Night falls from the City

"God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day." So declared Genesis 1:4-5. Fridays in big cities (Saturdays too, for that matter) seem exempt. There are two ways to look at it: Friday night being a seamless extension of the day, or that Friday itself begins when it gets dark. When the 7th annual Singapore Night Festival comes around, the march of time is suspended until Sunday morning.

I have never really been a festival kind of person, nor Mary - we've always preferred more permanent, crowd-free installations. Like waterfalls. Hang on, I take that back. In this time of climate change you can never be sure even of the shapes of continents. But I do admit sometimes we're missing out. The beauty of life is the beauty of moments - fleeting and forgotten if we aren't careful.

It took me 40 minutes to travel the short distance between office and Plaza Singapura where we arranged to meet. Bus 65 came, disgorged some commuters, refused to take on any and moved on. I barely made it on Bus 175, and amidst glacial traffic managed half a chapter en route to Dhoby Ghaut. Such was the throng at Plaza Singapura that queues outside many eateries endured well past eight. It was either the draw of the Night Festival, or the dross of my unschooled bumpkin ways.

The festival grounds were quite extensive. The action started at the School of the Arts (SOTA), and extended towards both Queen Street in the east and Armenian Street towards the west. We skirted the heart of the festivities on the Singapore Management University (SMU) and National Museum grounds, where the throngs were thickest, and only scratched the surface with three pieces - at SOTA, the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and the Armenian Church.

Below: Sticking umbrellas together to form sheltered, albeit rather makeshift, resting places was a brilliant idea. The whole idea was to draw attention to the SOTA steps as a place where people could gather, linger, catch their breaths and watch the world go by. But we could do none of the above, and were soon edged on by an endless stream of camera-touting visitors (very much like us, I must add).

Below: the elegant facade of the Singapore Art Museum was the canvas for the "Spirit of Nature" lightshow. Thus with light do we not only banish night, but also adorn that which by day is concealed under a veil of varnished white, sometimes blinding, sometimes withering.

Below: the Armenian Church hosted two installations. The first was Taegon Kim's "Dresses of Memory", spun from a total of some 40 kilometres of fibre-optic cable. These were islands of brilliance amidst the darkness in the church yard, switching from red to blue to green. It would surely be electrifying to try these on.

Below: the second piece in the Armenian Church was ALSOS*, by the French duo Grégory Lasserre and Anaïs met den Ancxt. Mary had a lot of fun shining her torch at the flowers amongst the branches. These emitted sounds the type of which were dependent on the intensity of the light shone on it. It would have been more poetic, and fitting for the haunting setting beneath the church portico, had the sounds elicited by curious and intrigued visitors even vaguely resemble a coherent tune. But I guess that is what one would call art.

We were also able to accord these venues more than the perfunctory glances on any other days. European Town, as the Bras Basah precinct came to be known in the 1822 Jackson Plan (Raffles Town Plan), was set centrally between Kampong Glam (for the Malays and Arabs) to the east and Chinese Kampong (today's Chinatown) and Kampong Chulia (all that remains today is Chulia Street north of Raffles Place) to the west. As a result this was also where the first churches (the oldest being Armenian Church, completed 1835) and Christian schools (the Catholic institutions of what later came to be known as SJI and the Convent of Holy Infant Jesus) were established in the first half of the nineteenth century. Today these echoes from a different world live on in what has been called the Museum Planning Area, an area set aside to go our our cultural heritage. Embalmed? Or restored? That will depend on whether one is on the side of heritage, or modernity.

Above, from top to bottom: the SOTA steps with its leafy portico of fern-covered colonnades; the classical elegance of the SAM, formerly St Joseph's Institution, first completed in 1867; and the austerity of the Armenian Church, completed in 1835.

Childhood Paths

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. So began L.B. Hartley's epochic novel on childhood, published at mid-century in 1953. I could have been writing a similar book, except for two rather glaring differences - I'm flattering myself a great deal, and I can no longer speak of my early years as being in the same century.

It is a lot simpler, however, to visit the places where our pasts unfolded, than it is to revisit the past altogether. Mary and I did just that today, since in any case we wanted to take a walk.

Below: memory lane, first door from the left was Ah Ma's before she moved away and the unit at the end of the corridor was ours.

