Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  And to satisfy greed, you must maintain efficiency and that is where fear comes in. All over the country, employees live in fear of failing to reach their targets. I saw a sign at Toa Payoh MRT station guaranteeing that 94 per cent of all train services would be on time. This is an astonishingly high figure that helps explain MRT kiasuism on so many different levels. In a way, those annoying passengers who push and shove their way onto the train before others get off have valid reasons for doing so. It is quite simply because that annoying woman on the recorded message is already announcing that the doors are closing three bloody seconds after the doors have opened. It is an insane race against the clock to get on board. I can recall at least two occasions during rush hour when I have travelled with a large group of colleagues and one of the others did not make it onto the train. Both times, we ended up waving goodbye to the one left behind on the platform in the same way that soldiers waved to their loved ones in the old war movies. Why is it such a mad rush? Simple. The guy up front driving the train is shitting his pants that his train may not fall within the 94 per cent band, which would then affect his bonus and put back his flat upgrading by a year. Just like Skippy the 238 Man knows he must complete his designated route within very stringent time limits.

  That, for me, is kiasuism. We are all guilty of it. I push past people to get on the train or the bus because I want to get on the damn thing. In those situations, it is a case of kill or be killed. Nevertheless, I really hate myself for doing it. I should know better and so should the Singaporeans who do it. The idea of self-help and pushing oneself to the limit was necessary for the republic to grow during its infancy but it is no longer necessary. The recent currency crisis, if nothing else, should have taught the shallow that there is more to life than greed. Living standards can still be improved without the need to eliminate all competition or to be first all of the time. So if you should find yourself at the end of a long taxi queue one day, waiting behind families and women with bags of shopping, do not be a prick and push in. There really will be another taxi along shortly.

  Chapter Seven

  My home is surrounded by lunatics. Oh, I do not mean the likes of Hannibal Lecter or my mother but merely the harmless weirdos who seem to frequent my apartment block from time to time, with the explicit intention of affording me as many laughs as possible. It seems these people were placed on Earth for people to laugh at them. It is their mission in life.

  And I am delighted to state for the record that living in Housing & Development Board (HDB) apartments in Singapore does provide the observant individual with more than enough nutcases to provide a few giggles. The best part is that they tend to zoom in on the quaint or the unusual, so being Caucasian and extremely tall, I get the lion’s share of all the lunatics on my estate.

  The first one latched onto me as I got off the number 143 bus at Jalan Toa Payoh one evening. He grunted the strangest greeting. ‘Hey, big boy,’ he shouted.

  Distant memories of Scott and I being drunk in a Leeds gay bar during our university days came flooding back. ‘Big boy.’ There it was again.

  I turned to find a large Chinese man walking just behind me, carrying shopping bags and wearing a huge grin.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said.

  ‘Wah, you big boy, ah? So strong. Jim?’

  ‘Who’s Jim?’

  ‘No, lah. You go gym to keep fit, is it?’

  ‘Oh, I see. Yeah, a few times a week.’ This was a blatant lie. You only need look at me to realise this but I was starting to like the guy. Then came the surreal interrogation.

  ‘Where you stay?’

  ‘Here. Toa Payoh.’

  ‘You on holiday?’

  ‘No, I live here.’

  ‘Which country?’

  ‘Singapore!’

  ‘No, lah. Which country you from?’

  ‘Oh! England.’

  ‘But you so big, you know. How come so big?’

  ‘Er, I play some sports.’

  ‘Oh! I’ve just bought some fish for dinner. You eat fish?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘How tall are you? Two metres?’

  ‘No, about 1.92 metres.’

  He looked me up and down, unconvinced. ‘No lah, you two metres. Which block you stay?’

  ‘Erm, that one over there.’ I pointed to the block that faces mine to avoid the possibility of him knocking on my door in the dead of night, holding a measuring tape and ready to prove me wrong.

  ‘Oh, I stay in that block.’ Shit, he nodded towards the block that I really do live in.

  ‘So, is your family tall?’

  ‘Quite tall.’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. I’m cooking fish tonight. Where are you going now?’

  ‘Oh, I’m just going over to the shop to buy some groceries and a big gun. Bye.’

  I still see the old sod now and again and he always calls out ‘big boy’, which has caused more than a few startled stares in my general direction. We usually talk about general stuff like my height, the weather, my height, food and my height. Whenever I have caught up with him, he is always on his own and I suspect he lives alone. Nevertheless, the jovial chap never stops smiling and likes nothing more than a brief chat, which is more than can be said for ‘Vidal Sassoon’.

  I first came across Vidal in a lift one morning, about three months after I had moved in. Wearing an old, faded samfoo, Vidal was already in the lift when I got in on the fifth floor. She then proceeded to stare up at me non-stop all the way down to the ground floor. That is only five floors, I hear you cry. Well, ask the person next to you to stare into your face for the next five seconds. It becomes just a trifle disconcerting, doesn’t it? Stepping out of the lift, Vidal turned to stare a little longer, almost blocking my path. I had to step around the old woman to get past her or I suspect we would still be there.

