“Well, cannot visit this one. Haw Par Villa shut down already. Been closed for years.”
I was not amused. Having narrowly avoided losing my reproductive organs to a flying Alsatian, my fractious mood might not have tolerated a No Entry sign. But, to my pleasant surprise, Haw Par Villa was open and admission was free. Yet a teenager who lived no more than 400 metres from its entrance was adamant that it had been closed for years.
That is not as strange as it seems. Haw Par Villa enjoys a bizarre love-hate relationship with Singaporeans and even though I had lived here for a decade, I had never had an overwhelming desire to visit. No one has ever approached me and said, “Oh, you must visit Haw Par Villa.” East Coast, yes. Sentosa, yes. The four floors of whores at Orchard Towers, yes. But never Haw Par Villa, even though its history is full of eccentricity, spontaneity, egotism and philanthropy; colourful quirks that are rarely encountered in this country.
In the mid-1930s, Aw Boon Haw was one of Asia’s wealthiest businessmen. An entrepreneur ahead of his time, he had a flair for marketing, ensuring that his Tiger Balm ointment was the ointment of choice all over the Malayan peninsula. It still is among the aunties and uncles. Whether you have got a mosquito bite, a sprained ankle or gonorrhoea, they will slap some Tiger Balm on the affected area before you can cry out, “Ow! That stings. Shouldn’t we be using live yoghurt instead?”
With his fortune secured, the charismatic Aw woke up one morning and decided to purchase a site to build his brother Boon Par (hence the name) a house. But not just any house. Oh no, this had to be a dome-shaped mansion on the top of a hill, with six rooms, sea views in every direction and sprawling gardens containing hundreds of statues and tableaux depicting traditional Chinese myths, customs and virtues. I was impressed. I only got my brother an iPod for Christmas.
With no expense spared, the lavish villa was finally completed in 1937. Visitors flocked to the place and the surrounding Tiger Balm Gardens became one of the most photographed sites in Singapore. Although there was hardly any competition back then. Sentosa was a British military base and there is only so many times that you can take a picture of Raffles Hotel.
Of course, time waits for no tableau and Haw Par Villa began to lose its lustre. Tourists were being drawn to the Singapore River, Sentosa was slowly taking shape and Singaporean children were having more fun in Genting. The appeal of standing in front of a statue of a laughing Buddha had worn thin. The park fell into disrepair, forcing the government to intervene. Te macabre and the horrific became the order of the day. Some $80 million was reportedly spent remodelling the place, with lots of electronic gadgets to jazz up the fading statues. The operators employed budding actors to work as ghosts and ghouls. There was even a boat ride and fancy indoor theatres to rehash Chinese folklore. All that was missing was an ice show.
But it came at a cost. When Haw Par Villa reopened in October 1990, the admission ticket set adults back $16. And it was another 10 bucks for the kids. Now that is a lot to fork out for the privilege of standing in the baking sun to look at a few statues. After an initial upswing, attendance eventually took a tumble, the park haemorrhaged money and it closed in 2001.
I did not even know it had reopened. But here it was in front of me, clearly desperate for any kind of patronage. It was Saturday morning, but the park appeared to be empty. This did not seem like a good idea. I was already castigating myself for my impudent behaviour when a souvenir stall owner beckoned me into the park. He practically pleaded. Oh well, I was here now. I would buy an ice cream I did not want from him and take a respectful, but hasty, walk around Haw Par Villa.
Well, it exceeded all my expectations. True, I never had any. And I will not pretend that a trip to Haw Par Villa equates to a week in Las Vegas. But the place was so damn bizarre, so eclectic and so disorganised in a country that is renowned for being none of those things that it felt like I had temporarily left Singapore and jumped into a Lewis Carroll novel.
Like every other visitor to Haw Par Villa, I headed towards the 10 courts of hell. I passed quite a large gift emporium, one of those period costume shops where you can dress up like a member of the Tang Dynasty and have your photograph taken and a coffee shop. All three were empty and the employees of each were sitting together at a table reading the Chinese newspapers. They virtually begged me to “come inside, take a look”, so I compromised. I patronised their toilet.
