As I stood in front of Block 53, it was obvious why those wily government chaps of the People’s Action Party (PAP) had picked this particular block for the queen’s inspection. It provided a microcosm not only of Toa Payoh, but of Singapore’s public housing in general, encapsulating the success of the Housing and Development Board (HDB) in sweeping away the decaying kampongs and creating a modern, urban metropolis in their place. Attempts to re-ignite the kampong spirit of community were evident at every turn. The block boasted an amphitheatre for grassroots events, a street soccer pitch, a basketball court, a decent playground, three barbecue pits (all numbered, naturally) and a fitness corner with pull-up bars, parallel bars and monkey bars.
The fitness corners are reasonably popular with the elderly across the country, but I have always viewed them as a touch Orwellian: a healthy nation is a fit nation is a happy nation and all that nonsense. But my cynicism probably was not helped by my attempt to try one pull-up. The blood rushed to my head, I felt faint and someone in a flat above giggled.
Block 53 had also been painted since I had last seen it. More aesthetically pleasing shades of peach, orange and white replaced the dark greens, blues and purples I recall of Toa Payoh when I first arrived. Indeed, gentler, more soothing pastel colours appear to have covered the harsh primary-coloured blocks that were once eyesores around the country and HDB deserves credit for that. There are also fewer blocks with their number painted down the side. I apologise if you happen to live in one of those apartment blocks, but they remind me of kindergarten drawings when a child paints “No. 15, Mummy and Daddy’s House, Singapore, Asia, the Earth, the Universe” in the middle of it.
What were the town planners thinking? I think they were pissed. Sitting around the plans after a hearty lunch and a few Tigers in the midday sun, someone probably slurred, “We should paint the block numbers 50 feet high, in bright red paint, down the side of each block.”
“Er, why?”
“Because red’s a lucky colour.”
“Yeah, but won’t it be a bit dazzling for residents and passers-by, like the pilots of a commercial flight for instance?”
“Nah, it’s perfect. Think about when you’re pissed and you can’t remember exactly where you live. You’ll be able to tell the taxi driver to look out for a 50-foot-high block number ... Don’t spill your beer on the plans.”
Block 53 had a viewing gallery at the top when it was first opened to enable residents and visitors to watch Toa Payoh (and the other HDB estates in nearby Ang Mo Kio and Bishan) slowly rise up around them. There was no cable television in those days.
I was heading for the lift of Block 53 when a voice beckoned.
“Hey, you okay? You look lost?” A middle-aged Chinese chap, holding a bag of shopping, stood beside me, eyeing my notepad with a benign mixture of curiosity and concern.
“No, no. I’m an author. I mean, a writer. You know, a journalist.”
My hang-ups have always made it ridiculously difficult for me to explain what I pretend to do for a living. An author is something well-spoken children from English counties like Berkshire or Hampshire say they want to be when they grow up and no one in their family laughs. A writer is what teenagers assume they are when they have written four angst-ridden poems as a woefully inadequate substitute for sex. And a journalist is someone who stands bravely in front of a toppling statue of a murderous tyrant in Baghdad, explaining how much the locals appreciate a good, strong Bush. I, on the other hand, stood in Toa Payoh with a lovely man who was holding a bag full of Maggi noodles.
“So what are you doing here?” he asked warily.
“Well, I heard that the British queen once visited here back in 1972.”
“Yah, yah, the queen come here. She come to my block,” he said excitedly.
“And did you get to meet her?”
“No, I was out.”
I thought that was marvellous. Britain’s monarch, the queen of the Commonwealth and the former figurehead of the old empire, popped by for a glass of 7-Up and Mr Maggi Mee was out.
“No, no. I mean, I was out of Toa Payoh,” he corrected me. “I moved here later but my friends still remember her coming here.”
