Law, Partially

Jaegër was always under appreciated. He was our second choice. Our first choice was Chester, but Chester had an overbite and wasn’t suitable for hunting. So we returned Chester to the farm with the hog trailer filled with German Shorthair puppies where we bought him and picked Jaegër as our new puppy. He was a little older by this time, and maybe because his earliest days weren’t spent in the loving bosom of the Linge family, he was never a very affectionate dog. He never grew to be very big and was always mild mannered. We said maybe he felt inferior because he was born in an ignoble hog trailer. But when he was a puppy, there was already an elder statesman of a dog at the house, Bullet, a dog whose legend all German Shorthairs have been measured against ever since. Bullet died after the move to Missouri on a summer’s afternoon where my mom had served him steak for lunch.

All four of the Missouri Linges went a few years later to a suburban house not far from our suburban house where a German Shorthair had given birth to a litter of purebred German Shorthairs. We had the first pick of the litter. There was a dog with character we liked, but we chose instead the biggest dog in the bunch, named Moose. He had big paws like Bullet as a puppy, and we thought he would grow to become a noble dog. While he may have been the largest in his litter, he was still such a tiny dog then, you could have held him in one hand. We fed him his first meal in the laundry room at 5 Alsace Ct. – a room that would eventually be known as Jake’s room – but he picked up the small Tupperware dish with his mouth and brought it to the kitchen so, we said, we could watch him eat. From such a young age, the dog felt there was something very important about his food.

We soon after named him Jake because that seemed like a masculine name for a dog who was destined to grow big. As he became a full-grown dog, he fought sporadically with Jaegër. Jaegër was past middle age by this time and was too mild mannered to be a fighter. Dogs fight occasionally, not necessarily compulsively, so my dad didn’t think it irresponsible to keep Jaegër and Jake together in the back of his pickup, which was enclosed by a camper shell, while he and my sister were visiting a horse barn. They returned to the truck to find that Jake had nearly torn Jaegër’s eye from its socket. This was to begin the “separation of the dogs.”

People foreign to the Linge house may not have grasped it immediately, but the process was quite simple. Jake cannot be in the same room as another dog, and he especially doesn’t want another dog anywhere near his food or another dog to pass through a doorway before him. Jake felt these spaces were owned by him, and for a dog to use them was to mortally offend him. Indoors, Jake had to always be separated from other dogs by a closed doorway, or else Jake and his largeness would beat the other dog into recognizing his ownership of the space. The four of us Missouri Linges learned very easily how to ensure that the dogs inside were always separated by a closed door – part of the process was calling out in the house, “Where’s Jaegër/Gus/Jake?” so that we would know which dogs were locked in rooms, outside, or roaming the house free, and with this information we could open doors and let dogs pass through them, assured there wouldn’t be a dog fight in the house.

From a young age, however, we thought Jake to be gentle with people. We even thought he may be a smart dog. Even as Jake got bigger (and bigger he would continue to get; he indeed grew into those big paws, becoming a German Shorthair of a size larger than average) he and I would wrestle on the ground, and he never hurt me; it was fun for him too. Even in his “crankier,” older years, he would never get mad at a human, although there were times when he was beating another dog and a human’s hand got in the way. He always felt bad about that, but at the same time he couldn’t contain his rage against the inferior animals that are dogs. And this is what was said about Jake, he could relate to humans much better than he could relate to dogs.

But many humans had trouble thinking of Jake as a human’s dog. They couldn’t get past his brutality against the dog species. The Iowa home of the Missouri Linges was the house of my Grandma Elaine. It had always been taken for granted that even big dogs, like German Shorthairs, were welcome along with the Missouri Linges. This open invitation was, however, rescinded because Jake even was angered by petite Dachshund dogs – namely, Grandma Elaine’s dog, Hexe. It may sound a little funny to say that Jake “tossed a dwarf,” meaning he picked little Hexe up with his mouth and threw her, but to Grandma Elaine, this was an unforgiveable offense. A normal component of Linge gatherings was a tribe of dogs scurrying about the floor, but with the inclusion of Jake there was forced a new consciousness at all times where Jake was in relation to other dogs. He was best locked away in a room or a cage or not invited at all. We didn’t always bring our dogs to Iowa anymore, and Iowa dogs didn’t always come to Missouri anymore. Sometimes Gus made the trip to Iowa alone while Jake stayed in Missouri

In Jake’s first few years, we marveled at his large size, lean frame, and huge muscles. There was no doubt that his purpose in life was to hunt for birds, an activity that requires much running, and when a dog spends nearly all of his waking hours hunting and running (even in the yard of the Missouri house), he will be a physically fit dog. The paths worn into the grass in the Missouri yard attest to his ambition for hunting. Blinded by his love for hunting, while Jake was actually hunting during hunting season, he often forgot that his purpose is to find birds for the men with the guns. Jake would often get distracted with hunting for himself. Sometimes he would try to eat birds, but I think he loved the hunt more than he did the kill or the “feast.”

