Exchanges

Going on exchange isn't about going on an extended holiday. Of course, if that's the way you want to play it then of course it could be. But going on exchange gives you the opportunity to do so much more than that. It gives you the opportunity to step into the shoes of the people you live amongst. Complete immersion is rarely achieved of course, but you get a taste, a sample of what life is like in a place wholly different from where you grew up in. Christine thinks you can get this even if you don't know any locals. According to her, you're doing all those everyday things like setting up a bank account anyway, so that gives you the experience of living in Singapore. I don't know. I'm inclined to think that living in Singapore for 4 months and not knowing any Singaporeans personally is really quite sad.

Being on exchange is about building relationships, sharing lives and fusing souls. The term 'exchange' program isn't just about the reciprocal exchanges of people between the universities. It's about the exchanging of lives: I show you how I live, I take you into my life and vice-versa. As much as this exchange is a wonderful thing for both parties, and indeed, that's what my thesis wanted to focus on (although I'm facing some difficulty writing that chapter), there are some difficulties involved which could explain the reluctance on the part of members of the host community to let any of these exchange students deep into their lives.

For exchange students, their lives here aren't their essential existence. It's a life apart from their reality. Sometimes you think it's not real, after all whatever happens here won't really matter when they go back home. It's a liminal period, as I am always saying.

It's a separate life, complete with its own symbolic birth, life and death. These people come into your lives, they interrupt it and then they leave. They're what Chuck Palahniuk calls "Single Serving Friends", a 3-in-one sachet of friendship which lasts 4-9 months at any given time. Usually it's a welcome interruption though. They bring so much into your life, they bring magic and wonder and they revalourise things you've grown weary and disenchanted with. But this is your real life. These are the chapters of your life that you live every single day, it's not an appendix. So when they leave and they go back to their realities, their experience here becomes frozen in a memory. In a picture frame, hanging on the wall. It's an appendix to their life. But it's a hole in yours. As more people come and go from your life, you become more fragmented. People take pieces of you with them as they leave parts of themselves with you. You become a bricolage, a postmodern entity.

You're left being a dirty mistress, literally. As they go back to their spouses. They have real lives to go back to but when they leave, what happens to you? Do they get us hooked on a high we can't afford? When we become little but memory. Is that why we keep visitors on the periphery of our lives? When we know they're gonna leave us, do we hold them at arm's length? Or would we embrace them will all we have left?

The truth is, they transform us too. They come into our lives and shake things up. They bring epiphanies and joy... at least, if you let them in. You have to let the right people in though. I think exchange life, here in NUS, people like numbers. The wider your social pool, the more options you have for travel partners. We here who live our daily lives here. And from here on I'm just talking about me. I've come to realise it's all about compatibility of personality. Some people interrupt your life in a way you'd rather not have it interrupted. They can offend. Without meaning to, I suppose. It's just ironic sometimes. Though I do have to wonder how much of a hypocrite I'm being.

Anyway. I guess the point is that when you want to have magic and fairydust in your life, you're gonna have to deal with the pumpkins and rats that embody the aftermath.