Applause and Embarrassment

Two days ago, I attended a scientific lecture which was open to the public, so there was an audience of a certain kind there, mostly of older, middle-class retirees. The man who introduced the speaker (this was an invited lectureship) walked up to the podium, and as he delivered his opening remarks, a cellphone went off. I think it might have been staged, because he said, snippily, "turn off your effing cell phone!" with a slight hesitation before the key participle of the sentence, to applause from the audience.

My question is: why applaud? There are a few possible reasons:

1. They were glad that it wasn't themselves being rebuked,
   
2. A feeling of self-righteousness, a sense of populist vigilantism - 'finally that guy got what he deserves!' (there's always that guy in every audience),
   
3. Plain schadenfreude at seeing someone else publicly embarrassed,
   
4. Or, a desire to conform with the wishes of and flatter the dominant personality in the room, viz. the person at the podium.
   

In any case, these are not particularly edifying reasons and it hence made me uncomfortable that people are so quick to turn against the nonconformist in their midst, whether for good or bad reasons, when given the appropriate encouragement to do so. I'm flagging this incident in my mind, to remind myself to look out for more on the psychology of crowds.

On Commonplace Books, Index Cards, and Scraps of Paper

The historian Keith Thomas writes about his experience gathering reading notes. There are two kinds of reading: casual and attentive. It is increasingly clear to me that serious, attentive reading requires note-taking, unless one has superhuman memory (Thomas cites the example of Macaulay).

In the one project of historical writing which I've undertaken, I laboriously copied quotes and notes into a single notebook, instead of onto cards and slips, because I had this notion of not wasting paper. Back at home (this was before I owned a laptop) I would transcribe my notes onto a word processor, and when I actually started writing I would cut and paste the individual notes and citations in order before stitching them together with prose and paraphrase. It was both Baroque and Byzantine but it worked. Two observations: the constant re-writing and the necessity to recall where a relevant previous note was within the physical context of the notebook made me more familiar with my material, and without the final cut-and-paste on the computer this project would never have been finished, because I was keen to use every single scrap of information that I found.

The Benefits of a Low Birth Rate

This letter to the Straits Times newspaper has attracted some online comment, mostly negative, among people I know. The writer claims that Singapore's low birth rate is attributable to society valuing career-building over home and family and to women having unreasonably high expectations for the men they'd want to marry (hence delaying marriage and childbirth), resulting in "a nation of 'spoilt princesses' unwilling and unable to handle the rigours of motherhood."

I'm not particularly interested in his characterization of women. What strikes me is that we still believe that a low birth rate among citizens and permanent residents is an impediment to the success of Singapore, an open and cosmopolitan city. The argument often offered for encouraging locals to have more children is that it increases the pool of talent from which the country can draw upon for its endeavors. This notion rides on a whole set of implicit beliefs and even bears some historical baggage.

The one that is in the back of everyone's mind, whether voiced or not, is Lee Kuan Yew's professed belief in some kind of eugenics. He believed that children born to educated, intelligent parents would likewise be more likely to succeed in life, because intelligence or ability is heritable. As a result, policies like the Graduate Mothers Scheme gave incentives for highly-educated women, who were also less likely to get married and have many children, for each child they bore. The declining birth rate is most marked among university graduates and careerists, precisely the kind of people that Singapore believes it needs more of. Hence birth rate anxiety is also class anxiety.

The other assumption is that talent inheres in a more-or-less fixed proportion of society, let us say the top 5% or so. Therefore, to have more talent, one can only increase the total size of society so that we have more people in this upper bracket. If, however, we believe that talent and ability are neither the products of inheritance nor necessarily rare or scarce, we are free to imagine more possibilities for society. I have found, more often than not, that my peers have developed their talents not through sheer innate force of will or genius, but through early influences in their upbringing, through the environment and work ethic which they have been immersed in, and through interactions with the people and resources that they have encountered. That is to say, we are more products of our circumstances than we like to think. Therefore, the reason that 'talent' (or should we instead say: conventional markers of success) is concentrated in a small segment of society does not suggest that true talent is rare. Instead it means that most people do not experience that fortunate confluence of circumstance and motivation that displays one's innate abilities to best advantage.

