by Judith Huang
Chapter 5: The Island and the Sea
“Sophie-ah,” said Clara when she came in the door of the flat.
“Yes, Ma?”
“You still haven’t helped me clean out the study. You said you would, remember?”
Sofia frowned. Yes, she had said something of the sort before Chinese New Year, when you were supposed to do spring cleaning, for whatever superstitious reason. And she hadn’t done it.
“Yeah…” she said, trailing off.
“Well, do it, okay? Now, please?” said Clara.
“Um, isn’t it like, bad luck or something to clean your house during Chinese New Year itself?”
“And since when have I brought you up to believe in good luck or bad luck?” demanded her mother. “Do it now, okay? That stuff is taking up way too much space.”
“Okay…” Sofia really didn’t have much of an excuse. After all, the school term had just started and it wasn’t as though she had a whole lot of homework to do just yet. And she had a couple of hours before her Chinese-tuition teacher came.
Sofia went into the study. Actually, it was more of a study-cum-storeroom where Clara and Sofia chucked all the stuff they couldn’t be bothered to deal with or sort through. Sofia did have a desk in there, and she also had her tuition there. The sheer amount of stuff in the room was pretty overwhelming, and even Sofia had to admit it didn’t make for a conducive place to study.
She started with a small, very yellowed stack of books and papers that were in a corner. They looked like tax filings. Boring, thought Sofia. They needed to be shredded and recycled. She got out the paper shredder from its box and started feeding the papers into it.
As Sofia went through the stack, something caught her eye. It was a handwritten document, in an unfamiliar scrawl, slotted in with all the tax filings. She looked at the date on a top corner of the document. It was during her parents’ grad school days, before she was born. This wasn’t written by her mother. Was this her mysterious missing father’s handwriting?
She thought her mother had got rid of every trace of him from the house, but here was something he could have written himself! Sofia started reading.
The Island and the Sea
“No man is an island” —John Donne
The problem is, we really are an island. And the truth is, we really have been marooned. And to compound it all, that old myth is true: we really are sinking, just not in the way we’ve always been led to believe.
In the mythology of our founding, we were born profoundly alone, and into an already-sinking leaky sampan of a situation. We have no water! goes the cry, the old cry of helplessness. So small, no water, no land, no natural resources, no army—we are basically a piece of rock, a little red dot, with water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. These things have been drilled into our heads. And these things are true, and there is nothing false about the pride that wells in us when once a year we sing—“but we did… but we did…”
It was certainly the efforts of our leaders, their foresight and intelligence, that guided us to where we stand today, and that must be deeply felt and acknowledged. That well of gratitude runs deep and has not yet been exhausted. The Party has an incredible store of credibility, earned by the sacrifices of our first leaders, without whom we would not know the kind of heady success we have today. But let us also not forget the conscious and unconscious determination on the part of every Singaporean—those invisible forces of our work ethic, our decisions to stay, our realigned loyalties and our willingness to sacrifice, or at least the tacit understanding that our sacrifices were for the greater good.
The problem is we retain even in success that siege mentality that makes the last of these—the willingness to sacrifice for the greater good—incredibly dangerous. Because the developmental state—that is, a state that insulates a professionalised bureaucracy to make long-term big government decisions often in the favour of businesses over populism for the good of economic growth—this sort of state only works with a high degree of cohesion in society: think South Korea with North Korea next door before 1989’s democratisation; think authoritarian Taiwan, determined to succeed and outshine her bigger hinterland; Singapore—determined to make good and show Malaysia up. So the myth that we are perpetually sinking, perpetually just about to go under, that our success is the sort that keeps our head just above water, and at any time, if we stop paddling, we will drown—this has become a precious and utterly necessary myth in the foundation of Singapore. It is our own collective obsession, our own Atlantis Syndrome.
And this myth is incredibly powerful. To call it a myth is not to say it is not true. To every extent that it justifies the laziness—yes, laziness, contemptuous laziness, which is very different from considered, intelligent submission—which leads us to acquiesce to every new invasion of privacy, every new curtailment of the liberties guaranteed us in our very own constitution, with the naïve trust that the people steering the boat will always have our best interests at heart, it is very dangerous to the entire island, the entire boat. This effect is incredibly ironic. Because at the very time the party evokes the need to sacrifice for the greater good “because this ship is sinking”, and then curtails our rights, it actually disables us from the very ability to throw our efforts behind the country and pitch in. Because when we toss our rights overboard, we also toss our agency and our responsibility. Two heads are better than one, they say. In the analogy of the boat, five million oarsmen, alert and intelligent, pulling their full weight into ploughing the ocean, have a greater effect than a hundred at the helm gesticulating wildly. And if one of those oarsmen should spot a rock rising in the ship’s path, if he were not able to speak out and say so, the entire ship may very well wreck itself in its effort to drive in the wrong direction.
Rights and liberties are not simply icing on the cake of human life, but carry with them the full weight of duties and responsibilities. The right to act gives us a reason to care. If nothing we do will ever change the course of events, then we might as well fold our arms and let someone else do the rowing. And if you see a rock coming up in the distance and have your mouth sewn shut, then it is in your best interest to jump ship and hope to be marooned on some other shore.
