Kevin Low

The past week have me in Hong Kong – a place very much like Singapore, except the lack of too many strict regulation/enforcement as well as a livelier culture. The living standards are quite very similar but the city presents a totally different path of evolution from Singapore. In Hong Kong, just as all human geographers postulate, the building front prices are the highest and most heavily utilized, as compared to Singapore where the government (as well as retailers and customers) will probably prefer to shop indoors. The city is shaped purely by capitalistic needs and thus space utility is really high in the Central. I realized that their shopping areas are severely restricted to the outdoor streets though there are lots of new shopping malls that feature a whole building of stores/departmental stores. Buildings, commercial ones are usually filled with retail activity on their outside, with tiny lift lobby that will lead upstairs, to the offices that the building’s primarily houses.

Perhaps because of this sort of intensity presented in spatial utility, with residence included (Hong Kong city-dwellers usually live on the apartments above the retail outlets) that allow bare elevated areas around the city. In Singapore, you probably won’t see the tall bare hilly areas but Hong Kong has abundance of them. They prefer to build private apartments on these hilltops, like those near the Repulse Bay. They don’t have public housing, at least not too much – but I guess the price gap isn’t that high relative to Singapore given our high ‘market prices’.

Like Singapore, the Places of Interests in Hong Kong is highly limited. I went to Ocean Park and Hong Kong Disneyland, both different in presentation, system and style but with the same sort of squeeze that we hate to experience, though they are less crowded compared to Japan’s Disneyland and Universal Studios, which are frequent by the locals.

Disneyland was more cozy, albeit small, and the Asian feeling is nice – that is to say that Japan’s Disneyland has a more foreign feeling for me. Ocean Park, in contrast, perhaps because it was raining when I went (and thus extremely biased against that place), lousy, in all kind of sense. You can’t really blame them. The place is old, not run-down but just a little outdated. The exhibits are ‘hi-tech’ in a sense and they give you lots of knowledge (the place was built for educational purpose initially) but presented in this arcane way like Singapore Bird Park or the Crocodile Farm a few years ago.

But there’s something we must admire about the place – their Mother Tongue retention. Perhaps, that’s just part of Cantonese Culture (even in Singapore, the dialect retention of Cantonese families are the highest), but the fact that the language operates almost at all levels of the place even when English is used very frequently in more high-end areas. I personally can only understand Cantonese a little, and speak no more than 50 words of it but the dialect variant in Hong Kong has taken an exceptionally interesting path that perhaps no other Chinese dialects in this world have evolved. They have lots of loan words from English and they have this very impressionistic use of their vocabulary. An example, ‘Qi Xint’, which literally translates to ‘Wires sticking together’, which is supposed to be a literal description of what happens to cause a short circuit, is used to describe a person behaving insanely. Today, this term, which originate from Hong Kong, can be spoken to the equivalence of our Singlish’s ‘Siao’.

On the other note, when they want to describe the fact that a couple’s relationship is on the decline, they use a phrase that literally translates into ‘Throwing Pots’. I guess you can visualize what happens when Hong Kong couples quarrel. Oh yes, the street food there are good, and in general, while the food prices in Hong Kong and Singapore are about the same, the food there always taste better – something not accounted for in the GDP.

Okay, I didn’t say anything about Windows Vista Copying Mac OS X. Seriously.

I am not exactly intending to get one of those new softwares or hardwares next year because of the loads of school work coming and the fear of disappointment either way. I have been spending quite a lot on such stuff already this year and I don’t wanna burn a hole in my pocket – so I guess I have to forget owning a MacBook anytime soon.

Naming a place to characterize Singapore is hard – Sentosa? Or The Merlion, Lau Pa Sat & Shenton Way? Perhaps Clarke Quay or the revamped Chinatown. Alright, maybe Orchard Road’s the best. I don’t know.

But I know every single of those above had elements of artificial decor, historical backing, and a whole lot of tourism board nonsense. Since a nation is made of it’s people, for if no one claims citizenship or belonging to the nation, it do not exist at all, and not land (not even the reclaimed ones), I thought a place to characterize the nation should be one well appreciated by its people, with a strong flavour of Singaporean activity.

