Displacing Singapore
(with apologies to Italo Calvino, James Clifford, Stamford Raffles and Munshi Abdullah,
and dedicated to the residents of Balam Road)
Peter Schoppert
freelance writer
’I have neither desires nor fears’, the Khan declared, ‘and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.’
’Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives a question of yours.’
‘Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.’
Italo Calvino , Dialogue of Marco Polo & the Great Khan, Imaginary Cities
When this place meant something, many years ago, there was a boulder that stood on a sandy spit at the mouth of the Singapore River. Two meters tall, the boulder had been split in two, one face carved to receive an inscription. Of the inscription we know very little, for only fragments remain. It was an Indic script, marking the island’s relations with the powerful port kingdoms of the Malay World: Majapahit probably, the Empire of the Bael Tree, or perhaps the old Sumatran kingdom of Srivijaya.
Five hundred years ago, or a thousand, Singapore was one of the many ports that grew, flourished, and faded back into an ignominy of mud and mosquitoes, in time with the tidal ebb of trade, of power, of the varying charisma of princes and admirals. In the ninth century Singapore was Dragon’s Tooth Gate, a far port on the Chinese maps; in the 13th, she sent a tribute of elephants to the Great Khan. In the 14th, judging from the old Annals, and from a few bits of celadon and a gold bracelet found on the Forbidden Hill that backs the river, Singapore was home to a prince, or princes. But we know little of these princes and their realm: was Singapore the temporary encampment for renegade prince on his way to found Malacca? Or was it a thriving city on its own, capital to three, or even five, generations of rulers, center of the Malay World, before Malacca? The Annals are ambiguous, yielding to many readings. Scholars are divided, or at least, resigned to uncertainty. Propagandists prefer not to dig too deeply. Archaeologists have nowhere left to dig: few patches of soil in Singapore remain undisturbed.
The Singapore Stone was the surviving witness to this history, to all the wealth and transience of old Temasek, of Sri Tri Buana, Parameswara and Iskandar Shah, the World Conqueror.
Munshi Abdullah, dedicated, compromised chronicler of early British Singapore, and the man who tutored Raffles in Malay, records how wise men from all of Singapore’s communities claimed the Stone for their own: "The Indians declared that the writing was Hindu but they were unable to read it. The Chinese claimed that it was in Chinese characters. I went with a party of people, and also Mr Raffles and Mr Thomsen, and we all looked at the rock. I noticed that in shape the lettering was rather like Arabic, but could not read it…" Some applied colored powders or lampblack to the stone, some took rubbings, some made castings, in an effort to better discern the outline of the blurred and worn characters. We will never know which wise man was closest to the truth, because in 1843 the Singapore Stone was broken up to make way for the house of the Harbormaster.
The few surviving pieces of the Stone -- placed for safekeeping, or as a curiosity, on the veranda of the Governor’s Mansion -- were hacked up by laborers for gravel a few years later, to pave the driveway. Three fragments remain to this day: two in Singapore’s History Museum, one catalogued but impossible to find, somewhere in the storage of the Calcutta Museum.
Singapore is a land that has misplaced its most ancient monument.
Who is the wise man who will claim the emptiness that remains?
---0-0-0---
The city churns. It changes constantly. Its citizens are persuaded that their survival depends on constant, never-ending labor and effort. And while they are champion traders and makers of things, those efforts depend on far-off markets, on the fortunes of strangers. The only labor which is in their own hands, and for which they pay themselves from their own substantial savings, is home improvement: the building and rebuilding of roads, bridges, tunnels, barracks, godowns and quays, office blocks, factories, slaughterhouses, hospitals, emporia, bomb shelters, airfields, schools, mansions, under- and overpasses, pathways and playgrounds, and drains deep enough to float a fleet. The busstops are made with I-beams and granite.
The city is constrained onto an island, and so all this ceaseless, nervous energy works upon itself, over and over again. Buildings are improved, upgraded, extended, torn-down and replaced, after brief years of service. Fortunes are made; roads are widened. New maps for new towns are overlaid completely on top of the old ones. The hills have been flattened, the swamps have long since been drained, and the coastline expands without cease, swelling into the sea, forcing a redrafting of all the maps, new surveys of all the boundaries.
The past continually makes way for a future that has no time to ripen into a present. And the citizens never imagine the city that awaits at the end of all that labor.
