1) It is possible for an entire population to be polite.
Maybe it's the whole history of British Colonialism, or the one-party rule, or the threat of so many fines for minor infractions against public order and cleanliness, but damned if it doesn't make for a 180-degree departure from the treatment I've gotten used to here. I was raised to always use the nice little formalities-- sir and ma'am, "may I please have," and "thank you very much"-- but I've also gotten used to the wry expression that they get in return, a look that half says "do you really mean that?" and "candy ass." To receive them in return, enthusiastically and consistently, and to see everyone else using them with each other, was bizarre but comforting as a lullaby. I think it was one small part of the overall impression of safety and order that made me feel like I could (and just might) wander out of my hotel at 3 in the morning in my pajamas and enjoy a pleasant stroll in the park.
2) It is possible for a thoroughly culturally mixed population to tolerate one another.
In the weeks leading up to my trip to see Pants in Singapore, I trumpeted often about how the place had better be foreign, by God, because I was not flying 18 hours to end up in a place that was essentially San Diego with an accent. And foreign it was. Narita airport in Tokyo and Changi in Singapore were quiet and pristine. No one shouted at us like cattle through a loudspeaker, no one yelled at a ticket agent or did the awful luggage-dragging shuffle-run get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way act, and no children wailed, screeched, or imploded all over the walls. There were indoor zen gardens. Smokers had their own sealed off, glass-encased, quiet rooms. Everyone spoke quietly and existed within their own little allotted bubbles of personal space.
That last one is important. I'll be the first to admit that I often walk around as though my skin's on inside out, which is to say that I'm way too damned sensitive about nearly everything. OK, I get it. But I'll also ask you to note how many times a day someone else's cell phone conversation or ring tone or after-market muffler or car horn or stereo or shouted dumb ass greeting ends up stuffed into your ears whether you like it or not. I think it's poor form, actually, people taking without a second thought more than their fare share of the communal airwaves. I feel like people in Singapore were sensitive to this. Or was it just that the heat and 1000% humidity pressed all the sound out of us, dampened everything down and muffled it?
3) It is a shame and a sin to eat the same thing all the time, or to pass up the opportunity to eat something new.
In a former life I was either a monk or a Russian prisoner. I say this because I've raised monotonous eating to an art form, a ritualistic, almost compulsive denial of variance and pleasure. I ate the same lunch for nearly two years once-- chocolate Power Bar, apple, water. Restocking was easy and cheap, caloric intake was a pegged constant, and there was no mystery: absolute control. When under pressure and left to my own devices, I tend to do this. I believe things are so far gone that keeping my body fueled is pain in the ass number one, a task too complex and wasteful to give thought to, and the weeks leading up to Singapore were no exception. I think it's valid to say that the chocolate Power Bar is like a red flag in my life-- when I resort to buying them in bulk, things are really bad, and I had four boxes of them in my cupboard.
Anyway, Singapore doesn't have Power Bars. Instead, it has the very best food from India, China, Japan, Korea, and Malaysia. I had Indian food from all four corners of the subcontinent served on a banana leaf. Every morning I had a new crazy pastry with my thick, sweet Malaysian coffee at a place called Bread Talk-- chicken curry, mushroom buns, curry naan, "hen and egg"-- and every afternoon we tried a new hawker center or food court. I learned the Asian noodle slurp with chopsticks and a scoop spoon, and took a cab driver's sage advice to finish every meal with green tea to aid digestion. I had Spanish tapas with teeny sardines and live, tiny white eels with sushi and sake. I had bean paste buns that looked like boobs at a dim sum place and a plate of fried carrot cake, which sounds like Texas carnival food but isn't-- it doesn't even look like cake or taste particularly sweet, but holy God it's delicious.
And you know what I noticed? I felt good. I also noticed that Singapore food isn't born of a corn economy-- the Cokes have actual sugar in them instead of corn syrup and the starches are different. There's less bread and more fish and fruit, and the portions are smaller than my head. Everything's eaten sitting down, since you're not allowed to chow down while you walk around in the street. I don't know why that is-- maybe it cuts down on litter-- but it certainly feels more civilized. One of the other things I do to disrespect my food rituals is eat in the car. It's gross. I do it all the time since I've got an hour commute on either side of my work day. Which leads to my next point.
4) Public transportation makes you less lonely.
I love the MRT. Not the buses, so much-- I rode the bus all the time in college and I'm a big critic of brake technique, believing it's often a passive-aggressive driver's means of revenge on an overcrowded bus-- but I've never met a subway or an El or a BART I didn't like. I especially love the MRT's announcement wording: "Next station, Dhoby Ghaut. Passengers continuing their journey on the Northeast line, please alight." Their journey. Please alight. Like birds on migration. And it's that orderly. Everyone stands around texting, not shouting into their phones, and Indian mamas drowse off next to their big-eyed children in the gentle shaking of the tunnels. You can go anywhere with your little green card, tapping your way in and out of electronic turnstiles and flowing along in the air-conditioned veins underneath the city with orange-robed Buddhist monks shuffling along next to you with iPods plugged into their ears. You feel like part of the big humming blood of something, like wherever you get on or off, it'll be the right place, and no matter what you can always find your way back along clearly colored lines.