  The weirdest thing about Vidal is that she is everywhere. Wearing the same worn-out clothes and dirty flip-flops, I have seen her sitting at the void deck in the HDB estate, shuffling past the local coffee shop, strolling through Toa Payoh Central and even lurking at the end of Balestier Road, which is some two kilometres away. On each occasion, she always finds time to stop and stare at me with that same weary, expressionless face. It is quite chilling.

  All of that is nothing compared to the most shocking encounter that I have had with Vidal, an incident that terrified me to my very soul. One evening, I was reading the paper at the table in my living room when my girlfriend screamed. Looking up, I was greeted by the sight of Vidal’s little head peering through the door grille and into my living room.

  Like most Singaporeans, I often leave the front door open and keep the door grille locked to improve air circulation and reduce stuffiness. People do pass along the common corridor outside but they usually mind their own business. I certainly did not plan for the door grille to become an observation post for loopy old women.

  Momentarily, my girlfriend and I sat in stunned silence, as you do when a seventy-year-old woman stares at you sitting in your own living room. Luckily, she had only caught me performing the innocent act of reading the newspaper. I have the socially inept habit of scratching things that itch and it could have become quite a testing situation if I had been caught red-handed.

  The problem was that Vidal did not say anything. She just stared and I knew for a fact that she either did not understand English or, at least, had problems interpreting it. Whatever sentence I threw at her, her brain would probably translate it to mean ‘Hello, auntie. Please could you gawp at me for a little while longer because I’m really enjoying it.’

  After about twenty seconds of suffering intense staring, I could see my girlfriend looking at me, motioning that it was time for me to do something.

  ‘Hello, auntie. Ni hao ma?’ My pathetic attempt to win her over by asking how she was in Mandarin caused absolutely no reaction.

  ‘Okay, auntie. I think that’s enough peeping for one day. Off you go. Bye.’ I tried to shoo her away with my hand b
ut that only titillated her. She then started to smirk at my partner.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Neil. Get rid of her, will you? She’s grinning at me now,’ my girlfriend complained.

  ‘Auntie, time to go. No more looking, understand? Go away.’ More staring and more smirking. ‘Enough now. Please go. Bye.’

  Left with the distinct possibility of her standing there all night, I got up, smiled at her and closed the door. Walking back to the table, I was struck by the horrifying thought of my partner leaving for work the next morning and being greeted by a short, smirking auntie. The shock would probably have killed them both. I went back to the door and looked through the peephole to see if she was still there but the old bat had moved on to her next haunt. She still passes along the corridor occasionally but she merely turns her head and looks in briefly, she does not actually stop now.

  But here is the remarkable thing. Although Vidal is always wearing the same tatty samfoo and the same old battered flip-flops, she has the smartest hairstyle. I have spotted her on my way to work in the morning and again late at night when I am returning home and she always looks as though she has just stepped out of a salon. I have pointed her out to Singaporean friends and they agree that Vidal (now you know why I call her this) is a bizarre phenomenon who defies all logical explanation. After all, how do you explain a woman who wears the same clothes every day, has the brains of a rocking horse, yet wears her hair like Cameron Diaz?

  Nevertheless, even Vidal pales in comparison to ‘bra lady’, who, would you believe, also lives in my apartment block. Bra lady makes Vidal look like a professor in nuclear physics. She is so insane that I am convinced the asylum lets her out on day release just to provide the local community with a little comic relief.

  Like me, bra lady’s major hobby is travel, which she vigorously pursues in her spare time. However, like most people, I like to explore new countries and cultures whereas she likes to explore lifts. To be more specific, she likes to explore and travel in the lifts in my block throughout the whole bloody day. I think she believes that she performs the unofficial, unpaid duties of a lift attendant on behalf of the HDB.

  I vividly recall the first time I caught her in action. After pressing the button on the fifth floor, my partner and I watched the lift descend from the twelfth floor, stopping at every floor along the way before reaching ours. Mildly irritated at the delay, we got into the lift to find that the only other person in the lift was bra lady. Why did I christen her bra lady? Because she was performing her lift attendant duties while wearing her bra over her clothes. As women are more observant in these situations, my partner was the first to spot the large pink bra over bra lady’s shirt. My partner then elbowed me in the rib cage to get my attention. Trying to prevent myself from roaring with laughter, I distracted myself by approaching the lift panel to press the ground floor button. But, silly me, I had no need to fear because bra lady had already kindly pressed the button. In fact, she had courteously pressed every button on the panel, yet she did not alight at any of the floors and no one else got in.

  When we reached the ground floor, my girlfriend got out but I paused briefly to watch bra lady as she meticulously performed her professional duties of pressing every button on the panel from one to twelve. Staring straight ahead at all times and never once looking in our general direction, bra lady closed the doors of the lift and she began yet another ascent.

