A PRODUCER for Channel NewsAsia called. She was making a documentary about post-general election Singapore. In a nutshell, they were looking for a new Singapore, or a “new normal” Singapore to borrow the nauseating buzzwords of the day. They sought my views on the general mood towards foreigners and planned to film me at my workplace going about my duties.
“So how do you spend your working day?” the producer asked.
“Most of the time at home banging away on a laptop,” I replied, as the producer pictured a pervert.
“And when you’re not at the laptop?” she enquired.
“I’m usually out on the road, notepad in hand,” I said, far too proudly.
“I see. Is there nothing else that you do?”
The dramatic silence was punctured by a thousand kiasu voices in my head, all screaming, “You’re a writer, ah? But what do you really do?”
I now add that I’m also a part-time property agent. This seems to make them feel better.
But as luck would have it, I had just left the Berlin Wall and was ready to cross the divide. I was off to a political hotbed where residents had made international headlines. For the first time, they had elected an opposition party in a group representation constituency (GRC). New Singapore would not just be casinos and theme parks, the political landscape had also changed.
I was headed for Aljunied.
The documentary crew directed me towards a bench in Hougang Central in front of the Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. On a wall behind, the sign and logo of the town council glowed above my head like a halo. The cameraman noticed an unsightly dustbin propped against the wall over my shoulder. His framing suggested that the dustbin was coming out of my ear so he pushed it out of shot.
“Action!” he called.
“Wait,” a voice cried.
A cleaner appeared from nowhere and started sweeping furiously, removing litter that had accumulated behind the dustbin.
“Cannot have that on camera,” the cleaner said.
Intrigued, I wandered over to the Chinese uncle and asked why he needed to tidy up.
“Must clean, lah,” he said. “Cannot make this place look bad, right?”
My cynicism turned me into Jason Bourne.
“Who sent you?” I asked.
“Wha’?” he replied, confused.
“Who sent you?” I repeated, peeking up at the town council windows.
“No one, lah,” he insisted.
I was not satisfied. In Singapore, someone is always sent from somewhere. It’s the old queen gag. Why does Queen Elizabeth II think the world smells of fresh paint? Because some lackey is always going crazy with a brush and a tin of whitewash just in front of her. The same applies to Singaporean ministers. If you fancy a unique trip to a hawker centre toilet when each cubicle does not look like the previous occupant emptied his bowels blindfolded, go during a community event involving a ministerial guest. The transformation is bewildering. Urinals gleam, basins sparkle and the only oblong-like objects left behind in the cubicles are additional loo rolls. At all other times, of course, bribing or maiming is required to procure three sheets of toilet paper.
So I was convinced that the Workers’ Party (WP), the opposition now in control of the town council, had sent down the cleaner. The new guys had inherited the old guys’ penchant for carefully controlled events topped off with a superficial sheen.
Or what my mother has always called “top show”.
“Quick, tidy up the place,” she’d shout down the phone at my young self. “We’ve got family coming around tonight.”
“OK, mum,” I’d reply, ever the filial son. “But is it a proper tidy-up or a top show tidy-up?”
“Nah, it’s all right. It’s only the cousins. Top show will do. Just do the usual. Throw all the disposable razors under the bathroom sink and no more craps until after they’ve gone.”
After the Channel NewsAsia crew left, I was still curious. I had to know whether the cleaner was part of a proper tidy-up or a cynical top show tidy-up. I took the stairs to the second floor. The walls had been recently painted. Aha. The town council reception had also been renovated, with new worktops, partitions and that bright fluorescent lighting popular at dentists. The receptionist smiled.
“Hi, this will sound strange, but did you send a cleaner downstairs just now?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
Her face answered on her behalf. She was not in on my conspiracy theory.
“I just did this TV interview and a guy cleaned up around us. I wondered if the town council sent him down.”
“No, I didn’t know you were filming downstairs.”
The press relations officer had no idea either. Pride rather than a paymaster had compelled the cleaner to spruce up the home of Singapore’s major political opposition. He was proud. Many residents in Aljunied are. They have put their HDB upgrading where their money is. History is theirs, but only for now. It can soon become an historical footnote, an asterisk at the end of a page. Making history of any kind is not without risk. There are always drawbacks.
