Articles by Lata Nott - Singapore
August 2005
“I keep telling all my friends back home that I love it here,” says one of my fellow California exchange students, picking at the fish balls at the Changi Beach steamboat restaurant “Which isn’t true. I don’t love it here. I just like it here. You know what I mean?” I nod without speaking, gulping down a mouthful of sweet corn ice cream. In all honesty I haven’t given the matter too much thought yet. Do I love it here? It’s the end of my second week in Singapore and my predominant feeling is exhaustion. Orientation has burned me out. The upside to that is I’m too burnt out to be homesick.
There are forty exchange students from the UC system here in Singapore. During our orientation weeks we travel in an enormous pack led by our hyper-enthusiastic EAP coordinator, Daisy. Every day we drag our jetlagged bodies out of bed at the crack of dawn to tour a different part of the city. We visit Singapore’s famous ethnic quarters, Chinatown, Little India, and Arab Street. We take in the animal parks and landmark buildings, the shopping centers and historical museums. We make after-dark excursions to the nightclubs and 24-hour prata restaurants downtown. Daisy keeps our tour moving at breakneck speed, attraction after attraction, sun up till sun down, and still there is always something more to see. We’re like children on a school field trip, tagging along after our teacher. There’s a sense of wonder in everything we do.
Singapore is one of the loveliest cities I’ve ever seen, clean, safe, efficient, and as industrialized as any of the major metropolitan areas in the U.S. For these reasons culture shock didn’t overwhelm me as soon as I got off the airplane. Instead it hits me in small doses—the jokes that fly over my head, the foods I don’t recognize, the numerous locals who speak fluent English but have trouble understanding my Californian accent—random reminders that I’m truly a foreigner in this place. The locals I’ve met here so far have been very good to me. They are patient and considerate, modest but fiercely intelligent. I’m learning so much from them, and also from the numerous international students who are here from Brunei, Malaysia, China, India, Vietnam, and every other part of Asia. On any map Singapore seems like such a tiny country, but now that I’m standing here there are moments when it feels like the center of the world. I like it immensely; already it feels like home. I’m still too new to this place, still too much of a tourist really, to be able to say whether or not I love it. I feel lucky to have the entire year ahead of me, which will (hopefully) be enough time for me to figure that out.
October 2005
There’s this joke that one of the professors at the National University of Singapore likes to tell at the start of the year, a sort of welcome to the numerous exchange students that wind up in his class. “There’s a crucial difference between Western students and Singaporean students,” he says. “If you walk into a classroom full of Western students and wish them a good morning, their first response is to argue with you. What makes it a good morning? How did I come to my conclusion that this was a good morning? How can I impose my definition of a good morning on them? When you walk into a classroom full of Singaporean students and wish them a good morning…they write that down.”
I laughed obligingly, but didn’t really get it until I had my first real dose of academic culture shock later that week. For my first Southeast Asian history discussion we were asked to prepare by reading a thirty-page article my professor had posted online. I downloaded it a couple of hours prior, skimmed it over until I got the gist of it, then headed to class feeling reasonably confident. When I got to class I discovered that every single other student had printed the article out in its entirety, and made extensive annotations in the margins. The guy sitting next to me had made so many notes on his copy it looked like it had been soaked in blue ballpoint pen ink. Worst of all, during the discussion every one kept adding smart little citations to all their arguments—“As you can see, my point is supported by paragraphs 12 and 47.” It’s very hard to go up against people who have paragraphs 12 and 47 on their sides. I kept my hand down, knowing that if I were called I’d probably just end up shaming my country.
Moments like that aside, I wouldn’t say that NUS is harder than UC Davis. It’s just very different. I don’t have to go to class as often as I did in Davis—most classes only have one lecture a week—but my discussions are much longer. There are more group projects, but the endless rounds of midterms that I despised as a Davis student are absent here. In many of my classes the grades are based entirely on the finals in at the end of the semester.
