Scribbles from the Same Island Page 3

  The BBC’s stunning depiction of early man is nothing compared to the ape-like behaviour of British parents celebrating their offspring’s academic achievements. I was reminded of this recently, when I attended my first university graduation in Singapore.

  As my girlfriend was one of the graduates, I felt obliged to attend and, besides, there was no football on TV that night.

  Crammed into the ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel with 200 graduates and their families was, truly, an unforgettable experience. But then, so is an enema up the rectum.

  A graduation ceremony, remember, is like a wedding — it’s repetitive and poke-me-in-the-eye-with-a-chopstick boring. At a church wedding, we all “ooh” and “aah” in the right places and say “doesn’t the groom look lovely in that white dress” (I’ve been to some liberal weddings), but what we’re really doing is thinking about the food and alcohol back at the hotel reception.

  Similarly, at a graduation, we clap politely as walking student gown No. 253 shakes hands with the chancellor and we wait — until our next of kin goes up on stage. Then, we stand up, take more photographs than the paparazzi and, then, we sit down again. That’s how it’s supposed to work — but no one told the irritating, impatient kiasu (literally meaning afraid to lose, in Hokkien) brigade this at the Ritz-Carlton.

  As the chancellor called up the first batch of graduates, there was nothing. No cheering, no clapping, nothing. Apart from some stifled applauding, obviously from the graduates’ families, there was virtual silence. There must have been 500 people in the room, yet the volume of applause was generated from no more than a handful of well-mannered folk.

  Feeling the need to compensate, I began to resemble a performing sea lion. This caused the Chinese auntie next to me to stare at me. Her puzzled expression suggested she didn’t know whether to laugh or throw me a fish. When it became apparent that I was merely clapping for strangers, she opted to laugh. So I hit her with my camcorder.

  Before the ceremony started, a rather naive MC asked the audience: “Please stay seated, please do not block the middle aisle and please turn off your handphones.”

  The audience surpassed itself. Not only did it fail to comply with any of these polite requests, some of its more excited members managed to do all three at once. Before you could say “itchy backside”, the audience was up and down more times than a convention for diarrhoea sufferers. The more adventurous kiasus actually left the ballroom, only to return, several minutes later, with plates of food that were supposed to be served only after the event had finished.

  Kiasuism is an exhausting business, remember, which requires plenty of sustenance. The middle aisle, for instance, was meant to allow graduates to return to their seats. The organisers had even employed two Australians, with shoulders wider than the Singapore River, to keep the aisle pest-free.

  They were the sort of muscle machines that could single-handedly keep 10,000 Melbourne maniacs away from Kylie Minogue. But the poor souls didn’t stand a chance with the kiasu brigade. The area was soon besieged by hordes of enthusiastic, though very amateur, photographers. Graduates suffered the indignity of using their scrolls as parangs to cut a path through the crowd. And those who remained in their seats had their view obscured by countless, fidgety bottoms.

  With my girlfriend’s turn on stage fast approaching, I could see little more than one man’s behind. So, like his damn camera, I snapped.

  “Excuse me,” I enquired. “Is this a lap dance club?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, do you think I’ve paid 150 dollars to see the ceremony or your arse wiggling? And may I point out, you are no Kylie Minogue, so please sit down.”

  “Oh, sorry ah.”

  To his credit, he moved — a massive four centimetres to the left. In these tribal situations, of course, there must be leaders and there must be followers. Fortunately, there was a leader in the shape of a very prominent Singaporean politician, who had been invited to give the occasional address.

  In my humble opinion, he had already completely cocked up his public performance by spilling water all over his speech notes. To compensate, he ad-libbed in a muffled voice for over half an hour. I’ve had wisdom tooth surgery that took less time.

  During the on-going ceremony, however, the politician surpassed himself. He spent his time most productively — sending SMS text messages on his handphone, while sitting on the stage. What a role model for the proud graduates who walked past him unnoticed. Bring on the next courtesy campaign!