Because my dad is the one who took him hunting, Jake always had a special interest in him, and Jake would become nervously energized when my dad would go to the room where he kept his guns and other hunting accessories. Pheasant hunting season has just begun in Iowa for this year, and Jake was there Opening Day, hunting like a younger dog. Some may say that tough, old dog chose to stay alive for just one more Opening Day, and with that accomplished he just couldn’t hold on anymore. I wonder how much pain he feigned ignorance of for one more chance to hunt in Iowa.

Hunting with my dad he may have loved, it’s my mother who spent the most time with him (right up until his last moments) because most of Jake’s days were spent in the house at 5 Alsace Ct. or in the yard, while my dad was away at work and my sister and I away at school. Before Jake was fully grown, he liked to follow my mom around the house, up the stairs and down the stairs. She frequently yelled at him for “trying to knock her down the steps.” He liked to go outside with her when she hung the laundry and follow her back in. She used to feed him scraps of food from the table. She would lock him in her bedroom (because one dog, and it was usually Jake, always had to be solitary in an enclosed room) and turn the television to PBS because she was sure he liked to watch “Arthur.” Jake would sleep with the television on, but if my mom said he liked to watch “Arthur,” she spent more time with him than me, so I have to believe her.

And now it’s just Gus in the Missouri house. We no longer need to worry about separating dogs. There is only one dog, and when we get a new dog, Gus will most likely be able to tolerate him near his food or walking through a doorway before him. Gus always thought of Jake as his big buddy, even if Jake didn’t feel the same about Gus. Gus isn’t as angered by the dog species as was Jake, although Gus’ adamant curiosity and sniffing and pestering can sure anger other dogs. Many people misunderstood Jake and his hatred of other dogs, but I know it is true that Jake was a very personable dog who could relate to humans better than other dogs. Jake was a people’s dog, and it is the people who will miss him most.

Maybe nobody wants to be reminded of the book, Where the Red Fern Grows, at the time of a dog’s death, but I read that book only months after we picked out Jake in 1995, and the boy’s puppy love in the book, reminded me of my own. I liked Jake.

Jake, my old friend, with his food, in his room, aka the laundry room

So Singapore is staging Formula 1’s first night race. They’re worried it will rain, and the flood lights reflecting off standing water will create glare. It will almost certainly rain because it rains a lot in Singapore. The track is set up through the downtown streets. This could be kind of cool. But I won’t go to it. I don’t have a ticket. Plus, everyone and his brother and sister will be at this thing, and I have studying to do. This is supposed to be a tourist attraction to lure foreigners to come and spend their foreign currency in Singapore. Luring foreigners to spend their money is very Singaporean, but to be fair, all nations want foreigners to do this. Singapore just comes up with well-funded and well-run schemes to achieve this goal. I can’t say that Singapore is particularly F1 crazy, from what I’ve observed, but I’ve seen more Porsches, Maseratis, and Ferraris here, per capita, than anywhere else in the world I’ve ever been - even Dubai. I’ll assume that Monaco beats Singapore in aggregate per capita car value. I’ve never been and will let you know after I go - though in Pittsburgh I did meet the Monacan ambassador to the U.S.

This talk about Singapore’s draconian criminal justice, with such harsh penalties for such minor crimes – deterring minor crimes will make major crimes even less likely; there will be no testing of the limits of prosecutorial discretion – I have to say it’s deterring some individuals from committing minor crimes. I’m not going to say I’m a newly-anointed party animal, but with my new Singaporean friends, I’ve stayed out late drinking a lot of beer, and I’ve been really tempted to urinate in public. In the States I would. I urinated in public in pretty much every European, North American, Indian, and Ethiopian city I’ve ever been to. It’s sort of a tradition. And when you gotta go, you gotta go. But here in Singapore, I’m too worried about being punished by public caning; not to mention, I don’t have time for court. (I’m not scared of being caned; I just don’t want to have to mess around with the hassle.)

