couplets in chinatown

Dear Diane, 

When I was buying tokens in Singapore (they use these blue coins !!) to get onto the subway from Chinatown to my hotel, I saw this childish scrawl on a wall nearby. When my dad first saw it, along with its Chinese counterpart, he immediately responded by saying "The handwriting is beautiful." I didn't really know how to respond, because the handwriting feels stilted and inconsistent (even in the size of the font) but it still feels very aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Here is the original, written in Chinese by Tan Swie Hian.

I am in love with the language of the poem (although you could say it is prose):

(1) The nebula swirls with a dance around the River South;

The equator darts through a song around the sea shore.

(2) The buildings in harmony do away the remnant shadows;

The waste land of ruined gravels grows a million flowers.

A third wall said that his art / poetry / calligraphy are on display along the entire North East Subway line. From the distance, all this may feel inconsequential (it's not exactly original either), but the surprise of seeing the poem in such a chaotic place is part of the experience of public art.  I felt both overwhelmed and comforted seeing it - finding spaces for poetry to thrive is difficult, especially because for the public, poetry feels inaccessible and up in the air. But where should poetry and art be but in the public? Poetry builds connections between minds: it comforts us to know that this feeling of agonizing pain or relentless regret has been felt by somebody else before us. It reminds us that people do not totally regret life - which we need to be reminded in unattractive places such as underground subway stations - and that we can find something redemptive in the midst of faceless, likely SOULLESS strangers.

-

The "Couplets in Chinatown" talks a little bit about the history of Singapore: "The master plan of Singapore drawn up by Lt. Jackson following Raffles' recommendation shows areas were specially allocated to the various racial groups e.g. Chinese, Europeans, Chaliahs, Bagis, etc." Singapore, like the United States, was basically built by minority immigrants, although the minorities transformed into the majorities. While it was originally colonized by the British, the Chinese, Indian, British, and Malay cultures represent just how significant the immigrant population is - that is, significant to how ridiculously successful Singapore. It has the third-highest per capita income and is the fourth-leading financial power in the world, and if that's not enough, 1 in 6 Singaporeans are millionaires (the fuk???).

I've been thinking a lot about the act itself of moving or migrating, literally displacing your entire life to a new world in contrast to being a petty tourist. My most recent journal entry is about the dispersal of humans from one location to another, and that’s how I'm going to conclude this post:

I went to Gutian, [my dad's hometown], where I can't help but feel is a place where memories are being left to die and not even I, in my desperate attempt to archive every moment, can successfully document every moment. The exhausted bricks of my aunt's home probably remember more than she does, not that I'm saying my aunt doesn't cherish her memories but her house has no photographs, her living room centerpiece a tiger that was there when I visited five years ago. Perhaps being static in one place never feels worth documenting: In Factor Girls, Leslie Chang always talked about how in China, a family's history began with the migration of a person to a new place. The Chinese, at least the traditional Chinese, are characterized as static. If they can stay in the same place, they choose to: when my cousin Aveta graduated [in Scotland], she got two visas for her mom. Her mom chose to stay home anyway, saying she feared being in a new setting, lost in translation. In the 20th century, immigration from China was not a decision made but an inevitability, if you were a dissident from China. Now, Chinese billionaires / millionaires choose to leave China, as do students who study abroad. Chinese girls migrate to cities to find better work in factories, hoping to move up the work status ladder. These are all active decisions they make and I think this change is important to the momentum toward modernism China has been desperately trying to achieve. In Japan, people were previously tied to their land, their heritage land - when a samarai was ousted or in danger, he would always return to the homeland of his ancestors. The Japanese bakufu (gov't) had to instate laws to address this obsession with the past to remove ties that prevented people from migrating to industrial cities.

Movement is important. As comforting as stability is, there is no true fulfillment from standing water. "Expect poison from standing water." [william blake]. 

Love,

Elina

P.S. OUR FIRST ENTRY !!!!! tHIS is kind of a big deal get out the champagne.