We are a really nostalgic lot in Singapore. It must be because the country has changed amazingly fast.

Skyline? Always new.

Lifestyle? Choices abound.

The way we make money? The Economic Development Board once rejoiced when salted-egg and joss-stick makers set up factories in Jurong.

Now it's the glorious hour of the wealth managers and life scientists and top-dollar tourists on the Flyer.

One way to personalise Singapore's transformation is to think back to our first home.

Remember it?

Too few of us can still pick out the house where we started our journey in the world.

That first abode is:

1. Replaced by a pricier hunk of concrete.

2. A road.

3. In line for changes that will in no way resemble the past we know.

It's tough to cling to the dissolving contours of our early life.

My early homes were in Pasir Panjang (the shophouse where I was a newborn has vanished), Queen's Crescent (now a patch of grass) and Holland Avenue.

That's the only place still around, so it's a living repository of old times.

On free afternoons, when I was a schoolgirl, I'd wander down the road to Holland Village which I loved for its spreading raintrees and eclectic mix of little shops.

A sense of other lands was evoked just by the many faces from elsewhere. Being there felt like a mini-holiday.

My younger sister returns to Holland Village each time she visits, though she has spent much of her life in California and Melbourne.

The power of our former homes can run deep. Someone once told me that when people dream of home, it tends to be our first home.

And sometimes we simply return to it, like my Vietnamese-American friend, Sandra, who searched for her first home in Ho Chi Minh City.

She'd lived in the city till age five, before her family fled their life of privilege for the United States with Saigon's fall.

Three decades later, she has a lively recall of details - how the maids made vanilla milk for the five children each morning.

Or the day her playful brother fell into the koi pond.

Her first home, as it turned out, is now one of many motorcycle shops in a city of racing two-wheelers.

It doesn't matter. She has carved a full life in the US and loves her Vietnamese roots, so she's doubly blessed.

I discovered that even when I lived in the US, the idea of the first home is powerful and can be transplanted.

I loved Bethesda, on the serene outskirts of Washington, just because it was my first home in the US and symbolised a new life.

Even after moving a couple of times, I'd drive back to linger in its coffee shops and take friends to my favourite sushi nook.

My globalisation professor in the US once asked our class: Where is home?

That was when I realised that I had two homes, Singapore and the US. That's a tremendous gift.

Home, wherever it is, is a place where I've found friends and a rich sense of family.

Create memories, my friend PD likes to say. And for sure both Singapore and the US have become endless wells of memories because they represent home and family.

Recently, I was re-reading Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's memoirs.

Being a little ill that day heightened the unreal yet oddly intimate picture of Singapore life and politics in such a different time that it was like reading about a half-remembered land and home.

It shows again how greatly Singapore has transformed, and how much home means.

Asian cities change incredibly fast. Singapore is no laggard in that regional race to the future.

At a personal level, the faster we race, the more rootedness we reach out for.

But that first home is a dream-like anchor that always recedes and disappears.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on June 15, 2008