Amanda Lee Koe

The youngest-ever recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize for Fiction ponders: In its journey from third to first world, what has Singapore lost along the way?

Marie Antoinette was but nine when philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in Les Confessions of a great princess who, upon hearing that the peasants had no bread, declared “Let them eat cake”, but the French must have had their reasons for pinning this pithy one-liner on her. Does it matter if she never said it in the courts of Versailles?

Here in Asian modernity, within the airconditioned comforts of a Japanese mall on Orchard Road, we perform post-colonial teatime, queue in snaking lines for hours for delicate pastries once native to Paris, as an old lady in Bukit Ho Swee pools together her coins from selling packets of tissue at the hawker centre, only to note stoically that she is $4 short of the price of a 20kg packet of rice.

A macaron costs $4, and there is, in fact, one named for that profligate Austrian queen of France, in lieu of the Sofia Coppola movie. Its top notes: rose and anise. The rice, when the old lady gets it, will last her two months. Meal pairings: soy sauce and eggs scrambled with preserved sweet radish bits. For now, her stoicism will feed her for five days, maybe a week. The macaron melts in your mouth. The world is a click away.

With the democratisation of the airline industry, everything is a plane ride away, and nowhere is nearly far enough. We can’t be sure about what American psychologist Abraham Maslow would say to American philosopher Judith Butler’s conjecture that “Possibility is not a luxury”; it is as crucial as bread, but what we are left with is the certainty that most of us here are privileged enough to contemplate concentric circles, rather than the hierarchy of a triangle, when we think about our needs.

When I was just a little girl, I asked a boy as bourgeois as me, as we sipped fair-trade coffee from Ethiopia, if he could believe in the word revolution, and he said a revolution is three hundred and sixty degrees, but if you really wanted to change things, isn’t it one hundred and eighty? He lifted up the ceramic saucer to show me with his hands.

After 10 years into the rat race, you finally look down for the first time only to realise you have been running on the spot. The soles of your shoes: worn through but squeaky clean – and I am no longer there to kiss your knees. You’ve allowed yourself to believe that it’s too late now, and the best you can do in this regard, in disregard, is cosmetic. Gold plate your hamster wheel as you turn tricks within. Queue for more European sweetbreads, baked in neutral Swiss factories, and shipped to Hong Kong, London, Tokyo and Dubai. Put your name on the waiting list for limited edition designer bags.

All the possibility in the world, right here in our city. From third world to first in fifty years, yes siree!

Truly, you are spoilt for choice – as long as you close an eye to the fine print that all your possibilities are strictly consumerist.

In Zhejiang, China, they have built Tianducheng, a city that is a replica of Paris, including a scaled replica of the Eiffel Tower. If you take a picture in front of the fake Eiffel Tower in Tianducheng and you angle it right, it will look just like the real thing. If it is true that money can buy you anything, and that love goes home to Paris in the winter, can the latter be paid via the former to make a swanky detour to China? It used to pain me so bad that all you ever wanted was a picture.

Baby, the truth is, life happened and you were a tourist.