I met another resident of the house I was living in this morning — Idris, a self-styled (former?) German refugee who was now living in Singapore. He was seated at the table with Issa, talking to him, when I went down in the morning, and we exchanged introductions then. He says he has been living in Singapore for 20 years on and off, and was 6 months or so into his current stint, and that he hated the German government and their politics, which was why he was here. I didn’t pry further.

This Monday was one of my “short” days out — by short, I still meant 6 hours or so of excursions, as opposed to 9-12 hours on a regular day. I love walking about, but my feet, particularly my ankles, start to really hurt after several hours. I thought the boiling sun would be more of a factor than it is though — it is painful, and all the sweating is horrifying, but all it actually does is make me seek out shelter and rest in malls and such every now and then, so it actually doesn’t affect my exhaustion levels as much as I thought it would. Thanks to the occasional drink or soup meal to go with my bottle of water, dehydration hasn’t seemed to be an issue despite all the water I’m losing through sweat. Yet, anyway,

i had been chatting with Paulene over WhatsApp the day before, as she had been one of those that had reached out to me inquiring for a good time for us to meet, and we had settled on lunch today, so I had my afternoon booked off. But for the morning, I sort of had a little secret pet project that I wanted to finish off.

To explain the background behind this, I’ve had one very specific piece of trauma (for lack of a better word) from the migration to Canada during my childhood, combined with me being transgendered, that I got hung up on for a long time in my past. Back before I started my transition, as well as after I had started it but before I had gone through with the surgeries, there were two or three stretches of time in particular where I was most definitely clinically depressed, and this was the most painful catalyst that ate away at me every time I thought about my situation. It would still make me feel down even outside those stretches of time, but during the actual throes of depression, it would weigh on me so heavily and overwhelm me so badly that I would just curl up in bed and cry into my bolster and wonder at Tigey if I could just restart my life and hope I reroll properly into a girl this time. Note: I was never suicidal, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t idly entertain occasional thoughts like that.

This regret that could never be solved was specifically that I never got to attend secondary school as a female together with my peers, back in Secondary 1 and 2 when I was at Dunman High. Even finishing my transition, I reasoned, would not solve this issue. i couldn’t go back in time and re-live those times, what I considered the stereotypical “shining days of my youth” (since I hated Canadian school afterwards, I considered those my best school days and friends by far).

Now that being said, the depression was eventually diagnosed and some medicine was actually found that helped me get out of it after only a couple months on the medication, and I haven’t been back down there in the darkness since. That catalyst did still eat away at me after, and I did acknowledge that what it was asking was impossible, but I wondered — how close could I get to actually exorcising that demon, to minimize my chances of it ever pulling me down into that deep mental pit again? I was the ultimate judge of whether it bothered me or not, so what would it take to convince me to learn to let it go? With a clearer head, I started to break it down into smaller pieces.

The first piece of that was obviously the transition itself, and finally shifting myself to my correct gender, surgery and all. This was a long process but was finally completed to my satisfaction in 2017. The second piece, I reasoned, was that I lacked closure with my friends whom I had left behind. I still constantly dreamt of them, more than 20 years later. I achieved this closure in Aug 2020 when i reached out to Kaiting, met Eileen in Los Angeles in Nov 2021, joined the class’s WhatsApp group, and then met even more of my friends and former classmates on this trip. Most importantly was that I met them and introduced myself with my female identity. This went a long way toward alleviating the pain. The third was the Singapore piece, that I could “never return” and see my friends and/or get actual closure by seeing Dunman High itself again. Solving this was initiated by me reaching out to Mindef in Sep 2019, and obviously something that was obviously attained on this trip, though as of Day 5 I had not yet visited my school (I did on Day 6, spoilers!). The fourth was “attending school as a female” in general, which I have achieved, and am also trying to supercharge by coming back to NUS on the exchange program, which would turn “attending school as a female” to “attending school in Singapore as a female” — the closer to the impossible regret, the better.

But there was another nagging piece that I was aware of even before I knew that going back to Singapore was a possibility this year. It’s a thing that I know even bothers me today a little bit as I see students walking around — I get jealous of them for their school uniforms! It might be because of school pride, it might be because I visualized the girls in class that I wanted to be like/be friends with wearing them because that’s all I ever saw them wear, or it might just be because that I really liked the simple uniform in general, but while looking at my nemesis demon from various angles, I realized that if I could acquire the Dunman High female uniform as an alma mater (of sorts), even if just to keep it and never actually wear it, that would probably lay to rest another substantial portion of that demon too.

And so, about 6 months ago, I greedily began looking into this possibility. I noticed that the school PE uniforms were vastly different now, but the regular uniform still more or less looked the same. I reached out to the supplier, Shanghai School Uniforms, and casually explained that I was an alumni of the school and lived in Canada now, and wondered if they would ship over there. Their answer was yes, but we couldn’t actually figure out shipping — they claimed they asked DHL and got quoted a shipping cost of over $300! And they said I could also arrange for a courier to pick it up and then for someone to get it over to me somehow, but that process was a complete mystery to me too. As well, they eventually warned me that the blouse I was looking for, the Secondary 1-4 one (as opposed for the “new” Year 5-6 Junior College one since Dunman High now hosted 6 years of students instead of the 4 years when I was present) didn’t come with the detachable metal buttons that were part of the uniform. I was aware of this, but was unaware, until they mentioned it, that they weren’t the ones who provided it, I had to get them separately from the school bookshop. I emailed the bookshop and got a vague reply but they never replied to my subsequent inquiry, so that fizzled out too.

However, around then, things fell into place for me to make this return trip to Singapore. And so, what exactly was preventing me from picking up a set once I was here? Not much, apparently!

And so, with that lengthy introduction out of the way, I can now segue back into the actual travel log and say that this Monday morning found me on my way to this Shanghai Uniforms warehouse store, which was located in a building in an industrial park area. I have memories of my mother bringing me to an actual shop in a residential area to get my uniform way back in the late 90s, but that was apparently no longer the case. The warehouse park was not actually far from my rented home though, about a 30 minute walk through some residential areas. I like me some residential areas, I think they’re far more authentic and interesting than malls and tourist traps, so off I traipsed.