This explains why a low birth rate can help Singapore. Instead of raising the population to increase the number of 'talents', we should instead focus our efforts on increasing the proportion of high ability within the population size. As for the issue of importing 'foreign talent', which incurs a lot of resentment, I remain agnostic, but observe that poaching from the best that other countries have to offer has been how America, for example, has maintained its technological lead over other countries. The main issue then is that the local population represents a pool of potential talent that should be developed and nurtured fully before we should claim that we need to look outside to find people of ability. The same set of implicit assumptions, and the same refutations of them, applies to that issue too.

English names in China

On the topic of English names adopted by Chinese...



From Danwei.org, via Benny.

Tango Aficionado

Planet Tango's website with lyrics and music to old tango standards. Oh joy.

Snake writ large

I always thought that many buildings looked like cellphones stood on end.

(via Chenzi)

Words

This evening I listened to a Spanish Catholic mass written in the Renaissance, sung in a Protestant Church by secular people. It still feels weird even though I've been to many such concerts; perhaps it's my irrational belief in the meaning and significance of words.

What's in a Name?

Americans sometimes ask me what's my 'real' name when I introduce myself as Brandon. Surely my Chinese name is more authentic, the more correct way to address me, their reasoning probably goes, and I don't fault them in that because usually it's born from a desire to be friendly and accommodating by taking the trouble to learn how I presumably am accustomed to being called, even though it might be hard to pronounce. So they are sometimes surprised when I tell them that it is my legal name, it's how I've always been called and how I think of myself. And yes my English is very good because it's my first language: I read it, speak it, think in it, and dream in it.

So it was with some disappointment that I read Lee Wei-ling's column on Chinese who adopt Western names for themselves (via TOC). Her argument is that doing so, unless one is a Christian adopting a Christian name, is inauthentic and vain, trying to make oneself out to be something that one is not, and making a fool of oneself in the process. I disagree deeply with this assessment, and with her basic assumption that taking on a Western name is the same thing as blindly exalting the West over one's own cultural and ethnic heritage.

There are a few reasons why one might want to adopt a Western name if one wasn't born to one: (1) To make it easier for Westerners to address you, if your name is hard to pronounce. (2) The idea that if one uses a Chinese name when speaking Chinese, one should use an 'English' name when speaking English, as a matter of complementarity. (3) To invent a new identity for oneself, to become a self-made person of some sort. (4) Because it is fashionable and everyone else is doing it. (5) As a pen name or working name to put some distance between oneself and the people one meets in the course of one's vocation. Lee's article directly criticizes only the fourth group, and implies that the fifth are déclassé, but doesn't address the other motivations above. Group 1, for example, chooses new names for themselves out of consideration for others' convenience, and group 2 espouses a very intuitive way of looking at the issue of names and languages if one is bilingual or multilingual.

Lee, like her father, whom she cites in her essay, is quite a cultural purist; in her father's case, this purism was born as a direct response to the colonial experience. But a multiplicity of names has been the norm, rather than the exception, for most cultures, including the Chinese, until quite recently. Literary Chinese of the past, for example, would choose for themselves a nom de plume that expressed some character or made reference to some place of significance to themselves. Chinese generally would not refer to each other, especially their elders, by their names given at birth, but would use generational terms, or familiar nicknames. One's 'true' name, though, was what was inscribed on the ancestral tablet and recorded in the genealogies. This is not to say that in traditional Chinese society, adopting a new name was not a mark of vanity - calling oneself the "Old Poet of Such-and-such Grove" surely is! - but instead that the vanity 'epidemic' is nothing new. It's not a malaise of modern society, as Lee supposes, but merely a reincarnation of an age-old way to distinguish oneself from the crowd, and quite literally make a name for oneself.

The most incongruous point in her article is that she accepts, and even approves, of Malay names derived from Arabic and Sanskrit roots. These attest to two of the great cultural exchanges that swept through the Malay Archipelago in its long history; at some point someone must have made the decision to adopt a new, 'foreign' name, and that decision stuck. How is that any different from what we've been discussing before?

