Dear Visa-17,

Visa-29 here. So I recently got on a Singapore Airlines plane (I know, finally!) and flew across the planet to San Francisco, California. It was, in my opinion, the best two weeks of my life. I have so much to say about it that I don’t know where to begin – until I remembered the advice that I give writers who are stuck, which is to think of the one person who you think would most want to hear from you, and to write directly to them. And so I’m writing to you.

Gosh, what would you wanna know? Some quick broad strokes about the next 12 years of your life:

• You know that girl you loved, and broke up with, and pined over? We married her! And it’s been fantastic. You’re a very lucky kid, you don’t even know it yet. (We also got two cats, can you imagine? They’re cute, annoying zen masters.)
• We started a business! We’ve sold thousands of t-shirts – I think over 10,000 at this point – and it’s opened all sorts of interesting doors and opportunities for us. And it’s just a lot of fun. Some of the t-shirts are particularly rude, you’ll love them.
• We were invited to meet the Prime Minister! Because of our Facebook posts! Turns out he’s quite a smart, thoughtful guy. This will help you realize, importantly, that you can pretty much talk to anybody about anything.
• We got a job! Working on Internet things, with incredibly smart and kind people – so all that blogging and forum posting you’ve been guiltily doing totally paid off. I am so, so thankful to you for that, you can’t imagine.
• We bought a flat! Having a place of our own has been such a blessing – it’s been a place to recover and heal and figure out who we are. One thing I do regret though, is that even now I haven’t quite… made it a home. I’m working on it.
• We got depressed again! Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re depressed right now. Surprise! And… after all of the life-changing, world-expanding things that happen, depression strikes again. And we work our way through it, as you’ll do in the coming months and years. I think… a lot of it is a sort of grief, a sense of hopelessness at the realities of existence. We eventually work through it. Alan Watts helps.
• We left the job! We spent a good 5.5 years there and it was easily the best environment we’d ever been in. Working there was a challenging, enriching experience and we levelled up tremendously on all fronts while we were at it. But eventually we’d feel a longing to do something different, and you shouldn’t leave your longings unattended.
• We have over 10,000 Twitter followers now! (You don’t even get a Twitter account until you’re 18…) We’d spend a bunch of time on Quora (receiving “You’re a Quora Top Writer!” in the mail will be something that moves you deeply), on Reddit, on Facebook… but it’ll be on Twitter that you finally find a medium that’s well-suited to the way your brain works.

Each one of those things has been life-changing. And none of that is what I want to talk to you about today. I want to talk to you very specifically about my trip to San Francisco!

You see, up until Q1 2019, we’d never have ventured further than this rectangle:

I wonder how you’d feel about this fact? Does it surprise you? I remember you used to vaguely talk about wanting to travel, but you never actually sat down to make plans. You never actually figured out the logistics, you never did the budgeting. It was never that much of a priority to you – you vaguely liked the idea of being a well-travelled person, but you didn’t feel The Itch that travellers often describe feeling.

Ooh, boy, am I itchy now! 😂

So you’d probably want to know – why San Francisco?

Why not New York? All of the TV shows are set in New York! All the cool buildings are in New York! All the song are about New York!

Well, the answer is friends. Around 2017–2018, we start tweeting a lot. I mean, a lot. In 2016 we discover (via Ryan, a Twitter friend) that we can actually search Twitter for old tweets, and reply to them, creating threads in the process. Can you imagine what that’s like? I’d love to see you think about it. At 17 you still hadn’t really gotten into political blogging yet, you were mostly busy figuring out how to articulate what was going on inside you.

Anyway – once we learned that we could reply to our own older tweets, we just exploded – and we got thousands and thousands of Twitter followers in the process. And for some reason, a substantial amount of them were based in San Francisco. Here’s a rough map of where our followers are:

I think it’s generally true that a lot of weirdos like ourselves tend to move to the Bay Area region to meet other fellow weirdos. And luckily for us, eventually a bunch of SF-based weirdos liked us enough to invite us to visit – and they even offered to take care of our accommodation!

