Unearthing Singapore of yore

 A long time ago, I was ashamed to admit that I spent the first five years of my existence in a kampong somewhere along Elias Road. At that time, when I was about eight or nine years old, I felt embarrassed each time classmates asked where I lived before moving into our Tampines flat.

The national narrative in schools then – and probably now – was how Singapore has finally progressed from its third-world, dilapidated-squatter beginnings, so much so that in my young mind I viewed my kampong roots with disdain. I thought living in a kampong was a sign of backwardness, where buckets had to be placed under corrugated-zinc roofs to catch dripping water on rainy days, walls were cobbled from plywood and toilets were separate entities with no running showers or flushing systems.

Fast forward to some 20 years later, I am now very thankful for having had a taste of kampong living. For Singaporeans born after the 80s (I was born in 1982 by the way), hardly anyone could claim that they have had such an experience. Looking back, I could recall only memories from three years of age onward, but it planted in me a whole lot of concepts regarding simple, back-to-basics living today, including the foraging trend that has gained a significant following worldwide. 

And I bet a lot of people aren’t aware that Singapore was quite a haven for foraging just not too long ago. My earliest childhood memories include peering up at jackfruits tied up with gunny sacks to protect them from insects, cutting berries and leaves with discarded can lids turned knives at make-pretend markets, my cousins stealing eggs from hens (note: chickens were of the free-range variety) and sucking nectar from ixora (which gave me a bad tummy ache later).

However, my father, the real kampong boy, could not abandon his roots even after moving into our flat. On Sundays, he would drive us in his rickety lorry to a secluded stretch of beach in Changi. (I vaguely remember it was somewhere near Laguna National Golf & Country Club, before the entire Tanah Merah Coast Road area was reclaimed.) We would spend the afternoon digging for clams on the coast, my younger brother and I filling our plastic bucket with the sea’s bounty. By the end of one afternoon, we would have collected enough shells for a meal; my mum would stir-fry them with some garlic and chillies the following day and that would also translate to some dollars saved.

Even to this day, my father still shows signs of his kampongness from time to time. Last year, when I spent around nine months in Singapore, he came home one day with a bag of durians and declared they were collected from the forest grounds “somewhere in Bukit Timah”; another day, he came home with a red plastic bag laden with scavenged clams but my queries about where on the heavily urbanised island could such shells still be gathered were met only with his sly grin.

I think foraging for edible treats in Singapore is almost next to impossible nowadays (well, unless we can start plucking mangos off roadside trees?), so that’s why it made me cherish my memories of a bygone Singapore even more. But now at least I’m proud to say I was once a kampong girl. 

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Nature's Cleaning

This morning here, far from our little lovely homeland, I was able to experience what Singaporean went through several weeks ago during the haze attack, at least only visually, fortunately for me.

The air smelt perfect as usual so I knew it wasn't quite the same thing. Besides, Indonesia would not have the audacity to start their fires during the period of a south-east wind. They also know very well how much noise Australia will make and render no "financial aid" that our Singapore government has been doing. Call that a conspiracy theory if you want but I wouldn't do that if I were you. Don't give me a the bullshit about farmers performing slash-and-burn at a specific season that happens to be the north-west wind cycle. When things "happen to be" for more than a decade, you don't call that a coincidence.

What I had here was probably thick fog. It seemingly engulfed the whole 30km range I drove. We are all familiar about haze by now which is essentially dust, smoke and other dry and light particles from the Indonesia fires in the air which obscure the clarity of the sky and of course, affect the quality of consumable air. Fog would have the same hazy appearance but is actually made up of dense water droplets. Think of it as a cloud at ground level for simplicity. We know that cloud is form by condensation. It must be quite cold last night with little or no wind at all for such thick fog to form over the entire metropolitan region. It is an unusual phenomenon because air here is seldom wet.

You wouldn't believe me if you are young enough not to experience regular fog in Singapore. This used to be a regular occurrence because air is usually humid and the nights were cold enough. These days, a little mist on the roads after a light drizzle is probably a more common sight. Fog itself is neither good or bad in my opinion though there are studies made that found fog actually cleans air pollution. If that is true, then we had lost nature's blessing and protection. In the absence of a natural air cleaner, Singaporeans these days have to spend money to clean the air of their personal living space individually.

