Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  If this sounds patronising, then I can only say that the facts do not lie. Singaporeans have traditionally chomped their popcorn while digesting the action fare of Jackie Chan and Sylvester Stallone in films where the humour is usually as subtle as a kick in the testicles. The majority of the Lock Stock audience were young Singaporeans. In fact, the audience had a similar demographic makeup to the one watching Army Daze back in 1996. Although cinema fans remain the same homogenous bunch in Singapore, their comic tastes are changing. It now takes a little more than just a limp-wristed teenager walking in an effeminate manner to evoke hilarity.

  Even to this day, when talking to Western friends, I am still irritated by the negative perceptions of the Singaporean people. The stereotypical notion that the country is populated by passive, dull citizens remains a strong one and all the hip talk of transforming the island into a ‘funky town’ seems to have had little influence. I cannot think why. The very idea of calling somewhere a funky town smacks of self-parody and therein lies the problem for me. In Singapore, it is not the people who take themselves too seriously but the nation’s government. And before anyone bursts a blood vessel, I am not being critical here.

  When the PAP took control in 1959, it was hardly the time for fun and games. The fledgling government was left with a hungry population that was living in homes fit for demolition with the kind of sanitation fit for dysentery; not really the time to open a fine bottle of port, chomp on a cigar and crack a few funnies. Only Winston Churchill had that privilege, safe in the knowledge that Nazi troops were only 22 miles from his country’s borders.

  Naturally, the PAP spent its formative years getting its house in order. Its leaders went about providing modern education and medical facilities for its people and left the one-liners and the corny sound bites to the likes of Kennedy, Reagan, Thatcher and Major (okay, I put the last one in for a laugh). Call me naive but politicians are paid to formulate policy, not to be comedians, bent accountants or war mongers.

  The trouble is that politicians are the front-line receptionists to the world. Singaporean politicians are the only Singaporeans that the rest of the planet usually gets to hear and see. My mates back in Dagenham are not going to get to laugh with the piss-taking Tanjong Pagar fans or chuckle at Uncle Kong’s old stories but they will read on in disbelief when a high-ranking official makes comments about having to take fun seriously. To an outsider, it sounds like a nation completely devoid of a sense of humour. What other first impression could such a ridiculous comment possibly give?

  Almost every day, some faceless bureaucrat gives some bog-standard response to a genuine enquiry in the Forum pages of the Straits Times. Whether the subject matter be road tax, crime rates or even the delayed start of a popular radio show, the official rejoinders are always given in an awfully patronising and robotic way. The only thing that surprises me is that the civil servant concerned is happy enough to sign his name to the drivel. Does he have no pride at all? Does his annual bonus mean that much to him? It saddens me because this is the Singapore that is read about all over the world, thanks to the Internet. Westerners cannot be blamed for forming the view that the country is mundane and humourless when these monotonous public replies are endlessly churned out.

  The United States gave the world Coca-Cola, Oprah Winfrey and Jim Carrey. England gave football, most of the world’s boy bands and Mr Bean while Singapore gave civil servants explaining, in a completely staid and restrained way, why lifts in HDB flats may have to be partly subsidised by the taxpayer. Not really funky, is it?

  In fact, just the other day I was listening to Capital Gold, a London radio station, on the Internet and the D.J. was bemoaning the state of public services in England’s capital, complaining, in particular, about the ambulance service. ‘A recent survey,’ he said, ‘showed that the call-out time for an ambulance is now 18 minutes, yet your local pizza takeaway promises to deliver within three minutes. So I reckon the next time you have a heart attack, order a pizza and ask the delivery boy to drop you off at the hospital on his way back.’ Now I thought this was funny. Could you imagine two local D.J.s making a similar wisecrack here? The civil servants would have an absolute field day.