Patronise is the right word because outside the toilet, someone had left a money box with the handwritten message “Toilet paper, 10 cents” scrawled on the side. That is not uncommon in Singapore. But we were not talking a sealed packet of tissues here. These were individual sheets of paper torn from a roll and folded into pretty little patterns. If the guy’s days as a toilet paper crook are numbered, he will always have a future in origami. I know Haw Par Villa needs every dollar it can get, but 10 cents for a couple of sheets of ripped toilet paper seemed a touch cheeky. Exorbitant, really, and it was not even absorbent.
The toilets themselves were surprisingly trendy, with smartly tiled floors and a few potted plants around the sink. Everything said modern, except the empty toilet-roll holders. Someone is making a mint here. There is probably a toilet-roll baron living off his ill-gotten gains in a colonial bungalow over in “Little Kent”.
After drying my hands, picking my ears and blowing my nose to make sure I used up every last sheet, I handed over a token $1 admission fee and headed into the 10 courts of hell. The signs proudly stated that terrified children once ran out of this exhibit screaming. Which just goes to show that children were stupid in those days.
The 10 courts of hell depict what will happen to us after we die, according to Chinese mythology. The courts are controlled by Hu Fu Shi Zhe, who manages the ghosts and devils in an executive capacity, and guarded by Ox Head and Horse Face. Their grotesque 2-metre-tall statues reminded me of the bouncers who once stood outside Hollywood’s Nightclub in Essex, the nocturnal dive of choice when I was a teenager. I felt most at home.
The first court of hell is judgement day, where a dead person’s deeds are reviewed. The good guys are sent over the golden bridge to paradise, where there is no poverty or famine and West Ham United win the Champions League every season. The bad guys are told to stand before the mirror of retribution. With heads bowed and bottom lips sticking out, they are sent to the nine torturous courts to atone for their sins. And the exhibit has created a freakish tableau for each of the courts.
Do not go looking for subtlety in the 10 courts of hell. There is red paint splattered all over the place. Evildoers are thrown head first into volcanoes, drowned in filthy bloody ponds, tied to a tree of knives and crushed by a large stone. The lucky ones, who probably stole half a slice of stale bread or something, merely get their hearts removed. Rumour-mongers have their tongues pulled out, a fact I gleefully passed on to my wife and mother-in-law later.
Each court seemed to be progressively more violent than the last and it did get a bit repetitive. There are only so many times Chinese children can be told to be good otherwise they will get their heads cut off with a sharp implement before it gets tiresome. When I was little, I was informed that if I misbehaved, Father Christmas would not drop off a VHS copy of The Karate Kid. Here, they tie you down, rip your tongue out, cut out all your vital organs, stamp on your heart and throw you into a volcano. It did not seem fair really.
At the 10th court, the sinners are taken to the pavilion of forgetfulness, presumably with their head, limbs and organs all in a basket, to determine whether they will be reincarnated as a human or an animal. Just for the record, I would like to come back as a sloth.
After the blood and gore of the 10 courts of hell, I stepped back into the daylight and studied the bare breasts of the virtues and vices tableaux. Essentially a list of dos and don’ts, each scene depicted a vice or a virtue and its repercussions. The most controversial tableau championed the importance of filial piety. It was more gruesome, and certainly more distasteful, than anythi
ng offered in the courts of hell. I suppose there are many ways to demonstrate filial piety: by carrying grandmother’s shopping perhaps, or cleaning her windows, cooking her food and sweeping her floor. I am sure you could come up with your own example but I bet it would not top Haw Par Villa’s. They had a young woman feeding her elderly mother-in-law, from her own breast! I have never seen anything like it and I have visited Desker Road in the twilight hours.
Rather than being shy about having a boob thrust into her face, old mother-in-law apparently could not get enough of the good stuff. The milk actually dribbled down her chin as she suckled on the nipple. It was a real Freudian nightmare: a pornographic horror movie.