I stood before one of the drawbacks. It was an empty field beside Hougang Central. At face value, the boggy lawn said nothing. Under the surface, the roots of new Singapore are more fragile. In June 2011, this particular site, along with 25 others used mostly for community activities, was excluded from the Aljunied-Hougang Town Council. The HDB, the landowner, had leased the sites to the People’s Association (PA). Before the general election, these sites had been managed by Aljunied Town Council when the town council was controlled by the PAP. Many of the sites are prime locations for grassroots events. In August 2011, the PA told Aljunied-Hougang Town Council Chairman Sylvia Lim that bookings by the Workers’ Party, which now controls the town constituency remember, would not be allowed. A gloomy picture had been painted soon after the heady days of change. The news was unfortunate for the residents of Aljunied. Most of all, it was highly ironic.
By any yardstick, a key issue in new Singapore is inclusiveness. Some Singaporeans feel neglected in their own country, overlooked by their own political representatives, brushed aside in the race to bring in more foreign workers and remain economically competitive. These are valid concerns. They are some of the reasons why Aljunied became the first GRC to slip from the government’s grasp since the GRC scheme was introduced in 1988. Singaporeans, all Singaporeans, merely asked to be involved again. If Aljunied MPs cannot hold grassroots events for their own residents in their own constituency, how will the locals feel included?
The perceived pettiness was undignified, and perhaps even unnecessary. Apart from the no-longer-open spaces, little else had really changed in Hougang and why should it? VCD shops still promoted three for ten special offers, with those alarming low budget karaoke videos showing singers crooning in front of waterfalls. Lift lobbies displayed the usual warning posters about not feeding birds or cats. There was even a wonderfully terrifying poster for killer litter. In red bold letters, the poster read: DEATH FROM ABOVE, HIGHRISE LITTER CAN KILL. The words were accompanied by a smiling resident dropping a plant pot, a broom, a hammer, a mop and bucket, a sheet and a coat hanger onto an unsuspecting victim below. Litter killers do nothing by half in Aljunied.
I needed to go higher. Hougang Avenue 4 divides the government and the opposition, with the WP’s GRC of Aljunied on one side and the PAP’s Ang Mo Kio GRC on the other. Depending on one’s point of view, each side represents either old or new Singapore. The symbolism was too surreal to miss. I took a side turning beside the Hougang Swimming Complex and stumbled upon an illicit gambling den. Half a dozen aunties sat around a stone table at the void deck playing mahjong. A bubbly uncle patrolled behind them carrying a fistful of dollars. They spoke quickly in dialect, presumably Teochew, but I had no real clue.
“Er, hello, knee how,” I stammered.
No one was interested in the tall white guy standing beside their table. They were playing mahjong.
“Yah,” said Clint Eastwood with his fistful of dollars.
“Is this estate, er, PAP or is it Workers’ Party?” I asked, to confused silence. “Is this Lee Hsien Loong or Low Thia Khiang?”
More silence. I took a stab at Mandarin. It might have been less painful had I stabbed myself.
“Er, wo yao Low Thia Khiang,” I said.
Clint Eastwood smirked. The aunties were horrified. They had misunderstood my intentions. I pointed to the floor and then gestured towards the HDB block above me.
“No, no, no. Er, this Lee Hsien Loong HDB. Wo yao Low Thia Khiang HDB.”
Losing patience, Clint’s hand gestures and smattering of Singlish suggested that he was explaining to me that neither Lee Hsien Loong nor Low Thia Khiang lived in an HDB block here.
I bid them a fond farewell. They didn’t care. I loved them for it.
In the end, a laundrette came to my rescue. I crossed Hougang Avenue 4 and enquired about the respective constituencies. The auntie generously gave me her time, directing me to the street and pointing at the junction’s traffic lights.
“That one over there PAP, Lee Hsien Loong,” she said, pointing towards Clint Eastwood’s HDB block.
