Singapore adoration

My (sort of crappy) apartment building. It wasn’t very easy to find an apartment that I didn’t have to share with the landlord. The rooms I initially looked at were extra rooms rented out by families and old men. Maybe if I would have looked harder and longer, I could have done better. But it’s difficult when you’re a foreigner, when you don’t know the city, you don’t know the public transportation routes, or even where your school is at, or even the terminology that’s used in apartment shopping. For instance, I live in a “private apartment;” which is different from government housing, called “HDB,” doled out by the Housing and Development Board; which is different from a “landed estate” and the elusive “condominium.”

I spent days in Ethiopia waiting for webpages to load in order to try to learn the ins and outs and meet roommates. My apartment is a little far from convenient transportation. The building is old. My room is small. My roommates are marginally friendly — they all stay in their rooms with their doors closed, but the ones who speak English say “hi” in passing. My rent could be a little less. But hey, if I wanted the perfect apartment, I’d probably still be looking, and I’m in my fourth week of school, and I have more important things to worry about than a life of comfort and convenience. The apartment is located fairly central, and I can walk to the Central Business District.

My street is very quiet (read: isolated from places I would want to go to quickly). Behind the photographer would be the street’s dead-end and past that, a freeway. I can hear the traffic now through my window as I type. My neighborhood is also lacking in the polish that Singapore is famous for. Evidence of this lack of polish would be my old building and also these slightly dilapidated buildings on the left.

My neighborhood — and really, the locality expanding greater than my immediate neighborhood — is full of such hardware and building-supply shops. There are also auto-mechanics and poorly translated business names. I should have taken a photo of the Earnest Car Stereo Shop. This isn’t earnest as in the first name, as in Earnest Goes to Camp, this is earnest as in these stereo installers really like their profession and sincerely want to install your stereo.

The MRT is the Mass Rapid Transit, or what I would call a subway or metro. I cannot take this to school because my school is even more isolated than my apartment. This Farrer Park station is my local station, but I have to walk past this (quite far past this, actually) to get to the bus that takes me to school. It takes one hour from my apartment door to the law library. Farrer Park is actually a park where thousands of Indian men - probably mostly here as foreign workers, or just Indians who haven’t forgotten their roots - gather to hold hands and talk on Sundays. My neighborhood is on the edge of Little India. In fact, the next MRT station after Farrer Park is Little India.

Being so near Little India, there are many, many Indian restaurants to choose from.

In the US we’re a little skeptical of spas as being fronts for prostitution. They are in Singapore too, where prostitution is not illegal, though street-walking is, if i understand the laws correctly. This being said, I think Asians like to get massages more than Americans, and that’s why the density of massage parlors – or spas — is so high in Singapore. I walk under this vestibule on my way to the bus, and there are more spas after this one under this same vestibule. Also, there are more light stores too.

These old colonial-looking buildings can still be spotted, scattered throughout Singapore. Imagine the whole city looking like this pre-WWII. So many are torn down now for high-rise HDBs and condominiums. But many, I’m sure, will not be torn down, a developer will fix them up, the bourgeoisie will come from far away to pay high rents for them, and the locals, like Sin Yew Huat Eating House, will go out of business, unable to afford the rents. These shops are somewhat dilapidated, as generally — keeping with a theme of this blog entry — is my neighborhood.
I’m not making a judgment call on the rightness or wrongness of gentrification. Shifting populations is just the natural life of cities, and I know that many bourgeoisie would love to live in such quant, old buildings if the buildings had modern amenities like rain showers, satellite television, air conditioning, and polished stone countertops. I mean, if I could afford it, I would too. I would especially love some more Starbucks-style coffeeshops where I could get free refills and study and read. There aren’t many of these in Singapore — but this is an American piece of culture, not Singaporean. The bourgeoisie, however, are already catching this fad here in Singapore. This is why I can’t get a seat at Starbucks, and a cup of black coffee costs US$2.50, and there are no free refills.

As you can see from the outside of the Sin Yew Huat Eating House, two photos up, they have some sort of sponsorship deal with Carlsberg. And this is a sign from the inside of the eating house. If Napolean Dynamite drank a certain beer, this is probably what he would say about it. (”It took me three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip. It’s probably the best drawing I’ve ever done.”) Carlsberg and Heineken are the two most popular beers in Singapore, except for the local brew, Tiger. Tiger is just as good as either of those Europeans. And while it’s the bourgeoisie in the US who drinks those European beers, it’s the average uncle and auntie drinking them here in Singapore. Makes a pretentious American beer drinker feel not as hip. The beers drank here are usually the tall, 633ml bottles (a bottle of wine is 750ml).


