Recycling in Singapore

“Why”, I wondered out loud to students after class one Friday, “Given all of the Westernish things and processes I see all around Singapore, like high end shopping malls, air conditioning everywhere, an incredible public transportation system…and the city is so clean…why don’t I see blue boxes everywhere, why not much evidence of recycling?”

“Ma’am, maybe that’s because you don’t know where to look.”

Truer words…

Karung guni is the local term for the occupational category “recycler.” But its roots are not so much a reflection of the modern sensibilities of environmental friendliness and avid recycling, as the time-honored tradition of wasting nothing...absolutely nothing.

My story about recycling starts, oddly enough, with bicycle horns. Almost everyone knows my quirky and VERY strong aversion to repetitive noise, accompanied by my inability to concentrate on anything else whenever it occurs. Noise doesn't bother me, even lots of it, even if it is loud and constant--as long as it is not rhythmic. Rhythmic repetitive noise that I find appealing (music) is distracting or absorbing, depending on what else I have going on—because I am transported by music, I can’t listen to music and work simultaneously.

Volume doesn't matter much. It's rhythm. So the up and down cadence of conversation doesn't count. Laughter and chit chat don't either. TV noise to me is like white noise for other people, I can tune it out entirely, no matter how much or how loud (as long as it's not a musical peformance). But the drumming of fingers, tapping of pencils, ringing of bells...those patterned repetitive sequences of noise are different. Repetitive noise in Debiworld (a strange place, for sure) is what I call the same sound repeated over and over and over...with a rhythm that I notice. All kinds of rhythm preoccupy, overwhelming my consciousness so that I can’t really focus on anything but the repeated sound.

I have two strategies for dealing with repetitive noise. When I can, I remove myself from its source. Alternatively, I stop it at its source. Otherwise, I get anxious first, and then cranky. I trace my aversion to repetitive noise to the summer my sister Nancy repeated everything I said everything I said everything I said everything I said. So, maybe it is no surprise that non-musical repetitive noise makes me just the tiniest bit crazy and abundantly hostile to its source. The same way I felt about Nancy that summer I thought would never end.

The first time I heard the repeated bleats of a bicycle horn in the parking lot outside my building here, I obviously noticed, but didn’t investigate. Just kids playing on bikes I figured (that was before I realized that I seldom ever saw kids on bikes—too hot to zip around on bikes for fun). The noise would move away as the kids rode off. Right. It stopped, no biggie.

The next time the horn started bleating, I felt a bit cranky. A second interruption. Why were they back? Don’t these kids have homework to do or someplace else to go? Don’t they know it is rude to disturb neighbors? Someone might be trying to work. Perhaps a bit overly focused on moi, but the amount and duration of noise did make it seem very inconsiderate. Couldn't they just holler insults and dirty words at each other like regular little boys (I was sure they were little boys)? I can handle that! It was the damn horn, over and over again. Grrrr. I gritted my teeth. But by the time I got to the window to see what was going on, the kids and the horn had disappeared, so the distraction was short lived and tolerable.

But the third time in a couple of hours that the horn interrupted my train of thought, I WAS really annoyed. I felt sure the offenders were probably members of an unruly gang of eight-year-old boys obliviously tooting the horn repeatedly, while I was trying to write. Or maybe it is just one kid who can't keep his hands off his horn. Regardless, enough was enough. Time to resolve the repetitive noise problem; strategies swirl in my head.

I know. If parents won’t stop the kid on the bike with a horn, maybe I can. I’ll just step outside and glare at the culprit(s). All of them will see the icy gaze of the (just slightly) crazy ang moh who is trying to work, and understand that means the noise should stop. Now. The glare will strike fear and respect in tiny hearts. They will freeze (figuratively, this is Singapore) in their tracks and decide the best strategies are either to just quit with the noise or take their horn(s) and their damn little bicycles elsewhere. I could stop this noise pollution in a hurry with one weedy look, I figured, no challenge for me.

