Donna Williams’ Blog

From art deco to Victoriana, from 80s functionality and cost cutting brashness, to 1930s accomodation of the depression, Singapore has many faces. We went to Sentosa and experienced true kitch in its unbearable glory then to the botanical gardens with its space and floral beauty to restore our faith that all was not utterly commercialised.

In the Chinese district the face of Singapore is distinctly Chinese and full of paw waving golden cats. The workers on the trucks and caretakers of working professional Singaporean mothers are often Malay. In the district of Little India you can have a panic attack as 15 sari clad Indian woman rush at your elevator not giving you a chance to exit and sandwich you in pressing the doors closed behind you as you dare not scream because the fuss would be noisier than a chicken coop. And for the shopper… apparently a favorite past time this is a universe of shopping malls.

I buzz on some sparklies and a beaming shop assistant approaches, exuding friendliness like a wag-tailed labrador. ‘You like?’ she asks.

‘Like isn’t want’, I tell her, ‘and want isn’t need’.

I can see on her face the incredulity of this. I’m Caucasian. Aren’t we Westerners all materialists?

‘You like’, she says, beaming till she’s in danger of swallowing her head with her grimace, ‘if you like, you should want’, ‘if you want you should buy’.

I move on. Her eyes follow me.

I eat Chicken Congee for the third day running. It’s rice with chicken and onions.

‘Western breakfast’, says the waiter proudly, ‘American breakfast’, and leads me to toast and waffles and hash browns. My gluten intolerant body screams ‘get me outta here’. ‘Traditional?’ I ask. He points at the vast choice of three dishes on the a-la-carte menu.

Singaporeans are proud of their modernity and for many this seems Westernisation, Americanisation. The term ‘George Bush’ isn’t the bothersome earwig reaction so common in Australia where the invasion of Iraq has left a terrible distaste in the hearts and minds of many, our island nation feeling stung, lied to, played for fools, sold out by our Prime Ministers chummying up to this master of bluff that had his people vote him in not once, but twice. Still, I’d rather share my elevator with Americans who don’t rush me like cattle escaping from a cattle run.

I bought mango at a street stall. The woman smiled a push button smile then dropped it, reverting to her usual ‘dead face’. They have these here too, I realised. The ‘dead face’ that is. ‘Anything else?’, she asked. ‘A smile’, I replied. She flashed the same production line one she must have got out of a cereal box last year. ‘A real one’ I said warmly. It made her smile, a real smile. Did I suddenly become human? Was this busy urban landscape so anonymous nobody ever showed they cared whether the smile was real or not?

At the airport a sign said awards were due to the immigration attendant with the most friendly manner. There was a checklist that included smiling and calling travellers by name, giving them full eye contact and handing their passports back with both hands. Eeek, I thought. There was a time in childhood I’d have punched myself in the face over being assaulted by such invasive sociability. But this was not an autistic world. This was the so called ‘real world’, a world in which people won awards if voted as the most sociable. God help us solitary personalities. Perhaps I’ll go find a hole now.

On return to Australia I thought I’d be relieved. An Indian woman and her sari were ahead of me in the queue. The attendant at immigration seems to snarl at her with sharp dagger eyes and smile like the zipper on a miser’s purse. The attendant next to her seemed to supress one of those roll of the eye thingies that says ‘another one’. And I wondered if Singapore wasn’t more sane than our immigrant phobic passport counter staff. A friendly attendant served someone over on the end. But he wasn’t white. Maybe that mattered. A white guy came and helped the sari woman, saving her from the bitey attendant who’d read to much Morning Herald-Sun and too many pro-bigot stories of ‘all those asylum seekers’ or had too much coffee or…. The man was kind and warm to her and I was glad. Poison is so contagious and I was glad we Australian’s hadn’t all caught it.

… Donna Williams

author, artist, screenwriter, fool.

http://www.donnawilliams.net