Singapore Swing (24 page)

Singapore has been branded as a preserve of intolerance, but what I see is different; there is a lot of tolerance in the city-state judging by its people
and
its leadership.

‘The problem here,' he says ‘is that the PAP treats its direct opponents very badly. They were detained without trial, they have no voice in the mainstream media, they are hit with defamation suits… But it doesn't mean that the government treats its
citizens
badly. The distinction is too fine for the Western media and it sells no papers. “Lee Kuan Yew as a tyrant” sells.'

I agree. I have read a university thesis positing that Raffles is being brandied as the creator of Singapore and its previous Malay past expunged, because it makes it easier for the people to accept a one-man-leadership in modern times: Lee Kuan Yew's. The idea might appeal in the confines of an academic ivory tower, but it makes no sense on the field. Just a short walk in town will demonstrate that Singaporeans have not averted their gaze from their pre-Raffles past – the opposite is true: excavations, exhibitions and plaques seek to shed light on its pre-colonial history, obsessively one might say.

Alex looks at his hands which he keeps binding and unbinding together.

‘People email me and ask me “What shall I do at customs when I arrive in Singapore. What can I bring? What CDs? What DVDs?”'

I snigger. I have seen my own books displayed in bookshops. I have seen some dissidents' books, too. Travel guides warn you that if customs find any books in your luggage, they can charge you $75 – the administrative cost for the censors to read them for approval. Then, when you arrive, they wave you through.

‘Exactly. The point is, the laws are there and can be used to threaten you so you exercise self-control. They're not really after you. They want the penalty to be there, so that you worry about it. They want you to control yourself so that they don't have to control you, but the moment you free yourself from that worry, you are a lot more liberated.'

There is one thing that can enhance Singapore's reputation: its multicultural character and the success it has in race relations. Lee Kuan Yew tried hard to forge a sense of nationhood after the riots and the split with Malaysia, what with competitions to find a national flower and all, but he succeeded.

‘They tried very hard. There was a time – I would think something like the late 1970s early 1980s – when they decided they had to invent a National Costume.' Alex falls back laughing. ‘The Malays had one, the Indians had one, the Scots had one, why the Greeks have one don't they? So they decided that Singapore must have its own National Costume. And they came up with this Hawaiian shirt with orchids all over the place: utterly gaudy – so effeminate looking. It was sold in shops all over town. No one bought it. They all went bust.'

I chortle.

‘They were trying very hard. I remember: the competition for the national flower and then came the national floral shirt. More like the great national embarrassment. Not one of their better ideas.'

- 28 -

The waiter arrives with our orders. I check the fried carrot cake. It looks like an omelette with prawns and white radish. It tastes fantastic and I'm a little disappointed; the only food whose reputation is deserved, must surely be the durian.

I move to the subject of nationhood: Singapore seems to have succeeded where others failed dismally. Look at the Balkans and former Yugoslavia. They couldn't stand each other –

‘…although they had to live together.'

How very true. They were forced to choose, they had to
belong
. I mean, what makes a country? Can it be manufactured? Before partition Pakistan didn't think of itself as separate from India.

‘You know the origin of the name Pakistan?'

I thought it was the Land of the Pure.

‘Not quite. It is an acronym. They put together the initials of the Muslim provinces. “P” for Punjab, “a” for the Afghan areas of the region, “k” for Kashmir, “s” for Sind and “tan” for Baluchistan, thus forming “Pakstan”. The “i” was added in the English rendition of the name. The word also captured in the Persian language the concepts of “pak”, meaning “pure”, and “stan”, meaning “land” thus giving it indirectly the meaning “Land of the Pure”.'

Alex sits back smugly.

‘They invented it! And you know what? Do you know there are Muslim Indians here in Singapore?'

There are, in Farrer Park, around the Mustafa Centre.

‘Correct. Some of them are from South India and they still identify as Tamil, but most of them are from Northern India and their forefathers migrated before the break-up. But now they are starting to say: I'm Pakistani. How can that be? Your forefathers didn't come from Pakistan 'cos Pakistan didn't exist when your forefathers disembarked from the boat. That notion of Pakistani/ Singaporean: where did it come from? The concept would have been alien to their grandfather who came from “India”.'

People are forced to identify.

‘Exactly.'

Still, I come to Singapore and I observe how people of different races exist side by side in harmony. In order to make this explosive mixture – mainly the Malays and the Chinese – live together, an identity had to be forged – and was
.
How did they do it? By force? Did economic success bind communities? What will happen in a slump?

Alex writhes in his seat.

‘We are generally
civil
to each other,' he corrects me. ‘I don't know if we live in harmony, but we are civil to each other. Have you tried to get a seat on an MRT train? Civility there goes out of the window!'

I know, but by hook or by crook, the PAP have achieved something.

‘It is a question of practicalities, and yes there are many things that are wrong. But there are things that are very good,' he concedes.

I want to hear about those Singapore successes; maybe there are lessons to be learned for us in Britain. Many immigrants have arrived and very suddenly. We have a second generation of Muslims, some of whom are rejecting the values of the country they were born in. Plus we are crammed. Not as much as Singapore, but we are becoming more crammed, nevertheless. So guess what? The government is starting to micromanage the social relations – just like Singapore does. Has Alex heard of ASBOs?

‘What's that?'

They are Antisocial Behaviour Orders. If someone is behaving ‘antisocially' then a magistrates' court can order them not to approach a specific area. They impose a curfew. Some are extreme; one 17-year-old in Wales has been banned from the very street he lives in. So he can't use his front door and is only allowed to use a footpath leading to the back of his house.

