Village Folk-Tales of Ceylon 1017653292, 1017653291, 9781017653298

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Indelible City

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© 2018 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited Text © Chew Yi Wei The chapter “Going Back to Emerald Hill” was first published in Eastlit (2013); “Hair Roots, Language Routes” in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (2014); and “Two Harbours” in Transnational Literature (2013) Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300. E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.marshallcavendish.com/genref The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Other Marshall Cavendish Offices: Marshall Cavendish Corporation. 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown NY 10591-9001, USA • Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand • Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia Marshall Cavendish is a registered trademark of Times Publishing Limited National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Name(s): Chew, Yi Wei. Title: Indelible city / Chew Yi Wei. Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2018. Identifier(s): OCN 1017653292 | eISBN 978 981 4794 84 8 Subject(s): LCSH: Singapore--Anecdotes. | Singapore--Social life and customs. | Chew, Yi Wei. Classification: DDC 959.5705092--dc23 Printed in Singapore

For Shao-En: I love you “fillion”

Contents Prologue: Maps of Places, Places of Maps Of Branches and Nests Room Without a Roof The Lamppost of Tanglin Halt Going Back to Emerald Hill In the Thin of the Skin Hands Hair Roots, Language Routes Two Harbours Epilogue: Indelible City Acknowledgements About the Author

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past

“Everything is somewhere, and in place.” — Aristotle, Physics

I

was eight when I first drew a map. It was a map of an imaginary world where imaginary creatures lived. The creatures were inspired by the bolsters and pillows on my bed. I made them come alive. I gave them a school, a home, a country. Having already flipped the pages of the local street directory, and gleefully taking multiple copies of tourist maps from the brochure slots in shopping centres, I had, already, an idea of what a map should look like. Maps had borders, had scales, had indexes, had legends. Most of the time, they had fancy little sketches of buildings, monuments, and even animals. More often than not, maps were colourful. Though I couldn’t understand them, I was fascinated that they could, on a mere page, represent an entire city, country, or continent. I didn’t start off ambitious. My first attempt was modest; it was merely a map, or more accurately, a guide to a little condominium development which my brother and I named “Coaster Apartments”. On this map were a few cottages – which we whimsically called “Coaster Cottages” – a cluster of small landed holdings supposedly part of Coaster Apartments. I think we liked the alliterative “co” sound that made a catchy appellation for a private property. In between the cottages that were spread out unevenly across the white sheet of A4-sized paper, I drew a forking path that linked one cottage to another. I labelled the path and numbered the cottages. Then I pencilled in a little drawing of my pillows and bolsters – faces, arms and legs included – next to one of the cottages and called it Coaster Cottage No. 5. I felt I had to number the cottages, give each one an address, so that I could identify them on my map, so that my soft bedfellows could have a house that was uniquely theirs. At that age, I couldn’t yet understand fully what it meant to own a property; I only knew, or perhaps took it for granted, that staying in a house meant that one had to have an address. Maps, too, had to have addresses, places one could delineate with clarity, if they were to serve any function, make any sense. This simplistic equation found its way into the little world I created, on a map. Within the premises of Coaster Apartments itself there were also high-rise condominiums. And of course, a swimming pool, which I proudly included as a coup de grace. All private apartments, to my young and unexposed mind, had to have a swimming pool as I was always drawn to the square of clear blue, always fascinated that water, despite its transparency, could have a colour. To me, having a pool within one’s living space was like having an artificial oasis where I imagined myself frolicking in on a sultry afternoon after school instead of doing my homework. Back then, the place where I lived did not have a swimming pool, thus it was no surprise that I could not but include that little item of luxury in the world I created with my brother. The pool within Coaster Apartments was encircled by the cottages and the high-rise units; a rectangular feature that provided some sort of recreation for the little pillows and bolsters on my bed. Upon completion of Coaster Apartments, I drew a border around its compound, because I knew private properties had to be gated, and added in a few other tall buildings and mountains in the background. Coaster Apartments was located along “Coaster Road”. Just adjacent to Coaster Apartments, still along Coaster Road, was a school that my pillows and bolsters attended – a school discriminatorily called “Bolster City School”. I don’t remember why I marginalised the pillows. Perhaps it was because there were fewer of them on my bed. Finally, there was a city outside of Coaster Cottages, a city that was part of a country called “Singapoo”, with none of the scatological connotations, of course. I remember thinking that the city was very clean. Like the real city, Singapore. Singapoo was, manifestly, an echo of Singapore, the one city my young self knew. Only it was bigger, less torrid, more temperate and geographically diverse. Of course, neither my brother nor I became property developers, architects or urban designers. Our tryst with urban planning stopped somewhere in 1993 when I turned twelve and decided that I was too cool for any further bolster and pillow talk. So, imperceptibly, my bedfellows ceased to speak, and the city which my brother and I imagined gradually faded into a remote region in our hippocampi. The bolsters and pillows, too, became older, dirtier, and one day, my parents decided that it was time for them to be trashed. We were too old for them, and they, too, were too old for us. It was only when I was in my early twenties that I serendipitously stumbled upon that old map when I was clearing my room. It was hidden away in an old plastic file I kept buried under a heap of books for fear that my childhood art be found out. I smiled at the silliness of it all and the sheer lack of selfconsciousness that my brother and I possessed back when we were younger. The apartments were haphazardly drawn, the forking path lined in an uneven hand, the cottages one-dimensional and conventional. The thoughts of a child visualised and materialised on paper. Crude, but bold. Ugly, but endearing. We were, clearly, so much less inhibited with our imagination, so much more comfortable with building a city made up of our desires and our realities. After staring at the map for a while, I decided that it had to go. So I crushed it up and threw it into the bin, like the way my parents threw away my bolsters and pillows without much sentimentality. At that point, my brother was building another city, this time on the computer – Sim City. His city looked distinctly different from that of Singapoo. It was animated. People were moving, eating, doing everyday city things. He mentioned in passing that he felt like a god, being the builder of an entire city, controlling the ins and outs of the Sims, what they did, what they didn’t do. Perhaps that was what we felt when we conceived and drew that map of Coaster Apartments and Singapoo. Except that we were unable to articulate it then, nor were we knowing, or maybe cynical, enough to grasp fully the power that came with designing a map of a city, creating a world – out of our experiences and memories, our then-past and then-present. Now, in my thirties, it is remarkably clear to me that Singapoo and Coaster Cottages were really my brother’s and my very own desires projected on an amateurishly conceived map. That city has now been resurrected from the dormant depths of memory, and will remain indelibly delineated on my mnemonic map. We imagined Singapore to have mountains. We wanted Singapore to experience the four seasons, especially winter. We saw snow-capped mountains in the picture books we read as children, and we desperately craved the presence of these sentinels overlooking our city. Coaster Apartments was our childlike imagination of what

living in a private condominium and in a temperate climate would be like. The very idea of a cottage was, of course, derived from the Enid Blyton books we read. Cottages figured prominently in her stories; they were a rustic fixture, a place where most, if not all, of her characters lived. From her stories, we imagined cottages to be cosy, to be firmly ensconced in the countryside – something that never existed in our reality, certainly not in the Singapore of the late eighties and early nineties that we grew up in. My map was a combination of my innocent longing for what I could only dream of, what I could only know from the medium of books. My map was my imagined city, my imagined country. I thrived on the vicarious experience of drawing a map, and hence owning and living in the very place that existed within the map. The map was a conflation of my memories, my desires, my imaginings, and my hope – a hope that I would, one day, get to walk into that map. The years have passed, and I have had the fortune to experience what living in the countryside is like. I have had the opportunity to immerse myself in the grand company of mountains. Yet, none of this has managed to replace the thrill of drawing my desires into being, of being my very own cartographer, of imagining what it would be like to be in my map, as though the fantasising itself were commensurate with reality. Coaster Cottage, Singapoo and its surrounding mountains are still today part of who I am; a magic map of an indelible city resides quietly, and comfortingly, some place deep within. A map of a place. The place of a map.

The city is a place of many places. City maps only reveal the skeleton of any given city. The city does not lend itself to cartographical simplicity; a map need not speak for itself. Maps. Whimsical documents that tell us so much, and so little about cities. Just as much as cities can tell us so much and so little about the maps they are force-fitted into. Lines can be drawn, can be visible, but lines can also be un-drawn, invisible. There can be erasures, traces, lines hard to see, lines easy to miss. The multiplacedness and multispatiality of the city can therefore be hard to locate – unless one uses one’s mnemonic map. Every day, memories fill up a place, populate it with the gold and dust of yesterday. The past, according to Henri Bergson, is “lived and acted, rather than represented”: this should be the way we understand the city. The everydayness of the city’s inhabitants, the constant hum of lives write and draw the city’s map, and outline the city’s genius loci. Lives happen in the present tense, and then in the past. Place happens in the present, and is made from the past. Memory, that spatial and temporal substance, forms vestiges of meaning, at once imperceptible, irrepressible and indelible. Memory marks are left all around the city, in places at the core and at the periphery. Memory is central to place-making, and place, to memory-making. What then defines this place, this city? Where do the lines on our mnemonic maps lead us? Here, the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible seep into each other. Our places make our memories. Our memories make our maps. Our maps tell our stories. Our stories continue to re-shape our maps. In this city are the migratory lines trod by our ancestors, the scent of our foodways, the flight of birds, the sigh of an old school, a demolished rooftop, an unassuming lamppost, fading tongues and extroverted harbours. These are the signposts – both seen and unseen, but thoroughly felt in equal measure – that guide us to another place, an inner place, layering over the city’s capitalist terrain, the maps in tourist guidebooks. The interactions we have with the tangibilities of the city become maps in themselves, our very own private maps whose boundaries and borders shift with the exciting capriciousness and spontaneity of memory. Place is perception; it moves into different spheres of understanding and experience, it can easily slip into being a non-place; it can lose itself, and find itself again. Through its movements and morphing, the lines of place are never fully given to erasure. We are left with patinas, palimpsests, the endurance of personal and collective memory. These bleached lines are the indelible marks that tell us where we are and who we are.

T

here is an old bamboo plant outside my apartment unit with multiple branches arching over the flight of steps that lead up to my door. That plant, potted still, has been around for longer than I have lived and has moved to the various houses in Singapore my family has shifted into and out of these past 32 years – from Parbury Avenue to Siglap, then west to Farrer Road and Holland Hill, and finally to Pasir Panjang where we currently live. My father bought the plant in its infancy: a little pot with short shoots sprouting excitedly out of the soil, so I am told. The plant enjoyed relative space when we had a garden in our houses in Parbury Avenue and Siglap. It thrived in the suburban sunlight of Singapore, its sprouts growing into turgid branches that hung over the doorway and over other smaller, more modest-looking plants. Because of its sheer size, it was no surprise that the bamboo plant managed to keep company with a few friends, mainly friends who flew. Birds of different feathers and the occasional butterfly would pay it a visit. I remember seeing, most often, the Eurasian Tree Sparrow perching on any one of the welcoming branches, the bird’s lightness and gentleness of landing causing the branch to move but a little, like a bounce. It would stay there for less than a second, dart its eyes around for a bit, then fly off, its departure leaving the branch to careen slightly, like there was a small wind. Sometimes heavier birds like the Javan Mynah or the Common Mynah would come around, too, encircle the branches curiously and make the occasional touchdown. Wherever we moved, the birds of the area would visit, our bamboo plant becoming a sort of resting place or temporary aviary for our feathered friends. Recently, a more curious thing happened. Our bamboo plant presently resides in a huge porcelain pot, with some of its branches bending over at least eight steps of a staircase. We live on the fourth floor of a low-rise apartment in Pasir Panjang and we keep a number of plants, herbs mostly. Tarragon, mint, basil, sage, lemon balm and avocado amongst others. If the morning brings a breeze, we are able to smell the fragrance from the basil especially, ushering in an olfactory freshness amidst a swirl of smells from the passing vehicles – cars, buses, trucks and lorries making their way to the nearby industrial areas in the West Coast. One January morning, we noticed a structured clump of twigs, branches and spider web, diamond-shaped with a hole or porch in the middle, hanging precariously on one of the bamboo branches, swaying gently in the passing breeze. Unbeknownst to us, a bird had made a nest in our bamboo plant. It may have been there longer than we realised, but that moment of discovery was surely nothing less than serendipitous, when wildlife decides to live among us, and with us. Did the scent emanating from the herbs open up a sort of red carpet, as it were, for the bird to want to make its home here? Or was its choice merely instinctive, and precise, with the bird so certain that that was the most suitable branch for a home, away from the wind, rain, torching sunlight and predators? What struck me most, however, over and above these questions, was the relationship between bird and branch, manifested in their mutual dependence: it was a framed image par excellence, an image of strength and fragility, two paradoxical forces converging and coexisting, wonderfully manifested in two of nature’s many architectural formations – the apparent flimsiness of the branch, and the apparent weightiness of the nest. Yet, nature has its way of supporting its own, of knowing its own. Despite looking so thin and feeble, the branch possesses a strength and sturdiness of structure, having the ability to stay the nest through the frequent tropical winds and torrential rains. The nest in turn hangs at just the right weight in order that the branch does not snap. The bird knows its branch, and the branch, the bird. They are neither too heavy nor too light for each other, begetting a kind of perfection, a silent understanding, a fine balance only achievable between plant and animal. After days of careful observation, the bird was now known to us as the Olive-backed Sunbird, which, as its name suggests, has olive plumes, signature yellow breast and a scythe-like curved beak. What’s more, it was now officially part of our domestic, built environment. It was more than a guest; it became family. And even more remarkably, this Olive-backed Sunbird wasn’t alone; she built the nest with the intent of laying her eggs, of finding a suitable home for her little chicks who were just about to be born. We left the bird alone for a week or two and one morning before the end of January, while watering the plants we heard high-pitched, eager chirps which sounded more like lip-smacking kisses coming from the nest. We put our watering cans down and moved closer to the nest and saw a brood of two chicks, their beaks wide open, and their heads popping up just above the lower rim of the hole – each chick contributing to a symphony of chirps, crying perhaps for the mother bird. It wasn’t long before the mother bird came back, food in beak. She headed for her nest of voracious chicks, suspended herself in mid-air with her wings flapping speedily, and proceeded to feed each chick by stuffing her catch into their mouths. The mother bird did this every day till the chicks grew to size, till feathers palpably olive covered their young bodies, till their wings were just about strong enough to hop on the branch. By late morning, the cries had quietened down, but in the early evening, the warbling began again. This diurnal ritual continued for a good three weeks, giving us morning and evening birdsong, a sonic ecstasy, plaintive and invigorating. It isn’t difficult to imagine then the pure joy Gerard Manley Hopkins felt while watching the windhover, or falcon, in flight, how its care-less wilderness was magic for him, how it was a thrill to see the bird within the very depths of his heart. “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!” The bird, a surprise, a thing of splendour in whose frame imagination meets reality. There was an incident during their time with us that got all of us stirred up and frenzied for a bit; an incident surely worth remembering. It was a weekend and the husband was watering the plants, leaving the birds to their own devices. But as he was doing so, he heard an acute, desperate cry coming from the nest. When he put his watering can down to investigate the source of the cry, he noticed a little bird with its legs stuck among the twigs and branches of the nest. To make matters worse, it was hanging upside-down, its little leg threatening to snap at any moment, sending its body plunging down four storeys. The precocious chick must have been impatient to leave the nest, thus tumbling out of its entrance and getting its leg caught in the twigs as a result. The husband quickly called for me – the bird and its plight a necessary cause for alarm and action. “We need to save the bird!” we said unanimously. A sort of commotion ensued with us getting all flustered, anxious and a little histrionic. He ordered me to fetch a stick as the nest was too far out for us to reach it without the aid of anything long. With the stick, the husband managed to pull the branch in towards him, with me grabbing his waist so that he would not topple over the iron railing. The most delicate part was yet to come. Now that the branch and the nest were in our hands, we had to tip the bird gently back into the hole of the nest, ensuring that we did not rip its leg out by force of our uncontrolled strength. Slowly and cautiously, we used our fingers to free the chick’s scrawny leg from the mess of twigs and web. It was a colossal effort for such a tiny creature, with us having to balance its feebleness with our

