Looking for Singapore Culture

Why are we so hungry for badges of identity?
Ravi Veloo, Today Online 5 Apr 08;

IS THERE a Singapore culture? Something unique and common to all of us in the way we act, speak, celebrate even what we eat?

Well, we know it's not the food.

Singapore can makan any paradise — no doubt about that. But we often get curried away and claim other people's foods as our own. I've heard us claim everything from chicken rice to roti prata as uniquely Singaporean. Which leads to things like columnist Hoo Ban Khee of the Malaysian English-language daily, The Star, taking the chilli out of us, making fun of a Singaporean show he caught on the Asian Food Channel, which featured fish-head curry.

"Surprise, surprise! Those Singaporeans claim they were the ones who came up with the delicacy," he wrote in Wednesday's edition of the paper, which claims a readership of 1 million.

"My first impulse was to quickly alert owners of my regular Indian and Chinese restaurants that specialise in fish-head curry to immediately patent the dish lest they be charged with infringing copyright," he added, thumb-in-cheek.

It seems that in his family, when anyone is abroad for too long, it is taboo to mention fish-head curry "lest it inflicts uncontrollable homesickness". Mr Hoo likes to use the word "lest" a lot.

Well, Sir Lest-a-lot, Singapore may not have invented fish-head curry, but neither did the Malaysians. Mr Hoo is guilty of the same "hoobris" when he says: "It is a genuine Malaysian dish not found in India, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan or China."

But point taken, and not to make a meal out of it, we don't have our own food.

Culture? It's not the way we speak.

What people like to call Singlish, melding the words Singapore and English, is not much different from Manglish, the broken English that Malaysians speak. By the way, have you noticed how much we (and the Malaysians) sound like Mexicans?

We shorten the long vowels and lengthen the short vowels. Take any flight and hear the stewardess say: "Plis fasten your sitbelt".

It is fascinating that Singaporeans would want to claim the broken English we speak as a badge of honour anyway. Maybe that's a sign of how hungry we are for some badges of identity.

Now, I hope the champions of Singlish will lobby Contact Singapore to make all foreign talent speak Singlish to integrate them into Singapore society. This will make most of them indistinguishable from us and unemployable anywhere else in the world, so they will have to stay here.

Culture? It's not the way we look or dress. We all dress in someone else's garb — from shirts to sarongs. Several lame attempts to invent and promote a unique Singapore dress each lasted slightly longer than an MRT ride.

Some would say culture is made up of many elements, including artefacts, myths, legends, long-shared histories, rituals, rites, unique ceremonies, unique national beliefs and attitudes. Look, we don't have any of those, so don't rub it in!

Perhaps, what makes Singapore unique is our firm immigrant determination to maintain the cultures of our ancestors in the state we last knew it, literally a hundred years ago — or more.

One newspaper reported a couple from China declaring after a visit to Chinatown during Chinese New Year: "You are more Chinese than we are!" This kind of remark brings a beam of pride to Singaporeans of Chinese descent. Ditto with Singaporeans of Indian descent who delight in hearing visitors from India exclaim how Indian they are.

Often, taxi drivers ask me which country I'm from. I tell them I am Singaporean, but this seems unacceptable. They always seem to want to ask: "But where are you from originally?" I try to tell them originally I was from Kandang Kerbau.

But here's the thing: A lack of Singaporean-ness does not mean a lack of pride in Singapore. In a survey by the Institute of Policy Studies in 1999 about national pride, Singaporeans said they were very proud of their country, comparable in the level of their response to the United States and higher than that of Japan.

So, we are doing something right — even if we don't really have anything in common.

The writer runs a media consultancy.