Most exchange students use the time in between to explore Southeast Asia, spending weekends and breaks traveling instead of studying. It’s an amazing experience. The hard part is remembering that you’re a student here, not a tourist, and that while you’re off sightseeing in Malaysia for the weekend, the locals are studying their butts off in the library. One Singaporean flat out told me, “I think finals here are much more difficult than you guys think they are.”
But I don’t mean to make the classes here sound so dismal. While lectures are just as dry and boring as all lectures everywhere, discussion sections can be downright lively. Gone is the stereotypical Singaporean who never argues and simply writes down whatever he is told. In my last Poli Sci class my TA posed the seemingly innocuous question, “What constitutes nationalism?” The result was a frenzy of debate, students abandoning formality to throw out any opinions that crossed their minds. “Nationalism needs some kind of fertilizer,” shouted a guy from the back of the class. “And that fertilizer is human blood!” Taking a page from the Singaporean book, I wrote that down.
November 2005
My first semester in Singapore is almost over. With only three finals to go, in less than a week I’ll be on a plane to California to spend the holidays with my family. Fortunately, I’ll be heading back to Asia in January for semester two, so I’m not getting all sad and nostalgic just yet. But I know that I’ll miss this place a lot when I have to leave it for good. Local students are always complaining about how boring Singapore is, but I assume this is because they’ve never experienced anything akin to the Davis weekend dilemma, where the constant, mostly fruitless search for entertainment made cow tipping seem like a more attractive option every week.
Singapore’s pretty small as cities go, with only four million people and seven hundred square kilometers to its name, but I don’t consider that a drawback. It has a coziness to it; you feel as if could get to know this city—this country¬—really well within the time constraints of a year. At the same time, it’s amazing how much it actually contains for its size. A few hours on the MRT (mass rapid transit system) can have you feeling like you’re traveling between worlds. Take the train to the Orchard shopping district and you’ll find yourself in a commercialism wonderland, where the classy restaurants and numerous shopping malls are all decked out in millions of Christmas lights—it feels like downtown San Francisco during the holidays, or it would if weren’t for the balmy tropical weather. Just a few train stops away is Little India, which, as the name implies, is exactly like an Indian city compressed into several city blocks, complete with Bollywood music playing in the shops and women selling flowers and fruit in the streets.
Two stops away is Chinatown. The existence of a Chinatown sort of strikes me as odd in a country that’s 75% Chinese—technically there’s nothing you can find there that you can’t get everywhere else in Singapore—but all of its historical buildings make it a nice place to wander around. The other main ethnic neighborhood is Geylang, the Malay enclave. If there’s one important thing my experiences in Singapore have done for me, it’s that they’ve led me to the new love of my life: Malay food. Before I came here, I’d never even seen a Malay restaurant. Now I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes craving mee rebus (noodles in a dark, thick, soya-based soup), counting down the hours until I can go out and buy some.
Different people travel for lots of different reasons: some people want to see amazing sights, others want to immerse themselves in a different language, still others just like the act of moving away from familiar scenery. Me, I’m a glutton at heart. I’m never happier than when I’m sitting down with a plate of some sort of food I’ve never tried before, knowing that it might have the potential to blow my mind. The upshot of Singapore’s rampant multiculturalism is that the food variety is amazing, and fusion cuisine is everywhere. Best of all, Singaporeans take their food just as seriously as I do. Whenever I’m talking to local students and I mention I’ve only been here for a few months, they immediately launch into descriptions of the best snacks to try and the cheapest hawker centers to get them at. One Singaporean I’ve met actually makes it a point to befriend exchange students every year and show them the best places to eat in the city, which to me is one of the most extraordinary acts of kindness there is.
I never did anything like that in the three years I was at Davis, and now I feel guilty. I see now that should have made it my duty to warn foreigners away from Woodstock’s mediocre pizza and all the inferior Thai restaurants that blight the downtown area, pointing them towards the Village Bakery and Thai 2K instead. Freshmen have plenty of opportunities to discover the good eats through trial and error, but when you’re an exchange student your time is short; you shouldn’t have to waste it eating crappy food.