"If you ask ‘Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?’, the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, ‘So that its destruction cannot begin.’ And if asked whether they fear that, once the scaffolding is removed, the city may begin to crumble and fall to pieces, they add hastily, in a whisper, ‘Not only the city.’" - Italo Calvino, Cities & the Sky 3, Imaginary Cities
-:]—0—[:-
Threatened by an approaching thunderstorm, we pick over the piles of earth. The construction site is idle. We have a few hours to retrieve what material we can from the excavated soil. This is Pulo Saigon. Once a waterlogged island, a bit of mud and mangrove, it has become part of the warehouse district that crowds both banks of the Singapore River along its short navigable length. In the days ahead, the area is to be excavated, or rather, excised. Tunneling works will bring a new roadway from the north, under the Singapore River. At Pulo Saigon the tunneling will meet a long southwards running open cut, a huge trench forty meters wide, a hundred deep and 1500 meters long. After the excavations are complete, and tunnel joined to trench, the open cut will be covered over, forming a new surface over the underground roadway.
We are here on a salvage expedition. One of Singapore’s amateur archaeologists, perhaps its only, had come across some stones while examining the newly cleared site. The stones are interesting, but hard to read. They could be axes in the "smash-and grab" style of the later Neolithic. Or they could simply be oval-shaped rocks. Most examples of these axes are ambiguous at best. The prehistorian’s craft is a difficult one, worked at the margins of legibility. On the basis of these finds though, and given the site’s proximity to the river, Singapore’s only professional archaeologist thought it worthwhile to request permission to survey the site, and to rescue what material he could from the first layers of soil that had been cleared away.
The Public Works Department, and the contractor who controlled the site did indeed grant a window of time in which to work: three hours on a Sunday afternoon. And this is how we few volunteers find ourselves here, picking our way between the lorries, cranes and excavators marshaled for action for Monday, when the earth will be moved in earnest.
The piles of earth are full of material, rich in detritus. As the afternoon wears on, we don’t find any hand-axes, no prehistoric stones, nothing of the Neolithic. We do find plenty of colonial glass, and shards and shards of 100-year-old Qing blue-and-white, the rice bowls of Singapore’s coolies, who arrived from the same places their crockery did: Swatow, Amoy, Canton. We find fine-grained granite, from Southern China too, brought here as ships’ ballast, and used as paving stones, or discarded. We find European stoneware, old gin bottles, and badly-fired old bricks, their centers still black with carbon. We find pieces of grey and black earthenware which could be a thousand years old, or a hundred, so common is this type of vessel to Southeast Asia.
And then, as large pregnant rain drops begin to fall around us, as the clouds loom lower, Chor Lin finds something else. Pieces of celadon, green glaze on a heavy stoneware body. Six hundred years old and made in China when the Mongols ruled, these pieces are contemporary with the fragments found downstream and across the river, on the Forbidden Hill. This is hard evidence that 14th century Singapore was a large, thriving city, with settlements on both banks, and this far up the river. One piece, two, three, then four, and then we scramble away, drenched and afraid of the lightening strikes that seem now to move between the cranes.
The next day, the bulldozers have their way, scrambling all traces. Four broken shards, from piles of disturbed soil. According to the standards of the archaeologist, this is meaningless, random information. We have found nothing.
Three months later, I walk across a traffic island on a freshly-made exit ramp for the new Ayer Rajah Expressway. The island has not yet been landscaped. The turf has not yet been laid. I notice shards of blue and white. I pick them up: Qing blue-and-white, the rice bowls of two generations earlier. The excavated earth we picked over weeks earlier has been trucked out and distributed around the island for landfill, bearing with it all its evidence, all its history, all its burden.
--((00))--
"…it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city, or are erased by it."
- Italo Calvino, Thin Cities 2, in Imaginary Cities
Singapore is a city that has misplaced its most ancient monument. Perhaps that is just as well, for no monument could be big enough to accommodate all of Singapore’s meanings and memories. No monument could be subtle enough in design to encompass all the comings and goings that this city has known.
But what about the landscape? The shape of the land, its forms and outlines, and buildings, corners, vistas, all of this read in the light of history, of experience. Isn’t this a kind of monument writ large, a visual reference point for everyone’s memories? Think of the long avenues of Manhattan, the seven hills of Rome, the Golden Horn, Parisian boulevards, Beijing’s precise orientation, its Drum Tower hill. In a sense, Singapore has misplaced this dimension of itself too, rubbed it smooth, made it featureless. The bodiless dragon, all head and no heart, Singapore, the imaginary city, has somehow succeeded in displacing its own landscape.
