September 11th from Singapore
Tags: reflections
Published: 2021-09-11 22:26:53

---
title: September 11th from Singapore
published: true
description: just some memories 20 years after 9/11.
tags: Reflections
slug: sept-11-from-singapore
canonical_url: https://www.swyx.io/sept-11-from-singapore
---

I was on the other side of the world when it happened.

My memory is curiously spotty about this major event I lived through. I remember exactly what I was doing at the time; yet I remember almost nothing else after.

Singapore is ~12 hours ahead of New York, so I was just finishing up my night class at home, walking out to our living room TV telegraphing that the world had forever changed. I remember thinking how it was a horrific accident, and then seeing footage of the second plane and realizing it was no accident. I remember the third plane crashing into Pentagon. Then the fourth. Drip-fed to us minute by minute through our local TV news, by scared reporters who barely knew any more than we did.

I don't know how I went to sleep that night. I remember looking at my baby sister, playing in her pen. Totally oblivious that the world she was born into had changed forever. (I would get that feeling again 2 years later, as [SARS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002%E2%80%932004_SARS_outbreak) threatened to lock down Singapore in the first coronavirus outbreak of our lifetimes.)

I didn't have any American friends at the time so it never got personal. But we watched with horror and confusion as the stories trickled out; [the Falling Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Falling_Man), [the Flight 93 phone calls](https://www.nps.gov/flni/learn/historyculture/phone-calls-from-flight-93.htm), [the firefighters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_the_Flag_at_Ground_Zero). I have no memory of how my parents or teachers dealt with it or moved on from it. I was myself unaware of how the military response moved from Afghanistan to Iraq and the intense debate prior and the quagmire after.

As a country with a 22% Muslim population, surrounded by other majority Muslim countries, tensions definitely were tight. First, copycat terrorists had to be preempted. Second, relationships needed to be rebuilt between faiths. [We would spend the next 1-7 years doing this.](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/politics/timeline-20-years-of-securing-singapore-following-911-attacks)

Travel didn't happen for me until about 4 years later when I went on my first international trip for a choir competition. By then almost all the security measures you have today were in place, including the [shoe requirement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_shoe_bomb_attempt) (which now seems to have faded), although they had yet to [ban water](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/565368/tsa-airport-liquids-rule-water-bottles-explained), and the X Ray machines weren't as fancy. For sure the days of [Rachel casually walking up to a flight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1q4w4wq8Cw) 30 minutes before departure were gone.

Later when I learned more about geopolitics we would debate [The End of History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man) vs [The Clash of Civilizations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations) at school and I recall my classmates having very strong opinions without having really read either book. It's still not clear to me that any of that was at all useful or relevant. I remember reading dire essays about the disruptive threat of nonstate actors, yet, [as Noah Smith notes](https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-911-era-is-over-good), state power won, once citizens gave up their privacy.

I wish I had journaled more back then. I wish I had told myself how it felt living through what I knew to be a special time. I wish I had close Muslim friends to process it with. And I wish I appreciated the difference between sudden tragedy and chronic, endemic disasters.