part0014

…in excavating the archaeology of Jewish identity, Freud insisted that it did not begin with itself but, rather, with other identities (Egyptian and Arabian) which his demonstration in Moses and Monotheism goes a great distance to discover, and thus to restore to scrutiny… Freud’s uneasy relationship with the orthodoxy of his own community…needn’t be seen only as a Jewish characteristic; in our age of vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants, it can also be identified in the diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community .

When I entered the room of the house, the tang-ki was already seeing people. The tang-ki, aged fifty, was lying on the floor on his side, slightly curled up, with his upper body slightly raised from the floor. He occasionally turned his head and aspirated a ‘prrrrr’ sound representing the hiss of a snake. There was a serious-looking couple in their sixties sitting cross-legged on the mat looking at him. Nearby was a low lying table on which were various objects and a large amount of ash from the burning of incense. This table like the room was very untidy.

I learnt later that a Datuk Kong Malay snake spirit possessed the tang-ki. ii The hissing sound he made was to drive away any evil spirits. This tang-ki mainly operated in Melaka, Malaysia, where he lived, but at the request of a businessperson he comes to Singapore every couple of months to give consultations. On one occasion, he had been to England for three months when Chinese restaurant workers requested his presence. The person was quite proud that he had made a significant amount of money from seeing people, and he showed me all the empty umpour packets [small red envelopes that contain money]. When he spoke as Datuk Kong, he spoke Mandarin. Harry, the person who had introduced me to him in the first place, had been disappointed with this tang-ki speaking in Mandarin when possessed rather than Malay and thought for this reason that he was not a genuine tang-ki.

Harry also took me to see another tang-ki, a Mandarin-speaking man of Indian background brought up by Chinese people, who when he became possessed by a Datuk Kong spirit spoke in Malay. I did not encounter any other tang-ki possessed by a Datuk Kong spirit in Singapore although in a third temple I frequently visited, one of the idols was a Datuk spirit This shrine was in the Geylang area of Singapore where a large number of Malays used to live, and where in July and September 1964 there were racial clashes between Malays and Chinese people (Baker 2005: 326).

The account of the Datuk tang-kis points one towards issues of identity and identity formation, a complex field of studies in the social sciences. There are two main positions on the question of identity that can be taken: one is an essentializing view that sees identity as a fixed position from which a person lives out their life; and the other is a post-modern view that sees identity as being fluid, multiple and open to change. In this second view, identity is seen as a discursive phenomenon constructed within representation. Hammond writes:

There is no pre-existing ‘essential self’ which is then represented or expressed; rather subjectivity and identity are constructed within discourse. There is no ‘unitary’ subject, ‘identical to itself across time’, but rather identity is always unstable, fragmented and contingent, since it is dependent on the exclusion of that which is ‘Other’ .

Identities in this second view are seen to arise in particular historical, socio-political, economic and religious contexts. Mol speaks of religion as a sacralization of identity (1976), and Katz and Rubinstein (2003) see religion as a process of conserving established identities. Tang-ki worship in South East Asia has been looked at in this way as providing an identity for Hokkien people (DeBernardi 1994a; Chan 2002). While I would not disagree with the idea of religion and tang-ki worship being about identity building, I argue for a more complex view; as well as tang-ki worship being about identity formation, it is also about the subversion of identity, shown not by its exclusion of the other but by its inclusion. What else could explain an Indian, Mandarin-speaking tang-ki possessed by a Malay spirit bringing healing to people in the medium of the Malay language?

The question of identity in Singapore has been a major issue since the founding of the city in 1819. The Government of Singapore has always had concerns about what it means to be a Singaporean in a country that has four main racial groups: Malay, Indian, Chinese and European and a multiplicity of religious discourses. Tang-ki worship in Singapore is embedded in a Chinese culture that is lived out in relationship to a multiplicity of identity discourses in Singapore and in relationship to the Government’s attempts at identity building. It is influenced by the various identity discourses that have arisen in Singapore and has also contributed to these. This chapter has as its aim the exploration of the relationship of identity concerns in Singapore to tang-ki worship. The history of Singapore is first outlined. Then, various discourses that have arisen within this history are examined, and, in the last section, the relationship of tang-ki worship to issues of identity is explored.

In 1985, when I first travelled to Singapore, Singapore was seen as a place that one stayed in for only a short period before going on to some other more ‘exotic’ destinations, like Thailand. Many fellow travellers at that time saw Singapore as being a modern city like any other city in the world without much individuality or ‘culture’. Indeed, if one walks along Orchard Road [the main commercial shopping area of Singapore] at Christmas time when the roadway has become a mall and is crowded with people, the shop windows and overhead lights dazzle one in a display similar but surpassing what one would see in any large city in Europe or Australasia. Orchard Road is flanked by many large shopping malls, some selling leading brand names of a variety of merchandise, such as clothes, shoes and electronic equipment. One sees other symbols of modernity and cosmopolitanism – Starbuck coffee centres, pizza parlours and McDonalds. One also gets the same impression of the presence of modernity if one visits the suburban areas of Singapore, passing block after block of high-rise flats, with the only difference between the blocks being that in recent years the blocks have become higher.

Singapore is a modern nation, a city-state, centrally planned with a liberal economy. It is strongly caught up in global capitalism. In 2000, it was on one index the most globalised city in the world. Factors such as economic integration, international connections, use of the internet and membership in overseas organizations were taken into account in making this assessment (Ooi and Shaw 2004: 36). Singapore is considered to have one of the world’s most free markets, coming second to Hong Kong in 2005 figures (The Straits Times 2006). Nearly everyone in Singapore can speak English, considered the language of science, commerce, technology and industry. Singaporean students’ ability in science and maths subjects is very high. Educational achievement is a priority for both the Government and the people.

