Peripheral Peripheries
Robert Wood on Alvin Pang
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
When you arrive in Singapore, chances are you will arrive at Changi Airport. You could come by the Causeway from Johor Bahru, but chances are that you will fly in, to a clean, quiet, gleaming, glistening, orderly terminal that looks more like a luxury mall than any other airport you have been to, especially LAX. The muzak will lull you, the travelators move you, and the janitors spray and wipe behind you. This is travel that is sanitised, suburban, temperature controlled by sensors and computers. After you pass customs, you will grade their service on a touchscreen and it will tell you to ‘have a nice day’. As you collect your bags, you will not be jostled, not even hurried let alone harangued, and you will begin to glimpse the concrete and green just out of reach, just in the humidity out there outside, all before you step aboard the MRT to take you anywhere in the city state you might desire, sweat-free. The money is made of plastic and there are stewards in case you need guidance, all while being welcomed into an idea of the present that has harbingers in the past and future. Welcome to Singapore.
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Alvin Pang’s poem ‘Suburbia: Jurong East’ is set in the eponymous suburb and in the mind’s eye. Jurong East is far from the tourist vision of Singapore. Far from Orchard Road where the best shopping is to be had; far from Little India where the scent of marigolds and sandalwood incense fills the street; from Chinatown where you can get bak kwa by the gram; from Arab Street with its floral textiles; from Geylang where sex workers labour; from Seletar Hills where my mother grew up in the 1960s; far from Changi Airport which sits at the other end of this island city. Tourists might pass through Jurong East to get to Jurong Bird Park, an attraction that trades on its beautiful and bountiful collection of avian residents and visitors, from the tropics and further afield, a place of leisure where you might find a flock of flamingoes just like a concrete set to be found on front lawns and backyards the world over. Jurong is coastal with wetlands and it is industrial with chemicals and ports, a view onto the Selat Pandan Strait itself. It is where you might arrive by ship if you were there to deposit oil.
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Growing up in Wembley (6014) we had a wetland down one end of our street and a food court down the other in a small mall with a video store, pub and supermarket. We would go back to Singapore over summer holidays to visit my grandparents, walking to the market in the morning, getting warm tau huay as a treat, picking up fish at the wet stalls for curries later in the day. When the rain would come later on, it came in thick sheets, and the open drains would fill up, with us racing paper boats until we could not chase them anymore. There was a paw paw tree in the back garden and we would drive through the city looking at Christmas decorations, or, if we were there earlier, Diwali, or if we were there later in the year, Lunar New Year. Every now and then, we would only stop in for a day in Singapore, on our way from Perth to Thiruvananthapuram or Berlin or New York, where other family was. It always smelled wet compared to Noongar Country, always a little mouldy, lively even, and the concrete could never disguise the sheer fecundity of life there.
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Pang’s poem opens with the short sentence ‘Decentred centre’, a comment, of course, on where we are, on suburbia and Jurong East. It is an absent presence, a body without organs, an anonymous and titular paradox that places us beyond the metropole, a peripheral periphery. This is an outpost, of a kind, but it is deracinated, vacuumed, amorphous, anonymous, alienated, if not exhumed and ghostly. Pang clarifies this in the next phrase, on the remainder of the line, ‘Regional hubnobbed, notquite heartland,’. Jurong East, it seems, is a place that never arrives, an arrival hall without a customs desk, without a form that asks where you are from. The poem goes on:
more ribcaged iron lung of the body poltic; working protein;
a thigh muscle: hardly missioncritical, although would be missed.
Or else re-placed.
The iron lung does the breathing of the body politic, connects to the flagella motor of the ones below, the mass of wage labourers who would be missed from industry, but are nevertheless able to be ignored, like Jurong East or other suburbs all over the world. It could be transported like a tree as they carve up new space and expand the city’s base.
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On 9 August 1965, shortly after my mother’s thirteenth birthday, Singapore became independent from Malaysia, separating itself as a legislative island from the peninsula, after both had been decolonising from British rule from 1955 onwards. This decade was marked by racial tension, and not only towards the ruling empire, but especially between the Chinese speaking majority and minority Malays and Indians. In July 1964, communal race riots led to the death of twenty three people and hundreds more being wounded. My uncle tells a story about pacifying crowds with nothing but a megaphone and a bamboo stick on his way to becoming Lee Kuan Yew’s personal bodyguard. Lee would go on to be the first Prime Minister of independent Singapore. My uncle grew disaffected and left the country soon after, working for the rest of his life in a brick factory in outer suburban Perth, and now confined to a locked ward in an aged care home, escaping every now and then to buy Lotto tickets in the hope he can pay his way out altogether. The People’s Action Party, Lee’s party and the party of independence, are still in power, of course, authoritarian by any measure west of Singapore.