force. The bird, finally out of its precariousness, was sent back into its rightful place, where it would be safe, just for a time, before it was truly able to take off on its own, without tripping on its home. And so it was that this little bird was saved, its life given a second chance that it may experience the rapture of first flight, of freedom in a city so hard-boiled and aloof. An indelible city of other birds building a space in the air of the urban wild. But our time with them had to come to an end, as all things must. In about three weeks, the chicks had grown into adults and flew the coop, their parents done with their duties, leaving an empty nest. The branch continues to keep the nest; it doesn’t quite demand or miss the presence of the birds, unlike us who still look at the nest with longing. There is a sense of loss that pervades our little nursery, if one could indeed call it a nursery. We miss the “tuwee tuwee” of birdsong, as Alicia Suskin Ostriker in her poem Birdcall manages to catch and record. We miss the company of the adult birds, their feeding patterns, their suspension above a sea of still suburban air, their swift and speedy turn of angle as they fly away for the next catch. We miss the art of their being, the mutual trust and intimacy they share with the branch. Here I return to Ostriker, whose poem is about a bird she sees and hears near her house. The poem is punctuated with the call of the bird, as though the bird were itself singing, whistling the poem in a language and inflection of its own. The bird comes, stays for a time, as though to allow her that brief moment of company, and then flies off. Then, like life, the birdsong ends. Here at one end of the chain of being, That whistles a song of presence and departure, Creating comfort but also calling for tears. The Olive-backed Sunbird came, and came with a few more, then all of them went, went in a brood towards outstretched, divergent paths of flight, only to converge again in my memory as I watch the empty nest dangle on the branch, now lighter, again. Perhaps it is heartening to know that in this obsessively pragmatic city meticulously lined with roadside-rooted trees, pruned parks and gardens, there can indeed, still, be moments when wildlife grows on an urban bamboo plant organically, when a falling bird is caught spontaneously, when nature flies into our doorsteps, briefly.

“Place is never completely effaced.” — Mark Augé

I

t was January in 1995 when we moved to Holland Hill. I was all of thirteen, at the start of Secondary Two. Having spent my childhood in the East of Singapore, I now had a whole new neighbourhood to look forward to, in the West. As I return to my past, I wonder why moving did not unsettle me back then. Perhaps the romantic flares of sentimentalism had not yet warmed my young heart; or it could be, too, that I was considerably more adaptable as a teenager – one thrilled and happy to be on the move, to be going to a different place. My brother and I were excited at the prospect of investigating our new place. So like amateur explorers, we ran around the compound. Empty stairwells and a miniature swimming pool more suitable for tanning than for getting a productive workout were the things we saw. The lobby was bland with grey tiles and white concrete pillars, and the lifts serving nothing more than to take people to their respective floors. The squash court was hardly used, with lizards and moths making it their habitation, more than anybody who wanted to get an active game going. There was really nothing spectacular or remarkable, unlike the fearful excitement one gets when exploring a huge Victorian mansion with its many doors and secretive rooms. Our new apartment building was, simply put, a vertical collection of horizontal plains, stacked atop each other. Middle-class private apartments in Singapore built in the 1990s don’t offer much nutrition and fodder for the imagination with their insipid modernist architecture. I had to drag it out, press it forth if I wanted my mind to meet my muse. That the surroundings outside the compound of my apartment were merely homogeneous blocks of HDB flats, lined with fluorescent lights and uniform corridors, starved my imagination further, making random jolts of inspiration next to impossible. Or so I thought.

After walking through the entire premises and thinking that we had quite enough of feeling riled up, we decided to take one last tour, to the adjacent, connecting block. There we headed for the lift and went up all the way to the last floor, that being the fifth. As usual, nothing surprised us. The doors to each unit were shut, with random shoes scattered messily or arranged neatly outside. We noticed that this block had more units per floor than there were in our block. Being nosey, we walked the length of the corridor in order that we might get a remote glimpse of how fellow residents kept the outside of their houses. Everybody minded their own business, so there was little opportunity for chatter or the general greeting to say that we had just moved in. So after satiating our banal nosiness, we decided to take the lift down, back to our unit, lest our parents got worried. As we headed for the elevator, we saw a door, the stairwell that would lead us downstairs. Perhaps it was better to walk, we thought. Opening the door, we realised that there was a flight of steps leading up to the roof. “Let’s go and see what’s up there!” I said with a slight hope of finding something different, unexpected. My brother didn’t say much in protest; he ambivalently followed, looking like he was trying to understand my enthusiasm for the new place. Just two flights up was a door. We expected it to be locked; after all, most roof accesses are not permitted to trespassers or unauthorised personnel. But to our surprise, it wasn’t. We opened the door to discover a wall and a ladder. They looked reticent, undramatic, white-washed, covered with the dust of the day. Yet beneath that unappealing façade, the ladder looked beckoning, inviting, almost seductive. So we succumbed. Just two steps up the ladder and there I was, at the brink of this world and a foot into another bigger, brighter, better universe. I had to plunge into it. “Wow! You must see this!” I shouted excitedly at my brother who was just seconds behind me. Quickly, I completed the climb and there I was, two feet standing firmly on higher ground and I knew at that very instant that I had found my hiding place, my very own private nation. If I had to divide my life into two distinct chapters, it would be a life up to my discovery of the rooftop and a life thereafter. Jon Krakauer says of climbing and being at an altitude that “Life thrum[s] at a higher pitch. The world [is] made real.” Nothing had ever so powerfully and profoundly impacted me as that overwhelming, daring, dizzyingly centripetal, epiphanic moment. I was floored, flat-out, possessed. Like Neil Armstrong taking his first step on extra-terrestrial soil, I too completed my climb and made a leap, my two feet plastering themselves firmly onto the concrete surface. It was an open, flat roof with nary a shelter in sight, proffering a view unblocked. The only features sticking out from the levelness were a few lightning rods lining the roof’s perimeter. Around me were buildings, near and far, penetrating the skyline. I could also see the roofs and peer into the rooms of other buildings below me. Facing west, even further away were the chimneys of Jurong Island serried together, emitting industrial fires, a brilliant and amorphous orange, illuminating the urbanised horizon. If one went there after dusk and stayed on long enough, it was possible to see those fires burning all night, unabashedly signalling an economy ceaselessly hard at work, energetic and dynamic. Southward was the city, so the Swissôtel, known then as the Westin Stamford, one of Singapore’s tallest architectural gems, was easily identifiable. I wonder what the view would be like now, given that Singapore’s landscape has changed so much. I suppose I would be able to see the triple-towered Marina Bay Sands with its signature ark of a roof garden, as well as the bluish glitzy, glassy assemblage of buildings of Marina Bay Financial Centre. In the near distance, I could see ubiquitous clusters of Housing Board flats proudly gracing the landscape, some old, some new, some upgraded. The only jot of green in the midst concrete was Bukit Timah Hill, Singapore’s highest, natural feature. My thirteen-year-old self had never experienced such a panoramic sight of the city in such an uninhibited way. Previously, my only other memory seeing the city from a great height was through the windows of Compass Rose, the now-closed restaurant at the top of the Westin. Here, I was surrounded by nothing. No walls nor windows for safety. The only thing to keep anyone from falling was a parapet a few metres below the roof. From then on, I never looked back. I developed an intimate relationship with the rooftop in the years that followed. I spent my adolescence running there for refuge under the open sky whenever the existential troubles of those years got the better of me. When

I grew into young adulthood, it was there that I spent some of the most significant and precious hours of my life, in solitude and company. I began to share the place with those I trusted deeply; I was, in every way, letting them into my world. There, without the knowledge of parental authority, I had my first cigarette, alone. There, I managed to catch the meteor shower of 1999. There, I would retreat to alone at night, when I wanted to block out the noise from others, when I wanted only to listen to the sounds of the city. There, lying down and facing the night sky, I tried to point out the constellations hidden behind the fog of the city’s bright lights. There is something peculiar and alluring about rooftops despite their anonymity and unremarkability. In Anthony Chen’s awardwinning film Ilo Ilo, the young protagonist and his helper sneak up to the roof of their HDB flat, a place that at once secludes and seduces by bringing two lonely people closer together, by connecting them in the height and midst of the city’s vastness. In Royston Tan’s 15, the two protagonists, both marginalised misanthropes, find their own little sanctuary on a rooftop, a place where they are able to live out their little fantasies, where they are able to avoid the gaze of an ordered society in which they do not belong. The rooftop, despite its architectural inaccessibility and spatial alienation, is a place and space of belonging, a place and space where solitude and connection with another, or with oneself, reaches its fullness. The expanse of its surroundings engulfs and alienates. Because of the visual experience one gets on a rooftop, perspectives change. Height engulfs a person’s being, taking him to the vantage point of phenomenological perception. One’s sense of self in relation to one’s physical environment reaches a profound symbiosis. A new existential dimension is created in such a place. Here, the individual becomes small and big at the same time, the city bigger, more isolating, more beautiful. It is nothing less than liberating when a place suddenly becomes part of a person and belongs to him, when the nearest and furthest boundary is only the horizon. The rooftop was not only my place in the world, but a space I could return to, and into, time and time again. In the parlance of cultural critic Walter Benjamin: first, the rooftop was a landscape, now a room. My room with the sky as its ceiling. My room on the roof. My room without a roof. Overlooking the urban sprawl. Place and space morph into each other the moment meaning and memory take over. Nowhere else in this city have I been able to find a place like my rooftop, nowhere else in this city have I been able to understand, and love, like that rooftop. Everywhere else is outside of it.

The years 2007 to 2011 were propitious, profitable and prosperous ones for Singapore’s property market, much to the delight of eager developers and the disdain of intransigent residents. En-bloc sales were a dime a dozen, offering irresistible pay-outs to residents. In land-scarce Singapore, development is given the pecuniary go-ahead, at all costs. Old buildings are torn down to make way for new, swanky and more expensive ones, so that the value of land and the upward spiral of property prices are in tandem with the workings of the free market. Furthermore, with the wave of affluent immigrants and expatriates coming into the city, it is only natural that they would be attracted to purchasing prestigious properties whose prices can only climb. The lure of a promising good investment in a country so wanting in land cannot be anything but compelling. While the global economy has been nothing but bearish, sluggardly and tottering, the property market in Singapore has been relatively stable, as if it were the only boat afloat in a sea of sinking ships. En-bloc sales are therefore a good indicator of how healthy the private property market, in particular, is. In these past few years, Singapore has seen a glut of instant millionaires as well as overnight nomads hunting for houses with their newfound wealth. With the constant demand for property by the sudden influx of people evicted from their homes, demand has been kept alive, growing and heating up property prices further. At the height of the en-bloc boom in 2007 and 2008, there were 86 such sales, generating a net gain of at least $11 billion. Construction sites that hold the promise of pomp and luxurious living are a ubiquitous sight today, telling almost-completed stories/storeys of attractive remunerations made in the second half of this decade. We were not spared from this wave. Appealing though the promised payout would be, we did not want to leave. There were a few of them, pushers of the en-bloc sale who could not but press the rest of the residents to acquiesce. They were a practical bunch, trying their luck with a property that was soon reaching its twentieth year, taking a stab at paying for a constant refashioning of the city’s décor in accordance with the promise of capitalism. My father was cordially invited to the condominium’s management committee meetings; he avoided their persuasions and persistence with a mixture of irritation and dignity. But the pull of money can be, in the end, annexing and invariable. We were one of the last few families standing; more than 80 percent of the residents had already agreed and we were left with Hobson’s choice. The remnant, the obdurate 20 percent, was forced, by law and by lucre, to move out. We were that 20 percent, or less. I never bothered with the statistics. All I know and remember with considerable ire today is that the value of a home is not determined only by the value of money. We were attached to Holland Hill. My mother, in particular, was shattered to hear the news that the en-bloc sale had gone through. It was around March 2007 when my father broke the news to us. With a deep sense of loss and disappointment, we asked him where he was thinking of moving to. “Don’t know. Search for a house,” said my father who was by then too tired to entertain any more questions about the collective sale. The satisfaction and anticipation upon finding Holland Hill back in late 1994 came to my mother like a dream. She told me, in the years that followed, of how she and my father searched painstakingly for a house that they would like on first viewing. And Holland Hill was it. She and my father knew, at the very instant they laid eyes on it, that this would be our house, our home. As such, while the confirmation of the en-bloc’s success thrilled its proponents, it quashed its opponents in equal measure.

