If you could spin a cocoon for yourself against the malevolence and the hatefulness, to emerge in your renewed life in a transformed world, that would be well. Easy enough for me, after a fashion. I am not called on to do anything about it and no longer live in that country, can even be profoundly glad I’m not living there, that I live in a sane and safe and well-organised one where most (though by no means all) of the issues that Americans still rage over are complete non-issues. And even shutting out the news media wilfully is still possible in this media-saturated age; one logs out of this or unsubscribes from that, meaningfully leaves unfurled the newspaper on the doorstep. Better to do so; to tear one-self up from afar, counsels Wise Cristina (and for a world I don’t live in, no longer have personal stakes in, and cannot directly participate in useful action for), is indulgent and futile and jeopardises besides those things in the world I do live in that need focussing on. And for finding peace for myself too — at a time where in my personal life I have had great need for healing and change.

But a part of me needs to be back in the US — where many others who share my grief and anger are physically congregated in the places I think of as my once-homes or would-be-homes: Cambridge and Charlottesville and Boston and Ithaca and DC and Syracuse — all of them blue and no accident. Where I would have access to private events and public movements and be able to participate in the collective grieving for a country I called home for much of my adult life. Here in Singapore, although the American elections are talked about and reported on, and there are those of us who care — both Americans (those in Singapore largely voted Democrat) and non-Americans who have lived in the US — our anger and grieving and anxiety is largely individual, subdued and very much isolated, I feel incredibly alone in my grieving, and that is enormously difficult too.

I think we always knew the days (and weeks) afterwards would be much worse than the day itself, because afterwards when we are innundated by the endless news analyses and post-mortems, the hand-wringing and recriminations. And also when the glee and gloating of the other side, come out, louder and more jubilant because now, their man has won, and that is what winning looks like, for them. But the stories coming out of the US now, of the malevolence and ugliness, perhaps long-existing — but I think unprecedented in the way it is now expressed so publicly, so openly, without filters, without any longer any fear of repercussion, far surpasses what I’d imagined.

Not just because he has won, not just because so many chose differently from us (that they would choose to live in his world; not hers, not ours.)

But because of how unprepared we are to live in a tomorrow that is this. In any other election we’d have said, ‘if A wins, then… ; if B wins, then…’ But we never let ourselves believe this could happen; right up till the revelation itself it had not seemed possible. I wrote to C. last night, Good luck America!  — ‘I have a good feeling about today’, was this morning’s reply; I wrote to S. in the morning, who was knocking on doors in Pennsylvania, ‘confident’ was his word, coming home in the afternoon. In the evening writing to S: “All the polls and forecasts and the Nate Silvers didn’t prepare us for this, the predictions so wildly off in a time we’ve come to put faith in the number crunchers, to say that that his support is but sound and fury but when it comes to the voting the data prevails. It never seemed to merit discussion as a real possibility — more a bogeyman in the migration to Canada jokes — so we never thought about what comes ‘next’.” And we don’t know how to live in the next which is now.

You must think the mason didn’t know his job, I said, showing Steve these photos.
Oh, no, said Steve, a plant always prevails over masonry.

house beside naung park, october 2016