Queer Changes As Folk

There is a zen-like quality to _____ Can Change that might have proved testing on the patience of militant feminists and those who wear their gay identity on their sleeve. The strange, impenetrable neutrality in the latest offering by The Necessary Stage seems so all-embracing that it can easily be taken as capitulation, turning the other cheek to the aggressive oppressors of the mainstream. And to add to their refusal in passing judgment on single women and homosexuals who make switches to societal norms, playwright Haresh Sharma and director Alvin Tan gleefully volunteer their own ‘Marxist past’ as an example of how the progressive can ‘change’ and be co-opted by the system, before rounding off the show with a segment of forum theatre – the very thing that earned them the Marxist label originally but is no longer banned by now. It is up to you then to call the bluff of this dynamic duo as the gamemasters, if you think you got their stonewall silence all figured out. But since the characters in the play are all humanised and none demonised for effect, exercise caution in passing verdict on them, for it might be revealing only of your own convictions or inclinations.

Wise are the ones who adopt the policy of speaking always from a bureaucratic high ground, like how the four actors make formal speeches as introduction and conclusion to the play, wearing a thin PR smile while couching pro-family or pro-government arguments in moderate terms that assume universal consensus. Curiously, even the stories they act out appear to be such mundane situations, completely devoid of ironic plot twists, that one may well walk out of the theatre thinking he or she has seen an educational programme commissioned as a community development project. (In fact the play failed to carry endorsement from the authorities for culture, but that’s like an insider’s story.) While some reviewers may judge the end product as bland or weak with questionable motives, I would like to submit that it stands as art imitating propaganda imitating art, but that a classification of the work as political would again be to miss its full dimensions. Let’s just say for starters that there is something typically and unmistakably Singaporean even in the deceptive simplicity of the three presentations – presentations complete with powerpoint as a tool employed so ubiquitously here to chart out one’s personal planning of family and finances or to flash out the multicultural fabric of society. Its ritualistic, matter-of-fact use appears to reflect the Singapore psyche or way of life rather than any attempt by the propaganda machine to penetrate it, or perhaps you cannot even divorce one from the other once you have grown up in the system. It is no perverse attempt here to satirise an institution like the SDU or the baby bonus scheme – and you can just imagine a lesser theatre group succumbing to such temptations. Instead, the decision for change, to give in to the normalcy of a married life, is always something that the character can only ‘blame’ himself or herself for; if there is noticeable coercion by any institution at all, well that institution is known as the family.
‘Law’, a keyword used very loosely in the theme of the overall fringe festival, not only refers to the laws that bind us in society, but can also be interpreted poetically as laws of nature; in any case, it is up to the individuals to decide if these are meant to be obeyed or broken (or changed, if we use our imagination?). The production begins intriguingly with the actors prowling in the dark, surveying the space littered with upturned furniture, as if they all harbour their own designs of bringing order to the place. The ‘message’ for Singles Can Change is delivered by the character of an aunt in her 50s (played by Nora Samosir), who has been left on the shelf way past her expiry date for marriage, and her own example of a regretted solitary life makes her advice to her career-minded niece (Siti Khalijah) all the more heartfelt. While the scene of institutionalised dating is most hilarious, what with the banker rambling on life partnership and investments in one breath, the same audience who laugh may well recognise the validity of parallels between security in finance and in emotional support. And the way the story unfolds makes the progression of marriage and childbirth look as natural and compulsory in life as death and taxes. (An alternative like adoption, on the other hand, would seem a legally problematic issue for the poor aunt, just swept under the carpet.) Not that there is no resistance on the part of the wife against bearing children too early, for her body belongs to her and she has the right to decide, as she would point out; but after the husband’s emotional blackmail and whatever it may be, she eventually makes a sacrifice on her career. There is a carefully constructed scene whereby the wife character becomes a spokesperson for parenthood with her husband; as she steps out of the limelight to a spot of softer light for a soliloquy, one almost expects some outpour that is ironical, but instead she simply professes that it is all of her own accord, for she has decided that a woman is worth nothing if she is not a wife and mother. The audience would probably be taken aback by the frankness of such bleak if truthful outlook; the discerning might also observe the subtle difference between making a statement in privacy and making the same in public realm – for there are those who would find it obscene to make a campaign advertisement out of one’s parenthood.

In Homosexuals Can Change, the fault line is between the respectable living room shared with one’s parents and the secret rendezvous of bedroom affairs with one’s boyfriend. Again, the green, green grass in a better world of ‘normal’ married life beckons from a cardboard cutout. Rodney Oliveiro plays the masculine half of the gay couple who finds it hard to come out to his parents, and also finds himself increasingly subscribing to the dogma that homosexuality is an ‘abomination in the eye of God’. Our playwright wisely gives that line to his character instead of the pastor character; after all, in the light of the attempted church takeover of the woman organisation AWARE in Singapore last year, there is really nothing more worth exposing. Instead, we are presented with an unlikely character of a female pastor, reminding us that homosexuality is not alone as a gender issue in churches. We are also given a galore treat of an entertaining scene whereby Chua Enlai, otherwise acting as the gay boyfriend at a raw end of the deal, plays the doctor who analyses the negative traits of homosexuals and recommends aversion conditioning, a.k.a. electric shock treatment. As he speaks, graphic images of gay sex pop out on the screen, featuring very shapely abs and asses, all of a foreign stock – which is interesting, for we all know of country bumpkins who think homosexuality is a social disease imported from the West and never existed in Asian culture before. (We can’t blame them of course for never studying enough history to know that the penchant for boys dates back to Huang Di, the earliest Chinese emperor more than 4,000 years ago according to some literature; or that according to the Law of Manu from 2,000 years ago in India, a male homosexual act needs only be atoned by a ritual bath, that being long before British laws like 377A were imposed.) Anyway, unlike the harsher or bitchier members of the gay community, this play shows a more understanding attitude towards gay men who turn straight – well it’s like, if they choose so to be, let them go to heaven with all their righteousness, no? It leaves just one point to ponder at the end of the story, as the man’s wife makes him promise not to hide anything from her – so would it be a sin or just a white lie to suppress one’s true being?

Sometimes the truth can truly set you free. As the fictional doctor in the play points out, the life of a gay man is beset with jealousy, insecurity, competitiveness, malice, tantrums, infidelities and hysterical mood swings. Those in the know would find something to laugh in this, if they have come to terms with it. It is sad to hear there were apparently gay men who boycotted the show, in the belief that it is counter-revolutionary. In his discussion on ‘culture wars’, British cultural theorist Terry Eagleton once commented that “what a gay rights group and a neo-fascist cell have in common” is that “both define culture as collective identity rather than as critique”. He went on to say: “Cultures struggling for recognition cannot usually afford to be intricate or self-ironising, and the responsibility for this should be laid at the door of those who suppress them. But intricacy and self-irony are virtues even so.” In more ways than one, _______ Can Change demands a more enlightened audience. Those who watch plays with gay themes expecting them to be a theatrical equivalence of a gay pride parade would be sorely disappointed by this production, which may seem muted instead of helping to fly the pink banner higher. But what it is doing precisely, amidst all that din of battle calls and claims on universal values, pro-family, pro-Singapore and what not, is to bring the focus down to individuality; as the old song by Mama Cass Elliot goes, you gotta make your own kind of music.

It is really all in good faith that there should come a time already when society can dispense with labels of dichotomy and just be civil. While presupposing the golden rule of respecting differences as a renewed rule of engagement in public discourse, one takes up the game here in a more subtle and sophisticated manner than even one’s devious enemies may know. The play, stripped down to a bare minimum in plot, confronts the audience plainly with the idea of change into uniformity. You may be shocked by the inanity of what you perceive as the selling of one’s soul; I kind of agree with you personally but I can still enjoy it like I enjoy a horror show. The final analysis made here is that an understated approach can, in fact, make one’s propositions the more compelling.

Happy Together – NDP 09

It appears that Singaporeans can be divided into two categories when it comes to the month of August: those who manage to get tickets to watch the National Day Parade, and those who do not. (Now you may have another way of categorising Singaporeans, ie by their attitude towards NDP; but I hope you care enough about the country to read on…) Well blame it on the hype of the goodie bags if you like, there is a great demand for NDP tickets thriving just like a Keynesian economy that inspires people to go upgrading their cars and houses or accessorising themselves with branded goods; Singaporeans never like to fall under the have-nots, they always enjoy being the haves that make others jealous, but even better is when you can get the handout of freebies without feeling any shame (especially in a country that is decidedly not a welfare state?).