I don’t know for sure if urinating in public is the norm in China. It is in India. And India and China are where a large proportion of Singapore’s foreign workers hail. We could say these people tend to be a little rougher in manner than the bourgeois, domesticated Singaporeans that also inhabit this island. And because it’s normal in their native countries, you’d expect them to carry on similarly in Singapore. They do continue with some of their homeland practices, like pushing and shoving when entering public transportation for no reason other than that’s how they’re used to doing it back home.

Well, I saw a man urinating on a sidewalk tonight. He could’ve been a Malay. He may have had a stumble to his walk too, so maybe he was experiencing what I’ve been experiencing – drinking makes you pee.  He also made no attempt to make it looks like he wasn’t peeing. He was on the sidewalk of a 6-lane road, casually standing there, in a wide open expanse of sidewalk, no nearby buildings to block anyone’s view, watering the lawn, looking like a man actually watering a lawn – picture the stance of a suburban American father holding a garden hose.

Singapore’s father, Lee Kwan Yew (a very, very important name here in Singapore) had this to say in defense of the strong social policies he has implemented in Singapore: “There’s already a backlash in America against failed social policies that have resulted in people urinating in public, in aggressive begging in the streets, in social breakdown.” He’s a very strong advocate of Asian cultures as being unique to Western, and that some policies that work in the West won’t work for Asia, so Singapore is justified in having policies such as strict criminal penalties for crimes minor to Western eyes. Seconds before, he had said this about the deterioration of the US as a societal model in the past 25 years: “I would hazard a guess that it has a lot to do with the erosion of the moral underpinnings of a society and the diminution of personal responsibility. The liberal, intellectual tradition that developed after World War II claimed that human beings had arrived at this perfect state where everybody would be better off if they were allowed to do their own thing and flourish. It has not worked out, and I doubt if it will.” (To read the interview with Lee - and it is good but maybe challenging in that some background information will help you to understand it better - click here; Lee is Tiger and he doesn’t mess around, letting it be known that Singapore will do what it wants because it’s Asian and not Western.)

I’m not sure that urinating in the streets can so easily be called a symptom of social breakdown. I think it’s just convenient, and I grew up doing it. It’s a value of mine.

No doubt about it, Singapore is an urban nation. But if all this concrete and all these buildings weren’t here, this would be a rainforest jungle. We’re only 1degree north of the Equator, and it’s humid too (weather.com says 70% today). My room stays a balmy 84 degrees, and when I woke up from a nap on Sunday evening, my bed was wet with sweat; I looked at the thermometer on my alarm clock, and it was 90degrees. Typically, when I’m in my room, I wear just gym shorts, and an unfortunate consequence of frequent sweating is that shorts start to smell. I’ve never had stinky shorts before, but I know now that if you wear them too often and sweat too much, they start to stink – even after just one or two days. There’s an annoyance/reward trade-off with rain. Rain cools the air but is annoying. Singapore wasn’t so hot earlier this month when it rained every day for two weeks, but walking in the rain, umbrella or not, sucks. Now it has rained very little for the past week, and it is hot.

On maps of Singapore, in the geographic center of the island, you’ll see a large patch of green. This is the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Lonely Planet calls this “one of the world’s only patches of primary urban rainforest.” Some of you may know that I don’t much care for jungles or wild animals. I’m not afraid; they just annoy me, and I don’t trust them. Supposedly, there are more species of tree in this nature reserve than on the entire North American continent (for more fun facts, click here). There is a zoo in the nature reserve and a “Night Safari,” where they drive you around in cars at night and try to shine lights on animals. Sounds like the ultra-fun hoosier activity of “deer spotting,” where you walk around the woods at night and try to shine a light on unsuspecting deer. I don’t care much about night safaris, but I’ll go someday to Singapore’s because it seems requisite.

Also worthy of note, Singapore is the largest exporter of ornamental fish in the world and supplies 25% of the world’s entire market. There’s much talk about Singapore not having any natural resources to exploit, yet the nation remarkably went from poor to rich in 30 years. Thomas Friedman said in The World is Flat that nations like Singapore and Taiwan with few natural resources end up as success stories because they are forced to rely on human ingenuity and hard work, and these are more sustainable than floods of royalty checks sent by the governments for, I don’t know, exploitation of oil reserves, rather than any work you did. Of course there are many national examples for and against Mr. Friedman. But the point is, Singapore does have a natural resource: ornamental fish.