It’s too late for me to take up this cause, since I’ll be graduating abroad at the end of this year. But to every food junkie remaining in Davis, I implore you to carry out the mission yourselves. Please. Do it for me. Take an exchange student out to lunch.
March 2006
The fortuneteller’s office was on the fourth floor of the Serangoon Plaza building, sort of an odd location since the first three floors were occupied by the Mustapha Centre, the 24-hour discount store that’s Singapore’s version of Wal-Mart. I’d come to the plaza to buy a new toothbrush and some dental floss. I figured it couldn’t hurt to stay a little while longer to find out about my future.
For a country that prides itself on being thoroughly modern and Westernized, Singapore is chockfull of astrologers, palm readers, tarot card experts, and spirit mediums. During my first few months here I was completely unaware of this; this superstitious world mostly operates underneath the surface. There are rumors that some members of the Singapore parliament consult astrologers on a regular basis, although none of them will publicly admit to it. I can relate; I’m the sort of person who searches for the horoscopes every time I open a newspaper, all the while pretending that I’m just scanning the classifieds. The office I was standing was perfectly designed for the reluctant and embarrassed semi-believer. It didn’t have any of the trappings I’d warily expected; there were no beaded curtains or sticks of mystic incense. Instead it was a plain room with a filing cabinet, a metal desk, a Hindu calendar, and a couple of rolling desk chairs. It could have been a tax attorney’s office.
My fortune-teller was an elderly Indian man in a white collared shirt and pressed slacks. I found out he was originally from the Indian state Tamil Nadu, the same place my father was born. It made him seem comfortingly familiar, like a distant uncle. “Do you know the date of your birth? The time?” he asked me. I did. Indian astrology hinges entirely on the exact minute of your birth; all the things that will happen to you from that moment on are supposedly written in the stars. My fortune-teller pulled a heavy, musty-looking astrology reference book out of his filing cabinet and started flipping through the pages. He drew an elaborate grid on a sheet of printer paper and scribbled down a few different numbers and names, muttering to himself as he calculated star and planet alignments.
“Any sisters?” he asked me when he was done. “No, no sisters for you,” he said before I could answer. “You only have a brother.”
“That’s right!” I said, excited. And here I’d been worried about being taken in by an astrology fraud. Clearly, my fortuneteller was the real deal.
“What else can you tell me?” I asked eagerly.
“Between the years 1986 and 1996, something important happened to your mother.” He looked at me expectantly.
“What?” I asked.
“Something important,” he repeated. “Did she get sick?”
“Um…no. Well…I suppose she was probably sick at some point in that span of time.”
He nodded briskly and moved on. “You and your boyfriend are quarreling right now. A serious quarrel, isn’t it? A true test, for you and for your relationship, am I right?”
“Um…no.”
“There’s no quarrel?”
“There’s no boyfriend. I don’t have one.”
His gray eyebrows flew up. “Are you sure about this?” he asked gravely.
“Fairly sure,” I said.
He tapped the paper grid authoritatively. “It says that you have a boyfriend,” he said sternly. “It says that you have a boyfriend and you are quarreling.”
Things sort of went downhill from there. My fortuneteller seemed somewhat put out. I got the feeling that he had a whole lot of information about this relationship I wasn’t in, and that he was annoyed that there was no reason to share it.
“What do you want to know?” he asked me.
“You know, the usual. Will I be successful? Will I fall in love? Will I ever get married, be rich, be famous, or be happy?"
Without batting an eye, he said, “Your finances will be fine. You’ll marry a nice man when you’re thirty, have two children. You’ll stay close to home. You’ll have enough money to live comfortably.” He went on in that vein for a long while, painting a very vivid picture of a pleasant, ordinary life. I stared at him with growing dismay. I’d been hoping for a special, glamorous destiny, or barring that, some sort of wicked curse over my head, which would at least give my life a sense of doomed excitement.
“Anything else?” I asked, not bothering to hide my disappointment “Anything at all?”
My fortuneteller pursed his lips, looking annoyed again. “Your health is bad,” he said after a moment.
