Elena reached out to me on Wechat a few years ago. We’d first seen each other amidst mutual friends at West Coast Park, but hadn’t interacted much then. At the time, between my first and second years at NUS, I was in the UTown hostel study room, trying to catch up on lectures from the previous semester that I hadn’t really understood. “Hey, I’m staying on campus for the break and getting pretty isolated in my room. Want to meet up sometime?” Elena messaged.

(“Elena”, like my other interviewee, prefers to use a pseudonym given the perceived sensitivity about commenting on her adopted home, Singapore.)

I remember walking to the Japanese restaurant nearby on a humid afternoon. As soon as we sat down, Elena confessed that she’d been feeling unwell and unusually tired lately, both physically and emotionally. I told her that ever since I was hospitalised in high school, I tended to get exhausted much more easily. “Oh wow, same here,” she immediately said.

I wasn’t expecting that level of honesty. Most people I knew, especially in the Chinese student circle, only talked about their successes, often on WeChat Moments: straight-A grade reports; LeetCode problems they’d solved; offers from big tech companies; and their latest impressive projects.

Elena was different. She was talking about pain, about vulnerability, about the parts of the “elite overseas scholar” experience that no one wants to admit. I felt something inside me ease. 

I thought about my own second semester—just months earlier—when I couldn’t get out of bed, when I sat in the lounge until 2am staring at problem sets I couldn’t solve, when my brain had stopped working the way it used to.

I hadn’t told anyone about that. I thought it was my personal failure, my weakness. But sitting across from Elena, I realised: maybe it wasn’t just me. “This is normal,” I reassured her, again and again.

Those words gave her, perhaps for the first time, a sense of acceptance rather than judgement—and marked the beginning of our friendship. Over the next two years, Elena and I spent countless nights together, sometimes studying, often just talking. When we both struggled with insomnia, we’d squeeze onto one of the narrow dorm beds, holding hands in the dark, keeping each other company until sleep finally came. We’d sit on the stairwell until 3 or 4 AM, talking about everything and nothing. I wonder if this is what previous generations of migrant Chinese female students also did here.