A Brit, a Yank and a SMUgger Walk into a Seminar

A Brit who out-studies the locals, an American golden retriever in a polo shirt, and a Singaporean who's been "on exchange" in her own country for six years. What happens when their worlds collide in an SMU seminar room? Writer Ashley introduces the characters of her unlikely friend group and what they've taught her about belonging.

1. Sam

“You’ll Get Used to It”

Through the haze I brought upon myself from staying up too late (“I only have one 12pm class tomorrow; the night is young!”), I rub my eyes. With one glance, NHB’s on speed dial. 

I remember SG50, when they put up those white statues of Sang Nila Utama and Tan Tock Seng near the river. Crumbling under their judgy stares, Sir Stamford Raffles appeared to have pranced off his marble pedestal and into the doorframe of the seminar room. 

Removing a monument is a serious crime, damaging it even more so. Those sick vandals swapped his gallant regency flair for a Uniqlo T-shirt and grey cargo pants, tousled his hair, then stuck a pair of thick glasses on that iconic aquiline nose. If that wasn’t enough, his raised arm—contemplative, thoughtful, and pointing towards a vision for our little fishing village—was clasped around a vending machine wrap.

A cheeky grin crackles over my lips.

“Sam!” I holler. He knows what’s coming, but he still makes the effort to peer up from the bed of lettuce in mild curiosity.

“Which one of your servants brought you that?”

His hand stutters as a cherry tomato almost falls from his mouth. He’s now much more interested in pointing the way out of this class. Sam lowers his gaze, glistening equally with pitiful defeat and honest, impressed amusement. He sits back next to me and picks up his pen, then strikes through another four lines in his notebook. 

That makes 60. 

We have 10 more weeks to go. 

But to quote a suitably British phrase he once taught me, “You’ll get used to it.”

And he did. He tells me later, with terminal levels of dry snark, that the Merlion is going to find a comfortable new home in a display case at the British Museum. The tally itself, I argue back, was still going to be his best souvenir. Weaponising the questionable legacy of his ancestors is the chosen art form of our loose nine-man class friend group. 

So much so that our fatherly, endearingly bumbling teddy bear of a tenured professor was catching on. From his tone, you knew he would feel terrible for swatting a mosquito. Yet with a quick, all-too-cheerful chirp of “Sorry, Sam!”, he mourns the vast swathe of nations brought to ruin under British rule. 

It’s a lot of responsibility for a 20-year-old who likes David Attenborough documentaries and Pokémon. (I swear I didn’t mention his ungodly hours in the conquest game Civilisation VI). He can hardly fly the Union Jack up on Fort Canning, what with the time he spends in the Li Ka Shing library every week.

Word goes around that exchange students aren’t hard workers. Snowbirds from the world’s wintry havens, they seek to bask in the exotic bacchanals of Bangkok and Bali, leaving us to our usual toil under the sweltering Singapore sun. Their migratory patterns span new countries every weekend. And when has a group meeting ever made anyone resist the call of an ice-cold Mai Tai in the Maldives? 

Local students find themselves the world’s most frustrated birdwatchers. So I was surprised to find Sam still hunched over his tablet computer next to me when the floor-length windows of LKS were pitch-black.

“Are you not going to go home?” 

It’s the crack of week 3, and without the keyboard symphony of desperate cramming, the library’s silence feels judgemental as we fight the white glare of our screens.

He sputters a bit and shows me his written homework, in which he’s packed a thousand handwritten sentences into the palm-sized card we have to fill each week for a measly ten percent. He could hand it in as his dissertation the next day and graduate instantly.

“Sam.” I shoot back a deadpan stare.

“What?”

“Your sem is pass-fail.”

He holds it up higher to me, like a kid expecting his mum to approve of his favourite drawing. But the three bullet points on my card and I were too busy having a crisis over who really was the true SMUgger, forged in the rigour of our world-class pressure cooker education system. The way his words were packed brought me flashbacks to the O level Literature notes I scrambled on a sketchbook outside the exam room, which had congealed into an insidious wall of blue ink. He had put the same amount of energy into that card as I did into my future.

When Sam passes out from exhaustion after his year-long bender in Singapore and wakes up in the grand stone halls of the University of Edinburgh, he won’t have stolen the Merlion. By the end of the semester, he would’ve probably earned it.

And how would we deal with that?

Well, we’ll just have to get used to it.

2. Mark

“Yank”

If my choice to abuse national stereotypes hasn’t already caught the ire of the editors, I suspect Mark is in fact a golden retriever in a polo shirt and bermudas. Like if the dog from Air Bud had been trained, instead of basketball, to code solutions into online geography quizzes faster than Sam can solve them—and violently spam eagle emojis on Discord during protests.

Nothing is safe from this bounding excitement. In the week leading up to my birthday, I once told him that I wasn’t looking for a big celebration. Mark had been fresh off the plane, having attended only one class the week prior, and said,“Omg, they don’t celebrate birthdays in Singapore!?”

