After ten years in this part of the world, I have come to a stunning conclusion: Asia is just too goddamned small.

One of the reasons I left Singapore to go to China is that I was overcome by a creeping sense of claustrophobia. After building almost my entire career in the city-state, it was hard to shake the feeling that I was running into the same people over and over again. This was partly because of my career choices. I had originally come to Singapore to work in its first big Internet company, Sembawang Media. From there I had spent several years working in a loosely affiliated Internet consultancy before going to work in tech PR. By the time I was wallowing in tech flackery, six years after first arriving, many of my old SembMedia colleagues had risen to become the technology industry and journalism establishment. And so I saw the same faces again and again.

This wasn't necessarily bad. I was never short of job offers. I had good connections. As a veteran of two of Singapore's most infamous tech startups I carried a certain amount of weight amongst tech flacks and journalists. But I was also constantly reminded of the limited horizons of a Singapore-focused career. There was, I thought, an entire continent out there. How come I keep running into the same clowns?

So I came up with what seemed like a foolproof plan. By god, I'll move to China. Green fields (metaphorically, that is), new horizons, and something like 300 times Singapore's population. Heck, Beijing alone has more than three times as many people. I would be a stranger in a strange land.

That lasted about an hour. Shortly after arriving in Beijing I met a woman at my gym who, by complete coincidence, turned out to be the sister-in-law of one of my good friends in Singapore. A guy who had tried to hire me away from my old PR company in Singapore transferred to the office of my new one in Beijing. An ex-colleague has just moved up to Beijing to follow her boyfriend and another is coming up for a six month language program. On one of my first assignments at my Beijing PR company I ended up on a conference call with a Shanghai-based client who's in-house PR manager turned out to be the woman who had been hired to replace me at my Singapore PR company. She hadn't lasted there, and had fetched up in Shanghai during the three months I was in my language program in Beijing. Yet another ex-colleague, Elvin, has just joined the regional PR team at another client of mine, and is forever on the same conference calls. I'm good friends with two of the Straits Times correspondents in Beijing, one of whom was referred to me upon moving to Beijing by a mutual old friend in Singapore.

And so on.

And it's not just in professional situations. Several years ago, on my first trip to Cambodia, I was walking down the path to the scenic Ta Prohm temple, in Siem Reap, when I heard a woman say, "Will?" Since I was travelling with three dudes, this was unexpected (though pleasant). It turned out to be one of my diving instructors from Singapore.

I was further reminded of Asia's deceptive tinyness last week when I got together in Singapore with one of my colleagues from Beijing, an American woman who was also in Singapore for the holiday week. She and her Beijing-based, British boyfriend had invited me and Mrs. Imagethief to join her and a few friends for dinner. I hadn't met any of the four other friends invited, but moments after they joined us at the table, one of them said to me, "Weren't you in Julian's band?"

As it happens, I was in Julian's band. Or, rather, both Julian and I were in Andy's band, Andy being the friend who had referred the Straits Times correspondent to me. Julian, Andy and I had all been colleagues at my second company in Singapore. Andy's brother, incidentally, had worked for me at my first company in Singapore. Julian, meanwhile, now works in the Singapore office of the same client company that my ex-colleague, Elvin just joined the regional PR team of. It turns out that one of the guys at dinner worked with Julian and had been at Julian's wedding last November. I had missed that, which was a shame because the Prime Minister of Singapore had attended. I wasn't aware that I had penetrated so close to the corridors of power. It further turned out that three of the people at the dinner table (including my Beijing colleague's boyfriend) had worked for Asia Content, a spin-off of my first company at Singapore, and we knew pretty much all the same people.

The point is not that this is unusual or remarkable in any way. Rather, it is that this kind of thing is completely typical. Everybody knows everybody, and I am forever discovering that the people I meet in China and I have mutual acquaintances and friends. My attempt to escape the gravity well of Singapore by moving to Beijing has, in fact, failed utterly.

This is not really surprising. You spend a decade anywhere and you will get to know people. The expat scene in Beijing is still a bit clubby, and the PR and media worlds simply aren't that big, even at a regional level. In a way, that's useful. This is Asia, after all, and a network is not a bad thing. Every job I've landed in this part of the world has been through someone I already knew. Also, the Singapore-Beijing axis is very strong at the moment, as people stampede northward to get in on the China momentum. Many of my old friends travel to Beijing regularly. But even after a year and a half in China I am regularly surprised just how few degrees of separation there are between me and my old stomping grounds in the Lion City.

But it does raise the question of where I will go when the inevitable sense of claustrophobia starts to creep in once again. Given that Beijing feels, in many ways, like the largest village in the world, it will happen someday. The obvious cities --Shanghai and Hong Kong-- are equally infested with ex-colleagues and familiar faces. Even Bangkok, Chennai and Dubai are a little close for comfort, for various reasons.

I wonder how the career prospects for technology flacks are in Lahore these days.