I headed for the door, steeling myself to deliver the glare as convincingly as I could. So imagine my surprise when I saw that single, older, weather-beaten man pacing through the parking lot, squeezing the rubber ball of his hand-held horn as if his life depended on it. He was karung guni, though I didn’t know it then. To me, he was just a guy who made so much distracting noise that I wanted him gone. With no baskets, boxes or bags, he wasn't trying to sell anything, I reasoned. He just had a noisy horn. My neighbors did not seem enraged at the din (at least, I didn’t see anyone else outside of their flats glaring balefully like me). He must be an accepted figure, even if his exact role was a mystery. Maybe he was mentally retarded or ill or otherwise unusual (given his obsession with the horn), but nonetheless graciously tolerated by my neighbors (now I was feeling just a tad ashamed at my impatience). Or maybe his presence had purpose, just not one I could discern. Hmmmm. A man wandering around parking lots, relentlessly squeezing a horn, hollering every so often. I've encountered men like that before (sans horn) and they sometimes make me nervous. No obvious social interactions, people mostly just ignored him (although somewhat less studiously than they ignored me). He seemed to be part of Boundary Ville's landscape. I tried to settle back into cultural sensitivity mode. Especially since the imagined repetitive noise problem involving a pack of bratty little boys was not the REAL problem, I lacked a strategy for dealing with it. I wasn't about to try to confiscate the horn; an attempted stare down didn't seem like the smartest move either. My best bet was a hasty retreat back into the flat and fervent hope that this was just a one day nuisance.

Hah. Karung guni patrol HDB estates like mine every day. I don’t know if each has designated territory, or whether any place is fair game. I’ve seen a pretty regular cast of characters here. One guy has an open blue truck, another has an enclosed white panel truck, and a third fellow comes by bicycle (but still carries the offending horn in his hand!) with a big box mounted on the back. They park and walk up and down the parking lots outside the buildings, sounding their horns continuously as they hope to be beckoned flats above. Occasionally, they shout something (Mandarin or Malay, possibly in response to a face in a window) designating what particular type of stuff they're looking for (furniture, paper, electronics).

Karung guni provide door-to-door removal services, taking other people’s unwanted items (from bundled newspapers, to old furniture, electronic items [highly prized], plastic bags, worn out clothes, just about anything except wet household waste) and recycling that into other commercially useful stuff. They are the 21st century equivalent to Dickensian “rag and bones” men who patrolled the streets and lanes of historic England with their carts (most other countries too, I'm sure, but this is a nod to British colonialism here) collecting unwanted debris and giving it a useful second life. With not an iota of usefulness left in original states, rags and bones could be rendered down into paper and glue...the historical form of recycling before environmentalism became fashionable and recycling reached the status of a tangible symbol of one's green bona fides.

In Singapore, the useful second life which provides the karung guni’s living (and some are rumored to become quite wealthy) unfolds in a surprisingly 21st century way, given the more typical low tech direct approach to soliciting materials that I’ve observed. Usually, apartment owners holler down that they have stuff they want to give (or sometimes, sell)to the karung guni. But when someone moves flats, a karung guni can be summonsed, not from the parking lot, but from a website!

They trundle hand trucks up the stairs and elevators of high-rise buildings and haul (almost invariably) heavy stuff away. Sometimes karung guni buy unwanted items, but more often they provide convenient disposal of stuff with just enough eventual value to make hauling it downstairs worthwhile. Recycling by karung guni could involve selling hundreds of used plastic bags to a merchant at a flea market for pennies, auctioning something on eBay for thousands, stripping down electronics for component parts, or selling a bundle of newspapers to the paper industry.

They appear regularly, but not like clockwork. A single day may bring several visits by one guy, visits by several different guys, or maybe just one visit by a single karung guni. The predictable patterns are accompanying noise, their absence amidst the monsoon, and magical reappearance the second the rain stops. There is a supply/demand cycle, I'm sure, that I'll see once I watch over a longer period. For instance, the end of Ramadan was a peak in demand, with a veritible blitzkrieg of karung guni descending on Boundary Ville, as Muslim neighbors did annual housecleaning and replaced worn out items with new goods. It was karung guni field day, convened by a symphony of horns. The eventual cargo was an improbably amalgam of stuff, often in states so old and in such disrepair that imagining possible future value draws a blank--but the karung guni know their market, for sure.