Since the founding of the modern settlement, nearly 200 years ago, alteration of the island’s coastlines and topography has been something close to an obsession. Sir Stamford Raffles personally directed the first landfill operations in late 1821, on the southern bank of the Singapore River, two-and-a-half years after founding his treaty port. Munshi Abdullah said it was like "men going to war". Raffles wrote to England that "I have had everything to new-mould from first to last; to introduce a system of energy, purity, and encouragement; to remove nearly all the inhabitants, and to re-settle them; to line out towns, streets, and roads; to level the high and fill up the low lands…"
Raffles’ successors followed in the same vein, driven by a vision of a hundred-year-effort to impose a Western rational will on an Asian landscape, on Oriental peoples, on the myriad threats implied by, and excused by, a tropical climate. Independence thirty-five years ago brought different motivations, different rhetoric, but similar results, the continual remaking of the land.
If Singapore could be said to have a single landmark, it would be its skyline, seem from the sea. The vista has attracted attention for years, since draftsmen recorded its profile in all the illustrated journals of empire. But there have been three generations, in some cases four, of buildings in the prominent spots along the waterfront and river. One edifice has replaced another, and another, and so on. It is difficult, often impossible, to find the traces of one skyline in the contours of another seen 40 years later or earlier.
Today, some xx% of Singapore’s total area is reclaimed land. The Tan Hock Kian Temple, built on the beach by Hokkien sailors thankful for safe crossings, is now not one but three miles from the Straits, separated from the sea by the city’s current financial district, and further on, the reclaimed land that will be its financial district in thirty years. Most of the seaside villas of Singapore’s Jazz Age rich were torn down for condos years ago. The few that survive are now a mile from the seashore, separated by housing blocks, markets, shopping centers, the highway to the airport and a park. The islands off the southwestern coast of the island have been joined together to form an offshore industrial site; the bays of the northwest have been sealed off and turned to reservoirs. At the eastern and western ends of the island, xxx square miles of land have been added, industrial estates, housing, an airport, requiring the import of tons and tons of soil.
What is the genius loci of a place where the land beneath your feet is imported?
Still, this is no diatribe, (though it may be as exaggerated). So what if Singapore has no landscape, in any full sense of the word? Perhaps it is better to be lost than found. Who needs all the bloody ballast of land and destiny? Singapore is about routes, not roots: an intersection point of the trajectories of a thousand journeys. Singapore is the sum of a hundred diaspora: at night, it seems everyone is dreaming about somewhere else.
It's been a while since I've dreamt of flying. The closest I've come to it these days is the little "air time" I get while dreaming that I'm jumping to slam dunk a basketball (something I can't, sadly, do in reality). It's been said that dreams about flying, as well as dreams about basketball (scoring), are dreams about sex. Why I'm thinking about flying right now doesn't have to do with sexual desire so much, but desire nonetheless. When I started writing down these impressions, I was standing on a hill in San Francisco, watching the sun set over the Pacific Ocean. And the colours of the sky, the great expanse of water, made me think of how wonderful it would be to be a sea bird - I know it's a cliche’d image, but perhaps it was fitting; I was, after all, on vacation, visiting a place where I used to live. I live in Singapore now, and it is Singapore which is the real location of these thoughts. In Singapore, on the other hand, I hardly ever think about flying over the city.
In Singapore, the notion of a bird's eye view - for me at least - has less to do with enjoying the island's scenery than with a frame of mind prevalent amongst those of us who live here who've made a vocation out of "reading" this place. Get a bunch of artists together, for instance, and it won't be long before the subject moves away from the particular issues of, say, installation art to the problems of society at large: that the education system here neglects the arts, that the government is constraining, that the people are overly consumerist, and so on. It is hard to find talk about any dimension of Singaporean life that does not quickly turn into a commentary about the totality of the Singapore system. No doubt this reflex is a product of living with a state which itself has been so totalising in its perceptions and actions. And of course the "reader" of Singapore par excellence is none other than Lee Kuan Yew, with his "helicopter", if not quite bird's eye, view, and his "authoritative" readings of events past, present and future. But the desire to read in terms of the total seems to emanate from almost everywhere: not only from those who are in control, but from those who complain as well as those who celebrate; from the conservative to the critical.