“It is?”
“Yes. You should probably do something about it. Be more careful, eat better, exercise more. Because you’re health is really quite terrible,” he pronounced. “Perhaps that’s why you don’t have the boyfriend,” he said musingly.
“But I feel fine,” I said.
“Quite terrible,” he said again.
I left pretty soon after that, mainly because I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. I took the elevator down to the ground floor of Serangoon Plaza, my head hung low, my dental floss clutched tightly in my hand. “Astrology’s such a crock,” I thought to myself, filled with righteous customer dissatisfaction. “I can’t believe there’s actual politicians here who listen to that crap all the time. I can’t believe anybody in Singapore does. Well not me. I’m so over that.”
I felt older and wiser, shedding that last bit of naiveté that even certain members of parliament couldn’t bring themselves to part with. I nodded smugly to myself, secure in the knowledge that I’d never be duped by another astrologer, ever again.
I headed out to the street to find myself a palm reader.
May 4th, 2006
A few months back, I took a trip to Vietnam with some friends. On our second day there we caught a bus to Halong Bay, one of the most popular destinations in the country, famous for its majestic limestone islands and caves. We hired a guide to take us to what he claimed was the most beautiful cave of all. I don’t remember the name of the place, only that it was huge and ancient and astounding…and filled with hundreds of neon lights. Everywhere you looked, you’d see a green or orange orb lighting the way for you (everywhere you turned there’d be a green or orange orb beaming in your face). The pathways (paved with the sort of smooth, uniformly shaped rocks landscaper’s use) were lined with the lights. They were even installed at the bottom of every pool of water, giving them all an eerie, nightclub glow. That, combined with the stream of visitors taking flash photographs every step of the way, made it a very odd experience for me. It’s funny, but when I think back on my time inside the cave, I just remember it being blindingly bright.
After we left I asked one of my friends what she thought of it. “It’s a beautiful place,” she said slowly. “But I wish we could have discovered this on our own. I wish we could have seen it before they put all of that crap in it.” I knew what she meant. There’s no magic in a place with paved pathways and lighted entrances (paved pathways and lighted entrances steal the magic from a place). It’s always kind of unsettling to see something that’s been altered so much from its original form, even more so when you realize that it’s been altered for you. The landscaping of the caves wasn’t an accident; it had been done for us and for thousands of tourists like us.
The irony of this is that what most tourists want more than anything in the world is to be able to see things that are untouched and “natural”. It genuinely upsets us when we find out some formerly wondrous place has been desecrated by a new freeway, a McDonald’s franchise, or the introduction of Avril Lavigne music. If you travel on the budget hostel circuit, you hear these complaints almost constantly. “Vang Vieng used to be an awesome place,” a backpacker I met in Laos informed me. “Until the masses of tourists found out about it and came here in droves. God I hate tourists—they always f**k everything up.”
I didn’t bother asking him, “What do you think you are?” The general definition of tourist is any traveler who isn’t you. There’s a certain amount of self-loathing built into the term. Think of Edward Norton’s character in the movie Fight Club. He goes to support-group meetings for problems he doesn’t have, just so he can feel better about himself. It works out great until he realizes that another person, a woman named Marla, is doing the exact same thing. “Marla, the big tourist,” he mutters spitefully. “Her lie reflected my lie.”
My theory is that deep down inside, what every tourist really wants to be is an explorer, striking out for exciting and uncharted territories, going where no one has gone before. Finding hundreds of people just like yourself when you get there sort of shatters that fantasy. So does the sight of halogen lights installed into ancient limestone rocks.
My friend was right—it would have been nice to discover the Halong Bay cave on our own, to have had the chance to explore it before all the artificial elements were introduced to it. But practically speaking, that would have been impossible. None of us were spelunkers, we never would have been able to navigate those caves on our own, and we probably would have died in there without those tacky lights to show us the way. There were some beautiful things in that cave—stalagmites, strange rock formations, the colors and textures of the walls. The lights cheapened the overall effect, but without them we wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.
