Two Sides of The Same Dollar Coin
Can a nanny state really rock?
By Rahul Jacob
Published: November 4 2006 02:00 | Last updated: November 4 2006 02:00
Singapore has long been a city that expatriates in Asia either liked or lampooned. While living in Hong Kong in the 1990s, I admired Singapore as a model of urban planning even as I was amused by its nanny-state obsessions. On my first day on the island more than 10 years ago, the lead editorial in The Straits Times was on the need to be punctual. And if Orchard Road, Singapore’s main thoroughfare, seemed like one of those irritating Ikea affairs that funnel you through the entire store in the hope that you might buy more, it was easy enough to escape.
Ten years on, the world has changed and become more like Singapore. Today, in New York’s Times Square, the glitzy neon is so overpowering that it seems like an outsized stationary carousel with a few skyscrapers attached - exactly like Singapore’s riverside financial and restaurant district, in fact. From New York to London to Kuala Lumpur, city centres are jammed with stores. At some level, we are all Singaporeans now.
Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, whom The New York Times once dubbed “the world’s most eloquent autocrat”, had a long-running argument with the US about civil liberties. But, as Lee’s son and current prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, points out in September’s Institutional Investor: “They used to say, ‘Why do you impose these limits? Why do you lock up people without trial?’ That was before Guantánamo Bay . . . Now, perhaps, we are not as far apart.”
Dubai, meanwhile, rarely seems to have had an idea about economic development it did not borrow from the Singapore model. A few years ago, an unusual business-government partnership in Bangalore said it wanted to make the city India’s Singapore. And even Hong Kong, which kidded itself about being everything that Singapore wasn’t, has changed. Lawmakers in Hong Kong passed a bill in August allowing more covert surveillance of its citizens, including phone tapping and bugging homes, which the government says is necessary to combat crime.
When I returned this summer, in many ways Singapore seemed reassuringly the same. The front page story of The Straits Times was about an attempt to make the ruling party “more hip”. At the airport, I would have needed a stopwatch to time how quickly I got through immigration and customs. (I can’t help thinking that the world would be a happier place if Heathrow and JFK were handed over to Singapore’s airport authority). The drive into the city with acres of palm trees, bougainvillea and orchids by the roadside is not unlike being in a botanical garden. If this is sterility, I want more of it.
And yet, and yet . . . from stylish boutique hotels to satirical English language theatre to Asia’s most diverse gay bars, Singapore seemed a different city. Today, the choice of quirky hotels, with names such as Scarlet and Hotel 1929, is much larger than Hong Kong’s. A friend who picked me up from the airport to drive me to the New Majestic hotel, on the edge of Chinatown, gaped when he pulled up in front of its lobby. Its ceiling had not been repainted and consciously bore the scars of its previous life as a traditional shop-house (or three) while mid-century furniture adorned the room along with a barber’s chair.
The restaurant scene bordered on frenetic. I tried in vain to get into Buko Nero, owned by an Italian married to a Singaporean, but never made it past the answering machine. The hawkers’ centres - those Singaporean monuments to fusion food long before it was fashionable in the west - remain as busy as ever. This is a city where the chef Anthony Bourdain writes of being forced to excuse himself from a meeting after days of overeating to discover he had a piece of scorpion’s tail caught between his teeth.
Late one night, a cab driver dropped me off at a hawkers’ centre near my hotel. The choice of Asian food from Malaysian laksas to Singaporean noodle dishes to Indian curries made me feel a little dizzy before I decided on a bowl of congee large enough to swim in. Nearby, a basketball team was in the midst of a noisy post-game dinner. An expat banker was just behind me in the 11pm queue for ice kacang, a confection of crushed ice with Day-Glo syrups ladled over it. I left wondering if you can build a civic spirit through this wonderfully unfussy celebration of street food - about half thepopulation eats out at these inexpensive food stalls six times a week.
Only magical realism could explain how Singapore has changed over the past decade. Imagine then a prankster presiding over the giant cauldrons and enormous woks that supply the hawkers’ stalls around the city. From a jar mislabelled “Creativity”, he adds dollops of satire instead. After delivering decades of rapid economic growth, the ruling party still wins elections by thumping landslides, the media remain as goody two shoes as ever and yet, everywhere I went, coded jokes about the government were being exchanged the way pleasantries about the weather are elsewhere.