Like many of the town’s residents, Mr Maggi Mee was proud to live in Toa Payoh. He had lived in the block for many years, worked hard, put his son through a decent education and spoke with tremendous pride when detailing the academic record of his son, who taught at one of the country’s finest schools. It is a familiar story in Toa Payoh. The once working-class town (many of the residents now fall into the lower middle-class bracket) bears many similarities with Dagenham, with one major difference. A child’s education takes precedence over everything else, as Mr Maggi Mee pointed out: “You got children? ... No? ... When you do, make them study hard. When your son makes you proud, it’s the best. When your son is an idiot, it’s the worst. Don’t have a ‘half-past-six’ son.”
I adore that expression. A popular, and unique, Singlish turn of phrase, it loosely means “incompetent” or “screwed up”, but “half-past-six” is much more creative. Its origin is supposedly sexual and refers to the angle of the penis. Naturally, half-past-six is droopy, while midnight is impressive. Quarter-past-three needs urgent medical attention.
“No, lah,” Mr Maggi Mee continued. “Half-past-six son no good. Don’t want one who smokes, drinks or takes the ganja and that white powder. What’s it called?”
“Cocaine?”
“No, not that one. The other white powder. Heroin! That’s it. Don’t take that white powder heroin.”
He sounded like a government health campaign. I only asked if he had met the queen. But I shook his hand and said goodbye, promising not to have a half-past-six son, before heading up to the 19th and top floor. Those Singaporean urban planners of the 1960s were rather clever chaps, weren’t they? Toa Payoh lies pretty much in the middle of the diamond-shaped country, the municipal jewel in the centre. And Block 53 finds itself at the heart of the Big Swamp and provided both the perfect location for a royal visit and a viewing gallery.
The queen is still going strong, but the same cannot be said about the viewing gallery. I sneakily climbed a stairwell that was clearly off-limits on the 19th floor, only to find a door locked with the biggest padlock this side of Changi Prison. This happens a lot here. The government builds something, then does not fully trust its populace to use it properly.
Even from the 19th floor, however, the view was spectacular. Providing almost complete and unblocked 360-degree panoramic views of the entire country, this was not an arresting vista. It was an IMAX experience. Seu Teck Sean Tong, the bright, exotic Buddhist temple of Toa Payoh, was below me, a building that has long provided an imperious entrance to Toa Payoh for those travelling in from the north, via Braddell Road. And spotting the housing estates of Ang Mo Kio and Bishan a little further north was easy enough. Walking around the corridor, I picked out the skyline of Raffles Place in the south, two of the floodlights of the National Stadium in the east and the green summit of Bukit Timah in the west before returning to my original vantage point, which was wedged between two plant pots that belonged to a resident whom I hoped would not pick that particular moment to water her miniature botanic garden. The clouds cleared a little and I spotted what could only be the Malaysian coastline of Johor. Hazy, a little blurred but clearly too distant, and too green, to be Singapore, Malaysian land was clearly ahoy beyond Selat Johor (the Johor Straits).
Pleased with my powers of observation, I left a happy man, albeit a slightly hurried one because one or two heads had begun to pop through the grilles of their front doors. Nevertheless, it was well worth the uneasy stares. While the coach parties and the backpackers hand over a small fortune for their minimum-charge drinks at plush rooftop bars and restaurants around Orchard Road and City Hall, similar views are free in Toa Payoh. But then, more tourists should come here anyway.
Although Queenstown came first, Toa Payoh was the first complete estate in Singapore. It
is the HDB’s crowning glory with polished gems on every corner. With the kampongs being bulldozed by the day, town planners built Singapore’s “Dagenham” on the Big Swamp, throwing up homes for 200,000 people, one tenth of the entire country’s population at that time. Missing the communal collectivism of the kampongs, not everyone was pleased to be moving to a concrete block, so developers moved quickly. Toa Payoh soon had everything: shopping centres, schools, clinics, a fine public swimming pool, sports halls and community centres, a cinema, gardens, playgrounds, a town park, hawker centres and a sports stadium. All of which were valiant attempts to foster a sense of community and belonging in a new, alien environment.
Over 90 years after the London County Council first conceived the housing estate where I would eventually be raised, Dagenham is still suffering from the short-sightedness of its architects. Social amenities and facilities never kept apace with the bricklayers throwing up the houses and my old estate increasingly resembles a ghost town, with boarded-up shops covered in graffiti and “to let” signs dotted around an estate that is in desperate need of some regeneration.