Anywhere in Singapore, you can walk, and pretty much at any time, too. The only limiting factor we came across was the daily thunderstorm, which had the grace to schedule itself predictably from noon to two. My dad, who lived part-time in Singapore for a while when I was a kid, later pointed out that for a city at sea level, the place also drains remarkably quickly, but by the time I was getting used to the thunderstorms, real no-shitters, all drama and bang like the Texas ones I love and long for, I had come to expect such order from Singapore. Of course it drains. There are Asian women in tailored dresses and fancy spiked heels that have to walk from the skyscrapers to the hawker markets for a delicate lunch of seven different cuisines-- it couldn't not drain.
5) There is room in public life for sacred spaces.
Thian Hock Keng is a Taoist temple on Telok Ayer Street near Chinatown. From its interior shrine you can look up and see construction cranes and skyscrapers for giant banks and fancy watchmaking companies. I actually smelled the various temples we visited before I saw them-- a rich, smoky smell of incense and burned paper offerings that immediately snaps the mind away from city noise and static to something quieter. I found myself wishing I knew so much more about Buddhism and Taoism than what my angsty teenage forays into eastern thought provided. Then I was looking for obscurity, some obtuse handle with which to grab onto the homelier proverbs and lessons from my mostly secular upbringing. "He who grasps, loses" was a favorite, which is essentially "All good things come to those who wait."
But what I wished I knew when I stepped over the high entry step to Thian Hock Keng, which someone told me was for making you look down, and therefore bow, on your way into a sacred space, was how to pray here. I had plenty of things to ask forgiveness for, plenty of things weighing on me and haunting me. I had bats in my head and I wanted to let them out, to kneel here in a cloud of sweet smoke and be able to stand up lighter. I watched a woman clasp three sticks of lit incense in her joined palms and rock back and forth on her knees with her eyes closed, shaking the sticks and murmuring. People left fruit and lit cigarettes in gold bowls in front of glass-encased dieties.
Later, at the Sri Mariamman Hindu temple, where Pants and I arrived and left our shoes at the door and washed our feet in time for the evening prayer, I let drums and cymbals and bells and some weird, long cross between a trombone and an oboe hammer a complex rhythm into my ears. There, everyone walked around and around brightly colored statues and a tiny tree in a cage, all in clock-wise circles. Men got down and did full body push-up bows to the shrines, and the bright, heavily lined eyes of a chorus of different gods watched us.
6) It is possible to bring some of Singapore back home with me, but it means I have to push back at old habits and some of the things in my life that I had assumed were there to make life easier.
Today I took a walk on my lunch hour. I used a theory I learned when I was training to run a 10K, which is allot a block of time, divide it in two, and wander at a steady pace for the first half and use the second half to negotiate return. I think I made it a few miles at least-- long enough to make my left hip start to hurt, which is usually quite a ways into a hike for me-- and I got some good thinking done. I also saw the Eastern Sierras, which requires rare atmospheric clarity, a large fallen honeycomb covered in bees that looked so meticulously constructed I had to go back and look again to convince myself it wasn't manmade, a community center with a great mural buried in a really poor neighborhood I've never actually seen on foot, and mop-haired teenage boys playing cricket on a back lawn of the university and not sucking at it (the bowler actually hit his sticks while I was passing).
By the end of the walk, I felt more even and peaceful, like I could actually feel the boundaries of my own personal bubble of space reforming, a shelter inside of which I could actually decide what out in the world was my problem and what was not. This is radically new to me, this idea of a bubble or a forcefield or a shell. I'd always prided myself before on being very open to everything around me and casting my sensory net wide and far. The problem with that, and I'm just now seeing it, is that it means I also cast my sense of responsibility with it. Everyone's problems became mine as well and I lived like a leaf in a wind tunnel. Up and down and all over-- news of the wars and the failing economy, a hazy cast to the sky, a friend's personal drama, the grid of intersecting work and school deadlines, and all over it overshadowed and hollowed out by Pants's interminable absence-- I let all of this at every minute color my mood. Is it any wonder I was eating Power Bars and drinking my face off on the weekends?
It took traveling to the other side of the planet to show me this, but even if I'm a slow learner, I eventually catch on: I can create my own space for peace; I can devote time and energy to maintaining and nourishing that space, and it's not wasted time; other people's problems are their own, and they get solved whether I worry about them or not; with all that spare brain wattage freed up from worrying about shit I can't and shouldn't control, I can actually devote time to figuring out what it is I want.
This is what I learned in Singapore. That and the fact that I want to live in Asia. There's a whole world of story just in seeing Pants again as well, but it's enough to say here that things were awkward at first, and then very, very good. We're learning to reshape the inherent limitations of email into advantages and trying to support each other in rethinking how the hell we're going to make it through the rest of cruise. I still hate the absence and think long-term spousal separation, as an idea, is right up there in practicality and desirability with landing a plane on a boat at night-- a bad idea the Navy has somehow turned into doctrine. That's not to say that I don't recognize the potential for valuable learning in it on my part-- maybe it's the patience of the monk or the prisoner in me.