Now, to what extent is the myth that we are perpetually on the brink of extinction true? To the extent that Singapore only coheres because of its success. If all there is to Singapore is economic success, then our leaders should be very, very worried indeed. The ruling party is not a party without legitimacy—the trouble is that it has ceased to derive its legitimacy from representation, but has slowly shifted its legitimacy onto the slippery sand of prosperity—(economic) progress, the dimmest star in the flag. Is economic success so chimerical? Can it really be there one day and gone the next? Yes, and yes! Singapore’s economy is very much a derivative of the world economy—it has little agency of its own (we are told this time and again by people paid vast amounts of money to control the “uncontrollable”, by their own admission). But since when has a nation—a real, solid nation and not a tax haven—ever based its identity, its very soul, on economic success alone? Besides, this is that old trick of conflation of the party with the country again. The Party’s legitimacy should be a quite different thing from the country’s legitimacy.
When we have been brought up to believe that the only star that matters is “progress”, the word circumscribed to a purely economic meaning, then indeed the moment the economic sinking begins we will all flee like rats from our sinking ship, condemned to be people without a nation. But all the gold in the world will never satisfy the human soul, and if all the gold a man owns disappears overnight, he will be left naked and cold and alone, but still human.
What is this humanity that necessarily underlies our nationhood? It is the national character, built in our best days, manifested best in the young Lee Kuan Yew, his vision searing through the TV screen, his words true and mesmerising.
“Let us get down to fundamentals. Is this an open
or a closed society? Is it a society where men can preach ideas—the novel, unorthodox, heresies, established churches and established governments—where there is a constant contest for men’s hearts and minds on the basis of what is right, of what is just, of what is in the national interest? Or is it a closed society where the mass media—the newspapers, the journals, the publications, TV, radio—either by sound or by sight, or both sound and sight, feed men’s minds with a constant drone of sycophantic support for a particular orthodox political philosophy? That is the first question we ask ourselves. And let me preface my remarks with this: that it is not only in communist countries where the mass media is used to produce the closed mind, because the closed society must produce the closed mind. I believe that [Singapore] was founded, if you read its constitution, as an open society, constituting peoples of various languages, of varying political beliefs, in which the will of the majority will prevail, in which a large dissenting minority will not be crushed and intimidated and silenced… I say let’s pause and ask ourselves… I am talking of the principle of the open society, the open debate, ideas, not intimidation, persuasion not coercion.”
The five stars of the flag represent democracy, peace, progress, justice and equality. It is that certain impish response in the face of adversity, the grim determination in the face of overwhelming odds. It is a willingness to work hard, to put aside egos and pettiness and rivalry to be united in a difficult task—yes, sacrificing your own claims, but voluntary sacrifice—volunteering someone else for the slaughter is not sacrifice but sabotage. It is that intuitive and powerful sense of justice—“regardless of race, language or religion”—the commitment to freedom of religion, freedom from discrimination, and a fierce meritocracy tempered by compassion for the least in society: placing greater burdens of responsibility on the most talented, the way a father tells the eldest child to look out for the youngest, because he, too, is one of his own.
And this commitment not to equality of outcome (though compassion must move us to eliminate the deplorable ghettos, the downright slums, which some live in on our very soil), but equality of opportunity—to ensure the elite never entrenches itself; that the Singaporean dream of kampong boy to successful professional is never waylaid by nepotism, by unaffordable school fees, by not being able to afford tuition teachers. (And what does it say about our school system when children in our top schools “need” tuition teachers outside of class time?) This is the national character of Singapore, not the grotesque caricature of the materialistic, self-serving opportunist who will desert at the first opportunity. For if that is the sad state we have arrived at, then we really are sinking, and perhaps this is a civilisation that is better under the waves than above it. It sets too dangerous a precedent—all manner of tyrannies will point to us and say, look, they sold their birthrights for a bowl of stew too, and our cruelty is justified. When in fact every iota of our success is derived from our integrity and sincerity, and every dishonesty and shirking of responsibility has compromised our ultimate success.
My island! We are alone—we are profoundly alone. “It is your problem. You are the only ones who will solve it,” said a very honest American politician when I pointed out that we, the citizens of Singapore, are caught in a double bind: there are, yes, far worse atrocities in the world that need attending to. Certainly nothing that happens on our high-tech island is anything close to bad enough for other countries to even consider intervention, and the party has been careful (and let’s not be entirely cynical about this) and caring to ensure that our economic needs were met (although never guaranteed).
Even our torture is the subtle kind: the psychological kind (some say the worst kind)—nothing so crude as electrodes or ropes, but sleep deprivation and arbitrary and indefinite detention and beatings and cold water poured over you in a freezing room. And so, because there are many worse things that happen, and some quite close by—in the troubled, often hypocritical democracies of the world—and because of our Midas touch we are rich, lacking nothing materially, lacking only what is the most essential to the definition of what makes us human, we can expect no help.