It's easy to laugh and point at people who try too hard to be different: the "Uneeks" and "Uniques" that she mentions in her article, for example. (Steven Levitt also brought up the example of babies named "Unique", and observes in a chapter of his book Freakonomics that your circumstances of birth might determine your name, but how well you do in life is not so much a function of the weird name you have but instead those same circumstances that predisposed you to your name.) Her fundamental thesis is that non-Westerners who choose Western names for themselves are culturally insecure, and leaves her analysis at that. On the other hand, I think that the cultural purism that she preaches, and the unwillingness to accept the cross-culturality inherent in something as deeply personal as one's own name, points to an even deeper and more insidious kind of cultural insecurity. In Singapore our cultural inheritance is a curious pastiche anyway. We speak a colonial language, we watch and listen to media from China, Hong Kong, Korea, and Japan, we eat food from basically everywhere... but our names must somehow be 'pure'? The sooner we accept the 'rojak' in us, the sooner we can get past this post-colonial hangover, and become truly comfortable in calling ourselves Singaporean.

Menu Shennanigans

How do restaurants make you choose the more profitable option on the menu? A look at the cunning ploys that menu designers employ. Some dos - puting unprofitable items away in some corner, giving two pricing options. One don't - putting items and their prices in a column where the prices can be easily compared.

Problem is - if we know these tricks we think we can outsmart the restaurants, but what if they've already outsmarted us by pretending that there is an art to menus and pricing? What if everything is overpriced?

Science, Superstition, and Soccer

Earlier this evening I was at the Science Center attending the launch of two new titles in its natural history guidebook series. Many of the familiar faces from the biodiversity scene were there, but an interesting experience was standing in a circle with scientists and science educators and listening in on the following conversation:

"...and when I was resident at Eusoffe Hall in NUS, some of the students said that they looked into the bus terminal and saw things. One guy was so spooked out by it that he moved out. Another told her mother, who hired an exorcist who did the whole ritual at the hall one day when I was away."

"Yeah what about Ulu Pandan camp? That's where they took the soldiers who were killed in combat during the emergency, right?"

"At least the Science Center doesn't have any of those things."

Given that the various numbers of True Singapore Ghost Stories have been consistently been bestselling (fiction!) titles in this country, shouldn't be too surprising that these stories are always circulating in some form.

*****

The other great Singaporean pursuit being soccer, I also heard about this great short film called Tak Giu (link to filmmaker's website with YouTube video), via Siva. The story is about three young guys and their quest to find an open field to play their game of football, without being harassed by the 'mata' (police) for trespassing. Neat social commentary too, and one should keep an eye out for its director/producer, Jacen Tan, who seems to be an up-and-coming talent.

Mistake/Corrective

Mistake: Making a rude comment on someone's facebook status that you later regret.

Corrective: Make more rude comments on everyone else's facebook statuses, and a few ads for Rolex watches, and then blame it all on your account being hacked.

Dashing Doggies!

Sir Aurel Stein was a Hungarian-British explorer and scholar of Central Asia, best known for his rediscovery of the famous Dunhuang Caves along the Silk Road, and the manuscripts and paintings contained within. On his expeditions he was always accompanied by a dog, and there were in total seven of them, all named 'Dash'. Reading about their fates (run over by bus, killed by pack of dogs, killed by leopard (!)) gives some idea of the danger of travel in that era, and really makes me want to name any dogs I have 'Dash' too.

Lesson 2: Population

There are lots of people on this island, and the best way to see a good cross-section of society is at the shopping centre. When I was a kid, Tampines had one small one, with a Japanese supermarket as an anchor tenant. Now there are three big shiny malls, one of which is built on the site of the old one, the sheltered area between the MRT station and the bus interchange is filled up with shops that have seemingly spilled over from the row of shops in the older building beside them, and it teems with people. They have come to shop, to see the many colorful ways in which their money can be parted from them.

Being a neighborhood shopping center, they come dressed in the Singaporean uniform: t-shirt and shorts, or sometimes jeans, and usually slippers. L told me: "someone commented that Singaporeans dress too casually, but what can you do if you're not in an air-conditioned office all day - it's too hot to dress up."