Toa Payoh has not made that mistake. As a social experiment, it was nigh on flawless. Singapore’s public housing policy is undoubtedly one of its greatest success stories, epitomised by my adopted home. The oldest satellite town now looks like one of the newest, having had an extreme makeover in recent years. Boasting a new shopping hub and the country’s only entirely air-conditioned bus interchange, Toa Payoh has upgraded just about everything since I first arrived, namely the apartment blocks, the swimming pool, the cinema, the central community centre, the schools, the public library, the food courts and the town garden. Everything. Like many other housing estates across Singapore, nothing is permitted to stand still in Toa Payoh. There are even two private condominiums in the area now, which means other ang mohs are encroaching upon my Toa Payoh turf. Apparently, they kept coming across books and newspaper columns that told them what a great place it was.
Even the queen thinks so. In 2006, she returned to Toa Payoh to revisit the same family she enjoyed a 7-Up with all those years ago. The family still lived in Toa Payoh but had moved to a newer block. I hear that the queen still lives in the same house and that it is getting on a bit. But Her Majesty cannot seem to get enough of this place and who can blame her?
As I wandered along Toa Payoh’s Lorong 5, I was reminded, yet again, how grateful I am that my dear friend David was not only Singaporean, but also lived in Toa Payoh. I recalled his kind invitation to visit his homeland as we sat in our room in Grosvenor Place, one of the better halls of residence for Manchester University students, while it inevitably pissed down outside. Scott and I were initially apprehensive. Scott was not sure if he would get work as an architect in such a competitive industry. I was undecided if I wanted to live in China.
If our Singapore story had begun in Yishun or Bedok it might have been equally exotic, but Toa Payoh became our first home. And the Big Swamp proved to be my only home for a decade. If it was good enough for the queen—twice—it was good enough for me. Extremely pleased with that thought, I headed over to the Lorong 8 hawker centre. I was hungry and it was getting late. It was almost half past six.
CHAPTER 2
It is not often that you are greeted by the sight of six arseholes. But there they were. Six photographs each depicting a pair of buttocks being pulled apart by a pair of hands.
Of course, these bottoms were no ordinary bottoms. Oh no. These bottoms suffered from acute piles. I am not a doctor, or any kind of anal specialist for that matter, but when the hands are pulling the cheeks so far apart that an MRT train could pass through, it is fairly obvious what is wrong. The photographs were mounted proudly on a sizeable piece of bright yellow card, which rested on an easel. On the off chance that the passer-by somehow missed the sore sphincters on display, a couple of colourful arrows had been drawn on the card with a disturbingly energetic marker pen to capture your attention. It was surreal. I had not seen so many arseholes in one place since a gang of drug addicts mugged me in a Dagenham park in 1996.
But this home-made board of bums was not pinned up on a wall of a doctor’s surgery, but at a pasar malam, a night market, where I usually enjoyed a cup of sweetcorn. I threw the sweetcorn straight into the dustbin and cut out the middleman. The stall full of bottoms sold some ridiculous cream that promised to cure all of the terrifying ailments depicted in the gory photographs. Surprisingly, the remedy for piles sat proudly beside a stall selling pineapple tarts, the sausage-shaped ones, which looked remarkably similar to some of the symptoms displayed in the photographs. Not surprisingly, sales appeared slower than usual at the pineapple tart stall.
I had two queries regarding the piles cream. First, how brave do you have to be to approach the stall owner? Surely, pointing to one of the bottoms on the menu and saying “I’ve got that one there. How?” was not an option. Second, and more important, who were the lunatics who agreed to pose as the models? That is surely not a photo shoot to put on your résumé.
Obese people are often willing to pose for “before” and “after” shots for slimming campaigns, but would you get your arse out for a “before” and “after” piles campaign? The photographer must have barked out some bizarre requests at the shoot. “A little more to the left, that’s it ... More cheek darling, more cheek ... Push them together, now pull them apart ... Beautiful, baby, beautiful. That’s a wrap ... Fancy a cup of sweetcorn?” I can only hope the hands that pulled the cheeks apart in each photograph belonged to the owner of the bottom.
