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A friend of mine rents a studio apartment in Chinatown. I admire him, to leave the comfort of home, his mother who cooks and cleans for him, irons his clothes. He is my age - most societies demand a man's independance 10 years earlier, but not in Sinagapore. Here, it is natural for children to stay with parents up till marriage, and then some more.

His parents of course, were puzzled, hurt and angry that he needed his own privacy, at the expense of incurring more cost. But his apartment suits my sensibilites: a kitchenette and bathroom and just one huge room with a bed. Everything is functional yet nicely run-down. And the view - a 30th storey panorama of the night time city. I could drift off to this every night, wake up to such a sight at daybreak. It was the view that made it worth while, he said. He wanted to show me something else.

The building was full of migrant workers from China. We climbed the stairs just outside his door to the 31st storey, and came upon a corridor with beds crammed head-to-head, women towelling themselves in rooms littered with broken furniture and glass bottle shards, 10 people cooking in 1 dim kitchen. They cast wary, threatening eyes, and I felt disorientated and afraid. The wind howled through everything.

Most of them are illegal, he said, the men stared at us openly. We retreated to his room, just a few feet away downstairs, and locked the door. Too strange, too jarring a reality. Mollycuddle me, swathe me with spankey-clean sheets, let bright suburban lights drive shadows away from the streets. Make me a fair citizen, an economic digit, and I will see my parents through their twilight, ferry my children to and from school, and wish that they will never wish for anywhere else but here, their sanitized, cloistered home.