Notes From an Even Smaller Island Read online

  Nothing in Singapore brings out that side of me quicker than kiasuism – a paranoid trait that made the Indian couple push in front of families with small children so they could be home ten minutes earlier than everybody else. It was kiasuism, I believe, that made the taxi driver pull over in the first place. He could see the long queue that he was barely fifteen metres from and I am sure he knew what the couple was doing, but he wanted to get his taxi meter running as quickly as possible and he could do it without the hassle of pulling into a taxi stand. Paranoid? I do not think so.

  Had that incident occurred during my first week in Singapore, I am fairly certain that Scott and I would have called them ‘cheeky bastards’ and shrugged off the incident. Having now lived in Singapore for over five years, I experience some form of kiasuism every day. To me, it is the city-state’s most negative (and most visible) feature.

  In Hokkien, kiasu means ‘to be scared to fail’. To a certain extent, it can be a positive characteristic in certain spheres of society. For example, the fear of failing encourages parents to provide the best education possible for their children. But it never stops at this healthy level. Many Singaporeans like immediate, positive results. They cannot wait for things; they must have them now and they must be the first to have them. After all, what is the point of coming second? No one remembers the losers.

  So what does all this lead to? Well, the ‘Hello Kitty’ 2000 phenomenon, of course. This phenomenon was not a national struggle to acquire the rights for a two-party system but rather the Singaporean population’s desire to purchase the ugliest set of cat dolls humankind has ever seen.

  The sad fact is that the Hello Kitty nightmare started calmly enough. These Japanese midgets had already been on sale in various guises and costumes in Singapore for some time when a fast-food chain announced that it would sell pairs of the dolls wearing different costumes with value meals. But if Hello Kitty products were already available elsewhere, why was there such a massive demand? Ladies and gentlemen, please allow the marketing gurus to step forward and take a well-deserved bow. They ingeniously tapped into the Singaporean psyche – the kiasu ‘whatever you have, I must have’ syndrome. It was one of the most successfully orchestrated marketing campaigns of recent times.

  How did the burger chain pull off this marketing miracle and turn usually sane Singaporeans into cold-blooded, green-eyed Hello Kitty hunters? Simple. It slapped ‘limited edition’ all over the little felines. Thus creating a wonderfully unique situation for the kiasu consumer. That is, the ‘whatever I have, you might not be able to have, ha’ syndrome. Now if that is not waving a red rag to a kiasu bull, then I do not know what is. And boy, did many Singaporeans see red.

  When the first pair of Hello Kitty dolls went on sale, the country went ballistic and the dolls were sold out within hours. Knowing this, people began to queue the night before the next pair of dolls were due to go on sale. Can you believe it? These people were even shown on the news camping outside various fast-food eateries. I was stunned. Until then, the only society of people I had ever come across that loved queuing was the British. It is one of our national pastimes. My fellow countrymen spend half their lives queuing and they are exceedingly good at it. Try to cut in a queue at the post office in Dagenham and you will be thrown looks that suggest you have just committed murder.

  In Singapore, where the lifestyle is so hectic, I was given the impression that its citizens barely have enough time to breathe, let alone the patience to stand and queue. Even in my local bank, there is no need to queue. They employ a wonderful system, whereby you simply take a ticket, sit down in a comfortable chair, read a book and wait for your ticket number to be called. Increasingly, Singapore is becoming a queue-free zone.

  So you can imagine how shocked I was when I read about the hordes of people eagerly queuing overnight for a pair of dolls. Many teenagers probably saw camping out as an adventure. And if these youngsters had been the only people involved, I suspect the whole episode would have been a comparatively light-hearted affair. But they were not. The kiasu brigade came in and took over. There were those who queued up to buy more than ten pairs of the dolls, which led to a limit on the number of sets each customer could buy. Then there were those who hired students to queue for them, thus creating the first professional queuers ever employed to purchase a pair of cuddly toys. People were arrested and fined for disorderly behaviour. At Bukit Panjang, stools were thrown at police officers. Others had fights in front of women and children over alleged queue cutting. Consequently, Cisco, a private security firm, was hired to place guards at some of the bigger stores. Finally, several people were injured when a shop window in Bedok shattered under the pressure of too many impatient fuckers leaning on it.