Yes, it is our own problem, and we can rely on no one else for the courage and the hard, hard work that the reclamation of our Atlantis demands. We, like the myth of our first birth, are quite alone. But then, we are also together; we are everybody; and we are everywhere. We are some of the most mobile people in the world, and the danger and opportunity of globalisation is that as the world swallows Singapore, Singapore also swallows the world.
Now, there are many dark and disturbing things in this broken world of ours, but there is one thing that makes all of us essentially and at heart Singaporean, whether stayer or quitter, heartlander or cosmopolitan, “scholar” or “farmer”, foreign or local talent; and that is a love for and therefore an unspoken concern and commitment to Singapore. I have seen it in the eyes of overseas Singaporeans who claim to have had enough and then speak painfully, passionately about why. And there are in fact quitters who have remained, to all appearances Singaporean but who have given up in their hearts the entire idea of Singapore. It is not geographical location that determines the heart’s citizenship, nor, indeed, is it citizenship itself. It is that hope, that conviction that we are the citizens, that we are, like it or not, responsible for her and she for us, because our Atlantis is carved on our hearts.
And as for those passing through, those cynically using what Singapore cynically offers, we can only hope that love blossoms from familiarity, that true love can come of arranged as well as love matches. For did not our own forebears come from the far-flung lands of the earth, including this one? Did they not risk everything, lower themselves to be construction workers and petty traders and the unglamorous administrators of the outposts of empire? Did they not also, somehow, come to love this place? For it is in the nature of people to love the places they live in, even if they don’t realise it. And it is a place of magnetic beauty.
And as for those who left, thinking they could cut out the part of their heart that had grown in them unbidden when they were children, they too must realise that however hard they try to change, however much they adapt, that shard of Singapore is embedded in their hearts; it hangs around their necks, heavy and inescapable. For when love chooses you, you can scorn it, you can deny it, but its claim has been made, and it can never be removed.
So the island is the world, and the world is an island, linked by the invisible pulsating threads of networks, families, lovers, friends—and above all, the hopeful and despairing cloud of our collective imagination, fed by myth and song.
Tyranny had better fear this cloud because the moment it is warmed by hope, it will condense into a powerful torrent, an irresistible river of a force never hoped for before. But anyone and everyone whose motivation is at heart Love will realise the wisdom of this river, will realise that the force of millions of voices, the quick, the unborn and the dead—raised in unison, raised even in the simple, unironic recitation of our pledge, eyes fixed on the five stars and the ascendant moon, are not just powerful, but beautiful, and irresistible.
The denial of the humanity of our island is unsustainable. For the island is defined by the sea, and we are also the sea—the sea that wraps and embraces the outer reaches of all the earth. We may continue lingering in the uncertainty or the comfort of the cloud, or we may distil our thought into action, and then you will see once and for all the great pouring of the monsoon—like the lion we were born to be, we will roar.
At the bottom of the document was a tight, almost illegible signature. But yes, she could just make out “P. Tan”. Her father had written this! Her father! Sofia admired the words. She felt a surge of something in her heart when she read it, much like what she had felt when she had read Isaac’s message.
Was there more?
Sofia turned the paper over and something else slipped out of the pile.
“The Utopia Machine is the answer—to build a world for our people, for all
our people, a world where we can all be together. —Peter Tan, Biopolis.” The same scrawl, the same hand had written these words on the yellowed slip of paper.
Sofia stared. She read it again. The Utopia Machine! Could it be the very thing Isaac had hinted he was going to tell her about? Was her father somehow involved in it? Was that where he had gone, into this Utopia Machine? And “Biopolis” must refer to the complex of labs her mother worked in. What if her parents were the ones who had worked on the very thing Isaac had told her about?
She had almost talked herself out of meeting the mysterious boy who had given her the prism, thinking it was too dangerous, or too weird, or too risky. She had almost rescinded her invitation to him to meet “in real life”. But now, her curiosity was overwhelming.
Carefully, Sofia took the essay and the slip of paper, and filed them into the clear folder where she kept all her most important documents. She had to meet Isaac. She had to get to the bottom of this. Perhaps he could help her find her father.
Chapter 6: Paradiso
Sofia flung herself face down on the bed and it gave the familiar screech against the floor. When would Isaac get back to her? It had been a whole day since she had sent him the message about meeting up.
Also, she didn’t like how this whole Natasha thing was going. One day she seemed willing to be friends, and the next she singled her out for public humiliation! Or at least, she had been in league with Jessica, who had humiliated Sofia. It made no sense at all. And that holo tag—the one that had given her freakish ears all through Science class—that had just been cruel. She felt her cheeks burn just remembering it.
Sofia’s mind was white hot with anger. She pulled her holo feed towards her. She had been working on the thing for months, whenever she felt lonely. She had been particularly pleased with the character that she had made to represent Natasha (secretly, of course, and it didn’t look that much like Natasha—she just thought her regal stature was reminiscent of her). The avatar was strolling around on her display, ducking in and out of the archways in the little city Sofia had constructed. Now she just felt like wiping it all out.