  There would be letters to the Straits Times from Mr Tan, the PR supervisor for the ambulance call-out timing department, stating something like ‘We’d just like to point out that although we thought the D.J.’s comments were quite humorous in a comical sort of way, they were, in fact, quite incorrect. A survey shows that our ambulances arrive at the scene within 17.8 minutes, which would make them the most efficient in the Southeast Asian region and an improvement of some 15 per cent. This statistic is up on last year’s figure by 6.8 per cent, which is part of an overall upward trend of 2.5 per cent over the last 4.8 years. By now, I should have confused you with all the statistics and you will have impatiently turned over to the Sports pages to check your 4-D results.’ This letter would, of course, be printed next to a letter from Mr Tay, media consultant for the food, health, safety and pizza department, who would seriously rebuke the D.J. for his potentially dangerous misinformation by writing ‘It’s in the public interest to note that pizza delivery boys are not equipped to carry sick passengers to hospital. Even if there is a basket on the front of the moped, this basket is designed to carry no more than five pizza boxes. Research carried out suggests that the basket could not possibly hold a human being going through the advanced stages of an epileptic fit. According to pizza regulations, any delivery person caught carrying a sick passenger on their moped while on duty risks being transferred to a burger outlet.’ Such letters appear almost every day and the rest of Singapore, including many of the politicians that these letter writers supposedly represent, is left with no choice but to cringe in embarrassment.

  However, I am determined to show that the average man, woman or child on the street is not like that. Let’s face it, civil servants are boring the world over, otherwise they would not be civil servants, would they? So we can throw them out of the equation and preferably into a bottomless pit. Singaporeans from all walks of life generally have a great sense of humour and they can laugh at others and, more importantly, at themselves. Being able to look in the mirror and laugh at yourself (I do every day – if you have seen me, you will understand why) is the only true test. Of course, there will always be a small group of people who take themselves a little too seriously and have the potential to screw everything up both in England and Singapore. And it is our duty to slap them into place.

  Let me give you a very relevant example. When I was young, we used to have a caravan on a site in Clacton-on-Sea, a seaside town in Essex. It was an enclosed site that had a narrow gravel road snaking through and around it. Built only to serve caravan owners, the road was not wide enough to take two cars going in opposite directions so the site owner made it a one-way system. This was most convenient if your caravan happened to be near the entrance; ours was not so we had to take a tour of the site every time we wanted to get to it. Well, we would have done if my mother had wielded such admirable patience. Instead she decided to short fuse the circuit by going the wrong way round the one-way system. Considering the site was not exactly crawling with traffic, it was only a minor misdemeanour. She did not drive fast and, besides, driving into a ditch periodically to avoid an oncoming car was part of the holiday fun.

  The only real obstacle we had to clear was a man who had his caravan parked at the junction between the right and wrong way. A profoundly tedious man, he sat on a deckchair by the edge of the road and leapt into action whenever he detected a car (usually ours) driving in the wrong direction. Hands waving, he would run forward crying, ‘Sorry, you’ll have to turn back. It’s a one-way road. Sorry, you’ll have to turn back.’ Being a lanky chap with long arms, he resembled a windmill. Initially, my mother would pacify him with the ‘sorry, we’re new here’ routine and he would send us on our way with a warning.

  After three years, my mother’s defence began to wear a bit thin. On on
e memorable sunny afternoon, my mother took her regular shortcut. From nowhere came the boring, windmill man. With his hands gesticulating all over the place, he shouted, ‘One way! One way! This is a one-way road.’ Without missing a beat, my mother retorted, ‘Well, that’s okay then. We’re only going one fucking way.’ The windmill, who I am sure was a civil servant, never bothered us again. Sitting in his beloved deckchair, he would start to get up, spot my mother and force himself to smile and wave, making the conscious decision never to let his children play with me or my sister.

  Dull people are universal and it is our duty to keep them in place. I read a letter in the Straits Times recently that was responding to an earlier piece about Singapore’s income divide and how statistics can cloud the issue. The first letter stated, quite rightly, that a typical household’s income could be calculated in many ways so we should treat figures with caution. The reply to this letter was something else. I think the guy was saying that the median income was a better yardstick for household income than the mean but I am not really sure. Take a dose of caffeine and read on.

