I ONLY LEARNT of Yale-NUS College at the end of high school, when we’d piled into a physics classroom to hear about the Ivy League. More than one boy asked about scholarships. The last slide of the presentation showed three skyscraper dorms, glowing at dusk between the heritage trees and emerald lawns of Singapore. It was a collaboration between Yale University and the National University of Singapore. This new school would be the first liberal arts college in Asia, offering a four-year, fully residential education. It would be a model of cultural exchange.

I was seventeen. I didn’t own a passport. I’d never been on a plane. The extent of my ‘cultural exchange’ was one Toorak party where, reciting Hamlet’s first soliloquy, I tried to woo the private schoolgirls before they realised ‘this too too solid flesh’ belonged out near Dandenong.