CRAZY RICH FLAVOUR
“Food in Singapore is one of the best melds, not just a melting pot, of world flavours,”
On a Tuesday in July, about 45 retirees, tourists and working folk on lunch break queue silently at the Chinatown Complex food centre in Singapore’s Smith St. They are sweating in the tight heat (it’s 90 degrees outside and there isn’t air conditioning), waiting to order at the metal-framed Hawker Chan Soya Sauce Chicken Rice and Noodle stall.
Hawker Chan sells plates of soy sauce chicken rice for 2 Singapore dollars (about $1.50) and gained global fame when it was awarded one star in 2016 in Singapore’s first Michelin guide, making it the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred meal. Some devotees line up for more than an hour; this tableau of diners loyally waiting for their favourite dirtcheap food is replicated in hawker centres across this island nation.
It’s a far cry from the Singapore depicted in the hit movie Crazy Rich
Asians, based on the bestselling novel of the same title. Watch the film and the Lion City, as it’s known, appears exclusively populated by the immaculately coifed and buffed über-rich (true, there are plenty here) who live in lushly landscaped sprawling homes (many of those about) and jet set to islands to escape the ennui of daily life (it happens).
But, in the six years that I have lived in Singapore, a per capita GDP heavyweight, I’ve learned that the scene at Hawker Chan is much more reflective of life here. It is commonplace to live and have fun in the city without breaking the bank.
Singapore gained independence in 1965, when it was mostly lowrise with shop houses and kampongs (villages) where homes had tin and thatch roofs. A government drive led to the creation of the Housing Development Board, which replaced kampongs throughout the island with high-density towers known as HDBs, no-frills blocks where four-fifths of the country’s 5.6 million residents today live.
With a strategic location in Asia and a history of receiving migrants from Southeast Asia, China, India and Europe, Singapore gradually prospered, the greatest leap occurring in the last two decades, when it shifted from an industrial to financial capital and re- worked its agenda to attract the rich through lifestyles. “Motor-racing and luxurious living became promoted systematically as part of the landscape, epitomized by the iconic Marina Bay Sands,” said Liew Kai Khiun, an assistant professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University.
Today, immense wealth exists in pockets but given the country’s Lilliputian size (smaller than New York City), it seems to inhabit everyday life, visible in the Ferraris that I see rumble around the roads daily, the marquee condominium complexes (one, Reignwood Hamilton Scotts, has an elevator for vehicles so residents can park their exotic sports cars in their living rooms) and the marinas.
But these snapshots are not the norms. “The perception of Singapore as the playground of the rich has caused some uneasiness and tension,” noted Liew. This was expressed in the complaints (about stereotyping, lifestyle, lack of ethnic diversity) by Singaporeans over the trailer of Crazy Rich Asians that portrays a city alien to the experiences of ordinary folk here.
Singapore is costly: For the fifth year running, it’s the most expensive city in the world, according to an annual survey by the Economist. With an average annual resident income of about 46,000 Singapore dollars, most Singaporeans regularly tighten their purse strings, this necessary financial prudence helped by a wide range of free and low-cost facilities and diversions.
There are free parks to explore, free concerts, free health clinics and tons of cheap places to eat. A day out need not cost a small fortune.
The 184-acre Singapore Botanic Gardens (about three-quarters the size of the New York Botanical Garden) opened in 1859, and in its early days was an important centre for cultivating plants, especially the rubber tree. Free to enter, it became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015 and is a spotless, peaceful patch of greenery, filled with people strolling (with or without dogs), exercising and birdwatching.
Gardens by the Bay was built on reclaimed land and is a marvel of engineering and sustainable design. I like how its climate-controlled greenhouse domes, superstructure artificial trees and green expanses contrast with the nearby central business district towers.
The Singapore Symphony Orchestra stages free concerts around the city (sometimes at the Botanic Gardens). Music fans can also check out the rotating schedule of free shows at Esplanade, the performing arts complex with a roof inspired by the durian fruit.
Companies like Monster Day Tours and Indie Singapore offer free walking tours of Little India and Chinatown that trace the evolution of these enclaves. ION Orchard, a shopping mall known for its high-end designer stores, has a free contemporary multimedia art gallery on its fourth level, and free art is dotted around the city.
My favourite freebie, Haw Par Villa, was opened in 1937 by the Aw brothers, the inventors of Tiger Balm; I never tire of the sometimes-gruesome dioramas and sculptures depicting Chinese folk tales through imagery that includes dismembered and impaled torsos or people drowning in bubbling pools of blood.
There are also many economical ways to experience Singapore.
The city has a network of pool complexes that cost a couple of dollars for adults, and include the Olympic-size pool at the OCBC Aquatic Centre and one at Jurong East neighbourhood with waterslides, a lazy river and a wave pool that I have visited more than 30 times. HDBs often have markets at the ground level, where I and many Singaporeans buy fresh produce and household necessities at lower prices than in the city’s ubiquitous air-conditioned malls.
For 2.50 Singapore dollars, visitors can catch a boat to Pulau Ubin, a small, little-developed isle off Singapore’s main island that gives a hint of life here pre-independence: It’s populated with jungle and wildlife and a handful of residents in tin-roof homes, no running water and virtually no electricity; an undiluted immersion into nature. I liken it to time travel.
No trip to Singapore would be complete without a meal at a hawker centre, a microcosm of the deep multicultural heritage here (a subject unexplored by the film).
“The food in Singapore is one of the best melds, not just a melting pot, of world flavours,” said K.F. Seetoh, Singapore’s de facto food ambassador and creator of the World Street Food Congress, by email.
“It is beyond rich migrantfood culture.”
For example, he noted that rojak, a fruit and vegetable salad whose name translates to “eclectic mix” and whose origins are unclear, “is neither this nor that, but truly our own style,” an apt symbol of the many cultures of Singapore.
Singaporeans are predominantly ethnically Chinese, but the Pan-Asian sensibilities of the country are inescapable — from street signs and subway announcements in the country’s four official languages (Mandarin, Malay, Tamil and English), to the mosques, churches, Buddhist and South Indian temples dotted around the island, sometimes on the same stretch of road. I can think of no place that offers a profound mix of Asian cultures and cuisines so compactly.
I have spent many hours at hawker centres, for a quick meal or to sip on a fresh sugarcane juice and watch myna birds with sun-coloured beaks and slick black feathers chirp- ing and hopping between tables, waiting for falling scraps.
Sometimes I go just to wander among stalls selling an endless variety of dishes that embody the cultural mélange, “everyday cuisines like satay, chicken rice, yong tau fu, fish-head curry, prata, nasi lemak, laksa, mee siam,” said Tan Ern Ser, a soci- ologist at the National University of Singapore.
“The cultural makeup of Singaporeans is somewhat complex. It is Southeast Asian, South Asian, East Asian and global, but not in an essentialist way, where race is defined by fixed, unchangeable traits.”
While these dishes — lip- smacking, addictively salty, spicy, silky and costing a few dollars — originate from different parts of the continent, they are all considered wholly Singaporean, comfort food of sorts. And they are like the country as a whole: not crazy, not universally rich, but most certainly Asian.