In the late 1980s, Chay Yew, an aspiring playwright living in California, returned to his native Singapore to complete his compulsory military service. While there, he joined a small theater company called TheatreWorks, for which he wrote a play about a straight, HIV-positive Chinese man and his relationship with a gay social worker. The script was swiftly banned by the Singaporean government for its homosexual themes, which were considered out of step with the country’s traditional values. (Gay sex is still officially illegal in Singapore.)

Rather than scrap the idea, Chay rewrote the play entirely, keeping the identity of the gay character intact but striking the overt homosexual references. He swapped specifics for euphemisms, and he wrote stage directions that conveyed the hidden message—the male characters “glided” onto the stage, for example.

“Government censorship taught me how to write between the lines with subtext,” Chay told the Los Angeles Times later.227

Chay’s bicultural identity as an immigrant living far from home, then returning, might have been the very thing that helped him think creatively under the tight constraints of censorship.

Several studies have found that being “weird” in one’s culture—as Chay, a gay Singaporean immigrant, was throughout his young adulthood—can enhance what’s known as “integrative complexity,” the ability to recognize and tie together several competing points of view at once.228 People who are better at integrative complexity tend to handle uncertainty well and are better at reconciling conflicting information. They can see a problem simultaneously from multiple perspectives. Like Fiddler on the Roof’s Tevye the Dairyman—also technically bicultural, given that he’s a fictional Jewish peasant living in Russia—they are able to consider things on “one hand” and many “other hands.” Chay knew that his play was good by Western standards, but he also knew it wouldn’t fly by Singaporean standards. So he found a way around both.

In fact, people who don’t fit neatly within any specific identity have been found, over and over again, to perform better at innovative thinking. Children who are exposed to multiple languages are better able to understand an adult’s perspective, which suggests to researchers that they go on to become better communicators overall.229 In one experiment, people who had spent time living abroad were better able to find hidden solutions to word and conceptual problems,230 perhaps explaining why the Russian Nabokov wrote Lolita while in the United States, as well as why Picasso, a Spaniard, began experimenting with Cubism while living among eccentric writers in Paris. A study that looked at the openness of Japanese society to foreign influence between the years 580 and 1939 found that periods of greater immigration and foreign travel corresponded with more national creative achievements two generations later.231