PT Data wrangler

Tag: Singapore

  • Nature and control

    Jeremy Tiang on how nature – from gardens to sexuality, from supertrees to freedom of speech – is kept in check in Singapore.

    I should say at the outset that being a product of my surroundings, I am not particularly in tune with the natural world. I have always lived in extremely built-up cities where I can get everywhere on foot or by public transport, and I’m never more than ten minutes from someone who will sell me coffee. I grew up in Singapore, which is probably currently most familiar to non-Singaporeans as the backdrop for the Trump-Kim summit and the glitzily aspirational Crazy Rich Asians, as well as in images featuring the infinity pool at the top of Marina Bay Sands, the annual Grand Prix, and the science-fictiony supertrees  rising luridly against the sky.

    If you don’t already know what the supertrees look like, I’m not sure I can do them justice, but basically they’re concrete-and-steel vaguely tree-shaped structures with skeletal branches, up to fifty metres tall and often dramatically lit in photographs. These are part of Gardens by the Bay, a seven-year-old park that, according to its website, ‘presents the plant kingdom in a whole new way.’ The term ‘park’ may be misleading, because while there are some green spaces, the most eye-catching elements, apart from the supertrees (which look like they were designed by someone who found triffids insufficiently sinister), are two vast, domed conservatories, both filled with flora not native to Singapore. They literally took all the trees, and put them in a tree museum, and charged the people… well, a good deal more than a dollar and a half just to see ’em. Even the land the Gardens are built on is artificial, reclaimed from the sea with soil from neighbouring countries. (An Indonesian friend likes to joke, ‘My country used to have 13,400 islands, but now we only have 13,000 because Singapore bought the rest.’)

    This instinct to enclose and label the environment was formalised in 1963, when then-Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew planted a mempat tree with his own hands . (It lasted a decade before having to make way for roadworks.) The “Garden City” initiative was launched in 1967, and updated to “City in a Garden” in 1998 , umbrella titles for a plethora of programmes, including an annual tree-planting day (the first Sunday in November), and orchid-breeding—hybrids are named after VIPs on state visits, though regular folk can also buy naming rights for upward of $3,000, and have their very own flower alongside the likes of the Dendrobium Margaret Thatcher.

    When a new space opens up, the immediate impulse is enclosure.

    In 2016, when a 15-mile stretch of railway track from downtown Singapore to Malaysia was decommissioned, the Urban Renewal Authority announced plans to turn it into a ‘Green Corridor’, with features including ‘rock-climbing caves and urban farms’. Writer Yu-Mei Balasingamchow set out to walk the length of the tracks before the land was transformed, and found it delightful just as it is. Yet in a Singaporean context, this felt like a radical idea—that a space could be sufficient in itself, without needing to be processed and commodified; that so much of government planning, which ‘caters to the idea of an urban population that needs to be entertained and coddled’, stultifies the imagination and prevents us from appreciating our surroundings as they are.

    I don’t want to make Singapore sound like an urban hellscape—much of it is perfectly pleasant, and of course difficult decisions need to be made when land is scarce. Nor do I want to suggest that nature is completely disregarded—National Parks does some sterling work here, with programmes such as its biodiversity database. Besides, while the lived environment is generally manicured to within an inch of its lives, the island as a whole has a tendency to wildness—plants grow fast in a tropical climate. But, as Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing point out in Paramilitary Gardening, ‘[t]he landscapers are in charge, here. And in a very muscular way. This city-state has quite literally been hacked from voracious equatorial forest; its geo-body has been “reclaimed” from the sea.’

    In any case, this corralling of nature didn’t start with Independence. The British left a number of elegant green spaces, including the Botanic Gardens, which was run by Kew-trained botanists who meticulously turned it into a site ‘where the colonial authorities attempted to assert their power over nature itself,’ in the words of Joanne Leow.

    These authorities took much the same approach to their human subjects, imposing a legal code based on English common law.