What I really really want to talk about here is not the thorny issue of equality (let’s leave that to some idealistic NMP who is ready to be rapped over the knuckles), all I want to say is what a great party we Singaporeans have witnessed, as in the so-called 44th birthday party of the nation. With walking puppets in exquisite ethnic costumes, and teenage ‘motivators’ and drummer boys littered among the audience to rev up the euphoria, it almost felt like a mardi gras that Singapore had never experienced (for the longest time, we citizens of this ‘fine’ city had to be tutored by plan to engage in ’spontaneous fun’). And just listen to the fabulous soundtrack for the historical retrospective on the past half century, going from old cabaret to disco, from classic Cantonese and Indonesian tunes to the Macarena, from Madonna to the Spice Girls and all, it has such a hypnotising effect in stirring up a shared memory that the different generations and communities here would usually be unaware of in their daily lives. Never mind that it is conflating good memories of pop music history with hazy memories of the island nation’s urbanisation and industrialisation, for a minute or two one could imagine being part of one united rhythm nation, regardless of colour lines. And most importantly, NDP has never looked so sexy with its multimedia – you have, from the seventies, the seductive eyes of the Singapore Girl that speak a thousand words to tourists and foreign investors, whetting their appetite for a piece of her; and for the noughties, you have girls and boys of a metrosexual generation strutting down the street, barely ripe for the material city but expected soon to have their own taste of adulthood in this Garden of Eden.

What I like most about NDP 09 indeed is how it aims, through a multimedia montage of historical footage and archival news articles alongside glamourous song and dance, to communicate at a subliminal level. So what do you see? It depends entirely on you as an individual and your personal, mental associations. You may still choose to be negative about the whole thing, seeing it as more of the same old state propaganda, the bloated ego of a little socialist red dot, serving a cult of personality – especially if you are a young impetuous freedom fighter sort, or even some old and tired member of an opposition party that remains unrepresented at the parade. But if you are say a liberal and artistic sort, who takes to a more hedonistic and refined lifestyle, what you see would be a small but self-assured dot that is growing healthily in the pink, blooming in a resplendent fashion. This is a parade proudly targeted above all at the young and trendy. In fact, if you are a music lover who is enamoured of the neon signs on Broadway, you ought to feel old this year. For the theme song this year is written and performed by a band from Singapore’s alternative rock scene (I say this without being aware of any mainstream rock scene here; you may protest and consider them Singapore’s very own Coldplay instead). If you are annoyed that you fail to hum along to the tune while your nephews and nieces are all electrified by the guitar sounds, I am sorry for you. This parade has been a little imaginative musically. I have even come across some reader in Zaobao writing to complain that the new acapella version of Majulah Singapura sounds too alien to his or her family’s ears, but I am glad at least it is not a complaint that the music sounds too Malay and not karaoke enough.

The young is our future. Why else would they present the story of Prince Sang Nila Utama in the form of a talking giant puppet if not to speak to the young, propably schoolchildren? (Not that the story of Singapura is still a riddle to anybody; what remains forever shrouded in mystery to all is the entity known as Temasek.) Another stroke of genius was to present the history of Singapore’s separation from Malaysia through flashes of sensational newspaper articles like in a cliche mafia movie, and against a soundtrack of ‘I Will Survive” performed by a diva batting long eyelashes and sporting a tall beehive hairdo – to kids who cannot understand politics otherwise, we can now explain that the merger was like a love affair that was never fated to work out, and one must stop crying and move on and not go on bitching about it. For the family audience this year, the best-loved moment must be in the segment of children sharing their dream careers, when this little boy said that his ambition is to be the president of Singapore. For me personally, the most poignant moment was in the pause of silence after that, followed by a plaintive solo by a trumpeter on wheelchair, opening a song sung by popular visually handicapped singer Chen Wei Lian. This was also the song whereby young performers ran out carrying models of pagodas, churches, mosques and temples, while others started forming a big heart shape on stage and hundreds of balloons were released as the words ‘love, love, love…’ were chanted. If only you were there to immerse in that awesome atmosphere, you would believe that there is no further need of a charter for love or compassion in Singapore. But then again the NDP would soon be followed by the National Day Rally where our PM warned of religious fault lines, referring to the AWARE incident not so long ago, and reminding all of the need for the Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act.

An NDP would certainly not do without a message of defence and security, and this year it comes in the form of a self-referential drama about the NDP event itself being under terrorist attack, prompting military aircrafts and navy speed boats to be activitated, culminating in a water bomb being defused. How entertaining it is, in the way it mimicks the self-importance constantly displayed in Hollywood movies about New York under alien attack; it may well inspire one to feel proud imagining that we have landmarks around the Marina Bay worth bombing. But I confess I do understand how all this mandatory military display can be attractive to the young and old – you have men in shiny uniform en masse, all these gadgets like expensive toys played by real men who are the top gun, and last but not least you have a group of soldiers firing a round of feu de joie into the air together, how orgasmic. All i all, I guess the show is a happy marriage of the masculine and the feminine, also the political and the artistic, made possible of course only by the former courting the latter (an evident awareness of how boring life would be otherwise), but kudos to the latter still for having the balls to stick it out and create something with a refreshing difference. The screen in the form of a big eye is to me a wonderful metaphor that marks an unique vision for all Singapore. Think of it as symbolising the common people’s hopes and dreams for Singapore, including kampung folks that are all but forgotten, and not just a helicopter view. Think of it as a way of saying there are always different views and perspectives in society, and you should free your mind, be tolerant, and be colour-blind. Just try not to think of it as the eye of a big brother watching you. (It is simply an unfortunate bad timing that cameras were recently installed at the Speaker’s Corner.) Anyway, I’m not interested in talking politics here. (Go read Gramsci on hegemony and internalisation if you are intellectual.)

Oh, but the pledge, how can one forget? Those bus ads seem to have paid off indeed in inspiring people all over the island from Tampines to Bukit Batok to come together at 8:22pm on National Day and say it in one voice as one nation. How magical. I’m wondering though if it is already sparking a conspiracy theory about the true meaning of this, for those numbers in some Chinese dialect would sound like ‘to prosper easily’. There have already been urban legends about Singapore minting its one-dollar coin with the shape of an octagon like a Taoist symbol to protect its fengshui when the MRT was first built, and about the Merlion being moved to its new location for good fengshui marking a new era in Singapore’s development. Now what about this? After all we know now that the pledge is just a matter of aspirations and not ideology, so we really should not dwell on its meaning too much, perhaps it is really supposed to be used as a kind of chant. Wow. And why not? Prosperity, that is our bottomline.

Elegy for the Moonwalk

“The planets are linin’ up
We’re bringin’ brighter days
They’re all in line
Waitin’ for you“

- Another Part of Me, Michael Jackson

There is a joke that NASA once spent millions of dollars to develop a ’space pen’ in order to write in weightless condition, whereas Russian astronauts or rather cosmonauts would simply use a pencil. Never mind if this is just an urban legend, the moral of the story is the importance of lateral thinking. So did they really put a man on the moon 40 years ago? Well, if you believe so. It has emerged now that the original tapes of the historic moonwalk have been erased and recorded over, and while NASA officials say the restored copies of the original broadcast will look even better, it is bound to trigger off a new bout of conspiracy theories about the entire moon landing being staged on a set just like in Hollywood, all for the sake of an ideological war. I am not propagating these, only the point that sometimes, everything you know may well be wrong, and one should have the right to doubt and wonder.

Until today there are people who would believe that Elvis did not die of drugs but was abducted by aliens. I hope the death of Michael Jackson will never be shrouded in so much mystery, even to reach the level of sensationalism surrounding the death of Marilyn Monroe linking her to JFK . But there are those who see in Michael’s tragedy the kind of persecution one also felt in the case of Princess Diana. Again I am not propagating any conspiracy theory of murder like what threatens to circulate in the internet now. So, Michael reportedly converted to Islam in November last year. But would any declaration of his faith in a concert tour that one may imagine necessarily turn out as positive publicity for the Ummah (or simply the Muslim world, as Obama would put it)? I guess we’ll never know. It may ultimately be best to keep one’s belief a personal matter and not high-key in the public eye, given to scrutiny. Does being the world’s top-selling artiste mean one has to carry the weight of the world and prepare to be crucified if one is not a saint?

Let’s just celebrate MJ’s moonwalk as a little beautiful dance step for all mankind. Say what you will about the carbon footprint in pop music, but it will save our mortal souls sooner that those nuclear arms and spy satellites. Well here’s how I remember those grooves…

CONFESSIONS OF A MICHAEL JACKSON FAN (written a week after 25th June 2009)

Let me confess, even if it sounds as bad as saying I was a teenage vampire some centuries ago: I was once a Michael Jackson fan. I used to think that Thriller and Billie Jean, with the ghouls, the moonwalk and all, were the coolest music videos on earth. That was a long time ago, before rap music began to storm the charts and before this abomination called house music was born, before bands like Metallica crept into my consciousness like Sandman, before Kurt Cobain was singing about teen spirit and the umbilical cord, before Bjork put mythical Iceland into my world map of music. Or if anyone is too young to even remember these, well it was way before the existence of a virtual band like Gorillaz was a conceptual possibility, way before Kanye West was preaching about Jesus and the Devil and hip-hop dancers were practising their moves to wrong grammar by star producer Timbaland. We are talking here about the 1980s, when R&B music meant singing one’s lungs out like Whitney Houston and not shaking one’s booty like Beyonce, when the immaculate Madonna could still pass off as a virgin and George Michael was still straight but Bono was wearing his hair like a girl, when the alternative to breakdancing in a disco was swaying to the beat of electro-pop like Erasure, Pet Shop Boys or Bananarama, and radio was otherwise dominated by blue-eyed soul such as Huey Lewis, Hall & Oates and worst of all, Rick Astley (Joss Stone was still an infant in the cradle then, but if only I knew, hearing her cry must have been preferable). In short, there was very good reason to consider Michael Jackson a class of his own in mainstream pop music. He took dance moves from the ghettoes and turned it into a glamorous art, and he made funky soul music accessible to pop fans around the world, all this at a time when African Americans were still simply referred to as blacks. And if he became the best-selling singer in the world while he was at it, I for one was happy to second that.

