“Why do you keep ducking? The bats won’t come anywhere near you,” my giggling wife would say.
“That’s easy for you to say, midget. But some of them are swooping to within 2 metres of the ground. They could take my head clean off.”
“God, you really are stupid, aren’t you? Bats have got echolocation. They send out sound waves, which hit an object and bounce back. The bats know where you are long before you even see them.”
“All right, David Attenborough. I’m telling you, they get complacent in Singapore as everything bounces off shorter people like you. No one’s almost 2 metres tall like me. The bats don’t expect to encounter someone as tall as me here. When their sound waves bounce off me, they think I’m a tree.”
And I swear that is true. Asian buses are not ready for me. The buttons inside lifts never expect me to be so tall and MRT trains misjudge my height. A flying mammal will eventually do the same and I will end up with a bat in my belfry. So I will continue to duck, thank you very much.
I came across another old bat at Mount Faber. She was a Caucasian woman (a number of expats live in the Telok Blangah area around the hill). Wearing ill-fitting Lycra leggings that Caucasian women of a certain age tend to favour when they are exercising, she marched towards me. She was one of those powerwalkers who are taking over the planet. Have you seen them? They storm across nature parks and town gardens like demented gamekeepers and you feel compelled to shout, “Either walk like a normal person or run because you look bloody ridiculous.”
This woman looked particularly menacing because she wielded ski poles. I am sure they have a technical term among the powerwalking fraternity, but they were essentially ski poles, which she used to plough her way through the difficult terrain that is the smooth tarmac of Mount Faber Road. She looked really, really cool. When she passed me, she breathed that heavy, theatrical sigh popular among overtaking power-walkers. It was a real effort not to kick away one of her ski poles.
With time to kill, I wandered down to the Marina Deck Restaurant, which was shaped like an old, timber-built sailing vessel. It looked nice and nautical but was largely empty and strangely eerie. The upper platform had no lighting and I heard whispering voices moving around behind me. This is it, I thought. I have been here before. I know the signs. Whispers in the shadows inevitably lead to me being left out of pocket. I moved to Singapore after being mugged twice in England and, after spending 10 crime-free years in the country, I was about to complete an unwanted hat-trick.
Then I heard a female voice giggling. I turned reluctantly to discover yet another courting couple fumbling around in the dark. For heaven’s sake, Mount Faber was developing into a retreat for the matchmaking Social Development Unit. Don’t these people have homes to go to? Of course, they do, but they are invariably packed with parents and siblings. Space is at a premium in Singapore. So is sex. The government is obsessed with the country’s ageing population, the falling birth rates and its future labour force. Ministers claim Singaporeans are not reproducing fast enough. Well, all I know is, it is not for the want of trying.
CHAPTER 7
When I was young, I wanted to be Samuel Pepys. You must have heard of him. He is quite a significant figure in British history. He was an English diarist who wrote for the Dagenham Post every Wednesday. Hidden among the teen pregnancies and the drug busts was a weekly column that talked about, well, not a lot. Old Pepys chronicled his shopping trips with his wife and other such intrepid adventures such as buying a new car or visiting his relatives around Dagenham. A columnist who wrote about his mother every other week? That will never catch on, I thought. But his inane musings about life in Dagenham proved strangely addictive and the elderly readers of the newspaper could not get enough of him.
Then I visited the Monument one afternoon in the City of London. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the Monument stands as a tribute to the rebuilding of England’s capital following the Great Fire of London in 1666. The historic site notes that the Great Fire, along with the terrible Plague that had preceded it a year earlier, was recorded in the detailed private diary of one Samuel Pepys. Not only was Pepys a key administrator under King James II and a Member of Parliament, he also played a pivotal role in establishing the British Civil Service. And yet he still found time to write a weekly column for the Dagenham Post. What a humble guy.
Imagine my devastation, then, when I discovered that old Pepys had died in 1703, which would have made it almost impossible for him to write about getting the spark plugs in his Ford Cortina changed at a Dagenham garage in the 20th century. The Post writer was using a pseudonym. Borrowing the name of the most famous diarist in English history. How dare he? I never quite recovered from the shock.
