On Learning Mandarin in Singapore

     Monday, 15 August, I began Intensive Mandarin with a private enterprise called inlingua. I'm immersed in it for seven hours a day, five days a week. My class started small, just seven of us. Two have fallen by the wayside.  One decided she liked Korean better than Mandarin.  The other, a middle-aged Australian, just couldn't get it. That leaves three twenty-somethings, one of whom is French, but has lived in Asian since seven years of age.  A Kiwi, aged 45 or so, is struggling, but hanging in there.
     I'm having fun. My classes at City College of San Francisco and College of San Mateo engraved something on my brain that has survived six years of neglect.  In fact, this time around, I'm super-aware of learning tones, and tone-markers in the transliteration of Mandarin.  This class places little emphasis on learning characters, so I will have to tackle that on my own, and I brought the materials to do so.  This will help me read signs, and MAYBE headlines.
     Here's the curious thing. As Singapore's population is roughly 75% Chinese by ethnicity, one might expect to easily strike up conversations in Mandarin. One would be wrong.  Speech communities and language choices in Singapore are complicated. The oldest generation may speak the Hokkien or Teochew dialect. Middle aged folk may have studied Mandarin in school.  They often are more comfortable speaking English. Young mainlanders studying or working here do speak Mandarin. It takes a bit of eavesdropping on the SMRT busses and trains to figure out upon whom I can inflict my language practice.
     I survived this first week, and will complete three more, taking me thru the first full week of September.  Then I will start Chinese brush painting class, just two days a week and I'll be back exploring the landscape and food.

Monsoon Weather Report

Raincloud as Elephant at Rubin Museum.

     Last May, I took in an exhibit about art representing the meaning of the monsoon for South and Southeast Asia at the Rubin Museum in New York. Having lived with the California drought for the last few years, and missing the dramatic thunderstorms and rains of New England, I relished each wavy, watery curve.
     Yesterday, rain was predicted. As I swam in the morning, I could see the clouds forming and moving from the south. Deliberately I sallied forth downtown without my umbrella. By the time I reached downtown, the sky was dark, and sure enough it began to pour.  I took shelter under the eaves of a church.

Rain

     A young man passing by almost succeeded in giving me his umbrella.  I was touched, but remained under the eaves, getting splashed, and soaking my shoes. In 10 minutes it stopped.  It did not rain on the West side of the island, where we live, nor was there lightening and thunder as in the storm of a week or so ago.

My Singapore World is A Garden

     Yesterday, I ventured down to Tanjong Pagar station, located in the southwest corner of what's preserved of Singapore's Chinatown.  After lunch (Chicken cutlet worthy of two meals.) at the must-return-with-spouse Maxwell Food Center, I walked over to the Singapore City Gallery .  It's part of the Urban Redevelopment Authority, and critical to understanding how this city-state-nation sees itself.
     Front and center is a scale model of the entire island.  Without a selfie-stick I could not photograph is adequately.  To give you an idea, see below the model of the Marina Bay complex:

That's the cruise-ship atop three buildings.

Or check out the condominium tower where we live:

We are on the 11th floor of the leftmost of the three towers.
Swimming pool beyond verandah structure not shown.

Another favourite is the Chinese Garden in the reclaimed land of Jurong.

The Chinese and Japanese Gardens are on the islands at left.

From the third floor gallery, I could photograph second model, this one of downtown Singapore:

Note the red tile roofs of Chinatown shophouses.

What you can't see in these models is the insistent greenery of the place. After all, it is virtually on the equator, and in the zone of tropical rainforests.  Lee Kuan Yew imagined a city in a garden.  It reminds me of the marvelous, transitory mural by Qiu Zhijie, The World Garden, which took up the entire wall of the Berkeley Art Museum.

Imagining the entire world as an island garden.

The Forest of Symbols in the Pottery Jungle

Dragon Kiln, just after cooling started.

Dragon Kiln; we could still see heat rising from end.

   The spousal unit and I had ambitious plans for our Sunday.  Two busses and the MRT took us to the western, less built area of Singapore, north of Boon Lay.  I wanted very much to see the Thow Kwang Dragon Kiln, the oldest surviving wood burning, brick built kiln in Singapore. Dragon kilns are so-called because their design resembles a dragon's long body rising up a slope. Fuel is burnt at the lower end, and the heat and gasses are channeled through the body.  Additional stoke holes allow for controlling the heat in each chamber.
     Thow Kwang was built in 1940 to manufacture functional wares, the wood firing producing variegated glazes.  Now it is fired two or three times a year to keep alive the tradition of pottery in Singapore. It was packed and lit on Saturday morning, reached 1400+ degrees, and by noon Sunday was cooling down.
    Pottery Jungle refers to the open air warehouse adjoining the dragon kiln building. To give you some idea of the profusion of styles and symbols with hidden meanings:

Blue and White in endless variety of motifs
for good fortune.

More blue and white.

Gibbons and peaches in homage to Journey to the West and Chen Wen Hsi,
pioneering Singapore painter of gibbons.

Modern versions of Nonya ware.

     So many pots! So many thoughts! I remembered the sketches I made to accompany my musings on Gourmet's forays into Hong Kong in the 1980s:

Lucey Bowen

Lucey Bowen

     I thought about the pottery shards found at Chinatown sites in California, and the shards found at excavations at Fort Canning and elsewhere on the island.

Plate from Marysville Chinese Museum.

     I thought about all the variety of ceramics in the museums of Singapore: Peranakan, the Tang Shipwreck at the Asian Civilizations Museums.  Ceramics have marked Southeast Asia's global commerce since forever!

