Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  Without telling the others, I began to panic after about two hours. We had not really seen any kind of footpath since the quarry, the trees were tall and thorny plants were ripping our bare legs to shreds. None of us were equipped for this kind of trekking and it was almost 5:30 p.m. This meant that not only was the park due to close in half an hour but, far more worryingly, it would start to get dark after 7 p.m. We had no food or drink left, no mosquito repellent and we were positively melting. None of us were wearing hats and I lost count of the number of times that I was scratched on the head by thorns. I was then struck by the terrifying thought – no one knew that we were here. The reserve, sensibly assuming that no one would be foolish enough to leave the footpaths, had no monitoring system that I was aware of. We had not told anyone that we were visiting the nature reserve that day and I had no hand phone then. (Oddly enough, I bought one in Toa Payoh the following day, I cannot think why.) Put simply, we could scream and not be heard, we could jump around and not be seen and I was beginning to wonder if we could die and not be found. At about the same time, everyone in the group suddenly became upbeat and jovial. This artificial mood swing worried me. They, too, shared the same concerns as me.

  With six o’clock rapidly approaching, we stopped for a while to think things through. We all agreed later that had we not conceived a viable solution then, we would have seriously started to panic. Something strange then happened. I am not a religious man but I am convinced that a touch of fate made me have one last look around an area that we had already covered with a fine-tooth comb several times. I vividly recall looking over my right shoulder and spotting a huge rock that protruded slightly through the trees. I was certain that we had walked past that rock on the way because I remembered seeing a squashed cola can, which had surprised me seeing as we were so far off the beaten track. Without saying anything to the others, I made my way over to the rock. The mashed-up coke can was by the side of the rock and just beyond it was a footprint made by one of Kirk’s trainers. For a brief second, I shared the exhilaration of Howard Carter after he had discovered Tutankhamen’s tomb. Then I felt like a man who had not eaten for three hours and I shouted at the others to get a bloody move on.

  After reaching the footpath, I decided to use the video camera to record the episode for posterity. When I watch it with others now, I laugh at the craziness of it all. When I watch it by myself, I find myself quite shocked by it. While I recorded, the other three stood still in silence. None of them attempted to make any conversation and they only looked at the camera fleetingly. My girlfriend had a couple of awful gashes on her knee. Kirk was extremely red-faced and, like me, was covered in mud. Poor Jodie was wiping her tear-stained face and trying to regain a regular breathing pattern following a breathing fit she had had a couple of minutes earlier. We certainly learnt from the incident.

  Despite the odd horror story, exploring Singapore can be a great laugh. The zoo, with its natural, open concept has to be one of the best in the world, while the first and only time I have stood transfixed was at the Night Safari, which is apparently the world’s only night zoo, as a group of giraffes ran together across a field under the cover of darkness with the stars twinkling overhead. It may not be the Serengeti Plain and ultimately the animals are still not free but it is not a bad substitute.

  At Sungei Buloh Nature Park, a great wetland reserve that is strangely ignored by many tourists, I encountered the fattest, longest monitor lizard that I have ever seen. It was relaxing by its swamp on a sun lounger, enjoying the midday Sun. For a working-class urchin from Dagenham, it was quite a wildlife experience. In the words of the great Sir David Attenborough, I shat myself. Obviously evicted from Jurassic Park, I was certain the miniature T-Rex was eyeing me up for dinner so I snapped a picture and ran off to change my trousers. Such creatures are rarely spotted down the high streets of suburban London.

  Singaporeans complain that there is nothing to do here but, in the next breath, tell me that they have never been to the Night Safari or Sungei Buloh. However, they have been to London Zoo, which is quite simply crap in comparison to the one in Singapore, and Regent’s Park. Just like I have never stepped inside St. Paul’s Cathedral but I have marvelled at the architecture of Notre Dame in Paris. We are all hypocrites and I intend to make up for lost travels when I eventually return to England.