Alex laughs. ‘That's new to me. We haven't gone that far yet.'

I lean back, my mind spinning with theories. The more we grow in population and diversity, the more we seem to be imitating the ways of a country the Western press used to deride. Maybe there is no other way forward, but Singapore's.

Alex sits up. ‘It may be politically incorrect to say that, but the reality is that people are not naturally nice to each other. Some degree of management has to be put in place until people learn to see the other person as the same kind as them. And I can tell you that we have such an example in Singapore's history. When the Chinese migrants came here in large numbers – that would have been the latter decades of the nineteenth century, the early decades of the twentieth– people didn't come here as Chinese. They came here as Cantonese, as Hokkien, Teochew and so on, because they spoke mutually unintelligible languages. They couldn't even call a dish the same name. The city itself was ghettoised. There was a Cantonese area, a Hokkien area – here from the corner up was the Hainanese area – settlers from the island of Hainan. And if you were a Teochew straying into the Hainanese ghetto you were an alien. People used to identify themselves by the province.'

He stops to drink some water. Alex doesn't drink alcohol. He is not a teetotaller, but he's not a great liquor fan either, avoiding it whenever he can.

‘After the overthrow of the last emperor, there was a surge of Chinese nationalism. The Chinese intellectuals said: “In order to make ourselves a country we need to unify these various provinces” – we are now talking mainland China. So they created the national language out of nowhere. The Mandarin you hear is a created language. It is based on the Peking high dialect. But it wasn't spoken elsewhere like that– it was imposed. Because in the old days, when there was no technology, the Chinese communicated by letters, by script. People could read the words and they were the same everywhere. But if I read a letter aloud to you and I was Cantonese and you were Hokkien, you would not understand. Chinese script was perfect for running an empire: we don't have to speak the same language as long as the same written character means the same to you and me. But to create a nation, they had to create a unified pronunciation – and they chose the Mandarin pronunciation of Peking –
Beijing
, see?'

Like Israel and Hebrew. ‘

Here in Singapore we were swept up in this wave of Chinese republicanism and nationalism and the community leaders– the Hokkien community, the Cantonese community, the Teochew community – changed their schools
on their own
from being dialect-teaching to Mandarin-teaching. This happened in the 1930s. Starting from that period, there was a melting down of the barriers between the various communities. Once you have a Hainanese boy who is able to speak Mandarin and a Hokkien girl who is also able to speak Mandarin, they start falling in love. They intermarry and the barriers between the communities break down. And because the only communication they can have between each other is in Mandarin, the children are raised as Mandarin-speaking. Three generations later, people do not identify themselves as Hokkien or as Cantonese but as Chinese. That change has happened.'

So it wasn't the PAP that imposed Mandarin as part of its great nation-building exercise?

‘No, the Mandarin schools preceded government action. There was some official intervention: the PAP government banned dialect-teaching altogether. Much later, in the 1980s –'

The period of forging nationhood...

‘ – they changed the Mandarin schools to English schools. I'm talking to you in English, am I not? How did that happen? The PAP killed the Mandarin schools because it needed to create a country that went beyond the Chinese community. Just blending the Chinese provinces was not enough. They had to include the Indians and the Malays and the Arabs and the Thais and the Europeans. It had to be English.'

In England we allow faith schools, we allow instruction, court interpreters, social security leaflets in other languages…

‘When you are dealing with first generation immigrants you have no choice. But you need to know when not to overdo it; it would be foolish to encourage it into the second and third generation. I'll tell you something else. People in Little India, Chinatown, Kampong Glam, they don't live there. They go there to work. They go there to shop because they can buy the spices and all. Singaporeans live in public housing – the vast majority anyway. Do you know we have race quotas for public housing?'

What?

‘Race quotas. In any given block you have to have 75 per cent Chinese and so on, to reflect at neighbourhood level the country's ethnic mix. You are not allowed as an individual to choose too much, because they know that people like to live among their own kind. And this is the way to create ghettos. You don't want a situation when, during some unrest, you can clamp down and barricade the streets.'

We had riots in Bradford, we had riots in Brixton…

‘Or in France? In Singapore, they don't allow this situation to occur. Living with racial quotas is easier for the majority than the minority of course. But I am not sure that there are any other, softer ways of achieving the same thing. It is very illiberal: “you can not live there, there's far too many of you there,” kind of thing, but I would be hard-pressed to offer an alternative myself.'

That Singaporean way again.

‘And we have not had any riots. Whereas in Europe where there were separate Serb and Croat villages and areas in town, there was a descent to barbarism. Everyone was behaving like animals when, as you say, they were forced to identify. So maybe there is something to be said for micromanagement of social relations. The question is of course, where you stop. At what depth you go with this.'

So the lessons are that we should acquiesce to ASBOs, break up any ghettos and promote English as a unifier?

Alex grins in anticipation. ‘Not always. I overheard something in town today. There was a massage parlour. I saw this doorman doing business with a tourist and the tourist was a difficult customer to sell to. He wasn't so interested and the doorman was trying to entice him. Now, what he meant to say was, “I will give you a 30-minute massage for 20 dollars,” which we all understand and makes sense. But it came out wrong. What he actually said was, “If you take the 30-minute massage, I give you 20 dollars.”'

Hehe.

‘This is also what happens in multicultural societies. People speak in a broken language all the time. Misunderstandings are waiting to happen.'