My point of entry into Michael Jackson’s kingdom of pop was 1987 to be exact, when the Bad album was released, marking the comeback of the elusive singer who by then was better known for stories on his plastic surgery, his oxygen chamber and his chimpanzee Bubbles. Though the album was not to duplicate the record-breaking success of Thriller, I was convinced it was a more consistent and coherent collection of songs. Despite the brilliant bursts of genius in Thriller, it had too much old-fashioned R&B filler for my taste, whereas Bad was a refinement of its success formula, calculated as it might have been. And one just had to admire Michael for the way he was pushing his vocals to the limits, the forceful falsettos, the relentless accentuation of syllable endings, the guttural stops and all, which he crafted into the music. Add to that the perfect album cover packaging of him in that black leather outfit full of shiny studs and buckles, with his new surgically modified look that transcended racial divides of black versus white, long before computer morphing was possible like in Terminator 2 or in his own Black Or White video. (It was a look that also transcended other categorisations of course; he looked rather androgynous especially with those locks of hair.) The man who was known for his affinity with E.T. and the Elephant Man made his music comeback seem almost as dramatic as the landing of an angelic alien on planet Earth, and I totally bought into that as many young kids then would. Watching singles from his album climb to the peak of the Top 40 one by one became my obsession, a sense of witnessing history unfold.

I can still remember hearing over the radio the first single off the Bad album, I Just Can’t Stop Loving You. The strains of music heave in as gently as a sunrise, and then the piano sounds start rolling in as heavenly as a harp before the vocals begin tenderly; the mix of the music is pleasantly understated, the drum beat remaining a mere light tap until the song builds up to a climax punctuated by kettle drum sounds. And the way the voices of Michael Jackson and Siedah Garrett blend so well made it all the more sensuous – one could hardly tell where the man ends and the woman begins. But the hit that signalled Michael’s grand return was undoubtedly the title track itself, which opened the album dramatically with its classic knell of four notes; the MTV for Bad, directed by Martin Scosese and featuring a young Wesley Snipes, became iconic instantly. I shall skip past the rest and fast forward to one song particularly close to my heart – Man in the Mirror. Growing up as I was in the 80s, the 60s era of soul music like Aretha Franklin was little more than a strange past in black and white, and the 70s disco era seemed even weirder with music of Earth Wind & Fire and images of UFOs. Reality of the world as I could understand then was more like the star wars that former cowboy Reagan was about to wage on one hand, and the biggest pop stars in a motley coalition of USA for Africa on the other, with voices ranging from Lionel Ritchie and Tina Turner to Willie Nelson and Cyndi Lauper. But Man in the Mirror was the song that introduced me, a young pop fan still cluelss about music genres and history, to the heritage of gospel in black music (the lyrics of the song, imploring one to “make that change”, were admittedly simplistic but the soulful style of singing lent conviction to it) and its music video, consisting of news images of famine, poverty and war as well as footages of historical figures, planted the figure of Martin Luther King among others firmly in my mind, years before I got to watch Spike Lee’s movie featuring Denzel Washington as Malcolm X.

While some of the songs in the Bad album would sound totally quirky today (why is Swahili spoken in a song that is Liberian Girl?), others remain memorable and Smooth Criminal for one has surprisingly spawned a successful cover version (most recently there is even a violin version). Sadly, Michael Jackson made impact with just one more album after that, namely Dangerous in 1991. Produced by Teddy Riley, the master of New Jack Swing, it was a good attempt in updating the great singer’s music, but ironically, though I found it had better dance numbers than Bad, the music scene was fast changing by then, with the emergence of new trends like grunge, trip-hop and trance apart from the popularity of gangsta rap. Michael Jackson with the high artistry of his vocal style and his theatrics was no longer in vogue. True to his insulated and single-minded personality, his response was to retreat further into his fantasy world that only children or the childlike among us could appreciate. Poor he probably never quite grasped why the world stopped caring about him, or was not able to adapt and change himself anyway. I thought the song Remember The Time – with a fantastic video set in ancient Egypt, directed by John Singleton and featuring celebrities like Eddie Murphy, Iman and Magic Johnson, in which MJ’s light complexion sticks out like a sore thumb – encapsulated what might have been the most painful regret of his life, that one can no longer return to the young and innocent days when one has ventured too far out. It is symptomatic of our time that a world which no longer feels entertained by the roles of heroes or freaks that he spent the best parts of his career playing in his music videos, somehow chooses to be entertained by the eccentricities and blemishes of his character in tabloid reports, right up to his death. (It was like a hidden desire to incarcerate him and establish his abnormality, as if putting a particular face to perverted behaviour would affirm the normalcy of society at large, affirm the sanity of us common folks who can’t sing or dance and never own a fortune but at least look just like how a regular human being should look.) MJ must have been pushing himself very hard in preparation of his impending soldout concert dates, dreaming of basking in the limelight of a final comeback of his music career. It was not to materialise the way he imagined it. But I guess his spirit is at last set free from the weariness of a body and mind too long burdened by the weight of past glories.

To the AWARE ex-co that should not be

Now this is the story that we must tell
Some people are just playing it foul
Lesbians, deviants, they like to name
But who even invite them to this game?
I don’t give a care who’s your aunt-in-law
Don’t pull this dumb shit if she knows the law
Women got to teach what girls need to do
If you’re full of doubt, first go back to your school

Let those without a sin cast the first stone
The way we all see it you’ve usurped the throne
Be a good employee, go count money
Focus on your little own family
Don’t act like AWARE is your property
What you’re doing now we call moral felony
Understand first, we need a free country
Keep your tongue-speaking to church proximity
You should have shown a little transparency
You’re not God, so don’t fake invisibility

So why you need to gang up silently like that
Creeping through the backdoor just like that
Locking the door on poor women like that
Spider lilies what? It’s not like that

Just listen
The times are ahead of ya
Our brains are ahead of ya
We’re not afraid of ya
Peace won’t be there with ya

Even government would say we need a society that’s secular
Chinese non-Chinese we speak the women vernacular
But vision of your church is a tunnel monocular
So back down now, before things get uglier
Don’t get us wrong, this is not us against Christians
Just restore AWARE to its original guardians
We need an NGO that’s all inclusive
Ask yourself now, who’s making this explosive
Big men with guns toy with their weapon
True feminists don’t force down their opinion
Rational people can talk it out
So get out of your hiding and talk it out
Get out!

(Epilogue after May 2nd:)

It’s all right now
They took a walk out now
Ask legal counsel how
AWARE is too profound
Like a cheque that’s getting bounced
They’re battered to the ground
Quietly they sit down
Should learn their lesson now
Flip over page 73
1414 that’s history
It’s gracious society now
So we can turn the mike, slowly, down, now

(Ed: but don’t let your guard down)

Is Singapore ready for a Malay PM?

Obama has won the elections in America to become its first ever black president! Or if you are really cynical, just call him the first American president with a good tan. Anyway. In Singapore it has immediately prompted a big question in the newspapers and public forums: is Singapore ready for a non-Chinese PM? So far all three PMs here have been Chinese, with non-Chinese relegated to the ceremonial role of a president, and even that hasn’t always been something to shout about – Yusoff Ishak, who was the first president, dated back to the time when Singapore and Malaysia was one, and Devan Nair, the third one, a union leader in his early days, was soon shamed and relinquished of his presidency for being a drunkard and eventually died without leaving Singapore citizens his full story. No, you just won’t get to see the same kind of excitement like the American presidential election, where you have rock stars lending support for a Democrat candidate going against the incumbent party, or rock stars dissociating themselves their music from appropriation by the Republicans. It’s simply a different system and different culture. In America there is a constitution against the president being in power for more than two terms, in Singapore you would be happy if there is a rule against power being held beyond two generations. Well in that little respect Singapore and the Bush family of the Ivy League were probably seeing eye to eye, but a lot of things in political elections here are uniquely Singapore’s inventions. One even wonders now if the spirit of the opposition parties in Singapore is all but dead, especially with the recent demise of the underdog hero JBJ, who truly deserved a medal for his resilience. Nowadays opposition party members seem more busy shooting themselves in the foot.

