What to write about it as a tourist just passing through? But I am a tourist with some historically deeper connection with Singapore, as my father worked here briefly in 1957, when he was a youthful advertising executive. Singapore was part of his first encounter with “the Orient”. The other places were Hong Kong and Bangkok. I’d also passed through in the mid 80s with my friend the poet and academic, now based in Macau, Christopher (Kit) Kelen. We stayed in a run down doss house near Bugis Street, a place run by an elderly Chinese man in a frayed white cotton t-shirt. It was the kind of high ceilinged room with no air-con and no closeable windows, only shutters. It was clean, had washing facilities, and was comfortable though hot. The light bulbs glowed without shades. It was the kind of place sailors might have stayed in, or very humble salesmen.
Since I can’t remember exactly where we stayed I don’t know now what lies on its foundations. Though Chris probably has the diary he kept on that trip.
The names are the same – Bencoolen Street, Middle Road, Little India. The old Bugis Street with its transvestite culture was officially banned and erased. Now it’s been resurrected in a pasteurized form, sans transvestites I believe (I didn’t have time to check it out).
I think it is too standard to make the usual glib complaints about Singapore’s modernization, but what struck me was how in exterior public places like parks, people were scarce. But enter the shopping malls and it’s all there. So too is there a street life in Little India. Dunlop Street has become a pleasant area for backpackers:
I found the History Museum very impressive if not somewhat propagandistic. The way history is mapped out and displayed as a maze is complex, with a deliberate culmination at the point of Singapore’s successful modernization under the PAP and Li Kuan Yew. I’d experienced this narrative technique before, in museums in East Berlin and Vientiane, the capital of socialist Laos. But here one navigates the Singaporean museum with a brilliant electronic guide, made by Siemens. The effect is non-linear, though the voice over guide encourages you to takes rests, or think of making choices – either the personal or the “official” track through a particular time period.
One is not encouraged to contemplate too deeply the contestation of the grand narrative, though there are hints – the room where you can contemplate your interrogation by the colonial head of the Malayan police force of the time,------ You, the suspect agent provocateur, the nascent revolutionary, suspected of fomenting a demonstration against the colonialists.
The other thing that was nostalgic for me was the smell of Singapore, which reminded me of my Bangkok childhood, and of my time teaching in Indonesia and Bali in the 90s. Somehow that smell, so sensuous, cannot be sterilized completely.
I also love Changi Airport – what used to be a simulated forest environment with taped birdsong has been upgraded with a butterfly enclosure. My favourite Nonya style restaurant is still there, overseen by the very same woman who served me in 2009, when I made a trip to attend a job interview. Unfortunately she looks to have had some kind of stroke and is barely hanging on. This time I felt terribly guilty for not sitting down for a meal, as Neela and I weren’t hungry enough.
It’s better to read comments and poems by Singaporeans like Alvin Pang, or my ex-student Mei Li Siew.
Hi Adam!
…What you say about Singapore is intriguingly resonant with my ambivalence towards life there. So safe and stable (unlike Malaysia) yet so sterile and numbingly material….
Salam aloha.
Mei Li
From: Adam Aitken
To: Mei Li Siaw
Sent: Sat, July 2, 2011 4:59:36 AM
Subject: your part of the world
Dear Mei Li
I was just in Singapore a day ago on the say to France, I thought fondly of Malaysia and all things "straits". What a wonderful world you are living now, despite it's political problems. I am sure things will improve on that front. I hope you are writing lots of poems and maybe something about Hawai'i too. I am sure I'll be getting to Malaysia in the near future. In Singapore Neela and I had dinner in one of the more traditional open air food stall areas and were fascinated to see people glued to the soapie that was on TV at the time. A Chinese made soapie which broaches some interesting topics. It was a wonderful feeling sitting there in a public space that was also quite communal and hardly postmodern. The food of course was great. I do worry Singapore is so overrrun with mega-malls it's become inhumane. But the small ordinary spaces are still there.
Best Wishes
Adam
I kept thinking of Kim Cheng Boey’s memoir of Sigapore, Between Stations, a book I like very much, reviewed here. The Readings Bookshop review is brief but sweet:
Kim Cheng Boey was born in Singapore and became an established poet in his home country before migrating to Australia in 1997. He has had many volumes of poetry published. Between Stations is his first collection of travel writing. He currently lectures on creative writing at the University of Newcastle. Cheng Boey was known in Singapore for his political writings and had become disillusioned with Singapore’s rapid economic growth, which he felt came at a cost to its places of tradition.
The selection of writings here focuses on his experiences travelling and working in China, India, Egypt and Morocco. Here are 11 stories to transport you to a particular place and state of mind. The phrase 'between stations' can mean something different to anyone who has migrated: the feeling of being somewhere which still after many years can feel new. The place of your birth – no matter your feelings – holds a sense of strong nostalgia that can never be lost.
Cyril Wong, a Singporean poet and critic reviews the book in Mascara: he writes
The poet-as-restless-traveller has become more three-dimensional to a reader like me who has followed his work since my junior college days. A sense of urgency grips the eponymous last chapter (“Between Stations”) when the writer tell us that as both emigrant and immigrant, he has become “adept at switching between codes:” “You become Kim Cheng Boey instead of Boey Kim Cheng…Kim Boey is accommodating…while Boey Kim Cheng has begun to try to find a way back to the old world…He is still searching for a language to utter himself into being.” Such urgency emphasises the schizophrenic state that the writer has been struggling to resolve throughout this book, particularly when this collection of essays is aching to a close.
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