  The writer said things like ‘The sample of households excluded those with no earned income and the typical household size was 3.6 persons. Thus, a household in the sample could have more than one income earner.’ He went on in a similar vein for another seven riveting paragraphs before concluding ‘The median is clearly a better gauge of average income. It mitigates any perception of income divide created by the mean.’ As conclusions go, they do not come any punchier than that, do they? This mathematician could have teamed up with the windmill to form a double act. They could have sat in matching deckchairs, discussed Pythagoras and shouted ‘one way’ at moving vehicles all day.

  That, however, is only if we let them. These dreary souls are still in the minority and we should be constantly on the lookout to keep it that way. If you are at work or at a party and someone makes a soporific comment involving statistics, money, property or the civil service, shoot the person. Plead to the judge that you did it on compassionate grounds to prevent the spread of what is commonly known as boringfuckeritis and the judge will throw the case out. Alternatively, send the afflicted to the terraces of Tanjong Pagar United for a season or refer him to Uncle Kong for a weekly consultation. Episodes of Friends and Under One Roof can also be administered. It is imperative that the symptoms are detected at the earliest possible stage to prevent them from spreading. In rare cases where the sense of humour has almost withered away, a literary injection of Spike Milligan, the legendary former goon, must be given immediately.

  Should this extreme measure fail, then the victim is left with no other option than to pay up his life insurance and join the civil service. At least, the sick man will be in the company of other victims and he will get to spend the rest of his life pursuing this business of fun very seriously. Fortunately, most Singaporeans that I know have been spared this horrific disease but, for goodness sake, do not pursue every business you undertake too seriously. Look in the mirror each day, laugh at yourself and issue a dry slap to every boring person you encounter. Together, we can prevent this tragic social illness from spreading.

  Chapter Eleven

  I have just got off the telephone from my mother and the call reminded me that, like most English mothers, she has two voices that are interchangeable. Mothers have an additional gene that can distort their vocal cords to produce their normal voice and a second, ‘telephone’ voice. The latter is triggered by an involuntary muscle spasm, which is the brain’s defensive reaction to the sound of a ringing telephone bouncing off its neighbouring eardrums. Only mothers suffer from the telephone voice syndrome.

  My own mother has had this syndrome for years. If it was a typical day, she would be screaming at us in her normal voice for not performing an exceedingly trivial task. ‘If you don’t put the bloody towels back on the rack properly, you’re both gonna get it.’

  ‘Sorry mum,’ we would murmur in self-defence, hoping that our feeble apologies would pacify her. They did not.

  ‘And Neil, I don’t know why you bothered showering in the bath. You might as well have just stood on the carpet outside and showered yourself on it. Why do you keep spending so much time in the bathroom anyway? It’s not normal behaviour.’

  ‘I was just washing my hair, mum.’

  ‘Washing your hair? You haven’t got any hair and what you did have is now sitting in the plughole. Is there any chance of you actually cleaning the bath when you’re finished? I can’t believe what a pair of lazy bastards I’ve brought up. Jodie, do you think you could tidy your bedroom? No, I suppose I’ll have to do it as usual.’

  That was the other thing about my mother, she always answered her own questions. So essentially, she was arguing with herself. Then the telephone would start ringing, which meant a temporary reprieve.

  ‘There’s the bloody phone now,’ my mother would complain. ‘Like I don’t have enough to do already. I don’t know why I’m even answering it. It’s probably for you.’

  Then as she lifted the receiver, the syndrome mysteriously kicked in and she went from being our mother to sounding like the Queen Mother.

  ‘Hellooo, this is 2689. Can I help you...? Sylvie, how are you? Are you still working at the supermarket? Oh, that’s wonderful because you wanted to work that shift, didn’t you? I am pleased for you.’