While I might not fantasise about flying over the country, I must admit that flying into Singapore by airplane can be rather dramatic: you pass the jungles of Johore and then there emerge towers of HDB (Housing Development Board) flats, skyscrapers and highways. Nevertheless, Singapore is perhaps the greenest of the capital cities in Southeast Asia. The tree-lined drive from the airport into town certainly gives a good and strong impression to the newly arrived. But somehow, I want more; this is the tropics. One of my fantasies is for the length of Orchard Road to be covered by a canopy of tropical forest, with the buildings punching through. Nature is certainly everywhere here, but the enduring impression I have of this city is of the single-minded desire for mastery over nature. Since Independence, hills have been flattened and land has been "reclaimed" to expand the country's surface area. One imagines that the whole terrain of the island can be transformed by instrumental reason if so desired. This desire for mastery is of course what has been traditionally defined as the essence of urbanisation. Singapore is just a particularly successful example. If the island could be covered with a dome and entirely airconditioned, it probably would.
On my last vacation, San Francisco reminded me about an aspect of city life which is so obvious, but which I had forgotten: that nature is not absent, but in fact abounds in the city. We may think that concrete, steel, glass and asphalt dominate, but sometimes what gives a particular corner of town its character are its trees. And what is a city without its parks? - what apartment block is completely bereft of potted plants and pets? Much as we urban dwellers drive nature away, we also always try to reintroduce it into the metropolis. For all our efforts to control, to order, to be industrial, mechanical, technological, one could say that "Nature" - in the many roles which it plays (from the beautiful, the pastoral, the opposite-of-culture, or the unconscious) - is the repressed of the city, which inevitably returns.
Even with Singapore in mind, there are few big cities I know of where nature is as visible as in San Francisco. It's most famous landmark, for example, The Golden Gate Bridge, is spectacular precisely because of that combination of natural splendour and civil engineering. The bridge heightens, frames our awareness of the hills and mountains, the mouth of the bay opening into the Pacific; yet it is these same surroundings which frame and make the bridge so pretty. One is always looking at a view in San Francisco: whether at the Golden Gate and Marin County from some hill in the city, or the city itself while driving along a windy road in the Oakland hills. Sure, the San Francisco Bay Area is intensely developed and urban, but everywhere "Nature" is there - indeed, it is the frame of almost every view.
In contrast, my own experience of Singapore as a place has little to do with such views, or the object of such views - landscapes - but with time. This would seem inevitable, as Singapore is, as almost everyone either always says, or is always told, a very small place. But the way in which accidents are used as explanations almost always betray an overcompensation. Singapore's small size may be an accident of geography and history, but we who live here seem to have made a fetish out of the country's small size. My own feeling is this is not all that small a space. Personally, I find it too crowded, but it is, after all, a city - yet is it not also a country? Perhaps the problem with size has a lot to do with this bipolar confusion: city or country? If it is a city, then I would argue it still has plenty of space. The island that is Manhattan - another favourite vacation destination of mine - is much smaller than Singapore, and no less populated.
Speaking of Manhattan, I was there again on this last trip. Visiting Manhattan is like walking into a movie. Every thing is an image of itself. The camera loves Manhattan. Every person, every street scene, is incurably photogenic, and simply by virtue of being framed by the city itself. If San Francisco for me is a city of vistas where the urban is always framed by nature - hills or bay, blue sky or ocean - then New York is the city where life, as incredibly diverse, teeming and vibrant as it is, is always mediated by the idea of the "City". It may no longer be the ideal or model for metropolises around the world, but New York remains the paradigm of the experience of the "City": with its rectangular grid, its grandiose pretensions - it is densely built-up, diverse and dynamic, relentless, intimidating and exciting, alienating yet welcoming, simultaneously snobbish and down-to-earth, a centre of capitalism, crime and culture.
New York may be far more exciting, but Singapore is no less a city of signs. And signs which are appropriated from everywhere: from Disneyland to ancient Asian traditions. It is this great capacity - seamless and relentless - to appropriate which characterises Singapore as a city pervaded by the idea of progress - the city as predicated on the future.