    One item, a law prohibiting ‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature’, is similar to the ones they left India, Jamaica, Myanmar, Bangladesh and other countries, down to the Section number: 377. Even after Section 377 was altered in Singapore, the specific prohibition against homosexuality, 377A, was retained. Gay sex is still technically illegal in Singapore, and while practitioners are no longer prosecuted, the law sanctions discrimination against them in a myriad of ways. This feels like part of the same impulse that drives much of Singapore’s urban planning: Nature is presented as sacrosanct (you will only couple as nature intended), but simultaneously as something to be rigorously managed (the state granting itself the ability to dictate whether your desires are ‘natural’ or otherwise).

    Human nature is, in general, kept strictly in check here.

    Protest is strictly policed, with public demonstrations only permitted in one location (a park, of course—and even then, only with a permit). Our Public Order Act defines ‘assembly’ to include ‘a demonstration by a person alone’, and ‘procession’ to include ‘a march by a person alone’, so even individuals are not free to express dissent in public except within narrow state-sanctioned parameters. Like our plant life, human beings must be strictly cultivated and kept within bounds, rather than allowed to flourish at will .

    There are obviously plenty of people happy with this state of affairs—the ruling party has won every election since Independence, and at the last one increased its vote share to a whisker short of 70%. And the trade-off is, perhaps, fair enough—rigid boundaries in return for growth and stability, the stifling but safe enclosure of a hothouse instead of the exuberance of wilderness. Still, I wish there were a little more breathing space. Many of the borders that contain us are somewhat nebulous, such as the so-called OB Markers (for ‘out-of-bounds’ – a golfing term) that prohibit certain topics from public discourse, the trouble being that these are not laid out clearly anywhere, and seem to frequently shift, so people are often left censoring themselves to be on the safe side. And this feels like the most sinister aspect of all this—that this control has become self-imposed.

    For the last ten years, an annual rally called Pink Dot has taken place at Hong Lim Park—the aforementioned sole designated site of protest—in support of LGBTQ rights. The theme this year was ‘We are ready’, a reference to the frequent declarations by government ministers that Singapore is ‘not ready’ for changes such as the abolition of 377A. Increasingly, it feels like there are cracks appearing in the surrounding walls, and we could let in a little wildness without losing ourselves.

     

    Jeremy Tiang is the author of State of Emergency (2017, finalist for the 2016 Epigram Books Fiction Prize, winner of the Singapore Literature Prize 2018) and It Never Rains on National Day (2015, shortlisted for the 2016 Singapore Literature Prize). He won the Golden Point Award for Fiction in 2009 for his story “Trondheim”. He also writes and translates plays, including A Dream of Red Pavilions, The Last Days of Limehouse, A Son Soon by Xu Nuo, and Floating Bones by Quah Sy Ren and Han Lao Da. Tiang has translated more than ten books from the Chinese—including novels by Chan Ho-Kei, Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Su Wei-chen—and has received an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, a PEN/Heim Translation Grant, and a People’s Literature Award Mao-Tai Cup. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

    Photo credit: Oliver Rockwell

  • A murky thing

    A murky thing

    ‘One place can be many, many things. I’d like to convey an image of Singapore that deviates from Western-centric cultural explanation.’ Where do we write from? Sharlene Teo, author of the hotly anticipated Ponti, responds.

    Words often fail me. If I admit that and call myself a writer, is that tantamount to a swimmer stating that they often almost drown? Or is this simply an acceptance of the limits of language, of the written word being inextricably enmeshed with cultural, political and representational complexities? If we read and write to comprehend each other more fully, why is the execution of this rarely as simple as our impulse to be understood?

    For a Chinese Singaporean like me, language is a murky thing. To write in English is to wade directly or indirectly into a state of cogitation and occasional conflict with my linguistic and cultural inheritances. My grandmother came from Fujian, China. But my standard of written Chinese is a shambles; my spoken Chinese is functional at best. English is the language of instruction in Singapore; from primary school onwards I’ve felt like a cultural traitor, estranged from my Chineseness. To write in English as a Singaporean is a privilege but not always an easy pleasure. My first language is one that was effectively enforced upon my syllabus by the forces and floes of colonialism and the global economy. This is further complicated by the fact that I have lived in the United Kingdom for the past twelve years, having moved there for university; it is in England that I have developed my adult consciousness.

    I experience a double estrangement writing in English and residing in the UK, the site of imperialist, colonizing power, yet I can’t escape that I am estranged of my own volition. The choice and hard-fought right behind this circles the sense of blame back to myself.