  I am fortunate enough to encounter cuckoos like bra lady, Vidal Sassoon and big boy on a fairly regular basis because I live in an HDB apartment block in Singapore. These government-built concrete, rectangular blocks, so often criticised by ignorant Western visitors, house all kinds of weird and wonderful people. In fact, by 1998, the HDB had built 833,814 units, housing 2,702,000 people – a figure that accounts for 86 per cent of the country’s population. I have lived in various HDB apartments for over four years now and I would not live anywhere else. Condominiums might provide swimming pools, saunas, barbecue pits and tennis courts, and I would be lying if I said I would not like having such facilities at the bottom of my block, but they lack a certain vibrancy that comes with living in HDB flats.

  Just a few weeks ago, a bunch of lower secondary schoolboys were kicking a ball around the void deck of my block. Now this is against the law and signs are plastered all around the void decks clearly stating that all ball games are prohibited. After all, these and other young lads could chip the paint, dirty the walls and cause considerable noise pollution for the residents living above. So being an upstanding young fellow of the HDB community, what did I do? I asked to join in, of course. We all had a great laugh. Then I received two major shocks. First, I found out that one of the Chinese lads was, like me, a West Ham United supporter and had been all his life. In a country where kiasuism prevails, Singaporeans have a tendency to follow winners like Manchester United, Liverpool or Arsenal. Therefore, I had never met a Singaporean who supported my East London team. The boy then floored me again by giving me a golden West Ham United sticker badge as a gift. The sticker badge now sits proudly on the side of my computer monitor. And as I stare at it now, it reminds me of the warmth, friendliness and safety that comes with living in an HDB flat. These feelings could not be extended back to England.

  In my second year at Manchester University, Elizabeth, one of the girls I was sharing a house with, brought a guy she had met at a bar back home with her. If she had walked through the door with a so-called HDB heartlander, I would have relaxed but the guy was a violent local, who, when informed by my ever-so-subtle housemate that she did not want to sleep with him after all, promptly went mental. He took half a crate of beer (he had drunk the other half) and smashed it around the living room. He then proceeded towards the front door where he was met by a half-asleep Reza, our other housemate. Now Reza, who is half-Indian, half-Polish and born and raised in Lancashire, has this unshakable habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That night was no exception. Taking a nap, he was woken up by the slightly odd sound of beer cans being smashed outside his bedroom. Rousing himself, he opened his bedroom door to find a psychopath redecorating our hallway with beer. Equally shocked by the presence of a half-Polish, half-Indian man dressed in pyjamas, the lunatic head-butted Reza before smashing his way out of the house. We later heard that the Mancunian lunatic lived nearby. Such neighbourly behaviour puts Vidal Sassoon’s peeping Tom exploits into perspective.

  It also helps illustrate some of the differences between the housing environment that I left behind and the one that I am a part of today. Here, Singaporean children play football below my HDB block and I join in. When I was living in Dagenham, children amused themselves by lighting fires outside the doctor’s surgery located opposite my mother’s house. Neighbours, including my mother, would tell them to pack it in or they would call the police. They were usually told to ‘fuck off’. Quite a contrast.

  Since its inception in 1960, the Housing & Development Board has, without doubt, done a remarkable job of building not only houses for its people but also creating a clean and safe environment for its residents. In 2000, Singapore had a population of 4.1 million, creating a population density of 5,900 per square kilometre. In the United States, the population density is just 29 per sq. km. In my country, it is 238 per sq. km. So we are talking about a lot of Singaporeans living in a very small space.

  After writing a thesis on municipal housing at university, I find the HDB’s accomplishments astounding. More so when you consider the state of Singapore in 1960. Then, wooden houses built on stilts formed kampungs, or villages. Although these kampungs fostered a sense of community, similar to the London slums at the end of the nineteenth century, the homes themselves could be hazardous. In May 1961, for instance, a fire at Bukit Ho Swee left around 16,000 people homeless. Remarkably though, the HDB had managed to build flats for all these people by February 1962. By the 1970s, the HDB had pretty much solved the nation’s housing problems. They may not look pretty but, like my old housing estate in Dagenham, HD
B apartments put a modern roof over the heads of its people.

  A modern house, however, does not necessarily make for a home. When I studied my own housing estate, I discovered that its newcomers often returned to their London slums because they missed being part of a close-knit community. The Singaporean government is faced with that same problem today.

  Residents often lament the loss of the kampung collective spirit that died when their wooden homes were bulldozed. My friends are forever telling me stories about how they shared cups of sugar with neighbours and how all the children in the kampung played together, went to school together and ate together. Nowadays, people tend to care only about family members living under the same roof. The grille to their HDB unit is locked and they close themselves off from their neighbours. They will exchange pleasantries in the hallway but that is about as far as it goes. If you walk along the void deck of any HDB block, the sight of old-timers sitting and chatting will invariably confront you. They still share that kampung bond. With the younger, more affluent generations now living in self-contained units, this bond no longer exists. The nature of one’s improved environment has allowed individualism to supersede collectivism.

  Of course, it is a social phenomenon that is not unique to Singapore. Even after my housing estate was built in the 1920s, its inhabitants valiantly tried to reestablish their old East London cockney communities. Back garden fences were kept low and neighbours would often chat across them. I once saw my mother hold a three-way conversation with two neighbours, each of whom lived five houses down from my mother’s in opposite directions.