15 Weeks

There is a banner outside my building, announcing that my neighborhood of Redhill Rise has been free of dengue fever for the past 15 weeks.  The numbers one and five are sewn on, suggesting that they can be replaced each week as the length of fever free grows longer.

I’ve been living here for the last three months, and the numbers have never been changed.

Which means that my neighborhood has been “15 weeks free of dengue fever” for the past 15 weeks.

I Live in China

So, let’s start a couple hundred years ago.

[Sidebar: All of the history I know about Singapore has been learned by happenstance, by accident, by observation, by estimation, by guessing games, by overheard stories, by references in newspaper articles, and probably by being lied to.  None of the history I know about Singapore has been learned by reading a book, or verifying sources, or doing any sort of research at all whatsoever.  So keep that in mind.]

Sir Stamford Bingley Raffles arrives in Singapore.  He’s English, but living in Indonesia, it’s like Eighteen Whatever Whatever, the man is really atrociously handsome.  He has a patrician air, a rugged grin, a questionable combover and really delicate fingers.  He strikes up a deal with the Sultan of Malacca to turn a swampy island at the tip of Malaya into a trading port, which is wildly in violation of current treaties with the Dutch vis a vis commercial control of Southeast Asia.

So he sails to Singapore on a boat, cuts a deal, signs some papers, reads a proclamation from a spot on the waterfront that now bears his statue, and then promptly gets back on said boat and sails away again.  Bear this in mind: Raffles is one of the biggest influences on modern Singapore, he is memorialized all over the island, he set in motion a legacy of cultural norms that still stand to this day, and he only spent two years in total actually living in Singapore.  The longest time he spent here in one stretch was eight or nine months.  He was very much an absentee father.

Now, as part of setting up Singapore as a British trading port, Raffles draws up a city plan.  Prior to this point, Singapore was an island of fishermen.  It had some villages, but not much else.  So when the British come in, they are creating a city out of marshland and not much else.  And Raffles draws up a plan in 1819, which is then elaborated on by a plan in 1822/23.  And in this plan, the city is segregated, by both ethnicity and purpose.  Using the Singapore River (which really, really is not so impressive that it should be elevated to the status of river) as a natural dividing line, Raffles first designates a part of the city for government, and a part of the city for commerce.  And then he designates ethnic quarters where people will live – the best land for the Europeans, and then large blocks for the incoming Malays, Chinese, Indians and Arabs.

And Singapore grows, and time moves on, and the trading port becomes an economic powerhouse, and the war comes, and the English are kicked out, and the Japanese are kicked out, and the English come back but only for a few years at which point they’re kicked out again, and for a brief stint Singapore is part of the newly created country of Malaysia, and then it breaks away and becomes its own city-state republic.  And this whole time, the divisions that Raffles created do not break down.

In today’s Singapore, the economic core of the city is still on the south side of the river, clustered around Raffles Square which, somewhat confusingly, is across the river from where he actually landed and his statue stands.  This area – the CBD, or Central Business District – is full of high rises, financial centers, Asian banks, shipping magnates, and the like.  It is Singapore’s own little version of Hong Kong, and it is quite lovely, particularly when seen from the Esplanade.  And then, across the river from the CBD, just as in Raffles’ plan, is the City Hall, the courthouse (a particularly bizarre po-mo structure) and the domed colonial era buildings that now house the Asian Civilizations Museum.  And then swirling around that, like the arrondisements of Paris, are Orchard Road and Fort Canning (the European zone), Little India, the Arab Quarter, Geylang, and Chinatown.

These are the clearly marked boundaries.  They are historic, so they are entrenched. When you walk between them, you recognize that something has changed.  And they are generally the only neighborhoods that are marked in guidebooks, the idea being that anything further afield is a sort of homogenous swath of public housing, all-look-same condos, and treeless green spaces.  Which is true and not true.  Because, even though the rest of Singapore does have a repetitive blandness – tall buildings, wide roads, overhead walkways, outdoor gym equipment – there is still a real ethnic divide from neighborhood to neighborhood.