There are categories of people easy to recognize because their kind is so ubiquitous: the young families going out, schoolkids in uniform, army boys, aunties doing their auntie thing. There are other categories which are easy to recognize because they are not themselves numerous, but because we have trained ourselves to spot and strenuously ignore them: old people peddling tissue paper, people in wheelchairs peddling more tissues, more old people scavenging for aluminum cans out of rubbish bins, buskers playing a tune with their laminated permit clipped to their music stand. Walking out of an MRT station I saw an old man, neatly dressed, asking passers-by for money. My mother commented, as we walked by: "more and more of these old people standing outside and asking for money." Begging, in other words.

One problem with trying to ignore such 'problematic' people is that you'll never quite know how to react when directly accosted by one. 'Problematic' here has two meanings: the first being the economic problems that force a person to scrounge for money on the streets, the second being the purely social problem of how to interact with such a person without insulting him or your own conscience. With people peddling things, it's easy to reason away a rejection: "I didn't have small change", "I didn't need more tissue paper", "I politely declined", "I'll buy something from him next time", or maybe "if you buy then more of them will start to harass you." What if he's just begging? To say (or think) "he isn't working productively so why should he be given money" is satisfactory when the beggar is a fit young man, but what about some frail old woman? Some time ago while out at lunch with some of the younger guys from church, we were approached by an older man, eyes bloodshot and obviously a bit disturbed, who had gone from table to table asking for "rokok" - a cigarette. No one really knew what to say, we turned him away, someone piped up "don't smoke, it's bad for you." We all need some kind of reason when we turn people away.

-----

On the weekend I went cycling with a bunch of friends, we cycled overnight seemingly all over the island. We rented bikes from East Coast park, went down to the city, through Clementi, up to Bukit Timah, down to Little India, Kallang, and then back again to Bedok Jetty to catch the sunrise, before returning our rented bikes. At night one sees all sorts. There were the pretty young things lining up to get into some nightclub by the bay, the construction sites for the casinos spotlighted and still buzzing with workers close to midnight (and possibly beyond), other fitness fanatics in their more expensive bikes with lights and tights and everything.

We cycled down a row of new condominium buildings near Keppel Island, the name was something Caribbean. The metal drain covers on the sidewalk made a huge racket as we cycled past them, but it seemed deserted, one of us thought that it wasn't occupied yet, so I didn't feel too bad about it, until I saw the lights on in some units, some windows with curtains in them, then I felt a twinge of guilt at making so much noise at 1 am. No one leaned out to shout at us, or if they did, we were soon gone.

At night in East Coast park there are lots of tents, we didn't notice them at first, but then we started seeing one in the bushes, close to the thick vegetation, one pitched under a rain shelter, and once you start spotting a few you soon see them all and they were everywhere, in some places only a few meters apart from each other up and down the beach line. So many people camping. But not all of them for the sheer pleasure of it. By the time we reached them we were too tired to make much noise, and it was just as well. Between the time the revelers and barbequers go home, and the time the sun comes up and the morning joggers turn out in force, they don't have many hours to get a decent night's sleep.

In Little India, we passed through a bus stop with a man sleeping on each of the three benches. Near the Kallang River, we saw people on the benches. Couples making out, we thought at first, but they weren't, for the most part. They were mostly men, some reclining fully, some sitting up with their heads resting in their hands or on their propped-up knees. Passing under an underpass lit up with painfully bright fluorescent light (for safety, presumably), we saw posters on the wall, some belongings stacked up in a miscellaneous assortment of crates and boxes, and two hammocks strung up, one with a sleeping body twisted around as if to shield his eyes from the unrelenting light. There were metal drain covers mounted on the ground, but we took care not to ride over them this time. To have woken him up would have been cruel.

Lesson 1: Geography, Part 1

My old school friend M and I agreed to attend the Online Citizen's End-of-Year Review for 2009. We met up at the MRT station, and followed from there some brief directions that I had written out on a scrap of paper. Walking from Lavender into Little India, we soon got disoriented among the shophouses and other low buildings which all looked alike - this wasn't the well-labeled HDB heartland we're accustomed to navigating. Old men, in shopfronts smelling of machine oil, watched as we picked our way through the cluttered five-foot-ways. We stopped at a hawker center so M could use the bathroom, and noticed that the ubiquitous old men, looking much alike in either graying striped polos or neatly pressed white thin cotton short-sleeved shirts, were having their evening beers in glasses poured from big dark quart bottles.

