Number Nine Singapore Flyer

2 January 2012

Near the end of Mid-Autumn Festival, we went to the Chinese Gardens to see the lantern display. We got there about an hour before dark, so we could see some of the gardens themselves before it got dark. The most prominent feature of the garden is a large pagoda set on a hill, with stairs leading up to it with marble lions all the way up. While there were a lot of normal-sized lanterns hung throughout, what stood out were the giant lanterns in the shape of animals and characters from folk tales and popular culture. My favorites were giant swans and cygnets in the middle of a pond, yard-long ants, and a sequence of highly stylized dragons along one pathway. As we were leaving, we came back past the pagoda, and I then realized the "marble" lions along the stairway were in fact more lanterns.

Water is a big issue in Singapore. As population grows, so does water demand, even with conservation efforts. I read about "The Four National Taps":

1. Water from Malaysia

2. Water from desalinization -- not a big source currently, but slated be become larger in the future

3. Rain catchment in reservoirs -- most recently, the Singapore River has been turned into a reservoir, with the erection of the Marina Barrage across its mouth

4. Recycling -- drain water is reclaimed and purified via filter, reverse osmosis, and UV.

There is a concern about source 1. Malaysia has threatened cut-offs in the past for political reasons, but they are going to need more of it to support their own growth. Singapore wants to wean itself from dependence on Malaysian water, and I think they are making progress. I read somewhere that some of the water that Singapore receives from there is purified and sold back to customers in Malaysia. Recycled water has been christened "NEWater", and the current plants started coming on line a decade ago. I saw a picture in a museum of the Prime Minister drinking NEWater to show its safety. My own opinion is that the water here is quite tasty, on par with Bull Run water from Portland.

At lunch with my dean, I got to see some of preserved "black and white" bungalows on Rochester Road, not far from campus. I believe the government owns them, but most are rented out to restaurants.

NUS has a small museum as part of the Cultural Center, which I went to check out one afternoon when Kaye was occupied with docent training. The first thing I saw was an exhibit about exhibits (or museums? or collections? "the exhibition offers the question of the Museum in Malaya as evolving propositions expressed through shifting concepts of colonial knowledge"). Downstairs were permanent collections, including one of Chinese pottery and a related one of excavated potsherds. The top floor is currently devoted to sculptor Ng Eng Teng. One room has artifacts from his house and workshop, plus newspaper articles about him. (The house was recently razed to make room for new construction -- people were allowed to come collect pieces as mementos.) A second room has a large number of his sculptures, most of which were ceramic. I really enjoyed some of his more whimsical pieces, which show highly abstracted faces and torsos. It also has the macquettes for a pair of sculptures entitled "Contentment" and "Wealth" that once resided in Plaza Singapura, but now grace the front of the UCC.

The NUS alumni council sponsored a free performance by a Cantonese opera that was written by a local composer and performed by the Cantonese opera company that he and his wife lead. It was presented in the lecture hall of the Alumni House on campus, which isn't really a stage, hence they did not have the fancy sets they usually use. But the costumes were lavish -- we got to see them close up, as some of the performers were in the lobby before and after the show. The subject was the next-to-last emperor of China, Guang Xu, and his struggles with the Empress Dowager Ci Xi (his aunt and adoptive mother). She was effectively his regent when he ascended to the throne at age 4. As Guong Xu matured, he tried to assert himself more, but his aunt generally prevailed. For example, he was not allowed to marry his first choice, Zhen Fei (though he was allowed to take her as his second concubine). Guang Xu is probably best known for his "Hundred Days' Reform" that might have given China better relations with European powers had it been allowed to stand. However, Ci Xi orchestrated a coup, and Guang Xu was kept under house arrest for the rest of his reign (and separated from Zhen Fei). One of the more interesting scenes depicted Guang Xu signing the forced treaty with the Eight-Nation Alliance during their occupation of Beijing after the Boxer Rebellion. It was interesting to see how westerners were depicted. A couple performers were actually Europeans, but the rest were Asian singers in wigs and beards. The opera ends sadly, with the death of Guang Xu at the age of 37. There are two version of the opera, in Cantonese and English. We heard the English version with English subtitles.