I spent the first of my prancing years in the Jalan Minyak (Oil Street in Malay) vicinity, literally on a little hill known as York Hill. Ah Ma (my maternal grandmother) always referred to the place in Hokkien as Ho Hong Teng (Teng here is short for hilltop). According to my parents, there was once a factory by the same name situated at that very spot. The street got its name from a soy sauce factory that operated in the area before the flats were built.

A gently-sloping road, the only way in and out for vehicles, led southwards towards Pearl Hill, Outram and Chinatown beyond. The north slope, facing Robertson Quay and Jalan Muhammad Sultan, was steeper and today remains clad in luxuriant vegetation. Pythons were not an uncommon sight then for my paternal family in their ground floor flat.

Below: the view north from the Jalan Kukoh estate, and the first time I've taken a lift to the top floor in all my years there; sometimes on weekends my parents would ask if I'd like to visit Daimaru, which was what I knew Liang Court by. Yaohan was Plaza Singapura (where we hung out as a family quite often too), and Sogo was Raffles City.

Below: more familiar views from Block 6 where I grew up. Landmark Tower (leftmost) has always been a pun, Pearl Bank Apartments (centre) always resembled a distant castle on a distant horizon and the pink and white building in front of Pearl Bank wasn't always a spruced-up hotel - it used to be my Dad's primary school (though he was actually schooled in the older compound on the other side of the hill).

Both Dad's (Block 4) and Mum's (Block 6) families moved in when the estate was completed in 1964. There they went to school (at the nearby Outram Secondary School), met, dated and got married. My parents rented a two-room flat in Block 6, on the same level as my maternal grandparents' flat. It meant, until 1990 when we moved away, I had very convenient Chinese New Years.

Below: Mary posing in front of my the flat where Dad grew up; the main gate of Outram Secondary School used to be up the road and to the left - a long uphill slog for those aiming to beat the bell.

I remember my kindergarten days at the Kreta Ayer People's Action Part Community Foundation (PCF) vividly. Mornings in school would be followed by afternoons at Ah Ma's. Lunch would be either buttered slices of Gardenia or plain Jacob's crackers, both liberally dunked in Milo before consumption. This would be served at half past three to coincide with the reruns on Channel 8 (then Singapore Broadcasting Corporation) of its 1980s drama series. The most memorable was 雾锁南洋 (The Awakening, starring a dashing Huang Wenyong and a lithe Xiang Yun). At five, the almost daily battle for the television began when Ah Gong (my maternal grandfather) returned from work (he sold fruits at Chinatown) - he wanted his Cantonese drama and I my cartoons. My victories depended on the vigour of Ah Ma's intervention.

On some evenings Ah Gong would bring me downstairs, where I would sometimes play with the other children in the neighbourhood on the little slope between Blocks 6 and 5. On other evenings I would stagger with my bucket of Duplo over to my neighbour's flat (this couple whose three sons were between nearly ten years older than me and who treated me like their own), where I would build spaceships in Rastafarian colours (I only had red, yellow, green and blue bricks). The time to get back home was announced at six with the proclamation over Chinese radio of the winning lottery numbers. If my parents were held up at work, I would create bunkers in my grandparents' bedroom with pillows and blankets and Ah Ma would tell me about the time the sirens signalled the arrival of Japanese bombers.

Things, predictably, are no longer the same. Half the slope between Blocks 6 and 5 has been removed to accommodate an electrical substation. We chatted briefly with Jessica, who lives now with her children and grandchildren in the flat once occupied by my family. "I know who you are, I moved here in 1991!" was her startling response when I introduced myself. She then went on to an even more startling revelation. "This place was a bit dirty, but we pray to Jesus and all is well now." It was a good thing we didn't know, or feel, a thing about it. I also learnt from Jessica that my neighbour next door had already moved away for two or three years already. She would have been that last link to my Jalan Minyak years.

Below: Mum was once robbed on this flight of stairs between Blocks 2 and 4, before I was born. The shelter is new, as are the evenly-spaced steps, which used to be cracked and narrow. Coming and going always felt like walking through an enchanted forest to get to Ah Ma's, sans fruit basket and bold fashion statement. The tall, dark trees - one of which once housed a little red Taoist shrine - and their drooping vines have since been removed. As has the innocent sense of adventure proffered by nocturnal passage.

