I am, by the accident of who I was born as, the default person in Singapore.

Cis, English-speaking, middle class, Chinese, citizen. Every shop caters to the needs of people like me. Almost all the food is to my taste. The snacks in every train station and every mall suit my diet and my flavour preferences. The hairstylists specialise in cutting my straight hair. The beauty salons are used to people like me. The gyms are full of people like me, with the same body type. I can get the food I enjoy at any hour of the night, and morning. No one ever others me.

It wasn't obvious to me until I left it for some time. But it is obvious. And it is not the same for many other Singaporeans, who are not the default people here.

Deciding, voluntarily, to go and be a minority somewhere else, for this and for other reasons, has been extraordinarily difficult.

I feel it most at Trader Joe's, of all places. I go in and I find I hate almost all the snacks, and part of why I hate that shop so much is that it reminds me, aisle by aisle, that I am not the default there, or even a known type of person. My preferences don't register. I have to go to special shops to get the things I want and need. I hate all the potato chips.

But not in Singapore.

But it's not really about potato chips.

It has been extremely seductive to entertain the idea of moving back.

It is life on easy mode, for me. I can get a new phone line in two minutes, sort out banking in ten, pay my taxes in five, and plan to buy a home here with almost no money down. I could get a high paying job quite easily, most definitely, and travel the world in a corporate job and as an individual, with easy access to the world from here. (The stereotype, which is true, is that your average office lady Karen type goes to Japan four times a year.)

I never had to struggle for anything, quite literally, until I left.

And at the same time, my work in local politics and volunteering and activism also showed me that not every Singaporean, not every person who lives in Singapore, gets to live like this. We have made some kind of Faustian bargain, where we've said that in return for comfort and money, ten percent of society will never come anywhere close to any of it, forming a permanent underclass along with the migrant workers we mistreat terribly.

I don't struggle because they do.

Could I voluntarily return here and simply not see the other side of that bargain?

I ruffled so many feathers being a race and class traitor, constantly yelling at people about racism and oppression. I think I was just supposed to be thankful. To walk away from Omelas.

Coming back as an adult, after almost twenty years away, will be strange. Even though I've kept extremely strong ties, I haven't really had a typical Singaporean life, and I hold certain expectations and ideologies that are just too out of place now. Like the idea that it should be illegal to discriminate against queer and trans people. (It is not.)

But in the toss up between survival and thriving, when the world isn't going well, the idea that there's a place for you, where you will be taken care of, feels very seductive.

If only it also had a place for my spouse too.