discovered quarks. Amazing.

How small and pathetic then does my own college seem when it declares itself to be a world-class institution! (I still quibble with the use of the word 'institution'. Marriage may be an institution, so may an asylum, or a law, or a governing body. A school is much more appropriately termed an 'institute', to term it an 'institution' merely reinforces the elitism of it all.) Here is Stanford, which, for the love of dear God himself, has a satellite dish system, a particle accelerator, which boasts amongst its alumni the great John Steinbeck himself, as well as Thom Gunn: here is a truly world-class institution.

Outside of nature, I managed to catch some shopping at the Stanford Shopping Centre, which is a great place to shop. And I love to shop. I was in the throes of shopping ecstasy, what with Macy's, Bloomingdales, GAP, Abercrombie, Banana Republic, and so many other things that we don't get in Singapore! The sales racks are fantastic, plus they're one season ahead of Singapore so there's no harm done anyway.

I also managed to cycle out to Palo Alto where I caught the Cheesecake Factory (sublime sinfulness in a single slice, not recommended for those with heart disease) and bought US$200 of books that are unavailable in Singapore, either because shipping over is too expensive to warrant the lack of a market, or because they are banned (Rushdie's Satanic Verses, a novel banned for no apparent reason, there is nothing Satanic about it, except that the Ayatollah Khomeini, a ultra-discerning man, discerned out of it Satanism and evil of the greatest kind, and Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, banned because of the cover art I think.)

Yosemite

My trip to Yosemite was almost not to be. In fact, I only learnt of the trip a mere few hours before it began. The story is somewhat complicated: my head prefect (the one who took me to the Game Theory lecture) brought me back to his dorm room, which he shares with two other Singaporeans. I mentioned in passing that I would have liked to visit Yosemite National Park, and, what unbelievable coincidence, they told me that a group of Singaporeans was going up and they were missing one person to make up ten, since someone had pulled out somehow or other. I received the call late at night, threw some clothes in a bag, and the next morning I was all set.

What a mistake that was.

No, not the going up - the throwing together some clothes in a bag. Foolishly I had not packed any warm clothing. This was to prove deathly as I manoeuvred through the melting snow (yes, snow! I'd never seen snow before.) and the chilling cold of the waterfalls.

Other than that, Yosemite was, to say the least, a breathtaking experience. I went up with a group of graduate students, who, although prone to periods of extreme jadedness and ennui, were extremely accommodating and very nice people.

In effect, the older ones took care of everything. I was left relatively free from duties. And so, I spent most of the time in the car (and believe me, there was a lot of time spent in the car: Yosemite itself is many times the size of Singapore, and the drive there took five hours) sleeping or learning Korean, thanks to a Korean graduate student and her son who were going up with us. I must say that Korean is a surprisingly gracious language: I think I have been conditioned by spy-shows which portray the Korean language as a harsh, spitting thing. I found it soft, genial, lilting, not unlike the politer forms of Japanese. I never learnt how to speak it fluently, but at least now I know my kimchi from my bulgolgi, and managed to amuse a few Koreans at the food-fest at the Takashimaya basement upon my return.

(How I love languages!)

The trip up to Yosemite was arduous, to say the least. The sun shone from the right of the car, and, since I was sitting on the right, I was asymmetrically sunburnt for the remainder of the trip, much to my irritation. Additionally, I'd never sat for so long in a car before - so thank heavens above that I was still sufficiently time-confused to sleep at any time, to the amusement and jealousy of the graduate students who had to drive.

And yet, when we crossed the boundary into Yosemite, somehow everything vanished. The air was cooler, the trees were fresher, the air crisper - as if something oppressive had quite disappeared. All that was visible were countless trees, merely beginning to reawaken from their wintry sleep, which stretched as far as could be seen. Suddenly I was reminded of a poem of Phillip Larkin's, the verse can only be appreciated by someone who has seen the regeneration of greenery: 'The trees are coming into leaf/like something almost being said...'

I was amazed at the verdant greenery. Singapore is a Garden City which thrives on weeding, not sowing. Here was a garden in which nature had been allowed to run rampant, strewing trees, fields, flowers, shrubs, bushes, bears, deer, waterfalls and mountains wherever it deigned. The roads, which wound around the contours of the earth like sycophantic serpents, were merely incidental. Here Nature was Goddess, the Alpha and the Omega, and perhaps everything in between. (How pagan I must sound!)

And yet the restorative powers of nature are undeniable. Within the first few hours I was prancing about like some sort of eager young animal, or a very small child. First stop: a semi-arduous climb to the top of a strange flattish hill in the middle of nowhere - that I tackled with amazing dexterity I never knew existed within myself. Here, a hardcore city boy had been transformed into a nature-loving tree-embracer. The promise of a view was certainly an incentive, and while the full view of Lake Tenaya never materialised before our very eyes, the climb itself was invigorating, and the weather incredibly wonderful.