I hope the prime minister is aware that the auntie mafia is managing an illegal gambling den in his constituency.
“But we are Workers’ Party. We are the opposition,” she continued.
“Have things changed?” I enquired.
“Change how? Please lah, nothing change,” she laughed. “It’s no different.”
I took a lift to the 10th floor of Block 501 in Hougang Avenue 4 and surveyed the political divide. Of course the woman was right. Discernible differences were negligible. This was not Potong Pasir, a single member constituency that had once been an opposition stronghold for many years and where I once lived. The checklist that came with voting for the opposition—a lack of upgrading, lifts that did not take aunties to every floor and so forth—was easy to tick off in the late 1990s.
There was only one subtle difference between the two constituencies in Hougang. On the government side of the road, I spotted residents heading into the Hougang Sports and Recreation Centre. Next door was the Hougang Swimming Complex and beside that was Hougang Stadium. That was all on the government side. On the opposition side of the road, there was a grass field.
I sincerely hope elected members get to use that one at least.
In the evening, I loitered around the void deck of Block 173 in Bedok Reservoir Road looking for Low Thia Khiang. I was stalking the guy. The Workers’ Party MP, vice-chairman of Aljunied-Hougang Town Council, Teochew titan and long-time symbolic figure for the political opposition was holding a meet-the-people session. Well, he would have been if I had observed the dates properly. He conducted sessions on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month. I had picked the wrong Wednesday. I stopped some teenagers sitting at the void deck playing with their phones.
“Hey, do you know if Low Thia Khiang is holding his meet-the-people session here?” I enquired.
“Don’t know,” said a teenager, continuing to play Angry Birds.
“Still, it must be cool to live here in Singapore’s first ever opposition GRC, right?” I probed, desperate to glean something other than tips on how to catapult a squawking chicken into a load of crates.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Does it feel any different since the election here?” I tried again, obviously overplaying my hand.
Suspicious, the teenager peered over his phone. He saw the notepad in my pocket.
“Same, same,” he replied quickly. “It’s all the same, nothing different, nothing different.”
I checked over both shoulders to make sure no one from the PAP was taking photographs with a long lens. It might be a new day in Aljunied, but it still feels a lot like old Singapore on the ground.
Unperturbed, I wasn’t leaving Aljunied GRC without witnessing a little grassroots action. I cut through Bedok Town Park and spotted a hand-painted dustbin in the darkness. Crude but colourful, the normally dull green plastic had been covered with Singapore’s cheesiest landmarks, including the cable car and Merlion. It was street art Singaporean style: neat, nationalistic and controlled. But it was an improvement.
A young Malay couple, holding hands, crossed the footbridge over the PIE and headed my way. They would know.
“Excuse me, this will be a strange question,” I began, “but are all the dustbins in the park painted like this one?”
“Yah,” said the teenage girl, her toothpaste smile beaming back at me.
“Really? I think it’s terrific. Is it an opposition thing? You know, a town council thing, because I’ve not seen it anywhere else in Singapore?”
“Yah,” she repeated, strangely unmoved by my patter about painted dustbins.
“Are all the dustbins in Bedok Park painted like this one?”
“Yah.”
“Are you just saying ‘yah’ to everything I say?”
“Yah.”
The couple giggled and went on their way, keen to lose the world’s most boring man. I followed the path for a while and the next couple of bins were decorated with hand-painted Merlions, but I stopped when I realised I was staring at dustbins in the dark and scaring joggers. (I later found some painted dustbins in government constituencies, too. The initiative deserves to go national.)
A little later, I reached Bedok North Avenue 1 where people were gathering beneath Block 550. Clearly, the meet-the-people session with Aljunied MP Muhamad Faisal bin Abdul Manap was in full swing. I tried my luck again with a guy walking my way.
“Excuse me, am I in Aljunied GRC?” I asked, feigning my best ignorance. “Is this the opposition’s GRC?”
“Yeah, this is it,” he replied, smiling.
“Ah, good, I wanted to have a look around. You seem quite happy about it.”
He nodded and smirked.
“It was time,” he said simply.