  In the end, the fast-food chain placed a full-page advertisement in the national newspapers apologising for the chaos. The burger chain also guaranteed that the last pair of dolls would not be limited and supplies would match demand, thus ensuring the end of both overnight queuing and the Hello Kitty phenomenon in general. Of course, if this strategy had been employed in the first place, none of the above would have happened.

  Once the farce had subsided, people were quick to step forward to analyse the incident and try to understand and even justify it. Some claimed impressionable adults and teenagers had simply fallen for a cunning marketing ploy. Others came up with the silly idea that Singaporeans had a penchant for queuing. Believe me, that is a complete falsehood. In a country where its citizens cannot wait three seconds for commuters to alight from a train before getting on, the very idea of standing in a queue for over eight hours would be anathema. No, it all comes down to greed. Pure greed. When those damned cats were stamped ‘limited edition’, it created a stampede of would-be entrepreneurs. Within days, these characterless toys were being auctioned on local web sites and they were being sold for S$50 or more at flea markets.

  One of my closest friends, Victor, admitted that he had queued up for eight hours in Toa Payoh. I almost forgave him when he said he took turns with his fiancée to queue because they were getting married in a few weeks and he wanted a pair of the wedding dolls for good luck. I was none too pleased when he told me that he had managed to sell the other pairs for S$50 a go. This just floored me. The dolls cost about S$10 a pair so he had made S$40 profit on each pair that he had sold after queuing for almost a full working day. The most infuriating part was that Victor knew what he was doing. He said, ‘I wanted a set for the wedding. But when I saw how much people were paying for the dolls, I thought “why not?” Everybody was doing it. I saw people being paid to queue. What to do? We love to have something free or be the first to have something.’ That is the trouble with greed, it clouds all logic.

  However, kiasuism goes way beyond greed. Undoubtedly, it ties in with avarice in the sense that you must be the first to have something whether it is a stuffed cat, a cinema ticket, a lottery ticket or a condominium. Ultimately though, it is a phobia. A terrifying dread of not winning, of coming second and possibly even, and I am going to have to use a rude word here, failing. Singaporeans would rather step into a boxing ring with a pissed off auntie before admitting that they might not have fully succeeded at something. So from the earliest age, they strive to be as efficient and as competent as they possibly can in the area of academic study because that is pretty much all they do in childhood. But then it progresses and becomes all encompassing. Kiasuism spreads rapidly though the brain (and in severe cases down to the anus because that is what badly afflicted victims talk out of) and eats away at you like Parkinson’s disease.

  My first direct experience of the kiasu syndrome came from listening to Melissa, a former colleague, complaining at work one day. We were all sitting at a table eating lunch when she just launched herself into a frenzy. ‘Ooh, I was fuming at the MRT station this morning. I was waiting to get on the train when someone brushed past me and got straight on. The worst part was that there was a mother with her baby in a buggy waiting to get on the train as
well but this guy just didn’t care. He brushed past her as well. So kiasu.’

  After that, I found out what kiasuism meant and began to hunt it down. It can be spotted every day on any transportation system. In a nutshell, people do not wait for you to get off the train before they get on. It is as simple as that. You are invisible. To the kiasu mind, you do not exist; he or she must get on the train as soon as possible. If it means brushing past ten people to do so, so be it.

  I have only reacted to it once. Scott and I were alighting from a train at City Hall on our way to watch an S-League football match, when suddenly, thwack! My left shoulder was hit so hard that I bumped into Scott. ‘You little prick. Couldn’t you see me, you dopey bastard?’ And the doors closed. I was angry because it was a young Malay lad who had arrogantly strutted onto the train with his girlfriend the split-second the doors had opened. He was showing off. Scott took no notice, of course; he was too busy giggling. ‘You nearly got knocked out by a kid,’ he said. So I pushed him down the escalator.