In Singapore I never forget where I am. How can one? - there is the hot, humid climate. But it is more than that. When I go on vacation, say to San Francisco, I experience multiple times; I experience decades. I visit old neighbourhoods that seem largely unchanged since I first saw them, or will discover places which look like they that haven't changed since the '80s or '70s or '60s. If I went to, say, Paris or Beijing I would experience centuries. In India, it would be millennia. But in Singapore, there seems to be only one time: the present, a hurried present. Every old building seems to wear a worrisome face - of being under siege, of waiting to be knocked down or perhaps worse, renovated. Life may be more hectic in Hong Kong, Tokyo, or in New York, but I don't know of any place else where it feels that everyone marches in the same step. The pace, although it might not be the fastest on the planet, is perhaps the most persistent.
New York, San Francisco, Singapore. For me, each in turn embodies, is framed by, an extreme of the urban experience: the idea of the "City", the return of nature, and the march of time.
Like most Singaporeans I always feel busy, pressured by work. Over-working is like an epidemic in Singapore, a disease that has gotten out of control. Life in Singapore is work, and work is about the pressures of time more than the pleasures of place. So no wonder I don't take the time to contemplate my environs. I associate the pleasures of place with outside of Singapore, outside, when I go on vacation for rest and relaxation. I sleep so much better elsewhere.
The other outside for me is the movies. Movies that almost always take place elsewhere (which would not be remedied even if Singapore's film industry were to take off, I watch so many). Movie-going is an avoidance of real-time: I suspend disbelief and sit in the dark of cinema-houses, watching, usually, the latest Hollywood fare - which so often seduce me with the promise that New York or San Francisco will be the backdrop. But when I leave the cinema the warm air of Singapore has the effect of the warm air of getting out of the airport after flying in from the United States. Movie-going has been compared to dreaming. But travelling is also like dreaming. It always surprises me how easily, after eleven months of being away, I can automatically slip into being in San Francisco or New York, and feel like I was there yesterday. And when I am there, Singapore feels like a dream. When I return, the situation instantly reverses, and then the American vacation becomes dreamlike.
I am fortunate that I can take the time to have extended vacations and travel. Perhaps it is significant that my vacations, my travels, are to places of my past. So that when I go to San Francisco, part of my pleasure is being struck by the fact and experience that some things haven't change, that my old friends are still there. Which is the opposite of what I feel about Singapore. That things are always changing. There is always some new building or infrastructure that I will have noticed has started or completed when I return.
Obviously, my comparisons are problematic. Because I work in Singapore and I vacation elsewhere, it is unfair to compare time in Singapore with time elsewhere. If I don't admit to being anxiously obsessed with Singapore's size, I do make a fetish of the Outside. Why do I live in Singapore, if I my enjoyment is framed by elsewhere?
This association between one's homeland, work and time versus the Other country and pleasure is perhaps true for people who live elsewhere than Singapore. A friend of mine in San Francisco was saying the same: that she can never really enjoy a vacation unless she leaves town. But from my own experience the situation in Singapore is unique; I have lived elsewhere, including the San Francisco Bay Area and I have never felt so divided in my experience of the present/work versus the vacation/Other-place/the past. I believe Singapore itself encourages this division. In an article published in "The City", a special issue of Commentary, Sanjay Krishnan argued: "because Singapore is a small country, because it is a metropolis without a hinterland ... This means our lack of space has forced us to think our relationship to our surroundings more in terms of time, or the changes effected through time, instead of our experience of spaces." Singapore is small, my qualifications notwithstanding, and this smallness has become a ruling idea - so much so that we have no space, and thus time is everything. And so we are always running out of time. That is why I find that I immediately experience another time elsewhere. That elsewhere there is always more time.
My ramblings about vacation have a parallel in the nostalgia Singaporeans feel for that most sentimentally charged, lost landscape, the kampung. Sociologist Chua Beng Huat,in his article, "Nostalgia for Kampungs", explains how Singaporean nostalgia for the kampung, "particularly for those who had never lived in one", is a symptom of the "politicisation of stress".
Invoking the spirit of the kampung is a popular, if not entirely articulate, response to the stresses of living under the disciplinary effects of industrial capitalism. Lost are the joys of carefree childhood; these have been replaced by long hours of study and compulsory extra curricular activities. Gone is the spontaneity of casual interaction among acquaintances which are fundamental to feelings of belonging and community-building; in its place is the feeling of social isolation in a sea of strangers within a new town with a formally planned, uniform visual environment that defies instant recognition of one's immediate location. Gone too are the high levels of discretionary free time to be filled with leisure activities; instead, there is a constant filling up of hours by externally imposed work which is often more alienating than self-actualising.
