Uniquely Singapore

Every break, I go home and get my hair cut and its color re-touched, my face pampered, my hands and feet manicured and pedicured, and my wardrobe updated with items I wouldn’t be able to get in the U.S., or in New Haven, at least. I go to one or two new restaurants that have opened in the time I was away (and rejoice silently when I remember I don’t have to tip there, because “service charge” is included in the bill), but most importantly, I make sure to stuff myself with greasy street food, rated by the late food critic R.W. Apple as one of the best and most varied in the world.

Welcome to Singapore, or Uniquely Singapore, as our Tourism Board would prefer me to say: a fine city, land of the free market but a censored press, home to the materially well-off but politically oppressed. The first thing friends at Yale ask me when they find out I’m from Singapore is whether chewing gum is really banned, whether the punishment for the offense of chewing gum on the streets is really caning, and whether people are really fined for littering or not flushing public toilets after use. While I have always held that I do not represent, nor am I singly responsible for the values my government espouses, I occasionally jump to my home country’s defense in these situations. I use the Singapore government’s sheer pragmatism, nose for profits that result from political and economic order, and insistence on efficiency as justification for its policies.

But the Singapore I grew up in did not seem stifling or strict to me. What’s a home supposed to amount to when you’re not given another one to measure it against? To be fair, my family made it a point to go to different countries during school vacations, a tradition I’m glad we’ve carried on to this day. By the time I walked through Phelps Gate for the first time in Fall 2004, I had been to Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Indonesia, India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Malaysia—but only as a tourist, not as a political correspondent.

Before I get personal, here are some factoids: Singapore is an island-city-state that lies at the Southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. The smallest country in Southeast Asia, and the second-most densely populated country in the world with 4.48 million people to its 269.1 square miles, it is also the 22nd wealthiest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita, and, according to a 2006 World Bank survey, the most business-friendly country in the world. Singapore’s investment-led economy has consisted for four decades mainly of traditional manufacturing and service industries. But the idea and concept of “service” in Singapore has had a longer history than forty years and an omnipresent role in the country’s culture.

A History of Service

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles of the British East India Company landed on the main island of Singapore in 1819 and immediately recognized its excellent geographical location. It was situated in close proximity to the Spice Islands and on trade routes to and from China and India. Raffles was able to use these features to his own advantage by signing a treaty with the man he claimed to recognize as the rightful Sultan. Singapore was sold to the British for a dime and served the empire’s economic purposes for more than a century afterwards.

Our step into modernity and world recognition began as a service hub. Raffles’s deputy, William Farqhuar, helped to develop the port into a port-of-call, and not a port proper, in that it was there to refit, revitalize, and protect British merchant ships (against Dutch competition). Ships would stop in Singapore to refuel and to let its crews rest before moving on to their final destinations. Thus, Singapore’s service industries have had a longer history than we’d care to think.

After the Second World War and Japanese Occupation of Singapore, the British agreed to cede sovereignty on condition of Singapore’s joining the Federation of Malaya in 1959. After several rounds of negotiations, the Federation gained full independence from the British in 1963.

The country was expelled from the Federation of Malaya in 1965 after ethnic discord between the Chinese and Malays. This was one of the worst periods of civil unrest in Singapore’s history, and local politicians still cite racial riots of the times to support limits on the freedom of speech. Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore and its prime minister between 1959 and 1990, cried on national television when announcing the ejection of the city from the Federation, so surprised by these events and worried about the country’s survival was he. This survival anxiety turned into the productive energy that drives Singapore in the new millennium. The free market economy and civil stability served and still serves investors and financial service-providers well.

Singaporean Service Today

The excessive lifestyles of Singapore’s relatively wealthy population seem to carry Lee’s crying image in their collective memory, implicitly responding to that distress with a quiet, self-assured “never again.” Never again do we wish to worry about where our next meal will come from, and we will serve whomever we need to for this purpose. Singapore is still a service hub, though now gains are made in securities, stocks, bonds, and private equity returns, not tangible goods. Today, instead of serving one empire or a federation, we serve giant corporations who make more than whole nations’ GDPs annually.