So I live in China.  Well no, I live in Redhill, which is a few subway stops from the CBD, and a quick walk to my school.  I live in an HDB, which is Singaporean public housing.  Most Singaporeans live in an HDB.  The city-state republic built tons of these things in the last forty years, and keeps building them, and the idea is to give Singaporeans an affordable place to live.  When they were first built, HDBs were generally segregated by ethnicity.  There are still many buildings that will only rent out to Chinese, or Indians, or what have you.

But what’s becoming more common is for HDBs to have a set ethnic ratio, where they will have X amount of Chinese, Malay and Indians (which are the major ethnic groups in the city… everyone else is just an “Other”).  So my building is one  that has a ratio.  And there are also many new condos in the area, which have no ethnic regulations and cater mostly to expats.  So at the subway station, or on the street, the area is, in terms of people, fairly diverse.

And yet, it’s China.  And it’s China, I think, because for every mixed-ratio HDB and condo, there are two or three old school HDBs that are all Chinese.  Across the street from us is a sprawling outdoor shopping center, with food stalls, wet market, hair salons, massage parlors, and general supply stores.  It feels like it’s forty years old, it has a concrete floor, half the stalls are permanently closed, and it’s very charming in a sort of charmless way.  And it is completely Chinese.

And this center is more than just a place to eat, drink and buy vegetables.  It’s a meeting center, a community zone for all of the surrounding buildings.  Every weekend, it seems, they put on some event, often involving drums and cymballs.  One night over the summer, they had a giant rock show with smoke machine, flashing lights, and performers flown in from mainland China (I have a video, I promise to post it soon). When I first moved in, the entire market was turned into an elaborate Buddhist temple.

Trucks drive by, at all hours, with Chinese men in the back, banging drums.  I have no idea why, but they seem to be drum gangs of some sort, like a car-centric version of the roving Brazilian samba bands at Carnival.  During Hungry Ghost Festival, a complex of tents was set up in a park nearby; they performed Chinese opera for a week, which we could hear through our open windows.  This weekend, for reasons that even my Chinese friends aren’t sure about, tents have been set up again, with more drumming and cymbal playing.

But it’s only ever Chinese people and Chinese events.  There are two mosques in the area, but I’ve yet to see a Muslim event – or even very many Muslims just hanging out and chilling.  Tons of Indians, but aside from a sign in the lift lobby saying “Happy Deepavali”, they aren’t a cultural force in Redhill.  No, if you want Deepavali, you have to go to Little India, half an hour away, where the streets are awash in lights, and there is feasting on every corner, and none of that reaches over here, because this part of Singapore is China and that part of Singapore is India and the two do not mix except in the most superficial of ways.

Singapore is a strange little place.  It simultaneously celebrates sameness and otherness, simultaneously asks its citizens to be one, while reminding them that they are many.  If Singapore has a mantra, it’s “Remember that you are Singaporean, but don’t forget that you don’t come from Singapore”.  A lot of people talk about Singapore as if it is a sort of Disneyworld Asia, by which they mean clean, functional, and a little boring, if visually attractive.  But perhaps a better metaphor is EPCOT Center.  Because in Singapore, you can move from neighborhood to neighborhood, ethnicity to ethnicity, country to country even (last night I was in India, today I am in China), sampling these perfectly parceled dollops of culture.

And while in Singapore these various ethnic cultures can co-exist, they aren’t exactly on equal footing.  Somewhere, always, one group is in charge, one group sets the rules, one group has their own culture, from their own home country.  And Singapore struggles with this, because you can either have Singapore, or you can have India, but you can’t really have Singapore India.  And so I live in Singapore, but really I live in China.

Ghee Ceremony, Batu Caves

On the outskirts of KL, about an hour from the center of town by slow bus, there is a sheer cliff wall, with a cave inside, perched a hundred meters off the ground, and a long staircase leading up to it, with monkeys climbing on the banister and a large golden statue standing out front.

This is a photo to help you visualize, taken from Wikipedia:

Once in the cave itself (actually a series of three caves), there are various Hindu temples – as well as trinket sellers – in each of the compartments.  I was doing the tourist thing, taking photos and whatnot, when I suddenly heard music.  I looked back the way I had come, and saw an unending stream of orange clad Indians, with large silver urns on their heads, with the occasional trail of milk dripping down their faces or into their eyes.