Pasar malams are fabulous though, aren’t they? The night markets are one of the highlights of living in Singapore and I cannot comprehend why the Singapore Tourism Board does not do more to woo tourists away from Chinatown and Little India and send them into the unique world of pasar malams around the HDB estates. Whenever I am preparing for a trip back to England, the following text message goes out to everyone I know: “Is a pasar malam in your town? Need fake branded purses and bags for mum and sister.” At pasar malams, I have seen handbags manufactured by “Pradha”, “Pada” and occasionally even “Prada”, which only adds to the fun.
Street markets have fascinated me ever since my mother dragged me around the Dagenham Sunday Market every, well, Sunday. I only went along because she always promised to buy me a “Dagenham Dog”, which was an enormous hotdog with greasy onions. When I got older, a “Dagenham Dog” ended up meaning something else entirely. But they were still just as greasy. On this occasion, the pasar malam was one of the larger ones that visit Toa Payoh Central just before Chinese New Year and occupied the space around the amphitheatre.
Selling everything from mobile phone covers and screwdrivers to pyjamas and cream for piles, pasar malams exude a warmth and cosiness rarely surpassed anywhere else on the island. My wife has followed the travelling markets all over the country, always checking with the stall owners where their next port of call will be. The byword of any pasar malam is cheap and their appeal is universal. Children look at the toys (including the first fake Monopoly board game I had ever seen), teenagers buy the latest CDs and jeans (both inexpensive and of dubious origin), women go for the purses and handbags (Gucci and his brothers “Guci” and “Gucii”), men hover around the DIY stalls and I buy Malaysia’s finest Ramly burgers.
The pasar malam was beside the Toa Payoh Community Library, which I popped into because it has the coolest air-conditioning and I needed to use the toilet after the Ramly burger. During my first year in Singapore, the library (which opened in 1974, the same year I was born) became something of a second home. Just before Christmas in 1996, my future wife joined me in Singapore and we rented a room from a tyrannical Indian landlady, who had a penchant for removing her clothes and baring her boobs to the world on laundry day. Her massive breasts could plug a sink. And as she leant over to do her washing, they almost did. So we were desperate to get out of the flat of the world’s oldest glamour model as often as possible.
&nbs
p; My wife has always loved public libraries while a lovely lady called Juliet McCully had decided to give me a job at her speech and drama school on the proviso that I hit the textbooks and attained the relevant teaching diploma. So we spent many happy evenings together in the Toa Payoh Community Library.
Singapore really does boast one of the greatest public library systems in the world and, more impressively, the library is still considered a viable place to hang out by children and teenagers here. In contrast, libraries in Dagenham are frequented by senior citizens who borrow books about steam engines and Tupperware. At the age of four, I was thrown into the nearest library by my mother and ordered to read more. I subsequently spent many happy years at that library, looking up rude words in all the dictionaries and finding illicit passages detailing hot steamy sex in the romance novels. When I returned to Dagenham a couple of years ago, my old library resembled a prison. It was surrounded by high perimeter fencing topped off with ferocious-looking spikes to prevent climbing. The library itself had shrunk; there were fewer books available to take out thanks to a reduction in local government funding. Working-class children need well-stocked municipal libraries and parents must force them, at gunpoint if necessary, to use them regularly. The public library is more than a source of entertainment; it is an escape route. Singaporeans should never take their magnificent library service for granted.
After rearranging my books in the Singapore section, I left the library and walked back through the first L-shaped shopping centre built here in the 1960s. With Chinese New Year approaching, the festive lights were coming on and the streets of Toa Payoh were packed with families. The relaxed mood is always convivial for shopping in the evenings. At dusk, the humidity relents a little and I often sit on one of the many benches the town council kindly provides as my wife dashes from one shoe shop to another. She is no Imelda Marcos; she just gets rather excited when she spots shoes going for less than $5, something that seems to happen quite a lot in Toa Payoh. Why are tourists not flocking to this place?
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 2