I went to MOE today, and emerged untouched by the huge concentration of undesirable figures there, but I found a place, that do have elements that characterize Singapore a bit. Holland Drive, absolutely uninfected by NTUC Fairprice, has a rather great wet market with the nice smell of spices and dried food. Yes, it is kind of revamped market, but at least it’s still around and even when it’s mid-day, it’s still bustling with activity. The coffee shops around there were pretty full and though not the kind of place teens would hang out even if you pay them to, the food’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, the price is a little steep, but that’s inherently Singapore!

The funny thing is that these places are not alone, just like Jurong Bird Park is paired with the Zoological Gardens. A subsequent visit to ICA building revealed a little ‘Hong Lim Complex’ in the Lavender area, a place I would least expect to see such stuff. The design was very ‘Chinatown-like’, probably a feature of Jalan Besar GRC and the feeling is really familiar – cheap bag shops, hair salon chemical smells, the traditional Chinese medicine halls, the small toy shops that sell plastic balls, water guns that gets damaged easily, yo-yos that doesn’t allow you to walk-a-dog or rock-a-baby and plastic green soldiers that you see in Toy Story movie. And you get 80 cents milk tea (or Teh, which means 70 cents Teh-O) there, something that have recently ceased to exist in the city/downtown areas after the coffee shop price hikes.

Sometimes we really need not cover up so much, we need not erect some great statues, or spend thousands a year to put up paintings in canals to ‘brighten’ the heartlands. We don’t have to put up art exhibitions all around Singapore to have a ‘biennale’ – artworks/HDBs/Coffee shops/4D Betting Booths/Litter/People/Paintings are everywhere and more importantly, they are indeed Uniquely Singapore, unaltered, uncensored and entirely natural, in the Singaporean way.

Though a month is over and homework is barely complete, the holiday has turned for the borer and I came up with the idea of starting this Corporation ‘Parody Inc.’ with the following subsidiary companies, brands, and tag lines.

Supermarket Chains

UnfairPrice – 贵价合作社

Dwarf – Dwarf Variety, Dwarf Prices, Dwarf Savings

Curryfoul – 咖哩福

Hot Oven – The Cooked Food People

Cafes/Coffee Clubs

DKK – De Kopi Konnoisseur

The Kopi Dao & Teh Hyio

AstroDollars

Kopi Klub

Food Courts

Food Junktion

Copitiam

Panquet

This giant holding company will specialize in the F&B industry and will attempt to expand into banking sector as well as opening cinemas, because it probably have nothing better to do.

I wanted to talk about this pretty long ago, but there’s a couple of stuff I am afraid of. I fear I may offend the secret service people, the defense science personnels, the military police and perhaps even trigger a operation to arrest myself. I convinced myself of the fallacy that Discovery Centre is no way affiliated to the military and so decided to go ahead with this entry.

It sux, totally. Discovery Centre is like the kind of place where you get ripped off for absolutely nothing. It is worse than getting the $2.50 National Education brochure that says ‘Social Studies Textbook’ on its cover. It is no better than attending a school neighbourhood police talk that requires an admission fee of $5.00. It just the kind of place you want to go to after a long roller coaster ride that say, stretches all the way from Siberia to Alaska in the round-the-earth way, having tasted enough excitement of your life. I once told everyone that the ‘Admission Fee’ list outside Escape Theme Park has nothing but 2 words, ‘Rip Off’, but Discovery Centre seem worse. I don’t mean tourist shouldn’t go there though – that’s really one of the places to get the taste of Singapore.

Firstly, ‘Discovery Centre’ is kind of a misnomer because you go there to ‘discover’ that you already know all the stuff they tell you. It’s like being Steve Irwin and going to some crocodile farm listening to that pathetic sociology-trained park guide explaining the diet of the reptiles, except the part about getting stung by stingrays. They tell you stuff like ‘The Merlion…’ Oops, pardon me, I was dozing off before I can type anymore. I think you should get what I mean.

