Things Left Behind and Things Taken Home
By: Wei-An Jin
Gardens by the Bay in Singapore
5 INCHES OF HAIR
(left behind, on the floor of a hair salon by Raffles City)
They say to cut your hair for a fresh start, but in truth, I did it because I can’t stand feeling hair strands all sweat-slick sticky against the back of my neck, and with Singapore being right in line with the equator, two weeks was all it took for me to fold to the mercy of a long bob. The catharsis came later, along with the heat tolerance.
ONE FOOD INSECURITY ZINE
(taken home, safely tucked in a white cardboard folder in my backpack)
In the first week of my internship at the Lien Centre for Social Innovation, I was tasked with “telling the story of food insecurity” in Singapore—one of the most food secure nations in the world—to spread awareness about the existing, but often overlooked, issue in an accessible way. And with a healthy balance of trust and guidance from Tasnim, my supervisor, I worked on designing and developing a series of three zine booklets over the course of 10 weeks, each one based on a real interview collected by the Centre to maintain sensitivity to a variety of lived experiences.
What I learned about storytelling for empathy and education: representation requires research (and lots of it), visual identity should be fine tuned to the parent brand and the project at hand (I settled somewhere between corporate and storybook), and print design is meant to be printed (seriously, just do it).
Exactly 10 copies of the first zine were printed to pass out during my final presentation and I still remember holding this culmination of work in my hands for the first time: sixteen pages of saddle-stitched A6 paper, colors warped slightly but not unpleasantly, hot off the press. In the end, I was able to keep one copy of this first-pass print to myself, close to my hands and close to my heart.
798 PHOTOS IN ONE FULL SD CARD
(taken home, kept inside a well-used Sony Cybershot)
Of the Singaporean skyline. Of nicely arranged trinkets in tourist traps. Of community cats and funny birds. Of Ubud monkeys that steal hotel flip-flops. Of my three fellow-GRIP-co-interns-turned-friends doing any variety of things. Of architectural, historical, and natural marvels across the five Southeast Asian countries I had the privilege of visiting on off-weekends and public holidays. But mostly, I liked to take pictures of local foods, which were often affordable and delicious.
P.S. Food highlights from abroad include: shaved ice desserts for sharing, glutinous rice balls, bánh mì with lunch meats, street vendor scallion pancakes, century egg & silken tofu, mango sticky rice, anything with Thai green chili sauce, and Gokoku black bread
HALF A PHOTO STRIP
(left behind, on the collaged fridge of my old flat)
During my stay, I lived in a small rental flat with two other girls: Anna, a student from Germany interning for the summer like me; and Lilyn, an office worker from Mauritius who had lived in the flat since her college days. Despite acknowledging the impermanence of our time together, the three of us decided to be friends anyway: cooking group dinners of questionable quality, singing karaoke into late hours of night, talking about our lives on the couch before work the following morning.
One of the first things we did together was eat out at a cheap mall food court and take pictures in a photo booth that could only print two photo strips at a time. The pictures hung on the refrigerator for much of the summer and melded into the background of our living room for two months. Anna took one when she left in July and on the night of my flight back Lilyn and I cut the second one in half and in that way our together-summer finally waned.
A PAIR OF BUSTED UP NIKE M2K TEKNOS
(left behind, in a black plastic bag outside my old room)
The soles were peeling off before I even left for Singapore and my mom laughed at me when I adamantly Gorilla glued them back. But somewhere between trekking around Gardens by the Bay on a girls trip with my co-interns and going dancing for Anna’s birthday and walking along the river path by Great World Mall after work every night, they became faded and gray, with fraying edges and once-again peeling soles and ripped up inner lining that dug into my heels.
It was, not unexpectedly, but still entirely, bittersweet to finally retire them the night before my flight back to the States. I tried to hold as dignified a shoe-funeral as possible (by that, I mean I chose a black plastic bag instead of a white one), and left them outside my doorstep. I probably thought something along the lines of: What wonderful things I have experienced in these busted up, kept-too-long shoes!
BERT
(taken home, in my arms)
A pro tip for the first lonely nights in a new city, before you’ve met anyone: an eight-inch-tall dinosaur plush can provide a surprising amount of comfort for any twenty-year-olds on the cusp of Real Adulthood, figuring things out 9,000 miles from home.
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The Global Research and Internship Program (GRIP) provides outstanding undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to intern or conduct research abroad for 8 to 12 weeks over the summer. Participants gain career-enhancing experience and global exposure that is essential in a global workforce.