It was a ghee ceremony, one I don’t really know anything about and won’t try to pass on to you, except to say that the crowd lined up to pass by a temple and hand their urn to a holy man, who then poured it onto an (obviously phallic) statue in the middle of the shrine.

This is the video:

[Vimeo 6409162]

Sweeping Generalisation II

Indonesia is really very wonderful when it isn’t trying to kill you. Unfortunately, it tries to kill you two or three times a day. More if you spend a lot of time in the car.

I {Heart} KL

So I absolutely love Kuala Lumpur – or KL as we say it in Singapore. I went up there a few weeks ago as part of a mini-holiday, spending two days in KL and then continuing on to the Cameron Highlands for a weekend of mildly death-defying jungle hikes, and far less death-defying (or even death-encouraging) walks through terraced tea plantations.

More to be said about that later, but for now, a short video from my first night. This is a little Indian/Muslim restaurant just on the outskirts of KL’s Indian Quarter. It’s open air and very stripped down, much like the Singapore hawker stands, except that rather than numerous food counters, there are only two, which may or may not be the same restaurant.

Actual meals are cooked in the back, while up front, a lone man works a stove preparing pratas and naan. An entire meal – mutton curry, bread, Indian tea – costs around two or maybe three dollars, served with basic utensils (for the Westerners) and a scrap or two of napkin.

[Vimeo 6409067]

Monkeys, Not At the Zoo

So, yes, this blog is woefully behind schedule.  I’ve been in Singapore for a month now, school starts tomorrow, I have a cell phone, an apartment, an internet contract.  A roommate (who has a much more present tense blog than me).  I’ve  been to Malaysia, and Bali, and was nearly killed – on more than one occasion – in Jawa, which is spelled with a W rather than a V and is therefore pronounced “Jah-Wah” rather than “Jah-Vah”.

And meanwhile, you’re still reading about my flight over and the airport in Taipei, and one measly Sweeping Generalisation (don’t worry, there will be more). Singapore Blog Fail.  What can I say, but apologies.

And promises!  Just as Singapore promises its citizens protection from (let’s be honest) non-existent terror attacks, I promise you blog-o-rama in the days, weeks, months, years, Millenia(!) to come.  Photos!  Videos!  Stories!  Singapore!  
Oh, the fun we will have .

To start:

I arrived in Singapore at noon, and I managed to power through the rest of the day, mainly by walking, blindly, through town.  The way that I deal with any challenge in life – whether it be jetlag, fatigue, hunger, travel anxiey, or newness in a foreign locale – is to walk.  Walk it off, walk it through, walk and walk and walk.

So I spent the day walking through the heat of Singapore, a heat that was neither as oppressive as I had feared nor as benign as I might have hoped.  I walked through an area that I would later learn is not a terribly good one, from the standpoint of being of zero interest, zero aesthetic, zero things to look at, zero sidewalks that lead you where you want to go (Lavender MRT stop area, I am talking about you), before stumbling onto the Arab Quarter,at which point things improved.

There will come a post soon, I promise (Historical Information!), in which I will tell you all about Sir Stamford Raffles, and the ethnic and cultural ghettoization of Singapore; about how the city was drawn into quarters that would keep the Chinese from the Malaysians from the British from the Tamils; and how this particular situation- a mass conglomeration of ethnicities which were encouraged to live together but not intermingle –  has shaped Singapore to this very day.

But at this point, this particular Walking Monday, I didn’t know about all of that.  I hadn’t really done my usual required historical reading.  I skimmed that part of the guidebook.  And coming from New York, which, like most American cities, had voluntarily segregated itself into ethnic ghettos, I didn’t think it all that strange that suddenly I was in an area of mosques, falafel, pedestrian streets and the promise of water pipes once night fell.

(Pedestrian Streets In The Arab Quarter!  Soon to come, a discussion of how the Singapore government works very hard to manufacture phenomena – like historical walking streets in historical areas with souvenir shops and ethnic eateries – that happen naturally in other parts of the world, because pretty much nothing happens naturally in Singapore, and if it does, well that will be remedied quickly, not so much by eliminating that thing which happened naturally, but by finding some way to control it.)