Little George wasn’t responding to my calls either – so much for some intelligent robot. That heap of metal has been abused by tonnes of children shouting at it in the past when it stood close to the entrance of the exhibits. They decided that he had enough and decided to place him as the last exhibit before you turn to your right to the souvenir shop. Exiting from the place was the greatest part; I said the first ‘wow’ when I entered the souvenir shop, not because of what they sell but because I realized I just finished a 15-minutes walk that cost me 15 bucks. Cool.

The souvenirs are alright, at least the prices are more reasonable and I would have gotten one of their polo T-shirts if I wasn’t a Singaporean. Fortunately, the visit wasn’t just that because I soon find myself sitting in a 350-seater auditorium dozing off from some 3D documentary about 3D movies. Yes, it was 3D, stuff come zooming at you from the screen and your eyes are strained because of that. But the storyline wasn’t like some dragon invading Singapore or going on some time machine roller coaster ride, it was a documentary, on 3D technologies used to help us perceive the 3D on screen – they call the video ‘Misadventures in 3D’. That was when I totally admit defeat and decided that I shouldn’t be wasting time extracting more value from that little ticket of mine – it was free for me anyway.

Perhaps you are feeling rich, or maybe you need to see the world before entering Woodbridge Hospital and be trapped there for the rest of your life, or if you had enough with everything sensible in the world and hope to do something absolutely irrational or probably to some extent, perverse – do visit the Singapore Discovery Centre. This paragraph is written solely to refer to Singaporeans, the insensibility lies on the fact that we all know the stuff they want us to ‘discover’. Tourists should definitely visit this ‘place of interest’ located in our great SAFTI Military Institute Campus, and ‘discover’ Singapore for yourself.

Yes, the Primary 6 kids just got back their PSLE scores, and my primary school top scorer wasn’t so good anyway – the score have never been higher than the top of my year, even until now. I don’t have much recollection of that time and I know I didn’t do that well anyway. But then, let’s just forget about PSLE and think about Primary Education for a moment. I just news from my cousin who was in Primary 4 that she was sad she didn’t get top for any subjects, though she got the overall top. Yes, I know she used to top Mathematics and English, sometimes Science, together with the never-anyone-else position of the overall top. That’s kind of crazy I know, but she happens to be in the same Primary School as the one I graduated from.

I do not suspect that schoolwork’s getting any easier, or exams, in any case, are getting less strict, but I do suspect that the Pygmalion effect (also known as the Rosenthal effect, or more commonly known as the “teacher-expectancy effect”) is at play, and this is bad. I am not doubting my cousin’s ability in any way but the education this days have the huge problem of Pygmalion effect even when the streaming is not in place. Somehow, without streaming, teachers may even find that they have to trust themselves even more now, thus discriminate much more people (reflecting the truth in the numbers sometimes – how can schools have so many talents anyway).

At my time, Pygmalion effect was already at play and I suspect I was one of those who benefited from it. But I also remembered that more people were in my league that in my cousin’s, now. I was the noise-maker who somehow manage to convince teachers that I was making noise in class not because I didn’t get a thing but because I already know everything. Somehow, the teachers also make me feel that I have got to know everything to get this right to make noise so there I go, in this endless cycle of deception and eventually make lies become truth. The guy who made noise because he knew nothing turned out to get to know things – in order to make noise; and he got a little hungry for stuff to know. Frankly, teachers just have to coincidentally influence students in the right way to get them going.

There’s still a long way to go for all these to incidentally happen, for my primary school, for my cousin, for the system, as well as the teachers hoping to inspire. Everyone just have to be themselves to eventually be someone else, because you always find that you have always been someone else anyway. I am glad to admit I am talking in spirals, because that’s who I am in any case.

It’s not easy playing God, even in videos. The stupid green screen effect I was trying to do for my film project cannot work out at all. The lousy green walls have huge problems with inconsistent lighting and being nobody with light control, we failed terribly. The actors had green reflected on their faces and became transparent when we applied the effects, making a couple of ‘Hollow M(e)n’ and totally screwed the video up.

