Day 1 in Singapore

Monday 14th May 2007

Destination: After the morning introduction and lecture session and lunch at the USP, we left for the Chinatown Heritage Museum, which was made to look like a sanitized and preserved version of what a typical house in Singapore’s Chinatown would have looked like in the past, and designed to draw visitors in to personal stories which were scribbled on the walls and in videos. However, some signs were biasedly written (they put the blame of the opium trade on William Farquhar only and then went on to blame women for the spread of prostitution) and others were blatantly made for dramatic effect (“I cleaned the cockroach and boiled it live”). The price of making history come alive for school field trips. The rest of Chinatown was no less of a museum. Being a place that was right next to the business district, it probably had to be sanitary and suitably hip.

Destination: Nest, we went to the Thian Hock Keng Temple, which was spacious and airy and had colorful architecture that was distinctive of Chinese folk religion. It was also an all-in-one temple, housing statues of gods and deities ranging from Tian Hou to Confucious, to one with a black face (according to a guide who was telling the story to a group of primary school students, his face is black because he had drowned and decomposed).

The rest of Chinatown was no less of a museum. After all, locals know where the new real Chinatown is – at Bugis. For instance, the architecture of shophouses were retained, but they had either been painted in funky colors (white with bright orange windows) or been converted to clubs.

Destination: We made our way from Chinatown to the Central Business District, to the Singapore River - where we had lots of fun with the statues, and learning about the history of the river at the same time.

Menu: Dinner was at a Hainanese eating house, Chin Chin at Purvis street, which was near the Raffles Hotel. At dinner, Hannah pointed out that many types of food served there could also be found in Vancouver – more preservation of recipes in migrating Chinese. Also it seems the various groups of Chinese – Hainanese, Hakka, Cantonese… - shared recipes, which isn’t altogether surprising, since there must have been a time even longer ago when the migrants within the southern regions of China brought recipes along with them. Which would explain why some dialects sound so similar: like Hokkien and Teochew, or Cantonese and Hakka. After which we wandered to the Raffles Hotel.

- Yinghui