Singapore was formerly a colony of British plantations growing rubber trees, but I think they’ve mostly left by now. There are, however, still rubber factories, that turn the raw latex produced in Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia (Wikipedia says they account for 72% of worldwide production), into rubber for tires, erasers, and whatever else you use rubber for. At the Singapore Commodities Exchange there is a futures contract for rubber traded. Singapore is “the world’s largest natural rubber trading center,” the Singapore Commodities Exchange website says.

            I am in school in Singapore, which partially explains why I don’t write as much as maybe I did in previous months. I don’t get the free time here to ruminate about my own and the country’s existence as often as I did in Ethiopia. There are some things I’d like to say about Singapore, a very interesting and very anxious city-state, but I’m not ready yet. Plus, I walk the streets with school on my mind rather than my blog.

            So maybe, dear reader, you wonder, what am I studying that’s so important that I can’t take any time for my audience? I’m at National University of Singapore in a one year masters program. In May I will be awarded an LLM (masters of law) degree. My major is Asian Legal Studies. Next school year I will go back to Pittsburgh for one more year, where I’ll finish my JD and MBA concurrently, then be ready to again enter the work force somewhere in the world.

            Why study Asian law? My brilliant plan is to become expert in Asian business so that I can specialize in trans-Pacific investment and business partnerships. Law incorporates so much more than legal rules that judges follow. Law is a component of culture, and learning the law of its proprietary culture teaches you about the people, their expectations, as well as how business is/can be done. I hope to secure a job here in Asia and stay here for a few years to add to my “Asian expert” resume.

            Why Asia? If you’ve read any business publications in the last 15 years, you may have an inclination that U.S. businesses are obsessed with expanding into Asia and especially China. I want just to have useful skills in a growing business sector.

            As part of my grand plan to become an expert in Asian business culture, I’m taking Singaporean banking law, Chinese corporate and securities law, Islamic law (where I’m writing a research paper on Islamic finance, a fast growing business sector, those in the know may know), comparative constitutional law (if you want to learn about a country’s law and people, the constitution is the best place to start – though constitutions are tough to read and understand; I’m writing a research paper on Japan), and comparative legal traditions of Asia (again, knowing countries’ law and their traditions of law is knowing the people and their culture).

            I started Mandarin lessons. Five hours a week I’m in Mandarin class. I studied some Mandarin in the U.S., but not enough that I was able to jump to an advanced class here in Singapore. Here, I’m in level I.

            So, daily, I wake up early, eat toast with coconut jam (called Kaya, a local favorite), read the Straits Times (the leading local paper, established in 1845, and the supposed government mouthpiece in this supposed illiberal democratic nation), walk to the bus stop past the spas, go to class and sit in the library and read and fall asleep. There are food stalls on campus, and almost every day I eat rice with Chinese vegetables. Other options are Indian food, noodles, Japanese food, and Western food. A Japanese guy asked me if I eat Western food every day, and honestly, I haven’t even tried it yet. The food prices are subsidized (as is my tuition!), and I spend about US$ 1.40 on a lunch of vegetables and rice – it’s almost like being in Ethiopia!

Nevertheless, mine is currently not a very exciting life, and while I do have much to convey about the culture of Singapore, I need a better grasp of the facts before I start divulging in my blog.

            My room is very small. I think that constantly transitioning between air conditioning inside and the heat outside gives dude a cold, so I rarely ever turn on my ac on at home. Plus, I have to pay the electric bill. So at home I strip to just athletic shorts, open the window, and turn on the fan. My alarm clock has a thermometer on it, and last night when I went to bed, it was 85def F in my room. The average is about 82def F. This leaves me without a good “room temperature” place to store wine, and I’m trying to learn which wines can withstand the heat and taste good warm. So far, cabernet. 