  For a country that is only 42 km long and 23 km wide, the list of things to do, in my opinion at least, is mind-boggling. If Sir Stamford Raffles arrived with his family today, he would be flying down the water slides at Fantasy Island by day and getting sloshed with the other expatriates at Clarke Quay by night. Of course, travel is travel and I would never discourage Singaporeans from taking their families to experience foreign cultures but there is plenty to see here. So jump in a car, preferably your own, and head for the East Coast, Mount Faber, MacRitchie Reservoir or any place for that matter that you have not visited for a few years. I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised.

  Chapter Ten

  Sitting on an aircraft almost continuously for 16 hours does several things to the mind and body. First, it turns you into a battery hen with a backside so numb that if you fell out of the window at 30,000 feet and manoeuvred your body to land on it, your backside would save your life. Second, it becomes increasingly evident (Singaporean civil service departments and Singaporean bus companies, please take note here) that there are only so many times you can watch Mr Bean before it begins to seriously rankle with your senses.

  Worst of all, air travel makes you Game Boy crazy. Or to be more specific, Tetris crazy. This is the game that transforms you not into a swashbuckling detective or a muscle-bound street fighter but into a bricklayer. Your mission, wait for it, is to build countless brick walls as fast as possible. Mark my words, there will always be one snotty-nosed kid, well within earshot, who will play the brick game at full volume while on an aeroplane. Within five minutes, you are left with no alternative but to approach the boy, grab the game out of his hands and whack him over the head with it. Anyone who feels my recommendation is a trifle brusque has obviously never heard the theme tune to Tetris. It is repetitive, childlike and seeps through your brain cells. Weeks later, you can be standing in a queue at the bank and find yourself singing at the top of your voice, ‘Do dee do-do do do-dee do-do do do dee do-do do.’ This irritating tune eats away at you for the rest of your life.

  So imagine how Scott and I felt after 16 hours of all this as we made our way towards Singapore in late 1996. Mr Bean had just fallen off the diving board and lost his trunks again and the kid in front with the runny nose had just started his 485th game of Tetris. We were praying for something stimulating to happen. Having already formulated seventeen different ways to murder a small child with a Game Boy cartridge, I decided to leaf through my guidebook of Singapore.

  In just one paragraph, we found our second wind and laughed so much that even snotty-nosed Game Boy paused his wall-building mission to turn around. The book noted that Singapore (i.e., the government) has tried so hard to reshape itself that it has fallen into self-parody. To support this claim, it quoted a Singaporean politician as saying the country had to pursue fun very seriously to stay competitive in the 21st century. What an inspired, unforgettable comment.

  Once Scott and I had stopped laughing, we were struck by a worrying concern. What kind of people were we letting ourselves in for? Joking about it was one thing but if foreign observers were complaining that the country was dull and lacking in humour and politicians were responding with such a painfully-serious reply, were we heading towards an island of sombre, humourless Singaporeans?

  Sitting open-mouthed and stunned in a cinema a week later, we were terrified that we might have been right. At the risk of being shot down in flames here, the locally produced movie Army Daze left us shell-shocked. David had suggested we watch a homegrown movie that would provide us with a slice of local life. It was a comedy that had been adapted from a highly successful stage play about the trials a
nd tribulations of National Service (NS) and had been taking the country by storm. It did not turn the cast and crew into overnight millionaires by any means but at least it did not star Jean Claude van Damme or Sylvester Stallone so it was certainly a step in the right direction. The audience was made up prominently of young male Singaporeans in their twenties, i.e., people like David who had already done their NS and could relate to the story.

  About twenty minutes into the movie, our worst fears were being realised. This really was an island of unfunny people. I genuinely believed I was watching the worst comedy since the terrible Carry On Columbus. Staring on in disbelief, Scott and I were stunned to find the auditorium roaring with laughter. No matter where we turned, we were faced with young, red-faced Singaporeans with tears streaming down their faces.

