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.

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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.