            It was tough to find an apartment where I didn’t have to live with a landlord, so I ended up moving into this apartment with four rooms full of strangers. I understand that it’s common for businessmen to keep mistresses in small apartments in Singapore, and at least one of my roommates is probably a mistress. She doesn’t speak English, so I never asked pointedly. But she has a lot of sexy shoes outside her door and entertains men on the weekends and doesn’t appear to have anywhere to go on the weekdays. The same is true of the other non-English-speaking roommate. But she’s a few years older than the other girl. (of course, either one could not be a mistress, but mistresses are more common in Asia than they are in the U.S. – it’s not such a big deal here) There’s a young Indian married couple. And there’s a Malaysian man who owns an insurance business in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He got his bachelor’s degree at UW-Madison. He’s only here every few weeks, spending the rest of his time in KL. He told me he wants to move out because the apartment has gotten too crowded (glad to be your roommate too, I said). However, on a daily basis, most everyone stays in their rooms with the door closed. I tend to leave mine open just to let air flow through. The two Chinese girls and the Indian lady don’t speak English, so even when I see my roommates, we don’t have much to say.

Singapore may have had a more sleazy reputation at points in its past. However, today in this country where so much is controlled by an intelligent and watching government, these parts of history don’t get much play. Like most good port cities, Singapore circa WWI was full of good times: gambling, prostitution, and the sailors who love them. There was also a bored European aristocracy who held fancy cocktail parties most nights, and a stream of rich Europeans sailing over and stopping by to go “oriental.” It was the imported labor (Chinese and Indians) and the Europeans-on-the-sly frequenting the prostitutes and opium dens.

I read a novel set in Singapore in the early 70s, called Saint Jack by Paul Theroux, that styled Singapore as a destination for some alcohol and prostitutes amongst soldiers looking for some r&r during the Vietnam War. (Click here for some lyrical, but not prurient, musings by Theroux on 70s Singapore.)

            Prostitution is legal to some degree in Singapore. I went to Geylang where skinny girls in short skirts stand in alleys. Legally, they’re supposed to only be in registered and government regulated brothels, I think. I was there because that neighborhood also has 24 hour hawker stalls, and I was hungry at 2am. For dessert I had durian, which is a creamy fruit that comes in a violently spiky husk and smells like rotting compost. It’s actually tasty, but it’s a taste that must be acquired. It’s now illegal to buy a prostitute under 16-years-old, and I read about the first arrest made under the new law last week. The guy had a family and job and cried in court. I think one (and maybe two) of my non-English speaking apartment mates are mistresses. You can buy alcohol 24 hours in at least some parts of Singapore. I bought beer at 4:20am from a 7-11 on a Friday morning. I think opium is probably passé, and casinos, having been outlawed for 50 years or so, will be opening again soon (but they’re much more 1990s Las Vegas than 1970s Las Vegas – meaning, very glossy, not very sleazy).

All in all, Singapore as SIN city (SIN is its airport abbreviation) doesn’t really fit with its “soft authoritarian” image, where you can be executed for possessing heroin, and bratty American teenagers get caned. (for a good, general, short, and readable overview of changing Singapore, try this)

            Last night I got off a bus in my neighborhood in front of a large Chinese grocery store. It’s a busy thoroughfare. I ran into an American guy I know from NUS, and we stopped and talked for a while on the sidewalk. A middle age Indian man, plain as day, was walking past, and he began vomiting. He was standing upright, vomiting large amounts of clear-ish liquid; he didn’t hunch over like most pukers. My friend and I were like, “?!” Then dude begins walking away, now with an unsteady swerve. About ten steps later, dude dropped his bag, hunched, put his hands on his knees, and began hacking up some remnants. A few moments earlier, it was one of the most casual pukes I’d ever seen, but now dude was feeling sick.

            This was funny because it was on a busy street in front of a busy grocery store. But I’m not sure Singapore is a true SIN city. I think Bangkok may be what sinners are looking for.

…as in, mobile phone. This was a headline in the newspaper. Singapore is famous for being very tough on crime. People here are still talking about Michael Fay, the American teenager who vandalized in Singapore and was caned for his crime, with even the President of the United States appealing for the twerp to be let off the hook. In St. Louis I used to read the police blotter in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to see where people were getting murdered. There were murders almost every day near O’Fallon Park on the Northside. In the U.S. you tell the police that someone stole your phone not because you think the police will find it - or even make an effort - but just because you want to have a police record to fill out an insurance form. But no, in Singapore, this makes the newspaper: http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Courts%2Band%2BCrime/Story/STIStory_274446.html

My (sort of crappy) apartment building. It wasn’t very easy to find an apartment that I didn’t have to share with the landlord. The rooms I initially looked at were extra rooms rented out by families and old men. Maybe if I would have looked harder and longer, I could have done better. But it’s difficult when you’re a foreigner, when you don’t know the city, you don’t know the public transportation routes, or even where your school is at, or even the terminology that’s used in apartment shopping. For instance, I live in a “private apartment;” which is different from government housing, called “HDB,” doled out by the Housing and Development Board; which is different from a “landed estate” and the elusive “condominium.”