The other tableaux were a bit of an anticlimax after that and I have not had a glass of milk since. But the sheer eclectic range of statues made the park intriguing. There were crabs with human heads, a human band with animal heads, a miniature Statue of Liberty and, my own particular favourite, a family of oversized gorillas eating fruit under some trees. Anyone mad enough to put a statue of King Kong in his brother’s front garden is all right by me.
I liked Haw Par Villa because it was essentially pointless. It is highly unlikely that such a daft project would ever get commissioned in Singapore today, when almost every landmark, green space, heritage site and tourist attraction must have a purpose, a function and a revenue target. The old villa and the surrounding Tiger Balm Gardens owe their existence to the eccentricities of one flamboyant Chinese philanthropist. In 1937, that was reason enough. There was no tourism task force required to set visitor attendance and profit targets. Just one guy who woke up one morning and said, “Yes, I see it now. A tableau of a brass band, where each band member is a human being but has the head of a cat, duck or monkey, and statues of beautiful young women with exposed breasts. Have someone build that in our garden immediately.”
I left Haw Par Villa a happy man. After spending a third of my life here, it was reassuring to know that Singapore could still surprise me.
CHAPTER 10
I do not like technology. Or rather, I am not overly keen on people who do like technology. Usually because they are indescribably dull individuals who naturally assume that everyone around them is equally tedious. If buying the latest gizmo and gadget simply because they have not got it is not irritating enough, they feel an irrepressible urge to share their contraptions with the world. Unfortunately, there are a lot of these people in Singapore. Far too many really. You cannot move in the office without someone saying, “Have you seen my new handphone?”
“Well, I have now, seeing as you’ve just thrust it under my nose.”
“Yah. It can take pictures of 50 pixies and store them at the bottom of your garden with the fairies. Because it’s hands-free, I can call someone, play Europe’s “The Final Countdown” from the MP3 and take a huge dump without getting up from the toilet.”
“You are a deeply boring man.”
“Yah, but I’m gonna trade it in next week. They’ve got an upgraded model. It’s purple and has Swahili ringtones.”
“That’s just marvellous. Tell me something, have you ever kissed a girl?”
And they are all such experts, aren’t they? In a rare moment of weakness, do not ever reveal you have succumbed and invested in an incomprehensible piece of technology. It will always, always, be the wrong model, bought at the wrong price.
“You’ve bought a phone made by knock-off?” they will say, in a voice that is so loud and so theatrical that you will find yourself ripping out their trachea. “No, you should’ve bought a phone made by semen. That’ll never go down on you. Why didn’t you come to me first?”
“Because you’re extremely sad and annoying.”
“Yah, that may well be the case but I could’ve got you one for half of the price. Where did you get it?”
“Far East Plaza.”
“Should’ve gone to Sim Lim Square.”
“I was joking. Of course I got it at Sim Lim Square.”
“Should’ve gone to Far East Plaza.”
“Fuck off.”
I encountered a tech lover on the platform at Clementi Station. He caught my attention because he was holding his child in one of those rucksack baby carriers and sitting beside his wife on a bench. The couple, in their early thirties, were both showering their child with attention, lots of cooing and giggling. It was a heartwarming sight. There was no maid. It is becoming increasingly difficult in Singapore to spot a middle-income family without one.
The father took out his mobile phone from the rucksack to entertain the child. He switched on the MP3 player and treated the entire platform to a burst of that ’80s pop classic “Forever Young” by German band Alphaville. If you are of a certain age or, better yet, of a certain taste, you might have been spared this ghastly song with lyrics that demonstrate English clearly was a second language for the band. “The Final Countdown” sounds like the work of Philip Larkin in comparison. But it is an ah beng anthem here, played a couple of times a week on mainstream radio. I had never even heard of the song until I came to this country. But then, I had never heard of the Danish band Michael Learns To Rock either. There are no push factors related to my decision to leave Singapore. But Michael Learns To Rock comes close.