That was all we had time for on the first day - after that we turned back to Wawona where we were to stay for the next two and a half days, in a quaint little chalet that seemed to have been made out of logs, but was equipped with all the trappings of modern civilisation. There was no need to rough it out. We were more than comfortable in the night.

(I wanted to leave the food out so we could tempt bears to come over, but I was severely vetoed on all counts by everyone except the boy. Spoilsports! Under no circumstances was I to leave any bait for the bear, unless the bait happened to be me.)

I woke up really early the next morning to try to catch the sunrise, but by the time I had arisen the sun was already up. So I did the next best thing - have breakfast. After eating we set out for Glacier Point, and from there we hiked all the way to Olmstead, a rocky outcrop in the middle of nowhere, literally. I watched with amusement the really intrepid adventurers who dared to walk all the way to the very edge of the stone protrusion, where they would proceed to do stunts. I tried to execute a few stunts of my own, rather unconvincingly, on the lower outcrops. No one was impressed, except, perhaps, for myself.

After Olmstead, it was back to civilisation - Curry Village this time - for lunch, an overpriced affair involving some pizza and lemonade. (How strange that I should recall this uninteresting fact - was the experience that traumatic?)

After lunch, what I consider to be the highlight of the trip to Yosemite: a hike all the way to the top of Vernal Falls, an experience if there ever was one. I don't think I've ever climbed so high in my life. Strangely enough, I never grew tired of walking uphill, something which I attribute to the low humidity and the typical Californian weather.

This has embedded itself in my immediate memory: standing beneath the bizarre rock formation that protrudes suddenly from the ground just a hundred feet from the top of the waterfall, gazing up towards the agitated froth-white edge from which the water plunges unabashed, beyond which the river does not meet the eye. From where I stand to the desired destination there are three rainbows which have been refracted out of the light by the endless amounts of water vapour churned up by the plunging stream.

And gazing on I stood there for a full five minutes, amazed at how a mere trick of the light and descending water can take on metaphysical meaning of such great and utter beauty.

By the time we came down from Vernal Falls, it was too late to venture to the other waterfalls in the vicinity. (I think we spent almost an hour up there, basking like lizards in the sun, admiring the courage of the water which dares to take the dive down hundreds of feet, at the same time assuming a series of yoga poses - thanks to a graduate student who had taken yoga and had decided to teach us a few moves.) And so the second day ended in tired contentedness, and back at the lodge I fell into the deepest, most uninterrupted sleep I have had in a long time.

The next morning was quite a mad rush - we had to pack everything up and be out by about eight in the morning. This violent ejection was followed by a visit to the Mariposa Groves where the largest trees on earth may be found. We didn't have much time and so we had to skip the trees in the more inaccessible parts of Yosemite, but at least we got to see the very largest living being alive (measured by volume), the Great Grizzly.

The end of the trip was somewhat bathetic - we went to see the extremely beautiful Bridalveil Falls (which really does resemble the back of a bridal veil, incidentally), but this did not involve any climbing or physical exertion. Eager to commemorate the last moments of my stay in Yosemite, I tempted the fates through my intrepid act of disobeying the 'DANGER! ROCKS SLIPPERY, DO NOT CLIMB' sign and scaled the first few feet of the base of the waterfall, posing for a picture, then scrambling down again, carefully: how meagrely triumphant I was, and what a way to bid goodbye.

San Francisco

By the time I got back to Stanford from Yosemite it was already late Sunday night, and I tumbled sleepily into bed after not having been able to find someone to take me up to San Francisco. Two options presented themselves - either I went by myself by Caltrain from Palo Alto Station, which was a daunting task for the unfamiliar me, or I not go at all.

I chose the latter.

And so the next morning I headed out to the Stanford Shopping Centre, hoping to comfort myself (who was then in the depths of despondency at not being able to find a convenient way to get to San Francisco) with a bit of retail therapy, which can be very therapeutic indeed. So I bought impulsively - two pairs of slippers, three T-shirts, a pair of jeans, some shorts...

But by noon I had had enough. Upset with missing out on San Francisco, I called my mother's contact (her sister's husband's ex-colleague) who lives in San Diego and asked, politely, if she could bring me out to San Francisco. No go - she had just returned from New Orleans and had many things to attend to at work.

I called my mother to complain of this unfortunate turn of events, but she was rather unsympathetic, and anyway, what could she have done from the island of sunny Singapore?

So, impetuously, I crossed the road to the Caltrain Station in Palo Alto and bought a train ticket, and two painfully slow hours later (thank goodness I had brought my books along) I arrived at Fourth and Kings lugging my gigantic bags of shopping, not knowing how to even get to the main part of the city, not having anyone at all to take me around.

But at least I was in San Francisco.