Below: a squirrel enjoying his buah long long. Ah Gong used to take me on these occasional foraging trips where we'll pick up all the ripe fruits that have fallen to ground. Sometimes, he wields a stick (formidably, I must add) and would throw these at the fruits still hanging from the branches and which were on the verge of ripening.

Below: a view of the Chin Swee tunnel as we cross Chin Swee Road (what we told taxi drivers, because nobody knew where Jalan Minyak was) towards Pearl Hill. I remember standing on the brand-new, gravelly road on the day the tunnel opened with Auntie Ah Tiu, my neighbour who indulged my Duplo fantasies. I also remember waving to a passing bus full of friendly old folks who waved back, as we waited in vain for the President to drive by.

Above: Pearl Bank Apartments - it took me several years to learn that people actually lived there.

I had my first pre-school experience at Lower Delta Road, not very far from my office in Grange Road today. Some mornings my grandfather would carry me in his arms to the bus stop along Havelock Road, where a handful of buses took me to school. If it rained my grandmother was on hand with an umbrella. Today, the path all the way to Block 6 is completely sheltered, and the steep, uncertain steps repaved. But nothing compared to the shelter of childhood days, as eternal as they were ethereal.

Ten Trail Thrills on Gunung Lambak

After the unsuccessful attempt at climbing Gunung Arong about a month ago, we spared no efforts in ensuring our trip upcountry would not be in vain once more. Our destination this time was the town of Kluang, 110 kilometres north of Johor Bahru and an hour and a half's journey in smooth traffic conditions using the North-South Highway along the west coast.

Below: not in vain, posing atop Gunung Milestone

Kluang was established in 1915 as an administrative centre for the central Johor region. Rail tracks were laid linking the town northwards to Kuala Lumpur, administrative capital of the Federated Malay States and southwards to the bustling port-city of Singapore. Trains a century ago would have transported both workers and produce to and from the oil palm and rubber estates in the area. Today, they bring in tourists from both Singapore and other parts of Malaysia keen to get a glimpse of small-town Malaysia.

We opted for the familiar, scenic, albeit longer and roundabout, eastern approach which we used the last time round to get to Mersing. A quick breakfast at the famed Kluang Railway Coffee, where the caffeine junkies in our midst raved about the unique flavoured of the coffee on offer, primed us for the planned ascent of the 510-metre Gunung Lambak. We share ten moments which made the experience a memorable one.

1. Values in Action, Kluang

We started our hike at about the same time as Mr Zhong, who lives in Kluang. As we paused by the information board at the trail head to size the hill up, Mr Zhong, tongs and plastic bag in hand, strode in purposefully and started picking up every piece of litter within sight. And his keen eyes missed nothing. He does this every day, all the way up to 半山 (halfway up the hill), which we took some huffing and puffing to reach. We have to set a good example for our young, he declared, we have to be responsible for our own immediate environment. He declined when asked if we could take a photograph of him.

2. Gunung Milestone

Mary and I may have made a mountain of a molehill nearly five weeks ago, but there is no underplaying the achievement of making it up Gunung Lambak after a three-hour slog. It was our first successful ascent as a group, and for Mary and I our first as a couple. (Mary requested that I qualify this: that this is the first hill/mountain we have climbed on foot from start to end.) There is hope for December, when Mary and I will attempt the volcanoes of El Salvador and Guatemala.

3. Trail thrills

Mercifully, much of the trail to the summit passed under forest shade. The quickest, most direct trail up started as an innocuous concrete path. This gave out after ten minutes, after which it became an unbroken upward slog on steps cut into stone and earth, two brief intervening rest points notwithstanding. On the lower flanks of the hill some of these were still buttressed by creaking wooden planks and hemmed in by shaky iron hand-rails. As the terrain steepened surer ground grew narrower and we had to scramble over looser soil on some stretches. Ropes were installed alongside the trail, so that both hands and legs were required to haul ourselves summitwards.

At the top, amidst the buzzing of dragonflies in the mid-day Malayan sun, we basked in our own self-declared glory. There was to be no visual reward for our iron-willed tenacity, no inspiring vistas of shadowy serrated ridges on the horizons. There was only the pompous self-congratulation of the deluded masochist, the inflated satisfaction of taking in the one clear vantage point to the west, marred as it was by poor visibility - those faint bluish hills which we claim as a prize for our unnecessary toil.