The inability for fog forming in most places in Singapore these days suggested that night temperature has risen considerably over the years, since air remains constantly humid. Environmental agencies in Singapore will conveniently point their fingers to global warming. They like the word global, because that depicts a global problem so everyone suffers from it and we will be consumed by inferno one day. So there is no need to scream about it.

How about this concept? Singapore had increased our number of buildings two, or three folds since our golden years which, in my opinion, isn't the present as one old god-man suggested two years back. Common science tells us that concrete releases latent heat that it absorbed during the hot sunny day very slowly. It was selected as our primary construction material out of good intentions. Since concrete releases heat slowly, it absorbs slowly too. That makes it a kind of insulation to slows our HDB flats from heating up too quickly. 

The solution ended up being a problem itself and there isn't a quick-fix way to get around it. Again, the first step is to accept the concept that there is a problem before anyone can decide to sit down to devise a clever solution or make necessary sacrifices. When you hear statements such as, "What do you want us to do?", "No amount of engineering can prevent this," or convenient blaming on global warming, we know that recognizing a problem isn't going to happen for a long while.

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The much-maligned frog

Captain Green, which sprang to life in 1990, was my first encounter of the amphibious kind

[Image: Remember Singapore]

Like its Chinese and English counterparts, Thai culture has a similar frog proverb to refer to ignorant minds who are unaware of the bigger world beyond his/her immediate surroundings.

Interestingly, the Thai equivalent is kop nai kala, which literally means a frog underneath a coconut shell.

Now what has the frog done to incur the wrath of humans to associate it with so these negative traits?

The frog has also been depicted as the unknowing creature in the well-known boiling water anecdote; its cold-blooded nature allows its body temperature to adjust to increasingly warm water until it’s boiled alive. And the boiling frog metaphor is often used to refer to the slow human response to climate change.

In my opinion, humans aren’t just slow to respond to climate change, we’re resistant to changes on the whole. We don’t like making changes to our lifestyles, we are afraid of changing jobs, we are hesitant to make the first move… Because changes bring lots of unknown – it could mean a turn for the worse, but it could also signify a move for the better.

Surely there’s nothing stopping a frog from jumping out of the well? And I dare bet that frogs who made the leap, or flip the coconut shell over, would seldom look back and crave for their past miniscule environments.

Then again, I’m only speaking for myself. In my mid-20s, I ventured out to live in another country. My adopted country isn’t perfect; it’s full of cracked pavements, stray dogs and ice cream served in coconut shells, but it inspires me in more ways than one.

Have you jumped out of the mindset yet? Most importantly, are you willing to make the jump?

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Saving the Earth by changing the Singaporean Mind

What comes to our minds when someone mentions saving the Earth? The eyes probably start to roll before anything comes to the mind at all. To many of us, this kind of lofty ideals belong somewhere else. We are such a tiny dot in the whole wide world. Does anything we do matter at all? So what if we have one of the highest carbon footprint per capita in the world, the total volume of toxicity we produce is a tear drop as compared to the much bigger industrialized countries in the world. If anything can save the Earth, it will be stopping those big countries first.

What we don't realise it is not what we do that hurts the environment most of the time. It is the way we think. A single thought perpetuates beyond our swampy shores. Thoughts manifest into habits and habits cement practices throughout the world in the businesses we started or acquired. An array of practices will cultivate a culture. A culture is very difficult to reverse and it takes a lot of effort as well as decades of commitment from the decision makers in the country and large business owners. Thus, a single thought is more powerful or deadly than we can imagine.

If you don't agree with that, try to recall how every event emcee pleaded the departing crowd to pick up thrash they left behind. Take a walk into any NDP venue after the event to see how the exploited free labour in the form of NS men were deployed to clear the grounds of the rubbish. This is a classical evident how a single thought can decide a solution or a problem.

To many of us, saving the Earth comes in the form of events. Such as the Earth Hour. And we saw hordes of people lining the streets of the CBD taking photographs or videos of the city flipping into darkness at the start of the Earth Hour. Perhaps these folks owned DSLR cameras that ran on solar energy from the Moonlight. After the hour, life resumed as normal. We saved Earth.

If you took part in an event (saving Earth is an event, remember?) such as this:

You were supposed to save the environment by running. If such a stupid theory works, our damaged environment will be fully restored if we could get 5 million people running on the same day. Try joining an event like that and see how many plastic bottles were used and discarded conveniently where no one was looking for a start. Take a look what kind of material they used for event banners, awards and what nots. The environment could be better off if everybody stayed at home and slept out that morning.