    The English vocabulary I use to articulate my innermost thoughts is a concession to the tangled, mangled roots of my identity. If I live in England, why do I keep returning to Singapore in my fiction? Frankly I feel freer imagining and remembering this space that has so definitively shaped my emotional education. Even the act of remembering is its own form of constant fictionalization. To me, the past is a well-known country. I edit and embellish bits of it to fit the narrative of who I’ve become, or what I’m becoming. When I write stories set in London, where I’ve lived for the past nine years, it feels stilted, less elastic. Like reportage, or bad travel writing. Perhaps familiarity mars or dulls my voice. Geographical distance from the site of my description makes it easier to pick out the strangeness in the mundane.

    I don’t write to fight or make a forceful claim. I’m constantly trying to get words out, strung together into a story, because I want to make connections with other people. Place to me is a framing structure rather than a shorthand or shortcut to such connections. Kazuo Ishiguro phrases this impulse much more eloquently: ’Stories can entertain, sometimes teach or argue a point. But for me the essential thing is that they communicate feelings…one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m feeling? Does it also feel this way to you?’

    The role of place in my writing, then, is as a way of conveying this emotional topography, a way of externalizing feeling to the reader. Place to me is an inner landscape externalized through observation or the shock of the weather. I love cities for reasons of obvious dramatic tension. I feel like characters can feel so incredibly, unbearably alienated amidst the hubbub and chatter of those they know best. My debut novel Ponti was set almost entirely in my home country, that is also my home city, that is also my home island. The Singapore I write about is its very own sometimes-unwieldy character. It is complex, protean, with jagged edges and pockets of decay. William Gibson famously condemned Singapore as ‘Disneyland with the Death Penalty’, a staid neoliberal metropolis deprived of democracy and spontaneity. Flawed as Singaporean technocratic governance may be, we shouldn’t let disparagement dominate all conversations or depictions of the country.

    One place can be many, many things. I’d like to convey an image of Singapore that deviates from Western-centric cultural explanation.

    I’m concerned with the mood of the space, its beauty and bad temper and contradictions. The way that certain neighborhoods are teeming with stray cats, old furniture, and a gentle sense of mystery. How does one convey this carefully, without romanticizing? Yet other spaces can seem so oppressive and cloying in intensely niggling and personal ways. How does one convey this carefully, without ranting? My concerns are intensely emotional and aesthetic.

    For the foreseeable future I can only imagine writing fiction fixated upon my own particular Singaporean perspective on the world. One that is diasporic, sometimes shamefully Westernised, and hopefully opened up rather than foreclosed to the narrative possibilities of having one foot in a different culture, another back home. What is home anyway? This hackneyed but essential question comes up time and again in discussions of migrant literature, in an increasingly globalised and connected world. The Internet with its memes and connectivity facilitates cultural osmosis. Our influences bleed into one another. Yet the corporeal cartography of Singapore the city is highly specific, despite its veritable hodgepodge of cultural influences. For a small country with neoliberal and global concerns, there really is a distinctively Singaporean way of seeing the world.

    Last week Singapore’s last polar bear died. His name was Inuka and my timelines were flooded with his picture. Born and raised in the Singapore Zoo, his off-white coat was stained by algae. In every image he looked unbearably sad and painfully out of place. Polar bears don’t belong in tropical Singapore, much less in captivity. The last time I saw a polar bear on a humid island was more than a decade ago, in the TV series Lost. A big bear in tropical confines is wildly implausible, but he survived for quite a long time. So this is what happens when you take a creature from far away and put it somewhere familiar. Its coat gets stained green. That’s my fear when I try to write about Singapore from a position of remove: that the telling might come across as grotesque novelty, unrecognizably tamed. This uncertainty and unsettlement both animates and haunts my process; the ambivalence outlives the animal a long, long way.

    Sharlene Teo was born in Singapore in 1987. She has an LLB in Law from the University of Warwick and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, where she received the Booker Prize Foundation Scholarship and the David TK Wong Creative Writing award. She holds fellowships from the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and the University of Iowa International Writing Program. In 2016, she won the inaugural Deborah Rogers Writer’s Award for Ponti, her first novel.

    Photograph: Barney Poole