The Government, after gaining complete independence in 1965, had the task of constructing both a nation and a people (Chua and Kuo 1991: 5). It worked to create a wealthy, modern, efficient and productive country as well as to create an identity for the people suitable for the modern, cosmopolitan, commercial image of Singapore. According to Chua and Kuo, economic success itself became associated with national identity (1991: 7). Wee says the leaders of Singapore, ‘... tried to make industrial modernity…the meta-narrative which might frame what they perceived to be an empty ‘‘Singapore” identity’ (2001: 255).

While it is possible to see Singapore as a country founded by a European Englishman, Sir Charles Raffles, in 1819, it is also feasible to see the country as existing before that event. Trocki maintains a less Eurocentric and colonialist view, refusing to see Singapore as just a creation of the European. He considers one has to take into account the life and structure of the people living in the region before the arrival of Raffles. (1990: 1, 19-20). Identity politics in Singapore did not then start with the British but was already present.

At the time of Raffles arrival in Singapore in 1819, the population, according to Baker, was only about one thousand people made up of groups of Orang Laut [sea nomads] and some Chinese people who had spice plantations (2005: 89). Trocki does not see Singapore at that time as only having a few scattered unorganized communities. He says the Chinese people had a social structure based on ‘kongsi’ relationships and an economy based on pepper and gambier production (1990: 3, 15). Trocki sees the continuity in the history of Chinese society in that area from pre-European to post-European contact being, ‘…the history of its primary economic and social institution, the kongsis’ (1990: 20). The early Chinese settlers in Singapore organized themselves into groups, called ‘kongsi’, for economic benefits.

Andaya and Andaya mention 1819 as ushering in a ‘New World’ for the region (2001: 117). Britain became the dominant commercial interest in the area, and in Singapore ‘free trade’ became the leitmotif. Singapore, thus, at the beginning of government by the British, became a globalised city fuelled by a capitalist economic system. The main trade item of this early period of Singapore as a colonial city was opium. Trocki characterizes these early years of Singapore’s history as a time where the government aimed at a ‘capture’ of the Chinese economy and its integration into the capitalist world market (1990: 34). He describes the kongsi organization of the social life of the Chinese as being based on brotherhood, partnership, fairness and on the moral economy of the peasant [Scott’s term], and he compares this to the competitive individualism of the capitalist system (1990: 3-4, 34).

As the British gradually gained more control of the area, the population of local people and immigrant Chinese and Indian people expanded. During the 19th and 20th centuries, many Chinese people came to the area, first men but then women. Apart from the Chinese Peranakan people, who were mainly involved in trade, the first Chinese who came to the area were involved in tin mining, gambier and pepper production, then rubber plantations in the Malay Peninsula and gambier and pepper production in Singapore. Coolies provided much of the labour to the region, but gradually they became involved in commerce and small businesses.

Baker notes that the reasons for the immigration of the Chinese people were the population increase in China, famines, incompetent governments and the forced opening up of China by Western countries, which led to the control of ports and easier access for boats travelling to the Nan Yang [South-East] region (2005: 102).

Elliott (1951) points out that the immigrants to Singapore were not the scholarly or gentlemanly classes but nor were they country peasants. They were poor people from the cities where traditional Chinese concepts of kinship were weak. He uses the term Liu-min [the flowing people] to name these people and characterizes them as relatively rootless, restless and going where opportunities presented themselves. Elliott sees these people as less conservative than both the peasant and the gentry and so more enterprising (1951: 44). In the light of the underlying discussion on identity, one could start to think they are less tied to tradition and are harbingers of modernity. Because of weaker kinship ties, Elliot sees these people as more likely than other people to join gang-like groups or armies of warlords in China (1951: 44). He also points out the insecurities of their way of life so that in religious matters they were open to incorporating gods that served utilitarian purposes rather than speculative or theoretical purposes (1951).

The kongsi groups of the Chinese settlers were often the only form of government the Chinese knew, and they often overlapped with secret societies and triad rituals based on the ideas of a sworn blood-brotherhood (Trocki 1990: 10-27). These groups often had a religious aspect to them. The idea of a sworn brotherhood has a long history amongst Chinese people. The history of tang-ki worship can be seen as stemming from this early history of the Chinese people and the kongsi associations.

Singapore suffered badly during the Second World War. It was occupied by the Japanese for three and a half years and there were various massacres of Chinese people in both Malaya and Singapore. A resistance movement arose, mainly made up of Chinese people. Christopher’s [Chapter Two ] mother’s oldest brother from Christopher’s grandfather’s second wife remembers one day, when he was only about ten years of age, being told to quickly go away and hide in the long grass, which he did. From this position in the long grass, he saw Japanese soldiers slaughter his mother and his four brothers and sisters. His father, at that time, had been away from the village engaged in fighting against the Japanese. His grandfather soon after this married Christopher’s grandmother, who was much younger than her husband. The marriage ended in separation during the late 1950’s. This marriage was arranged mainly to protect Christopher’s mother from the Japanese. The fall of Singapore to another Asian country had a huge effect on Singaporean people as it negated the idea of British supremacy and showed European countries were not invincible (Baker 2005: 231-232; Borkhorst-Heng 1998: 140). In the Ang Mio Kio shrine on New Year’s Eve, a stack of sugar cane is placed around the outside door. Someone said that it represented the sugarcane fields in which Chinese people used to hide from the Japanese during the Second World War. The sugarcane is placed in the temple as an act of thanksgiving to the deities for allowing some people to escape the Japanese.

