Another look at the heart of Singapore
Efforts to extend what little history Singapore has, to merge seamlessly what is old and new for the younger ones, are found all over the city. Shophouses in Ann Siang Road are transformed into bed and breakfasts. The Old Hill Street Police Station is now a compound for art galleries. Singapore can merge tradition and innovation so effortlessly.
The ticket attendant shoves a pocket-sized map in my hand. “Anything else?” he asks, but the query comes out more an imperative than a question.
“Figure it out,” its undercurrent seemed to say. The queue forming behind me, comprised of two people, was getting too long for his comfort.
This is in Dhoby Ghaut Station, one of the busier intersections where the yellow, purple, and red lines of Singapore’s metro system meet.
There are many more just like it - generic, mildew-free, high-ceilinged behemoths of concrete and steel. Its efficient signages written in Chinese, Malay, Hindu, and English. A crisscross of multicolored vinyl stickers on its floors. And as if in afterthought, digital artworks, photographs, and murals on the walls.
On one of them, my favorite, is a typographical play of a poem entitled Couplets on Chinatown. “The buildings in harmony do away with the remnant shadows; The waste land of ruined gravels grow a million flowers.”
I doubt the average commuter has the time to read
it in between the space of his point A to B, his waking up and arriving late, every day. But such frivolity is allowed to a tourist who dawdles in a country that seems to find the very act of stopping, let alone stopping for a poem, indulgent.
I stare at an underground Singapore on paper. It fit conveniently between my thumb and forefinger. I have always been suspicious of maps. They plot a world made up of defined borders. In its one-dimensional world, landscape is neat and organized. Distance is distorted. In a map, places are always reachable. I have never learned to read one.
Almost immediately, I get lost in its symbols, in the concept of self-sufficiency. Harbourfront. Outram Park. Somerset. To not give away my ineptness, I study them religiously, trying to find where home is for the rest of the stay.
The impatient septuagenarian behind me suggests I download a mobile app instead.
9 stops of silence
I do not follow. Even with app in hand, I ask a seatmate on the train every night, at every opportunity, whether I was going in the right direction. That night, it was a middle-aged man in his 50s. It has been over nine stops of silence. Everyone is on their mobile phones.
“Where is Pasir Panjang?” I ask, although I already know the answer. It is still 11 stops away, an error in judgment made coming from Orchard Station. I forgot the line was actually circuitous. He points. I nod.
“You staying there? That place haunted. Go during the daytime,” he says. I almost laugh at this surprise show of superstition. Something found deep in the cracks of their skyscrapers and artificial trees.
The man was referring to Haw Par Villa, which greets commuters as soon as they alight from Pasir Panjang. It holds the attraction the Ten Courts of Hell. Every night, I take a quick glance at its oversized statues of severed heads and pulled-out tongues before I turn left. “Hell” was just beside where I was staying.
Two best friends now reside here, go-getters who both work for digital platforms at the Central Business District overlooking the Singapore River. Their condo looks barely used. When they take me to places with expat friends, everything, and everyone, looks so shiny.
A week after I arrive, the third-worlder in me becomes antsy for germs and conversation, something to break the Orwellian dream of a city that smells like it was just taken out of its box. It smells like a combination of flowers and manicured grass.
Singapore’s facade suggests something defined and finished, that it’s easy to forget of its adolescence as a nation, that it just celebrated, in 2015, its 50year independence.
Even the portrayal of its past seems unequivocally current. Scattered around the city are SG Hearts, “a crowdsourced map of the nation’s ‘heart’,” a shade thrown to outsiders who perceive that the place lacks of one.
The heart map, its website says, is one of the attempts to “weave memorable past places, meaningful present places, and aspiration of future places that define home for us.”
I spot one of these red commemorative marks at the newly-opened National Museum, so new that it is not even integrated into pop culture yet. Attendants working at a nearby Cold Storage store remarks, “We’re Singaporean, but we don’t know where that is.” The museum holds one of the 50 strewn heart maps all over Singapore. But when I look at it, I think not of antiquity, but of the Millennial admen who spearheaded the initiative, admen who understand shifting concepts like branding, digital presence, and innovation. These concepts can only reside in a new world.
Efforts to extend what little history they have, to merge seamlessly what is old and new for the younger ones, are found all over the city. Shophouses in Ann Siang Road are transformed into bed and breakfasts. The Old Hill Street Police Station is now a compound for art galleries. Residences in Joo Chiat Heritage have turned parts of their homes into souvenir shops. There are well-curated signages showing the significance of buildings - whether it’s a fire station, temple, or commercial house.
In Armenian street, the Peranakan Museum, a repository of Singapore’s culture, shares a side road with The Substation, an experimental hub for visual arts and theater. I walk in the middle of both structures, colonial windows on one side, and graffiti on the other, and grow jealous of how Singapore can merge tradition and innovation so effortlessly.