It has been seven and a half years since we moved out of Holland Hill. After I got married, I moved into a little three-room flat directly facing the back of the old place. What faces me today as I open the door is a construction site. A concrete building, half-complete, stands imposingly, its skeleton and scaffolding grey and new. When complete, it will probably be about thirty storeys high. For now, there are the metallic, giraffe-like cranes that surround the building, robots that pile one concrete slab on top of another. Beside them are the excavators, the diggers or mechanised chungkols, as I call them. More soil to plunge their teeth into, more trees to uproot. Among the vertical mammoth and ubiquitous machines is a cylindrical structure, still unpainted, the only thing softening the angularity that engulfs the site. I presume that it will become a pool or jacuzzi when the construction is finally finished. In the day, I hear incessant drilling and hammering. Old walls are removed to make way for new walls. Old rooms vanish so that new rooms can appear. An old roof disappears into the rubble, with a new one to surface, closer to the sky.

So much happened in the twelve years I was there. I grew up, I loved, I lost. To see it hacked away and built over fills me with a nameless pain. Perhaps I am a sentimental fool. It is disconcerting, the hard-nosed detachment and the ferocious practicality of the free market. This is a city whose dictum is to innovatively change places, to re-place, to un-place, to dis-place. This is a city that operates on economic functionality, that thrives on and drives the quantifiable benefits laid down by property developers and corporations. What we know to be our very own sense of place, a place that is real, dear and authentic to us, a place in which we share an intimate relationship, is lost in, and to, the winds of commerce. What then can salvage the intangible detritus of urban renewal? What else can lay claim to a past (place) that has been forcefully removed from an individual or a community? What else can I depend on to reclaim and preserve my past, or at the very least, the memory of my past? Thomas Hardy says in The Woodlanders of place: “The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lacks memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with its kind.” Memories make a place, and place makes memories. One cannot do without the other. Without memory, place would be meaningless; without place, memories impossible. Memories need a home in order that they feel more real, and lived. But unfortunately, so many memories have been let up, let go of, emptied of their place in the world, chased away from their places of origin. What belies the colourless corners, general plainness and forgettable exterior of my apartment block at Holland Hill is a building fraught with pain and loss, a building in full knowledge of its imminent demise and demolition. Like a niche or a cemetery, my old house at Holland Hill is a place of memory and remembering. I have, with footsteps over those few chapters of my life, traversed its nondescript car park, its scant, bourgeois lobby lined with uncharacteristic, dull, grey and pink tiles; and most importantly, its flat open rooftop facing the concrete sprawl, the unlimited sky. Each step was in ambulatory sync with the years, with my coming of age, with my turning from 14 to 26. Somewhere in the beginning of those years and those steps, I discovered a place that I keep with me till today – that eternally lost but indelible place in this city that can only be justifiably remembered by writing it into re-existence, by prosaic confabulations.

T

onight, S – one of my best friends – and I are walking around our old estate, Tanglin Halt. It is the Seventh Lunar Month during which is the Hungry Ghost Festival, and all around us are people burning paper offerings to their dearly departed ancestors. A smoky smell permeates the air; the Gates of Hell are open. Amidst the raucous and vigorous din of the getai performance is another sound, the unheard conversations, silent songs of another world, another city. We stroll along the old, uneven pavements. The night is sultry, young and alive with things visible and invisible. The lampposts blaze their characteristic orange glare and our ambling bodies cast intermittent shadows whenever we walk under their immortally craned necks. Just for kicks and for the sake of completely immersing ourselves in the spirit of the ongoing festivities, S tantalises me by asking if I have ever heard about the ghosts at Tanglin Halt chap luck lao (sixteen storeys). She used to live in Block 81 Commonwealth Close before she moved to Clementi, and later, Australia. Commonwealth Close is part of the larger area of Tanglin Halt, and because the blocks of HDB flats there are sixteen storeys high, it has come to be known affectionately and unofficially by that very name. “I just know that the place is damn haunted lah,” I quip. “Damn dirty. So many people have committed suicide there before,” she adds. S tells of the ghosts of those who jumped, of the numerous spectral visitations at Tanglin Halt. Given the verticality of the landscape, what better way was there for people to end their lives? The suicides there got increasingly frequent, and as a result, the hauntings became so baleful and intolerable that the residents of Commonwealth Close decided to call a medium to solve the problem. According to her story (which she herself had heard from someone else, as all urban legends go), the medium said a few prayers in order to summon each and every spirit. He then proceeded to trap them in a lamppost, and as a final flourish, tied a red string around it to prevent the spirits from emerging and disturbing the residents ever again. The red string, it is claimed, can still be seen today around the said lamppost, in some place near or around Commonwealth Close.

I have never seen the lamppost with the red string tied around it, but the story in itself fills me with an amused sort of gratification, that the lamppost, at once an object so ubiquitous and symbolic of industrialisation and urbanisation, can in fact house beings so immaterial, so unseen. It is the lamppost as a thing, an object that stumps and dulls with its anonymity. It is the lamppost with its signature hunch and bulbous head that emits that stark orange glow each evening in order to make the night’s darkness visible that is also an icon of this city. For me, however, the totality of the lamppost is encapsulated in its being a dwelling place of spectres and stories as well. In his poem The City Remembers, Alfian Sa’at speaks from the point of view of a street lamp. In the poem, the street lamp says, with gleeful but morose irony: a trip in my circuitry allows Me to flash my Morse, making Your shadows appear and vanish: The stutterings of your soul, Your soul finding its form. Each lamppost is a silent witness of the city’s daily grind, of passing traffic, of lovers kissing underneath its craning neck, of the lone man leaning on it waiting for the next bus, of ghosts inside them waiting to get out. Our memories, our souls are contained in the lamppost, its form and shape an undying, undead receptacle of what we say, how we live. In its physical ubiquity lie our broken, unmistakable individualities. The lamppost is a testament to the spectral world within Tanglin Halt, that other-world of other-stories, of other lives that have not been remembered or retold even as Tanglin Halt is now bestowed with the newfound status of a heritage site. The wave of nostalgia created by the recent SG50 mania has engulfed a few places in Singapore, Tanglin Halt being one of them, what with coffee table books, memoirs, and even a Channel 5 sitcom titled Tanglin pervading Singapore’s popular culture. The area has also been designated as one of Singapore’s heritage walking trails. Indeed, these very places have become national mnemonics, specific urban landscapes now romanticised and idealised by Singapore’s turning fifty years of age. These neighbourhoods, the blocks of flats ensconced within them, their denizens and dwellers, are now put under the spotlight, re-contextualised, objectified and perhaps even commoditised, all in the name of constructing an additional layer to the nation-building narrative, that we are a nation that treasures the old, that we are nation that doesn’t just run along unthinkingly with the winds of what we call progress. That while so many of Singapore’s buildings are torn down, re-built and forgotten in the speedy process of unyielding change, Tanglin Halt stands as one of the last bastions of an older Singapore – before the inevitable wrecking ball comes its way in the near or distant future. Urbanisation is a kind of death. When a building is torn down, its destruction displaces the memories that live in it, leaving them to haunt the city. Better to commemorate the area prior to its eventual death. According to Freud, the word “heimlich” is a dialectical one. First, it is taken to mean the homely, or experiencing a kind of homeliness. Second, it means to conceal. In sprinkling the gold dust of nostalgia onto Tanglin Halt, the government has attempted to affect a sense of home there, a permanence of place in a city that is ever-changing. Yet, in doing so, they have also unknowingly

concealed the secrets of the old neighbourhood. What official nostalgia has forgotten to remember and record is the invisible city constructed and rooted in our midst. There is an unseen neighbourhood in Tanglin Halt that lives within and together with the visible walkways, the old blocks of flats, the small provision shops, coffeeshops, hawker centres, and the miscellaneous lampposts. In view of the fact that Tanglin Halt is one of Singapore’s earliest public housing estates – a site of the nation state’s success and progress – the blocks of flats, each ten or sixteen storeys high, gave people an entirely new way to end their lives: vertically, downwards. It is these tragedies of the quotidian that get left out from state-constructed narratives of the country’s national identity, an identity that is still haunted by the ghosts of those who have fallen. Ghosts are the memories of those departed. Ghosts of unofficial nostalgia are (un)remembered more for their violent, tragic departures. And it is in the ghost stories that these little tragedies are remembered, that they are in some way still alive, in other memories, in a humble lamppost. These objects of our city become sites where the material meets the supernatural. The city needs these spaces, whether or not we believe in ghosts. We know the lamppost as a tangible, tactile thing-in-itself, and we understand it to be that object which lights up and lines our city. But the lamppost is also an idea, one of the many ideas that make up the invisible, layered cartographies and silenced narratives of this city. This is the city’s relationship with its most commonplace object – it is both haunted and beholden by its light. There is an invisible city that lies not below us, but with us. We need this city, as it is the dwelling place of folklore, of urban legends, the other home for those who believe in such lore and legends. There is an unspoken reverence that believers have of this very spectral city. Sometimes the borders of this invisible city seep into the visible, the concrete. The objects – remarkable or mundane – sprawled around the visible city, in every wallet, on every pavement, in every alley and corridor, are the conduits to belief, to memory, to what can be sensed, not touched. The visible city has a curious but intimate relationship with the objects that make up part of its landscape. Walter Benjamin once said, “Death is the sanction of everything a storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death.” Objects are part of the psychic geography of the visible city. Because the visible city dies a little every day to urbanisation, it is truly death that makes these objects the storytellers and the stories themselves. It is the everydayness, the vernacular nature of this invisible city and the visible objects that it interacts with that tell us what we believe in and what we do not, that tell us of the indelible hauntings we have made in the course of change, that tell us the stories that make up our visible city.

The night gets quieter as the getai performance comes to an end. S and I have walked aimlessly around the estate for the past two hours or so. The embers of burnt paper offerings are fading, leaving a dying but strong orange patina, the very last sparks of hell money that have yet to reach their destination down below. In these two hours, we have not yet found the lamppost with the red string tied to it. We stop wondering if this story is true. It may or may not be. It need or need not be. In our directionless perambulation under each passing anonymous lamppost, we reach a destination of understanding that the truth of the story is immaterial, that the materiality of the lamppost stands for something far bigger, and far more profound than the story itself. We know that the ghosts who are trapped, and the ghosts who are free, are part of the spiritus loci and the genius loci of Tanglin Halt chap luck lao.

T

here is an old place, ensconced snugly and discreetly in a pocket of Orchard Road that I will always return to, no matter how long ago it has been since I left. Like going home, this return journey is irrepressible and gravitating. This place is none other than Emerald Hill – the grand old dame which is today a site of real estate prestige, a regular haunt for merrymakers and tourists; the regal queen which has been mythologised in plays like Emily of Emerald Hill, a place where stories originate and perpetuate; the glowing gem that has been iconised in the annals of Singapore’s history and architectural heritage. Today I make my way there on foot; the surest, most contemplative means of travel, where one is able to absorb the quintessence of one’s surrounding environment, its sights, sounds, texture, gaining as it were an emotive resonance through perambulatory pleasure. Emerald Hill is flanked on both sides by old Peranakan shophouses. During the late eighties and early nineties, I used to walk up those dusty corridors, five days a week. Many other girls like me walked the same path – some in the morning, others in the afternoon and in the evening, back down into Orchard Road. As I enter Emerald Hill, those years like sad, friendly ghosts greet me quaintly, almost with a sigh. As my pace unhurriedly gathers ground, I find myself sinking into a sort of time warp. The hustle and bustle of Orchard Road fades away and a strange quiet takes over. Just a few steps into Emerald Hill and the sounds of passing traffic turn into a muffle, ushering in a more sombre, plaintive sonic environment. Traces of what used to be start to reappear, forming a spectral layer over the solidness of the present. It is not that things look particularly different; more insidiously, they only have the semblance of difference. Because time has passed, I expect things to look older, but they do not. Conservation efforts merely simulate the past, giving us only a pretty charming, but ersatz, image of it. Conservation is nostalgia with a lost cause. Can we not retain the past by leaving it alone? In a bid to keep the past, we sap the life out of it. The shophouses do not look the least bit aged; on the contrary, like the rest of Orchard Road, they have not been spared the artificiality of anti-ageing mechanisms. The old flapping wooden doors have now been given a new, polished glaze. Gone are the creaky, flaking wooden doors that once graced this long line of shophouses. What strikes me amidst this ambivalent familiarity is, however, the old antique shop with its red exterior walls. For six and a half years (1988–1994), I walked past the shop not bothering even once to set foot inside. To my then immature mind, antiques were meant only for people who had an excessive abundance of time on their hands to waste away. At least I am now able to appreciate them as delicate evidences of the past. Today I decide that I need to break that long spell of un-entering, to finally make my first foray into one of the places in Emerald Hill that has been left determinedly untouched. It seems even quieter inside the shop. Nothing stirs. The two old men, proprietors of the shop, have probably been there since the beginning of its time. They watch me furtively. Only their eyes move. Not a word is said. I feel their scorching, uncongenial gaze on me as I thread carefully around the cluttered shop. Like resigned relics they sit, unmoving, not bothering an iota if I have the slightest intention of making a purchase. If these two old men were collectors of antiques themselves, they would have also added the years to their collection. And as such they remain, to this day, the precious few living voices still able to tell the story of Emerald Hill. Hand-carved wooden fishermen in straw hats stand uncomplaining in the glass display cabinets. Little china boxes, intricately handpainted, sit reticently on rose-wood tables layered with dust, concealing years of unopened secrets, eternally lost to me. Enamelled vases, vessels and cookware placed securely on long sideboards speak of a dynasty immortalised in a glossy finish; the furnace they had to go through to attain that end embellish them with a dignified resonance and resilience that rebels against the passing of time. At this moment, my sight dalliances with my olfactory senses and I conjure the words of William Carlos Williams, who says with defiant irony in his poem Smell!: “Oh strong rigged and deeply hollowed / nose of mine! What will you not be smelling?” And indeed, what could I not smell in this little curio-city shop! What antiquated odours would not tickle my nostrils and gently project me back to those days when I trudged past it! It is unmistakable, and as Edward Thomas would intone: “It is enough / To smell”! That dustcovered, mildewed, musty, fusty smell of younger days, the odd scent of memory. I know it instinctively and at once, I see my elevenyear-old self walking past the shop in my blue uniform and canvas shoes on a hot mid-morning, glancing at a huge vase standing at its entrance and wondering who in their right mind would ever buy it. Then the smell greets me and I am one step closer to the start of another school day. If one could demarcate an area on one’s mnemonic map, then the invisible arms of smell would inevitably figure as some sort of boundary, a signpost to single out the particularity of that place in question. Some smells only belong to some places. One smell can sometimes only belong to one place. I am glad that I never lost the memory of this smell. Its distinctiveness, though not quite redolent, represents a part of my life that I can never return to; the encapsulation of my school days in Emerald Hill enfolded and gilded into one permeating, intimate smell-scape. I step out of the shop. The two old men show no visible sign of reacting. Before I run off, I turn to its signboard in a bid to commit the name of the shop to memory. What is within closest reach is always furthest from us: it never occurred to me to find out what the shop was called when I had the opportunity to walk past it every day. So today, I confront my long-time apathy: the One Price Store, it is named, almost like an epithet. A very clever way of telling its customers that it isn’t quite tolerant of bargain hunters. One would have thought the shop deserving of a more austere name perhaps. Despite the forthrightness in appellation, the shop survives. I inhale its signature staleness for the last time and walk on.