I’ve saved his contact as this exact sentence ever since. No, I don’t intend on changing it. 

Being around a goldie gives you that warm fuzzy feeling that can never make you feel negative, no matter what they do. I wasn’t even mad when Mark showed me a graph, then apologised for forgetting social science students can’t read them. (Don’t ask him why an accounting student is taking social science courses; clearly there’s some illiteracy on his end too.) I wasn’t even concerned when he proudly showed me the 80,000 enemy death toll in the strategy game he plays. 

But the thing about goldies is that they aren’t usually known for picking fights with other kinds of retrievers.

Bored in class, I returned to my ‘doomscroll with a side of Discord’ and texted:

[As a yank, is Seth Macfarlane a good singer or has the torrential storm that is Family Guy ruined his music?]

He takes a while to respond.

[First off, I wouldn’t ask anyone from Massachusetts if they were a yank. We are rivals to the Yankees team to the point of murder.]

Feeling the business-school sass in his bones, he proceeded to make a graph to show my chances of survival if I used that colloquial name for Americans anywhere else.

At first, I felt like those 80,000 digital enemies died merciful deaths. But then I remembered – I’m a social science student. I can’t read this!

I’ve met a whole arsenal of Americans through the gentlemen’s club-cum-gladiator blood sport known as Model UN, but none of us really bothered with the likes of baseball. It just so happened that the sun was beginning to set across the other side of the Earth in Florida, and a friend had some time to send the verbal airstrike of the entire Yankee Doodle rhyme in his DMs.

I’m sure Mark left for JB that day with a purpose. And less sure I’ll be invited to any baseball games anytime soon. I did get recommended a capybara café from across the causeway, though, where I never would’ve gone otherwise. 

Gently, I remind him to put on some sunscreen. But goldies have always been suited for the summer, and Mark was determined to make the most of his. 

The next thing I know, he’s seen all of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto in 8 days — then Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Cambodia. Scheduling planned down to the half-hour, with at least seven activities a day. As I collect ang bao with one hand and gamble them away with the other, I delight at a new Insta story in anticipation for some beautiful photos of his travels. What adventures did he behold in places so close to home, yet so far from my imagination? If I were to see the cities and cultures around me through his eyes, rather than dream of the Hallmark snowscapes of Europe, would I learn to love them more?

I tap the notification.

He’s actually ordered a pizza in Hanoi.

And when I set foot on the ancient cobblestone streets of Montréal, on my very own 120-day vacation, we got Korean BBQ. 

3. Ashley

“If I can’t see it, I won’t walk to it”

She thinks in the Queen’s English. Not the high tea places in Takashimaya but glimmers of softball and Sunday roasts, of the way her feet feel on a bed of warm, golden-dry grass. When her mouth is opened she is spoken for by a newscaster from New York, perhaps Idaho, or even Toronto. 

It captivates the class during presentations in a way she knows they’re not paying attention to what she’s saying. But to that listening-comprehension cadence of a voice, designed to be the common denomination of English to countries that didn’t originally speak it. 

Geographically and culturally indistinct.

Just like her.

With that voice she holds almost-conversations, makes almost-friends. Bursting from her lungs are almost-declarations of love, shouted oceans apart for the countries that have welcomed her. 

Her father’s studies took her to Australia for four months as a child, then New Zealand for four years. She doesn’t know how to drink coffee in a bag, sing national day songs or estimate the weight of one-dollar coins to determine her future, but she does know she’s Singaporean. 

So when the adult manning the SafeEntry post to her polytechnic feels entitled to ask, “Are you from here?”, she smiles. 

Knowing yet another school lies ahead of her, she graduates staring into her reflection.

She’s been “on exchange” in Singapore for six years. That’s 18 semesters.

They say third-culture kids like her live a lifestyle as if they’re internationally mobile. Growing up without the same culture as their parents or host country, reaching for that sense of belonging feels like reaching into Oobleck. Dipping her fingers in, excited people surround her and are eager to help her learn the culture, or return to her roots. They’re relaxed, forgiving. But the harder she pushes, through the nitty-gritty faux pas of what’s right to say and what isn’t, she meets resistance — and it’s molded her into something else.

An almost-New Zealander. An almost-Singaporean. 

It’s why she laughs until her stomach hurts when Sam shows her a shorter, more convenient route to Bugis MRT in the cover of darkness, and Mark’s capybara cafe recommendation becomes the highlight of her most recent JB trip. It should’ve been her showing them. Instead she makes them clutch their pearls with a slogan, “If I can’t see it, I won’t walk to it” — a subtle declaration that she’s seen enough of Singapore that she needs to. But meeting those two, she realises that maybe Singapore hasn’t seen enough of her.

The little girl who talks too loud, too ang moh, running barefooted across the SOSS lounge.

Searching for dry grass.