I, of course, didn’t make it to night fall, because by six PM I was pretty much dead on my feet.  Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that the ground beneath my feet had a peculiar tendency to roll, as if I was in my own personal earthquake, a symptom of the jetlag and a phenomena that would take fully two weeks to stop completely.

The following days were much the same.  Up early, walking all day, working my way systematically through the various areas of Singapore (Colonial District, Central Business District, Chinatown, Little India, check check and check).  I went to my school, I met some faculty, I began to look for an apartment.  And I kept fighting the jetlag, and the heat, and the constant newness, which is perhaps my favorite thing to do, if all cards are laid on the table.

And by Friday, I began to have Singapore a little under my belt.  Enough so that I hopped a bus (well, no; I hopped a train to a train to a train to a 250 meter walk to a mad dash across six lanes of traffic to a bus) to MacRitchie Reservoir, which is both a public park and an attempt to ensure that Singapore has a water source should we face apocalypse and/or Malaysia stops supplying all of our water.  Among MacRitchie’s many offerings are an 11 kilometer trail through a forest populated by a number of animals, including packs of monkeys.

I had walked maybe ten minutes into the woods – less – when I noticed them.  On the trail, in the trees.  Walking overhead, jumping from limb to limb.  In Grand Teton, you walk onto a deer or a moose or a bear; in Singapore, you discover monkeys.

The monkeys that I watched foraged for food, and scratched their heads, and eventually had a quarrel amongst themselves.  The monkeys that my friend JB saw, on his walk a few weeks later, tried to bite him.  Everyone has their own experience.  (JB now carries a monkey stick when he goes hiking.  It’s five feet long and thick; I will let you know if if it proves effective.)

It’s late now in Singapore, the Singapore from which I’m writing, from which I have to be up early in the morning, from which I should go to bed.  But the Singapore of my first week, walking through the Monkey Forest, a little of that still lingers, and I will leave you with a small piece of it.

With the monkeys.  No monkey stick required.

Sweeping Generalisation I

The way that Singapore is like Asia, is that the dirty parts are dirty.

The way that Singapore is not like Asia, is that the nice parts are nice.

Green Relaxing Zone

As promised, photos from the Green Relaxing Zone, an “oasis” in the Taipei Airport.

The zone is a bit of gimmick.  It’s offered as a place to chill out and center oneself after a long flight (Taipei is one of the major hubs for EVA Air and China Air, so many passengers are in the middle of 17 – 24 hour transits).  And there are free massage chairs which offer a truly amazing ten minute massage.  It’s literally the case that I might not have made it through my flight if not for these massage chairs.

And yet, it’s also the case that the Green Relaxing Zone is a large scale advertisement for Taiwan.  All of the flora and fauna is native to the island, and as you wind your way through the museum-like displays, you are really looking at sweeping images of beaches, mountains, oceans and other natural jewels of Taiwan, all of which say (figuratively) “Come to Taiwain”.  It’s a soft sell, but it’s a sell.  (And did it work?  Well, I sort of want to go to Taiwan now…)

But the chairs!  Glorious body saving, back enriching, blood flow improving, relaxation ensuring massage chairs.  And for free, when gladly I would have paid ten or fifteen dollars (money, like time, means very little when you are in the middle of a day long air trip) for the luxury of such a service.

But instead, you stop in at the Duty Free shop, ask for a token – the token says Taiwan! on it – put the token into the slot, and….

Aaaah.

Midnight Sunrise (Flying to Singapore)

FLIGHT DETAILS

Number of Legs: Three (New York to Alaska, Alaska to Taiwan, Taiwan to Singapore)

Approximate Time of Each Leg: six hours; nine hours; four hours

Total Flying Time: 19 hours

Total Transit Time (with layovers): 24.5 hours

Total Calendar Time Elapsed: 36 hours*

Relative Amount of Daylight during Transit: 7 hours**

*Explanation of How Time Works: When flying to Singapore from New York, presuming you fly via Asia rather than Europe, you will cross the International Date Line.  And like * that *, you are in tomorrow.  When you make the reverse trip, you suddenly find yourself in yesterday.  This works in such a way that when you fly from Tokyo to Los Angeles, you make it to California some eight hours before you leave Japan.  And when you fly for 24 hours to Singapore from New York, it’s actually taken 36 hours to make the trip.