A few doors down and I’m back at the old school. The side entrance – an old metal gate – once opened morning, noon and evening, is now perpetually closed, and sealed. What used to be a metal gate with square grids is today sealed with a blue plastic sheet. To my delight, however, the wall framing the gate has yet to lose its cracks and stains; a dignified oldness remains, reticently retaining a sense of connection and continuity to the past – my past. Some steps away is the bus bay, where buses and vans used to park bumper to bumper in the afternoons and evenings, first letting out a horde of girls then awaiting another horde to board once the bell rings. As I stand at the deserted bus bay, I realise now just how short the length of the area is. Places are polymorphous; their dimensions change with time and age. Leonard Shelby poignantly muttered in Memento, a film about short-term memory loss, that “memory can change the shape of a room, it can change the colour of a car”. The reverse can also be true – places and colours can change the form of memory because perceptions shift as one grows in height, size and age. Being young and being old(er) are shaped mostly by perception. When I was seven, the bus bay looked immeasurably longer, wider; and the pillars that hold up the entire block – the Song Ong Siang Block, as it was known for so many years – were, of course, much taller. Despite the shifts in space, there is, however, one thing that remains staid, unchanged – the sturdiness of these pillars. Today, the old Singapore Chinese Girls’ School still stands, despite the mercurial weather and the merciless march of time, because of them. I try to peer through the narrow slits in the main gate to see if there is indeed anything I can recognise. I never thought gates to be so fancy; once again, what used to be a brown iron gate which never bothered to conceal the interior of the school is now a covered aluminium one. Squinting through its narrow slits, I can only see what was once the field. The field – what we then referred to endearingly as “the cabbage patch” – is now a boxed-up and walled-in soccer court. There were seasons back then when no one was allowed on the field because she was “balding”: barren patches spread out sporadically amongst grass that was browning and drying, especially in the hot months of the year. When the capricious torrential rains fell, she perked up whimsically, her bald patches witnessing little blades of sprouting grass. Then when the school holidays came, when she was left alone to resuscitate in the December rains, she would flourish, as if preparing a welcome freshness for us when the January term began. It was only when the field regained her verdure, her patina, that we would be allowed to run on it again, freely. Games like “zero-point” and “catching”, PE lessons, National Day celebrations, outdoor assemblies and fire drill gatherings were some of the activities we carried out on that small, friendly cabbage patch. Other times we simply strolled. We loved her as she loved us; despite the intermittent seasons of receding grass-lines, she was still our outdoor sanctuary, our sylvan space outside the classroom. She was the meadowy lawn we could step on without feeling guilty as we would the trimmed turf of today’s landscaped gardens. There was an intimate and organic relationship between her and us; she knew our feet as we knew her sheaths. On the day we left the old campus in 1994, she was graciously and appreciatively trod on, for the last time – this time not with the heavy thumps and jumps of gaming feet but the lilting affability of a picturesque folk dance – a dance like a swansong, to bid goodbye to an old, friendly field. There is nothing to preserve now, nothing to let grow or rejuvenate, no dew or mud balls to avoid in the morning, no earthworms and millipedes to squirm away from – the cycle of grass-growing seasons has ended. Forever. For the grass is no longer there; what lies instead is an AstroTurf for the games played by expatriate or foreign students of what is now Chatsworth International School. A ball is whacked against the wall that surrounds the court. A resonating “bam” is heard, reifying the loss of a humble grass patch that, in its day, was the cherished playground of so many pairs of feet. If a ball were kicked this hard back then from the field, it would probably roll to where I am standing right now, some distance away, without the safety of walls, the dryness of turf.

Something roots my feet at the gate. I stand there, peering in, still not wanting to leave despite my obscured view. Somehow, undergirding the act of squinting is a defiance, a persistence of sight. Even if it were impossibly difficult to achieve an open, unobstructed view of the school’s interior, at least it would afford me the luxury of remembering on-site, of phenomenologically experiencing those halcyon days there and then. Anne Fadiman, in her cult classic Ex Libris, devotes an entire chapter to the act of reading in the actual place at which a piece of fiction or nonfiction is set. Under such wonderful auspices, we can say with delightful satisfaction that we have entered into a “You-Are-There” moment where we “see exactly what the author described, so that all we need to do to cross the eidetic threshold is squint a little”. If I could transpose and appropriate this verisimilitudinous experience to the present moment, then my act of remembering at the place itself intensifies and amplifies the aura of being-there. Somehow being at the actual site and remembering it is indescribably and infinitely more profound than remembering it from any other place or looking at some faded, old photograph of it. While being there exacerbates the loss, it does at the same time render a kind of site-specific materiality to the memory that any other mnemonic object can never provide. Past and present conflate into a single protracted moment, proffering as it were a kind of double consciousness of the There and Then, the Here and Now. Oh how memory seems to fit better when you take it back to where it originated! It’s like finding an old T-shirt, putting it on and realising just how well it fits still, despite the passing of time and the changing contours of your body. While all “You-Are There” moments can never reclaim the essence of the past, at least they give us the pleasure of dancing with its vestigial ghosts, in the present. Squinting, my eyes take me now to another part of the school compound. To the left is the canteen. From where I am standing and through the insufferably narrow slits, I am obviously unable to see just how it has transmogrified. But sight is not the primary mnemonic sense that I need to rely on when I think about the canteen. Of all the places in the old Singapore Chinese Girls’ School, the canteen is veritably a space characterised by sound and smell, more than sight. To my memory at least, this small, humble eating area, or “tuck shop” as we once so quaintly called it, peppered our daily dining experience with the sound of heavy footsteps thump-thumping above our heads. Because the gymnasium with its long, creaky but sturdy wooden floorboards was right above the canteen, forming its “ceiling”, recess and lunch breaks were often accompanied by the background rhythms of jumping, running feet against hard wood. A PE lesson or a game of badminton perhaps could be taking place upstairs as we ate. The canteen was thus a queer, quirky little space where ceiling meets floor, constructing as it were a soundscape that we grew so accustomed to as each day passed. Completing this auditory thudding was the ever-so-distinct concoction of smells – black vinegar, flat yellow egg noodles, or mee pok, and fried chicken wings. Emanating from different stalls and permeating the canteen, these smells made up my daily

olfactory diet. Singapore Chinese Girls’ School is known not only for her unmistakably sexy school uniform, she is also well-reputed for having one of the best-made mee pok dishes in the country. The secret? Black vinegar. Lots of it. Served together with a steaming hot bowl of ta mee pok (dry flat yellow egg noodles) or kway teow mee (flat white noodles), one would hear the ubiquitous request of “Uncle, jia chu!” or simply, “More vinegar please, Uncle!” Way back in 1988 when I was in Primary One, I had my virgin taste of this signature school dish. A bowl of mee pok tang, or soup noodles, for an unbelievably sweet forty cents. That was enough to fill me for the day. I spent the rest of my allowance – a mere eighty cents a day – on a packet drink or a fried drumstick (wrapped in a square piece of paper! No plastics, yet!); and, would still be able to save at least ten to twenty cents. The mee pok stall held the largest area in the canteen. That this was so was of course nothing surprising. The stall consistently garnered the best business and back then, mother and son, an old lady and a middle-aged man, would unfailingly whip up that delicious local delicacy, bowls and bowls of it to generations of girls who would leave the hallowed gates of the school having had a taste of this dish that is, till today, so dear to the palate of most, if not all, SCGS girls. These two pioneers, responsible for the creation of a collective gustatory memory, have since passed on. I do not know how long more this business will last; as it is, people have complained that the mee pok no longer tastes as delectable as it used to. I don’t suppose the descendants of this mother-and-son pair desire to take up the mantle. When pioneers die, their distinct heritage can sometimes follow them into the grave. If one is fortunate, someone else may bravely perpetuate what the previous generation has built up. But then again, this would not come without some modification, some kind of variation, leaving only token and polite traces of the past, eroding away the authenticity of the original. Perhaps the legacy of Uncle Mee Pok – as he is affectionately known to us all – will remain, evermore, only in the epitheliums of our tongues. I continue squinting in spite of my left eye getting a little tired. I see my seven-year-old self ordering a bowl of mee pok for the first time, and later carrying it so cautiously back to the nearest table, ensuring that a spill did not happen. I made it to the table successfully and for the very first time in my life, I sipped the vinegar-laden soup from the pink plastic spoon, and there it was – a taste that would grace the memory of my palate, forever. Accompanying this humble gastronomic experience was the sound of moving feet above me, and the field with her bald patches in front of me, creating the auditory and visual coup de grace. It was of one of my most consummate and unforgettable multi-sensory dining experiences, all for an unbeatable price of forty cents.

I give my eyes a rest and walk around the bus bay. Because the school looks more like a gentrified, gated community now, out of bounds to those who were once its inhabitants – those who know its secrets, its nooks, its corners – there are parts of it I am not able to reach from where I am standing. So, for all it’s worth, I continue in my “You-Are-There” reverie and usher in another memory. It was about 11 in the morning in the year 1988. I was seven years of age, my first year in this weathered building. The bell had just rung, signalling the end of recess. Almost liturgically, we rushed to the shelter, lined up in an orderly manner and waited for our respective form teachers to take us back to class. It was a ritual that was carried out every day, a regime we had grown so unthinkingly used to. Later on we were told to stand in line again, this time cup and toothbrush in hand. Another ritual awaited. We moved towards the sinks in the canteen and there, once again in methodical fashion, filled our cups with water. Our form teacher, Ms Ee, hurried us along to the drain that stretches a good 50 metres and we squatted in a row, side-by-side, with our cups and toothbrushes. Staring at the longkang, or drain, below us, we anticipated further instructions. The daily dental observance began, this time not with any dentist, but with our teacher teaching us how we should brush our teeth, supposedly in the proper, prescribed way, only without toothpaste. It is sagacious, we were continually told, to maintain good oral hygiene. Back in 1969, the Government decided that it had had enough of teeth-related diseases and denture-donning adults; to prevent the next generation of Singaporeans from having their teeth fall out by the age of 40, they instituted a scheme that emphasised the importance of preserving the wonderfully solid, calcareous combination of dentin, pulp and enamel. “Ten times on your left, ten times on your right!” Ms Ee boomed, more like the teacher she was than the dentist she was not. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten!” she counted. Little toothbrushes moved in military fashion, proffering a sight of horizontal uniformity. We were flanked on both sides by our classmates as we partook of this oral ablution, day after day, in a cleansing ritual that marked our fleeting days in Primary School. “OK! Gargle and spit the water into the drain!” ordered Ms Ee. We followed her instructions mechanically. Like automatons, we took in the water from our coloured mugs – mine is red – irrigated our mouths and spat out the dirty liquid into the drain with aplomb. A resounding collective splash was heard and the ritual was complete. We got up, lined up and headed back to class as the ascendant sun made his way to his noon-day high, evaporating away the repulsive mixture of spit and drying up the scintilla of food left behind from the morning’s recess. I did wonder to myself during those times where this was all leading. Would I be spared the sad dentile destiny of my parents? Would I really not have to see myself dipping dentures into a mug of water before I went to bed in my old age? What was the point of brushing my teeth without toothpaste? Though I delighted in not having to squeeze a tube of fluoride onto my toothbrush, these were the very thoughts that preoccupied my young mind as I robotically participated in the ceremonialism of honouring my teeth. I don’t hold any grudge against the humdrum of those sessions. In fact, I look back at the communalising of such a solitary practice with some longing, with a wistfulness of heart. Instead of staring into the mirror while brushing my teeth as I have been doing all these years, I was able to do so in the company of classmates, shoulder-to-shoulder, with my teacher being imperiously didactic, all while she was probably just as amused as we were that a national dental care exercise of this nature had to be carried out. Surely teaching us how to brush our teeth was not part of her job scope.