The Hawker Center

… is a wonderful Singaporean institution. A hawker center is like a food court at a mall, only you sit in the outdoors, covered by a roof, on plastic (usually red) chairs, and the food stalls don’t have name brands. They’re little local operations with names like Lam’s Large Prawn Noodle. There will be many of these stalls in one hawker center, and each stall will have different foods or variations on similar foods, and it would take a long time - and a bit of Mandarin would help - to learn what the dishes, ingredients, styles, names, differences, and variations are.

I love spicy food, and I met a significant challenge at Lam’s Large Prawn Noodle. I ordered the hot and spicy noodles, and not realizing how spicy food can actually be, I began eating fast and filling my mouth. Once my mouth was on fire, I continued doing this because more food in the mouth cools the mouth. I was washing down this fire with a tall bottle of Tiger, but it wasn’t helping. I almost threw up. Once some cold green tea put out the flames, I began eating slower, and I finished the whole bowl, though it took two Tigers. I ordered those noodles again the next weekend and ate them with no problem. I just took them slow and careful. My chopstick skills, by the way, are good, and chopsticks and a Chinese-style broad spoon are what the hawkers give you with the food.

Hawker center near my house.

The other hawker center near my house. The placement of hawker centers is dense in Singapore — even more dense than the spas. This is a very normal place for a Singaporean or a Singaporean family to get dinner or from where to get take-out. Middle age people — the uncles and the aunties, uncles mainly — also like to spend the evenings and weekends talking around the tables and watching the centers’ televisions, drinking bottles of beer and/or coffee.

The hawker stall above, Madan’s Authentic Chettinaad Restaurant, may have you saying, what the heck is Chettinaad? Well, my facts are bolstered by Wikipedia, but Chettinad is a region of Tamil Nadu in southern India from where many Indians in Malaysia and Singapore emigrated, being sometimes many, many generations removed from India proper today. Some of the dishes served at Madan’s - like mee goreng - aren’t really Indian, as such, but are dishes invented by emigrated Indians using local ingredients and influenced by local cuisines. Tamils are the third largest ethnic group in Singapore at 8.8% (the two largest being Chinese at 75.2% and Malays at 13.6%, all according to Wikipedia), and Tamil is an official language of Singapore, along with English, Mandarin, and Malay. You can see the loopy Tamil script in the MRT trains along with the Latin script and Chinese characters (Malay is written in Latin characters.), saying things like, “Mind the platform gap.”

Singapore is famous for its malls. There are a lot of them, all over. This one, being built in the photo above, I pass on my way to the bus to go to school. At first I thought, “Oh god, just what Singapore needs, another mall.” On second thought, the malls here are already crowded to the brim on the weekends. There are things I want to buy, but I don’t feel like braving the crowds in order to buy them. And with so many malls, Singaporean culture is written off as generic. The mall, after all, is an American invention. And it’s the same stores that any shopper could find in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, or Dubai, United Arab Emirates.  But Singapore does have its own culture. How unique and interesting is this about the hawker centers?

The Chettinaad food isn’t the only patois food of Singapore. Much of the “Chinese” food couldn’t be found in China (I’m told). Chinese immigrants have invented it here, using local ingredients and influenced by local cultures. And food that couldn’t be called Singaporean — like Hainanese chicken rice, which is from Hainan in China, brought by Hainanese immigrants — is present also. And to have the hundreds of unique, non-franchise outlets, under one roof, serving Singaporean and foreign food, as we have here in Singapore at the large hawker centers, is not something we have in the US or Europe. With their open seating they are like community centers where families and neighbors can meet over food and drinks (and you never have to worry about there not being enough choices for picky eaters). Singapore’s father, Lee Kwan Yew, is famous for saying he wouldn’t want Singapore’s society to look like the West’s, where the focus is on an individual’s liberty and not duty to his community and family. A hawker center on every block gives the community a place to commune. We barely have that in the West. To me, these hawker centers are so uniquely Singapore. They fit Singapore’s fabric and wouldn’t fit into the West’s. Every French textbook will lament the slow death of the Parisian cafe to you.

What Singapore has is a blend of cultures mixing into a unique patois that’s only similar to a few other outposts along these Straits of Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Indian Ocean meats the Pacific, and where Arab and Indian cultures et. al. met Chinese, Malay, and aboriginal et. al. What you get is a culture forming just like how any other culture in the world formed: movements of people and people adapting to their new locales. It’s how European and American cultures were created. The French people were not French since time immemorial. Singaporeans just feel self-conscious about their culture because their country is the economically richest in the region, and all eyes are on them.