As a Singaporean, nothing gets my national spirit quite as fired up as gushing about our beloved Changi Airport—Changi, for short. So let me begin: It has been named the best airport in the world a dozen times by various rankings, including Condé Nast Traveler’s Readers’ Choice Awards, and it’s even been named one of the world’s cleanest airports, so believe me when I tell you that this place sparkles.
In Changi, space is not limited to those who can pay for it. Although private lounges and Bib Gourmand restaurants abound, travelers can find plenty of open seating, power outlets, and nap chairs angled in such a way that one’s sleeping visage can be hidden from the rest of the world. Whenever anyone tells me they’ve passed through Singapore, I grab their arm and demand to know if they’ve seen Changi’s Rain Vortex—the world’s tallest indoor waterfall circled by a massive forest valley that hums hypnotically to calm the tired, hungry, and overstimulated. When they nod yes, I let go, as if I planted the man-made rainforest myself, down to every last shrub.
I grew up near Changi, and therefore, in it. Ever since I was a child, before I even left the country for the first time, the airport represented free air-conditioning, clean toilets, and Wi-Fi—all publicly accessible 24 hours a day. Thanks to our public transit system, it’s efficiently connected to the rest of Singapore—an easy enough commute given the country’s small size. Here, heading to the airport feels no different from going to the mall. Growing up, I would sit cross-legged on the floor of Changi’s viewing gallery, where travelers could watch planes take off and land, and where I sought refuge from the equatorial heat while reading a book. I constantly campaigned for my parents to host my birthday dinners there. Sometimes, I would even slip into sweaters and pretend I was jet setting to a cold-weather country for a vacation instead of just the intensely climate-controlled airport fifteen minutes away from my house.
For much of my schooling life, my friends and I would ride the bus to the airport after class and camp out overnight in one of the 24-hour cafés to study. We’d make a single cup of coffee last for hours, much to the chagrin of the baristas, then take turns watching each other’s bags as we ducked out to drink soya bean milk in the cheaper staff canteens (accessible via a word-of-mouth path through the parking lots). As sophisticated globe-trotters traipsed past us with their Rimowa suitcases and coordinated sweats, it felt as if my friends and I were living parallel, secret lives. Even though we were sharing the same physical space, breathing the same air as these temporary interlopers, our version of the airport was totally different. A private world hidden in plain sight.
Years later, as an adult, I regularly returned to Changi airport. I could be found on a near-daily basis in the recently renovated Starbucks duplex, where I wrote the bulk of my debut novel, The Original Daughter. I had an office then, one I rented in the city center for the precise purpose of finishing my book. Yet again and again, I found myself back at the airport. And no matter how many times I did, the first step through its glass doors invariably calmed me. I felt cocooned in familiarity, steadied and ready once more to confront the most significant undertaking of my life. Travelers flitted around admiring Changi, but their movements focused, not distracted me. As they committed their version of the airport to memory, I too wove my own invisible world into permanence.
It’s something that amuses many of my friends. After all, airports are primarily transitory places. They’re designed to be a temporary hammock for the international traveler—not a place to nest in. Yet for me, and I suspect, many Singaporeans, our relationship to the airport is an emotional one. Our country is relatively young; it turns 60 this year. It has been renovated, redone, and rebranded by progress many times over. As a nation smaller than the size of New York City, every square foot’s purpose in Singapore has to be constantly reevaluated, and no space’s future is guaranteed. The stories of my parents’ childhood are anchored only to their memories and my imagination, the physical landmarks of their past ceded to ever more efficient architectural structures. The schools they attended no longer exist, shut down due to declining class sizes; some campuses have been transformed into office skyscrapers. The giant indoor playground where I celebrated my childhood best friend’s fifth birthday was long ago razed to accommodate a shopping mall; the shophouse where I worked my first grown-up job as a copywriter is now the boutique hotel The Clan. There is a sentimental cost to constant innovation, and Singaporeans know this better than most.
And so, writing a Singaporean novel set in our contemporary history has been one way for me to immortalize this ephemeral version of my home. It is fitting, then, that much of the book was written in Changi, this transitory space that has somehow managed to become my country’s most permanent fixture. Now that I live between Singapore and the United States, my love for this airport has deepened exponentially. Each time I leave my past life in search of a future one, I know I will be able to return to Changi, even if nothing else remains. How can I explain the comfort this brings me? When I tell you of my love for the world’s best airport, this is what I mean too.