I spent days in Ethiopia waiting for webpages to load in order to try to learn the ins and outs and meet roommates. My apartment is a little far from convenient transportation. The building is old. My room is small. My roommates are marginally friendly — they all stay in their rooms with their doors closed, but the ones who speak English say “hi” in passing. My rent could be a little less. But hey, if I wanted the perfect apartment, I’d probably still be looking, and I’m in my fourth week of school, and I have more important things to worry about than a life of comfort and convenience. The apartment is located fairly central, and I can walk to the Central Business District.

My street is very quiet (read: isolated from places I would want to go to quickly). Behind the photographer would be the street’s dead-end and past that, a freeway. I can hear the traffic now through my window as I type. My neighborhood is also lacking in the polish that Singapore is famous for. Evidence of this lack of polish would be my old building and also these slightly dilapidated buildings on the left. 

My neighborhood — and really, the locality expanding greater than my immediate neighborhood — is full of such hardware and building-supply shops. There are also auto-mechanics and poorly translated business names. I should have taken a photo of the Earnest Car Stereo Shop. This isn’t earnest as in the first name, as in Earnest Goes to Camp, this is earnest as in these stereo installers really like their profession and sincerely want to install your stereo.

  The MRT is the Mass Rapid Transit, or what I would call a subway or metro. I cannot take this to school because my school is even more isolated than my apartment. This Farrer Park station is my local station, but I have to walk past this (quite far past this, actually) to get to the bus that takes me to school. It takes one hour from my apartment door to the law library. Farrer Park is actually a park where thousands of Indian men - probably mostly here as foreign workers, or just Indians who haven’t forgotten their roots - gather to hold hands and talk on Sundays. My neighborhood is on the edge of Little India. In fact, the next MRT station after Farrer Park is Little India. 

Being so near Little India, there are many, many Indian restaurants to choose from. 

 And spas can be found all over the city. In the US we’re a little skeptical of spas as being fronts for prostitution. They are in Singapore too, where prostitution is not illegal, though street-walking is, if i understand the laws correctly. This being said, I think Asians like to get massages more than Americans, and that’s why the density of massage parlors – or spas — is so high in Singapore. I walk under this vestibule on my way to the bus, and there are more spas after this one under this same vestibule. Also, there are more light stores too.

too.      These old colonial-looking buildings can still be spotted, scattered throughout Singapore. Imagine the whole city looking like this pre-WWII. So many are torn down now for high-rise HDBs and condominiums. But many, I’m sure, will not be torn down, a developer will fix them up, the bourgeoisie will come from far away to pay high rents for them, and the locals, like Sin Yew Huat Eating House, will go out of business, unable to afford the rents. These shops are somewhat dilapidated, as generally — keeping with a theme of this blog entry — is my neighborhood.

I’m not making a judgment call on the rightness or wrongness of gentrification. Shifting populations is just the natural life of cities, and I know that many bourgeoisie would love to live in such quant, old buildings if the buildings had modern amenities like rain showers, satellite television, air conditioning, and polished stone countertops. I mean, if I could afford it, I would too. I would especially love some more Starbucks-style coffeeshops where I could get free refills and study and read. There aren’t many of these in Singapore — but this is an American piece of culture, not Singaporean. The bourgeoisie, however, are already catching this fad here in Singapore. This is why I can’t get a seat at Starbucks, and a cup of black coffee costs US$2.50, and there are no free refills.

As you can see from the outside of the Sin Yew Huat Eating House, two photos up, they have some sort of sponsorship deal with Carlsberg. And this is a sign from the inside of the eating house. If Napolean Dynamite drank a certain beer, this is probably what he would say about it. (”It took me three hours to finish the shading on your upper lip. It’s probably the best drawing I’ve ever done.”) Carlsberg and Heineken are the two most popular beers in Singapore, except for the local brew, Tiger. Tiger is just as good as either of those Europeans. And while it’s the bourgeoisie in the US who drinks those European beers, it’s the average uncle and auntie drinking them here in Singapore. Makes a pretentious American beer drinker feel not as hip. The beers drunk here are usually the tall, 633ml bottles (a bottle of wine is 750ml). 