Sometimes I feel that Arts is the only ‘real’ thing in this world. Without the ability to produce the effect, you cannot try and ‘fake’ like you do in faking report, using impressive languages, and such. In Arts, though there are so called ‘props’ and stuff to fake around, in fact, you get people to fact – the moment when the work presents itself, everything is ‘real’. In paintings, it takes real efforts, in photography, it really takes skills. But for one, playing God is only possible in Arts. You can make your characters defy laws of physics, do ridiculous stuff like a ball ‘bouncing upwards’.

Science is kind of real – since it is a study of reality. Unfortunately, many times, science has become so preoccupied with unreal stuff like molecules that you can’t see, DNA’s coiling around histones, or the processes in the mitochondrion, even the effects of gravity on anti-matter. Too far-fetched, too unreal in that sense.

Nothing beats spending 12 bucks on lousy stuff, like lousy movies, with lousy popcorns that cost money, followed by lousy organization, then lousy games with some lousy rubber bands. I have to admit, the food that came after all those wasn’t lousy, but the quantity of food provided was. Oh, sorry about the cost, I made a mistake – the cost of this lousy package is 15 bucks, due to some lousy mistake. You learn things out of little bits and pieces of life, and of most of them, these bits are the really lousy bits because only by experiencing the worst can you know what you have may actually have been the best all the while.

Nah, Convenant wasn’t that bad, at least there was the ‘Marvel-Dragonball Z versus Capcom-cum-StreetFighter/MortalKombat’ kind of Kung-fu effects. I thought everything else was pretty expected, except for exceptional move involving a corner-kick kind of move that was done to the ball of ‘power’. Yeah, it’s kind of childish I must say. I bet Flushed Away will be a few hundreds of times nicer than this movie.

I am seriously attempting to be apathetic. I won’t be so later.

After the Project Work Presentation, I seem ’empowered’ by a strong sense of apathy – but the feeling ultimately stems from something else (not the Project Work). I have always been curious about the feeling of apathy, given how infectious it has been amongst the youth and the elderly in recent times. There are reasons for being happy and sad, emotions correlate with some matters in reality and so should apathy – but what?

The answer struck me as I continue to pursue the roots of the emotion, backtracking from the feeling to it’s source. I realized that apathy can be generally explained by ‘an expected sense of disappointment’. In other words, people are apathetic towards something because they feel that the outcome would be disappointing to them. Therefore, apathy can be easily summarized by the line, ‘What’s the point of doing [something]?’. I considered a few cases: Why would people be apathetic towards nation-building? Because they believe that they can effect no change (a huge source of disappointment and a great opportunity to ask ‘What’s the point?’). Then why would youths be apathetic towards some traditional art form? Probably because they think they wouldn’t be successful in mastering it anyway.

Having understood the explanation behind apathy, I questioned the sudden emergence of such an emotion in the times of modernization. I believe it is because of the flow of information and the infamous preoccupation with speed. Wanting to succeed quickly, and being able to see how many have done so, one with the expectation that one would be disappointed quickly becomes discouraged and do not even care to engage in the activity. But why do I mention that I am ’empowered’ by apathy. The feeling, I realised, stems from the expectation for disappointment but it acts as a reaction to this expectation – it does so by dismissing the activity/task in concern. In other words, when I know I can’t effect a change in terms of nation-building, I think nation-building is not important. In that way, I continue to justify my disregard for the activity I expect to be disappointed in.

I guess apathy is a strong barrier that helps holds us up most of the time. It is perhaps an important feeling for those with some kind of inferiority complex, but unfortunately, apathy is one that leads to further isolation, very much in line with the existantialist standpoint. Nothing can rid anyone of apathy other than the wearing off of the expectation of disappointment – probably anything that can build confidence. Apathy can destroy policies and plans within systems, but it also disrupts the spirit of man and may not necessarily be something healthy to feel about. Though existantialists may tend to disagree.