** Explanation of Daylight Hours: I had really hoped that I was wrong when I did the math on this before my flight.  I wasn’t.  This is how it goes: You leave New York (well, Newark) at 11:30 pm.  It’s dark.  You land in Anchorage at 2:30 in the morning, Alaska time.  It’s dark, even in August.  You take off at 3:30 or 4:00, about an hour later.  It’s starting to get light.  It’s not sunrise, more the intimation of sun.  You fly north for the first hour, such that those with an east-facing window continue to have a sliver of milky orange light visible just out of reach.  And then you turn west, and the sun is behind you, and you travel into tomorrow night, and you don’t see the sun again until you reach Taipei at six the following morning.  Which means that, if you leave Saturday evening and arrive Monday morning, you basically spend all of Sunday in darkness, except for a brief hour of almost sunrise.  This makes the flight worse, but the upside is it confuses your body so much it makes the jetlag better.

TRANSIT SHOUT OUTS

To EVA Air, for giving me an aisle seat in the row with extra leg room and no seats leaning back.  And for the ridiculous number of meals.

To the film “Wolverine”, which I watched on the plane, which has amazing action scenes, and which makes absolutely no sense.  Whatsoever.

To the airport in Anchorage, Alaska for being as weird as I had hoped.  (Though, alas, I could not see Russia.)

To the Taipei Airport, for the free massage chair in the “nature oasis”.  There will be photos soon.

To Changi Airport in Singapore, which looks like an Asian idea of a European idea of America.

And an extra shout out, also to Taipei, for this:

The Hello Kitty Nursery and Changing Room. I was invited to step inside by a couple with a baby, who said in reasonable English that it was empty. I managed to snap a few photos before a silent, frowning guard came in, looked around, and waited for me to leave.

New Jersey Transit

I get the train from Penn Station.  A friend takes me there.  I’ve been staying at her place the past few days, we had a date the night before (Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, doing a rather brilliant – if, yes, slightly too long – new piece about… well, about everything that NATO likes to do shows about, um, sure, yeah), she’s the person I’m going to miss the most when I leave and…

The question is raised.  Is the experience of missing someone, or of preparing to miss someone, is this a function of being afraid of whatever the next moment is (foreign country, grad school), or simply a genuine emotional reaction of commitment, attachment and loss?  (Are there even such things as genuine emotional reactions?)  And I don’t know.  My friend, she turns to me at one point and says “it will be okay”, and I don’t really know what either of us is referring to.

But I get overwhelmed by emotion.  And I think too much.  So.

We made each other mix CDs.  I gave her books, a DVD of pirated movies.  Things to remember each other by.  Because, the truth is I usually forget people.  And perhaps that is what missing, or preparing to miss, really is.  A way to make a bruise that will serve as a reminder.

She takes me to the station.  We don’t talk too much.  She puts me on the train, and we stand there, in the bowels of Penn Station, and waited.  For what, I don’t know.  For nothing.

A minute passes.  And it is time.

I sit there alone, look out the window, it’s tinted and dirty, hard to look through, but I see her on the other side, waving, waving at a train that isn’t moving yet, as she disappears from my view, and perhaps the other way as well.

And then train really is moving, and suddenly – a smile on my face.  I do so love to be in transit, going somewhere new.  And for awhile, as I go to the airport – yes, nothing but myself.

The last moment, as the train begins to pull out of Penn Station, and I put her on, not her mix for me, but my mix for her.  Because, her mix for me is what she wants me to take, but my mix for her is what I want to remember.  Everything I feel, it’s in the mix.  I’m saving hers for later; I want to exhaust mine.

And as the train pulls away, a song plays.  Something dreamy, half-whispered, almost like a dream.

We’re sleeping underneath the plastic trees

Turn off the sun, the wax fruit tastes lovely,

We ride the waves of simulated surf,

We make love on the fresh cut Astroturf

Memorize bliss,

Free as the day,

See right through me,

Like an X-Ray.