     Seeing these thousands of pots, a virtual jungle of them, is so different from their display in museums, where each one is individually spotlighted to emphasise its status as a masterwork. I think that may miss the point of the technical challenges of mass production conquered by the potters of China. Seeing them in all their profusion is humbling.

Peaches of Immortality, in open air storage.

To wit, a version of the Imperial peach vase, like the one at the Asian Art Museum, displayed in open air, a green layer of mold was growing around the shoulder.

   

Welcome to Wayang

     Last week, the spouse and I attended a performance of waying kulit, shadow puppetry, at the Malay Heritage Center.  A few days later, I saw a woodblock with wayang kulit as its subject at the Singapore National Gallery. 

Cong Way Ndut

Choo ken Kwang's Wayang Kulit

     Our resident anthropologist (Seriously, there are two at the moment.) informs me that Indonesians prefer to present wayang kulit with the audience on the side of the puppet master.  Even as the performance was in Bahasa Indonesia, we could follow the humorous asides from the puppet master and the musicians. It helped that the story was a familiar one, from the Ramayana.  That ancient Hindu epic remains a favourite in predominantly Moslem Indonesia.

Children of all ages enjoying wayang kulit

Peeling Away the Layers of History

My Mental Map of Singapore, 21 July

An hour's bus ride from our housing at N.U.S. is the Malay Heritage Center at Istana Kampong Gelam.

     You could be forgiven for thinking a small island would be easy to traverse. In Singapore, it's easier to get lost.  My solution is to form a map of places I visit, so that I have an association with place names.  I'll keep track of this for you on the paper above.

     I wanted to begin with Singapore's beginnings, so I took myself, on the Number 33 Bus, to the Malay Heritage Center. This was an hours journey from the National University of Singapore's tree-filled, high-rise filled campus into older parts of the city.  

     Place names are so revealing.  Kent Vale: so English.  Istana Kampong Gelam, where the museum is housed, tells an old story.  The Istana, or palace, was built for the Sultans of Jahor in the early 19th Century. Kampong is the term for Malay village.  Gelam refers to the former plantation of tree grown for the use of its bark for caulking ships.  The landscape which surrounded the Istana was that of a tropical plantation, enclosed by a wall.  The architecture of the istana could be called tropical Palladian, most likely designed by George Drumgold Coleman, an Irish civil architect who designed much of colonial Singapore. He incorporated the pyramidal roof of traditional Malay limas. 

     Thru Colonial machinations, the Kampong became the property of the British Crown, and state land at Singapore's independence.  In 2004, the Istana was refurbished to serve as the Malay Heritage Center.  As a North American, used to broad expanses of land, I struggle to imagine the watery world view of the Malay Archipelago.  Eric Tagliacozzo's lecture at the Asian Art Museum and his book help. The age and complexity of maritime trade in this part of the world is humbling to one who considers herself cosmopolitan. The term Malay itself is as about as precise as European.  Malay describes a wide range of peoples and languages of Sumatra, Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, a realm sometimes called Nusantara.
     The list of things I don't understand about Singapore's Malay heritage is endless.  Maritime trade and its role as a hub for Muslim pilgrims made Singapore an important center of the Malay world centuries before the legendary Sir Stamford Raffles arrived.  In the late 19th and early 20th Century Singapore was a center of Malay intellectual and cultural production.  Kampong Gelam was a center for printing and publishing.  The famous Hong Kong film company, Shaw Brothers, had a Malay subsidiary, and made more than 150 films from 1949 to 1967.  At the museum I watched clips from several different genre: romantic musical, horror, and social realism.  (I have a feeling that the Asian Film class I'm taking this fall will be nothing like what I learned at San Francisco City College!)
    The Heritage Center has a series of exhibitions called Se-Nusantara, which feature one of the sub-groups of Malays of Singapore.  At the moment it's The Heritage and Culture of the Javanese in Singapore. Tomorrow night we'll attend a performance of wayang kulit, the famous shadow puppet theatre, at the Heritage center.  As for Javanese food, you'll have to read about it my food blog!
     

     

     

Deep Background

     Wondering why you should read my posts about Singapore? If you are curious about these questions:

• How does this multi-lingual, multi-ethnic/racial, multi-cultural society function?  Is it doing better than the USA?
• How does this island nation, which imports almost all its food, feed itself so well?

Read on.

     For me, awareness of Singapore began with my dad telling the story of how he sailed on a troop ship from Halifax around Cape Horn in the early days of World War II. After the ship set down his American Field Service contingent in Bombay, the boat carried the remains of the British Commonwealth Army on to Singapore, where they were bombed, sunk and captured in the Japanese invasion. Noel Barber, an early contributor to Gourmet, wrote about this from the British perspective in his Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore. 

     Contrast that to the account that the late leader Lee Kuan Yew gives in the first volume of his autobiography, The Singapore Story.  

     A better understanding of the Singapore perspective is my goal.

Off to the Many Singapores

     Perhaps I'm just jet lagged. My brain is whirling. I'm in this place where everything I've been studying for ten years is in the air.  The Hindu temples for Sri Layan Sithi Vinayagar and Sri Mariamman; the Masjid Jamae Mosque; the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple; the Thian Hock Keng Temple; all within central Singapore's Chinatown.
     Out the west side Expressway for the night, we are surrounded by skyscrapers and 100 shades of greenery.  Next to our hotel is an enormous multi-purpose futuristic-looking concert hall with shopping mall, and next to that the junction of the Circle and East West lines of the MRT.
     On Saturday we will settle into a flat near the University. The spouse will begin his teaching duties on Monday, and I'll begin exploring the many Singapores.

Balustrades, Raffles Balcony Courtyard
October 2015

Supertrees, Gardens-by-the-Bay
October 2015