We got our bearings easily from there on, and at the event met a school senior, C, who we had not seen since leaving secondary school. He's since graduated, and wants to be a journalist. After leaving, and having a long lingering talk with one of the guests at the front door of the venue, we decide to catch the last train and have dinner closer to home. But it is dark and the road looks completely different. We decide to start walking anyway, and pass several KTV lounges instantly recognizable by their lurid neon signs, blown up pictures of cognac bottles in the windows, and heavily made up women sitting pretty by the door. I glace inside one and see a row of them singing and gesturing on a dark stage, and hurry on.

Soon enough we're lost again, and M does what I'd been resisting for a while, and whips out her iPhone to look at the map. It turned out that we were on the right path, just so uncertain that we didn't even know it. We keep walking and she glances at a road sign and says, "Pe-ta-in Road, wonder what it means." It sounds like a Malay name. C corrects us, "Marshal Petain, the French World War I hero who later was a Vichy collaborator - a taboo name in France." Why would someone name a road in Singapore after a French traitor? "It seems like there are several roads named after World War I commanders in this area," he went on, "Kitchener Road... that's the guy in the British 'I want you!' recruiting posters, the ones that inspired the Uncle Sam posters." And there's Haig Road too, I added, and strained to remember any more. C points out Foch Road, too. If these houses were built just after the war, it might explain why the roads were named this way. Strange that they never changed Petain's road, though, after what he did. Perhaps people just didn't remember it was there.

Would LKY get his own road? we wondered. Not anytime soon, but eventually, for sure. But what road would be suitably proportional to his influence? Maybe Orchard Road? The road that leads to Parliament House? Some new road in a new HDB estate? Some time ago, Goh Chok Tong had suggested having some of the roads now named for 'minor colonial officials' renamed for prominent locals instead; perhaps this was sometime after S Rajaratnam's funeral when people were briefly paying attention to the past. Who gets to choose, though? We'd just spent the whole night listening to people talk about politics. Perhaps when they name a road for one of the Barisan Sosialis leaders we'd know that the political scene has finally changed - or would that just be tokenism, domesticating the past? In the course of this debate we walk past some more shophouses, some funeral parlors, small businesses, an eclectic mixture on the outskirts of the city center. We enter the underground MRT station, and C remembers an old story: "What about that old tunnel that was supposed to connect Sentosa with the main island?"

---

From my bedroom window on the 18th floor, facing South over the broad low plain of Bedok, Katong, Marine Parade, and beyond, I can see glimpses of the sea from between the highrises that sprout up to take advantage of their coastal vantage. Most of the other blocks in my direct line of sight are lower than mine. And in the horizon of those bits of ocean, I see green hills and islands far away. It is shameful then that I don't know exactly what they are, except vaguely that they're Indonesian. To me, and most people, I suppose, the maritime heritage of this country is more imagined than inherited. There is a sign somewhere on Kent Ridge, on a nice lookout point near a shed built by NParks, which labels all the features to be seen on the horizon. From that ridge one can also see Pasir Panjang, the Long Beach, today a mass of cranes and containers, but previously a pretty piece of seafront property. No wonder all those big old houses were built where they are, like in Katong too, holiday beach villas marooned by land reclamation.

As Singaporeans, we shouldn't be too surprised by now at the change wrought by development, but it's always a bit jarring when one looks into the landscape and suddenly can read the traces. At least as human beings, we can potentially move around and not be smothered by change when it comes, unlike the corals which used to fringe Sentosa, which are now, ironically, smothered in white coralline sand imported from Indonesia, to create a simulacrum of a tropical beach for our enjoyment.

Optional Winter Session Course 65r - Singapore, an Introduction (Field Course)

Intensive (re-)introduction to Singapore, its past, present, and possible futures. Students will be taught immersively and phenomenologically, living and interacting with Singaporeans and other dwellers in the island city. Topics to be explored include geography, society, environment, and the state. No formal assessment is required, but students are required to discuss their experiences with their peers. Prerequisites: some prior familiarity with the subject; this course is suitable for Singapore residents who have been away for some period of time.