So when the street sign Pepys Road leapt out at me as I trundled along Pasir Panjang Road on the No. 143 bus, I knew that it was the very stop for me. My plan for the day was to take a gentle amble through Kent Ridge Park, cut through the National University of Singapore (NUS), take a break in Clementi Woods because it sounded like a location from The Blair Witch Project and finish off with a sunset over West Coast Park.
But I got sidetracked. Heading down Pepys Road, I glimpsed a sign for a national heritage site called Reflections at Bukit Chandu, a World War II Interpretative Centre. It was at the edge of Kent Ridge Park, which I had visited before, but I had never noticed the museum. Oh well, I could always spare 15 minutes for a national heritage site. I stayed for over two hours.
This exhibit was truly one of the National Heritage Board’s hidden gems and a compulsory visit must be included on the curriculum of every Singaporean student. With the exclusive address of 31K Pepys Road, the old colonial house was the only one left around Bukit Chandu, an area that forms part of Pasir Panjang on the west coast. Bukit Chandu, by the way, means “Opium Hill” in Malay and possibly refers to a British-owned packing plant that was located there in 1910. Yet another proud legacy of the old empire. The house had been charmingly restored and served as a deeply poignant tribute to one of the most heroic acts of bravery recorded in Singapore’s military history. Notice I say Singapore’s, and not British, because most of the men came from the 1st and 2nd Battalion Malay Regiment. The soldiers were mostly Malay Singaporeans, not British, or even Australian. They fought not for a Union Jack, but for a land that was their birthright.
As most Singaporean students will tell you, the invading forces of Japan took just 55 days to overrun Peninsular Malaya and had reached Johor Bahru by 31 January 1942. The Japanese eyed Malaya, known as the “Dollar Arsenal” of the British Empire, because it had produced half of the world’s supply of rubber and tin since the beginning of the 20th century. Expecting an attack from the south, the British forces were pushed back quickly as the Japanese poured in from the Causeway and Pulau Ubin. In desperation, the guns that faced out from Labrador Point, along with the ones that I had visited at Siloso Beach, were dramatically turned inwards to fire on their own country.
But it was all in vain, of course. Local forces retreated to Bukit Chandu and prepared for their last stand. The battle should have been a formality. As most of the soldiers at Bukit Chandu were from the Malay Regiment, they were considered to be less experienced and battle-hardened than their Western officers. They were outnumbered and running out of ammunition but they simply refused to yield. The bloody battle at Bukit Chandu on 14 February 1942 was essentially a battle for Singapore and the odds were insurmountable. When the Malay soldiers ran out of ammunition, they resorted to hand-to-hand combat, displaying immeasurable valour in a battle they knew they could not win.
The British surrendered the next day, but the Japanese were reportedly so outraged by the indomitable spirit of the Malay Regiment that they took revenge in the most savage and cowardly fashion. They stormed the nearby Alexandra Hospital. Being used as a British military hospital, there were around 200 injured soldiers and civilian medical staff there. An unarmed British lieutenant rushed out to meet the Japanese soldiers, waving a tragically pathe
tic ad hoc surrender flag—a hospital bed sheet. He was mercilessly bayoneted to death.
In the hospital, doctors, nurses and civilians were stabbed. According to one survivor, the Japanese entered an operating theatre and murdered all the medical staff in the room, before bayoneting the patient lying on the operating table. This went beyond collateral damage. This was mass murder. A handful of survivors were herded into a small room and locked in with no food or water. Some were taken out later and executed, others died in the night through medical neglect (most were injured in the first place). Of the 200 who were attacked in Alexandra Hospital, no more than five survived to ensure that this monstrous act would never be forgotten. There is now a memorial to commemorate the tragedy at the hospital.