By a strange and almost prophetic coincidence though, a political play in Singapore being staged the last two weeks has enacted a scene that smacks of the impossible – a Malay/Muslim woman wearing tudung becomes prime minister of Singapore and gives a speech in English and Chinese. It’s like a mirror image of the power structure which has prevailed in Singapore since its independence. The play, staged fortuitously at a time when Singapore is just relaxing its rules on political plays and public speech (not that no film maker is getting his political film banned and nobody is getting charged for expressing certain political views or defamation or related form of contempt of court or whatever unprecedented virtual crimes – all this is happening at the same time), deals partly with the issue of Internal Security Act, its main character of a political prisoner being inspired by one Said Zahari. But as the title of the play Gemuk Girls suggests, a work of weighty political issues needs not go without a feminine and glamorous touch, not to mention the comic. The other two characters are hence a liberal and flamboyant Malay mother with a good English education and her witty half-Chinese middle-of-the-road daughter who is having fun attending PAP parties at one point and looking destined for a great career, then turning into a conservative character wearing a tudung and going to the streets to protest (in the Singapore context I guess that would be at the Hong Lim Park in old Chinatown). There is a lot of rapid fire humour in the beginning – for instance the mother would tell the daughter not to enter politics, if she likes to express her own views she should just join the press (actresses turn back to face each other and burst into laughter). As the play progresses, the tension turns more serious; the politically active daughter starts accusing the mother of indulging in material comforts, dreaming of life in Dubai or simply tending her private garden, while the mother argues that she is more productive with her garden compared to the futility of all those political efforts. You may read this as an argument of the masculine political approach versus the soft feminist approach; then again, growing a garden also means weeding out the unwanted, so go figure. When you are watching something by The Necessary Stage, you know you shouldn’t just settle for a straight interpretation. The play is not quite a linear narrative and is presented in a kind of magic realism exploring various scenarios and angles, aided by multimedia of words and images serving multiple functions from private reminiscence to larger-than-life propaganda, and a special prop set of wooden floor blocks sliding on tracks like trains, under which the character of the prisoner may hide as if he is a ghost best forgotten. If you want a simple summary of the whole thing, the underlying question is probably: is it fear or material comfort or what which has rendered Singaporeans politically inactive or disinterested in the past four decades or so?

But to go back a little now to the issue of ethnicity or race (I don’t like the word race actually but it is still in currency in Singapore), I was rather amused that day while reading a Chinese review of Gemuk Girls in the Zaobao newspaper. The writer, while describing the two female characters as modern and liberal English-speaking ladies, stated that “they are unlike the Malay women we usually know of”. That seems to reflect emphatically on the image of Singapore’s Malay woman in the mind of the Chinese community here. Well indeed a Malay PM won’t be elected any time soon then. Perhaps that is why we need the arts and media to help free our minds then. So far in the English TV serials here, Malay characters have already secured a stereotype as policemen – which is good, at least they are supposed to be the ‘mata’ maintaining law and order, not drug addicts or hanyut, but there is still some way to go. And talking about the theatre scene here, I wonder how much has really been done in terms of something intercultural. Of course the late Kuo Pao Kun has long propagated multilingual theatre as something that would reflect the Singapore reality. But I’m not sure how much progress has been made since then, except that nowadays multilingual no longer means English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil like the National Day or Chingay parade but rather multinational like a mardi gras carnival. It seems even in the arts, Singapore is becoming known the same way it is famous for its airport, which does not produce anything but simply packs goods and passengers in different configurations for different destinations. So-called ‘intercultural’ theatre tends to portray just general, textbook-like human conditions, when not selling Asian culture blatantly as a spectacle of the exotic other. Now a place for transit only is a non-place, because it has no memory of history. Perhaps we really must try to put some Singapore characters of different communities into a play and make them talk somehow; what’s the use of removing old enclaves in Kampungs and Chinatown and distributing them proportionately in high-rise blocks all over the island if people just won’t come out to the corridors and void decks to talk? In Gemuk Girls what we see is a different sort of multilingual situation, whereby the Chinese presence is cleverly conspicuous by its absence. In a couple of somewhat surreal scenes, the young Malay/Muslim woman speaks in Mandarin, but it just sounds disconcerting – is the Mandarin capability of the Malay character empowering for her, or is it oppressive? Go figure, and try to free your mind.

In the end, I think we have to agree that it should not be something as simple as black and white when it comes to politics. I can only say on the issue of power that it should not be about who, but rather the what and the how. It was George W. Bush who said: “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.” Let’s not be like him. But as we are celebrating the hope that Obama signals, I can’t help quoting another dumb Bushism: “I think we agree, the past is over.” Amen (Amin).

People vs the Ruling Class – Legal battle and beyond in Thailand

Thai politicians sure know how to enjoy the finer things in life. I’ve not been hearing much news from Thailand lately, but what I do know is that the ousted Prime Minister Thaksin, supposedly facing some trials of corruption, has simply been enjoying the victory of the Manchester football club famously owned by him, while the man currently taking his seat – Samak Sundaravej, a celebrity chef with his own cooking show – has made a friendly visit to Singapore to compare the wet market prices of prawns and tomatoes between the two countries. Fortunately, I just got to enjoy some other juicy story from a different perspective in Thailand, thanks to a little screening at the Singapore Film Festival of an independent documentary film, The Truth Be Told: The Cases Against Supinya Klangnarong. It’s about this media rights activist with a salary of 14,000 baht who was sued by Shin Corporation for libel demanding 400 million baht in compensation from her, all because she made comments to the Thai Post newspaper in 2003 that the corporation then owned by Thaksin’s family had benefited from favourable policies by his government. It’s a film with a subject matter that certainly can interest any Singaporean with some political consciousness, for obvious reasons. Incidentally, just a couple of weeks ago there was a ‘private’ screening here of Singapore political films, organised by independent journalists and activists who are mostly not new to police investigations for their civil activities. Interesting to know that even in Thailand, makers of a film like this do not live completely without fear either. 

While the filmmaker is naturally not able to immortalise the trials themselves on film, the documentary does manage to capture the tension of the three years’ legal battle by following the activist Supinya around in casual moments at home and so on, interviewing not just her but also her parents. The enemy she was fighting on the other hand was an invisible one, for she had never seen Thaksin in person and had no dealing with the Shin Corporation personally. It is a formidable battle for an ideal that her own parents and relatives as everyday people would not fully grasp; even she herself would feel torn between her ideal and the worries her parents suffer for her, a very Asian thing. She comes across as a lonely fighter in the film if not for the occasional scenes of protests and rallies conveying some sense of strength in numbers. Where is the face of justice to be found in all this? Perhaps only in the figure of Chinese folklore Justice Bao. There was a rally scene where a satire was staged in the form of Chinese opera with Justice Bao confronting a ’shameless face’ who was propagating a ‘democracy of Shin, by Shin, for Shin’. Man, that is so entertaining, Singapore political rallies in comparison must look like a, well, black-out. Miraculously, Supinya eventually survived the ordeal as the criminal court threw out the criminal lawsuit while the civil lawsuit was also withdrawn eventually. There is however a dramatic twist – for this is apparently a country that can have not just judiciary powers separate from legislative and executive, but also military powers at play independently (not to mention the monarchy). Just as the documentary was already in the editing room, the September 2006 coup took place and the film had to evolve in a different direction. Perhaps the filmmaker should even do a sequel now, as the old powers are returning to haunt. Politics in Thailand seem to be going round and round. (But then I should qualify as a Singaporean: at least it does move.)

(Below is a revisit of an old post written at the time of the Bangkok coup)

Tanks were rolled out in the streets of Bangkok on 19th September 2006. That night, as an old general was appearing on television to make a solemn announcement, those old enough to remember already had an inkling of what was in store, for it’s to be the 4th time in 20 years that this familiar face is announcing a coup d’etat in Thailand. And this would now be the 18th coup in Thai history since 1932, when a bloodless coup replaced absolute monarchy with a parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy. But if the latest coup causes any alarm at all, the Thai people seem to be losing sleep for just a night or two. In no time at all, the land of a thousand smiles is back to its normal cheery self. The only difference is they are now busy smiling into the camera with a tank in the backdrop. Parents take photos of their children in front of a tank, ladies pose next to soldiers for pictures, all eager to take away their share of the historical moment. Roses presented to soldiers, yellow ribbons tied on tank guns, all are frozen in time as they become part of harmonious compositions in colour photos.

As the coup passed the midway point of the two-week window period, some people might be getting jittery or impatient, there were protests here and there. But not to worry, the army brought in female soldiers to entertain the public. For those who can’t get enough of women with guns like Chai-Lai Angels, here are now women dancing in camouflage. Perhaps that will be a new draw for tourists being scared away by the coup. Unfortunately, from the photo alone I cannot tell if they are playing dance tunes of the north-eastern variety, I imagine that may help win over some regional support from Thaksin’s voters. A bloodless coup like this seems surreally like a calm before a storm, the news media are just watching intently for temperature rising like El Nino, and whatever spark turning into real fire that may change the perspective suddenly. Will this coup truly be a positive one, different from those before it? So far, the most remarkable difference is that the coup has been led by the Buddhist country’s first ever Muslim to be commander-in-chief, General Sonthi Boonyaratglin. Quite an interesting cultural phenomenon he is, especially if you look elsewhere in Southeast Asia these few weeks – Malaysia and Singapore, the old sparring partners they are, have just been bickering over which ethnic group has been marginalised in which country.

