16:57.

A re-post, from two years back in this blog, an article written a dozen years ago. Some bit cynical, whimsical and even among such traits, probably guilty of romanticising.


Published 1993 Sept 24
Author: A sad Lat if

SINGAPORE takes pride in its food. I do not mean the confluence of so many culinary cultures here, though that is important. I am talking about the way people eat.

I used to visit a restaurant - "eating-place" is more accurate - in Kerbau Road, off Serangoon Road. There, at peak hours, would gather a congregation of the hungry, appetites sharpened into devotion by long hours of toil. Some
moulded stone and mortar into the houses and roads of Singapore. One wrote about Singapore on computer screens.

Those who had just arrived would sit back in grateful expectation after ordering their food. I joined them.

As the food arrived, we dipped our fingers slowly into the rice, feeling its heat. We spread it out as if to increase its yield, spicing its taste with salivary waiting. The vegetables and spices were mixed in, slowly, calmly. We mixed them in a little more, the pace increasing.

And then, in the abandon of delicious freedom, we began eating. Rice, avial, sambar, papad, more, pickles, meat, egg or fish, we ate it all, great, shameless quantities of it all. Ours was a gusto which, if watched by the merest of artists, would have turned his canvas into a masterpiece.

The food swept into us, strengthening our limbs and gratifying our hearts, uniting a ragtag band of devotees into seamless, undistracted impatience.

It cost $3 for the chicken-meal, $2.50 for the fish-meal. The rice and vegetables were unlimited. The pieces of meat or fish were fixed. But the gravy was unlimited.

The restaurant has since moved, leaving no address behind.

THE closure of the restaurant meant the destruction of a community, for me, anyway. For it was there I learnt that a community is a group of people united by a common purpose though they may follow different paths, rarely agree with
each other and often have little to do with each other as individuals.

Which brings me to the market.

If you go to a market quite late in the day, when prices are likely to be lower than during peak hours, you will see old women scanning the remaining fish. They smile with a kind of sheepish greed that is meant to disarm the vendor but actually irritates him. Though the fish themselves are becoming second-rate, the vendor can be quite rough with these second-rate customers.

That attitude becomes doubly irksome if he happens to be nice to you, a proper customer who is late because he did not have the time - not because he did not have the money - to come earlier.

And when the old lady smiles at you because you are trying to make things a little better for her by smiling, you know that the only thing you can do is write.

I AM sometimes tempted to divide the world into three groups: states, unreal people and real people.

The state we know about. Unreal people are the kakis of the state.

They owe their livelihood indirectly to the state as a source of power. Conservatives, democrats, situational democrats, anarchists, armchair anarchists, intellectuals, economists, staid senior leader/feature writers (Selfews), Contentious news reporters (Connerps) snapping at the Selfews' ideological heels - all are hangers-on of the state, pretenders to imaginary thrones, parasites feeding on suspect lineages, unreal people all.

Those at the receiving end of their actions are real. Children, housewives, students, teachers, hawkers, entrepreneurs, engineers, doctors, lovers stealing a kiss in the dark, rubbish-cleaners, dreamers - these are the real people of the world.

Unreal people speak: Real people are spoken about. Unreal people write: Real people are written about. Real people love or at least make love: Unreal people make money by writing about love.

Now, mark me, I do not have anything against the state. I do not understand those who are railing forever against "the state", as if there was a viable alternative to it. Nor am I saying that real people are "good" and unreal people "bad". Life is hardly as uncomplicated as that, and roles do overlap.

The loan-shark is a real person, but I doubt that you would want him as your friendly next-door neighbour. No one but journalists (if even they) likes journalists, but imagine a world without (unreal) journalism.

Which brings me to my point. Journalism is perhaps the only unreal profession which exists only because there are real people around. Democrats could chant passages from De Tocqueville and economists could continue to disagree with each other, but only journalists are privileged to enter the lives of real people without knocking. They are suffered, as all intruders are, but they are suffered on trust. And it is that trust they need to keep when they write.

I HOPE that the thoughts on food and markets are some small proof of this, even though I am a Selfew who was once a Connerp. Though this is not always possible, I feel that it is better to try and describe things well than to explain them, for most explanations debase the thing being explained.

"To discover the various uses of things is the work of history," Marx wrote, on the first page of the first volume of Das Kapital. He himself lived up to that challenge quite well; as someone said recently: "No other writer gives more vivid, intense accounts of modern 'things'. No one has better described the ambience of a great textile mill or the misery of a brickfield or the enigmatic nature of commodities."

Unlike his successors, Marx was not a Marxist; unlike them, the early Marx at least understood how important it was to allow things to speak for themselves instead of getting polemic to speak for them. It is not surprising that Marx was once a practising journalist; so was Dickens.

SO IT is that real people create real situations, and that journalists must write about them.

I was travelling by bus last week. At a stop, I was looking around idly, when my eyes fell on two teenage schoolgirls. One of them was waving at a student who had entered the bus and saying something; the other was giggling, her right hand cupped lightly over her mouth.

What a sight. I do not have a sister, but if I did, and if she at 16 had giggled like that, my brother's-heart would have awakened from its slumber and soared on the wings of her laughter. Dear girl, hold on to your laughter; keep your giggling youth as long as you can. For one day you will be as old as I am. You will not only have to think before you speak, but think before you laugh.

But, then, as a journalist, you will have the freedom to capture your captivity and turn it into words.