Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg Page B

defiance.
    I felt a hard push from behind and tumbled into the road as the bus arrived, its large wheels so very heavy and so very fast.
    ~
    August 2008
    “All right, class dismissed.”
    The students in front of me, twenty-seven young men and women around a decade my junior, closed their laptops and packed up their bags. The horseshoe-shaped room filled with low muttering, and I reached behind me to turn off the ceiling-mounted overhead projector. My first Academic Writing night class at Singapore Management University was now over, and I exhaled in relief. I’d relayed my expectations and the assignments for the semester, started discussing the concepts of identity and discrimination, and managed to get through the ensuing awkward discussion and remainder of the 90 minutes without sweating completely through my shirt, my nervousness battling it out with the room’s central air-conditioning. Teaching a brand new class was always stressful, especially in a foreign country; I’d moved from North Carolina to Singapore for SMU’s two-year contract and was still adjusting to the different social mores, so I hadn’t been sure what to expect.
    The students all filed out, and I unhooked my own iBook from the cables in the podium and slid it into my green canvas Converse shoulderbag. I looked up and one student had remained behind, a fetching young woman who’d taken a seat in the front row, wearing a sleeveless dress that ended just above her knees, her long hair frizzed out full. Her smile was wide and genuine, her teeth small and even. I recalled the class roll: she had a Chinese surname, but her features belied a blending with another ethnicity, possibly Malay.
    “Professor?” she said.
    “Nicole, right?”
    “That’s right. Um, would it be possible to talk to you about the first essay assignment? I’m still a bit unclear on what you’re looking for.” Her voice was low and musical, with hardly a trace of a Singaporean accent.
    “Sure,” I said, looking around at the empty classroom, aware of how it might look, a professor and his female student, alone. “Is there someplace a bit more public we could go?”
    “Yeah lah,” she said, smiling again. “I know a great place.”
    She stepped outside, I turned off the lights, stepped out myself, and locked the door with the EZ-Link card that doubled as my university ID. “Please, lead the way.”
    We exited the building and wound our way along the brick walkways, with Nicole asking hesitant questions: where was I from (North Carolina), why did I come to Singapore (teaching work), how long had I been here already (one month), did I like the food (for the most part), had I traveled anywhere else in Southeast Asia (no), was I married (no), did I have a fiancée (no), a girlfriend (no)? I answered as best I could, acutely aware of her line of questioning, trying not to stare at the way her dress flowed around her body, at the long line of her neck, at the way her bountiful hair came tantalizingly close to brushing my arm.
    Nicole said, “Okay, we’re here,” and I looked ahead at a small lighted glassed-in café emblazoned with a tyvek sign reading MR TEA, the shop tucked underneath one of SMU’s many class buildings on Victoria Street, with dozens of occupied tables set up outside, crowded with young people (when had I started to think of them as young people? after I turned thirty?) working on assignments next to open textbooks, or tapping away on high-end laptops. I noticed more than a few with the lit Apple logo and smiled, myself a devotee of Steve Jobs. It seemed Singaporeans had money to burn.
    We stepped inside Mr Tea and up to the counter and the sign reading “Q Here.” Short for queue, rather than line, one of the many Britishisms still sticking around after the country’s colonial days, yet another thing for me to have to get used to. Nicole ordered something called Teh Tarik, and before I could interject, she called a Ginger Masala Tea for me.