But, as Chua argues, nostalgia for the kampung is by no means a desire to return to its specific reality, "with all its material disadvantages"; rather, this nostalgia is "indicative of the desire to 'rest', to be content with one's lot after having strived for long and arduous years, instead of striving for just that little bit more." However, this desire to reassert control over one's life and thus over the logic of capital, will not, as Chua reminds us, be supported by a government whose very legitimacy from the onset has been predicated on ceaseless economic development. "The people must be constantly pushed to the competitive edge, for to rest content is to risk being overtaken by others ..."
My desires, I have hoped to suggest, while they are not exactly for Singapore, are of Singapore. This desire for the Other, for the Outside, for an Other time, is a typical Singaporean desire, a desire produced in reaction to this bargain we have made with global capitalism.
In his book on the "experience of modernity", All that is Solid Melts into Air, Marshall Berman offers us Goethe's Faust as a central image for the condition of modern society and the modern individual. Faust is famous as love story whose protagonist makes a bargain with the devil, but for Berman, the play epitomises the idea that self-development and economic development "must fuse into one, before either of these archetypally modern promises can be fulfilled". These great developments - intellectual, moral, economic, social - that Faust initiates have great human costs. "This is the meaning of Faust's relationship with the devil: human powers can be developed only through what Marx called 'the powers of the underworld', dark and fearful energies that may erupt with a horrible force beyond all human control." For Berman, "Goethe's Faust is the first, and still the best, tragedy of development."
While Singapore does not conceive of its capitalist development in terms of tragedy, as Krishan notes:
We imagine ourselves as being in a state of perpetual crisis, solving one problem in order to anticipate the next; articulating our history not in terms of the past, but of the future ... Here success is tied to the discipline and efficiency with which the social workforce has subjected itself to this idea of "speed" and its concomitant structures of control....
Here the lack of space enforces the need to exploit time better, be it in terms of greater productivity, timing, or planning. We imagine ourselves concretely through endless projections; whether short- or long-term we build our city as we build our nation, through an inevitable future of shocking change, visualised and manipulated through time. We might go so far as to claim that it is the precise lack of space that has forced Singaporean society to a will to mastery over time.
Singapore overcompensates, has performance anxiety. Not that it fails to perform, but it fears that it might - it flies, but has a "fear of flying". And perhaps like the protagonist in the Erica Jong novel, Singapore is torn between a lover which can perform (global capitalism), and a lover which cannot, but is more desired (a sense of arrival, of happiness).
The view from above, while it has become the modus operandi of both Singapore's leadership and its critics, this above, is also an outside. In Singapore it is so difficult to be in Singapore.
At the forum "Visual Articulation of Urbanised Spaces", organised jointly by the Goethe-Institut and the Singapore Art Museum, one speaker, architect Richard Ho, expressed his concerns that our particular modes of mastering time might render us poorer socially and culturally. Architecture is for Ho a vital archive of social memory. He criticised the way our economic development appropriates architectural heritage at the expense of other values, historical, architectural and cultural. As an example, he discussed the conversion of the former girls convent school, the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus (CHIJ), into its present state as a shopping and restaurant complex. No advocate of Catholicism, Ho is nevertheless angered by how the conversion has utterly disregarded the chapel's history: it can now be rented as a venue for all sorts of functions and parties. What is equally disturbing is that a basement has been added, and constructed so as to give the impression that the former school had a catacomb-like lower level. For Ho this collapsing of the present and past, this invention of a false past in Singapore buildings runs counter to function of architecture as being part of our social memory.
Chua, also a speaker at this forum, responded to Ho's comments unsympathetically. The former seemed less concerned about any decline into a state of architectural kitsch than the predominance in Singapore of this wishing to be elsewhere, this wishing for things to be otherwise. We wish we didn't have such bad architecture and taste; we wish we had a more engaged civil society; we wish we didn't live under this paternalistic government. Chua argued that foreigners, outsiders, don't seem to have a problem reading Singapore; it is we who live here who have a problem reading this place. Singaporeans seem to forget that this seamless, relentless appropriation is in fact our culture. Ironically, for a society which is so thoroughly framed by the economic, the idea that the economic character of our society is fundamental to our culture is repressed; instead, what we desire from culture is couched longingly in terms of ethnicity and the arts.