Are you getting it? This trip means so much to me not just because it finally meant breaking out of the local rectangle that we’ve been confined to all our life, but also because we were invited and welcomed by a bustling community of nerds.

Here’s a story I’ve told several friends to help explain this. Remember when we were in secondary school? Every day, at recess, there would be different groups of boys at different tables. There was a territorial aspect to it. There would be “the band table”, “the soccer table”, even “the Indian table”. And while we were generally welcome to join any existing table where we had a couple of friends or acquaintances, none of the tables were “ours”. If a table was full, nobody was going to scooch in to make space for us – we mostly had to find another table. And so we had to work extra hard to be charming, charismatic, likeable – whatever it took – to earn our seats. We got by, but there was a fundamental insecurity at the heart of the experience.

Well, going to San Francisco felt like walking to an empty table – and finding dozens and dozens of people who were eager to sit with me. Finally, after over a decade of writing, socializing, reflecting, journaling, thinking, learning, being – finally, Visa, we have a table we can call ours.

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Ultimately, if there’s just one thing I can get across to you, it’s this feeling. God, what a feeling. I have never felt so accepted. I have never felt so loved, cherished – desired, even. People love us, cherish us, feed us, invite us into their arms and into their homes, and make sure we get home safe. I have just been devastated with gratitude, and it is such a precious, powerful, important feeling. Every human being should get to experience this feeling, and it’s sad to consider that not many really do, not like this.

There are all sorts of interesting details about San Francisco itself that I’ll write about in a follow-up post. But just a few quick notes: The flowers are extremely colorful and intense, totally different than SG. The weather is absolutely lovely – it’s probably considered “somewhat cool” to people who’ve experienced actual winter, but to our tropical Singaporean ass, it was delightfully freezing. You get to wear multiple layers of clothes and have the midday sun shining on your face, and still enjoy a hot chocolate! The burritos are amazing – the guacamole is fresher than anything you’ve ever had. So are the strawberries.

On a less cheery note, there are homeless people on the streets – which is something I know you’ve seen before in India and the Philippines, but there’s something extra jarring about having a delicious gourmet lunch at Twitter’s HQ and then stepping outside to see people passed out on the streets. It’s a complex, difficult problem, and witnessing it will change the way you think about America a little bit.

There are all sorts of other details – marijuana is legal and you can smell people smoking it pretty much everywhere. There are cashless cafes that only take mobile payments. All the major tech companies have really cool offices. But let’s save the specifics for later – the fundamental thing that I want to convey to you is… people are so different. You’ll learn this when you visit Thailand, and the Philippines, and India – and all of those places are also in Asia. There’s something dramatically different about California, or maybe San Francisco in particular. It’ll take me a separate essay to articulate precisely what, but the critical thing I want you to know is that it is. I need you to know that the world isn’t some sort of big generic blob. Intellectually of course you know that’s not true – but personally witnessing the differences is a trip. You have to feel it – it makes you realize that you’ve spent your whole life living with all sorts of assumptions that you’ve never thought to identify, let alone question. And once you realize this, I think you’ll never be the same again.

(And… also, simultaneously, people everywhere are also so similar. People everywhere in the world have similar conversations with their friends about their other friends, people walk their dogs (there are a LOT of dogs in SF, though) and worry about their aging parents and coo at babies. People get married and take wedding photos at scenic locations. There’s a comforting thing about this. You’ll feel a sense of one-ness with all human beings.)

My trip to San Francisco was many things for me. I don’t want to imply that there’s something ridiculously, fantastically magical about the city itself. I don’t know that, and I don’t think that’s necessarily, particularly true. It could very well be that a Bizzaro Visa born and raised in SF might a similar experience coming to Singapore! (Well – probably not, but you get what I’m getting at.) It was the first time I ever travelled alone – there’s an entire essay I could write about that. But I’m getting sleepy now, and I’m going to publish this first – so that I can get a chance to read and hear what my friends think about all of this. That’s something we get to do now! We are so blessed.

With gratitude and love,
Visa-29