I still don't believe that I dared to do something like that, take an untried and foreign train all by myself, and up till now I am proud of myself for having navigated so well with just a small map and the directions of many helpful strangers.

My first stop was Castro (which I had been counselled against missing at the dinner), which is one of the reasons why San Francisco is so vibrant in the first place. Hopping into the J-Train at the underground station of Fourth and Kings I climbed out of the station at Castro only to be greeted by five or six gigantic rainbow flags, and a street lined with the six colours in various sizes. I had just missed the pro-gay marriage protest by a week or two; now that would have been really exciting. Otherwise Castro was a relatively tame experience (it only becomes hip and happening at night) which I found refreshing, since everyone was quite open about everything, unlike in Singapore where one is only allowed to be gay if one is rich.

From Castro I took the Muni down to Ghirardelli Square and died in chocolate heaven. I must have bought about eight thousand pieces of chocolate or so, and got a tub of hot chocolate for good measure. My heart is still reeling from the high-fat high-cholesterol shock, and I'm still running and cycling and swimming to work it off. Maybe Ghirardelli's wasn't such a good idea after all, but I suppose the sugar rush was worth it at that point in time.

Making a rational economic decision not to visit Alcatraz, from Ghirardelli's I walked down to Fisherman's Wharf, which was disgustingly touristy and therefore really artificial and boring. After buying some clam chowder I stalked off in impatience and decided what the hell, since I'm already in this tourist mood I might as well pay an exorbitant fee of three US dollars to take the tram. And I did. Standing at the back and lurching around, it was a miracle that I made it alive to Union Square.

I looked around for a while and then rushed to the desired destination: the AppleCentre at Stockton Street, Macintosh's flagship store, the largest in the world, in San Francisco. As an Mac user, the AppleCentre was a near-religious experience - the building is so cute and plastic, like everything Macintosh, and I got to fondle an iPod Mini lovingly for a few moments before finding out that they sell out daily within two hours of receiving a shipment at about noon.

(The Mac evangelist within me begins to speak out: everyone, use a Mac! And buy an iPod! Do not succumb to Microsoft preponderance!)

By the time I had made the mandatory pilgrimage to the AppleCentre it was rather late, and I had to turn back to the Underground and take the J-Train back to Fourth and Kings, and endure the long ride back in the Caltrain.

But my experience with San Francisco was not over. Dissatisfied with not having seen many of the sights, I inquired if anyone would be able to take me around, and finally, a lead opened through the Singaporeans at Stanford email channel: I was to meet a student who had already graduated and was presently working in San Francisco in the afternoon, near Union Square.

So in the morning I made my way down to San Francisco again, through the painful Caltrain method. Bright and early at Fourth and Kings, I had to kill time before meeting the Stanford alumnus. I decided to take a look at the Golden Gate Bridge, which I figured was one of the main attractions of San Francisco. The train ride was long, the transition from train to bus really confused me, the transition from bus to another bus nearly boggled me out of my brain, the wait in between vehicles quite murdered me with boredom, and by the time I got to the Golden Gate I was ready to be stunned with the grandeur of modern civilisation.

I was not impressed.

Well, not totally. There is always a sense of awe and wonder at something so big and so well-known, as if meeting a movie star one has often seen but not in person. But I observed with wry amusement the gift-shop (gifuto-shoppo) that sold strange T-shirts at excessive prices to the poor unsuspecting Japanese. I've always wondered how something that has become so representative and symbolic of a place can cheapen itself with seeking profit. But then again, I live in the land of the merlion. Or should that be Merlion.

I walked briskly on the bridge to the halfway mark and then decided that I should inquire about what there was to do in Sausalito. Apparently I couldn't access the nicer parts of Sausalito without a car, so I decided that to cross the bridge entirely wouldn't be particularly exciting, so I walked back despondently (why oh why can't I drive!). To comfort myself I took a photo of myself with a sign that said 'EMERGENCY PHONE AND CRISIS COUNSELLING', the Golden Gate looming ominously in the background.

Taking the bus back, I chose to evade the hordes of tourists by alighting at the mouth of Lombard Street. My plan was to walk all the way down to Little Italy, experiencing the famous winding road by foot.

It was a refreshingly painful experience. Little did I know that the walk was to stretch a few kilometres of San Francisco's trademark uneven roads, uphill here and downhill there. I managed to work off some of the excess calories consumed the day before at Ghirardelli's, of which beneficent effects I promptly reversed by entering a quaint sweet-shop and consuming all the gorgeous sweets in sight. (A pattern emerges by now, as I think has been noticed: I have a sweet tooth.)

Along the way I met a few French/Canadian tourists (or rather, a few thousand French/Canadian tourists). I don't know why but the streets were absolutely teeming with them, much to my enthrallment. I took the chance to polish up my slightly rusty French skills, and amused more than a few of these poor beleaguered souls (beleaguered by me that is): I think the surprise of meeting a Singaporean-Chinese French-speaking teenager all by himself in San Francisco requesting advice on where to go and assistance with photographs pleased some of them.

