Yesterday, my boss teased me: “I hear you're something of an internet celebrity.”
I said, “Hardly. I barely have any followers.”
Thinking about it, I have simply never been particularly guarded about sharing things about myself. In my view, much of that information gains little from being kept private; secrecy often creates more trouble than it saves. At work, in life, and in our relationships with others, openness is usually the most efficient way to communicate.
That said, it has been a long time since I seriously shared anything. I do not feel much desire to write about technology, and as an ordinary person, I cannot claim any exceptional accomplishments. But everyone's experience is unique. What we go through shapes how we see the world, gradually forms our values and worldview, and ultimately guides the choices we make in life.
Lately, I have been thinking about writing down more of my life outside work. On September 2 this year, it will have been exactly five years since I arrived in Singapore. A fair amount has happened over those five years, though most of it has been the small stuff of everyday life. Looking back, there are not that many moments I would call truly significant, but there are plenty of thoughts I could share. Rather than trying to cover everything, I want to begin with the question I have been asked most often, and the one that is easiest to tell from the beginning: why did I move from the United States to Singapore?
I am not writing this in the hope that many people will read it, nor am I worried about who might. I simply want to leave myself a record of these five years.
When I first came to Singapore, people often asked me, “Why did you leave the United States for Singapore?” I never had a particularly precise answer. A choice is rarely driven by a single reason. Looking back now, my career, my life, my surroundings, and a few intuitions I could not quite articulate at the time all played a part.
Research and room to grow
During my PhD, I began working on natural language processing, or NLP. My main research was on word embeddings and sentence embeddings, and I also took part in several projects on graph embeddings. In a lab without a deep body of prior work in these areas, I managed to publish several conference papers and papers in IEEE Transactions journals. Once I had met the basic requirements, I graduated as quickly as I could.
But I felt that I had only just found my way into the field. I had gone from knowing almost nothing to gradually developing some intuition of my own. I had produced a few results, but they would hardly have stood out in labs already well established in the area. I had gone straight from my bachelor's degree into a PhD and finished the PhD in only four years. On the one hand, I wanted to give myself more time to understand the subject in greater depth. On the other, I did not want to enter industry too early; I wanted to preserve a little more freedom and optionality.
At the time, most PhD students around me hoped to graduate quickly and join a large U.S. technology company to work on industrial projects. American technology companies generally value doctoral training, and PhD graduates often enter at a somewhat higher level with better compensation. It is a perfectly good career path. It simply did not appeal to me that much.
Life outside work
The considerations in my personal life were more complicated. Not long after the pandemic began, my girlfriend graduated and returned to Shanghai. If I stayed in the United States, there was no telling when she would be able to come back. That made me feel even more strongly that the United States might not be where I wanted to remain for the long term. At the same time, the pandemic exposed a great deal of disorder in American society and made the future feel more uncertain. For those without a green card, immigration status always hangs in the background, while differences in language and culture never disappear entirely.
Relatively speaking, I think I adapted to life in the United States fairly well. During three of my four years as a PhD student, I worked as a teaching assistant to cover part of my tuition and living expenses. I spent at least fifteen to twenty hours each week leading discussion sections, holding office hours, and teaching labs. Through that work, I interacted with many local undergraduate, master's, and PhD students. Even so, there was still a large gap between me and people who had grown up there. Our cultural backgrounds were different, and many things never felt quite as natural or effortless.
While living in the United States, I dealt with a car accident and the police, and I lived through both the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. At the time, I lived near downtown Los Angeles, where I gradually came to feel that the society had little regard for people at the bottom. That challenged some of my core values. I would not claim to possess any extraordinary compassion, but even after moving to a wealthier neighborhood, where the suffering was easier to ignore, I still knew that many homeless and impoverished people were living nearby. This was no longer about any one person's misfortune; it was a social problem.
I also seriously considered whether I wanted to live in the United States for the long term, and whether I wanted any future children of mine to grow up there. At least as I saw it then, American culture felt more direct, more competitive, and at times even aggressive. A child growing up there, regardless of race, would naturally become American in cultural identity and behavior. There is nothing wrong with becoming American; it may well be an excellent choice. I simply had not worked out whether I wanted my own children to grow up in that cultural environment, or whether it matched the family life I imagined. Of course, this may only have been a partial impression formed from my own few years of experience, and it was not necessarily a complete one.
An opportunity in Singapore
Overall, the higher level and compensation offered by large technology companies did not hold that much attraction for me. I still wanted to find somewhere quieter and continue the research I had not finished—or fully understood. I contacted two or three postdoctoral positions in the United States online and received offers. Then my PhD advisor asked whether I would consider an opportunity in Singapore. I said, “Sure.” With my advisor's recommendation, I decided to come to Singapore for a postdoc after graduation.
Many Chinese students had visited Singapore for travel or an exchange, but I had never been here at all. Accepting the offer was a fairly bold decision. I did not even ask many people about Singapore or the National University of Singapore before making up my mind. I simply decided to go. There were still more than three months between graduating in the United States in May and starting work in Singapore in September, and that period came with a few complications of its own. Perhaps I will write about those another time.
Five years later, I still find it difficult to point to one specific reason why I moved from the United States to Singapore. The decision was more the combined result of my research interests, career choices, feelings about life in the United States, and an opportunity that appeared largely by chance.
Many choices in life are probably like this. We do not set out only after thinking everything through. With limited information and understanding, we choose a direction we are willing to believe in at the time. Looking back five years later, perhaps what matters is not whether I made the single best choice, but that the choice led me down a road I had never expected and gave me a distinctive experience of my own.