Western media are condemning the coup as a sign of Thailand stepping back in time. Well the West have always suffered from this burden of being the only ones in the world who actually believe in ‘democracy’. Perhaps they would believe in democractic elections even when there is obviously no fair play in the process; in fact they seem to have such faith in democractic elections, they are known to tolerate when a batch of ballot boxes go missing, and even when they resort to military means to install regime change in another country, hey, it’s all in the name of democracy. The West also have a fixed idea of mankind’s common progress in history, that is equal to democracy, equal to capitalism, equal to secularisation, equal to globalisation. One day when all countries in the world look the same, then it will be the end of history for them, like God would finally take a look at it all and be pleased with what man has done for himself. But the oriental people have a different idea of history. History is simply one dynasty rising and falling or one power giving way to another, it’s a never-ending cycle like reincarnation, all you have to answer to as an individual is your karma, for you reap what you sow. And in the Thai world view, the King is at the centre of the world much like the Mount Meru in Buddhist belief, no matter what earth-shaking news there may be, his presence makes a reassuring factor. With his blessings, life just goes on. Two weeks after the coup, the Thai people have already forgotten about the tanks and have taken their cameras instead for an exciting picnic in the ‘golden land’ – the new Suvarnabhumi Airport. Meanwhile, more than 100 members of the Thai Ruk Thai have quit the party, but not a sign of their infidelity they say, it is rather to prevent the party from being banned, so it is all out of love for the party. Well the past is best forgotten now, nothing more to talk about. Anyway a friend working in a human rights organisation in Bangkok just told me, in times like this, the policy is to keep mum.

Anybody still remembers the last coup in 1991? Man, that’s like such a long time ago, MTV’s current femme fatale Tata Young was so young then, she was only 11 and only qualified for children’s singing contests, yet to launch her career as a teenage pop singer with a mushroom hairstyle, and certainly a far cry from her new ’sexy, naughty, bitchy’ image singing English songs. But maybe things don’t change so much in Thailand within 15 years. OK, the Bangkok metro system is finally up after the long wait. But if I’m not wrong, bus fares have remained the same all this while (hard to imagine for people living in a place like Singapore with constant price hikes). What else? Bird Thongchai is still the number one superstar, while countless teenage idols have come and gone. Many a politician have also come and gone. So how will someone like Thaksin be judged 10 or 15 years from now? Let the historians be the judge. Perhaps he will best be remembered for the death toll of 2,200 in a war against drugs and 1,700 in a war against insurgency in southern Thailand. It may also depend on whether future leaders will have as much business acumen to run the country’s economy (and his own family’s enterprise too, in this case). But perhaps as the new interim prime minister says, Thailand will find its own form of happiness not measured by GDP – the popular benchmark all over the world? Or perhaps real life has to be some form of compromise, like the new Suvarnabhumi Airport (oh poor Thaksin, he didn’t manage to take off from the swamp that he was turning into a symbol of his glory). Designed by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn, it is cold and modern on the exterior with a shell of glass, steel and concrete, but when you get to the inside, it is a showcase of Thai art works, all there for a sense of identity.

 

From “The Art of Corruption” art exhibition held at the TPI Building in Bangkok from Dec 2007 to Jan 2008. Sutee Kunavichayanont’s installation Great Cheat Great Cheat: Children of “Srithanonchai” is a room filled with many typical Thai-style writing canvasses covered with words conveying corruption.

Hong Kong Sex Photos in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Like virginity, innocence once lost can never be recovered. This was an overpowering sentiment that came across in Lee Ang’s erotic espionage movie Lust, Caution, which was the hot talking point in the Chinese-speaking world just a few months ago, thanks to the very vivid and elaborate sex scenes between Tony Leung and Tang Wei. Tourists from China were flooding cinemas in Hong Kong just to see the uncensored version. But the sensation caused by that movie has since paled in comparison to the sex photos leaked out of singer and actor Edison Chen and his string of celebrity partners in bed. The questions “did they do it for real” or “are the pictures doctored” were very soon replaced by the question “which actress is next in action?”. Not only did star gazing and porn surfing become one and the same for the first time in Chinese entertainment history, the daily fresh reports that fed the public’s obsession with these very private realms of the stars were resembling a long and drawn-out soap opera – a very star-studded series in this case, and a soap opera of very dirty linen.

With the sex photos spreading like fire in the internet, this has become a disaster on a national scale for the moral police. Hong Kong police was left helpless before data transfer in the information superhighway (as some tabloid put it, the police went simply ‘mo fu’  – there is no magic charm against the evil of unidentified netizens with a resource of these photos, who might possibly be extorting the parties concerned). Police commissioners were also inconsistent on the legal issues in the face of this unprecedented media scandal, saying at one point that anyone with those pictures on their computer could be in breach of the law, only to clarify later that it was not a crime to transfer the pictures to friends, which then prompted sending of picture files en masse between ‘friends’. And soon In mainland China, CDs of the pictures were even illegally manufactured and sold in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, sellers apparently enjoying brisk sales from school kids among other customers. It is not merely the career or marriage of some Hong Kong actresses at stake in this scandal. Life will simply never be the same again for the young generations of media consumers in Hong Kong and China as the many-splendoured world of their pop culture idols is suddenly reduced to some pornographic close-ups.

It is not that the Chinese society has been the most prudish in the world. I just snort when I see how western reports play up the news story by describing sex as a ‘taboo’ in Chinese society until now, as if the world’s most populous country has been reproducing by means of test tubes in the last 5,000 years. Come on, it’s 4 centuries ago that China produced the classic novel Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase), an erotic story sexually explicit past the point of being instructive. And now Chinese celebrities are proving they can outdo Paris Hilton. There is certainly a kind of decorum in Chinese culture of course, which can be summarised in some old Chinese wisdom which would go: there are things you can speak of but not do, and there are things you can do but not speak of. The unsaid Asian wisdom however remains that if it is an indecent act by your neighbour, by all means talk about it. Hence the ‘paradox’ of how tabloids and gossip magazines in Hong Kong were splashing lurid photos of this scandal all over the place; makes you wonder how many of them should be fined under the Obscenity Act if is seriously enforced. Actually, the entertainment magazines in Hong Kong have long been notorious for planting spy cameras, to catch celebrities smooching in cars or even changing backstage. What stands out in the typical Chinese reaction towards this scandal is not merely the moralising but the way the public relishes prying into the sex lives of these celebrities in the process of moralising. There is simply no concept of privacy in our moralistic Asian society. In fact the way that the Chinese media has been reporting this scandal, despite all posturing of moralising, is not far removed from the reactions of any male net surfer checking out Edison Chen’s photo documentation of his exploits – first he goes: “filthy sluts!”; then he adds: “lucky bastard!”.

There is a Chinese saying that goes something like this: a wife is not as greal as a concubine, a concubine not as great as going to a brothel, going to a brothel not as great as committing adultery. Now I don’t mean to make any moral judgement here about sexual promiscuity. But it should be fair to say that this Edison Chen is quite plaintly a pervert, for the sheer amount of pornography he has produced. (Call it male instinct, right from day one I thought there is something spooky and loathsome in him, which made him perfect for the role of a triad member sneaking into the police force in Infernal Affairs II; but female fans would not listen.) Just as 1,300 sex photos leaked out from his pink laptop seem staggering enough, police investigation reveals that he has in fact several times of that to his name, involving a couple dozen women. Now photographing or filming your wife or girlfriend to heighten sexual pleasures is one thing. But to take pictures systemically of naked women spreading their legs or performing oral sex on you suggests an irksome egomania, not to mention a compulsive obsession with the genitals. Furthermore, such obsesssive documentation of sex is in fact taking over the sexual act itself in importance. It has gone beyond a documentation of two persons in the heat of passion. A pervert like this is not so much seeking satisfaction from the physical intimacy as seeking psychological satisfaction from the very thought of violating a woman’s body, which is why documentation is essential to him, serving as proof of the violation. Such behaviour is akin to a dog’s territorial pissing, a tourist vandalising walls of a scenic site just to say “I was here”, and a savage severing the scalp or whatever body part of his enemy as proof of his conquest.