Before independence, the political interests of the Chinese people had been focused on China, particularly with the fall of the Ch’ing [Manchu] dynasty and the rise of Sun Yat-Sen’s Kuomintang party. Sun Yat-Sen had visited Singapore on several occasions, the last visit in 1911, and had gained a lot of support from Chinese Singaporeans. One family, I knew, still had a photo of him in their house. The Malaysian Communist Party had been formed in 1930, and it fought against the Japanese, as did the supporters of the Kuomintang. The communists and leftists, in general, became very involved in trade unions and strikes. Many students, especially in Chinese-speaking secondary schools and the Nanyang Chinese-speaking University became interested and involved in left-wing political activity (Chua and Kwok 2001: 89-91).

Amongst the Chinese people in Singapore, there has always been a division between Chinese-speaking and English-speaking people. The early Peranakan Chinese were mainly English speaking and so somewhat allied to the colonial government. After the war, the politics of Singapore was led by the English-speaking Chinese group (Baker 2005: 263), out of which developed the Malayan Democratic Union. However, in the first elections in 1948, where only six out of twenty-five seats were open for election, this party abstained, and a conservative Singapore Progressive Party [SPP] gained three of the seats. This party grew in influence. It was also largely made up of English-speaking Chinese people. In 1951, the SPP party won six of the nine seats open for elections.

Then, in the 1955 elections, the labour front led by David Marshall won ten seats and the People’s Action Party [PAP] led by Lee Kuan Yew won three (Baker 2005: 264-267). At that time, the PAP had a leftist Chinese-speaking side that Lee Kuan Yew encouraged, knowing that the presence of this group of people would help attract the support of Chinese-speaking workers to the party. It also had a more moderate English-speaking strand with Lee Kuan Yew as the leader. The PAP stood for independence from colonial rule and supported the Chinese-speaking population in their labour and union activities.

Singapore gained self-government in 1959, and in the first election, the PAP won forty-three seats out of fifty-one. It is interesting that the PAP before taking up leadership of the country labelled, ‘…their more conservative English educated opponents as corrupt pawns of the capitalist defenders of privilege and anti-Chinese’ (Baker 2005: 284). After the PAP’s win at the elections, the party became a supporter of capitalism, anti-union, elitist and, in the early days of their rule, was negative in attitude towards Chinese-speaking people in Singapore. After winning the elections, there was a split in the PAP party and the leftist element left the party. As Tamney puts it, Lee seemingly cooperated with the leftists while coordinating their defeat with the British Government (1996: 4). The PAP won all of the seats in the election of 1966 and, according to Baker, by the 1970’s the Chinese-speaking community as a political force had been neutered because their leaders were either in jail or discredited (2005: 370).

Up to this time, Singapore had much poverty, overcrowded housing, unemployment, ethnic conflicts and gang activity with problems of drugs, gambling and prostitution. Under the leadership of the PAP, this situation very quickly changed; unemployment went down, wages increased, good housing was provided for everyone, education standards increased, an efficient health service was provided, corruption was wiped out and the gangs broken up. From being somewhat of a ‘sin city’, Singapore became a model of Puritanism and also became a model of growth and development.

In 1966, the Government started to implement what it called a bilingual policy of education where people learnt English and also their mother tongue [one of three other national languages but not necessarily the language people spoke at home] (Bokhorst-Heng 1998). In 1957, only 59.4% of Indian people reported Tamil to be their first language while only 0.1% of Chinese people reported Mandarin to be their first language. 39.8% of Chinese reported Hokkien to be their mother tongue and 22.6% reported Teochew to be their mother tongue (Bokhorst-Heng 1998: 37). The bilingual policy, in reality, meant that English was heavily promoted, much to the chagrin of the Chinese-speaking people who had supported the PAP to come to power and expected to receive help from the Government in establishing themselves. English was promoted on two accounts:

However, in the seventies and eighties, as more people became familiar with English, there was concern that the growing strength of the English language was leading to problems. The language policy was considered to be leading to a de-ethnicization and a de-culturalization of Singapore or even a Westernization of Singapore. Some saw that along with learning English went a learning of the ‘decadent values of the West’ – liberalism, individualism, permissiveness and drug taking (Bokhorst-Heng 1998: 199-200, 226, 248). Gabrielpillai says of a 1976 conference on Asian Values and Modernization: ‘Modern values of effective democracy and consumerism…were represented as the dangerous face of Western’ individualism, while ‘Asian’ values were taken to comprise filial piety, community consciousness, thrift and hard work’ (1997: 71). The Government was very concerned about this situation and labelled it a crisis, which went hand-in-hand with the Chinese people no longer speaking Mandarin. The bilingual policy was seen as failing, in that people were not seen as being rooted in their cultural identity but were becoming Westernized (Bokhorst-Heng 1998: 203).

As a result, the Government became increasingly interested in implementing a policy called the ‘Creation of Asian Values’ or the ‘Asianization of Singapore’. At the beginning of this policy, the ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign’ was initiated in 1979. It was particularly directed against dialect-speaking Chinese. Chinese service workers such as taxi drivers, for example, had to be able to speak Mandarin. It is noted that the Colonial Government’s Registration of Schools Ordinance, in 1920, required the schools to teach dialects rather than Mandarin. In both situations, the issue of the unity of the Chinese people was at stake. In colonial times, the Government saw the unity of Chinese people to be a threat. In 1979, the Government saw the unity of the Chinese people as a strength. The ‘Speak Mandarin Campaign’ coincided with the rise of China economically and the establishment of diplomatic relations with China in 1990. Many Chinese Singaporeans look to China as a power with which they can identify. The emphasis on Mandarin and Confucianism led to the idea of a Confucian or Mandarin modernity to counter a European identity, and this started to become the identity of some Chinese Singaporean people (Wee 2001: 255-257).