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In the suburbs, we know as much of what is here by what is not. They are not operatic because cities and mountains are, not sublime because skyscrapers and oceans are, not grand like boulevards and national parks. Pang’s poem lists this, lists what Jurong East cannot be:
…. no bigshored rickshawed
downtown comehitherness here. No one to impress, this corner of
the 21st C, so everything smallcapped, missmelt, mixmetaphoric, free
of storyboarded skylines or selfieready shopfronts. No toilets
glazed with ads above the urinals advertising legacy watches&
and holidays by the seine….
Jurong East is beyond the tourist gaze, like the suburbs in general, which neither seem romantic nor modern in the poetic imagination. They are not orientalised like big smoke lust, unable to impress for want of audience, not a narrative of escape and arrival, of being seen by lights and glow. Not even a home for narcissism now in the bask of petit bourgeois assets. Even the toilets cannot consume our consumerism, not for the time we leave behind or the glamorous capitals that were reared on the stench of other revolutions far away. This suburb is not a place where poets are, not a place to read.
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The first of my mother’s sisters to arrive in Noongar Country became a social worker in the city’s only public maternity hospital and was assigned to teen mothers from the regions and those most likely to have their newborn babies removed by child protection. Often, they were Aboriginal, often it was a policy of genocide, and often she was left consoling them for the days they were checked and prodded before being discharged, and sent back to where they had always been. Now, she volunteers with the Women’s Legal Service as a researcher, and when we talk, it is about politics. She tells me stories about my grandmother, who came from Kerala to Singapore after Indian Independence, and always gathered people close to her, feeding those who were hungry, making sense of history with the certainty of someone who could determine the wind before even it knew which way to blow. My aunt here was the first in her family to marry a white man and they still live in the suburbs of Perth in the house they raised their sons. Since retiring as a prison psychologist, he has also become an activist, spending nights locked up protesting mining companies.
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The word that counts for double in ‘Suburbia: Jurong East’ is ‘still’. It comes after the list of what the place is not and before the list of what it is (and which I shall come to). It is a simple word ‘still’, but capitalised and bookended here by a full stop and a comma, a kind of minor break each side to signal a little of its importance. The poem turns here, is the moment where the poet comes into consciousness, stops looking for what is lacking and is about to embark on what is fulfilling. They awaken. ‘Still,’ in Pang’s poem is the moment after you have cleared customs and before your flight takes off, or the moment after you have landed and before you have collected your bags. It is the liminal space, the third space, the space in between, where we get to choose whether we are in the city or out in nature. Here, ‘still’ resonates because it is itself a moment of quiet, approximate to, if not quite becoming, a kind of pause, a distillation of tears into gin, an essential calm that is necessary before we begin to realise what Jurong East is.
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The aunt who has almost always stayed behind in Singapore is the eldest of my mother’s generation, the matriarch now, who was married young, who was widowed young, and remains young even at eighty four. She dropped out of law school and married the editor of The Straits Times, entertaining diplomats and intellectuals and artists, before her husband died somewhat abruptly because of a major heart attack. This aunty left to do a masters in cultural studies in Melbourne and returned to Singapore, becoming a beacon for second wave feminist activism, gaining the moniker of ‘Mother of Civil Society’ in the process, with documentaries and exhibitions now part of the mainstream in the course of the last thirty years. She is something of a personality with cookbooks and memoir and children’s books to her credit as well as work on domestic violence and migrant labour and censorship. She is known, perhaps worryingly, to the government, and organisations she has founded and run have often been subject to infiltration and takeover. When we were children, we would visit her in an old black and white colonial bungalow, eating her luxurious breakfasts as dissidents and humorists asked what went wrong at Independence.
