Day 4, Singapore: No country for old trees or old cars
Priya Ramani -
Wednesday, April 16, 2008 6:57 AM
But the old men tell great stories.
It was the photographs that drew us to Andrew Yip's store in Chinatown. Stunning black and white portraits shot over four decades. A painstaking chronicle of change. A 6000 picture library record of history. And of course Yip, 73, had a story to go with every picture.
The shots of Samsui women toiling in the fields, for instance. He said in 1929 the British Government found that there were four men to every woman. So they stopped the men from entering Singapore. Construction workers from Samsui, a town in southern China that rested on the confluence of three rivers--Pearl, West and North--were in demand. These women never had bound feet, as was common during that time. So from 1930 to 1965, i.e. independence, the Samsui women built Singapore. Yip is a poet too. So many prints come with homegrown verse. Here's a sample:
The Samsui Women
But the Alpha Women from Samsui came,
Braved the surging storms and nature untame.
How those Samsui Women matched the men
In hard and heavy work traditional to them.
Samar adds:
We were intrigued by a towering--and of course spotless--Sri Mariamman Temple in the heart of Chinatown. It was founded in 1827 by a clerk called Naraina Pillai, eight years after the East India Company (yes, the same company whose biggest hostile takeover was India) set up a trading post in Singapore (another of the company's acquisitions). After reminiscing about the days he had shown Shashi Kapoor around ("In the days when he was your size") town, Yip told us how the Chinese and Indian communities--both migrants--once had very close ties. "It was the time of the war (World War II, I assume) and many Chinese did not have enought to eat," said Yip, his perenially amused expression clouding over momentarily. "The Indians opened their temples to us, gave us food and shelter."
We weren't in Singapore--the President is Tamil, the Prime Minister Chinese--long enough to tell how relations were today, beyond the superficial. There are Indians working in Chinatown's shops, and Chinese working in Little India's restaurants and shops. There seemed to be an easy acceptance of each other, and even ethnic taxi drivers--usually a cynical, right-leaning breed the world over--talked of the Singaporean ideal: a multiracial society.
Priya adds:
We got some more local wisdom from another old man, a taxi driver.
See the modern cows, he said, pointing at a bunch of labourers rushing to load a truck under menacing clouds. No farm, no grass but Singapore is full of cows, he said.
Food is important for the Chinese, he added. They don't say hello, how are you? They say, have you eaten?
And when we said we love the greenery: Yes, we have lots of tree doctors. They come and look at the trees, if they look even slightly diseased or old, they fell them, he said.
The cars all look new don't they? In Singapore, there are no old cars. Cars more than 10 years old are not allowed on the road, he said.
The old men here are full of tales.