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?"

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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.