Spreading awareness by getting children to collect recycles is not a bad thing but holding it as a contest will simply leave it as it is - a contest - at the end of the day. Will these participants be recycling a lot thereafter?

If we are sincere in helping the environment, big environmental players such as National Geographic or National Environment Agency should sit down and think these over seriously. We have to debate whether organizing events are for the purpose of showing everyone their respective agencies exist and have been doing some work and think of far better ways to invest the budget spent on these events year in year out on changing the mind of the Singaporean.

For a start, start to think hard yourselves first. You cannot expect to change the minds of the others if you are not even sure what you are doing. If you want ideas, hire me. If you are too cheap to do that, spread the word of this website so that our current and future work can benefit the future generations.

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Lesson #1 for the frogs

Frogs of the well, please gather around me. 

Today I will share a short story about the fallacy of the over-dependency on methodology over common sense.

A few years back, WWF published a Living Planet Report (2010) and named Singapore as the highest per capita in carbon emission in Asia-Pacific. Singapore has been accustomed to being number one for the right reasons but do not generally take it too kindly when it is found in at the wrong end. Thus, on March 2012, Singapore’s National Climate Change Secretariat (NCCS) hit out against WWF's President, Yolada Kakabadse's earlier statement declaring Singapore as "...maybe one of the best examples of what we should not do."

NCCS's rubbished Kakabadse's comment by declaring it "seriously misrepresents the situation." The two parties then laid out their methodologies of emission count and found great misalignment between their respective frameworks. With that, the Singapore government closed the chapter with the usual what we did was right, what they did was wrong mantra.

In theory, nobody could fault the Singapore Government's attempt to flip real life problems into imaginary ones. In reality, theories have limitations. Frogs will quote you another example which was as clear as the sky. Well, not that current hazy skyline though:

What we have here are two publications from the same publisher on two different dates, three months apart to be exact. In the first publication on 20 December 2012, it was reported that Singaporeans were the unhappiest people in the world. Before the end of the first quarter of the following year, a new report stated Singaporeans were probably the happiest people in Asia. Is there any logic that may explain how the unhappiest people in world can become the happiest people in Asia in just three months? Did every household receive a unicorn as a present from their government? Did Singapore experience a gold dust shower islandwide instead of River Ang Bao for three days three nights during the Chinese New Year? Can Singaporeans ever be happier than Bruneians for a start, with all their oil in their backyards. With that of course yet again, the Singapore Government decided that Singaporeans are happy people, yes even with a hazy smog greeting us every morning these days.

This, my fellow frogs in the well, is a classic example of how common sense was buried under a pile of neurotic reasoning. The worst way of solving a problem is denial. Any attempt to throw a dart towards the board is still better than chucking it straight into the bin. Having said that, we the frogs in the well will be fair frogs. Given the state of things going on in Singapore these days, we have to accept that environmental issues will have to be filed at the bottom of the pile. Until perhaps we realise too many frogs are dying too soon.

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A Little Spark

As a young boy, I used to dream of having my own tree house as my play pen. I would then build my own windmill some distance away from my tree house when I grow up. The next addition would be a little hydro-powered generator at a little dam I will install across the river nearby. Ah, how innocent and naive a child could be, when his mind was given the freedom to roam wild.

Born and breed Singaporean in the late 1970s, I watched Singapore’s rapid emergence into modernity from the sidelines. When I was a small boy, I played on the streets of the developing country. By the time I was a grown man and made my first step into the working world, Singapore was already known as a first world nation, a fully developed country.

Before I knew it, the environment that my friends and I grew up to cherish became the distant past. Our happy memories were forever buried in the concrete jungle that shroud the island, with hardly any surviving artifacts of reminisce. Without a doubt, modernization was a key for our country’s survival. With our chronic lack of space, there was little choice but to sacrifice sentimental subjects for important ones such as businesses. Sadly, as years went by, I found myself alienating from these ideals.

Some time later in life, I left the sunny shores of Singapore to Australia for work. Currently I am living in the metropolitan region of my state. It isn't anything like the kind of living environment that I dreamed of as a boy. But here, I dare to dream. I dare to take action to make a dream a reality.

This is my dream. This is my story.

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