The Hawker Center

… is a wonderful Singaporean institution. A hawker center is like a food court at a mall, only you sit in the outdoors, covered by a roof, on plastic (usually red) chairs, and the food stalls don’t have name brands. They’re little local operations with names like Lam’s Large Prawn Noodle. There will be many of these stalls in one hawker center, and each stall will have different foods or variations on similar foods, and it would take a long time - and a bit of Mandarin would help - to learn what the dishes, ingredients, styles, names, differences, and variations are.

I love spicy food, and I met a significant challenge at Lam’s Large Prawn Noodle. I ordered the hot and spicy noodles, and not realizing how spicy food can actually be, I began eating fast and filling my mouth. Once my mouth was on fire, I continued doing this because more food in the mouth cools the mouth. I was washing down this fire with a tall bottle of Tiger, but it wasn’t helping. I almost threw up. Once some cold green tea put out the flames, I began eating slower, and I finished the whole bowl, though it took two Tigers. I ordered those noodles again the next weekend and ate them with no problem. I just took them slow and careful. My chopstick skills, by the way, are good, and chopsticks and a Chinese-style broad spoon are what the hawkers give you with the food.

  Hawker center near my house. 

The other hawker center near my house. The placement of hawker centers is dense in Singapore — even more dense than the spas. This is a very normal place for a Singaporean or a Singaporean family to get dinner or from where to get take-out. Middle age people — the uncles and the aunties, uncles mainly — also like to spend the evenings and weekends talking around the tables and watching the centers’ televisions, drinking bottles of beer and/or coffee.

The hawker stall above, Madan’s Authentic Chettinaad Restaurant, may have you saying, what the heck is Chettinaad? Well, my facts are bolstered by Wikipedia, but Chettinad is a region of Tamil Nadu in southern India from where many Indians in Malacca (Malaysia) and Singapore emigrated, being sometimes many, many generations removed from India proper today. Some of the dishes served at Madan’s - like mee goreng - aren’t really Indian, as such, but are dishes invented by emmigrated Indians using local ingredients and influenced by local cuisines. Tamils are the third largest ethnic group in Singapore at 8.8% (the two largest being Chinese at 75.2% and Malays at 13.6%, all according to Wikipedia), and Tamil is an official language of Singapore, along with English, Mandarin, and Malay. You can see the loopy Tamil script in the MRT trains along with the Latin script and Chinese characters (Malay is written in Latin characters.), saying things like, “Mind the platform gap.”

Singapore is famous for its malls. There are a lot of them, all over. This one, being built in the photo above, I pass on my way to the bus to go to school. At first I thought, “Oh god, just what Singapore needs, another mall.” On second thought, the malls here are already crowded to the brim on the weekends. There are things I want to buy, but I don’t feel like braving the crowds in order to buy them. And with so many malls, Singaporean culture is written off as generic. The mall, after all, is an American invention. And it’s the same stores that any shopper could find in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, or Dubai, United Arab Emirates.  But Singapore does have its own culture. How unique and interesting is this about the hawker centers?

The Chettinaad food isn’t the only patois food of Singapore. Much of the “Chinese” food couldn’t be found in China (I’m told). Chinese immigrants have invented it here, using local ingredients and influenced by local cultures. And food that couldn’t be called Singaporean — like Hainanese chicken rice, which is from Hainan in China, brought by Hainanese immigrants — is present also. And to have the hundreds of unique, non-franchise outlets, under one roof, serving Singaporean and foreign food, as we have here in Singapore at the large hawker centers, is not something we have in the US or Europe. With their open seating they are like community centers where families and neighbors can meet over food and drinks (and you never have to worry about there not being enough choices for picky eaters). Singapore’s father, Lee Kwan Yew, is famous for saying he wouldn’t want Singapore’s society to look like the West’s, where the focus is on an individual’s liberty and not duty to his community and family. A hawker center on every block gives the community a place to commune. We barely have that in the West. To me, these hawker centers are so uniquely Singapore. They fit Singapore’s fabric and wouldn’t fit into the West’s. Every French textbook will lament the slow death of the Parisian cafe to you.