As part of the Asianization campaign, the teaching of religious knowledge, including moral values, was started in schools in 1984 (Tamney 1996: 25-55). The Government saw the teaching of Confucian values as a very important part of this moral teaching. However, it was not successful as most Chinese students opted for Buddhist or Christian studies. In 1989, the Government brought to an end the teaching of religious knowledge as a compulsory subject. This was mainly because Chinese people did not take up the Confucian option in the large numbers expected, and also because religion was starting to be seen as a divisory, rather than a unifying factor in Singaporean society. Protestants were thought to be becoming aggressively evangelical and some Catholic groups were thought to be becoming politically leftist (Tamney 1996: 28-37). The forming of a National Ideology project, which included a commitment to the values of placing society above self, the importance of the family, consensus rather than contention and religious tolerance, was started in 1988. These values became known in 1993 as ‘shared values’.

Some people in the non-Chinese section of the population saw the teaching of Mandarin and the importance given to Confucian philosophy as suspicious. They saw this as going against their own interests and as the creation of a stronger Chinese identity than before. According to Gabrielpillai, Chinese culture and Confucianism were being taken as the definition of being Asian, and ‘Chinese-ness’ as being Singaporean. She sees this as a Sinicization of the Singaporean national culture (1997: 75-78). She also sees it as a rhetorical device and a reverse type of Orientalism, part of an American colonizing project and ultimately being in the interest of the politics of capitalism, legitimizing the subjugation of its people to the ruling class (1997: 1-53).

In this discussion on education and language, one sees the presence of a multiplicity of identity discourses present in Singapore as a whole and amongst Chinese people in particular. An individual or family will probably be part of various discourses. Categories which stand out are Chinese/non-Chinese, Chinese-speaking/English-speaking Chinese, Chinese educated/English educated, dialect-speaking/Mandarin-speaking, Singaporean/Chinese, Confucian/ other religions and Asian/Western. Many of the categories, of course, overlap with one another.

One could add several more categories to the above list of identity discourses. The various religious discourses present in Singapore, including Christianity, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Muslim could all be added to the list, as could a section for atheists and agnostics [often called ‘freethinkers’ in Singapore]. The concepts ‘heartlander’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ are terms used by some people in Singapore to describe differences amongst people. These terms can be mapped onto, to some extent, the concepts of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ and also the concept ‘working class’ and ‘middle class’. Modernity here is taken to be:

… that historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and instrumental forms [science, technology, industrial production, urbanization], of new ways of living (individualism, secularization, instrumental rationality) and of new forms of malaise [alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impeding social dissolution]

Traditionalism, rather simplistically, can be defined as all that is not modern.

One sixteen-year-old girl interviewed said to me that perhaps I should have chosen another place to study spirit mediums rather than Singapore, as Singapore had only four million people and was very homogenous. However, in reality, Singapore is heterogeneous and has a multiplicity of positions or identities for people to live out their lives, one being that of tang-ki worship.

If, when walking along Orchard Road, one enters a particular shop, one of many selling electronic goods, one might, by chance, come across a particular salesperson who will talk to you in detail about cameras or other items he is selling. This man, William, is in his fifties. He will be wearing a suit and have a crew cut hairstyle. He will be a little chatty. On further talking to him, he might tell you about his family, one daughter, a university graduate and a teacher; a son, still a student but not as industrious as his sister. William’s wife is not working, although she frequently helps in her sister’s small shop while her sister’s husband, who had once started to study law, runs his small finance business.

So far, there seems nothing that identifies William and the two families he might talk about as being any different from many people and families one might find in any other large commercial city in any part of the world. Now, if you were to meet up with William for a drink, which would probably be a Tiger Beer [brewed in Singapore], and if he talked more, one would probably notice after a while that as William spoke you were finding it increasingly difficult to understand the conversation. This difficulty would not be entirely because of a difference in accent, but because there would be a difference in the very structure of the sentences and there would be words being used that one has not heard before. William would be speaking what Singaporeans call Singlish. If one then went ahead and tried out the very poor Mandarin one might know, one might find that William did not understand it, and that he would prefer to talk in English or, preferably, Singlish. It would only be if one of his friends turned up that one would know, in fact, that William would prefer to speak in Hokkien, if one could distinguish it from Teochew, another Chinese dialect.

If the conversation happened to take place on a Friday evening, one might learn that William could not talk for very long as he would have to join his wife. You might be told, although he probably would not tell you if you were a tourist, that he was on his way to a small Taoist shrine in the area of Ang Mio Kio, quite a long way from his home. The head of the shrine is Anna’s husband because a woman could never be the head, although, in practice, Anna is head of the shrine. William would go on to tell you that a deity, Guanyin, who looked like a woman but was, in fact, a man [although he might not be too clear about this himself], possesses Anna.

At the shrine, William’s job is to sit by the front door stamping yellow strips of paper that helps make them into talismans, which he would say can help cure people if people keep them in a wallet or burn them and drink some water containing the ashes. William might then go on and tell you about people coming to the shrine and being healed by consulting with the deity. You might also be told that his own luck is not very high, and that he never seems to win even small amounts of money in the weekly state lottery. Strangely enough, William might also say to you that you should not believe everything you hear. If he went on to tell you about his sister and brother-in-law, William might tell you a story about their small shop and how it is not doing so well. They think the proprietor of a nearby shop has brought about this state of affairs through an alignment with evil spiritual forces, and that they are trying to rectify this problem by going to the tang-ki shrine.

