Sing-Sing
Thoughts of the drug couriers passing the double barbed wire of Changi Prison; the kind of regime and program that must operate inside. The executions part of the exhortatory civic programming in this city/country—omnipresent billboards, piercing announcements on the trains, newspaper ads.…. Twenty times smaller land area than Montenegro and six/seven times the population: 4 mil./600,000. The Labour Camp Museum was closed, but the eateries nearby had lots of Aussies at the tables, left to draw their own conclusions on Imperial Japan, the Western Alliance, WWII and the Pacific theatre, international trade, cruelty and inhumanity from the movies, Sixty Minutes, magazine and newspaper features.
Flapping washing always a welcome sight. (More so where there are no birds or almost any other animals to be seen, even in Geylang.) Hung out on short bamboo-like poles from housing eight and ten stories high. Ships under an odd, ragged kind of sail the effect. (Better apartment blocks elsewhere disallow the practice.) Part of the nakedness of the poorer, workaday sections of the city.
Pensioners pay about $S400 per month for these well maintained HDB – Housing Development Board — flats. (Nothing like bleak Housing Commission.)
Pocket tissues sold by old ladies on the street possibly part of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s social program: promoting self-reliance; minimizing serviette litter from the eateries. (Serviettes likely permitted in the better class eateries around City Hall.) Fittingly, younger smiling women sell the hope of lottery tickets at the footpath tables. (The resistance against a casino collapsed under the new political guard: currently under construction.)
From school books of 40 years ago near relative of Java man walking the street here nightly, a wonderful, captivating architecture of cranium and features. (In the city in expensive Western dress and manner the relationship far less apparent.) Jaws prominent, loose slack mouths (dentistry as expensive here as elsewhere), heads lolling a little, width across the cheekbones. Striking the relaxation and complete ease of expression, the loose limbs, the unmistakable laxity and collectedness. Out of the ordinary on any city street. Recognition and exchange in looks and glances, gestures and spoken greetings: the unknown stranger not the frightful mystery that he is ordinarily…. Far more than colour or occasional native dress, these the signs of the foreign labourer’s foreignness, otherness. The marks of origin in entirely different homelands, different communities and structures.
The procession spills from the narrow pavement under the verandas onto the outside lane of the road, ceaseless, various, marvelous one way and the other along the busy five lane thoroughfare. An array of supple able-bodied young strength, Chinese and Indian, singly or in groups — all in possession of recent health check certificates—returning to their dormitories. (25 – 28 to a room the size of a badminton court; cold-water communal shower block reports the Straits Times). In hand the cheaper take-away plastic sachets of chai and teh tarik. Much of the apparel surprisingly fitting the dominant global street-wear cred (direct from place of manufacture); the English on the t-shirts almost entirely unintelligible on this street (the reason the oversized FUCK YOU can be sported by the rapper fans). While at the cheap pavement tables the older locals a few pegs above in the social order, male mainly, demonstrate the problem of the demographics (identical to the position of any other denatured “Western” country).
In Geylang more than anywhere else in Singapore the awareness of the geography of the region: the great seething land mass to the north. An entrepot of an entirely different kind now.
LOWER CRIME RATE DOESN’T MEAN NO CRIME
Protect yourself & your loved ones
Practice good personal hygiene
Value life, act responsibly
Touching ingenuous naivety harkening back to a long-lost optimism. And given the rudimentary English here, discordant in Geylang.
No Name Karaoke Pork Ribs Curry Noodle Yen Furnishing Thian Thian Joss Stick 503 Bosch Tolay Electrical Trading Pte Ltd within fifty metres of the chosen MC Eating House ($S3.00 for King-size plate.) Car repair places behind roller shutters immediately off the footpath, one a few doors down from the large mosque.
Unlit scrap-quality bicycles and scooters up and down with pillions uncomfortably perched (a fantastically illuminated one blazing coloured lights and blaring dance music the exception). All unhelmeted. Dark young men back of flat-bed trucks like convicts or some kind of underground slaves; resting heads on rails, holding on slack-bodied against the motion—more and more in the aspect of war-time coolies, salt mine labour camp prisoners. Medieval transports to execution sites…. Old green part-covered trucks from the Fall of Singapore common—wooden rails, canvas or metal canopy, Bedford-type nose and grill. Early afternoon near Bugis startled by a couple of dark young lads fast asleep on the corrugated tray of a small white truck parked along a line of commuter vehicles standing in their metered spaces. Taking no-one’s notice. Murdered, their postures would have been unaltered. Some-one said Tamils and Bangladeshis largely (house-maids Indonesian and Philippino).
Lessons in contemporary First World capitalism.
SMILE. IT INCREASES YOUR FACE VALUE
Comparative absence of neon, pizzazz, haute chi-chi seduction in these parts. No subliminal advertising whatever. Only this endless civic-mindedness.
Nothing to buy on Geylang. Shopperless shopping strip. The place utterly bereft of consumer goods and novelty shops—a couple of fancy lighting stores almost the sole exception. Fifty cheap eateries in two kilometres, bikes, eye-glasses, fruit, pawnbrokers, car repair, bars, karaoke, massage, a mosque, organic food. Supermarketless the length and breadth. Two Seven-Elevens with the look of recent encroachment. (Within the towers round Raffles and City Hall novel quirky unique fashion-design aesthetics aplenty no doubt.)