4. Nature's embroidery

The steep terrain gave us many opportunities, as we panted between bouts of grueling exertion, to admire the living raiment of green and brown which clothed the hillside - a sylvan latticework of sprawling root and trailing branch, testimony of the asymmetrical beauty of Nature.

5. Comic camaraderie

There was no lack of laughter all along the way, as we battled both fatigue and gravity. We had all our travel companions to thank for this. Mary was our walking jukebox. It being National Day back home too, she proffered a looping medley of incomplete verses from Home, Count on me Singapore and One people one nation one Singapore. And then we had the long-running incentive wrangle between Allan and Cindy, born of a case of contentious orthography - Allan spelt carrot, Cindy spelt carat. No prizes for guessing who prevailed.

6. The delusion of distance

Are we there yet? The eternally unanswerable, almost existential, question on many hikers' minds. Jayson and I attempted to do so, nonetheless, when Cindy asked. Our standard responses of ten minutes more and Jayson's almost there drew more questions however, most of it almost vitriolic.

Below: the only pH scale which matters, ranging from "almost there" on one end to "ten minutes" more on the other.

7. Home abroad

There is nothing like meeting a compatriot when you least expect it. While Lambak is a popular destination for Singaporean hikers, we hardly expected to meet a fellow Singaporean at the summit at nearly three in the afternoon. Our compatriot (we chatted happily but didn't ask his name), who arrived ahead of his companions, hailed from Bedok and bussed it from Singapore via Larkin to Kluang. Dressed simply in a sleeveless 42.195km Finisher T-shirt, shorts and running shoes, he - glistening arms and toned calves all - easily outshone us with our long sleeves, camouflage long trousers, mosquito patches and cans of Off repellant.

On the way down we entered into another conversation with a white-haired (very sprightly) elderly Malaysian Chinese man who, surprisingly, wished us Happy National Day on our way down. It could be that he had a long memory, although later he shared that he learnt this off the Singaporean channels on air locally. As a Singaporean and a historian, it was a poignant moment. Our circumstances, history and citizenship could have been very different. There is no denying the shared heritage between both our countries. It is the political lines on a map which matter most, but at the same time they hardly do, too.

8. Roots

As we neared the summit, I urged my companions not to 功亏一篑 (a Chinese proverb that means to fall short of success for want of a final effort). You pass your Chinese, Cindy exclaimed in response. Perhaps it was uttered more in disbelief than in praise. Earlier, Mr Zhong had made a similar remark. 你的中文讲的不错 (literally translated as your spoken Chinese is not bad). I was pleased, of course. And needless to say, I was also aware of my own fluency, or lack thereof, in Chinese.

It encapsulates the very different directions taken by the plural societies left behind by the British on both sides of the Straits of Johor. In Singapore a common multiethnic political identity sometimes loosely masquerades as a common cultural identity, albeit acknowledged as nascent and tenuous. On the other hand, lacking Singapore's enforceable centralism, Malaysian communities have been refracted through a very different political prism into a wider spectrum ranging from the cosmopolitan to the insular.

Here, Robert Kaplan's description of both the Malaysian and Singaporean Chinese communities in his recent Asia's Cauldron (although doubtless a sweeping generalisation) deserves some consideration. According to Kaplan, compared to the many Chinese communities the world over, amongst them China's post-Maoist communities, Singapore's Westernised Chinese and Philippines's Chinese mestizos, the Malaysian Chinese have managed most successfully to retain their culture.

Here at the foot of Gunung Lambak was the classic post-colonial encounter, an incongruence further emphasized when Mary felt compelled to confirm: 他的中文已经算是很烂了 (his actually isn't considered fluent at all).

Below: smugness at my own command of Chinese, actually a makeshift shopfront at the trail head selling snacks and drinks.

9. Climate change

God is good. Prayer is potent. Ours for good weather was heeded emphatically. All day, it was neither too sunny to torment nor too cloudy to disappoint. The turn in the weather was perfectly timed too - claps of thunder just as we freshened up post-hike.

10. Highway to civilisation

My favourite part of the whole experience was going up Lambak, but the most pleasurable sentiment came from finally getting into the car and heading back to civilisation. This came from the certain knowledge of food in hunger and rest in weariness, and all in good company. As I pondered these thoughts on the way out in the car, I quipped that wah eh kah nng liao (in Hokkien, my legs are numb).

Allan's pithy, almost emotionless, response? Wah eh kah zee liao (my legs are broken).