#002 - Life as we live it today | Culture | Q&A
How well do you know your history? Does your knowledge of Singapore’s history include the lines, “Singapore was a sleepy fishing village before 1819″ and that Singapore became what it is today because of “The great vision of Sir Stamford Raffles”? That’s what most of us grew up with, from official sources and canonical educational texts that surround us but there is obviously more that needs to be told.
The latest book by Mark Ravinder Frost and Yu-Mei Balasingamchow titled Singapore:A Biography hopes to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of the little island of Singapore. Offering an intriguing and refreshing fresh look at the life story of the island city-state, the book is told through eyewitness accounts and personal perspectives of coolie workers, adventurers, rulers and revolutionaries, giving the book a unique voice of its own.
After attending a talk at the National Library by the two authors where they spoke about their latest work, we decided that there were some questions that then followed up with an email interview with Yu-Mei to dive a little bit deeper into the thoughts behind the book and Singapore’s history.
Also, we are such big fans of the book, that we want to share it with you! We are even giving away a signed copy of it and you can find out more details in our previous post here. Meanwhile, enjoy the interview that we did with Yu-Mei.
Happyesque (H): Is History cool? If not, how can it be cool. And if yes, how so?
Yu-Mei (YM): Sure it is. Everyone loves a good story and history is full of good stories, not just dates and dead (white) men. You have Hollywood mining the past for good drama, and there are lots of meaty and popular books out there that combine good writing with solid history. Our book has a good mix of different historical stories – the individual experiences of rickshaw coolies, traders, women and revolutionaries, as well as zingy moments of high drama, with pirates, riots and war.
In Singapore specifically, I think there is a burgeoning interest in the past – nostalgia, as well as history. How did we get here? What did life used to be like? It doesn’t hurt that “retro” seems to be “in” (again?) and that the Little Nonya has tottered in her slippers to some kind of mini-Peranakan renaissance in local popular culture. Instead of looking at foreign cultures all the time, maybe people are starting to realise that our past and hey, being Asian can be cool too.
H: You mentioned that the book is for “the general reader”. In this age of superfast web browsing, scanning headlines and excerpts, does the “general reader” still exist? How do you think the new-age “general reader” will react to the thickness of your book?
People who have lived through relatively recent history know that there is more to it than what was captured in the textbooks – Yu-Mei, author Singapore: A Biography
YM: People are still reading and sampling different types of texts. The kind of information and enjoyment you can get from working your way through a well-written piece of extended writing is quite different from the skimming and scanning that tends to happen on the web. So it’s not to say that books, or thick books, are dead.
One thing about our book that makes it neat for browsing is that it is sub-divided into chronological sections (which also happen to be somewhat thematic), and that it channels many voices of different people who lived in Singapore through the centuries. That makes it good for dipping into and browsing from time to time. Of course it’d be great if everyone sat down and read it from cover to cover, and it was written with that kind of reader in mind. But it can be read as stand-alone sections too, if you just want to get a flavour of a particular time period or person in history.
H: In your opinion, how comfortable are Singaporeans at dealing with their own complex history?
The state version of history has been the official version for some time, which students are fed in schools and which underlies or even dominates everything from the National Day Parade to international tourism campaigns. But people who have lived through relatively recent history know that there is more to it than what was captured in the textbooks, while some young Singaporeans are curious about what else was there before 1965 (or 1959, if you prefer, or 1819). Right now I think a lot of history tends to get conflated with nostalgia or trivia, and treated at that level. How we can move beyond that is something that I think our society as a whole has to work on still, partly because it’s much easier to just say accept the state narrative and leave it at that.
H: Is the Singaporean society mature enough to be exposed to a wealth of sources and then have their own intepretations of history?
YM: I don’t think everyone has to become au fait with Singapore’s past overnight in order for us to be a mature society. But I think it would be healthy if we thought and talked about it more, alongside how as modern Singaporeans we regard ourselves and our society today. History intersects with culture – both past culture(s) and modern-day culture. One thing that struck us as we were writing this book was the kinds of similarities that do exist between Singapore culture today and Singapore culture of the 19th century (or earlier). We didn’t spell everything out in the book, because readers can draw their own conclusions, but if they examine some of the incidents and people carefully, they’ll see that there are some of these regular tensions between the people and the government, tensions over space in Singapore and what it is used for (literally or symbolically). Even the question of what it means to be Singaporean is not a new one.
H: What role does our built environment (buildings, road layout, etc) play in telling the history of our nation?
YM: It’s both limiting and liberating at the same time. Limiting because so much has vanished, of course – jungles and kampungs, even road names (poor Farquhar Street) or roads themselves, which may be rerouted even if the name is unchanged. People like to feel a connection with what they can see, not what they have to imagine. I remember watching the Singapore TV series Site and Sound some years ago, which was about the history of different places in Singapore, and one technique they used was to superimpose images of an old building or place over what the current scene looked like – like a hologram overlain on the modern-day scene. If technology ever got to a point where you could press a button on your iPhone and project that sort of historical layer onto the landscape of Singapore, I think it’d be astonishing – both in terms of appreciating the changes Singapore has gone through, as well as a visceral appreciation of the lives that were led here in previous decades or centuries.
At the same time, having a constantly changing environment can be liberating. Very postmodern, right? No need to feel constrained by the past – everything is possible! Ironically Singapore culture today seems to lack a certain impetuous zest for life. There’s a tension between wanting more modernity (often translated as “progress”), and holding back, conserving the past, getting sentimental over old buildings, old coffee cups, even old road signs.
Having said that, I sometimes wish that as a society, we had a more fundamental connection to specific places that saw important moments in this island’s history. The poor old Padang, for instance, now relegated to the odd Singapore Biennale event or rugby match. I’m not saying the National Heritage Board or NParks should step in and turn it into a “heritage park” – perish the thought! But the Padang is very old ground that has seen some very compelling stories, and its significance as a place of meeting and gathering force is these days too easily consigned to the history books (including ours).
H: If there was a sequel or a prequel to Singapore:A Biography, what would the story line be?
I’m not sure about a prequel, given the current dearth of archaeological evidence, but there should really be a sequel someday. The institution of Singapore the nation-state would certainly be a solid chunk of it – the national economic success story vs. the individual social and cultural changes that were going on without respite. I think there is a lot of what I call unarticulated angst about the state’s version of the “Singapore Story” – where that goes, what kind of stories emerge from that, still remains to be seen.
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Text: Adib Jalal