In considering the above scenario, in the light of the identity discourses discussed in the previous section of this chapter, one can immediately see that there is no one identity discourse from which William speaks. He can be seen to inhabit various identity discourses. One would say, at first, that one sees in his discourse that of the modern, cosmopolitan person working in the centre of the commercial, retail section of the community, catering for both overseas tourists and the wealthier, probably younger Singaporean person. Then, as we notice the language spoken, we see another discourse, that of the Singlish speaker and that of the dialect speaker. We would start to think of him as being situated more in the discourse of the ‘heartlander’. His daughter, though, as a university graduate and teacher not interested in religion, appears to be very much in the ‘cosmopolitan’ discourse; probably someone much like Christopher or Carol, mentioned in Chapter Three . We would also, later, on hearing more about his religious views, be even more inclined to see William as inhabiting a ‘heartlander’ discourse. It would be difficult, though, to attach a label of traditional or modern to him.

Ang Mo Kio town, near where Anna established her shrine, after a dream in which Guanyin told her where she should buy a place to serve as a shrine, is a ‘modern’ town, one of fifteen new towns the construction of which started in 1973 and finished in 1980. The town, like many places in Singapore, is well planned and dominated by high-rise blocks of flats. In the 19th century, the area was largely uninhabited and was used for rubber plantations. After this, it was used for market gardens and pig and poultry farming. Many people moved to the area during the Second World War to escape the Japanese.

I found the town a clean, orderly place but lacking much sense of community or uniqueness. Admittedly, I lived on the outskirts of the town in a semi-detached house, similar to Anna’s house, quite a long way from the nearest hawker [food] centre where people frequently come together over a cheap meal; although a few minutes walk from where I was staying was a small restaurant known throughout Singapore for its Roti Prater, a favourite Indian dish.

Sometimes, coming home in the evening, I used to see at the Ang Mio Kio MRT train station a Eurasian busker, aged about fifty, singing such songs as ‘Put your Sweet Lips a little Closer to the Phone’ and ‘You don’t have a Wooden Heart’, although I never saw anyone giving him any money. Hearing these songs, well known to my parents, sung on the streets of a suburban ‘Asian’ town was strangely eerie and made me very aware of the many different groups of people in Singapore. Of course, the busker would have had to have a licence to play in a public place.

Only after I became involved with Anna’s shrine did the area really begin to have more of a character for me. I was then able to have a glimpse of life behind the similar-looking doors and was able to participate in the lives of some of the people who lived behind these doors. I did not find the ‘zombie dogs’ Singaporean film producer Toh Hai Leong portrays as the way of life of the average person in Singapore, in his film Zombie Dogs (Toh 2004). The shrine gave some soul and vitality to the area, and I was often comforted when going home late at night and looking up at the shrine as I passed by.

This ensoulment of the area by the presence of the shrine was not necessarily the experience of people living near the shrine. I never saw the neighbours ever greet anyone who went to the shrine, and also, apart from Anna’s family, there were only a few people from the local area that attended the shrine. It was not a community-based shrine. Generally, after seeing people who had come to the shrine to consult with the deity on the Friday, the members at the Ang Mio Kio shrine went home, although there were other occasions when they came together.

On my first visit to the shrine accompanied by a Chinese friend, we were both immediately struck by how ‘modern’ the shrine appeared. There was a group of five young people in their late teens assisting the medium. Some had on the T-shirt of a local Catholic school. My acquaintance had not seen so many young people in a shrine before, especially those with a high level of secondary education who had the intention of going to university. Three of the young people were Anna’s children. One of them, Anna’s daughter, was studying science subjects at university. One of the young people was also heading to be a medium, although he was slightly reluctant and was being put off by others, including Anna. Anna is a very vibrant and interesting person with a great influence on the character of the shrine. Most of the other people in the shrine were in their forties with a couple of older people.

There are about fifteen people who are regular members of the shrine. Most of these are from the Hokkien language group. They have various occupations – one man had given up on a law degree, he has his own financial business as well as owning a small shop where his wife works. This couple also had a maid, a sign of status. Another person was a salesperson in an Orchard Road store. Two were driving minibuses. One woman, in her late sixties, lived in the same block of flats as the temple and used to come to visit the temple during the week. The two patrons, not regularly present, were wealthy entrepreneurs. The presence of an Indian Hindu man, a university-educated, business person, who had come for some help for himself, was unusual. Another man, who later joined the shrine, had an IT background. Two other men were struggling with their occupations. One had a small shop but had to close it later that year. Another had a small catering business but also had to close it for lack of business. One woman was driving a minibus and also trying to sell Amway catalogue products.

Apart from the healing ritual when Hokkien was spoken by the possessed tang-ki and was seen to be the voice of the deity, most people in this shrine used either Mandarin or English in their conversations. The older people sometimes spoke Hokkien to each other. A conversation developed over language and Anna was insistent that a deity would never speak English. She said Jesus might speak English but not the Chinese deities. Occasionally, if one of her assistants spoke English while she was in trance, the deity would scold the person. Interestingly, once when I was out with Anna’s husband and I spoke to one of his acquaintances in Mandarin, Anna’s husband told the man off for replying to me in English, saying that he should be ashamed of himself not knowing Mandarin. So we see here signs of a discourse of modernity seen in the use of Mandarin and English but also signs of a discourse of traditionalism where dialects are spoken. Anna is quite proud of the fact that English is spoken in the shrine. I think, though, that she overestimated the period of time that people spoke English.