Singaporean desire - as with any desire, if psychoanalysis offers any insight - is framed by misrecognition. According to psychoanalysis, the infant first acquires a sense of identity when he has an image of himself which unifies all his disjointed experiences. To do so, he identifies with this image, and so much so that it is a process of self love. But the infant - or the society, if we see this desire writ large - misrecognises this imagined unity as an ideal, as something more perfect and thus as something other than what it is. So at the moment it says, "this is me", it is also saying "I am another".
Chua is not suggesting that we simply celebrate what we have, as if by finally recognising what we are then we would become whole and happy - as if this "it" were the essense of our identity and self-contentment. Rather, he suggests that we should move away from this wishing to be elsewhere, which dangerously belies a desire for any solution to be a total solution. Intervention should be in the specific, the particular. We need to move beyond the view from above, to the ground; we shouldn't be only preoccupied with flying, but learn to walk, slowly. In reading the signs and texts that make up Singapore, perhaps we should take heed from German critic Walter Benjamin, who wrote in "One-Way Street":
The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text is different when it is read from when it is copied out. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it ...
T.D. : Taxi-Driver P : Passenger...
P : Ei, you put pandan leaf in your taxi ah ?
TD : Yeah, to stop cockroach, lah. Why you ask ? You got cockroach problem at home, is it ?
P : No lah, my maid. She brought this bed bug from her country in her luggage, never see before one, not in Singapore, cannot kill with insecticide - all the furniture kena infected. Last Sunday got to throw out all the children’s furniture.
TD : Your maid from where ?
P : Myanmar.
TD : Not so bad what, Myanmar.
P : Can do lah, at least can cook.
TD : Ei, I tell you, Myanmar better than from Philippines.
P : Why ? I thought they speak English good.
TD : Good ? They spend all their moneys on weekends at Lucky Plaza. How you think they get their money to send home ?
P : How ?
TD : You know I know lah. (silence)
P : Terok ah, the way they gather at Lucky Plaza on Sundays.
TD : What to do, only Sundays they’re free what. Don’t say Orchard Road, now on Sundays foreigners everywhere. Singkaporeans also got no chance to go near those places.
P : Where, like Golden Mile for Thai workers is it ?
TD : Yeah, the Siam-kiah all go there. But worse is Serangoon Road, I tell you. Kiah see lung ah, Sunday night. All the Indians and the Banggalah. Some just run or walk on the road, never die before.
P : I heard people say you all never stop for them even if they call for taxi. Most of the time they carry a lot of things back to their work site. I waited there for taxi there before -
taxi never even stop.
TD : Ei, it’s not that we don’t want to pick them up...huh...I don’t really care who take my taxi one. But usually they take very late at night, carry so many things, and so many cram inside the taxi. My friend ah, he once drive them to this really ulu place near Sembawang, no lights one, so deep inside. They ask him to stop, then just walk out. My friend also scared, he know they won’t pay so he quickly gostan and drive out. Who knows how many stay inside that jungle.
P : Yeah, but at least you see Chinese or Malay at Serangoon Road you can stop what.
TD : Ei, not easy lah, I tell you.
P : Some of them quite cham lare. Kena trick into selling their house and cows in Banggalah, then when they come here got no job, no money, also no way to go back home even.
TD : What to do ... if you are like that you also will do the same. Some Singaporean contractors really pai-sim-kuah. They know they got no work permit, so the contractor ask them to work for them, but they must deposit their pay with them and can only get the mahnee after one year. So you know what happen ?
P : What ?
TD : At the tenth or eleventh month, those bastards get someone to report the Banggalah for working illegally, then they get sent to Lorong Halus, you say cham or not. They can’t speak English, don’t even know how to start explaining what happen.
P : You mean Lorong Halus near Tampines where they unload black charcoal ah ?
TD : No more already lah. They got some place to keep illegal workers there.
P : Cham si. (Silence for a while)
P : How much do you think they earn a day ?
TD : 15 dollars, the most 30 dollars.
P : Wah ... how to survive.
TD : Can lah, they come out only Sunday what ... some even buy supply back to cook at their work site.
P : Just like the Siam-kiah before them.
TD : Yeah, same lah. In the 80s it’s the Siam-kiah, in the 90s it’s Banggalah.