I look at my watch and realise that a good thirty minutes have passed and that there are other parts of the school I have not yet revisited. As such, I make my way further down Emerald Hill. It seems like I cannot escape the pull of the past even as I walk down

the short remaining stretch towards Hullet Road. Hullet Road is a transition zone that bridges Emerald Hill and Cairnhill. Every step is a frisson of memory, an uncanny arousal of my past. Even the old trees that stand austerely by the pavements greet me as I amble past them. They were there then as they are here now. If trees are indeed sentient beings, then they must have witnessed with some sadness how the little Hill has metamorphosed through the years just as they would be able to provide some kind of record of the people who have passed by their weathered boles. I am one of those recorded in their memory and perhaps they, with some mellowed delight, say hello to me today with a silent nod and a lulling rustle of leaves. Along with the tress, a warren of shophouses with ornate Peranakan façades acknowledges me too, silently. Smoothly, automatically, my steps take me from Hullet to Cairnhill. What flanks Cairnhill is a basketball court and a private apartment block. This basketball court is of course the property of Chatsworth International School. Before, it was ours – the concrete alternative to the cabbage patch for similar activities of gathering. There are a few basketball courts in Singapore that form the storehouses of my memories. But it is in this basketball court that my best memories of basketball are amassed: it was here where I first decided that I loved the game; it was here where I had my first training sessions in Secondary One; it was here where my friends and I gathered to play the beautiful game before afternoon classes started. Other than the canteen and the classroom, the basketball court was the place where my friends and I bonded, not over food or idle chatter, but over games and games of basketball. We have these few sites to thank for the solidifying of our friendship. How many footsteps have we made, footsteps that formed intricate patterns from the sheer number of games we had, running up, down and around the court? If I could plot out the lineage of my friendship with these very people, it would start on Emerald Hill and its basketball court – a complex, spirited and beautiful pattern of footprints, invisible but reified, that define the cartographic journey of friendship, where little feet grew steadily to big feet, in a dance of basketball games, PE lessons and 1.6 kilometre runs. I walk in step with these memories as I watch the Chatsworth students run with abandon in their own game – not mine – of basketball. I must admit that I do not feel very happy for them; I cannot empathise with their fun because my better past stands astride their present and mine, and it only exacerbates what I have already lost. It is of course no fault of theirs that they are the ones playing basketball here today, but still, I cannot help but blame them for taking over what was once so preciously my friends’ and mine. I empathise with Jonathan Franzen who confesses ever so bluntly in his angst-ridden essay Meet Me in St. Louis – St Louis being the town he grew up in – that he hates the people who have moved into his old house. “My feeling about the people who live here now is that they’re not the people who used to live here, and that I hate them for it. My feeling is that I would die of rage if I had to live on this street where I once lived so happily. My feeling is that this street, my memory of it, is mine; and yet I patently own none of it.” Nostalgia can sometimes be so taunting. Palimpsests are all I am left with now, and when I see the place that was once almost my second home being used by complete strangers, I am seized with an unhealthy combination of envy and annoyance. Their present mocks my past, which I can now only experience as a trace, an apparition that is frustratingly so real and so impossible. And so, I complete my little detour and amble, my re-living of the peripatetic ritual of yesteryear. If I could retrace my life in steps, then Emerald Hill and Orchard Road would constitute a very significant part of my mnemonic terrain. Re-walking these steps is both pleasurable and torturous. Pleasurable because of the sublime strangeness of embodying two time zones simultaneously. Torturous because of my being there, but not quite. There is always something very confronting and possessing about revisiting a site you used to frequent, a place that is so physically familiar, a space that is so dynamically personal, and precious. I am a compulsive walker and through the years of travelling with my legs both away and at home, I have come to realise that walking is the only form of movement that seals any sort of experience for me because it is only by the gathered, reflective pace of walking that I am able to formulate and fashion a deeper impression of the place; because it is only through the walk that I am able to understand and immerse myself in the affective dimensions of space. When walking into a memory-site, what kills me is the total implausibility of exactitude; each step is a step of ambiguity, each footprint is on an indelible road that has been erased: I am there, but I am not. I have it, but I do not. The past is there, but it is not. The present is here, but it is not. The past enfolds but the present engulfs. Much like the Romantic poets, the hopeless romantic in me laments the passing of the past, the hapless impossibility of ever attaining it again. While I thrive in nostalgia, I totter in it as well. The constant disenchantment with the present is fuel for my not-forgetting. In this mnemonic haze, I plod on, my return journey made, but never completed. Emerald Hill has changed. I have grown up. Home is now another place.

I

t is lunchtime and I am islanded in front of the popiah stall in the food court of Takashimaya Shopping Centre. The crowd speeds past me in a blur, like a fleeting, indistinct image, each individual caught up in his own hunt for a midday meal while I stand rapt, mesmerised by the deft hands preparing the two rolls of popiah I just ordered.

The one standing behind the counter is a young man from China, probably no more than 25 years of age. He first places a thin, round sheet of popiah skin on the wooden board. Then, swiftly, he dips a tablespoon into the thick, black “sweet flour sauce” and spreads it on the skin in a swirl. As per my request, he skips the garlic and proceeds niftily to the chilli, the ingredient that I specifically want more of. The striking orange-redness of the blended chilli mixed with the dark, viscous, syrupy inkiness of the sauce whets my appetite thoroughly. It is, to me, the most essential of the ingredients, save the skin. Without the added spiciness, eating popiah would hold little to no meaning, leaving the taste buds feeling a dearth of fullness and thrill. After he is done painting the face of the skin with sauce and chilli, he proceeds to cover the surface of the skin with a lettuce leaf. Already I see a tri-coloured, halfcompleted piece of work. The verdant freshness of the leaf, curled up at its ends, looks almost like a palm coyly welcoming the plethora of ingredients into its gentle grasp. His hands move quickly as he sprinkles first the crispy fried fish flakes, then the thinly shredded omelette, raw bean sprouts and crushed peanuts, before he puts in the main ingredient, the filling – the slow-cooked julienned bangkwang, or jicama, mixed with taukwa and carrots. He takes a perforated ladle and scoops a dollop of filling; it is dripping with gravy so he has to drain the glistening oily wetness away by pressing the perforated ladle with a rounded one, the bangkwang-taukwa-carrot mix in between. The gravy is drained out, leaving the filling less soggy, so that it may be more safely placed in the skin without it breaking during the process of wrapping. He carefully positions the filling on top of the rest of the ingredients, using his palms to give the filling a tight but quick compress in order to ensure that it does not fall around loosely and messily. Chopped coriander is then lightly strewn over the filling – and it is ready to roll. The young man then makes sure that everything is tucked in snugly before he wraps it all up. He rolls the skin from its edge, folds both sides inwards, and continues rolling, till a perfect, compactly wrapped roll is seen. I watch as he repeats the process with my second popiah, and I am presented with two rolls of ingredients, stuffed, ensconced and securely cradled within the protective membrane of a very thin floury skin.

Wraps and rolls are used in the cuisines of many cultures. The Mexicans have their tortillas and burritos, the Japanese have ingredients wrapped in rice and seaweed – sushi as we know it, the Vietnamese have their goi cuon, known popularly as Vietnamese spring rolls, the Koreans have their ssambap, rice and meat lovingly wrapped in lettuce leaf, and so do the Hakkas have their enfolded fried minced pork, like the ssambap, in lettuce leaf. In today’s health-plagued food culture, the wrap has taken on another incarnation ingeniously marketed as the “salad wrap”, where a series of supposedly organic ingredients are used, where a salad is literally tossed and rolled into a whole-wheat wrap. The middleclass consumer is now able to choose his/her desired ingredients and have a wrap instantaneously and specially custom-made to suit his/her taste buds, or his/her dietary conditions – “eating clean”, as it is known in common parlance today. Yet, despite these ubiquitous salad shops popping up everywhere, the popiah, to me, still claims the title of being the most delicious wrap of all, its relative unhealthiness notwithstanding. The popiah is the culmination of various tastes, the apotheosis of flavour, concisely wrapped in a neat, not-too-stodgy roll. Cuisines are part of material culture that travel along with their bearers. The popiah we find in Singapore today is but a derivative, an innovation, an evolved form of what it was where it first originated. When Hokkien immigrants came to Nanyang from Fujian Province in Southern China, they brought along with them their recipes, too. While Singapore might have been the destination for these immigrants, their food and foodways continued to morph, adapt, changing with time and taste. The immigrants unwittingly and invariably globalised their cuisines, and later, what was once globalised became distinctly localised. Yet, this localisation of Chinese cuisine has not stopped people from constantly reinventing it. This is the culinary logic of the diaspora. Tastes acclimatise and reacclimatise to the different climates of globalisation and localisation, and the popiah is a worthy example of a Hokkien delicacy that has been baptised by the continually transforming foodways of the Chinese diaspora in Singapore and Malaysia. In contemporary Singapore, the popiah is not thought of, much less known, as a Hokkien delicacy. Today, the dish has come under the category of Chinese and Peranakan cuisine writ large. Its ethnic roots have somehow been rendered irrelevant through years of naturalisation and homogenisation of different Chinese ethnicities qua linguistic and cultural policies that discouraged Chinese people from identifying themselves as part of their distinct dialect groups. One became merely Chinese in Singapore, with Mandarin being enforced as the Mother Tongue of all who were racially Chinese. These policies gradually and insidiously diluted one’s affinity and connection to one’s dialect group, and this slowly but surely led to a growing ignorance of the varieties of Chinese ethnicities in Singapore. In a bid to prevent the Chinese diaspora in Singapore from being fissured and pluralised by their dialect groups, the PAP effectively managed Chinese ethnicity in such a way that dialects were conveniently substituted with Mandarin. The linguistic shift from dialects to Mandarin led, almost inevitably, to an alienation of the unique cultures inherent in the various Chinese dialect groups, the inimitable and distinctive foodways and foods of each group being one of the biggest victims of Singapore’s linguistic modernisation. Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew and Cantonese restaurants are not uncommon sights in Singapore; yet, not many people actually know how different these cuisines are, now that Singaporeans of Chinese descent are gathered under the wider umbrella of being merely, and simplistically, Chinese. Because of these homogenising policies, the younger generations of Chinese Singaporeans are left incapacitated when it comes to speaking their respective dialects, much less understand the culinary histories of their respective Chinese ethnic groups; under these circumstances, it is imperative that the foodways and the foods of each

dialect group perpetuate their individual cultures and heritage. If one cannot speak one’s language, then one must, at the very least, be able to eat the culture his language belongs to. All the more so when the acts of speaking and eating make use of the same appendage – the tongue. This is not to say, however, that indigenisation of food and foodways is not welcome. On the contrary, food should, in all respects, be open to localisation and globalisation. Tastes change; they become more demanding, more urbane, more thoughtful. The taste of the Chinese diaspora in Singapore is, as it is in any other part of the world, a complex amalgam and dynamic of cross-pollination and distinctiveness, resulting in what is known as hybridity – a smooth and bumpy crossing of alimentary lines, a brazen gustatory creolisation; a mish mash, a colourful conflation of present and past, there and then, here and now, through continuity and rupture. The popiah is a site of such temporal and locational hybridity.

Originally, the popiah from Fujian used bamboo shoots, peeled and cut into thin slices, as their main filling. The popiah one finds in hawker centres, food courts and some Chinese restaurants presently use bangkwang instead. It is only the Nonya variant that uses both bangkwang and bamboo shoots for its filling. Because the Peranakans in Singapore pride themselves on having one of the most sophisticated and intelligent cuisines and cooking practices (and rightly so), Nonya popiah is the only other type of popiah that distinguishes itself from the “standard” popiah. Traditionally, the Hokkiens employed slow-cooking as a culinary method. This ensured that the flavours of the ingredients permeated the dish in its entirety. This method of cooking is still used today when cooking the bangkwang and bamboo shoots together with pork stock, shrimp and lard. It is the preservation, perpetuation and continuity of these cooking practices that safeguard the connection with the dish’s history, and as such, the identity of the Hokkiens in Singapore. Apart from keeping bamboo shoots as the filling, one can easily tell the difference between a Nonya popiah and the typical popiah from its skin. The skin of the former is known as the egg skin. It is smoother, slightly more rubbery, oilier in texture and more yellowish in colour by virtue of egg yolks, the most indispensable part of the skin’s ingredients. The latter’s skin, on the other hand, is made solely with all-purpose flour, tapioca flour, salt and water. The absence of eggs in this latter recipe renders the skin’s colour white, and it feels distinctly drier. The importance of the skin to this delicacy, be it the “standard” or the Nonya popiah, cannot be over-emphasised. As it is called, popiah in Hokkien literally means “thin skin”, with the word “po” being defined as thin or flimsy, and “piah”, biscuit or flat cake. It is the thinness of the skin that characterises this dish, yet such thinness belies a kind of strength that binds, that holds all the ingredients inside. Made well, the skin will not perforate. Being so thin, popiah skin looks beguilingly simple to make. However, it takes years of practice in order to master the art of making the perfect popiah skin.

Making the skin of the popiah successfully is no easy feat. It takes skill, stamina, patience and art on the part of the one standing behind the griddle. It is not anything I have tried doing before, and I tell myself that this is better left to the experts. So, I make my way down to Commonwealth Crescent Market and Food Centre, where a little stall specialising in making popiah skin is located. When I get there, I ask the owner if I can watch him at work, to marvel at the way such arduous but fine culinary art is unassumingly made every single day in the modest space of the hawker centre. He is congenial and gives me the go-ahead. And there I stand and stare, spellbound by the ease with which he goes about making skin after skin of tight, sinewy, delicate thinness. Flour, tapioca flour, salt and water are the few humble, but essential, ingredients needed to make the popiah skin. The man first mixes these constituents together to form a very thick, elastic and lumpy batter. The consistency of the batter must be just so, because in the later cooking process the batter cannot afford to be diluted. He tells me that the batter must be left overnight in the refrigerator to allow it to settle and develop, in order that it becomes smoother, suppler and more solid, like dough. He keeps the newly mixed batter in the fridge and takes out another bowl of batter that was made the day before. Almost instinctively, he scoops a dollop of dough from the bowl with his hands and twists his wrist around it so that the excess batter is pulled off. His hands become almost like a ladle and a cup, where the dough is firmly entwined. With alacrity, he smacks the dough onto the griddle and smears it in a circle. This is where it gets challenging; he swiftly and nimbly pulls back his hand to ensure that only the dough that gets into the griddle remains there. There can be no excess dough in the making of just one popiah skin. Soon, the dough becomes translucent as the heat from the fire spreads under it. As soon as the dough becomes a very thin layer, its edges begin to curl inwards, and that is when he speedily and gently peels it off the griddle without tearing it. I stand hypnotised as he repeats the process, his hands and dough having achieved a relationship of deep understanding, where the texture of the dough and the rhythmic movement of his hands culminate in an esculent waltz. In the poem La Mian in Melbourne by the Singapore-born Australian Boey Kim Cheng, the poet stands rooted, staring intently at a noodle maker in Melbourne’s Chinatown. Like the popiah skin maker standing behind his griddle on a stultifying humid afternoon in Singapore, the la mian maker on a wintry Melbourne night takes a fist-sized ball and starts his noodle magic, stretching his bands, the sleight-of-hand plain for you to see, weaving a stave of floury silent music. […] the art of la mian reeling you in to a music deep beneath Like the dulcet song that pervades Boey’s inner world, the dance between the popiah skin maker and his stretchy ball of dough