There were quite explicit rules about behaviour at this shrine, such as no drinking alcohol, no smoking, no swearing, no gambling [apart from buying lottery tickets], no touching of each other and women had to make sure they covered their shoulders. These rules made the shrine slightly puritanical in outlook, and I was never sure if this was because Guanyin the main deity was known for her purity or because this style was part of a modernizing project.

Rituals were carried out in this shrine with a greater attention to detail and slightly more anxiety about getting it right than at other shrines I attended. Anna said she was trying to cultivate a place where people would not feel intimidated when they came to the shrine and where mothers and their children could come as well as business people. She did not particularly want people with tattoos or coloured hair [the hairstyle of some youths] in the shrine. Anna wanted to present the shrine as a respectable place, given, she said, that many people still associate tang-ki shrines with secret societies and with cheating. I had a sense that if tang-ki worship were diminishing in Singapore, it would be shrines like Anna’s that would have a chance of surviving.

The Redhill shrine has a longer history than the Ang Mio Kio shrine and was more embedded in its locality. I was told Redhill [Bukit Merah] was named after the colour of the red clay that formed the hill on which Redhill was established. One story has it that the red soil was said to come from the blood of a boy who had been killed by people jealous of him after he saved the area from swordfish that used to attack the coastland area. Another tale is that the ruler had executed a holy man and that the hill was washed with his blood.

Early settlers had used the Redhill area for cultivating gambier and pepper. It then fell into disuse and became swampland and was used for burying people and also as a dump for rubbish, earning the name of Rubbish Hill [La Ji Po, H. Poon Saw Pore] (Federal Publications 1996: 9). During the Second World War, there was a prisoner-of-war camp in the area for prisoners held by the Japanese. After the war, a large construction project took place, and many high-rise flats were built. There are no longer any cemeteries in the area, but the people at the shrine say there are many ghosts. The hill, after which the area was named, has also been levelled. While there are still some blocks of flats left that were built after the war, most have been renovated, and newer condominiums have been built in the area. Redhill, from being a poor area known for having secret societies and gangs involved in drugs and gambling, has now developed into a respectable place to live in.

During most of the time I attended the shrine, next to the MRT overhead train line at Redhill was a makeshift hawker [food] centre, where the members and I would often gather after a consultation session at the shrine for a meal and a drink of milo; sitting in a slight breeze that was cooling after the heat of the day. Sometimes, in the evening, there could be two or three other tang-kis at this hawker centre.

The new hawker centre, clean, orderly and brightly lit, opened in 2005 in the latter part of my stay in Singapore. It was built on the area of the old site. Some of the members of the shrine could remember the time that pigs used to roam around the area. In the evenings, it was crowded with people, very noisy, and it was difficult to find a seat. The tables had fixed seating, and one table could only accommodate four or, at the most, six people. Unfortunately, this seemed to split up our group as there were not enough seats to sit us all at one table. This may seem a minor point, but one wonders how such changes in the urban landscape could affect the shrine. A Chinese man from outside the shrine, who was himself studying tang-ki shrines looked at all the new buildings in the area and asked the same question. The number of people coming to the Redhill shrine had been decreasing for the previous two years. The members put this down to people moving out of the area and new people moving in, as well as the availability of modern medicine and other such material help.

No one knows the exact date the Redhill shrine was founded, but the members take 1930 as the year it was founded. One person said that in the early days of the shrine some of the members had been supporters of the Chinese Kuomintang political party. The shrine had moved several times since the 1930s. At one point the shrine had been located in a slightly larger temple on a small hill in the cemetery near to the present MRT train station, but since the cemetery disappeared to make way for housing and the railway line, the shrine is now located in an area near to Redhill. The shrine at present has two active tang-kis, the main one, Wei, who becomes possessed by Nezha and another who becomes possessed by Qing Shui Zu Shia [Cheng Chwee Chor Su]. Guan Gong is an important god of the shrine; one medium, now retired because of illness, had a reputation for being quite ferocious when possessed by Guan Gong.

The Redhill shrine has a strong core of some twenty active members, mostly in their twenties and thirties, with a few older and a few younger members. It also has another group of about fifteen older people in their fifties and sixties who only come to the temple on special occasions. Most of the younger men have had secondary education, and two were studying commercial subjects at university. Wei, the medium, is a tradesman and works for himself. The other tang-ki works in a factory and the retired tang-ki cuts up meat for a living. One man had his own small food processing business as well as owning a small hawker shop in the middle of the commercial centre of Singapore, where two other members work. He had once gone to England on a training course. Another young man was working in a factory and another, trained in carpentry, was finding it difficult to find employment. One seventy-year-old man was still working at a cleaning job. Another person had his own delivery truck but was finding it difficult to get more than four hours of work a day. Another was working as an interior designer and still another man was in the army. Nearly all the men could speak English quite well except Wei, although they would not use it in their daily life as much as those from the Ang Mio Kio shrine. Teochew, then Hokkien, and a mixture of the two are mainly spoken in the temple, although Mandarin was sometimes spoken and people mostly used English to talk to me.

The Redhill shrine has a strong sense of community about it. Most members are either living in the area or had ties to the area through family. Many of the younger members had fathers who used to be active in the shrine. It is a shrine whose members are mainly men. The members meet regularly three times a week to offer consultations to people, and they sometimes meet on other days when they would socialize and gamble at cards or mahjong, although not for high stakes. The men occasionally swear, tell scabrous jokes and drink alcohol [although not as much as some other people think]. The shrine has connections with other shrines and the members often go to these other shrines to support their activities. There did not seem to be an anxiety about ritual activities [present in the Ang Mio Kio shrine], and the men get on with what they have to do. One often hears mobile phones going off during consultations and the men talk over the phone and then go outside to carry on the conversation. The members, as a whole, seem less well off than the members at the Ang Mio Kio shrine, which felt a little more middle class than Redhill.