What Singapore has is a blend of cultures mixing into a unique patois that’s only similar to a few other outposts along these Straits of Indonesia and Malaysia, where the Indian Ocean meats the Pacific, and where Arab and Indian cultures et. al. met Chinese, Malay, and aboriginal et. al. What you get is a culture forming just like how any other culture in the world formed: movements of people and people adapting to their new locales. It’s how European and American cultures were created. The French people were not French since time immemorial. Singaporeans just feel self-conscious about their culture because their country is the economically richest in the region, and all eyes are on them. 

I’m in Singapore, and Singapore is not part of China. Singapore is far south of China. Singapore is a very small nation. It is an island nation, and the city of Singapore composes the entire nation that is Singapore. It’s a city-nation-state. My Singaporean friends tell me that Westerners always think Singapore is part of China. In a way, that’s not a completely uninformed guess, as China does have some special city-states that were former Western colonies – Macao and Hong Kong – and Singapore herself is a former colony city-state. And the majority of the population in Singapore is of Chinese descent, as in, part of the Chinese Diaspora. But young Singaporeans speak English very well. It is their first language. The schools here are good. That’s why I came. 

Can you picture the place now? One degree above the equator, snuggled between Malaysia and Indonesia, composed of nothing but a big island and a few smaller islands, ships with goods manufactured in China have to pass through the Strait of Malacca, near Singapore, to get to the Suez Canal and on to Europe, likewise, so does oil from Arabia bound for China, this makes it strategically placed, and this is where I am. I’ll be home for Christmas.

  There were many tourism advertisement posters posted in my offices at the Ethiopian Ministry of Trade and Industry. The women of some tribes in southern Ethiopia don’t wear tops, and tourists actually go down there to gawk. It seems too voyeuristic to me, but maybe all tourism is anyway… 

  And the lovely Ministry of Trade and Industry itself. This is the ministry in charge of Ethiopia’s bid to join the WTO, and this is where I spent my summer working. The squiggles above the Latin characters are the Ethiopic script, aka the Ge’ez script. Amharic is written in this script. 

  Ethiopian attorneys. That is indeed a picture of an Indian god behind us because we went to an Indian restaurant for my Addis Ababa farewell lunch. I had a speech planned to give about my time in Ethiopia, but my boss didn’t ask me to give a farewell speech, so the lunch was unceremonious and featured mainly me impressing everyone with how much I can overeat. 

  Ski Dubai inside the Mall of the Emirates. Behind these glass plates is a small toboggan run for kids. To get a good view of the actual ski slope, behind the toboggan run, you have to go to a restaurant. My belly was still full from Ethiopian Indian food the day before, and I was too tired to have a drink after my night spent in a chair at the Dubai airport with the hundreds of Indian and Pakistanis also sleeping at the airport, so I didn’t go to one of these restaurants. 

  Burj al Arab, the self-proclaimed 7-star hotel. It’s in the shape of a dhow, a small, traditional Arab sailing ship. This building is right on the shore of the Persian Gulf. Notice the haze in the air. That’s sand picked up by the wind. 

  Burj Dubai, the future tallest building in the world. There are at least 8 cranes in this photo, and only 3 of them are on the being-built Burj. I’d much prefer to invest in the crane business in Dubai rather than the property business. The property market is going to crash hard, yet buildings are still being built. Hundreds and hundreds of skyscrapers are being built. 

  dune bashing

  my best Tunisian friend and I in the Arabian desert 

  The historic National University of Singapore Bukit Timah campus. There is a much larger NUS campus, but the law school is at this small old one. These buildings originally housed Raffles College, a school built by the British when Singapore was a colony. Singapore was founded by the British. My professor tells me, Singapore was placed where it is in order to drive a wedge into the Dutch East India colonies in the Indonesian archipelago. The British weren’t the first European power in Asia and as a latecomer had some strategic asserting to do. 

  Such covered walkways are built into the street-level of many, many buildings in Singapore, though they come in many forms. They keep the sun and rain off walkers. Here, they also keep the sun and rain away from the windows of the buildings — in the old days there was no air conditioning, so the windows would have been opened. Now it’s icy cool inside these old college buildings, and the windows are high-tech and energy efficiently sealed. It’s hot and humid outdoors like Missouri on a hot August day, and it’s supposed to be like this all year long. There are also bursts of vicious rain showers, which I am also told will be a regular occurrence for all 12 months of the year. Singapore is one degree north of the equator.