The country’s fascination with, dare I say it, ’80s music has long fascinated me. In that particular decade, some fine bands, including Madness and The Police, came to the fore in the music world. But they seldom get airplay here. No, Johnny Hates Jazz, Rick Astley and Sheena Easton are the order of the day. It has taken me 10 years but, thanks to Singapore’s radio stations, I now know every word to that James Bond classic “For Your Eyes Only”.
There is nothing wrong with nostalgia. One of the most popular radio stations in Britain is Capital Gold, which plays hits predominantly from the 1960s and 1970s. But its popularity generally derives from the sheer quality of its selections, from The Beatles to Motown. Gold FM plays similar music here. But Singapore must be the only country left in the civilised world where a mainstream, contemporary radio station still plays Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy, Shy” with a straight face. The music is safe and conservative and the lyrics repetitive and simplistic. It is pre-Beatles bubblegum pop set to synthesizers. This particular brand of ’80s music is benign and non-threatening, which could explain its longevity despite its overwhelming blandness. Either way, Singapore finds itself stuck in a musical Groundhog Day, where the nation wakes up every morning to the tune of “Brother Louie, Louie, Louie/Oh, she’s only looking to me”. The band behind “Brother Louie”, Modern Talking, is no longer modern and no longer talking. But those German musicians, like their compatriots Alphaville, will always be forever young in Singapore.
I got off the train at Queenstown. The western town is famous for being the oldest housing estate in Singapore, predating even the birth of the Housing and Development Board in 1960. Indeed, the first blocks in Queenstown were initiated by the same chaps who built Dagenham—the British! The Singapore Improvement Trust was established in 1927, after the British colonial government finally recognised that the kampongs were crumbling and citizens deserved decent, affordable housing. The Trust drew up the initial plans that finally came to fruition, thanks to the more efficient HDB, in the 1960s. Toa Payoh proudly took the prize for being the first complete estate constructed by HDB planners, but Queenstown did, in fact, come first.
For a while, you could tell. When I began visiting the area around Tanglin Halt Road and Stirling Road on a regular basis in the late 1990s, some of the blocks were in a dreadful state. The climate had taken its toll; the paint was peeling and the apartments had taken on a dirty, greyish colour. Pavements were cracked and pockmarked, window frames were rusty and gardens were virtually non-existent. Many of Singapore’s poorer families, and I have to be honest here, a high proportion of whom appeared to come from the country’s minority races, lived in the Queenstown area and it was difficult not to conclude that these residents were getting a pretty raw deal.
That has all changed. The town council must be commended for breathing new life into Singapore’s oldest municipal estate. Almost every block has been upgraded, with the additional room at the back, and most of the paths, void decks and corridors freshly paved. The estates, particularly around Tanglin Halt Road, now enjoy landscaped gardens that are actually being used. In Toa Payoh, it is rare to spot children around town after 6pm. They are mostly at home drowning under a sea of textbooks, tuition timetables and the kiasu demands of their parents. And that is just the preschoolers. But as I meandered around Queenstown, children were doing something quite unusual; they were playing. Dashing in and out of corridors, void decks and each other’s ground floor units, some eight or nine children played hide-and-seek. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but they were all Indian and Malay. They certainly looked very happy.
And I was in Queenstown to return to a place that once made me very happy. Well, two places actually, but we will come to the Commonwealth Avenue coffee shop later. I was here to revisit Queenstown Stadium. In 1998, my wife and I decided to take the plunge and rent an entire apartment. We were craving space. Our Indian landlady already had us packed into one small bedroom and two Filipinos in another when she decided to sleep on the sofa and rent out her third and final bedroom. The prospect of seven adults, four languages and a woman lying on the sofa with her enormous boobs hanging out was a bridge too far. So we rented our first home, a three-roomed flat in Lorong 1 Toa Payoh from the affable Uncle Kong. After signing the contract, he asked, “You’re English, ah? You like football?”
“Of course. I support West Ham United.”
“Never heard of them. Anyway, if you like football, go meet my daughter, Christine, at Queenstown Stadium. You can help her, tell her you know all about Manchester United.”
“It’s West Ham United.”
Final Notes From a Great Island Page 8