conjures a tune of travel, a melody of the Hokkien immigrants, an aria of a dish with ductile routes and roots that stretch across the seas, that binds and keeps in the loose ties of the Chinese diaspora in Singapore – a piquant continuity, an edible lineage. Royston Tan, the enfant terrible of Singapore cinema, has a short film simply but significantly titled Popiah. In the film, the protagonist and his father are making popiah in preparation for the death anniversary of the former’s grandfather. The protagonist is unable to understand his father’s persistence in making the dish by hand, painstaking as the process is. To him, labouring over a dish that can be bought in the hawker centre is but a meaningless and time-wasting exercise. Appreciating the process of chopping and cooking the ingredients, making the skin of the popiah, eludes him as he is, for a moment, a victim of supermarket culture – a fixture of globalisation and technology – where individual labour is easily and mind-numbingly substituted with the speed, efficiency and convenience of machine-made consumables. The beginning of the film is set in silence, where only the sound of carrot against grater is heard, highlighting the resonance of labour, the echo of love. As the film unfolds, the young protagonist begins to understand his father’s intention, experiencing a revelation when the entire family is gathered before the altar, offering prayers and popiah to the departed ancestor. To my mind, this scene is a visual culmination of one of the film’s lines: “The most important ingredient of the popiah is none other than the skin, for without the skin, nothing can hold the ingredients together.” The values of family unity and a deep and unfettered respect for one’s ancestors are, of course, the larger issues that pervade the film, with the popiah skin as a metaphor most apt for expressing such sentiments. Despite Tan’s status as Singapore’s maverick filmmaker, most of his films dwell lyrically and tenderly on the precious place of filial piety and tradition in the Singaporean Chinese family. The film Popiah is both homage to the dish and a meditation on the bonds that should exist between the members of every Singaporean Chinese family. It is also a contemplation on the extended bonds Singaporeans of Chinese descent have with their ancestral homeland through the popiah, an evolved dish, much like the Singaporean Chinese person himself, that originates from a source. There is considerable debate over whether a descendant of the Chinese diaspora should have ties to the Motherland; most would hesitate to find any sort of connection to and with China, much less desire to identify with being a part of it. As the world continues to globalise, one can confidently assert that the category of “Chinese” is not at all homogeneous; Chinese identity is not the same the world over – no longer is there a need to identify oneself as being invariably tied to China-as-source, or as point of origin. The source or origin today is both a reality and an imagination, one to be eschewed or embraced. Yet, despite the multifaceted and fascinating ways Chinese people identify themselves, both within and without the boundaries of race, geography and history, it is undeniable that the foods and foodways of any contemporary immigrant society are the derived products of those who came before, those who brought not just their labour along with them, but their lifestyles, their alimentary practices, their sense of a home left behind. If home was now a distant land, a faraway and perhaps potentially forgotten place, then it had to be consumed – imagined, relished, remembered – through our indelible, age-old, tried and tested recipes. Tucked snugly within the thin skin of popiahs are a dynamic plethora of cultures, a multifaceted palate of histories, a large swathe of distance and geography, a confluence of globalisation and localisation, an intimate taste of family ties both within and out of China. In both its strength and fragility, the skin binds together, ever so profoundly, the various ingredients that make up the scatteredness, diversity, dissonance, and harmonisation of what it means to be Chinese today, and in particular, what it means to be Chinese in Singapore today.

I sink my teeth into the wrapped roll made by the young man from China, and I can taste the heavenly dalliance between the sweet and the savoury, the riotous tingling of chilli dancing on my taste buds. The sweetness of the black sauce fused with the saltiness of the bangkwang filling bursting forth at the back of my tongue, the crispiness of the fish flakes, the mild wetness of the filling and the softness of the skin culminating in a balanced, full-textured bite, coupled with nothing less than a full-bodied taste, a fusillade of flavours. We consume our histories and our geographies in a wrap, and from there, we continue to roll out, to unravel different stories about what we eat, where we eat, who we love and who we are.

T

oday, my hands feel a little spirited, as though seized by a strange electricity. They want to chop, to slice, to peel, to knead, to fry, to steam, to bake. They want to feel icy meats thawing in the afternoon humidity. They want to throw dew-drenched vegetables into the invigorating, hot oil that is sizzling in the pan. They want to massage, to press against the elasticity of flour mixed with butter and egg. They want to conjure, to concoct, to create a dish, ex nihilo. But only inspiration can beget action, so I look to the past – a place of the heart where memory forms the most scrumptious and intimate of recipes. My urge to cook not forgotten, but postponed, I decide to make a beeline for the cabinet that houses tomes and tomes of photo albums collected over the years before digital photography came along. I rummage through the mountain of albums, flipping their plastic flaps speedily hoping to find one of those countless photographs of birthdays and banquets. It is a little detour my heart will have to make before my hands start their work. It doesn’t take me very long before I finally stumble upon an album with a set of photographs of my seventh birthday. There are a number of photographs that grace this album. Thankfully these photographs, developed in matte finishing, are still well preserved, a legacy of Kodak colour negative film, able to withstand the mildew and march of time. Among the set are a few photographs that capture plates of food gracing the dinner table; in particular, there is a photograph of a man standing over a table arrayed with an elaborate feast of homecooked food. No one else inhabits the frame, betokening almost a reverence for the one pair of hands that has prepared the dishes that adorn the table. The man is my father. He has a hammer in his right hand and a stick in his left. The stick is placed on a hardened lump of dough and my father is smiling, about to hit the stick with the hammer so that the dough can break open. “This is called ‘Beggar’s Chicken’,” he says with some amusement. The photograph does not reveal what’s inside the lump of dough, though memory tells me it is a whole chicken, covered in fragrant herb-scented gravy, snugly ensconced inside the hardened protective loaf. The stony loaf, like a cocoon, wraps, traps and keeps the aroma in, preserving the taste and tenderness of the chicken while it bakes. Preparing such a dish requires the knowledge of science and the skill of craft – a potent combination that will ultimately and inexorably titillate the tip of every tongue. Spread out on the table together with this oddly named dish, which is of course anything but beggarly as its name might imply, is an assortment of delectable colours, a culinary magnum opus, the work of a single pair of hands, my father’s hands.

In another room in another house hangs a framed portrait of an old man; it is taken in black and white, slowly becoming more discoloured with age, the spotty mildew hiding snugly behind the frame’s glass. It is a medium close-up, his body tightly captured within the dimensions of the photograph; he is in suit and tie, and on his nose rests a pair of thin, metal round-rimmed glasses. His head is shorn of hair, his lips are fleshy, though not pouty, sealed tight, unsmiling, like he has already said all he had to say in life. The eyes behind those glasses are slightly bulging, penetrating, though the pupils betray a sliver of tenderness. Yet, when his features come together, they form an austere, unmovable face, a face with a sonorous presence, with the inexorability and dignity of an emperor. As a little girl, I used to stare at him, his image; his eyes would then follow my gaze, whichever direction I walked, almost as though he knew my movements, my thoughts. I never met him, this old man. When I was old enough to speak, I asked everyone in the family who this man was; they told me he was my grandfather, my father’s father, my grandmother’s husband. When I got a little older to understand stories, they told me that my grandmother was his second wife and that he had another family somewhere, though it didn’t quite matter who they were, where they lived. All that mattered was that this side of the family, the five children my grandmother had with this man who was almost 40 years older, and the six grandchildren that came after, stayed together, unscattered. The photograph does not reveal his hands. His arms are lined neatly at his sides, his body cut off at chest level. There is, strangely, despite the sheer number of albums that are stored in my grandmother’s house, no other photograph of my grandfather. I have, as a result, not seen him standing, full-bodied, or in any other position save the portrait that hangs so enduringly on the wall. What my grandfather did in his life, what he said, how he used his hands, are therefore told to me by my father, his siblings and my grandmother. He lives on, unobtrusively and affectionately in their memories, in their stories of him. They are the only conduits, my only access to a man long dead, a man I never once saw, save in a picture. There is an empty tin that lies hidden in the storeroom of my grandmother’s house to prove his enterprise. Gracing the tin is a logo, once iconic in the biscuit industry; it is a head of a British palace guard donning a tall bearskin hat. Near the bottom of the tin is an illustration of various biscuits, an assortment of shapes, sizes, patterns and flavours. Chocolate cream, lemon cream, vanilla cream, sweet butter, sugar-coated; round, square, rectangular, serrated or straight at the edges. These biscuits, as far as my own memory serves me, were once upon a time daily staples for my mid-morning snack or tea break until I turned seven. I used to dip them in Milo, my favourite flavour being lemon cream. From their stories, I picture my grandfather’s hands, how they followed him from Fujian down south to Nanyang, to Singapore. The winds and tides transporting a young man from his home up in Southern China, bringing along unleashed hopes, bubbling aspirations, embodied in that one and only pair of hands he owned. What was he clutching other than his suitcase and the clothes on his back as he crossed the seas in the halcyon air of the early twentieth century together with hordes of his contemporaries, who sought dreams waiting to kindle? Did he look at his hands and wonder what he could productively build with them, what he could industriously mould with them, what he could powerfully own with them? How would the lines of destiny change as the inconstant sea winds blew against his palms? What future did those palm lines promise? Surely he must have convulsed some nights while he faced the darkness on board, with currents of excitement, and fear – a whole new life and lineage awaiting on that tiny island he was

to dock at, his head and hands pointing towards the future; his home, his past in Fujian at once separated by a mere breath and a million sea sprays.

He starts humble. There are coffeeshops, small establishments which serve snacks and drinks; they could be part of old shophouses or wooden shacks set up on the side of the street. To make a living out of what little he has when he first steps onto the island’s shores, he helps out in one of these ubiquitous stalls, delivering drinks to homes when asked. For many years, he uses his hands for serving and saving; he bides his time and like many of his contemporaries, he harbours the single-minded ambition to become a towkay, giving orders to others instead of taking orders from them. As the years pass, his coffers fill up, his hands hewn rougher from the hard work. My grandfather decides to build his business on food; Siong Hoe Biscuit Factory Private Limited is what he names his empire. The newly minted towkay finally anchors his feet and fate on the soil down south, his hands now at his side, no longer serving but served, no longer only saving but investing. He is married now to his first wife and has begotten five children. Wealth and family, however, are not enough for him, so the story goes. He wants something more intangible, what his hands cannot materially provide his heart. His first family does not give him the warmth he craves; the biscuits are only his business, not his soul’s appetite. So, as towkays of his time are apt to do, he seeks a new wife. My grandmother is only seventeen when she meets him; he cups her young hands in his older, weathered ones. They get married and proceed to have five children, commencing yet another line, another series of lives, another collection of stories. His seed is further dispersed in his new home, a place he set foot on many years ago, a land where he constructs an empire, an island in the equatorial sun he never leaves. While his hands are used for big things like trade and commerce, the new warmth he finds in his second family makes his hands a willing captive to smaller things. My grandmother recounts how he used to cook kiam muay, or salted porridge, for her and the children in the middle of the night. Hands grasping a corpulent slab of pork, he deftly proceeds to chop it up. Later, he takes the bones and simmers them in water, conjuring a thick, fragrant stock. After this is done, he gathers cups of rice grains and throws them into the now well-seasoned and savoury stock. The rice cooks; he adds salted peanuts, pork balls and a dash of finely chopped spring onions. The children are sleeping; it is past midnight. In his booming, commanding voice, he wakes them up, not only with steaming hot bowls of porridge laid out on the table but an enticing two-dollar reward for everyone who finishes their supper. The children, motivated more by the monetary carrot than freshly cooked porridge, rise from their beds and sip their supper with eyes half closed. After all is finished and the house returns to its nighttime quiet, he slips out of the door of this little walk-up apartment along Outram Road, and his chauffeur drives him back to his first family, in a huge house nestled on Cairnhill Road. The years go by and this nightly ritual continues. The children grow up quickly, steadily. But my grandfather’s hands never tire. He rises early every weekend, leaves the house at Cairnhill and makes a beeline for the wet market in Chinatown. The market is abuzz with the crude smell of fresh fish, prawns, pork, beef and chickens, the last of which are kept in cages awaiting slaughter. Sounds of chopping knives against wooden boards are heard. A fishmonger bashes a giant garoupa on its head as it flips and flops on the floor, its blood splattering the roadside. Fruits, in all their assortment of colours, give the morning marketplace an extra burst of life. Some coolies are sitting on wooden benches voraciously gobbling down a bowl of rice to start another laborious day, their rundown coolie quarters just a stone’s throw away from the ubiquitous dirt-covered go-downs that line the Singapore River. A short distance away, the river’s signature stench continues to pervade the Chinatown air. Tongkangs bob up and down on its dark, murky surface, the river’s slight currents slapping their hulls gently. Children run helter skelter and scream, their shirts off as they play by the riverbank. Dogs skirt around, some wondering if they will chance upon a fellow canine’s carcass floating forlornly on the river’s surface. Sometimes, my grandfather stumbles upon a familiar face from his old home, latitudes away in Fujian. They fall into congenial chatter in a language that sutures their transplanted bodies with the Mainland, a moment of kinship rekindled on a different earth, occasionally recalling the market there, how it is so unlike this little messy market here in a town called China, under a tropical equatorial sun. But this is the only enclave where old friends from an old home can meet, a distant ripple of China, an encapsulating space of personal histories, scattered memories captured and archived in a slushy, cluttered river. Boey Kim Cheng articulates it most succinctly in his poem Chinatown, about the dilemma-strewn path of migrancy, about how home is lost, and found, gradually, unconsciously, naturally: “these Chinatowns / grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home”. Here, in the market in Chinatown, the only hub of organic connections where past hands scramble towards the present, where present feeds the hungry mouths of the future; where an old home finds itself new skin, in a new place. Such is the morning crowd he ambles through, a portly man with a rattan basket in his hands among a sea of housewives, ah mah jies and samsui women, in search of the best produce. He buys the biggest prawns and the meatiest fish by the catty. He haggles with the sellers in a sing-song mix of his native Hokkien and the neighbouring Southern Chinese dialects that have, together with him, travelled their way down south into this humid morning market in Singapore. These tongues are so familiar to him; he speaks them with finality and authority, making sure he never gets a raw deal. This market is his playground, his bazaar of alimentary emblems. His fingers poke the turgid flesh of dead, fresh fish; his hands swiftly sift through a stack of pigs’ trotters. He encircles the market for an hour or two and by the time he is done, his gait becomes a little more measured, a little less striding because he has his hands full now with food for his family. The basket is heavy with love, his hands gaining a deeper strength as he walks home to Outram Road, a heart anticipating the eager faces of his children as they sit in the kitchen wondering what their father will cook for them. He is their only sturdy pair of hands, their disciplining hands, their labouring hands, their loving hands. China is somewhere in my grandfather’s mind, but Singapore is now, rooted in his heart. I am told that he often reminisces about Fujian, as though it were a distant but vivid and intimate dream, or a story one makes up. Nevertheless, he never looks back. Fujian is now only a memory, a place he remembers. It is another market, another home. One day in 1968, my grandfather dies of a brain haemorrhage. He dies suddenly, intestate. His biscuit empire built on the shores of this new island slowly crumbles away. Because he leaves without a will, my family receives none of its shares, and there is squabbling among the siblings of his first family as to whose hands his assets should fall into. The years pass and the factory my grandfather built in Toa Payoh is flattened, mowed over. A high-rise condominium now stands over it and when I pass by this very

site, I sometimes forget that my grandfather’s handprints are still there, indelibly, silently.

