It’s quarter to 8pm in Singapore.

The very last tints of twilight blue are subsiding into darkness on the western horizon, which just happens to be to the left of my third story window. Directly north a large thunderhead is putting on a silent light show. Brief electric illuminations demark the borders of the wall cloud before it vanishes against the night sky again. I can see one star almost overhead. It seems as if the storm is coming closer, but it’s hard to tell. We’ve had one cloudburst already today, but it only increased the humidity of an already uncomfortably warm afternoon. Rain tonight might actually cool things down.

Traffic on the main road outside has not yet slowed, but traffic is always bad. A classmate told me today that his friend once spent $200 on gas in one day of driving because all of the driving is city driving in stop and go traffic. There are only five kinds of vehicles on the road: taxis, Japanese utility trucks, luxury cars, motorcycles and public buses. The quiet cars are out right now; it seems that all the muffler less vehicles wait until midnight to take to the streets.

Tonight, this is Singapore. It is not how I pictured it when I prepared to cross the Pacific but, then again, foreign countries never are. A big reason for this is that one of the foundational definitions we have for countries other than our own is “foreign”. The definition of foreign is “alien in nature, strange, unfamiliar”. But once you set foot in a place that has previously to you been only a “foreign” country, it is, in some sense, no longer foreign. Now it is something you have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched. It is no longer “that place over there”, it is rather, the place right here, and that is not what you expected.

This is not to say that it is no longer alien in nature, strange and unfamiliar. There will always be things and moments that catch you off guard, no matter how long you stay. You still feel like a stranger, like you don’t quite belong, and that some things here will never make sense. But the country is no longer separate from you. Regardless of how long or short your time there, it is now part of you and thus, no longer foundationally defined as “foreign”.

When I communicate with people back stateside, they always want to know “How’s Singapore? What’s it like?”. I’m finding more and more that the most instinctual answer for me to give is “normal”. The sun rose this morning, and since I have to do chores on campus at 6:40am, I was an eyewitness to the event. It was hot and humid today. I ate breakfast, lunch and dinner. I went to class. I made plans with people to see a movie tomorrow night. The sun went down. I sat in my window and watched lightning on the horizon, thinking somewhat nostalgically of similar summer storms back home in Minnesota. And I procrastinated from my homework by writing a blog piece. Normal. Today’s normal just happened to be in Singapore, the not so foreign country were I currently live.

I stepped off the plane and onto Asian soil for the first time (well, Asian tarmac and concrete) and found America all over again. I had read books to prepare me to come to Singapore, books that detailed aspects of the rich cultures that comprise Singapore’s complex society. I had learned about the Chinese, the Malay, the Indian, and I read about how Singapore was still emerging as a united cultural entity from this melting pot.

Singapore is the halfbreed brainchild of the east and the west. It’s a sea of Asian faces that all speak English. It’s a McDonalds and Pizza Hut on the corner down the street (they both deliver to your door), and Oreos and Ritz next to seaweed crackers and dried shrimp in the grocery store. It’s people introducing themselves to you by their Chinese name and then their English name as they smile with the tolerant knowledge that you won’t be able to remember the first one. It’s sitting at the bus stop and being serenaded by three tween girls singing Bon Jovi’s “living on a prayer”.

The western influence here is apparent, not only on the surface but also in the shifting fabric of Singaporean culture. All my Singaporean classmates can speak of the generational gaps in their families, similarly to what is often experienced by Asian immigrants and their children in the States. The Singapore that my classmates grew up in is not the Singapore of their parents or grandparents. My classmates may or may not speak their native tongue (some dialect from China, Malaysia or India usually). Their parents typically speak both English and their native tongue. Often their grandparents will not know English at all. The language is only a measuring rod for other cultural differences such as the materialism and individualism that seem to inevitably follow western influence.

The extent of the western influence in Singapore is vast and pervasive. The other day, it caught me off guard in an unexpected way. My professor was talking about his religious background and how he used to be Taoist before he became a Christian as a college student. “My whole family was Taoist,” he shared, “we prayed to everything. We prayed to the kitchen god, to the sea god, to the household gods, and we prayed to the moon, well, until the Americans landed on it.”

The class laughed, as did I, but I was suddenly struck by this perspective on what had for me always just been a great American scientific accomplishment. Countless cultures and religions around the world throughout human history have, in some way, shape or form, worshiped or venerated the moon or a lunar deity. It was an unreachable and luminous heavenly body that had both the indifferent distance of a god and yet the predictable rhythms of something trustworthy. And then America landed on her. Suddenly, the distant became near, the unreachable had been reached, the luminous wonder was exposed as a colorless rock in the sky. And we never even thought about the cultural and religious implications of that act. Just the scientific accomplishment.

Now, this is not a criticism of the moon landing or American science. It is merely an observation of how ignorant we can often be of the immeasurable influence we have. Though we are still young as a nation, barely out of our awkward teen years, there are younger siblings around the world watching us, imitating us, wanting to grow up to be like us. The question now is what will we do with that responsibility?