...in Sing-a-paw, of course! Where I ventured, for the first time in nearly thirty years, with my seven-year-old son (whose joke it is) for 6 nights, last week, after spotting bargain Tiger Airways fares from Perth, on the 'net..
I lived at number 10, Jalan Pergam, near the village of Somapah, near Changi Village, as a child, when my South African Dad was based their as a corporal in the British Airforce (I've since been told our street was in the area called 10 Mile- for more detailed information and an old map of the area, see Stanley Ng's comments below the blog post titled Nothing But the memories : Somapah, Changi & The Old Singapore). The people of Somapah were apparently rehoused in the area called Tampines.
Many of Singapore's flavours and smells are etched into my memory, so I was irresistably drawn back, if only to the ghost of the memory of that forgotten time. Go here for Jerome Lim's marvellous, award-winning photo blog, by a Singaporean about Somapah nostalgia that could nonetheless have been written by my brother or myself. Go here for an interview with Jerome about it.
I miss it I do, The Old Singapore, the Singapore of the 196Os. I remember the market at the end of the village, the food vendors selling bread and fruit and groceries door-to-door from bicycles and small trucks, the kampung over the road with pigs and chickens, playing in the monsoon drains with other RAF and local kids.
FLASHBACK: I had been back to Singapore only once, in 1984, a $30 stopover in The Grand Central Hotel, en route to Paris. I'd met an Englishman on the flight from Perth— Christopher Tapp, of Henley-on-Thames in Oxford—who had been studying in Australia for a year as an exchange student. There he was in the queue at Perth airport, wearing his souvenir cork-fringed, bushfly-defying swagman's hat. It turned out he was in the adjoining bank of seats on the half empty plane and was staying in a hotel near mine, so we arranged to meet the next morning to go sightseeing together. I recall him wanting to go to the Raffles Hotel, but it being closed for renovation or something along those lines. I also recall giving him a book of vouchers that I was unable to use, as I was due to catch my connecting flight to France after only a one night stopover.
Chris warmly invited me to visit his family home in England after Paris—a posh-sounding place called Shandi, Hop Gardens, Henley. Through shyness and reserve (I think, at the tender age of eighteen, I felt intimidated at the prospect of staying with a wealthy family) I never did, and regret it to this day. I just Googled him and discovered a newspaper article dated 2011, revealing that Christopher is now a successful architect, was about to become a first-time Dad at age 50, and specializes in sustainable housing design!
This time, I really wanted to take my son to see some of the places I knew as a kid. Such as it is. Even since 1984, Singapore has become a high rise, cosmopolitan metropolis. A comprehensive network of trains and buses that run to schedule across the island; cleanly-swept streets...and an underbelly of prostitution (in Geylang, the red light district where we have just stayed) that allegedly doesn't exist.
Good on 'em, those Singapore people who now have independence, universal housing and all the mod cons. Those well-behaved subjects of Lee Kuan Yu and now his son, who risk being flogged or, worse, imprisoned in Changi Gaol, for spitting, swearing, smoking or committing other earth-shattering acts of public disobedience in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Good on Singapore, for gaining independence from first the post-Raffles Brits and then Malaysia. But boo oh boo hoo I say, for rejecting their past and modernizing at the expense of much of its 'character'—a demolished heritage for which many now pine, scrambling to salvage what's left (e.g the Capitol Theatre renovation project) in a landscape of skyscrapers and regimented, contrived parks, entertainment and playzones. As a Wikedia article puts it:
"Singapore has a partly deserved reputation for sterile predictability that has earned it descriptions like William Gibson's "Disneyland with the death penalty" or the "world's only shopping mall with a seat in the United Nations." Nevertheless, the Switzerland of Asia is for many a welcome respite from the poverty, dirt, chaos, and crime of much of the Southeast Asian mainland, and if you scratch below the squeaky clean surface and get away from the tourist trail you'll soon find more than meets the eye."
Exactly! We visited the well-trodden tourist trail... and also made a point of going to the lesser know relics of the old Singapore: Pulau Ubin, the Botanic Gardens and Tiger Balm Gardens, with its Chinese statues; the hawkers huts and the satay stalls. The places of my childhood which— thankfully—struggle on among the skyscrapers and the cleanly efficient but characterless clockwork trains.
A view of the modern Singapore city from Gardens by the Bay, where we went on Tuesday, despite the rain.
No comments:
Post a Comment