The past is just a memory by Clarissa Oon

This commentary piece by Clarissa Oon came out yesterday. I post this up so that this can become a discussion point.

The past is just a memory

Heritage issues and conservation causes loomed large in 2011 as Singaporeans reeled from the erosion of personal space

By Clarissa Oon, Senior Writer

I came face to face with the sights and smells of my 1980s Katong childhood two years ago while on holiday in Penang.

On a long road lined with shophouses were musty Chinese medicine shops with pungent herbs, tailor shops with bales of fabric, photo studios with display portraits of men in pompadours and women in upswept Farah Fawcett hairdos and haberdasheries with their constellation of buttons and zips.

The street was Jalan Penang in Georgetown, the civic heart of the coastal Malaysian state which has historical links with Singapore as one of the three Straits Settlements administered by the British in the 19th century.

A stroll down Jalan Penang, inhaling its perfume of mint leaves, fish flakes and spices from roadside laksa stalls, was like a trip back in time to the East Coast Road I knew as a young girl. All that was missing was a shop selling school uniforms, like the one my mother took me to many moons ago to be fitted for starched white blouses and crisp blue pinafores.

Today's East Coast Road - a stone's throw from my family home in Marine Parade - is a different world of patisseries, food joints serving everything from foie gras to bi bim bap and design-conscious furniture shops. Its contrast with Penang threw into sharp relief how, in less than one generation, globalisation and breakneck economic growth have overhauled Singapore's cityscape.

This sense of irretrievable loss amid the gains has come at a time when I have assumed a growing list of adult responsibilities - the vote, marriage, mortgage, a baby. It makes me think: What can I see, touch and feel of this land that keeps me rooted here? What is worth preserving and passing on to the next generation?

It would seem a growing number of Singaporeans - young and old alike - are asking such questions. In 2011, heritage issues and conservation causes loomed larger than ever in civil society and cultural life.

Call it the pull of nostalgia or search for the island's unchanging soul, it is a tide of emotion that can no longer be content with just technocratic progress.

Part of it is the urge to go beyond the official narrative to uncover the many Singapore stories in our midst. In today's crowded concrete jungle, people are also reeling from the erosion of personal space and the attendant memories.

The year's top-grossing local film was Kelvin Tong's It's A Great Great World, a valentine to the bygone Great World amusement park in its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s. Young moviegoers connected with the film even if they could not understand fully its melange of Hokkien, Cantonese and Teochew dialects.

Numerous books published this year served up slices of pop cultural and literary history, including memoirs by veteran poet-playwright Robert Yeo and music industry stalwarts Mel and Joe Ferdinands. Home-grown publisher Epigram Books re-released five classic Singapore novels by Goh Poh Seng, Yeo and others. Epigram and S. Rajaratnam's biographer Irene Ng also put out a volume of short stories that showed the literary side of one of Singapore's founding fathers.

But most striking of all were the public outcry and debates over the impending loss of parts of the historically significant Bukit Brown Cemetery and the former Methodist Girls' School building, now home to the Old School arts enclave.

The sprawling wildlife-rich cemetery contains many tombs of distinguished local pioneers and their families.

The announcement in September of plans to build a road cutting through Bukit Brown sparked calls from the public to preserve the cemetery, earmarked by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) for long-term residential use.

The pragmatic argument that the new road would ease traffic congestion on nearby Lornie Road did not convince heritage lovers. 'Roads are insatiable. Within a few years' time, it will be realised that this little fix was inadequate... and another road will have to be built somewhere else.

Meanwhile, part of Singapore's heritage and an invaluable source of genealogical and historical data for scholars will be lost forever,' wrote one Lim Su Chong - a descendant of pioneers Tan Tock Seng and Lim Boon Keng, whose families are buried at Bukit Brown - in this newspaper's Forum page.

As for Old School, the URA has said only the oldest of six buildings in the Mount Sophia complex will be conserved after the lease on the arts enclave expires in June. A Save Old School campaign has been launched on Facebook by Methodist Girls' School alumni, garnering about 5,000 supporters.

In comparison, the demolition of old Chinatown shophouses and the former National Theatre in the 1980s in the name of urban renewal scarcely raised a flutter. No attempt was made to restore the National Theatre building off River Valley Road, the precursor of today's Esplanade arts centre, built in 1963 with contributions from ordinary Singaporeans as well as the Government.

Its distinctive building - with a geometric facade riffing on the crescent and five stars of the national flag - was deemed structurally unsafe, closing with little fanfare in 1984 before facing the wrecking ball two years later.

Times have changed. Singaporeans are so attuned to the discourse of conservation these days that they want to see not just the physical shell of a historic building retained but also its spirit. Hence the brouhaha that erupted among heritage and Chinese culture lovers last month over Majestic Theatre, when it was reported that the once-iconic venue for Chinese opera and theatre is now a horse-betting centre run by the Singapore Turf Club. This is even as its chinoiserie-inspired exterior has been preserved according to conservation guidelines.

The other new buzzword is documentation. In land-scarce Singapore, numerous cemeteries have been razed over the years without systematic documentation of their tombstones.

However, for Bukit Brown, the Government has taken the unprecedented step of appointing a specialist-led team of volunteers to put together an online archive of the dead. In all this, there are two significant developments for state-society relations. One is a greater flexibility and willingness to consult on the part of the authorities.

While the ban on Chinese dialects in the mass media remains, the Media Development Authority had the sense to know that a period film such as It's A Great Great World could not have achieved any semblance of authenticity without dialects.

While plans to build a road through Bukit Brown remain unchanged, the authorities are now consulting experts to find a path with the least impact on the graves. Also notable is how the Government has been soliciting ideas from the public and conservationists on what to do with the Rail Corridor, the historic long strip of former railway land which Malaysia returned to Singapore in July.

In turn, civil society is more organised and better able to mobilise supporters through social media. The Singapore Heritage Society, for one, has been lobbying for and researching the likes of Bukit Brown and Old School, and updating its members regularly through Facebook.

Clearly, not every old building can or should be saved, hence the need for informed views and accommodation from both the Government and civil society.

But a few will argue that the exercise of trying to recover the past is too little, too late. One of them would be Boey Kim Cheng, seen as one of the best Singapore poets from the post-1965 generation. He left Singapore for Australia in 1996, disillusioned in part with how much of old Singapore had been erased.

In a poem on the National Theatre published recently in the online Singapore literary journal QLRS, he wrote:

In the lost photograph the National
Theatre
stands, its five spires rising above
the crescent-boat fountain and its
aqueous ribbons
sparkling in the late 60s sun,
to salute the nation's birth, and mark
the year it severed the cord
to the Peninsula, and sailed down
the long chute to the future of leaping
towers
jostling to own the country's sky,
the same year the boy in the fore-ground
was born, caught mid-air in Kodak
heaven
leaping from a parapet.
Now the boy teeters on middle age
and the Theatre is gone.

I was too young to really remember the National Theatre, though I have memories of being taken to the nearby Van Kleef Aquarium - another landmark in the area, demolished in 1998 - to see the giant fish and turtles. My wish for 2012? Not just for more people to see that old is gold but more debate and discourse to open our eyes to all that is worth holding on to for posterity.

clare@sph.com.sg

E-mail stlife@sph.com.sg and share your memories of spaces in Singapore that no longer exist.