My father sees me keeping the photo album. He asks me what I am looking at and I remind him of his signature Beggar’s Chicken. In his usual taciturn way, he tells me that he remembers still the day he made it, how despite it being his virgin attempt, he was able to knead the dough and wrap it around the herb-drenched chicken. I ask him who he inherited his love for cooking from, and he says, without a moment’s hesitation, that it is from his father. “Ah gong. Who else?” Perhaps my grandfather’s spirit is now residing in my father’s hands. I see it in my father’s deftness when he scrubs the carapace of a struggling crab, when he adeptly plunges a chopstick into its mouth. I see it when he rolls a wicked mixture of minced chicken, ground chestnuts and tofu into little balls for deep-frying. I see it when he slices a snapper thinly, neatly, as though it were as delicate as paper. I see it when he sprinkles chopped parsley on top of a few skewers of oven-roasted king prawns, a swashbuckling finishing gesture, giving the dish, as it were, a full stop to an alimentary sentence. I tell him that I feel like cooking today, and that I have just watched Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman to gain some sort of inspiration. Then my father surprises me and tells me that it is one of his favourite films. “The father in the film is just like you,” I quip. My father doesn’t reply to that; instead he turns to me and asks what I feel like cooking. But a day will come when he will get old, when he will no longer see as well, when he can no longer work his magic in the kitchen like he used to, when the touch of tender, uncooked meats will speak to him more than the sight of them. He will prod the cold flesh of a fish, rub his fingers against its rough scales, its serrated fins. He will then estimate its length, feel the fullness of its weight as he lifts it gently, guess its name. And I will tell him, like the poet Li-Young Lee says in his poem Persimmons, that “Some things never leave a person” – like how the taste of his cooking, his very own gastronomic handiwork, will never leave my taste buds, how its olfactory signature will always remain on the planes of my mnemonic terrain. Like my grandfather, my father builds a home, here in this country. But unlike my grandfather, he does not possess an iota of business savviness, so he never becomes a towkay, or in contemporary parlance, a CEO of his own company. But his hands, together with many other hands of his generation, construct a city. My father spends most of his life working in the Housing and Development Board, overseeing the buying and selling of land fit for public housing. The kampong dirt he used to know soon becomes the dust from multitudes of construction sites that get erected on the soil of this city. Upwards, upwards come the flats on the flat land that was once ground to houses made of corrugated iron with zinc-plated roofs. In addition to building this city, my father, like his father, finds his hands put to better, more stimulating use in the kitchen. It is a place where he remembers his father, his father’s hands, a place where he carries on his father’s culinary legacy; a place where palm lines meet, from generation to generation. “The Chinese say that our body is the memory of our ancestors,” notes the South African photographer Santu Mofokeng, and so it is that my father, his father and I are joined hand to mouth every time we cook. Because my memories of my father’s culinary delights are made here, I know no other place that will conjure up for me memories so vivid and present. There is nowhere else a bowl of steamed white rice can ever smell the same, taste the same, feel the same. There is nowhere else the skein of steam emanating from a bowl of kiam muay can entwine itself so perfectly around the memory of my grandfather.

My father’s hands, the lines on his palms, serve almost like a code for me, an access to my grandfather – the route he took from China, and the roots he chose to simmer, to sink, here in Singapore. Home for me is this city, where the hands I have known so well have dug, fed and grown the h/earth. The lines on my father’s hands are the map of my lineage, the cartographic link to my past, and the compass that directs me to the future. And it is here where I will stay, my hand lines – a connection with and a continuation of my father’s and my grandfather’s – ever showing me the roots/routes backwards, and forwards, into the mouth, through the stomach, towards the heart.

“There are many places within a place, many regions, each with their own identities, dialects and dialectics.” — Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar, Place

M

y grandmother and my aunt are engaged in a conversation. I think my grandmother is telling my aunt that she wants to dye her hair. To my unaccustomed ears, it sounds like this: “Wa ma jik ai kee ni tau moh.” I check with my aunt to see if I am right, for once. And yes, I am. My grandmother wants to dye her hair, tomorrow. She is eighty-nine years of age, and she wants to dip her hoary head in the colour of youth. Thirty-one years of youth and I am beginning to fall in love with an old language, a language that has only been listened to and spoken in fragments; a language that I have known for so long, but which I am still so unfamiliar with. They then lapse into other tongues, which I try to decipher – a bit of Cantonese, Hakka and Teochew in the space of a few sentences, strung mellifluously, seamlessly together, like a song. I first encountered the Chinese language when I was a toddler. Both my paternal and maternal grandparents spoke to me in Hokkien despite themselves coming from vastly complicated linguistic genealogies. It is difficult to remember exactly how I learnt the language. One could say that it grew into me naturally, almost. There wasn’t any official class or textbook that set out to teach me just how to speak Hokkien. Rather, it was the mundane gossip between my grandmother and her neighbour, the conversations that took place between my grandmothers and their children, the ordering of food at the market and the hawker centre that made up my lessons. How I got to speak and understand this lively dialect was nothing short of organic, a linguistic acquisition that came with hearing, association and mimicry. I must confess that I am still not too proficient in the language, because soon after these very impressionable years, I was immersed in a whole new learning environment, a structured, planned and institutionalised one, a far cry from that visceral, loud soundscape that encompassed my grandmothers’ households. After I moved out of my grandmother’s house, Hokkien slowly and gradually became a weekend language, one spoken only to my grandmothers and their contemporaries. It was no longer a sound I would hear every day, no longer a language I would speak with any comfort. They were uneducated, I was told. Thus English was nowhere in their vocabulary. They could only speak multiple Chinese dialects, not English like I can, I thought. To my very young and immature mind, Hokkien became a pejorative – a sort of ghetto – second-class language spoken only by those who never went to school. The English I spoke in school and with my parents became my primary language, fuelled by my diet of American cartoons and Sesame Street; it was the language that colonised my dreams, and the only language I wanted to understand. If English was not enough to emerge as the dialect-killer, then Mandarin came along to exacerbate the already lamentable state of dialect use in Singapore. Apart from English, we were taught a different Chinese in school. Mandarin, or Huayu/Putonghua, became the designated second language for students who were racially Chinese. For some strange reason, Mandarin became a byword for Chinese, too. If one were Chinese in Singapore, one ought to learn to speak Mandarin, not the other Chinese dialects. The dialects that I used to hear at my grandmothers’ homes were never heard in school. Our Chinese teachers spoke to us only in Mandarin, and we were told that as Chinese people, we ought to know how to speak the language of our forefathers – that being Mandarin. Back then, it didn’t quite occur to me to question such an assertion, an assault almost to the immense diversity of Chinese languages. In China alone, there exist about 1,500 dialects, Mandarin being just one of the many. In fact, only 53 percent of Chinese people are able to speak Mandarin. Though Mandarin is by and large considered the official language of China, a common language as it were to unify – in governmental parlance – the divisiveness of its linguistic terrain, and though it is used as China’s language of capitalism and the language that most non-Chinese seem to associate with China, it cannot in any way lay claim to or homogenise the pervasive and persistent use of Chinese dialects in China itself, and elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora. Mandarin as such is the language, or more precisely a dialect, of an imagined China, a dialect used by international politics as well as transnational Chinese media to represent China. It is a product of managed cultural perception, a product of historical and political manoeuvring. Nevertheless, despite its growing global presence and its representative significance, it is not the language of my forefathers. I come from a colourful linguistic lineage. My paternal grandfather came from Fujian Province. He spoke mainly Hokkien and, I am sure, a host of other dialects spoken in his province alone. His wife, my grandmother, born in Singapore, is a mixture of Teochew and Hakka. My maternal grandfather came from Wuxi; from his tongue rolled Shanghainese and the Wu dialect. My maternal grandmother, born in Malacca, was Peranakan, but she spoke mainly Hokkien with an admixture of Teochew and Malay. If anything at all, I am in no remote way a native speaker of Mandarin.

Singapore was never, racially speaking, a Chinese nation. Even after the Chinese immigrants came and settled, Singapore was stubbornly still not a Chinese nation, much less a Mandarin-speaking one. Our linguistic landscape was a panoply of Chinese dialects, mainly Southern ones – Cantonese, Hainanese, Hakka, Hokkien, Hock Chew, Teochew – with the less frequently heard Shanghainese. At home, one could very well hear a flawless mix of dialects being spoken. Rarely could one hear Mandarin dominating any household, or English for that matter. Unfortunately, this voluble eclecticism of Chinese tongues would by order of policy be silenced, allowed to die a natural quiet death. When Singapore achieved Independence in 1965, Lee Kuan Yew decided that English had to be the working language of the newly born nation state. After World War Two, English had begun to spread rapidly as the language of international diplomacy, commerce, economics, equal opportunity, science and technology, what with the legacy of the British Empire and a rising American one. Under such auspices, the move to bilingualise Singapore began, most evidently through educational and media policy, and indirectly through racial policy. If one was Chinese by race, then one had to know Mandarin as a language. Students were made to study all

their subjects in English save their mother tongue, and gradually television and radio programmes moved away from dialect to English and Chinese channels and stations respectively. (I should add, too, that this shift applied to all other racial groups. Dialects, be they Chinese, Malay or Indian, were swiftly and institutionally ignored.) Slowly but surely, Singapore witnessed a growing number of households speaking either English or Mandarin. The Chinese language was reduced to Mandarin, in a bid to even out Singapore’s remarkably heterogeneous linguistic geography. Politics and policy are close cousins of history; they map out and pave history’s trajectory, and inevitably shape the destinies and identities of people. Lee Kuan Yew’s language policies, though implemented years before I was born, did not fail to fall squarely on my shoulders, shaping me somewhat through my most formative years. Twelve years of compulsory pre-university education saw me struggling with Mandarin. Because I wanted to pass my exams, I forcibly tried to remember the characters, words and phrases, the way they looked, they way they sounded. I treated Chinese as a second language, after English, my chosen language of comfort. And as for my father’s tongue, Hokkien, it continued to be spoken in fragments, unthinkingly. I became simply one of those in my generation who could not attune myself to either my dialect or my prescribed second language. Lost in education, my generation and I were gradually incapacitated with an appalling inability to communicate in the local and native tongues of our forefathers. Despite being Chinese, I could speak neither Mandarin nor Hokkien fluently. And this shameful ineptness came to define me as a Singaporean and as a Chinese person – my tongue a windblown appendage, disembodied from my mouth, silencing me; my heart, irreversibly transplanted from the deepest regions of my forefathers’ China. I am linguistically neither here nor there, uprooted, dislocated, post-colonised.

Living in Singapore, a city arguably in a perpetual state of post-coloniality, a city still trying to figure out its cultural, national and linguistic identities, a city striving to reconcile the neatness of policy with the messiness of society – I have, in more recent times, wondered what it means to be Chinese, here. Much as I have grown to love Mandarin as a language, its subtlety, its pithiness, its precision, its descriptiveness, its four-toned tunefulness, I cannot affirm that I am Chinese because of Mandarin. Mandarin does not in any ostensible way embody the great civilisation that is China. It could possibly semaphore the contemporary international presence of China, but it certainly does not make me Chinese. Mandarin is not a signifier of Chinese authenticity, too. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what makes a Chinese person Chinese – what with globalisation, migration, naturalisation and nation-building contributing to changing identity formations in any given society – but if we could mark out a spot in our linguistic histories and geographies, the language of our forefathers, their homes back in China, then we could well be at the start of a long journey back to our linguistic homes. Then perhaps we can begin to talk about what makes us Chinese. We come from a kind of Babel, our Chineseness a scattering and amalgamation of different dialects. In Singapore, where Chinese identity is defined as being synonymous with Confucianism and Mandarin, it is easy to bury the malleable and multiple tongues of our forefathers, forget about them and start our Chinese identity formation from a historical ground zero. But to do that would be to create a kind of frottage between the audible presence of our forefathers, their histories and their connections with their homes, back in China. Singapore is not, in any remote way, China; but we are inescapably “an outpost / a piece of China,” says Boey Kim Cheng. Blood links and dialects form the connections between then and now, here and there, us and them. Our genealogical geographies, a sprawl of regional Chinese tongues; our linguistic destinies, our Chinese identities shaped by regional Chinese heterogeneity. In the midst of the complexities and instabilities of Chinese identity, we can perhaps find some sort of ballast in the languages of our forefathers, not to cast in stone our Chinese identity, but to start a search backwards, and forwards, to what we, through our forefathers, sounded like, to where we used to be, to what we used to speak.

As I watch the black dye smooth over my grandmother’s white hair, the reality of her age and the inevitability of her imminent passing hit me harder than ever before. There will come a day when her generation will be no more, when the many tongues they possess will, too, cease to permeate the soundscape of this city. Her hair is now dyed completely black, concealing what truly lies beneath, the whiteness of her hair’s roots. But the true colour of hair never fails to return. In a matter of a few weeks, she will request to have her hair coloured black, again. And at this point, I wonder to myself if our Chinese dialects will have the same tenacity to (re)emerge, to return – in spite of English and Mandarin – as Singapore’s immensely successful bilingualism threatens to cover over, and phase out completely, our multi-linguistic roots, our forefathers’ tongues. Then I turn to her and say in a smattering of English, Mandarin and Hokkien: “Ah ma, you no need to ni tau moh ma si hao kan” – that she looks good, even without dyeing her hair.