One of the lesser-known museums here is the Red Dot Design Museum. I had assumed (before I visited) that the "Red Dot" part meant Singapore, as it is sometimes referred to as the "red dot", from its depiction on many maps. But it turns out the museum is a branch of the Red Dot museum in Essen, Germany, which exists to showcase the winners of the Red Dot Design Awards. (I haven't determined where the "Red Dot" in the original name comes from.) Singapore focuses on an award for design innovation and concepts. (The latter means basically designs that have not been physically realized.) It was a fun little museum, and included many actual design artifacts from the German competition.

The Red Dot museum is in the Tanjong Pagar neighborhood. Tangjong Pagar means "Cape of Stakes", which is puzzling for a place that is a quarter mile from the nearest water. However, one soon realizes that there are many streets (e.g., Beach Road, East Coast Road) that used to run along the waterfront before reclamation projects. (Singapore has added almost 50 square miles of real estate since the 60s, which is about 18% of the current land area). So Tanjong Pagar was indeed a cape once. The "stakes" probably refer to fish traps that were once set up there. The neighborhood has a large concentrations of preserved shophouses, and Kaye and I spent an afternoon walking up and down the streets looking at them. You generally need to cover both sides of the street to see them all, as, per Raffles, they incorporate the "5-foot way", which is a covered arcade sidewalk in front. Thus you can only see the facades from the other side of the street. Most of the shophouses housed businesses (though there may be people living on upper floors). For some reason, bridal salons are very common in the neighborhood. I'm not quite sure why they are all concentrated in one place. Is it like car dealerships, where people compare store to store?

One thing we noticed about the shophouses is that many of them had tight spiral staircases in the back alley. I found out at a lecture later why that is. First, the general layout of a shop house would be a shop in the front of the ground floor, and living quarters behind and on one or two floors above. They were traditionally packed together like rowhouses, both side to side and back to back (so no alley initially). Since there were no windows on the sides or back, there would usually be one or more courtyards that extended up through all the stories to let in light and let out smoke from cooking. When the city needed to install utilities, it was decided to chop off the back of shophouses to create alleys. Most lost a back stairway in the process, hence the added spiral staircases.

Increased productivity is a main government priority at the moment. Singapore has relied heavily on foreign labor for economic growth. Out of the 5.3M population, 3.3 are citizens, 0.5M permanent residents and 1.5M non-residents. Foreigners were almost 35% percent of the labor force in 2010, up from 16% in 1990. However, as a result of pushback about crowded transit, housing shortages and the like, a couple years ago the government started restricting the number of new foreign worker and raising the proportion of Singapore residents that companies must employ. Since companies can't rely to the same extent on cheap labor, there will need to be significant growth in productivity to sustain current levels of economic activity. I've come to appreciate here that there are two ways to consider productivity. One is output per labor dollar spent. Singapore does OK by this measure, because of low wages for foreign workers and people working long hours. But it doesn't fare as well by the more conventional measure of output per hour worked. Employers haven't had much of an incentive to automate, invest in training or capitalize, because labor has been so cheap. Why buy or lease a washer to clean truck tires leaving your construction site when you can get by with two workers with hoses who only cost a few dollars an hour. (Or why even buy a hose nozzle, when the workers can use their thumbs.) I have also been surprised by the amount of rework on the apartment units where we live. I can't tell if it's because of problems with specifications, communication, skills or materials, but it must certainly weigh against productivity.

Linguistic Drift: I've been noticing instances where American and Singapore English diverge:

- "beating the red light": Here, it means running a red light after it's changed

- "parking lot": room for a single car -- what I'd call a "parking space"; what I'd call a parking lot is a carpark here.

- "relook" as a transitive verb: for example, "The government should relook the policy on flat resales." I would use "reexamine" in such a context. This one puzzles me a bit, since I haven't seen "look" used transtively.

- "revise" means "review" or "revisit", when applied to lessons.