  I tried to find the MP after the ceremony to discuss the importance of politicians practising what they preach, but he had gone. And, disastrously, so had all the makan. The kiasu brigade had eaten much of the food during the ceremony. In future, these occasions should come with a public health warning: “Eat before you go in and those who stick their buttocks into other people’s faces risk a discreet elbow in the kidneys”.

  A celebration of academic achievement? Frankly, I’d rather sit through a convention for diarrhoea sufferers.

  NOTE: Just to jog my memory, I watched my camcorder video of the graduation ceremony the other night. It’s like sitting through a bad pornographic movie. The sound is really poor and every few minutes an arse pops into frame. Then it disappears; then it reappears. This goes on throughout the ceremony. And I was right about the guy’s backside, too — a wide-screen TV wouldn’t do it justice.

  THE BREAK-DANCING

  THE United Nations is clearly wasting its time. A workable solution to the Iraq crisis won’t be found in peacekeeping soldiers wearing blue helmets in the Middle East. Instead, the answer has been found in Singaporean break-dancers wearing bandanas at Far East Plaza.

  One Saturday afternoon, I inadvertently found myself in the basement of the shopping mall, which now poses as the labyrinth of cool. It has become a mini-funky town of hip clothes, music and pop culture, generally. Teenagers with model looks who personify sophistication stand outside the shops looking devastatingly handsome.

  Yes, fair enough, I found it by accident and was about to leave when the PA system announced a dancing exhibition to promote some trendy camera the size of a thumbnail. You hang the camera around your neck like a pendant. The idea being, I suppose, that you never know when you are going to get caught stranded on a desert island. This way you can take photographs of your environment so that, when your body is found, your relatives will have some souvenirs from your final days.

  Several elderly aunties, who had either bought one of the cameras or, like me, were clearly in the wrong place, were heading for the escalator when they started cooing excitedly.

  “Wait lah,” said the apparent leader of the group. “Watch dancing first. Come we go near the front. Can see better from there.”

  Quite obviously, they were expecting a ballroom dancing display or a line dancing routine perhaps with a group of well-rehearsed senior citizens wearing cowboy costumes. And then seven youngsters came out, wearing jeans that would have been too baggy for Coco the Clown, and started spinning on their heads. It was truly priceless. The aunties’ faces transformed from a kind of eager expectation to a kind of “what the fuck is this?” expression. The music was so loud that the baselines made the floors vibrate — in Toa Payoh. There was robotic body-popping, head and body spinning, back flips and cartwheels and the occasional shout of “Let’s go, you mothers!” And that was just the aunties.

  But I thought I’d been transported back to my childhood. When it was 1982 and lots of electric boogaloo. Break-dancing was the thing to do. And I couldn’t do it. Attempts to do the caterpillar across the living room floor often culminated in my lanky legs flipping up and kicking me in the back of the head. My mother would then slap me for blocking the television and I would promptly pass out.

  Yet, here we were in Far East Plaza in 2003 and break-dancing was back and it was happening. One of the younger aunties had even started to clap along with the frantic hyper base throbbing. Initially, she appeared to be waiting for Engelbert
Humperdinck to come out and start crooning, “Please Release Me”. But now, I half expected her to turn her cap around, somersault across the floor, high-five the other funky dancers and join in. When the rather impressive exhibition had finished, there was generous applause from a 200-strong crowd while the eager auntie pumped her fist and shouted, “woo, woo, woo,” as the performers left the stage.

  After the show, I had a chat with the dancers and they spoke to me like I was mentally ill. They told me break-dancing had been dead since the ’80s, but now it was making a comeback as part of the hip-hop culture. And who’s part of the hip-hop culture, I asked 17-year-old Gianna. These guys were strictly one-name people.

  “Oh, it’s guys like Eminem and Missy Elliot.”

  “Miss C who?” She looked at me with benign pity, as if I needed help to cross the road. Or my incontinence knickers needed changing perhaps.

  “Missy Elliot? The singer? You know who she is right?”