I

t is spring in Hong Kong. The weather is mercurial. On this mid-March day, the evening is windy, chilly. Yet the harbour at Tsim Sha Tsui is peopled with tourists, mostly from the Mainland, armed with their digital SLRs, sharing the promenade with celebrities who have been monumentalised, immortalised in bronze. Bruce Lee, the most recent addition to the Avenue of Stars, stands in all his sculptured iconicity, beckoning one for a fight, his unmistakable, vociferous kungfu holler echoing, resounding around the harbour and the Kowloon Peninsula. Other stars like Sammo Hung and Jet Li, in their burnished metallic stillness, are a persistent reminder of Hong Kong’s long-standing and remarkable film industry, its transnational celebrities, the “Hollywood of the Orient”. A director sits regally on his chair, unmoved, as his cameraman operates the device that will send reels of Hong Kong film around the world. Almost strategically, the director sits by the sea, beside a harbour – a convenient and decisive position of access, a place where his art is bound for travel. I am here this evening to catch a film at the Hong Kong Space Museum, located on Tsim Sha Tsui’s waterfront. Just as Hong Kong films have come and gone in times past and present, the sea propelling them forward into other continents, other worlds, the wind has escorted me here today for the Hong Kong Film Festival, where an assortment of films from around the world land at the harbour’s adjacent buildings to be screened. I decide to arrive a little earlier just to wander, to walk around a waterfront in a city to which I do not belong but feel so at home in. Today, in fact, is my second day here. There is something about this place, this harbour that keeps me captivated. Perhaps it is the sea, the boats that bob up and down the little currents, the sound of the cruisers, the smell of salt, the spray, the foam and the wind, the stunning cityscape lining Hong Kong Island, opposite. I came last night, too, and was quietly awed by the iridescent candelabra of lights illuminating the nightscape, extroverted, flamboyant. Truly, Central by night, seen from Tsim Sha Tsui, is visually spectacular, boisterous, bright. The water between Tsim Sha Tsui and Central serves only to buttress and extol the city’s vitality, connecting each peninsula, each isle. Bright, dappled lights emanating from the buildings ricochet off the water, embellishing the night sky, escorting one into a reverie. Yes, I am, without any doubt, a tourist, a recalcitrant urbanite soaking in the classic postcard view of this vivacious, fiercely competitive Asian city. Accompanying my infatuation with this harbour and this city, however, is something a little more intimate, a little less superficial. There is another city with a harbour not too far away that is so uncannily similar to this one. These two cities are inextricably tied to each other by the winds of trade, the exchange of currencies, the entrances and exits of ships, the commingling of tongues. Due to its spiky façade and its waterfront orientation, The Esplanade – Theatres by the Bay is a building that has become something of an architectural icon in Singapore. Surrounding it are svelte buildings with shiny surfaces, a confident reminder of the brimming success Singapore has worked herself up to. The reflection of the bay and the river are imprinted daily on the impeccably polished glass windows of the office buildings and hotels that stand amidst the Central Business District, architectural mirrors reflecting the porosity of the city, its contact with the world. I often walk along the promenade after a performance or after a meal. Many others like me – tourist or local – are consistently drawn back just to sit by the stone benches or to watch the daily laser display shooting forth from the newest architectural icon rooted in Singapore’s urban landscape – Marina Bay Sands, or MBS for short. Stationing itself firmly on the roof of the skyscraper triplets is a ship-like structure, waiting as if to sail off onto a highway in the sky, an aerial ornament brazenly bearing its imprint atop the three towers and the city-state. Housed in the interior of MBS’s shopping complex is a newly built theatre mainly staging performances with high production values. The Lion King, Wicked, Annie and Avenue Q are but a few of the musicals that have been staged there so far since its opening in 2011. As if to hide its penchant for order and paternalistic statehood, Singapore constructs on its urban surface architecture that is daringly sensational. The Esplanade Theatre, nestled for a good ten years now by Marina Bay, is a building one can either find admirably audacious or haplessly hideous. Slicing the air with its shark-fin-like metallic shade awnings projecting from every window, the rounded roof of the Esplanade comes across more inimical than inviting. Even its curvatures fail to soften the chiselled, pointed look of the building. Yet, in the past ten years, the Theatre has managed to secure itself as the chosen performance venue for a multitude of acts both local and international. The tripartite confluence of harbour, business district and art seems almost inevitable when I think about both cities, Hong Kong and Singapore. As I walk down the promenade at the Avenue of Stars, not only does the wind carry my thoughts back to my home city a little down south, but the words of Edwin Thumboo drift resonantly, swiftly into my mind as well. Through a peripatetic weaving of words along this promenade, across the seas, Thumboo makes a transnational connection between the two harbours. In his poem aptly titled Two Harbours, Thumboo articulates with much perspicuity the fates and comparability of the two harbours. He says, For us, tides are destinies. They brought hopeful Eyes that built and bred a Tao whose unfolding still Proclaims, still travelling with cool audacity; flows in Cutting edge stuff; dare caress global twist and spin. We too house the world’s stage, ever shifting rock And hum, spliced mass media, traditions redesigned. The unremitting pulsations of trade, the aggressiveness of economic activity are shaped by the movements of tides, the direction of the wind. What blows into our tiny shores makes or breaks our futures. We are two harbours interconnected by the whims of the wind and the turn of the tides. Aspiring eyes of migrants, the diligent trudge of the fisherman and coolies who form the perambulatory

course of our history have transformed our rivers, harbours and cities into the ceaseless hubs that they are today. Embodied in the organic word “eyes”, these seeing glasses, these lenses that project themselves into our present and future, still persist in creating a vision, a transnational Tao that unifies the unfolding and enfolding of harbours, of cities. That Thumboo chooses “Tao” reveals a universalising principle behind his words, an intimacy and likeness of relation between the histories, presents, and futures of the two harbours – a trajectory “spliced”, aquatically connected. Almost like a dance – a “global twist and spin” – both harbours’ dalliances with imports and exports render a daring environment of industry and enterprise. With iconic performance venues located there, the two harbours and their cities become a “world’s stage” where the arts and their global audiences gaze and strut. Most starkly then, what characterises the similarity of the two harbours is their sense of invitation for the arts. Indeed, the harbours of Singapore and Hong Kong are More alike than we care to know, we compete, Yet share creative get-up-and-go, vie to be tops, How tickets sold, count good reviews. In the poem, the tension between the triptych of relations – harbour, business district and art – is evident. While the harbour ushers in the arts, profit must be a firm consideration, too. Which harbour makes an arts hub? Can the economy, patently emblematised by the central business districts of Hong Kong and Singapore, afford a greater stake in the arts? Maybe that which keeps the city economically vibrant is not so much art existing for its own sake, but art that receives rave reviews, art that makes itself for an adoring audience. How can these two harbours afford it otherwise? Just like the ships at the harbour, the arts only “arrive to depart”; they are made of tos-and-fros, of impermanence, of movement, of mobility. Thumboo, being one of Singapore’s pioneer poets, has seen the nation develop from a backwater to the affluent city it is today. However, being a poet, and as such, one who stands in the interstices of society and art, he does not seek to moralise, but questions the tensions inherent in this triangular relationship. He hopes, but does not insist on any high “truth”. He celebrates the energy and hive of economic activity of the two harbours, but concomitantly wonders about their compatibility with the arts. Indeed, the sculptures at Tsim Sha Tsui tell a greater story; a story about the Hong Kong film industry, about how far the cinematic creativity of Hong Kong has travelled, its transnational currency. Having them positioned by the sea, at the harbour, is revelatory of the “creative get-up-and-go”, the dynamism of the artistic process. However, all is not so simple and romantic; cast in bronze, these sculptures are also a staid reminder that artistic success and profit are inexorable bedfellows, be their relationship tense or comfortable. I pause to take a picture of Bruce Lee’s statue. There is still a little time left to walk around before the film starts at the nearby Hong Kong Space Museum. As I circle the waterfront, the salt-tinged breeze ruffling my hair, I remember the harbour back home. I remember ambling along the half-completed Esplanade in 2001; back then, its spikes had yet to jab the sky, the river and its promenade a construction site cluttered with cranes, sticking their necks of steel into some distance above, beyond. I wondered then how the finished product would turn out, how it would change the way Singapore is perceived, how it would mar or enhance the city’s skyline, whether or not it would pave the way for any sort of renaissance the city-state was aspiring to. A year later, in November 2002, I went for my first performance, the very first performance at the Esplanade – the musical Singing in the Rain. By that time, the thorns were fully constructed, indignantly and determinedly proclaiming to the world the theatre’s entry and its presence. The performance was full of spectacle but mediocre: to my mind, it was more a show of the technical capability of the theatre, more braggadocio than art. I wasn’t provoked, as it were, by the performance’s content, but then again, I could not expect a popular musical to ask any sort of probing question that addressed the nuances of human nature. I was proud of the new theatre, but I wondered why the inaugural performance had to be a popular musical, performed by an international cast. Need this maiden performance go down in the annals of Singapore’s history as the one that opened the new theatre? But then, I came to a realisation when I saw water being poured down from the stage ceiling drenching the performer below. He continued to sing, to sing in the “rain” no matter how stylised, how artificial this “rain” was. His insouciance articulated a certain, perhaps sobering, truth. In order for a city to gain global recognition, it needs to have its arts scene injected with international currency. That’s how hubs function; that’s our destiny, brought about by the ebb and flow of confident tides. And that’s one of the reasons I am here at Tsim Sha Tsui this evening: the Hong Kong Film Festival is not a free event, but a ticketed, sponsored international one, and I am, indubitably, a part of this massive transnational exchange of cultural products. Fortunately, against the reality that art need not merely be made for its own sake but for profit as well, can be set another more optimistic truth. Thumboo concludes with a very powerful “But” – a conjunction on which hope is predicated: “But the Arts / Conclude to start again, to shut doors so open others.” I am certain that the film I am about to watch will tell me another truth, a truth that will be less pragmatic, a truth which exists on the other side of art, a truth that emerges from another door, another harbour, somewhere. I do not want to be naïve, nor do I want to be cynical; it is indisputable that art is, in large part, a mobile product in today’s transnational ambit; but it can, despite its economic obligations, be a beacon in the dark, no matter where it is viewed. The drizzle is setting in and I run into the museum, just in time for the film.

P

oring over a tourist map of Singapore, I see a landmass, elongated at the sides, like a disfigured diamond floating somewhere south of the Malay Peninsula. On the landmass are significant landmarks like the Esplanade, Marina Bay Sands, the Marina Bay Financial Centre, the Parliament House, The Fullerton, the National Gallery, the Padang, Sentosa. Then, shifting my gaze from the centre and the south, I see the Bird Park in the west, East Coast Park and Changi International Airport in the east, and towards the north, a nicely sealed tip that juts out into the Malay Peninsula, the inked blue of the sea ending neatly at the border of the page. Landmarks, symbolised by elementarily drawn cartoons, at once identifiable by anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Singapore’s attractions, at once seductively charming, accessible. An island with its borders stretched out as though in constant welcome to travellers. A little city somewhere in Southeast Asia. A little city that has made a place in the daydreaming minds of so many sojourners. A little city that has become the reality of so many imaginations. The visible marks of this city’s success, its glamour, its urban impeccability. The material marks of what this city is known and remembered for, in the memory of the tourist, encapsulated in a few miniature animated sketches. Here, at these discernible points on the map, is the surface beauty of the city.

There is, however, a city submerged under the clarity and unequivocality of the tourist map and its lines. This is a city of memory, the urban memoir of the insider, individual walker and dweller. This is the city that gives itself up to the map, the map that gives itself up to memory and fantasy. We all have within us the map of this city. This indelible city. In the disturbing and captivating video of Radiohead’s haunting and penetrating electronic track Daydreaming, a man walks into a tunnel and to a door, which opens to empty corridors, into rooms with people he stares at with familiarity and blankness, out into snow-capped mountains which greet him gloriously and coldly. He seems to know them, these places, these landscapes, interiors, exteriors. They seem to know him, too. Or perhaps they don’t. Perhaps he doesn’t. Yet, these places stick. They occupy a quiet chamber somewhere deep within him. Their ghostliness, strangeness and familiarity do not leave him, even as he leaves them. Like the man, I begin by walking through my own tunnel. A pulsating light pervades. The tunnel becomes a catacomb that connects different time zones and places into a chronotopic wonderland that is compelling, comforting, complicated. I enter a door, then into a lone passageway, then into another door which brings me to a room, into a house, onto a rooftop, a road lined with some trees, a balding field, a basketball court, a frosted window that frames an old science lab, a door frame that stands in the centre of a hill, then another, and another, and another place. I see the faces of the people I know and love, knew and loved. I feel the balminess of the December morning, and I am sitting on a hard wooden chair holding a bowl of mee pok, I am standing in front of a faceless man making popiah. There are sounds of thumping against wooden floorboards, the warble of birds on an April morning, the scattered squeals of girls as they play in the mid-afternoon sun, the drone of traffic on a busy street as the day begins. I am back in some marketplace imagining my grandfather lug a catty of prawns back to his house on Outram Road. There are the flight paths of birds, ghosts in a lamppost, a scent trail, a recipe handed down, a lost dialect, harbours embracing the phantasmagoric world of sweet commerce. This is the map in my head. A map whose lines are constantly moving when a memory is triggered involuntarily, like the way Proust can’t help but experience a gush of memories when he dips his famous madeleine into a teacup and puts it into his mouth. An innocuous, unexpected gesture that ushers in a deluge of the past in a single, profound and powerful moment when place, sensory perception and memory enter into an irresistible ménage à trois. Here I am, walking into this map. And the map becomes the city, my city. A city whose terrain and topos are multidimensional, a heady mixture of the here and now, the there and then. Here, I am a native who redraws the lines that map my city. With each new interaction of old and new memories, the map lines shift, the places change again as they stay the same again. Lines fade, get bolder simultaneously. In this city, I am split into multiple histories and geographies, my body blends into time and space. In this city, the past layers over and under the present, and I am transported back into a patina of other places, still existing, always fading, but never disappearing.

T

he folks at Marshall Cavendish have been integral in the materialising of this book project. Without the good faith they had in my manuscript, this book would not have been possible. I would like to thank, first of all, my editor Sophia Susanto for her fair and thoughtful feedback, openness of mind and professionalism in the editing of my work. I would also like to thank Lee Mei Lin for driving the publication process from the very start. A first book would not be complete without the early reviews from more established writers. Many thanks to Yong Shu Hoong and Loh Guan Liang for reading through my manuscript and for writing the most encouraging reviews. I am truly humbled to have them as my first readers and as my literary predecessors. Many of the essays in this book have also been inspired by my friends – the stories they have told me and the experiences I have shared with them. I would like to express my sincerest thanks to Bernadette, Ern Chi, Greta, Kelvin, Min Min, Reina, Sabrina, Shireen and Uma. I am also fortunate to be surrounded by people who read and write, and who love reading and writing: my erstwhile colleagues, now friends, from the then-SOTA Literature Department (2014), as well as my ex-students from the aforementioned school. Their authenticity, kindness, sense of humour, creativity and fierce intellect have added to my love of literature. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my closest family members for unceasingly believing in me and loving me – through the good times and the bad. All that I am today, I owe it to them.

C book.

hew Yi Wei has been published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, POSKOD.SG, Transnational Literature and Eastlit. In 2009, she took part in the Mentor Access Project organised by the National Arts Council. She completed her PhD in Cinema Studies at the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. Indelible City is her first