  She would then continue talking in this affected, BBC-styled voice that made her sound like the actress Judi Dench. The beauty of the syndrome for us was that she could not possibly use both voices at once so we would take our cue to have a fight on the living room floor. Having a smaller sister meant there would be the usual tears, headlocks and bruised dead legs but I would hang in there. By the time we were belly flopping off the top of the settee onto each other, we knew that the Queen Mother would need to make a royal pardon.

  ‘Do excuse me, Sylvie. Could you please hold on for just a second? I have to take care of something.’ My mother would then regally place the receiver against her chest, perform the royal wave and beckon her two scrapping children to pause momentarily.

  ‘If you two don’t stop right now, you’re both gonna get it. Sit down and shut up or you’ll be getting no fucking dinner... So sorry about that, Sylvie. Now, you were saying about your husband’s vasectomy.’

  When I grew taller, making it harder, but not impossible, for my mother to crack me across the head, I asked her why she put on a ‘posh’ voice whenever she answered the telephone.

  She replied, ‘You have to play the game. You never know who is going to be on the other end and you don’t want to give the wrong impression, do you?’

  Now I am not sure if my mother is in contact with the Singaporean prime minister but I feel her presence here, too. The way Singaporeans converse has become a national obsession over the last year or so. It began with Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew who hinted that Singaporeans should polish their English. Before you could say government policy, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong had introduced the ‘Speak Good English’ campaign. In other words, Singaporeans had to ‘play the game’ and adopt my mother’s telephone voice to ensure that friends, colleagues and business acquaintances could understand them correctly, thus creating a favourable impression.

  Being a former speech and drama teacher, my initial knee-jerk reaction was that the government had implemented a rational, logical policy to help improve business communications flow between East and West. I have met many expatriates working here who have experienced difficulty understanding locals on a day-today basis and vice versa. Quite surprising, perhaps, when you consider that the official working language of Singapore is English. Every Singaporean student must learn English at school, irrespective of ethnic or cultural background.

  Where then is the problem? Well, take the movie Army Daze for instance. Having been in the country for only a week, Scott and I could not understand some of the dialogue that was allegedly in English. This was mainly because it was not in English but rather Singlish, the
local dialect of Singaporean English (some would say it is even a separate language) that is the result of the ethnic melting pot that exists on the island.

  With Singlish, you often end up with the word ‘can’ at the end of sentences, rather than at the beginning, much like ke yi in Mandarin or boleh in Malay. Exclamations like lah, aiyoh, meh and alamak often find their way into Singlish, too. However, it is the vocabulary of localised English that I would like to emphasise because this is the most important aspect of Singlish.

  In my last job, I enjoyed antagonising my Canadian friends by reminding them that, as a native-speaking Englishman, I had never encountered an English dialect that I could not understand. This fact is true but hardly a big deal, considering I cannot speak any other language. Canadians like my good friend Shawn, on the other hand, struggle with any accent that is not North American. When he saw the movie Trainspotting, he confessed that he needed the subtitles to understand the dialogue, as the cast spoke with strong Scottish accents.

  As the British Isles is blessed with having so many different accents and dialects scattered over such a small area, I was confident, therefore, that Scott and I would have no problems coming to grips with the local tongue. English is English after all. However, some of what Singaporeans speak most certainly is not English and this is where we encountered some difficulty. What was even more worrying was that as I began to teach in Singaporean schools, it became apparent that students did not even realise that many of the words they spoke were not English. Even if they spoke slowly and adopted my mother’s resonant telephone voice, words like kiasu, kaypoh, meaning ‘nosy’, and gong-gong, meaning ‘silly’ or ‘stupid’, were still being uttered. After discovering what these words meant, I went back to my classes and told disbelieving pupils that these words were not part of the English language. I recall one particular teenage boy who refused to accept that kiasu and kaypoh were not English words. He explained, quite rationally I thought, that these words were spoken by Singaporeans of all races and they could be heard and read in the national media. Although I agreed with him, I added that they were unique to the Singaporean vocabulary and would not be understood in other parts of Asia, let alone in places like England and the United States.