  “What? Me and Miss C? Are you kidding? I’ve got so many of her albums, we’re almost friends. She is up there, man. Miss C is up there with M C Hammer and Vanilla Ice.”

  I felt 128 years old.

  The break-dancers called themselves Radikal Forze, with a ‘K’ and a ‘Z’ no less. There were seven of them — five Malays, one Chinese and one Caucasian and their ages ranged from 14 to 36. Being the minority, I asked National Serviceman Felix if he felt like an outsider.

  “No way, man,” the Chinese teenager told this ‘man’. “We come from different races and different backgrounds. But we just work and practise together because we love what we do. There are no barriers, man.”

  And that’s when I realised that Felix is right and the United Nations is wrong. In the ’80s, conflicts and disputes between rival gangs on the streets of New York were often settled through break-dancing. There were movies and documentaries about it. A body-popping contest, or ‘burn’, to use its street name, would be held and two enemies would attempt to out-dance the other into submission.

  When I was 11 years old, the school bully summoned me to ‘burn’ with him in the playground. It was spectacularly awful. Neither of us could perform any dance moves, except the ‘arm caterpillar’. Do you remember that one? You just flicked your left arm like a caterpillar and moved through to the right arm in one fluid motion. Well, we stood chest-to-chest and did the ‘arm caterpillar’. For an hour. Until the bell went. In the afternoon, neither of us could lift our arms, except when they involuntarily flicked into the ‘arm caterpillar’. The spasms were most inconvenient. The history teacher kept assuming we were putting our hands up, in rather extravagant fashion, to answer questions on Stalinist Russia.

  And that brings me back to current dictators with moustaches. That ‘burn’ between the bully and myself was a success in the sense that we left each other alone after that. So if it worked for schoolboys, it’d certainly work for George Bush and Saddam Hussein, wouldn’t it?

  Get them both down to the United Nations’ headquarters (Bush will cry and tell his daddy if he doesn’t have home advantage) and send out Radikal Forze with both their ‘K’ and ‘Z’ to train the two leaders.

  Then, before the world’s news cameras, Missy Elliot could bang out a few tunes and Bush and Saddam could stick out their chests in that belligerent pose popular with world leaders and totalitarian pretenders and get to work on the ‘arm caterpillar’. Once the ‘burn’ has reached a satisfactory conclusion, the schoolboy-cum-national leaders must thrash out their differences. Incidentally, has anyone else noticed that if you say Saddam backwards, it comes out as ‘mad ass’?

  Now, you may think I’m naive and out-of-touch (the break-dancers certainly did), but wouldn’t it be rather wonderful if we could solve global disputes with body-popping, rather than gun-popping?

  THE GEEK

  MY missus has seriously contemplated leaving me recently. And I know precisely where and why it happened. We were at the Kranji Reservoir, a beautiful green spot that overlooks Malaysia in the north of Singapore, when I heard a distinct rustling in the long reeds hanging over the edge of the bank. A bird had landed. Not just any bird, you understand, but a grey heron. With no time to lose and absolutely no thought for my own safety, I dashed off in pursuit. Stopping some 10 metres from the long-legged bird to compose myself (and I haven’t done that since I last frequented the tacky nightclubs of my youth in Essex), I crouched down to allow the long grass to provide some natural cover.

  And then, the bird looked up at me. Quickly but calmly, I reached for my trusty pocket book, entitled A Guide To The Common Birds Of Singapore, and sought out my tasty bird. Well, I just could not contain myself.

  “It’s not a common heron, mate,” I shouted to the missus. “The beak is black. It could well be a little egret. Hang on, I’ll get a bit closer and compare the photographs.”

  “Neil!” came the rather urgent reply.

  “Yes, mate?”

  “You look a complete fucking wanker.”