The young woman at the Chinese Heritage centre - a mini-museum that houses a moving reconstruction of the conditions in which new immigrants to the city from China lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries - advised me with a wink to get a credit card with DBS. “It’s owned by the government so you get discounts on everything” - including it turned out admission to the museum. A cab driver insisted on rattling off slyly reworked acronyms for government initiatives like the Central Provident Fund, which he said was known as Control People’s Future, while he derided the Disneyesque island of Sentosa as “So expensive and nothing to see again”. This carried on for the entire ride; he was still at it when we pulled up at my hotel, running down one of the world’s earliest congestion charging schemes: “ERP means Everyday Rob . . . “
The play I chanced upon at the National Library was called Homesick but the dialogue seemed an inversion of that word. In the programme notes, the twenty-something playwright, Alfian Sa’at, writes of “nostalgia and hope - for what Singapore was, for what Singapore can be. And also disillusionment and despondency - for what Singapore has become, for what it can never be . . . ” Nearly all the children of the elderly Singaporean man diagnosed with Sars have migrated abroad. The youngest, facing mandatory military service if he stays, contemplates leaving for Australia. “Singapore is a prison with room service,” he says. I idly glanced through the pamphlets for upcoming plays in the lobby afterwards. A Mandarin play called Trash was planned for the end of August. The synopsis read: “In a very small country, the government exercises stringent birth control on the low-downs of the society. A female worker is found to be pregnant without a permit . . . ” Well, you could have knocked me over with an orchid.
For a vision of what Singapore could be, visit the galleries of the Asian Civilisations Museum. It is a testament to multiculturalism with rooms dedicated to Thai and Indian sculptures and Islamic calligraphy and art that you would not find anywhere else in Asia. With three distinct communities in the city, it is the kind of museum that could only be in Singapore. There is a statue nearby of Stamford Raffles, the British “founder” of Singapore as an entrepôt, which pays tribute to his “genius and foresight”. Raffles saw Singapore’s potential as a “commercial emporium”. But as I was ushered out of this museum at closing time and looked on hundreds upon hundreds of western and Singaporean investment bankers having drinks along the quay that evening, this seemed a limiting ambition for the 21st century. Singapore could be both the banking and fund management centre it has successfully become and a hothouse of multicultural synthesis in the way that London is today.
Then I received a text from someone I had met in the local film industry. If I wrote anything about our conversation, he would rather I did not mention him by name. The investment analyst who took me to drinks implied as much. “Don’t quote me,” said the articulate Malay cab driver who picked me up after I had gone jogging in the Botanical Garden the day before - I did not even have a notepad.
Enormous crowds of people were swarming towards the waterfront as a taxi took me to the airport that August evening past signs that said “Flag up Singapore!”. They turned out not to be attending a political meeting or a rock concert but heading for the fireworks display the government organised to celebrate Singapore’s National Day. Has Singapore changed? I think it has, but please don’t quote me.
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An interesting article that shows the dichotomy between how others view Singapore today, and how Middle Singapore views this display of urban swankiness. Is it one of those usual “oh, but he’s just a tourist, and will never truly understand reality here” one liners?
What keeps us relevant in the world today? Is the journey to keep ourselves relevant one bereft of domestic warmth because we have to inevitably pander to the passing tastes of the world around us. The global city-state is neither a nation, nor a state; not to mention an exercise in irony because the very defining statement of being global, one removes the need for Singapore to be a traditional nation-state.
When we become Singapore Plaza, what will it stand for? Will it stand for our ancestry and heritage as a transit point, and not a less than ephermeral existence in this part of the world? I have many questions. Singapore may have to change her role and this change might be a very final defining move to illustrate what she can be for the next 50 years.
A state in name, but perhaps very different in actuality. A place where tolerance and diversity is the hallmark.One cannot build an Asian capital city if there are apron strings cutting swaths of intolerance and control across the landscape. However, we must not pander to the lowest common denominator and sacrifice ourselves to money and more money.
It’s one thing to listen to childish ranting by a little girl from RJC, it’s also another thing to see more homeless people on the streets and in mature HDB estates, but it’s a whole tragedy if we let ourselves be fooled into thinking that as long as there are others out there who see us as the next London, things will be hunkydory. That’s one of the problems that I see occuring fairly regularly, this aimless aping of external opinions. Opinions are like feet, they stink and everyone has them. So it’s not healthy to be smelling feet every two seconds or so.
Let’s have a more diverse and bold society where being who you are, makes you important. It’s time to empower the individual and strengthen the quilt of society.
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