Lee’s tears gave way to shouts of Merdeka! (”freedom”) to frenzied, cheering crowds, on August 9, 1965 on the Padang, a field in the heart of Singapore’s Civic District. Surrounded by the former Supreme Court buildings, the Singapore Cricket Club, and Singapore’s Old Parliament House, now a multi-purpose arts event space, the Padang is now used for cricket, rugby, and softball games, and sometimes, the annual National Day Parade on August 9. I played softball in secondary school and junior college (our high-school equivalent), and while I have never considered myself to be particularly patriotic (or “RaRa” as we might say in Singlish, a creole of English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil words, usage of which the government also frowns upon), I loved playing on the Padang, for its sheer sense of urbanity and history, colonial and otherwise. After games, we would head to the nearest mall, Raffles City, and have a meal from Wendy’s, known as “Burger King.” Sometimes, the boys’ team would join us, and one of the main things on the boys’ minds at that time (besides sex) was the two-and-a-half years of compulsory military training they would have to endure when they turned 18.

Thus, in freshman and sophomore year, while I was broadening my mental horizons at Yale, most of my male peers were stuck on our tropical rainforest island in the rut known as “National Service,” or NS for short. Many Singaporean males feel very disgruntled with the government and their involuntary service for the country. This feeling of stasis and seeming lack of choice is certainly something I associate with Singapore. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t feel politically oppressed when I go home, nor do we have little consumer freedom—we have so many consumer choices that they’re coming out of our ears. This distracts us from how politically stifled we are. Deviation from the norm in terms of, say, sexual preferences, until recently was frowned upon by the government. The norm, of course, is whatever the government endorses, which is usually what the majority of Singaporeans thinks, anyway.

Singapore has been sticking, consciously or not, to a paradigm of service for such a long time that it is at risk of losing the benefit of other perspectives. By “paradigm of service” I refer both to the image of “success,” the now-displaced British imperialist waited on by his local servants, as well as the idea that stringent laws truly serve to maintain a peaceful civic society. The paradigm’s stasis accords a permanently superior role to the served, and an inferior role to the server. While I enjoy the luxury of not tipping and the presence of two domestic helpers from Indonesia in my household, they show me how easy it is to take service for granted. For all the pedicures, massages, and nightclub-entry stamps I chock up, I wonder about my government’s proud claims of being a meritocracy. Like in the US, and many other countries in the world, the privileged, more often than not, remain so, and the servers carry on serving the multi-course meal in the Dinner and Dance of our lives.

Beyond Service

The Singapore government is now trying to encourage “innovative” and “creative” ways of thinking, since they think creative industries will drive the economy to greater heights in the coming years. I vaguely remember being prepared to “think creatively” in school. We were taught how to draw mind-maps. Every classroom had the same chart of mind-maps we could draw. I found it amusing that to get us to think creatively, the Ministry of Education was telling us how to think out of a box. Perhaps the idea was that they would serve us with their methods, and we would serve them with profits derived from our “creative” ways of thinking.

The government’s zeal for economic efficiency before all else permeates the daily lives of Singaporeans. A quiet desperation, which in some cases has developed into disillusionment and resignation, seethes beneath the hum of the lunchtime crowd in the Central Business District on any given weekday. As an intern at various firms in different years in the CBD, I sensed an awareness of something else, something more than the maps we’ve been given for leading A Successful Life. A Successful Life does not always feature domestic helpers, spa and facial treatments, scuba-diving classes, and gastronomic (or alcoholic) delights every weekend. It is not the complacent contentment of consumer choices. There is also the subconscious need for fulfillment beyond material well-being, over and above all the services you can lay your hands on. If that fulfillment comes from the self-awareness that all one needs to be happy is material luxury and service, so be it. But first we must question ourselves and the values we’re used to in order to gain such self-awareness. My greatest fear for my country is that we’re too caught up in service to begin questioning in the first place.

BY SU CHING TEH
IMAGES COURTESY OF THE SINGAPORE TOURISM BOARD