The winding part of Lombard Street was quite fun, since I think I broke about a hundred traffic rules along the way trying to get a photo of myself and the street. Mercifully, I met a Singaporean couple who were more than willing to aid me in my kiasu quest to immortalise my experience descending the meandering road.

Down at Little Italy, I observed the cathedrals in the district and decided to sit down for lunch at a nice Italian restaurant. For some reason I remember distinctly the exact dish that I ate, spinach gnocchi in a sauce made of three cheeses, parmigiano, gorgonzola and pecorino - I liked the sauce but didn't finish the gnocchi because the green discs got too dense and heavy after the sixth bite.

After lunch at Little Italy, I received a call from the person who was supposed to take me around - I was to meet her in front of the San Francisco Fire Department. This proved to be extremely convenient since it was just down the road from Little Italy, and I managed to snap a few pictures of the Transamerican Pyramid on the way.

The rest of the day was mainly sightseeing - I was brought to Coit Tower, the Levi's Museum, rode a bus around central San Francisco, gave Chinatown a miss ('it's like all the other Chinatowns internationally'), went down to Polk Street to see a sexy shop, went back to the AppleCentre to see if I could get an iPod Mini, skipped Koreatown because it was too late, finished up at Japantown where I had a nice little Japanese dinner (how incongruous) and perused through Books Kinokuniya with zest.

By the time I was done it was almost seven-thirty, and I had to rush back to the Caltrain Station or run the risk of being marooned.

Turns out that I really was marooned at the station. I missed the 8:09 train by about a minute or so, and the next train was scheduled for 9:09. For some reason I was possessed by fear and suspicion as my mother's words came back to haunt me. Suddenly everything was coloured with fear and suspicion, as in my mind the train station became the scene of my murder. Frightened, I ran six blocks down to the Borders Bookstore (thank heavens for familiar multi-national companies and globalisation) where I sought refuge amongst books and magazines. At exactly nine p.m. I ran out of Borders back to the station, where I promptly boarded the train and left San Francisco for the what I imagine to be the last time in a long time.

Departure

Back at Stanford I was invited by another Singaporean, Bryan, back to his dorm, Branner, just to hang out for a while. And so my last night was full of conversation until the late hours of the night: I arrived back at Jason's room at about four a.m., and collapsed into my sleeping bag, tired but content.

The next morning was a mad rush of packing and farewells, as I composed my thank-you letters (in Microsoft Word, no less) to the various people who had made my stay so much easier.

And then I walked out to bid Stanford goodbye.

How everything seems to be touched with pathos and poignancies when one realises that there is so little time left. Suddenly the almost familiar route from Terra to the main quad, which I had traversed so many times in the last few days, became a strange and sad funeral march, as I trudged slowly, smiling sadly to myself, memorising the colour of the clear sky and the fresh grass and the wild flowers.

I looked at the main quad for the last time, visiting the bookstore to buy the only Stanford souvenir I allowed myself to buy - a small notebook - as an incentive to make it back to Stanford to buy the rest of the stuff.

I bought my last Jamba Juice and drank it slowly.

Then mutely I walked back to the carpark where Jason was waiting for me to go off to the airport.

As we rode out, I couldn't help but thinking that things had come full circle - mythmaking in a personal context, organising and arranging the events into a coherent, artistic whole. I entered Stanford in the dark, and everything was obscured by fuzzy darkness. I left Stanford in bright clear light, illuminated by the Californian sun - was that a good omen? I certainly hope so.

Leaving was a quiet affair. At the soundless departure gate I looked fondly at sky and the clouds and the grass and tried to internalise everything. Silently I boarded the plane and waved goodbye, to no one in particular, and, leaving part of my heart in San Francisco, left on a jetplane back to Singapore.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks go out to:

The Stanford Alumni of Singapore for providing me with this opportunity to visit Stanford. If the purpose of the trip was enrichment, then rest assured that I have been greatly enriched. If the purpose of the trip was to entrap me and make me fall in love with Stanford, then shame on you for your cunning plan, which, of course, succeeded.

My host Jason Bay, and his fellow Singaporeans at Stanford, Jeremy Lee, the brothers of Toyon, others who I have callously missed out - thank you for having done so much for me, going out of your ways at times to ensure the success of my trip. I appreciate everything.

My friend Bryan Tan, whom I got to at Stanford, and made me feel so at home. Or how much home can get in a foreign land.

My classmates, who endured my telephone calls at strange hours, and for helping me keep up with stuff when I was gone.

My parents who allowed me to go, and did not impose many things on me.

And other people whom I have missed out.

Thanks once again.