It’s Okay Not to Look Okay
A piece of diamond with water that gushes down at its center. Trees that seem to have overly steely determination to reach out for the sky. A ship that is washed ashore but seems to have stuck more than 50-storey above ground.
There is no need to try so hard to be pretty, Singapore.
It’s okay to look slightly in shambles, with each of the different “town” keeps its particular, seemingly antiquated character. Tiong Bahru used to retain its pre-war and post-colonial architecture, without being disturbed by hipster cafes and slick-cut baristas creating latest latte art. Queensway Shopping Mall might look like what we imagined to be the 90’s — dingy looking, damp, slightly dark. Yet it is still part of us because of what we remembered of doing sports in secondary school — restringing rackets and getting vendors for CCA tee.
We don’t need it to be turned into another “hip, youth-oriented place” with the seemingly out-of-place color scheme and running track around the mall (ehm Funan, ehm). Only my little cousins will run around following the track. I can only afford about half of the items on display there too. With my secondary school allowance, Macs is the only place in Funan I would go.
It’s okay to retain a slight rustic charm in all that you do, Singapore. Not all parts of the island need to be properly developed or utilized. We are too afraid of losing the character of Coney Island that we forget that Punggol used to be a sleepy fishing village — now sprawling with new HDB flats for young couples. To me the scariest part is not how we lose the character of certain places, but HOW QUICK we forget about its character after losing one. It’s like a blip in human history.
(I am not saying young couples do not deserve to have their own homes for raising children. Not at least until we can untangle the systemic injustice that underlie such rapid development, with migrant workers surviving on hundreds of dollars per month and living in crowded quarters, prone to disease outbreak.)
After all these years of trying hard to be pretty, like a moving train with broken brake system, it’s very hard to stop trying. Our climate change response calls for more extreme weather-resistant infrastructure — bigger drainage system, more parks in the city. But we forget how to tame our gardens, prune the grass, cut the trees, or even recycle our trashes. Aren’t these the kind of work that we still rely on many migrant workers to do work for us?
Of course free work will not generate the best outcome for us. Without financial incentives, I wonder how many of us in the community are willing to maintain our gardens and clean our clogged drain. We will not get the same spick-and-span greenery around our town with reduced reliance on migrant workers for sure. But the promise of better community engagement maybe can steer us to a more sustainable development in the future.
It’s okay to not look okay Singapore. Maybe we have been pretty all along.