I’ve since often watched as the karung guni load the motley assortment of booty coaxed from my HDB neighbors with their siren song of horns. They then head off to other parking lots in another housing estate, drawn magnetically towards the unknown potential of someone else’s recyclables. There they will repeat their ritual of bleating horns, faces hopefully upturned and the hard work of humping loads of other people's detrius up and down stairs and onto waiting trucks. Karung guni are one reason that Singapore is so clean

They are also the reason, as my students explained that Friday afternoon, that I failed to grasp the extent of local recycling. I expected to see some variant of high profile blue plastic recycle boxes that are ubiquitous in the U.S. and U.K. Singapore's recycling culture, of course, was there all along, I just didn’t know where to look...or how to listen. What I finally discoverd in lieu of seeing the expected blue boxes was hearing the much more exotic karung guni horns, now subsided into just another of the interestingly different parts of my everyday life in Singapore.

I hardly even notice the repetitive noise any more.

Getting around

I love cities that inspire walking because there’s actually appealing destinations I can reach as a pedestrian. For me, walking in circles because it is good for me is mind-numbingly boring. I’m too task-oriented for that—walking is a means to an end, not an end in itself—if I get exercise as a side effect for going somewhere, fine. But that’s not why I walk; I walk to get there.

Singapore has plenty of destinations within easy walking distance under “normal” (for me, flat terrain and climate-wise) circumstances—within a mile or two of wherever I start. But the heat and humidity here often make walking distinctly unpleasant. Which is why I wax poetic about Singapore’s public transportation system.

Public transportation often makes me happy (I even love it in London, where everyone complains), so it’s no surprise that public transportation here makes me nearly giddy. Within 500 yards of my flat are eight bus stops. Less than 8 minutes' stroll is the Serangoon Station on the new Circle subway line. That's my local stop, open (along with four others) six months ahead of schedule. The Circle line is advertised to be complete in 2011, though as efficient as the first phase of construction was, I bet it won’t open on schedule, it will open early.

Plan A, when I first arrived, was to ride a unique bus route every day. I'd begin with the lowest bus route number and work up to the highest. This vision of observing and learning about a city and its inhabitants by riding buses in numerical order from terminus to terminus was not (sadly) my original idea. I read a column written by a London bus rider who started at lowest numbered London bus and is working his way through all of London’s varied routes. I hoped to emulate his systematic approach and dedication (and glean similar insights about life) in Singapore.

Like many plans hatched in the abstract, mine wasn’t very practical. Despite its geographic compactness and smaller population, Singapore has HUNDREDS upon hundreds of bus routes, many more than in London. I did not know that when I arrived (and presumed there'd be fewer), but I sure know it now. That’s part of the charm of getting around, why people can live within an easy few minutes’ walk to half a dozen bus stops and subway stations.

Plan A couldn't be done in semester. Not even if I devoted most of my time to it--I'd have to ride at least 3 or 4 entire bus routes every single day--and many bus lines here take 1.5 to 2 hours, terminus to terminus, except during rush hours (7 am-9 am, and 5 pm to 9 pm) when it can take much longer. There aren't enough hours in the day, or enough days, period,to do that. So I've devised a substitute, homage with a twist to my bus riding hero. It is an adventure (I hope it is an adventure) that I can feasibly accomplish if I'm persistent. It would be nice to FINISH ONE THING.

