I’ve lived here all my life, but never had I seen so much color in Singapore – bright orange columns against the dirty cream of signs reading “Internet Café, 24 hours” with blinking neon arrows. As I walked towards the ethnic neighbourhood of Little India, the gravel beneath my sneakers slowly fell away to a tessellation of orange diamonds, and the public housing shrank to traditional shophouses, standing in full glory from red windows, to turquoise walls, and striped patio blinds.

I remember tripping over myself in my dash through the automatic doors that separated Narita airport and the outside world for that first breath of Japanese air – of the late spring/early summer cool that I had romanticized for the last 6 years. Strangely, it was the first time that, when landing in a foreign country, I didn’t feel like I was out of place, but rather, surreal – like an explorer who finally steps off the shaking waves onto the home he had been dreaming of.