Travel Book Review ~ Notes From An Even Smaller Island - Singapore Through a Young Brit's Eyes by Neil Humphries

Notes from an Even Smaller Island by Neil Humphreys. First Published 2001.  232 pages. We usually have a copy of this book in stock, click here to see if one is available now. - also available in a three book anthology, Complete Notes from Singapore.

As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you...

Our favourite Singaporean concept - Aunties and Uncles...

There is a song written by Robbie Williams called 'Millennium' that I believe could be an anthem for Singaporean 'aunties'. Whenever I hear the song; which contains the line 'Come and have a go; if you think you are hard enough', Singaporean aunties immediately spring to mind. To borrow from London terminology, I have yet to meet anyone who is 'harder' than a Singaporean auntie. Believe me, they are rock solid and their resolute attitude and lust for life is something that the younger, greedier generation can learn from.

A Singaporean auntie or uncle can be anyone who is from the older generations, like an English old age pensioner (OAP), and the term is used out of affection and respect. In a country where so much emphasis is placed upon the family unit and respecting your elders, it is only right that the elderly are held in such high esteem.

When the Japanese invaded and occupied Singapore, then a British Crown colony, in February 1942, these people endured terrible hardships. Under the constant surveillance of the kempeitai (the Japanese military police), many were imprisoned, tortured and even executed. Nevertheless, underground resistance groups still flourished until the war ended. When Singapore began its transformation from Crown colony to a leading Asian economic city-state, these hardworking people were the backbone. Far be it from me to deny the importance of the political direction of the Lee-Kuan led People's Action Party to achieve prosperity but I am certain that modern day Singapore owes everything to it's aunties and uncles. So every time I see students and young executives brushing past them as if they were invisible to get on a bus or train, I really want to throttle the impatient little bastards...

...the queen of Singaporean aunties would have to be Saudita - the major inspiration for writing this book. 

Saudita is an elderly Indian woman who weighs about 250 Ibs and has a tongue filthier than a drunken sailor. She could speak three languages: Tamil, Malay and swear. This mountain of a woman could strike fear into any man, woman or child who dared to cross her path. And she was my live-in landlady, from whom I rented a room for a year. To be honest, I am surprised that I am still here to tell some of her tales.

In twelve months, she must have sworn at me in every language except English, which she hardly knew. Indeed, her lack of spoken English led to many surreal telephone calls. First of all, she could not pronounce my name properly. It was always 'Neeoooh' with the pitch rising dramatically on the 'ooh'. I would be sitting in my locked bedroom when I would hear her cry 'Neeoooh!' Seeing me walk towards the phone, she would merely grunt and point at the receiver. Every time I picked up the phone, I would hear giggling on the other end. It reached the point when friends would call just to hear her shout my name. Being on the receiving end was an experience, too. I telephoned the house once to speak to my girlfriend and the conversation was just bizarre.

'Hello, it;s Neil'

'No' replied Saudita.

'Hello?'

'Hello."

 'It's Neil here.'

'No house.'

'What?'

'Neeooh, no house.' The penny dropped.

'No, I'm Neil'

'Neeooh, no house, no house' she said impatiently.

'No, I'm Neil. It's me on the phone. I'm Neil'

'Out. Neeoooh out. No house. Out'

'I'm fucking Neil, you silly cow. Now will you please put my girlfriend on the line before I come home and kill you.' She hung up. I suppose I asked for it really but she was such hard work.

She once asked me to use the dimmer switch to turn down the lights in Indian. Understandably, I was fluffing her cushions, cleaning her windows, feeding the cat she never had and performing every possible household chore except the one she wanted. In the end, when she ran out of patience and I had run out of things to turn on and off, the woman moved from one side of the sofa to the other and turned down the lights herself. It would be generous of me to say that Saudita was somewhat lazy.

However, everything changed at the weekend. The apartment was cleaned, the shopping was done and Saudita changed her clothes. Yes, she changed them just once a week and how she did it was chilling. Standing at the kitchen sink, she would take off her shirt and bra and wash her hair and upper body without making any attempt to cover herself whatsoever. Now if there was one woman on the planet who had two gigantic reasons to conceal her chest, it was Saudita. Being a rather large woman in her sixties, her breasts came down like two sacks of potatoes. Without a care in the world, she would then take her newly washed shirt, lean out of the kitchen window and peg it to one of the washing poles that vere outside, with her ample bosoms bouncing all over the place, that is not all. The apartment was on the eleventh floor and faced another block that could not have been more than 20 metres away. I used to imagine some little boy in the opposite block saying, Mummy, there's a woman over there hanging out her washing md she's got three heads.'