  There is simply nothing you can do to stop the impending stampede as the doors of an MRT train open. In my more ludicrous moments, I have tried to devise a human dam, i.e., me, to hold back the tide. However, let me state for the record – I am no Moses. If you gave me a plastic bucket and spade, I reckon I would have a better chance of parting the Red Sea than holding back kiasu commuters. Even if I stand on the markings on the platform floor that show you where you should stand to get on the train and avoid alighting passengers, I can only block one side of queuing passengers so kiasu commuters simply walk around me and cut in from the other side. Believe me, if there is a gap, they will find it.

  Then there are the Singaporean bus services.

  When I was a kid growing up in the late seventies, there used to be a comedy show on television called On the Buses. It was quite funny and well written but it gave me nightmares thanks to Jack the bus conductor. Jack was supposed to be the Juan de Marco of London’s bus service and the terror of all female passengers. Yet he must have been the ugliest man on the planet. Painfully thin, he consisted of a cluster of bones all held in place by the belt of his grey skin-tight bus uniform. His long, narrow face suggested he had spent his formative years trapped in a vice. Nevertheless, the scriptwriters seemed oblivious to all of his physical failings and gave him the sort of lines usually reserved for Brad Pitt. In some ways, the fact that the leering, dirty old man (he was in his late forties even then) did not look like Clark Gable made it funnier. However, as a four-year-old boy, he horrified me. When my mother took me shopping, I was afraid of travelling on buses in case Jack the bus conductor pounced. I knew that he would say some of the same lines to my mother and she would laugh and run away and leave me. I did not lose my phobia until On the Buses was taken off the air. By then, Jack was nearing retirement and chasing girls was leaving him visibly breathless. And Viagra was still a pipe dream.

  My fear of buses returned with a vengeance when I arrived in Singapore. Jack the elderly sex bomb was replaced by ‘Skippy the 238 Man’, the crazed, hyperactive driver of the number 238 feeder bus service that covers the housing estates of Toa Payoh Lorong 8. I hear that the Singapore Bus Services (SBS) have cloned him countless times to take care of the other feeder services throughout the island. Rumour has it that he was cloned from the DNA of Skippy the kangaroo and mixed with a dollop of kiasuism to produce his unique driving style.

  He pulls into the bus stop and you innocently board with your farecard in your left hand and a bag of shopping in the other. Just as you lift your card to slot it into the machine, he pulls away sharply. Suddenly, the bag of shopping has a pull stronger than the tide and you find yourself lying horizontally along the aisle still holding your farecard. It is a nightmare.

  No matter who drives the number 238 bus, the methods for getting from A to B are identical. ‘Skippy’ will pull away from the bus stop as fast as he can and, not forgetting his intensive kiasu training, leaves it until the last possible second before braking. On a regular bus journey, such a technique would be mildly irritating. However, it is positively infuriating on a feeder service where stops can be as little as 200 metres apart. Many passengers refuse to sit down because if they do, they know there is a better than average chance that they will end up sitting on the lap of the person in front.

  This erratic driving boils down to kiasuism. In fact, bus travel itself could be a case study. From bus drivers trying to cover small distances at recklessly high speeds to passengers rushing onto the bus to take the seats positioned near the exit door, it is all an upshot of trying to get things done quicker and getting to destinations faster to improve efficiency. By the way, if a picture ever painted a thousand words, it has to be the sight of twenty people sitting on the outside-edge of twenty double seats. Why do people do that? It means that the next poor sod that gets on the bus has to ask someone to move so that he can sit on the other half of the seat. When this happens, the person sitting on the edge of the seat shoots him a look that suggests she would like to kick him between the legs. Then, she sighs emphatically and merely moves her legs to one side, meaning he now has to squeeze past her to sit by the window. In this situation, I have perfected a technique in which I drop a shoulder, swing my rucksack around and deliver a deft blow to the side of the old bat’s temple. I have asked many friends why Singaporeans do this as it does not happen in England. Some have suggested that passengers panic that they might miss their stop if the bus gets packed. I find this a dubious theory because, as I am sure you have noticed, kiasu types press the stop button 15 hours before the bus approaches the bus stop. Others believe that travellers want to sit away from the window to avoid the Sun or that they just want the whole damn seat to themselves. I suspect that it is an amalgam of all these theories, with kiasuism lurking in the shadows.