Instead chronic bus riding, Plan B will put me in touch with my inner mole (or maybe inner groundhog?). Plan B is to ride every subway line start to finish in the next two months. This will be MUCH easier than riding hundreds of buses, since there are really only 3.5 subway lines [the Circle line is only 5 stops long so far, hardly even .5 of a subway line] covering much of the island. To keep this in a spirit that parallels the twin potential for discovery and boredom that bus riding provides, I have added my own twist to what will count for me in terms of riding and observing on public transportation. Unlike my bus-riding hero, who merely observes, I will also act. I will pop above ground at every subway stop for at least ten minutes of surface walking around the vicinity of each station. I will also talk to at least one person encountered during each stop, attempting something beyond just ordering kopi and kava or asking directions. Stops don't count without both surface time and chatter. That way, maybe I’ll get a flavor for some of Singapore's distinctive neighborhoods while my democratic approach offers potential to surprise/annoy/enchant innocent bystanders all over the island. Why limit my exposure to funeral attendees and hell god birthday celebrants and laundry spectators?

Despite being a single city-state, my impression so far is that Singapore is more accurately a collection of (not so) small towns, each with distinctive flavors. Will this impression hold up in the light of more systematic evidence?

Counting each stop along each line, I come up with about 75 stops altogether (it would be exciting if a more new Circle line stops open before I leave).

Green Line: East West Line = 31 stops
Red Line: North South Line = 24 stops
Purple Line: North East Line = 15 stops (including one in my neighborhood)
Orange Line: Circle Line = 5 stops open (including one in my neighborhood)

Some stops interchange with other lines, so they were counted twice. There are probably really only 60ish unique stops, making an average of one stop per day for the next two months all I need for my plan to work. Maybe I’ll lavish my interchange stops with some extra attention to compensate for double counting them; maybe twice as long above ground, or pestering more of the local people? I’ll avoid them until I have a strategy I can apply to all interchanges. And of course, I’m going to be more efficient than one stop per excursion/day most of the time. After all, imbibing the cultural practices of Singapore--where efficiency matters most--creates pressure to be efficient myself. Having a full time job while I’m here also puts pretty hefty constraints on free time, especially since my home-to-work route uses buses, not subways. So for most outings, I’ll try to multi-task and knock off more than one stop at a time.

Later this afternoon I’m heading downtown at the Carleton Hotel to help recruit more students for UB Singapore. Seems like a perfect opportunity embark on Plan B. I’ll get a stop or two under my belt today.

Little known facts about laundry

My flat came with some interesting domestic tools: one very long flexible hose attached to my shower. Six colorful 10-foot bamboo poles suspended in a pole rack on the ceiling. A broom with a 6 foot handle.

On the way to see my apartment for the first time, we had driven past several apartment buildings where laundry was hung outside on bamboo poles. From a distance, the laundry hanging outside looks like flags for some kind of festival. But up close, it just looks like laundry.

Having half a dozen drying poles in my flat made perfect sense. Every day (or every part of every day that is not raining) is laundry day, so I'd put them to good use. Anyway, I understood the bamboo poles were necessary, but why (since Singaporeans tend not to be very tall) would anyone need a REALLY long broom? And in a 4 foot by 4foot bathroom in a tiny apartment, why 15 feet of hose?

To prepare the roof for laundry, obviously.

Little known facts about laundry: unless the roof beneath it is clean, neither would the clothes I'd hung out to dry be very clean, since they were (barely, not even sometimes) suspended above the roof. That was clear the first time I tried to hang 30 or 40 pounds of dripping clothes out the kitchen window and it lapped up the dirt from the roof. Long handled broom puzzle solved: I've swept off used tissues, banana peels/leaves, other people's laundry (higher floors), plastic bags, and (yuck) one dead bird. That's when I realized why the hose--it reaches out the kitchen window to the roof. Really, stuff decays very quickly. Gotta get the bird gunk off of the roof before the laundry goes out.

A brand new, front-loading washer does a great job combined with nature's dryer (very environmentally friendly), air and a bamboo pole.
Almost every apartment has a series of six metal tubes embedded about a foot apart into the concrete outside, just beneath kitchen window. Each of the embedded tubes has a removable metal cap (furthest away), attached by a string or piece of wire (foreground). "Be sure to put those back every time," Bee warned when she showed me the caps, "Health Department gets after you if you don't...only takes three days to hatch mosquitos...get dengue fever..." I've had an irrational fear of dengue fever since I've known I was coming here. Laundry is serious business here, as the scolding for dripping laundry demonstrates.
Messing with the Health Department might get me caned or quarantined. And those tubes could obviously catch and keep water if uncapped, so it has taken no reminder for me to replace the caps drying poles come with.