Like most apartment blocks in Singapore, Saudita's shower room faced onto the kitchen. After taking a shower one evening, I opened the door to be faced by my bare-breasted landlady making roti prata. 

Astonishingly, she made no attempt to cover herself and scolded me in Tamil for not being in the habit of walking around with my eyes closed. Not wishing to get a nipple in the eye, I made a sharp exit. It happened many times after that. She could be making a variety of sumptuous dishes, all of which would leave you salivating until you found yourself face to face with the bare-breasted woman and you would make an instant decision to never eat anything again. To this day, I cannot buy a bag of potatoes without hinking about Saudita's chest.

Despite her hard exterior, she was quite a caring woman. On a delightfully sunny Saturday afternoon, my partner hung some washing on the line and discovered two hours later that it had been saturated by some uncaring soul who had hung out a dripping wet duvet on the floor above. Of course, no one is saying that a duvet cannot be cleaned but there is an unofficial law of courtesy within the apartment blocks whereby you do not hang out something that is large and soaking wet if there is washing hanging below. Now, the woman above had broken that unwritten rule and Saudita did not stand for it. She stormed upstairs and convinced the guilty party, via some carefully selected Malay swear words, to bring in the duvet until our washing was dry. Consequently, the duvet was withdrawn to allow my sopping wet underwear to win the day.

Kiasu and The Hello Kitty Riots...

Nothing in Singapore brings out that side of me quicker than kiasuism - a paranoid trait that made the Indian couple push in front of families with small children so they could be home ten ninutes earlier than everybody else. It was kiasuism, I believe, that made the taxi driver pull over in the first place. He could see the long queue that he was barely fifteen metres from and I am sure he knew what the couple was doing, but he wanted to get his taxi meter running as quickly as possible and he could do it without the hassle of pulling into a taxi stand. Paranoid? I do not think so.

Had that incident occurred during my first week in Singapore, [ am fairly certain that Scott and I would have called them 'cheeky bastards' and shrugged off the incident. Having now lived in Singapore for over five years, I experience some form of kiasuism every day. To me, it is the city-state's most negative (and most visible) feature.In Hokkien, kiasu means 'to be scared to fail'. To a certain extent, it can be a positive characteristic in certain spheres of society.

For example, the fear of failing encourages parents to provide the best education possible for their children. But it never stops at this healthy level. Many Singaporeans like immediate, positive results. They cannot wait for things; they must have them now and they must be the first to have them. After all, what is the point of coming second? No one remembers the losers.

So what does all this lead to? Well, the 'Hello Kitty' 2000 phenomenon, of course. This phenomenon was not a national struggle to acquire the rights for a two-party system but rather the Singaporean population's desire to purchase the ugliest set of cat dolls humankind has ever seen.

The sad fact is that the Hello Kitty nightmare started calmly enough. These Japanese midgets had already been on sale in various guises and costumes in Singapore for some time when a fast-food chain announced that it would sell pairs of the dolls wearing different costumes with value meals. But if Hello Kitty products were already available elsewhere, why was there such a massive demand? Ladies and gentlemen, please allow the marketing gurus to step forward and take a well-deserved bow. They ingeniously tapped into the Singaporean psyche - the kiasu 'whatever you have, I must have' syndrome. It was one of the most successfully orchestrated marketing campaigns of recent times.

How did the burger chain pull off this marketing miracle and turn usually sane Singaporeans into cold-blooded, green-eyed Hello Kitty hunters? Simple. It slapped 'limited edition' all over the little felines. Thus creating a wonderfully unique situation for the kiasu consumer. That is, the 'whatever I have, you might not be able to have, ha' syndrome. Now if that is not waving a red rag to a kiasu bull, then I do not know what is. And boy, did many Singaporeans see red.

