It’s funny when you travel around the world and feel more at home than you do at home. Here, people smile and nod. They bring their hands together. I like the lemon taste of the drink. Emulsified chilies in a bowl, spread liberally. The supposition that people start from: thank you for coming, we assume you are here for some positive purpose, be welcome. Be at home.

These are the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, and if you go to Singapore, you have to go here. Singapore is a country that is essentially one city. It is a totalitarian regime, no freedom of press, and dire penalties if you offend the local people. Do not offend the local people. They are wonderful and warm, coming as many did out of British colonialism, in this case through the tip of Malaysia. A city-state that pulled itself into prominence and is a key waystop through Southeast Asia. But it is more than that.

The Gardens at night, and this grove of colour. It’s eccentric and loud, humidity and music and a boat on top of a hotel in the background. You can become lost in the Gardens at night, and nothing bad will happen to you. Totalitarianism, perhaps benevolent dictatorship it can be called, creates safety. I never met a poet in Singapore. I wonder if that’s because they do not feel safe.

Those curves of concrete are 3D-printed. The pool overflows and spills into gardens along the side of the hotel. A man with a transparent hosepipe was watering the gardens above, nurturing the verticality of this forest. I kept touching all that green, assuming some of it had to be fake. The hallways were filled with businesspeople. Are you a writer, I wanted to ask them, a hidden writer that walks these halls in a suit and backpack-laptop-bag? I didn’t have the courage for that. I lack this trait, because the very question can expose the very notion.

A temple over a park in Bangkok. This city is hard to comprehend. Skyscrapers knocked against shanties, corrugated metal roofs that you want to jump to from your fifth-floor balcony, unsure if it will hold your weight. Electrical cables like braided hair, strung between poles over a scalp of narrow roads and stone gates. Canals of sewage. Street vendors making offerings, take them. This food is okay, they tell you, so you eat like a fugitive, trying small bits of it all. Bangkok is meant to be consumed in bites.

Here, there are no rules. There are no illegalities, and thus you must be careful. I saw a school offloading children in uniforms, every single child a poet. Young writers flooding home, jumping on the backs of motorbikes or into shiny cars clattering along the bricks. Composing in their heads as they make for home. It’s wild. It’s a perfect composition of humanity, tolerance, convective drafts of heat that make you crave the air conditioning but hate its civility.

Put your hands together as you pass these little roadside temples. Bring those hands to your chest, and close your eyes. Nothing will happen to you as you stand there, a sea of humanity passing you by. Make an offering of your own homeland, the place where you are a foreigner, as a token of a different world. Utter a prayer, secular or not, and then invite these people to your world. It’s one ocean away. Everyone smiles, and when they see your invitation, they all say yes.

Hands together and to the chest, on the balcony at night, hating the coolness in the room behind you, a prayer let loose to assure these people that you are here for a good purpose. We are in this together. We have our problems. We make our problems. Children go to bed dreaming novels of faraway places, ones that can’t possibly exist but for the reality they make of them – the reality that springs forth the very moment they close their eyes. I remember those days. Do you?