One could very easily classify the Ang Mio Kio shrine as modern and ‘cosmopolitan’ and the Redhill shrine as traditional and ‘heartlander’ in orientation, as I did at first; and that would be true up to a point but it is not so simple.

Anna appeared to be a very modern person, but compared to her husband with his business involvement and his interest in local affairs she appears traditional and as a ‘heartlander’, while he appears modern and ‘cosmopolitan’, despite Anna seeing him as a traditional Chinese man, particularly when she first met him. At home, Anna refuses to watch the TV programmes that the rest of the family watch, seeing them as based on permissive values. Instead, she watches traditional Teochew Chinese opera on a television placed next to the other one. Perhaps, one could say that Anna and the people at her shrine are engaged in a type of ‘heartlander’ discourse that allows for a form of cosmopolitanism.

Anna told me that people with hysteria, depression and anxiety can all be treated by a tang-ki and that they see people with these problems all the time; not a statement one would expect from someone situated in a discourse of modernity with its medical and psychological master narratives. Anna has even seen a young teenage girl who has a severe eating disorder, perhaps the most modern of modernity’s ‘illnesses’. Anna is thinking of starting a matchmaking service with the help from the deity. It is difficult to know whether this would be part of a traditional, arranged marriage service or part of a modernist, partner-finding service similar to the Government’s ‘dating agency’.

Anna ridiculed my wanting to sanitize the needle on which a wooden head was mounted and which represent the generals of the celestial army if I was going to insert it into my skin, as some of the male members do at the yearly shrine celebrations. She railed at that time against the idea that modern science was the answer to everything.

In another shrine, where there were even more English-speaking people and two men in particular with an advanced university education, one in the sciences, I found an even greater denunciation of modern medicine, with the idea that modern biopsychiatry only made ‘zombies’ out of mentally-ill patients. One of these men thought that tang-ki rituals were better suited for such persons than the mental health system. These comments, by themselves, can be seen as examples of a traditional way of thinking, yet here we see them coming from a shrine that can be labelled ‘modern’.

The Redhill shrine in contrast to the Ang Mio Kio shrine can seem very traditional. The men mainly speak a dialect of Chinese and come from the local area. I was surprised that one forty- year-old single woman, the relative of one of the members, had only visited Orchard Road (Singapore’s main shopping area) on a few occasions in her life and not recently.

The shrine has a long history and is embedded in the locality of the shrine. It is strange, though, that while the men at the shrine did not normally speak English, their English was slightly better overall than men at the Ang Mio Kio shrine. They were also a little easier to engage with than the men at the Ang Mio Kio shrine.

In the Redhill shrine, the tang-ki when possessed has often told people who have come for advice to go to a medical practitioner. We saw [page 72 ] that the tang-ki told one person to go to the dentist just in case they had an infection, despite the fact that the person did not want to go to the dentist. We also saw the tang-ki give advice to a mother to stay out of the affairs of her son and to leave him to make up his own mind about marriage, something that would have traditionally been a family affair rather than something an individual would decide. Wei told me that illnesses like depression, anxiety and hysteria cannot be treated by tang-kis, but should be treated by a psychologist. It is difficult to think of these situations as examples of pure traditional thinking.

It may well be that tang-ki worship within the Chinese community contributes towards forming a Hokkien identity in particular and a dialect ‘heartlander’ speaking identity in general. Tang-ki worship can in this view be taken as a contestation of a modernizing, cosmopolitan Mandarin or English-speaking identity discourse, one supported by the official master discourse of the Government. However, I argue that while this is true, there is more to the identity formation aspect of tang-ki worship.

The situation of the shrines and the people in them described in the last two sections of the chapter disallow a simplistic view of tang-ki worship as being about the production of a totalizing identity discourse of a ‘traditional’ or ‘heartlander’ subjectivity. In a temple labelled traditional [Redhill] the people can be seen to be helped to be more modern. In a shrine described as more modern, the Ang Mio Kio shrine, one can say people are helped to be in touch with more traditional ways of thinking. One sees in the stories of the main deities of the two shrines, Nezha and Guanyin, that both go against the traditions of their day. The shrines then can be seen as neither supporting traditional nor modern discourses of identity.

It is proposed here that tang-ki worship, rather than being about any one identity discourse, in particular, is about ‘identity’ itself. It is a reflection and commentary on quotidian identity discourses similar to what Boddy observes of the Zar rituals in Northern Sudan (Boddy 1989: 353). Participation in tang-ki worship in Singapore can be understood as allowing a person to find their own position amongst the multiple identity discourses in which they find themselves. iii This conclusion is congruent with Ewing’s idea of multiple subjective modalities or shifting selves (Ewing 1997: 35; 1990). It is also congruent with Moore’s view that, ‘individuals are multiply constituted subjects who take up multiple subject positions within a range of discourses and social practices’ and that the process of becoming a subject is never finished (Moore 2007: 17, 41). Both show that contradiction, contestation, and negotiation are part of the process of becoming a subject and we see this also in tang-ki worship.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the aim of the analyst, at least when working with those with neurotic disorders such as hysteria and obsessionality, is to deconstruct the fixed identity discourses with which people identify and which limit their existence, thus allowing them to take up a different position towards these identity discourses, without, necessarily, giving them up entirely. There is the implication in much psychoanalytical writing that this process only happens in psychoanalysis and that religious ritual is only about a person being interpolated into a fixed totalizing identity discourse. I argue that the process of deconstruction of a fixed identical discourse can be seen to take place in some aspects of religious activity and that one sees such a process take place in tang-ki worship without the necessity of someone going through psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is one ritualized way in western cultures of deconstructing identity discourses.

