The anguish and the anxiety

I am neither of the East nor the West, and Beijing brings home to me painfully how tiny Singapore is.

With age, the anguish has lost its sharp edges, become less acute. Now there is only a dull ache.

In the 1990s, when I came to China regularly, on temple grounds and in parks like Du Fu's Thatched Cottage in Chengdu, confronted with the calligraphic inscriptions on steles that I could not make out, I was made to feel less Chinese.