Singapore: Merlion with a Thousand Faces
A 30s Male Journey to Singapore
Singapore is an immigrant country. This is obvious the moment you land – the sights and sounds and smells are intoxicating. That said, there are layers upon layers that only start to reveal itself after you’ve lived here a while.
The Singapore that is most familiar to the world is clean, curated, and commercialized. It’s the one shown in Hollywood movies like “Crazy Rich Asians”. It’s the spirit of Lee Kuan Yew shouting at the top of Jewel@Changi: “We’ve made it!”.
The Singapore for white expats is not too far off, conceptually. The foreign talents flock to the familiar Westernized spaces of Holland Village, River Valley, Dempsey Hill, and Orchard Road. It’s safe and comfortable, stocked with French cheeses, Spanish wines, and Americanized tacos.
Before moving, I only knew one face of the Merlion. I’ve visited before and did a lot of research. A lot. But none of the hundreds of hours of YouTube videos, mostly told from a Westernized point-of-view, reflected reality on the ground.
By happenstance, I stayed for a month with a family friend in Hougang. It opened a whole different world. For context, Hougang is one of the earlier HDB developments (translation: public housing). Today, it’s filled with aunties and uncles who settled there in the 1980s, while the younger generation have left for greener Matcha lattes.
The first morning, I took a stroll in Pungol Park. A tsunami-sized wave of nostalgia hit me, despite not even knowing the place existed a day prior. There were groups of elders doing synchronized Taichi and children running around with their grandparents, all accompanied by the natural symphony of a tropical rainforest. Interspersed between bird songs, you could hear the constant chirping of Hokkien - the mother tongue of my mother’s mother. At that moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt in ages - the warmth of a mother embracing her infant child.
Not too long after, I had Chinese New Years dinner with the family friend, his adult sons, and their families. The topic of National Service came up. Typically, it’s a complicated subject and quite touchy. But that night, they started reminiscing about their times and noted their best friends today are the ones from NS. I was envious. Afterall, the deepest bonds are forged in the hottest fires.
When you are a Chinese diaspora growing up in the west, you constantly code-switch: whether it’s corporate culture, white friend groups, Asian American friend groups, new immigrants from the motherland, family setting, etc. On a daily basis, your mental and emotional energy is divided. America is described as a melting pot. In reality, it’s more like a mosaic made up of different tiles of social circles. However, these social circles – whether intersected or isolated – are, in actuality, hoops to jump through. When you no longer are burdened by these distractions, there’s a sense of freedom and wholesomeness to devote energy into community and relationships.
I ended up moving one MRT stop over to Kovan, where few expats reside. I rarely use English and go about my day speaking Mandarin. I volunteer with TzuChi on the weekends and buy vegetables from the local pasar. I take walks at the local reservoirs where I am greeted by the resident macaques. That’s not to say my life is perfect. Far from it. But there are some qualities of life that cannot be reflected in salary or GDP numbers. When I moved to Singapore, I expected to peek through a window of a supposed different culture, but instead I was reflected back in a mirror of a reality-that-could’ve-been.
By peering behind the glamorized facade of Merlion meant for the outside world, I found another face of the Merlion smiling gently at me, beckoning me to come home to Asia. For me, I might not necessarily settle down permanently in Singapore, but it couldn’t be a better first stop on my Journey to the East.