  Initially, I went for the obvious conclusion that we were from a different culture and, therefore, could not possibly appreciate the localised jokes and the colloquial language. Having been so impressed with the country to that point, I desperately tried to enjoy the movie but the corny gags were relentless and only slightly less predictable than Scott constantly leaning over and shouting ‘This film’s fucking shit’ every other minute. I remember one particular visual ‘gag’ that still makes me cringe. The limp-wristed, effeminate character, who was obsessed with his appearance, tried on his new army uniform and then walked up and down the corridor as if it were a catwalk. Even the camp Carry On movie series of the sixties, which I had watched as a child, had more originality than this. Nevertheless, bladders seemed to be leaking all around me.

  Later that evening, I tried to console Scott who was deeply distraught by the whole affair.

  ‘Look Scott, we’ve only been here a week. We haven’t done national service and not all of the film was in English.’

  ‘So? It had subtitles, didn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, but you can’t read.’

  ‘Bollocks. I can’t believe I had to pay S$7 to watch that shit. Chicken rice is only S$2 and I know which one I’d rather have. And what that fuck were they all laughing at?’

  ‘It’s just local humour, isn’t it? We couldn’t expect them to understand a film that was in a London cockney dialect.’

  I was wrong on both counts and I knew it. Humour is universal as that bloody Mr Bean has proven over the years. I reminded myself of this just recently when Army Daze was repeated on television. Being a sucker for nostalgia, I settled down to watch it with my girlfriend who had never seen it. Guess what? It was still crap. Being more in tune with the local culture, there was only one joke that I had missed the first time. There was a fast-talking, Hokkien-speaking, gambling, streetwise teenager who behaved just like an Ah Beng and whose name happened to be Ah Beng. His character did make me laugh. As for the rest of the movie, well, it seemed dated when it was made and it now seemed prehistoric.

  None of this, however, matters any more. I am no longer paranoid about a faceless mass of boring Singaporeans because they do not exist and I am not sure that they ever did. Since coming here, I have encountered more than a handful of funny Singaporeans, some of whom should be receiving psychiatric treatment.

  Take crazy Chinese drummers, for example, or one huge Chinese drummer called Ah Heng to be precise. Ah Heng performed the drumming duties for the Tanjong Pagar United Fan Club. Tanjong Pagar United is one of the professional football teams here and plays in the S-League, the national league. Do not ask me how but I somehow ended up becoming vice chairman of the fan club for a year or so and we managed to win the S-League Fan Club of the Year award in 1998, something that I am quite proud of.

  I have always believed that a good testing ground for a community’s sense of humour is on the terraces of its local football club. Needless to say, I was delighted to discover that Singaporean football fans also share the piss-taking wit of the terraces. Every time a referee makes a perceived error, one half of the stadium will instantly cry, ‘Referee kayu, referee kayu.’ After asking around, I learnt that kayu means ‘wood’ in Malay. In this context, then, the referee is ‘dead wood’ or a ‘plank’. I have always loved the word ‘plank’ ever since I was endlessly called one at school. There are dozens of terms you can use to call someone a moron or an idiot but I love the word ‘plank’ because it sounds dopey too. Thus, whenever Singaporeans call a referee a plank, they do not hear any complaints from me.