A small plastic tool ends in a crook that helps coax the bamboo poles out of their ceiling rack. Specially designed clothespegs (not enough for each piece of laundry, but enough I figured) are big enough to span the girth of the bamboo pole. Plus, you can thread clothes onto poles, right through the sleeves of shirts, the straps of bras, the legs of panties...only a few things actually need pegs. It is really just a matter of loading the wet clothes on the pole, sticking the bamboo and hanging it out to dry.

Sounds easy.

Not necessarily.

Little known facts about laundry: putting 20 or 30 pounds of wet stuff on a thin stick, pushing the stick as far away from your body as you can (you have to get it out the window and past the end of the tube that secures it) and then having the dexterity to manoeuver it back towards you until it is seated securely into its holder isn't as easy as it might appear at first blush.

Singapore laundry must have its own spatial culture. People who learn to launder in Singapore probably have a knack for the kinesthetic ballet that the body needs to move and leverage itself to stay upright inside a building while finagling the laundry out. Lucky for me that I am decidedly NOT a waiflike guest worker. Otherwise, on Day 1, I'd have been out of that window like a shot. The windowsill is a fulcrum of sorts and wet clothes a dandy counterweight...well, you get the picture.

Once I got past the false start of hanging wet clothes above a dirty roof I thought I had clear sailing...until I got the pole full of wet clothes out the window a second time only to realize I'd not yet removed the cap from the tube that secures the pole. Holding onto a pole full of wet laundry is NOT a single-handed job (an insight I should have remembered), so the pole gets hauled back into the kitchen, cap removed, and out it goes again. Success! I finally had an entire bamboo pole full of laundry hanging outside, securely attached to the building by its tube.
That's when the air started moving, helpfully I presumed. Kid memories floated back of my mom as she took clothes out of the basket and pinned them to the line. She would comment "it's a (not very) good drying day," depending on her calculus of the quality of the sun and wind and humidity. And of course, she was talking about cold Canadian air applied to her clotheslines full of laundry, not the turgid climate of Singapore.

Even when it is moving, you can't really call hot air here a breeze. Breeze implies something cool and refreshing. Here, it is just hot air that moves, even if sometimes it moves quite a lot. And it did move a lot that first laundry day.

Little know facts about laundry: Panties, confronted with air moving at great enough velocity, puff up. After ballooning considerably (especially if not secured due to shortage of clothespegs) they can move of their own volition. Despite being threaded onto a pole, if panties happen to be simultaneously (a) at the wrong end, (b) unsecured, and (c) full of hot air, they can animate so vigorously that they fly off their bamboo pole at a pretty good rate of knots, sometimes even ending up on the far side of the parking lot. I know this. I've seen it happen.

Good thing I packed extra panties. I haven't lost any clothes since.

Drying bed linens, even after I got the knack of most other stuff, remained problematic. The poles weren't quite high enough to suspend sheets fully above the roof. Despite hosing and sweeping, I didn't love wet sheets sliding over the red roof below. What to do? I decided that spreading the queen sized duvet cover across two poles, about an arms length apart, would take up enough slack to eliminate drag. Good concept, even if not such great execution.

You may have seen this coming, I did not. Now, instead of the tricky manoeuver of hanging 20 pounds of wet clothes out a window on stick gripped tightly in both hands, I would instead attempt hanging 40 pounds of unweildy wet sheets spread over two sticks, one in each hand. Picture me, bride of Frakenstein-like, lurching towards the open kitchen window, bamboo poles wobbling and arms akimbo, quivering from the weight and effort of keeping the sheets off the floor...