Needless to say, such photos represent the male gaze on the woman as a sexual object or instrument. The camera becomes the most powerful weapon in the hand of a man who is shooting his willing victims one by one, like murder by numbers. There has long been a perfect allegory for this in the 1960 movie Peeping Tom by Michael Powell, whereby the serial killer literally kills with his camera. Of course, in this case what Edison Chen is helping to kill indirectly would be the career or marriage of his past partners in bed. Perhaps in each of these cases, the actress or whoever was having fun play-acting to the male fantasy, presuming that it would all remain within the privacy of bedroom walls and hard disc memory. What they forget to their own detriment is that photography has the power of immortalising a single act, making it larger than life and impossible to erase from public memory. That aside, what Edison Chen has helped to kill is the erotic fantasy of many male fans over the likes of Cecilia Cheung and Gillian Chung. You may think surely the reverse is true? Well granted, a woman fully clothed is not as sexy as a woman dressed in a revealing dress. Imagine a woman dressed fully in a formal outfit, say a police uniform, that would hardly be enticing. But say she slowly unbuttons to show some skin beneath the formal outfit, and even strips to show some lacy undergarments. That would be exciting, wouldn’t it? But say she strips down to the nude before you can say: wait a minute, slow it down. Suddenly we remember the good old wisdom: Less is more! Men like women to yield to their desires, but hey, they also need space to give a free rein to their power of imagination – allow us to first do some mental undressing of the desired woman! The chase is part of the fun. Georges Bataille summarised it best when he talked about women as objects for the aggressive desire of men: “In so far as she is attractive, a woman is a prey to men’s desire. Unless she refuses completely because she is determined to remain chaste, the question is at what price and under what circumstances will she yield. … Putting oneself forward is the fundamental feminine attitude, but that first movement is followed by a feigned denial.” Initial refusal only enhances the value of a woman as object, whereas the minute she gives herself freely, game is over. That is also why something like the schoolgirl image of Gillian Chung in the duo Twins was so popular; it is a cultivated image of a virginal young lady, yet to be corrupted, a perfect object for the male fantasy. Not surprisingly, when she first apologised in the wake of the scandal, she simply claimed that her sexual involvement was due to her being ’silly’ and ‘naive’ – what a calculated ‘turn-on’, these are clearly two desirable qualities in a girl that avail herself for manipulation by men, not least sexual. Unfortunately, not many seem to buy that. The fact remains that whereas men who are playboys in our society are all the more revered for their virility, women who have fallen are simply spoilt goods. In show business, men can be anything any time, but women are best marketed either as sweet and innocent young things or seasoned erotic symbols, the role is sealed with the image.  Bataille said that “prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude”, I guess men like the filthy sluts, but we also need the comfort of women who are exclusive products, or at least yielding only at much higher price.

The devaluation of Hong Kong celebrities now can also be understood by borrowing the word ‘aura’ from Walter Benjamin (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit). Until now, the constant spying on celebrities by Hong Kong magazines had served to create an impression that these stars are elusive – in physical appearance, that is, while the magazines are able to reveal all trivialities of their personal lives so much so that readers begin to feel they have the right to know everything. Such spying (and the celebrities’ hiding) helps to whet our appetite for we tend to think the celebrities must be good-looking cos they are so hard to see, as the song goes. But just like a Britney Spears upskirt, suddenly fans are given far more than what they asked for. Suddenly even the celebrities’ most private realm of the senses has turned into images as good as commonplace property of every household. Such indecent exposure has now led to a loss of ‘aura’ which the celebrities have hitherto enjoyed from carefully laboured public relation exercises of photo shoots for magazine covers with the best angles and best lighting, as impressions of the stars are now stripped down to numerous images of raw sex which go through no quality control and are circulated endlessly to infinity. As Benjamin said of the effects of photographic reproductions: “By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” Suddenly it strikes viewers, after satisfying their curiosity, that the physical bodies of the celebrities are really nothing that special, which we ought to know in the first place since the faces are what make celebrities unique. The breaking of moral taboo on display of sex in this case also marks the passing of an age of innocence, just about as revolutionary as the secularisation of religious cult images which Benjamin described: “Artistic production begins with ceremonial objects destined to serve in a cult. One may assume that what mattered was their existence, not their being on view. … Certain statues of gods are accessible only to the priest in the cella; certain Madonnas remain covered nearly all year round, certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals are invisible to the spectator on ground level.” The exhibition value of photography quickly displaces its cult or personal, sentimental value. In this case, it is the sanctity of sex which some people like to guard with religious fervour, even in a secular society like the Chinese which has never been ruled by a church with a concept of original sin.

Frankly, one would not get so excited about the whole thing at all if one is not remotely a fan of Chinese entertainment. Hong Kong media continues relentlessly to chronicle the Edison Chen saga like scavengers (the latest episode centering on the identity of 8 women from affluent families, published in the magazines with photo silouettes and nicknames). The western media has generally been less than excited about this case, partly because Asian eroticism without any white player is of little interest, sex in the middle kingdom would be as alien as sex in the animal kingdom to them; anyway the concern in respectable media of the western world would be over invasion of personal privacy rather than public moralising. That said, it is fun to compare how different European media report the Edison Chen scandal differently. Le Monde, being French, simply relishes the potent mix of glamour and dirt as entertaining news, especially with rumours of extortion and celebrities’ mafia links: “Sexe, célébrités, mafia… les ingrédients sont dignes d’un thriller, le casting, lui, est prestigieux”. Der Spiegel, being German, immediately politicises the whole issue with a macro-social perspective, before falling into essentialist philosophy – first it describes the Chinese authorities as desperately fighting western influence and internet technology which defy traditional taboos on sex, and then it speculates if Edison Chen has deliberately started the whole thing himself as a publicity stunt. (Oh well, we should see it coming, Karl Marx with his great historical dialectism was born of German soil; it’s also typical of the general western view of the Asian society as backwards – yet to democratise, yet to secularise, yet to liberalise, all state-controlled and hence devoid of any capacity to think and behave as individuals unless western influence comes to the rescue.) The article seems just short of proclaiming Edison Chen a hero or martyr in a country which happens to forbid pornography by law even in this day and age.

It has been commented that China generally exercises more censorship over political content in the internet than sexual. While Cecilia Cheung’s commercial for a feminine cleansing product (which seemed a nicely timed self-mockery) was pulled in China possibly due to dispute on medical claims rather than her sex photos scandal, there has been a blatant ban in Chinese television not only on a skincare commercial by actress Tang Wei but any video of her. It is not just for her sex scenes in Lust, Caution though; the criticism seems to be that her character in the movie “glorifies traitors” and “insults patriots”. (Never mind the original story by Zhang Ailing was written half a century ago; and actor Tony Leung being a man and so well established is simply spared.) There is in fact a new directive on film licensing and censorship announced by China’s broadcasting bureau in early March stating that movies should give priority to “healthy development of the young and social effectiveness”. One can only speculate as to how much of this has been inspired by the Hong Kong sex photos scandal. But certainly even during the Chinese New Year period, it was noted with disgust that media attention on news of Edison Chen’s scandal was rivalling public concern over the winter disaster in China – which had left thousands freezing with water and electricity supply cut off, and prevented many from returning home for the reunion dinner, the most important annual ritual in Chinese culture. (Members of the public who condemn those involved in the sex scandal get so emotional that in Hong Kong, even Gillian Chung’s appearance in a charity concert for the winter disaster was met with protests from the audience; they have simply no forgiveness for such ’sinners’.)

But the conservative and the socially conscious in China should take comfort in the knowledge that people still have other things to talk about than the sex life of celebrities. Like how some would point out in Chinese internet forums, why should we worry so much about the lives of these rich movie stars who still can afford to ‘burn’ dollar bills? One unlikely entertainment star who has been the talk of the town in China’s web sites during the Spring Festival was Zhao Benshan, a farmer turned comedian who has appeared for about two decades without fail every year in Beijing’s CCTV Spring Festival special, playing the role of an old farmer. While some would now criticise him for being an outdated cliche no longer representative of rural folks of China today, others still praise for his satire of modern life in China, saying he has a thing or two to teach movie director Zhang Yimou (currently busy preparing for the Olympics ceremony), who has been indulging in fetish of martial arts chinoiserie these days and dreaming only of winning an Oscar from across the Pacific, no longer relevant to real life in China. Zhao incidentally is also a performer in the folk art of song and dance known as er ren zhuan, arguably an intangible cultural heritage. Personally, I find it so nice to know that there is a huge population of simple folks who may still enjoy rustic and old-fashioned entertainment despite how the world has changed.   

Not that China does not have its own unique form of obscenity. In Chongqing city or municipality, there is a man who shares the same first and last Chinese names with Edison Chen. It is purely a coincidence from the world’s fastest growing urban centre, with a population of 31 million, and the poor man has been so harassed by people poking fun at him that he must be hating the name given by his parents. Anyone, this is a megalopolis which has recently boasted new luxurious villas at the hefty price of 50 million yuan each, and it may just enter the Guiness book of records soon with a new public toilet of capacity for 1,000 people at one time. Not only does the concept go against the logic of usage (why would people want to converge from far away to do their business en masse?), its design is in a style shamelessly stolen from Gaudi’s Parc Guell in Barcelona. It’s amazing the kind of strange vision some people produce by way of making a name for themselves.

Meantime Edison Chen has made a public apology over the incident and withdrawn from the Hong Kong entertainment industry indefinitely. It is a necessary gesture in respectable Chinese society to give a nod to morality even as the floodgates of internet and other media cannot be retracted, and the images will take a long time to fade from public memory. (Tabloids also say that his apology was timed with a holy day of a white dragon temple in Thailand, probably to save himself from people who want his blood.)  Chen may yet have hope of finding a new career in Hollywood with his role in the Batman movie filmed in Hong Kong, but the careers of ladies associated with him are apparently going down the john, and he will get no thanks for making this special administrative region of China look sexier than Gotham City.