  Ah Heng, in particular, was very fond of the term and would scream it over the top of his incessant drumming in the terraces of Tanjong Pagar’s football grounds. Now it must be said that he was no Phil Collins but he did have impeccable comic timing. Like football fans the world over, I despise professional footballers when they insult the average supporter’s intelligence by performing their dying swan act. It fools no one except that plank with the whistle. We have all witnessed it. The winger breaks free on the left and hares towards the goal just as the chasing full-back accidentally sneezes some ten yards away. Right on cue, the winger goes down as if he has been shot by a cannon and before anyone has even had the chance to call the diver a wanker, the plank arrives to book the defender for the offending sneeze and to nominate the dying man for an Academy Award. To add insult to injury, the winger must now see his performance through and pretend he is really injured so the game is delayed while six fat guys pant and wheeze across the field with a stretcher. Enter Ah Heng, the perturbed percussionist with huge drumsticks. As the ‘injured’ winger groans theatrically, our drummer strikes up a sombre beat that causes hysterical laughter from the crowd. The first time Ah Heng played this beat, I asked the Chinese auntie next to me what he was playing and she told me it was played at Chinese funerals. Call me insensitive but I thought it was absolutely delightful. By this stage, other drummers had joined in, some of the kids were clapping along and just about everybody was laughing. It was marvellous. The world’s worst actor was being carried off to the Chinese funeral march. West Ham fans performed a similar ritual when I was a kid. Whenever an opponent went down, be it genuine or feigned, the West Ham faithful would simultaneously cry ‘Nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw, nee-naw’, mimicking the sound of an ambulance. The Tanjong Pagar fans went a stage further and actually killed off the guy.

  However, there is certainly more to life than football and there is certainly more to local humour than S-League football fans. Beginning to feel a little guilty for my savaging of Army Daze, I began to look out for other homegrown comedies and so started to watch Under One Roof. It is a sit-com based around a stereotypical Singaporean HDB-dwelling family. The wife is a caring but nagging, mahjong-playing housewife who loves to gossip with the neighbours, the daughter is a typical overachieving Singaporean student, one son is a lazy cad obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes and the other is a hypochondriac. These characters make the show watchable for many but, for me, it is the father who is the real scene stealer. His stinging rebukes to his children are razor sharp and he ends every episode with a story of extremely dubious origins.

  I mention this character only because I have met Singaporeans who are really like this. My landlord, Uncle Kong, is a fine example. Larger than life, he loves spending time with what he calls his ‘big family’ and he kindly includes my girlfriend and me in this circle. He started laughing about five minutes after we first met him and I do not think that he has stopped since. No topic of conversation is beyond his amusement. We have discussed our apartment, starting a family, politics, moving back to England, the weather and even the soft drinks sold at a particular chicken restaurant and somehow he has always managed to make a joke out of whatever we have been talking about. The best part is that no one has ever found Uncle Kong’s quips funnier than the man himself. We were once discussing the high crime rates in England as compared to Singapore and he immediately put it down to lifts.

  ‘What’s it got to do with lifts?’ I foolishly asked.

  ‘No good for burglars. Can only carry one thing at a time. Got to take the video, then go down. Come back up, take television, then go back dow
n again. Have a rest, drink kopi. Come back up, take VCD player. It takes so long to rob HDB flats. English houses much better. No lifts so can take more much faster. Make more money, lah.’

  However, it does not stop at Uncle Kong. At Tanjong Pagar United, we used to have regular fan club meetings and there were plenty of self-deprecating comments. There was a lovely guy called Sunny who, after being congratulated on the birth of his third child, said, ‘We’re going to call him Shafiq. So now we have Taufiq and Shafiq. Our next baby will be called traffic.’ As in most cultures, names are taken quite seriously in the Malay community so for him to make such a joke in a room full of Chinese and Malays may not have been a laughing matter, but it was.

  In fact, the younger generations are finding more comical outlets than ever before. In 1999, a small London-based gangster movie called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels sneaked into Singapore with little fanfare. Like most so-called artistic overseas movies, it was put on at the Picturehouse and should have realistically expected a run of around two weeks. If I recall correctly, it was playing to packed houses for at least six weeks and received rave reviews all over the island. I will admit that I had a vested interest because the actors in this film had the same accent as me, a rarity in most movies shown in Singapore. Nonetheless, Singaporeans found it hilarious, proving my theory that what is funny is funny no matter where you are. This was the London equivalent of Army Daze in that it was a homegrown movie about a certain London lifestyle. The film’s dialogue was even sprinkled with cockney rhyming slang, which is not properly understood outside of London, so I sat in the Picturehouse with a warm glow as the laughter echoed around the auditorium.