  “Yes, mate.” Her comments threw me off kilter slightly. She rarely called me names, well, not in public at least. Luckily, at a largely deserted Kranji Reservoir on a Sunday afternoon, there are usually only teenaged courting couples eating each other on the benches. Their only concern is whether or not they can get away with a quick shag in the park without being spotted by a passer-by, an ang moh amateur ornithologist or, worse still, their parents. So I knew I hadn’t suffered public humiliation. But the unnecessary swearing rankled a little. I mean, I’d been called a wanker by various members of my girlfriend’s family more times than I care to remember. But the f-word meant she was somewhat perturbed. This was hardly a trifling matter.

  “What was all that about?” I asked, adopting my best hangdog face. It never works, though; I always come off more like a rabid dog.

  “What the fuck are you doing getting on your hands and knees and making a tit of yourself for?” God, I love her. You don’t get brutal honesty like that from the snotty-nosed types in the wealthy suburbs of England.

  “I was looking for wild birds, weren’t I? You knew that. That’s why we came here in the first place, didn’t we?”

  “No, you said we were going to look for some wildlife. That’s fine. I didn’t expect you to roll around in the mud, looking at pigeons.”

  “It’s an egret.”

  “I couldn’t give a shit what it was. You look bloody stupid.”

  And then I saw another exotic bird swoop down and land beside the egret/heron and I lost my senses. My missus, on the other hand, lost the will to live.

  “Shit. There’s another one,” I shouted and ran off again. But my excitement superceded my concentration and the sound of a red-faced Caucasian stumbling through the reeds terrified my birds and they flew off into the trees. Now, it was the wanker’s chance to retaliate.

  “Are you happy now, you stupid woman? They’ve gone. That’s it. I’m buying a pair of binoculars and not some cheap kiddy’s pair neither. I’m getting a decent pair like ornithologists use.”

  She looked at me, throughly horrified. Initially, my little rant had rendered her speechless before she managed to compose herself.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You want to buy a pair of binoculars so you can sit under a tree for hours looking for birds?”

  “That’s right. I don’t sound too silly now, do I?”

  “Look, mate,” she replied calmly. “If you buy those binoculars, you will never be the father of my children.”

  She was only joking. At least, I hope she was because I really fancy a pair of binoculars. But seriously, she was right. What have I become? What has Singapore done to me? I’d become a wildlife geek — one of those weedy, bookworm types that parents would make their children avoid on buses when I was growing up in England. Living on the working-class council estate of Dagenham, the only animals I ever saw came in batter next to my chips. That was the perfect symbiotic relationship as far as I was concerned.

  But Singapore has irrevoc
ably changed that ignorant perception towards my fellow earthly species forever. During that weekend when I went heron hunting, we encountered monkeys at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve and Pierce Reservoir, a couple of sizable monitor lizards at Lower Seletar Reservoir and then came the icing on the geek’s cake.

  Having a well-deserved break at Lower Seletar, we were sitting in front of the catchment area admiring the view when we witnessed something straight out of a documentary for the Discovery Channel. I noticed a bird (I feel like such a sad twat when I know that you now know, instinctively, that I am referring to the feathered variety) circling above the water. It was certainly a bird of prey and, on closer inspection, I realised it was a kite.

  Now, before you laugh, I went to Australia last year and they were all over the Northern Territory there so they’re easy to spot. Then, suddenly, just as I was about to divulge the feeding habits of the kite to the missus, the brown beast stretched out its talons and swooped towards the surface of the water. The huge claws went below the surface and came out swiftly bearing a rather stunned fish. Despite the fish being over half the size of the kite and wriggling like a lunatic, the kite gamely held on and took its supper back to the trees. Not 10 metres away, incidentally, stood a rather nonplussed fisherman, who boasted rather expensive fishing equipment, but had caught nothing other than a decent suntan. At times, nature has a wonderful way of reminding man of his real place in the world.

  Moments like that have not only given me a greater appreciation of living in Southeast Asia, but have also fueled my rather geeky obsession with wildlife and ecosystems. Singaporeans, particularly those who’ve completed their national service in the few remaining jungles and rainforests around the Republic, are probably wondering what the big deal is. A bird catching his dinner? That sounds riveting. Do you remember what time it was so we can choose our 4-D lottery numbers?