Two-kilometre five-lane traffic thoroughfare ( bus-stop posters warning against jay-walking) hosting each evening a couple of hundred working girls on the beat. Clustering around the bars and karaokes younger pencil-thin Viet girls. Older mainland Chinese work the eateries, accepting invitations at the plastic outdoor tables, joining the beer drinking, adding to the repartee, immediately enlivening the table. Down the eastern end making an odd near neighbour, Muslim Malay Village, where the women cover top to toe and generational oddity at the tables reveals (illegal) multiple wives.
Worn open faces the like of which disappeared from our city streets twenty and thirty years ago. (Visible still only in Footscray and Blacktown Coles Cafeterias.) Elderly on small motorised scooters, wheelchairs, walking sticks, under arm, adding to the full human gamut. TV a lesser companion for these people. (Outdoor screen in the Malay quarter showing non-stop choreographed violence always drawing a little knot of on-lookers). Likely lack of air con. at home a factor. Cheapness of food too.
Casino body aims to strike right balance
One aim to keep bad hats out;
Another to curb harmful social impact
Straits Times, 18 April
Twenty four year old Bangladeshi construction site worker 1 ½ yrs in country earnings $S600 – 650 per month. Repatriates $S400 each month. Company accommodation. Sixteen year visa.
Last year Singapore Coastguard chased off 245 suspicious vessels; four times the number in 2007.
Straits Times 18th April.
Much Ado About Nothing playing somewhere within spitting distance of Raffles no doubt. (Worn, barely legible pavement cautions against the practice). Advertised on taxis and buses. More down-heartening than the Frank Sinatra t-shirt seen on a labourer trudging along Geylang as if through a rice paddy. Much more down-heartening.
Sunday night in Little India
For the native Singaporeans an unusual entertainment Sunday afternoon and evening going to watch the cheap labour take their leisure in Little India. Little India is the name of the MRT stop in the old Indian quarter where the temples and tea and spice shops—now overtaken by knickknack shops—are centred. Ordinarily in Singapore the dark skinned sub-continentals can only be sighted in the rear of flat-bed trucks or around the stalls in Little India……
A social experiment in a large field laboratory stretching about three square kilometres: Take 40,000 young Indian men between the ages of nineteen and thirty six out from their homelands (between 1.55 – 1.7 metres height); put them to work six or six and a half days a week at fourteen or so hours per diem (some of the foreign workers have one or two Sundays off per month); then on their free afternoon allow them to bathe and dress themselves, iron shirts and trousers and fraternize entirely as they wish into the evening. Observe the result.
— You have to see this. You will be amazed. You can see them milling everywhere you turn, sitting on the ground and in the street. They hold hands and walk arm in arm. Men together, our Singaporean local reveals in her advance promotion.
The event become something of a curiosity for the natives, the Singaporean Chinese, who venture out to witness the remarkable spectacle, the extraordinary throng. Young men down in the gutters, scatted across the few grassed areas, under the trees ( the trees first taken). A minority sit at the eateries in front of the large screens showing Bollywood epics and music videos. (Five thousand times the number of tables would be required to seat them all.) The greater proportion walking with their fellows up and down, no-where in particular.
And true to tell, precisely as forewarned: hand-holding, arms across shoulders, elbows clasped. In conversation an arm or elbow held while the words given. Warm, purposeful, close exchanges. Breathed conversations. Earnest telling. News-information-advice-giving. Smiles, laughter and raucousness less evident. Circumstances dictate another tone and register.
Fifty or sixty thousand possibly. In neatest Sunday-wear. Intriguing for the local Chinese, and unnerving too with the implied thinness of social order. Ranked buses wait to return them to their dormitories, loud-hailers directing.
(Otherwise Sago Lane in China Town and the Little India thoroughfares tourist traps only.)
Mainland China and Singapore worlds apart according to the locals. “We are not Chinese,” when the question wrongly put. Sixty-five – seventy per cent Chinese population according to the Chinese. (A quarter of the population non-citizens:1.2 / 4.8 million.)
Sport non-existent here as an element in the social mix. Yonex Tee going by gives the reminder.
SAFETY FIRST
LIFE IS GOOD
(For dark skinned foreign workers?)
Seat-belt law optional in practice; inapplicable for the workers on the flat-bed trucks. (Arrogance in the car driver toward pedestrians a product of the harsh natural law and class system operating?)
The age-bracket for working girls same as the labourers; lower limit in this case more elastic very likely. (No admittance under sixteen years of age. No Soliciting on these premises: in all the bar entryways.) Mornings the younger ones return to Geylang in taxis picking up take-away en route to their dorms. (No doubt twenty to a room likewise).
The older mainland Chinese gladden the hearts of the local workers, small businessmen and pensioners. Eighty year olds returning from their morning constitutional are recalled to their youth and made to ponder the possibilities under the verandas.
No sixteen year visas applicable.
Survival
Bangladeshi worker quoted saying a month in Singapore without work one could not survive. Back home it was a year.
Eighty thousand Indonesian housemaids start on around $S250 per month and progress up to $S500 – 600 when they have proved themselves and won their place in the family. Contracts commonly two years. Yearly flight home included in salary package. First and third Sundays monthly free.
Sundays Paya Lebar a honey-pot for the boys and adventure playground for the girls. Paya Lebar has two large multi-storey shopping complexes opposite each other at the main intersection and numerous cheap eateries adjacent. Quick “emergency love” (Garcia Marquez) is cheaper and sweeter here than that offered by the working girls down the road. Even so, as the boys say, without the money there is no honey here too.