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Singapore will never be short of a lunch option, and, of course, after Pang’s ‘still;, we know what to order in Jurong East - Michelin standard porridge, or mee pok (a noodle dish either with fish balls or mince meat). The hawkers are here for rent, but no matter how far from the centre they are in this decentered suburb, their lunch is enough to lure Mercedes drivers to come along the Pan Island Expressway, rolling up their sleeves with chopsticks and spoons in hand. Pang follows this image with a description of what comes with the food. He does this through repetition. The Mercedes are parked at the town council, which is:
next to the atm queue next to durian tout next to mobile repair&
next to pawnporn creditready lenders, remitters, resellers, headbowed
men and women loaded with fairprice bags
The punning neologisms mix like mee pok, a kind of street level slang, which pops and is layered one on the other, next to the other. This is a quick succession of what is seen, and all connected to the market, to trade, to commerce, yoking together those twin pillars of Singaporean identity—what we eat and how we spend.
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My mother was called ‘Mongoose’ as a child and I had an uncle who went by the name ‘Grasshopper’. After he retired, he used to take night classes in pastry making at a Perth TAFE, and on the weekends I would go out to their brown brick four bedroom home with arched doorways to make croissants and bake bread. He worked as a surveyor flying in and out of the Pilbara to mark up new suburbs. This uncle always said he fell in love with the big sky country up there, even as he thought the place wild, reckless and dumb. After growing up as a minority in Singapore, he never complained about the racism he experienced. But he often repeated a story about only being allowed to drink on the Aboriginal side of the bar. This was in the 1980s, long after Singaporean Independence, but before our own. His greatest moment as a migrant was watching Cathy Freeman win gold in the Sydney Olympics and he told me once that was when it felt most like home. When he died from Parkinson’s, they released a hundred balloons at his funeral, and I baked chocolate cake for all his grandchildren.
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Jurong East, we are told, is
…. More tuition centres than toy stores.
Beautiful, necessary employment embanking drenched and empty playgrounds.
Dollars to be stretched and places to stretch them in. Home is where hope’s
affordable.
This suburb, like the suburbs of our own youth, are where learning matters, where the parents push the children to go beyond their own experience, to become professionals and make something of themselves, to strive. The ‘beautiful’ here are the working conditions not the playgrounds, made necessary by what the next generation shall achieve; the dollars knowing their limit and finding it; and, of course, hope being a matter for the heart, being ‘afforded’ a place in the ‘ribcaged iron lung of the body politic’ that is Jurong East itself. The language here moves away from a punctuated percussive layering, the next-next-next of slang replaced by a simple and direct observation of how life goes on, in a quotidian if affecting, public and domestic manner. It is the moment where Pang clearly tells us that airports lead to absence lead to stillness lead to hawkers lead to commerce lead to education. What happens after is anyone’s guess, but it might only happen here.
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My sister lives in Singapore now and we have not visited since the borders were closed. She will be home for a visit soon, and when she comes she will remark on how large the houses are, how quiet the streets, how dry the landscape, how slow the buses, how strange the television, how beautiful the stars, how diverse the people, how it all feels like memory. When she tells people she lives in Singapore, no one ever seems to ask ‘where in Singapore?’ As if Marymount is the same as Novena is the same as Punggol; as if the country club is the same as the golf club is the same as the work club; as if Takashimaya is the same as Paragon is the same as Orchard Central; as if an orchid is an orchid is an orchid, which it clearly is not. We pass islands in our archipelago, along straits made of tarmac and asphalt, past eddies and flows, on family currents, and with the peace of mind that the rain and waves will wash it away tomorrow, that we will make land no matter the risk, and perhaps, we arrive on a land of less sorrow.
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Pang’s poem ends with six lines of lyric intensity, the streetscape elevated and enlightened by language itself; uncles, sons, aunties, hubbies and divorcees coming to life in their corner of a vibrant and real world. Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known. That Jurong East is a place of ‘love’, that it is a love ‘sharper than a good story’ and one with ‘no end in mind’. Pang’s poem then is a poem of place; of named absences; of lunch, commerce, striving; of lists; of turning points; of claim; and, of course, of identity, history, and the family that comes with proximity to others. It is a poem in the afternoon where the light is golden like chicken skin, shimmering with hope, fat and corruption, where the arguments hit different, where there is affection and frustration, where Singapore tells itself the myths that matter, and the people who love it from afar are able to see it in a new way, as if they just landed at Changi Airport for the very first time in a very long time. To stay.
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Robert Wood lives on Whadjuk Boodjar. He is interested in non-violent direct action, parenting, and education. Robert is a Malayali with connections to the East Indian Ocean and edits Portside Review.