“You felt it was time for a change then?” I enquired, rather transparently trying to push buttons.
He put his hand to his mouth
“Yeah, I voted for the opposition,” he mumbled.
Bedok North Avenue 1 was nigh on deserted. And still, the opposition voter felt compelled to put his hand over his mouth, presumably for the benefit of the Internal Security Department lip readers sitting at a nearby coffee shop table.
“You voted for the opposition?” I asked.
“Yeah, I did,” he clarified.
I had heard him the first time. I just wanted to see if he cupped a hand around his mouth again. He did.
“And nothing’s really changed, has it?”
“No, of course not. What did people think was going to happen? It’s so funny,” the guy said, still smiling. He glimpsed over at the residents waiting in line at the void deck of Block 550. “Well, that’s changed. Look at everyone sitting outside sweating. Under the PAP, they had their meet-the-people sessions in the air con. Now they have to wait outside in the heat.”
He was right. I crossed over and watched the elderly fanning themselves as they sat on plastic chairs and watched videos on a cheap TV and DVD player to pass the time waiting to see Aljunied MP Muhamad Faisal bin Abdul Manap. They did not look particularly comfortable. No one complained. When the government ran the Aljunied show, residents used to chat with their local MP at the other end of the void deck inside the Kaki Bukit Park Residents’ Committee Centre next door. I wandered over. It was closed. Residents’ committees in Singapore were initially set up in 1978 to encourage greater neighbourly interaction and preserve the increasingly elusive kampong spirit. Volunteers mostly help out at the residents’ committees to organise programmes, activities and events for those living in the area. One might assume a meet-the-people session with the local MP comes under one of those categories.
Residents’ committees fall under the purview of the PA.
Ah.
So residents are being made to sweat, literally, each time they meet their Workers’ Party representative. That’s not making voters repent. That’s like kindergarten kids squabbling over crayons.
Most of all, it’s redundant. On foot, I ambled around Hougang, Bedok Reservoir and Bedok North and saw no bolt of lightning. No one was struck down. The cat got the tongue when the eye caught the notepad occasionally. Other than that, life chugged along in Singapore’s first opposition GRC as it always has done. With the landmark general election less than a year old, physical differences were impossible to spot. Indeed the housing estates around Bedok Reservoir had obviously been upgraded and their gardens and playgrounds relandscaped, presumably by the previous town council before the election, and yet the voters still got rid of the incumbents.
As I wandered around the elderly and young families waiting in line to chat with their MP, I thought about that voter’s comments.
It was time.
New Singapore’s changing political landscape is in the mind of a growing number of residents. There is a growing restlessness, an impatience for new policy, a growing coffee shop culture quick to tekan, or whack, the government at every opportunity. There is a slow but gradual demand for change from the bottom up. But I wonder what kind of change new Singaporeans really want. What is it time for? Is this about Martin Luther King or Marlon Brando in The Wild One? If there is a growing acceptance that Singapore’s labour and human rights issues are a cause for embarrassment— and they are—when it comes to the elderly, foreign workers, domestic helpers and homosexuals, then count me in. But if there is a desire to follow Brando and rebel for the sake of rebelling, then I have reservations. What are the protest votes really protesting against? By all means, tekan the government for making aunties clean hawker centres into their eighties and for tolerating the rampant property speculation that has made it so difficult for young couples to get onto the first rung of the ladder. I’m not so sure a government deserves to be toppled because of a few MRT breakdowns. If that happened in Australia and the UK, governments would be booted out once a fortnight.
There is always a bigger picture. Mine was painted by a couple of muggings in London, a burglary in Liverpool, a deranged home invader in Manchester, a friend’s violent death in an Essex nightclub and a once proud hometown fraying at the seams and edging closer to economic irrelevance. There is much to be gained politically in new Singapore and still plenty to lose. Sure, make the ministers work harder for their inflated salaries. Make them sweat. Demand a level playing field, even for grassroots events in Aljunied. Expect to be included. But kicking out a government because taxi fares go up a few cents is not much different to making residents wilt in the heat to meet their opposition MP.
It’s petty.