Singapore’s government, particularly its old guard, is forever reiterating the importance of remembering and respecting the country’s past. I could not agree more. Singaporeans are spoilt today. Children of the “maid generation” barely know how to make instant noodles by the time they go to university. They have never ironed a shirt, washed their school uniform or mopped their bedroom floor. There is little, if any, appreciation of the suffering that paved the way for their pampered existence. I am not sure they even care. While I wandered around the fascinating Bukit Chandu museum, a group of students, all around 15 or 16, were ushered in to watch an informative video about the Malay Regiment’s courageous final stand and the massacre at Alexandra Hospital. Some looked bored. There was fidgeting and the occasional glance at a branded watch. I find that infuriating, particularly in a country that barely has a recorded history. The “maid generation” does not need to regurgitate every relevant fact about the island since the 14th century, but it must recognise that Singapore’s history does not begin in 1959.
After lunch, I headed up the steepish slope outside Reflections at Bukit Chandu and into Kent Ridge Park. It was only 47 hectares, but its ponds and natural vegetation, including rubber wood, wild cinnamon and those sturdy tembusu trees, made it an unusual park stuck in the middle of the concrete labyrinths of the National University of Singapore and the Singapore Science Park.
There was also the superb Kent Ridge Canopy Walk, which was not here when I last visited. Built at a cost of $1.3 million, the 280-metre-long boardwalk opened in November 2003 to link the Reflections at Bukit Chandu museum with the park. And what a graceful combination of nature and history it was. The walk was a breezy stroll among trees that were helpfully labelled until I reached its centrepiece—the site of the actual battle between the Japanese and the Malay Regiment. A blown-up photograph allowed me to pick out Alexandra Hospital between the trees and it seemed almost incredulous that such a serene setting marked Singapore’s plucky last stand in 1942. Plant nurseries now occupied the old battleground. Somehow that seemed appropriate.
As it was a Monday afternoon in the middle of February (coincidentally, the same week that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese 64 years earlier), I had the Canopy Walk all to myself until a teenager swaggered towards me, singing aloud to whatever he was playing on his iPod. His headphones were bigger than a couple of Belgian buns and he favoured those massive aviator sunglasses that I thought had gone out of fashion with Magnum, P.I. When he got closer, I realised he was not only singing to himself, he was also talking to himself, which is a rare feat for those of us not living in a padded cell.
“Excuse me, mate,” I asked tentatively. “Is NUS this way?”
“Yeah, man,” he replied, still bouncing along to his iPod. “Keep going straight, man.”
“Thanks. Are you a student there?”
“What? Hey, no way, man. No way.”
He looked disgusted. I had apparently insulted his intelligence. A university education was clearly beneath him. But then if he spent all day talking to himself, he would always be first among equals.
Kent Ridge Park had one of those signs that the conscientious guys at the National Parks Board diligently provide at their green havens across the garden city. It simply read: “Lookout Point”. Because if the sign was not there, you would not know, would you? The sign smacked of a fledgling garden city trying too hard. I think I speak for all park visitors when I point out that if I am standing at the top of a hill that provides unblocked vistas of the southern islands, I can deduce for myself that it is a lookout point. What is more, signs such as this one are meaningless because they offer no information. A lookout point for what? Pink dolphins? A sinking Chinese junk boat? Crazy Horse dancers jiggling their boobs?
The phenomenon of pointless signs is not isolated to national parks either. Take a walk around any shopping centre in Singapore and follow the signs. The first one will say “shops”. And the second? “More shops”. Well, that is informative, isn’t it? And here I am thinking that I will turn a corner in Suntec City Mall and find myself confronted by an escaped rhinoceros.
In Britain, shopping centre signs sensibly inform the shopper that Woolworths and Boots are on the left and Marks & Spencer and The Disney Store are on the right. It is not a complicated system. I remember Scott, an architecture graduate, being fascinated by the lack of information when we first toured Orchard Road. He would stand under a sign in Takashimaya Shopping Centre and shout, “Here Neil, you’ll never guess what they’ve got down there on the left?”
“What?”