When the first pair of Hello Kitty dolls went on sale, the :ountry went ballistic and the dolls were sold out within hours. Knowing this, people began to queue the night before the next 3air of dolls were due to go on sale. Can you believe it? These people were even shown on the news camping outside various fast-food eateries. I was stunned. Until then, the only society of people I had ?ver come across that loved queuing was the British. It is one of 3ur national pastimes. My fellow countrymen spend half their lives queuing and they are exceedingly good at it. Try to cut in a queue at the post office in Dagenham and you will be thrown looks that suggest you have just committed murder.

In Singapore, where the lifestyle is so hectic, I was given the impression that its citizens barely have enough time to breathe, let alone the patience to stand and queue. Even in my local bank, there is no need to queue. They employ a wonderful system, whereby you simply take a ticket, sit down in a comfortable chair, read a book and wait for your ticket number to be called. Increasingly, Singapore is becoming a queue-free zone.

So you can imagine how shocked I was when I read about the hordes of people eagerly queuing overnight for a pair of dolls. Many teenagers probably saw camping out as an adventure. And if these youngsters had been the only people involved, I suspect the whole episode would have been a comparatively light-hearted affair. But they were not. The kiasu brigade came in and took over. There were those who queued up to buy more than ten pairs of the dolls, which led to a limit on the number of sets each customer could buy. Then there were those who hired students to queue for them, thus creating the first professional queuers ever employed to purchase a pair of cuddly toys. People were arrested and fined for disorderly behaviour. At Bukit Panjang, stools were thrown at police officers. Others had fights in front of women and children over alleged queue cutting. Consequently, Cisco, a private security firm, was hired to place guards at some of the bigger stores. Finally, several people were injured when a shop window in Bedok shattered under the pressure of too many impatient fuckers leaning on it.

In the end, the fast-food chain placed a full-page advertisement in the national newspapers apologising for the chaos. The burger chain also guaranteed that the last pair of dolls would not be limited and supplies would match demand, thus ensuring the end of both overnight queuing and the Hello Kitty phenomenon in general. Of course, if this strategy had been employed in the first place, none of the above would have happened.

Once the farce had subsided, people were quick to step forward to analyse the incident and try to understand and even justify it. Some claimed impressionable adults and teenagers had simply fallen for a cunning marketing ploy. Others came up with the silly idea that Singaporeans had a penchant for queuing. Believe me, that is a complete falsehood. In a country where its citizens cannot wait three seconds for commuters to alight from a train before getting on, the very idea of standing in a queue for over eight hours would be anathema. No, it all comes down to greed. Pure greed. When those damned cats were stamped 'limited edition', it created a stampede of would-be entrepreneurs. Within days, these characterless toys were being auctioned on local web sites and they were being sold for S$50 or more at flea markets.

One of my closest friends, Victor, admitted that he had queued up for eight hours in Toa Payoh. I almost forgave him when he said he took turns with his fiancee to queue because they were getting married in a few weeks and he wanted a pair of the wedding dolls for good luck. I was none too pleased when he told me that he had nanaged to sell the other pairs for S$50 a go. This just floored me. Fhe dolls cost about S$10 a pair so he had made S$40 profit on >ach pair that he had sold after queuing for almost a full working lay. The most infuriating part was that Victor knew what he was ioing. He said, 'I wanted a set for the wedding. But when I saw tiow much people were paying for the dolls, I thought "why not?" Everybody was doing it. I saw people being paid to queue. What to do? We love to have something free or be the first to have something.' That is the trouble with greed, it clouds all logic.

However, kiasuism goes way beyond greed. Undoubtedly, it ties in with avarice in the sense that you must be the first to have something whether it is a stuffed cat, a cinema ticket, a lottery ticket or a condominium. Ultimately though, it is a phobia. A terrifying dread of not winning, of coming second and possibly even, and I am going to have to use a rude word here, failing. Singaporeans would rather step into a boxing ring with a pissed off auntie before admitting that they might not have fully succeeded at something. So from the earliest age, they strive to be as efficient and as competent as they possibly can in the area of academic study because that is pretty much all they do in childhood. But then it progresses and becomes all encompassing. Kiasuism spreads rapidly though the brain (and in severe cases down to the anus because that is what badly afflicted victims talk out of) and eats away at you like Parkinson's disease.