Our creative colonial cousins

Known for his extensive study on cultural creativity in the world’s great cities, British urban planner Peter Hall said that “the biggest and most cosmopolitan cities, for all their evident disadvantages and obvious problems, have throughout history been the places that ignited the sacred flame of the human intelligence and the human imagination”. According to his book Cities in Civilisation: Culture, Technology and Urban Order, cultural creativity is observed to take place in urban environments characterised by accumulated wealth, social tensions and the presence of outsiders. Which to me begs the question: why is it that despite all the wealth that Singapore boasts of which has resulted in a world-class theatre and all, despite all its efforts in attracting foreign talents, does it seem that it is our poorer neighbour Malaysia which is actually ahead in creative and adventurous film-making?

I’m not talking about a spectacular epic like Puteri Gunung Ledang (it would be unfair since the only legendary figure Singapore has is Prince Sang Nila Utama, all for spotting a lion in the jungle, and there is even doubt if it was indeed a lion; and it has no hero to talk about since Lim Bo Seng during World War II, nobody poltically correct anyway). I’m talking about film makers like Yasmin Ahmad (her groundbreaking work Sepet just happened to be shown on TV last week during Chinese New Year) and Amir Muhammad (more on him later) who have challenged censors with their social or political commentary. I’m thinking also partly about the 2005 Malaysian movie The Third Generation which I stumbled upon by rare luck in a video shop here, a Cantonese movie with impressive cinematography (if a little overdone) in the Raise-the-Red-Lantern school of oriental beauty, that makes Penang look just about as sexy as Shanghai. Perhaps the Malaysian cities we like to think of as lagging behind Singapore by a couple of decades have actually managed to preserve some old Chinese architecture that affords a cinematic panorama? It is interesting, as Singapore cinemas are now selling a local Chinese slapstick comedy which indulges in fun with the Malaysian Chinese accent, to note that Malaysia has long taken its Cantonese dialect thus to film festivals in Cannes, Shanghai and Hawaii. That was even before Singapore’s most prominent movie director made box office records with a campy Hokkien musical!

While Singaporean directors tend to grab attention through romanticising of juvenile gangs or florid depictions of red-light districts or other forms of sensationalisation, Malaysia’s famous directors prefer to keep it real, bringing potentially explosive stories of social and ethnic tension down to the street level of everyday people. In Sepet for instance, the girl Orked has an open argument with a Malay school mate on interracial romance, and meanwhile in a Chinese coffeeshop, her Chinese boyfriend Jason is facing similar reactions from a pal who advises him against the relationship, saying it’s troublesome to convert and he wouldn’t be able to eat char siew again. (It’s funny how the Chinese fear of other cultures is often linked to food; incidentally, in a racist and/or plain stupid entry in youtube, two Chinese Singaporeans have tried to poke fun at an Indian Muslim hawker by asking for bak kut teh.) Reference is also made in the movie Sepet of the bumiputra policy in Malaysia: whereas Orked who has scored 5 A’s is awarded a scholarship, Jason who has scored 7 A’s is just out in the streets making a hard living. It’s such a pertinent movie; if there is anything I can complain about, it’s just that the movie is so manja at first and then so sedih in the end. Yasmin Ahmad (who has gone beyond garnering international awards and is currently on the jury of the Berlin Film Festival) (link: http://yasminthestoryteller.blogspot.com/ ) has made not just one movie but an entire trilogy out of the Orked story, including Gubra which is partly about a Muslim cleric who has prostitutes for neighbours. You can make a big fuss about the scene of him caressing a street dog, but as I’m trying to say, it’s all about human beings in daily lives. Making everything seem natural and casual without being judgmental is this director’s greatest strength. It’s like how Jason’s brother says about his divorced wife, just in passing: serve me right for marrying a Singaporean. It’s meant to draw a smile rather than provoke head on.

Perhaps Singaporeans are so stifled in their creativity and unable to portray real people because they just can’t get out of their shells. Singapore film makers are not so adept in reflecting on intercultural situations, they tend to do only cardboard representations of multiculturalism, echoing the typical government propaganda that is best manifested in a kitschy Chingay parade. No wonder another urban theorist, Charles Landry, author of The Art of City Making, concluded on the place: “The notion of a creative city implies a level of openness that potentially threatens Singapore’s traditions of more top-down action.” He said: “Singapore’s strengths embody its weaknesses. It is better at creating the containers than the contents, the hardware rather than the software”. Perhaps constraint is something which has been internalised by Singaporeans; in a city which has a fixation for clean toilets, everybody becomes constipated with an anal personality.

Anyway, below is an old review of mine on the film The Last Communist, which I really enjoyed as a wonderful portrayal of multiculturalism in the Malaysian peninsula, not to mention the director’s courage in dealing with such a politically sensitive figure of the last century. If anybody in Singapore attempts to make something along the same line, somebody will make sure he gets his head checked. (I’m not saying there is no effort at all among local film makers in tracing Singapore’s history, but it tells you something when the one notable title is, aptly, Invisible City.)

Saw The Last Communist at the cinema that day, Lelaki Comunis Terakhir, the Malaysian film directed by Amir Muhammad revolving around the legendary Chin Peng, who joined the Communist Party of Malaya at barely 16 and became its leader at age 23, henceforth public enemy number one for the British forces in Malaysia. The film features interviews with former CPM members now living in the Peace Village in Thailand following the 1989 peace settlement, mostly rather old by now (Chin Peng himself, who never appears in the film, is already 82). But that is only towards the end of the film. The film traces the life and legacy of Chin Peng, starting from his birth in Sitiawan, Perak where his father ran a bicycle shop. He grew up in a colonial society whereby the Asians were segregated from the Europeans. He refused to study in a Christian missionary school and enjoyed playing with his friends near a mosque. But such facts about Chin Peng’s life are juxtaposed throughout the film with depictions of ordinary folks in present-day life and culture in Perak, in an often light-hearted manner. There are even musical interludes now and then, with hilarious songs spoofing national propaganda as a way of telling the history of communism and colonial rule in Malaysia. One just has to watch it to see how fantastic the film is, really bagus! Unfortunately there is only one screening per day, scheduled at odd timings like one hour before midnight, as if to deter all but the die-hard viewers. Still I count myself lucky to be able to see the film since it has now been banned in Malaysia; understandably such media portrayal of the communist party remains a taboo in Malaysia, much like how a film about the opposition parties would get Singapore authorities taking action in panic.

Much of this offbeat documentary film in fact consists of interviews with ordinary people in Malaysia of different trades today, so much so that you tend to forget at which point in time the focus of the film actually moves from the hometown of Chin Peng to the resistance against Japanese occupation and then the emergency period under the British, and you begin to wonder if the film is about Malaysia’s economy or Malaysian food culture. You hear Chinese fruit sellers in Ipoh talking about pomelos – how the Chinese like it sweet while Europeans like it sour; you hear Indian peddlers in Bidor talking about the variety of petai beans – how Chinese like ‘rice’ petai, malays like ‘wood’ petai and Indians like ‘nut’ petai. Then somebody in Taiping would tell the story about the origin of their popular flower bun. Apparently there was a man who joined the resistance force against the Japanese during the war and was captured and given the Japanese torture, like forcing water down one’s throat and then hitting the bloated stomach. Meanwhile his mother started going to a temple to pray to a Chinese goddess for her son, and he started dreaming that a fairy was feeding him with lotus and somehow he survived the ordeal. Since then his mother started worshipping at the temple offering lotus flowers. After the war he went underground again, this time as guerilla against the British, and was never heard of again. But his mother kept offering lotus flowers in prayer and as they became hard to come by, she started replacing them with pink-coloured buns with a white pattern of 6 petals on top. This soon became a specialty of Taiping popular all over Malaysia.

And then you would hear a mock patriotic song about Malaysia being the top exporter of tin and tyres in the world. The singer is a fat lady with big curly hair, posing by a stream in a valley. As the camera tilts around her in different angles, she would sing about the industry set up by Malaysia’s colonisers, how whenever the world needs its supply of tin and rubber, Malaysia is willing (Malaysia rela…). There is an interview with an owner of a charcoal factory, who proudly shows how charcoal is produced there and adds that the Japanese are major buyers. You hear rubber plantation workers saying they are too young to remember the second world war, and talking about their hopes and dreams for their children. You also see some tunnels that have been used as hideouts for the communist soldiers, where tin ore can be found. And there is a song about identity cards being issued during the emergency period. The fat lady would ride a bicycle around town, singing about how important ICs are (IC, penting!). The ICs helped the British to contain communist influence; the British also guarded people in racially segregated villages, to prevent them from supplying communist soldiers with food and medicine. There is an interview with a man who has betrayed his communist uncle and cousin to the British for a sum of RM1,000, big money at the time as the starting pay for a teacher then was just RM62.

