China and Singapore: Perspectives from my "double life"

It's a relief to escape from organised chaos to the orderliness of Singapore, but China's derring-do spirit is something to be admired.

- Tan Dawn Wei

For the past nearly seven years, I've lived a double life. I have existed in two parallel universes — China and Singapore.

Up until two weeks ago, my job as The Straits Times' China bureau chief required me to be based in the capital city of Beijing, where I had — not as a matter of choice — wholeheartedly embraced the unique, immense ecosystem that is China.

It is a world that, for someone coming from a tiny city-state whose very survival depends on being open and fiercely plugged into the global system, can be rather isolating and often frustrating — even stressful.

Instead of WhatsApp, my daily life revolved around WeChat. Instead of paying with my credit card and chalking up points that could've allowed me to upgrade to business class on Singapore Airlines, I used Alipay or WeChat Pay which gave me no significant perks. Instead of navigating with Apple or Google Maps, I used A Map or Baidu map, which I've found to be far superior if not for the annoying pop-up ads. Instead of sending e-mails, I had to fax government agencies with my media queries. And the most obvious difference of all — instead of English, I operated almost entirely in the Chinese language.

The clearest manifestation of my bifurcated existence was my two phones, each a microcosm of one of my twin identities: Chinese apps on one phone, rest-of-the-world apps on the other.

My singular identity and my perspective, however, has been inexorably shaped by the stark contrast of these two worlds: the scale of everything in China; the chaos and pulsating energy of a city of 20 million people on the go; the homogeneity but also extremities between the richest and the poorest, the urban and the rural in the second-largest economy of the world and a country that, for the most part, still treats foreigners as an afterthought. And then, there's the opposite to all of that — Singapore.