Number Six Singapore Flyer
16 October 2012

After being here six weeks, I was starting to get a little shaggy, and needed to locate a haircutter. I'd seen fancy salons, but also barbershops that seemed like little more than a chair on the sidewalk. My department chair guided me to middle ground, an express-cuts place at a local mall. You buy a card from a machine that entitles you to a haircut. Then you wait your turn. The cut itself is fast and vigorous. One cool thing is a little opening that looks like a mouse hole in the mopboard. But when you flip a switch, it turns on a vacuum cleaner somewhere behind the wall, so you just sweep hair towards it and it disappears.

We saw the NUS Dance Ensemble at the Cultural Centre across the street. The program was called ObservAsian, and had pieces by four different choreographers. We've been impressed by the quality of the dance groups at the university. The Dance Ensemble has both current students and alumni, and has many excellent dancers among them. I liked "Four Short Stories about Boys and Girls" because of its humorous elements, and Samsara, which was inspired by Balinese dancing. Perhaps the one thing I'd wish for is more numbers that featured individual dancers or small groups -- most of the numbers had fairly large ensembles.

One element that has been present in almost every performance we've seen here is smoke. Someone must have been having a sale on smoke machines, because just about every group has one. I can only think of two things we've seen that were completely "smokeless".

I saw that Yelp is starting up a site for Singapore. It will be interesting to see if they can get the level of participation that local food site, Hungrygowhere, has.

One Saturday we headed north to Memories at Old Ford Factory, which, besides being the Art Deco headquarters building of a former Ford factory, was the site of the British surrender of Singapore and is now a museum devoted to the Japanese occupation from 1942-1945. It has extensive material on just about every aspect of the occupation: getting the city up and running after the surrender, life in the internment camps, attempts to inculcate Japanese language and culture, food shortages, setting up an Indian liberation army, even a panel on managing a wedding celebration during the war. The displays are very frank, with stories of brutality and highly differential treatment of different ethnic groups. Europeans were highly suspect, and almost all interned. Chinese were also closely watched, as many in their community had been raising funds to help forces on the Chinese mainland to resist the Japanese invasion there, and they had filled many civil service positions under the British administration. Indians and Malaysians were more trusted, possibly as both were seen as wanting to curtail British rule.

A few additional highlights.

- Out back was an occupation garden, featuring tapioca, sugar cane, bananas, papayas and other items that were cultivated in Singapore during the war. There was also a type of grass that internees would bring back to the camp when they found it on work parties. They extracted juice from it, which they meted out to people needing vitamins.

- A Japanese agricultural research station figured out that pigs would do well when fed on seeds from rubber trees. Their manure then proved to be excellent fertilizer for crops.

- I learned about Force 136, part of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), that worked to establish resistance groups in Malaya. They seemed to have had ongoing problems with trying to get workable radios into Malaya for communicating with infiltrators and local groups. They were ultimately able to help train and supply the Malaya Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA) that was affiliated with the Malaya Communist Party. However, the MPAJA later contributed to the guerilla forces that opposed the British during the Malayan Emergency from 1948-1960.

Skipping ahead a bit (but staying on topic), Kaye won free tickets to a sold-out show titled "Occupation" that addresses life during the occupation. It is a one-woman show written by an NUS professor, and was first produced 10 years ago. It takes inspiration from oral history recordings from the playwright's grandmother, who lived in Singapore during the occupation. (The main characters are the grandmother and the young woman taping interviews with her.) The grandmoher was part of a Muslim Indian family, and she and her sisters were all kept in the house for the duration. Nevertheless, she managed to start a correspondence with the tutor who was living in the house behind them (via notes carried by the assistant cook). She would also climb onto the roof and wave to him. Through much perseverance, he managed to persuade her mother (through intermediaries) that they should be married. Lots of interesting bits of family history. The father (of the grandmother) was in the ship chandelling business, and right when Singapore fell, one of the sons drove a truck full of provisions (meant for cruise ships that wouldn't arrive) up to the house. The family filled a room with it, which amazingly went undetected during a Japanese search of the house. The food lasted about a year, as they shared it with neighbors and others who asked. Definitely the better of the two plays we've seen here. And, yes, it had smoke.

The performance was in the National Museum, so on the way out I stopped at a special exhibit on the period 1945-65, between occupation and independence. It was a difficult time, with infrastructure in disrepair, unsanitary conditions for many, and limited economic activity (mostly connected to trade rather than production). Much of the initial effort at economic diversification were in fairly low tech manufacturing, such as clothing, but there was a steel mill and shipyards. Volunteer groups set up "People's restaurants" with cheap or free food, and various health, education and sanitation efforts. Public housing became a priority, first focused on rentals, but then on apartments for purchase. [Public housing projects took a vastly different path here from those in the US. Currently about 82% of Singaporeans live in HDB (Housing and Development Board) flats, and 90% of those own their units. HDB estates are generally well served by public transportation, usually have a food centre (aka hawker court) and a wet market, plus other shops, and often a community center for classes and sports.] Singapore had various forms of municipal administration under the British after WWII, getting self-governance in 1959, becoming part of independent Malaysia in 1963, but then splitting off as an independent country in 1965. An interesting aspect was giving the population a sense of nationhood. In order to help people learn the national anthem (Malujah Singapura -- Onward Singapore), there was a phone number you could call to hear it sung. The exhibit also had some short films made for early public television being shown. I liked the one on tourism in Singapore.

After Hungry Ghost Month came Mid-Autumn Festival, associated with lanterns and mooncakes. We went to the light-up event in Chinatown, where they had a record number of lanterns strung over the streets. There was a stage set up in the middle of the street (which was closed off) where there were various dancing and performing groups, and where the official button to turn on the lanterns resided. (However, first there were speeches given by sundry politicians. We got to hear each speech twice -- once in Mandarin and once in English.) We got a glimpse of the president of Singapore, who was the guest of honor. When the lanterns were turned on, there were fireworks right over our heads, shot from the top of a local shopping mall. From Chinatown we walked down towards the river, stopping at a park with large lanterns (of entire animals and scenes). There was a tent set up showing the entries for a contest to make lanterns from recycled materials. My favorites were a dragon whose scales were plastic spoons, and a lion who had red and yellow drinking straws for "fur". Clarke Quay had lanterns all along it, mostly floating in the river. We ended up down by the reverse bungee rides, and got to see the laser show from the Marina Bay Sands motel.