The film portrays the 1957 negotiation between Tungku Abdul Rahman and Chin Peng through caricatures. Actually colonialism was already getting out of fashion and expensive for the British by then and Malaysia’s independence was in sight, the communists were about to lose their major mission. But the only option offered to Chin Peng and his forces was to surrender and renounce the communist ideology. Chin Peng refused and said there was no true independence if the British military bases remained in Malaya. The CPM forces hence persisted for the next few decades, though they took more of a defensive position instead.

It is in the final segment of the film that it turns to the ex-soldiers of CPM who now live in the Peace Villages in Thailand, especially since applications to return to Malaysia have been rejected. Among them are men who are maimed, who have a right hand gone or a left leg lost to landmine. They can only spend time now singing karaoke of patriotic songs, recalling 30 or 40 years of their lives given to an ideology as memories of glory. Some of them concede they have committed mistakes in their time, causing inconvenience and distress to civilians, but basically they have no regrets for the lives they have chosen. Unfortunately the film director has not been able to interview Malay communists who occupy two of the Peace Villages, due to current unrest in southern Thailand.

After watching the movie that night, there were no more buses and I had to take a cab home, with the extra midnight charges. A very small price to pay of course for such excellent efforts of a film. Pity not many people here will spare 90 minutes of their time for a movie like this. Something like this will never make the big headlines here, unlike news this week such as a Singapore actress making it to the Desperate Housewives television series in America, or the opening of the new X-men movie; apparently the job of saving the world should only be left to some mutants in an imaginary future. I suppose 2,000 people holding out for 30 or 40 years in the jungle is already a miracle. Imagine living without proper shelter, enduring worn-out garments and broken shoes, just hanging on to the belief that you are doing something worthwhile. They are like a miracle generation now gone by; for who even dreams of miracles these days?

End of this repeat broadcast. By the way Amir Muhammad (link: http://amirmu.blogspot.com/)  also made a sequel that was also banned, Village People Radio Show (Apa Khabar Orang Kampung)  about Malay former communists living in exile in southern Thailand. I must clarify that I’m not voicing support for communism here, what interests me is the multi-faceted Asian identity in this region. In fact I would like to cite a quote by one Tom Nairn who wrote: “The theory of nationalism represents Marxism’s great historical failure. But … [it] would be more exact to say that nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory”. I read it in an essay that also noted “the fact that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms”, like China, Vietnam and so on; written by Benedict Anderson, the essay is entitled Imagined Communities: Nationalism’s cultural roots, and it talks about how language has created the possibility of imagined communities and set the stage for the modern nation. Tak faham? Well, never mind, such long stories.

Welcome to Singapore. Nothing you see is real.

Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten. – Walter Ulbricht

Nobody has the intention to build a wall. These were the famous words from the Chairman of the GDR State Council in 1961, just two months before the Berlin Wall came into being. Time marches on. Since Germany’s reunification in 1989,  the most shameless walls in the world are now those built to hem in Palestinians (of which one was partly broken down dramatically last week between Gaza and Egypt). We are of course dealing here with a nation that indirectly resulted from Nazi Germany’s persecutions, that interestingly, has adopted a similar approach as the Nazis with ideals of a nationality based on pure ethnicity. It has inspired British graffiti artist Banksy to spray-paint art works on the West Bank barriers in 2005, defying Israeli gunpoints, including an image of children trying to dig a way out; recently, he has also done similar works in Bethlehem.

But let’s turn away from such heavy stuff and cut to some comic relief in a sunny little island nation at the tip of the Malaysian peninsular. There I was sitting on a bus the other day when images of some fragments of the Berlin Wall came on the mobile television. It’s a feature on an infotainment programme about 4 panels of the Berlin Wall being donated to Singapore, to be placed at a reservoir park. They are to stand as an ‘ode to freedom’, the report said. I was so bemused and amused that I immediately messaged a friend and we started discussing what the hell that should mean – is Singapore being commended for its efforts in fighting against communism all these years, or is it for the sheer quantity of ‘freedom fries’ consumed here?

Now the Berlin Wall has long been torn apart for traffic instead of standing substantially as an exemplary instance of architectural conservation. If you ask an East German, you will be told that all the kitschy appeal of the Berlin Wall today (not to mention the over-dramatised tourist trap called Checkpoint Charlie) represent basically perspectives of the West Germans because people in the GDR never had the luxury of beautifying the walls. Anyway, among sections of the Berlin Wall which have exchanged hands in the international market, four panels painted with figures dubbed ‘kings of freedom’ are destined to be part of some recreational area in Singapore. On this topic, the foreign minister even went on that infotainment programme to be interviewed by a comedian who is like Singapore’s very own Priscilla Queen of the Desert, in a rather embarassingly minute of airtime. Incidentally, one of the other show hosts of this same programme is a former beauty-queen-turned-nominated-MP, the term NMP referring to something invented by the Singapore government years ago to convince its people that they don’t need to elect opposition party members into the Parliament, since the the ruling party can pick other people to do the job of giving alternative voices. So you get an idea of how fuzzy the line is between Singapore politics and show business? Here is more: the ruling PAP actually made some of its MPs in their 30s attend hip hop dance classes to perform a minute at last year’s Chinese New Year parade, in order to demonstrate it has some young blood, for voters who are suckers for that presumably. And just two months ago, the CEO and staff of Singapore’s Media Development Authority went on youtube and made it to top 20 of The Guardian’s Viral Video Chart with what is aptly described as a ‘completely cringe-worthy rap video’, with lines like “Nothing but the best service for our customers/Fees and fines we make it a lot easier”. But just in case you are seriously impressed by the Singapore government’s new-found sense of humour, think again. Just over last weekend, an Asian premiere of a show at the Singapore Fringe Festival ‘08 called The Complaints Choir Project, originally promising to let Singaporean weave their complaints into songs with foreign performers, was cancelled due to licensing problem. It had to be turned into a private event due to some regulation similar to that for Singapore Speaker’s Corner, which requires registration and does not allow non-Singaporeans to perform. 

It is interesting to think about those walls which will be standing in the middle of nowhere in some corner of Singapore. On which side should you find freedom? Singapore’s political history in the Cold War years have curiously been something like a mirror image of the GDR. The witchhunt here was for communists among the Chinese-educated, students and teachers alike, during the 60s and 70s. Even a prominent editor of a Chinese newspaper would be jailed and never heard of again. (All newspapers in Singapore soon became merged under one corporation, the easier to monitor.) The founder of Nanyang University, a Chinese university built by means of donations from people literally of all walks of life – notably trishaw riders, was robbed of his citizenship, and the university became downgraded into a technological institute. (This was just before China opened up its economy and the Chinese language began to become lucrative.) And Singapore held one of the longest-serving political prisoners in the world, one Chia Thye Poh who was detained without trial under the Internal Security Act, the gist of it being that he refused to confess to being a communist. He was imprisoned for 23 years, followed by 9 years of house arrest. It seems Helmut Kohl played some part in Singapore softening the stance towards him, and perhaps it was when Nelson Mandela visited Singapore that the country realised there is one world record it does not want to be known for.

By the way, unauthorised graffiti is against the law in Singapore. (Just recently, an arts school here expelled a student who attempted graffiti art on the spanking new walls of the campus.) Its Vandalism Act was originally passed in 1966 to curb the spread of communist graffiti, but what everybody would remember is of course the American youth who was caned here, despite Clinton’s clemecy appeal, for spray-paint vandalism. Well Singapore may be one country that would gladly support the fight against Al-Qaida and the Taliban, but its does share with Middle Eastern countries a culture of punishment by flogging. Call it the art of a fine balance, just like the way Singapore embraces capitalism while extolling Asian values in rejection of western-style democracy. Singapore has a Speakers’ Corner, it is just that no demonstration is allowed. And it does not always ban foreign magazines critical of its government, sometimes it only limits their circulation. Of course there are also cases like Financial Times which was sued last year for alleging nepotism in Singapore. That is not so harsh considering that the most hardcore politicians of opposition parties here have been sued to bankruptcy or have fled the country. I think I should have nothing more to say about the dynasty of rule which has been in place for close to half a century here. Singapore has long been under the shadow of one who belongs to the same generation of pro-Western Asian leaders as Indonesia’s Suharto who just passed away, but people would say that it is a country that works well. You can’t say there is no graffiti here at all; the authorities will not let you say that, because they can show you it does exist in designated areas.

Well, we can rest assured that there will be no boring art in the social-realism style of GDR on Singapore’s own Berlin Wall panels; those Chinese artists doing social realism paintings or leftist woodcuts in Singapore in the past would remain lying low today if they are still alive. Always trust that the government knows how to stake its money on giving the city an aesthetic beauty. This is after all a government which has announced some years ago that it has very concrete plans to allow its people to have ’spontaneous fun’. If it is importing a piece of freedom now from abroad, you best believe it will look better than the real thing.

Further reading: Disneyland With the Death Penalty, by William Gibson.