P : Wait ... I remember. Some time ago, I went to Bukit Timah jungle, and I saw some of the Siam-kiah carrying a huge bamboo shoot out of the jungle. Huge, man. Need two person to carry the shoot.
TD : Should taste good ah. They try all kinds of ways to increase their food supply. Funny ah ... Singaporeans eat canned bamboo shoot and they eat fresh ones. I tell you what is worse. I saw some Siam-kiah and even Banggalah fishing with net at Nee Soon river. Sometimes they catch quite good fish there, you know.
P :Where, outside Nee Soon Camp ah.
TD : Yeah, somewhere around there. And you know what they catch there ?
P : What ?
TD : Leh-hu okay ! Those beautiful black leh-hu.
P : The type you eat when you have wound so they heal properly one ah.
TD : Yeah lah, that type.
P :Wah, not bad what.
TD : Tell you something ... the Hongkies also go there to catch leh-hu. But they more sophiscated, use rod, also they wait until after rain, more fish then. Once I saw six of them one early morning and they were splitting twelve leh-hu among them. Twelve okay ...
P : How you know they’re Hongkie. Can be Singaporean also what.
TD : No lah. This kind of thing can tell one lah.
P :Yeah hoh. Hongkies and mainland Chinese also increase recently.
TD :Yeah. After all these years, I thought I learnt all the dialects in Singkapoh already. Then all these people come, kili kulu don’t know gnarp mat yeah, like sing song like that.
P : Now ah, even got argument amongst Chinese. I once saw Chinese professor at University kena bully by bus driver. Mainland passenger buay kam guan, argue back. First time I see Chinese discriminate Chinese.
TD : This type of thing boh pian one, more different races sure more differences one.
P : We haven’t even talked about the bloody angmor yet.
TD :What’s wrong with angmor. I depend on them you know.
P : You just look around lah. They’re all over the place. Only difference is they’re the richest foreigners, richer than most of us. Weekends can afford to be anywhere. When weekend come, you can’t find a nice place to drink beer amongst other Singaporeans.
TD : Yeah. Some even ask me to take them to Changi. They really know where to find these places.
P : Don’t say Changi. Changi gone long time ago. Now even those small Chinese beer shops selling only Chinese beer also full of angmor.
TD : It’s okay what. We need all these people for economy what. If we don’t go international how we survive.
P : My foot. Only 30% of them are really useful to Singapore ...
TD : Ei ... Not so bad lah ...
P : Okay ... maybe 40%. They earn the money, say 3 to 4 years and then they split. All the time they use to get the experience wasted. And all these Singaporean girls like them and even want to marry them.
TD : Ei ... you married or not.
P : Yeah. married.
TD : Then why you worry ? Let it be lah. There are worse things to worry about.
P : No lah. Just cannot tar han lah, why we give them so much when they take away so much a-ready.
TD : Oi, face it. There’s nothing you can do right ? You parn-charn angmor can or not.
P : You pick up angmor passenger after they’re drunk or not ?
TD : Yeah, drunk Singaporean passenger also jit tua too what.
P : Then ?
TD : Just have to send them where they want to go lah. When they’re drunk they’re all the same what. Provided they got mahnee to pay me and don’t womit in my taxi, I don care.
P : No bad experience with drunk angmor ?
TD : Actually got.
P : How bad ?
TD : Er ... the one I remember donno can count bad or not. Once there was this angmor chabor was seepeh drunk and got up my taxi. She say where she want to go then lay back on the seat at the back. Then she put both her legs on the front seat.
P : Block your rear view mirror ah.
TD : No, one leg on each front seat.
P : Then ?
TD : When I got to the street which she say she want to go, I look behind to ask her where ejactly she want to go, then I saw her cheebye looking right at me.
P : She didn’t wear hah.
TD : Shock me man. You know this kind of thing pantang one for taxi driver you know.
P : You finally send her back right ?
TD : Yeah, luckily she womit outside after dropping.
P : Heng for you.
TD : Nowsaday I put plastic bag in my taxi. (Silence)
P : Sometimes I don’t know if they’re the foreigner or I’m the foreigner. I don’t know how the Malays feel.
TD : Donno. Kan kai dian. Close one eye and live lah. Life too short you know.
P : Ei, over there, Lorong 15. You pass already or not.
TD : 15 ah. Never mind. I u-turn back. No extra charge.
P : ...
