8:22pm.

Most people wouldn't guess if I didn't tell them so. Because while every fibre inside me screams Singaporean, my passport and identity card say otherwise. Born in Malaysia, but growing and living here since 9 months after my birth makes me every bit local as everybody else. Except for my identity documents, that is.

Today is National Day, and I am so thankful to be here.

Singapore isn't perfect. Perhaps, there are too many rules, too many things one can and cannot say about the government; There are too many people in lifts, trains and buildings, and finding a seat on public transport is like striking lottery; Our youth are spoilt, distracted and too wealthy for their own good-myself included. We have made mistakes, and are still making them now- I shudder each time we drive past the integrated resorts which will become a casino hub, and laugh wryly in bemused resignation at how a counselling service for gambling addicts will be set up in response to the architectural monstrosity which will boost our economy but tear apart families, create jobs but destroy characters, bring in tourists but take away our sense of integrity. People fall through the cracks of our healthcare system, however impeccable we claim it is on an international standard, still. We are too pragmatic.

It's true, we aren't perfect.

But we have roofs over our heads, clean water from taps. We have public transport- try that in Nepal. And while we can't provide the best healthcare for every citizen, the economic-cost benefit is just about... there. We don't have large fields and horses and sprawling meadows, but we have nice parks and pretty landscapes. We don't have 4 seasons, but we have lovely weather, nonetheless. We have clean streets, fresh air, a place we can call our own.

I don't know how to sing the national anthem of Malaysia. I have visited the place a number of times, only to feel like an alien in the place, unsafe in the neighbourhood where I was born in, after knowing that a close family friend had been robbed four times in the district. I don't eat durians, the Malaysian national favourite delicacy, and I eat meepok (an Asian noodle dish) with ketchup, the Singaporean way, not dark soy sauce- something which all my Malaysian relatives use as the litmus test to differentiate our loyalties. They cringe and shake their heads in mock disgust.

This morning, a friend met up with me before dawn for an early morning run. And as we ran past the park connectors to the beach and back, adjourning to run in quaint little roads, we marvelled at how clean, pristine and beautiful the scenery was. "I feel so happy today," he said, "it's national day." I felt the same too.

"This is where I hung out when I was a kid," he pointed out. "Me too!" I said, as we talked and jogged past places which mattered to us, which formed a significant part of our identities.

The beach is the place I grew up in, the place where my best friend from childhood and I and his family got drenched in the rain while going to play with mudskippers when we were five. The college we jogged past was the college I attended. The coffeeshop we ran past was the place my father would give me pep talks in while I was going through my emo, angsty adolescence. The train station is where I met people who changed my life, like Grandpa Zhou. The east is where I schooled and played and grew up in most of my life. We jogged past the apartment I stayed in previously, and I mused at the time when I was still in pre-school and my mother would play those catchy national day jingles ("We are Singapore", "Singapura... sunny island, set in the sea...") and lullabies on a cassette player at night before I went to bed. Singapore is the place which gave me an education, gave me a chance at learning medicine through meritocracy, not a bumiputra system. This is the place where I met people who helped me understand who God was, and is.

It's not perfect, I know. But it's where I can call home.

I love the way we are so anal and uptight about cleanliness, among other things, the way we call our elderly "aunties" and "uncles" as if they were our relatives (it is an asian culture), love the way we try so hard to be Uniquely Singapore, and succeed, if only sometimes. We aren't perfect, but I love this place, still.

At 8:22pm tonight, the whole of Singapore will stop whatever they are doing to recite the national pledge, that pledge which I was chosen to recite in primary school on the school stage with a microphone. It's a strange feeling, something I have yet to reconcile with, to be a foreigner in a land you feel you only know to call home and yet can never quite call yourself to be a citizen of. It's strange to have studied and been 'brainwashed' by the history of a place which has bitter roots with your birthplace, of which you know little of. It's a strange feeling too, to know that home in the future may be elsewhere, in a developing country, and not here. I am straddled between two shores and an unknown one, over a precarious river of identity crisis.

But I forget, that perhaps, many of us, too, are foreigners in this world, God's people walking in a godless world, walking on this earth but only transiently, with a piece of eternal heaven in us, the heaven which is to be home for good in the future, just not now. (1 Peter 2:11)

And all at once, I remember, that Home isn't my previous apartment or my present room or the east of Singapore or the Malaysian neighbourhood where I was born in. Home doesn't depend on what my passport says or what I am familiar with. Because homes change with circumstance, and no home but One is truly perfect.

Home is where gratitude for things past, hope for the future, and love for the present is. Home is in the inside place.

Happy 44th birthday, Singapore.

"This is home, truly,

Where I know I must be."

- Home, truly