What one sees in the liminal ritual practices of tang-ki worship, then, is not so much the gaining of a totalizing, fixed identity position but a loosening of identity. In these rituals, it is seen that people encounter an ‘other’ that speaks to them, literally as the word of the deity, and questions any identity that is totalizing and undivided. iv

William, as a knowledgeable shopkeeper selling high-performance cameras to overseas visitors, came across a photograph of a shrine celebration that showed a white haze in a funnel shape over Anna, when she was possessed. The presence of the white haze is for Anna and the shrine members proof, more than any words, that a deity really possesses tang-kis. William is thus positioned in a discourse other than that of the salesperson of high performance, modern technical equipment, namely that of the believer in apparitions of other beings, a rather ‘traditional’ discourse. Instead of having to choose one identity position, he is able to inhabit two.

While in Singapore on one occasion, I visited the stock market with a person who is a stockbroker. The place is a hub of commercial activity and perhaps the centre of that modern, capitalist, commercial activity that the Singaporean identity appears to be based on. The outlook of people in the stock market seemed at first miles away from the outlook of people at tang-ki shrines, yet in Anna and Wei’s shrines there were some people who were also involved in investment activities. Anna, herself, had worked in this field and her husband still does. There was another man in Anna’s shrine who had his own investment business. Anna gave me the details of an investment made by her husband of a significant amount of money that they lost but which had they followed Anna’s opinion, based on a dream in which the deity disclosed to her how she should invest the money, would have gained them hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is understood by these people investing money that one must have sound investment knowledge to work in the investment section of the economy but also some ‘luck’ is needed, which some people see as coming from involvement in tang-ki worship. Again, one sees in this example that tang-ki worship is not some traditional form of worship embedded entirely in the past but goes alongside people’s everyday activities, including involvement in global capitalism.

While it can be argued that tang-ki worship is pristine, as going back 5,000 years, and that it can be seen to mediate this history to people living in the present, it can also be seen to be quintessentially modern, hybrid and contemporaneous with what goes on in Singapore today. For example, there did not seem to be much mixing between the different ethnic groups in Singapore. At two large weddings, I attended, I only saw two other non-Chinese people present, but I maintain that in the tang-ki rituals one always encounters an ‘other’. The very fact that the tang-ki is possessed bears witness to this ‘other’.

Guanyin is a Buddhist bodhisattva, yet is a major deity of Taoist worship. Furthermore, as we have seen [page 92 ] Guanyin was at first an Indian bodhisattva, not Chinese. There is also an opinion that the story of Nezha came from India, although no one I met in Singapore seemed to be aware of this view. The story of people hiding in the sugar cane to escape their pursuers was given as being a story that arose in Singapore but it seems that it first arose in China. I was told Toa A Pei and Ji A Pei, the two hell-spirits who smoked opium, were originally Chinese coolies in Singapore, but it seems this story also came from China.

When Anna gave her many explanations about beliefs and practices to the people at the shrine, she drew on a wide experience that included what she was told by others and life events and her dreams. Anna was not bound by any dogma. Just as a way of life was forged for the people of Redhill out of the cemeteries and rubbish dumps of the area, so tang-ki beliefs and practices can be understood as being put together out of the various experiences of the people who inhabit the shrines, including their legends, history, personal experiences and also contemporary events. The tang-ki and the members act as bricoleurs putting together various elements of their lives in certain ways to form a whole, or, more accurately, a loose combination of elements that are flexible. This loose combination allows for change and some fluidity of manoeuvre for members who live their lives in the diverse, complex, heterogeneous world of Singapore.

Immediately beside the Geylang shrine, with the statue of the Datuk Malay spirit standing outside, is a motorbike shop run by Malay people, some who would sit outside the shop-front in the evenings, while outside of the Chinese shrine, which opened out to the road, people were waiting for consultations. One of the Malay men said to me that his god was the motorbike god because it gave him his money. Sitting not far away was the statue of the Malay earth god prayed to by Chinese temple attendees.

I visited another tang-ki possessed by one of the seven fairies. v This medium first spoke a language [glossolalia] that no-one knew, thus bearing witness, I suggest, to the fact [presented also in the Abrahamic religions story of the tower of Babel] that it is hubris to think there is a prelapsarian language or discourse that is a totalizing one, where signifier and signified have the same meaning. We are bound to live in a world with a multiplicity of discourses where ‘heteroglossia’ is the order of the day. This tang-ki, in the end, had to talk to me, while in trance, in English [Anna would not think this was possible]. She told me not to worry too much about learning Mandarin but said it would come naturally, and I would learn enough to complete my project. She said there is a diversity of languages in Singapore, and I would find somewhere to fit into this diversity.

Rimbaud’s saying, ‘I am another’ taken up by Lacan and the same idea argued by Said (2004), in his work on Freud, questions at a profound level the notion of identity. It has been argued in this chapter that tang-ki practices also question the notion of identity, and that the tang-ki embodies the conundrum of Rimbaud’s saying, allowing it to pervade the thinking and the lives of those engaged in tang-ki worship in such a way that it helps people get on with life, despite the contradictions of living in a place where a multiplicity of identity discourses and languages exist.