“More shops! And on the right, they’ve got, now this may come as something of a surprise, more bloody shops! How the hell did they build such a modern mall and then fail to provide the most basic information to the shopper?”
Perhaps the fad culture is to blame. With fashions and crazes coming and going faster than you can make a cup of bubble tea, shop turnover rate is high. Retail units at Far East Plaza, for example, appear to change every week. Signs that indicate the location of Hello Kitty, cinnamon bun, 10-minute haircut and luohan fish shops would need updating frequently. Maybe it really is easier to simply say “more shops”.
After spending a few minutes at what was indeed a splendid lookout point, I jogged down the steps that led to the two ponds in the park. Unfortunately, the native wildlife was conspicuous by its absence. The team of drillers digging up the path around the pond did not help matters. By now, I was convinced they were tracking me around the country. Reluctantly, I trudged back up the steps. It was about to rain; the humid air was oppressive and my damp clothes were stuck to my skin. And I had climbed the wrong steps. A gentle ramble around a park had somehow turned into a never ending trek up a troublesome hillock. Then I spotted a turnstile at the top of the steps. Rather fortuitously, I had stumbled upon a side entrance to NUS, where an air-conditioned food court waited for me. Or so I thought.
“Woah, woah, woah, woah! Where you going, ah?” shouted a sprightly Chinese chap in his sixties, striding up the steps behind me. How the hell had he caught up with me so quickly?
“You got a pass? Must have a pass. If you don’t have a pass, cannot go in. No, cannot go in without a pass. Must have a pass.” I had not uttered a word. The man was having a heated argument with himself.
“I’m going out on a limb here, but am I right in saying that I must have a pass? I need a pass just to walk through the university campus grounds?”
“No, no, no. This not the university. No, no, no. This is private property. University not here.”
“Then where is the university?”
“Don’t know. Not here. See the sign. This private property.”
“I’ve just walked up a thousand steps to get here. Why wasn’t the sign at the bottom of the steps instead of at the top? Is there any way I can get back into Kent Ridge Park without going all the way back down the steps?”
“Kent Ridge Park? Where’s that, ah?”
“Where’s Kent Ridge Park? It’s there! Right beside you! You see that huge forest right next to you, full of trees, bushes and plants? That.” I wanted to kill him.
“Oh, follow longkang, go by longkang, longkang. You want longkang, longkang.”
And he was gon
e, through the turnstile and into his private property. And I was left wondering whether he was repeating himself or calling me a longkang, or drain.
On the way down, I was accompanied by a younger Chinese man who left the mysterious building as the uncle went in. Wearing an expensive shirt and a sharp tie, he obviously did not clean the longkangs.
“If it’s not NUS, what is it?” I asked, as I wrung out my sweaty, soaked shorts.
“We’re called DSO,” he replied, rather hesitantly. “It’s a research company, defence and stuff.”
“Wow! You work for the government. Singapore’s answer to James Bond. What are you working on at the moment?”
He laughed politely as we continued to walk down the steps together. But he did not reply and the penny eventually dropped. I was dumbfounded.
“You’re really not going to tell me, are you?”
“Better not, lah.”
So he did not and we parted ways at the car park. I later discovered that I had chanced upon DSO National Laboratories in Science Park Drive. DSO is Singapore’s leading defence research and development organisation. According to its website, it essentially strives to improve national security, working to increase the operational effectiveness of the Singapore Armed Forces and create cutting-edge defence technology. I was lucky I had not been shot.
But some perspective is also desperately needed here. The last time I watched one of his films, James Bond was not a lanky, red-faced ang moh, wearing sweaty shorts and moaning about “these bloody steps”. But that is life in Singapore. Self-censorship has become a reflex action from the bottom up. How many times have you opened a newspaper and read about an interviewee who has refused to give his full name, even though his comments are usually inane? Indeed, it is quite common to read paragraphs such as: “An eyewitness, who only wanted to be known as Mr X, said, ‘I stood on my balcony every evening, watching the dramatic events unfold. I eventually realised that when the sun goes down, the moon always comes up.’”
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 6