  Kiasuism has even led to a bus crashing less than thirty seconds after I had boarded it. Travelling to work one Sunday afternoon after doing some shopping, I got on the number 16 bus opposite Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. Quite typically for a Sunday afternoon, there was heavy traffic and the bus was behind at least four other buses in the bus lane. It was real bumper-to-bumper stuff. The kiasu driver was impatiently revving his engine and edging forward. Looking further down the bus lane, he anticipated that the bus in front would start moving. Only it did not. Nevertheless, the bus I was in did move and we merrily smacked into the back of the bus in front, smashing our windscreen and its rear window. The incident was pathetic really. I had only just collected my farecard from the machine and was walking down the aisle when it happened. Having just left my partner at the bus stop, I could see her through the window laughing hysterically. The passengers all reacted with considerable good humour. Although the woman opposite me was clutching a Bible to her chest, which I thought was a little premature.

  Without doubt, kiasuism is everywhere. I have seen, or rather I have heard, people taking handphone calls while sitting on a public toilet, doing bench presses in a gym, attending a wedding ceremony in a church and even teaching secondary school students in a classroom. The strive to be first and the desire not to miss out on anything has become overwhelming.

  And in what I believe to be one of the most ironic chains of events in modern Singaporean history, kiasuism was cultivated by the very institution that is now trying in vain to quell it – the government. With legitimate intentions, I think the government unleashed within its people an uncontrollable human vice: greed. Think about it. When Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965, who could it turn to for help? The British had already screwed up once during World War II when, out of a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, they most kindly stepped aside for the invading Japanese forces. The British returned briefly after the war to top up their fading sun tans and then promptly buggered off again, this time for good. In 1965, Malaysia told Lee Kuan Yew to do the same. So Singaporeans were left with a fledgling government and an unstable economy, which needed to supply everything. With Britain and Malaysia ou
t of the equation, no one was going to give Singaporeans anything. They were going to have to help themselves.

  With incredible foresight, Lee Kuan Yew made a speech shortly after Singapore’s independence in 1965 in which he predicted the country’s transformation into a metropolis. The amazing thing is that against all expectations the government and its people achieved their goal and Singaporeans became one of the most productive labour forces on the planet.

  Undoubtedly, such rapid progress is going to get the average man on the street thinking. Even in his wildest dreams, he probably did not expect to achieve so much so soon. Having secured a decent three-roomed flat for his family and a reasonable level of education for his children, he is entitled to assume, therefore, that if he raises his productivity further, the flat could increase to five rooms and his kids might be able to attend university. Inevitably, Singaporeans across the island make similar assumptions and push themselves and their families even harder to improve themselves socially and economically. This is wonderful news for the government as it is a clear popular mandate for its policies. So, in turn, the government makes an effort to increase productivity and efficiency within its spheres of influence, such as the civil service, housing, the national airport, the country’s shipping ports and the nation’s transportation services. Productivity targets are constantly being set and exceeded in all these areas, bank balances rise and shop tills keep on ringing.

  However, when such a socioeconomic phenomenon peaks, two human weaknesses inevitably arise: greed and fear. Unlike the old days of struggle and shared hardship, Singapore has evolved into an individualistic rat race: a materialistic society in which anything is attainable if you work harder than everyone else. Years of being told by parents, teachers and politicians that you must provide for yourself, because no one else will, has moulded the average Singaporean into a kiasu king and transformed my generation into a bunch of greedy bastards. For the sake of economic prosperity, it forsook communal spirit for individual avarice. For laudable political reasons, the government unleashed a social disease that has no cure.