I only got the damn poles half way out the window, before I lost control and got stuck. Couldn't get them in, couldn't get them out. If I let go of the poles, I worried that the sheets would sail off into the parking lot aka panty heaven. So there I was, for an eternity (okay, only a minute or two) kind of stuck but mostly paralyzed by laughing so hard I just couldn't go forwards or backwards. Tears were rolling down my cheeks, inspired by my situation...my attire (bra and panties, it was hot), attitude (stuck in a window) and audience (South Asian construction workers at the site next door might have been able to see, and for sure the taxi driver in the parking lot right across from my window could, watching in amazement). I was just ever so slightly hysterical.

Little known facts about laundry: From the Singapore New paper (that's right, not newspaper but New paper): [a] foreign domestic worker fell from the fourth storey while hanging out the laundry on Tuesday. Okay, take domestic and fourth storey out of that news clip, and put in second floor, and that laundry misdadventure could have been mine.

I finally managed to haul the wet sheets back into the kitchen and found a bathrobe. I next googled maid services in Singapore. I had no business doing laundry, I'd kill myself sooner or later...I needed someone competent to help. Experience was teaching me that I could savor a full-bodied, authentic Singapore experience without having to do every single solitary thing that a person MIGHT do here. I figured laundry's not in my job description, I probably wasn't covered by worker's comp for self-inflicted laundry injuries. Even more worrying: would the University's liability insurance cover me if I inadvertently maimed or injured an unsuspecting neighbor with bamboo poles and wet cloth...or airborne panties? Best to leave laundry to the pros, before someone got hurt.

Little known facts about laundry (according to an American who has lived here for years): the leading cause of death for foreign workers in Singapore is falling out of apartment windows while putting out laundry. I'll grant you, most foreign workers are domestic workers, not professors. Still, I have decided that doing laundry in Singapore could be the tropical equivalent of fishing in Alaska--the deadliest catch might just be trying to catch one's balance while holding a pole full of wet laundry.

Blog doldrums

Do I lack the discipline for regular blogging (or do I lack discipline in general?) Maybe I lose interest. Or maybe nothing much of real interest happens for stretches of time. Mostly, I've just been working, not very interesting fodder for a blog unless other procrastinators are interested in picking up pointers for all the creative ways I find to stay very busy yet STILL don't get the work I must get done, done.

Mary Nell says that's the process of creative procrastination...accomplishing something useful, just not what needs doing from the top of the list. I know that I wonder, even in the midst of doing it, why I'm tweaking class preps for next spring and fall 2010 courses, when I have lapsed deadlines from last week, last month, and a ton of work to get done before class TOMORROW morning?

Part of my problem, I know, is fretting about London limbo, which annhilates my concentration. I bounce back and forth between things...distracted. Normally focus is not a problem for me, but right now, it is. Recruiting for the UB Semester in London has been time consuming, even or maybe especially from afar. It feels like it has taken more time and effort this year, and without the same kind of pay-off. For me, recruiting feeds on itself--I'm excited, that generates interest and excitement, and that fuels me and the process. But it is much harder to recruit with the degrees of separation that distance creates, since the personal interactions with prospective students are what seem to matter most. So it has been hard (and time consuming)...and in the end, I worry that all the work may not be effective enough to compensate for not being on the ground in Buffalo. We'll see what Friday brings, the deadline for applications is October 1. I think I'll just be glad to know, one way or another, though I really hope the program goes again.


I think recruiting is fun (usually), so I pitched in at the UB fall open house here in Singapore on Saturday. It was held in the atrium of the Singapore Institute of Management, where several British, Australian and US schools pitched their programs to parents and prospective students. Although it was a poor substitute for London recruiting, I have to admit I enjoyed meeting parents and students considering UB, and I'll help another UB colleague who will here for several recruitment briefings at Singapore hotels next week.

Although the UB recruiting is mainly to attract students in general to enroll in UB, it is fun to explain to the very practical and efficient Singaporeans (where there is little tradition of degrees in sociology, especially at the grad level) why they should spend tens of thousands of dollars to help their sons and daughters get BAs in sociology. I think I actually persuaded some. Too bad I can't recruit students here for the London program--I'd have snagged enough students Saturday afternoon, I'm sure!

The UB Singapore students have to figure out ways to make their own community and forge a sense of identity within UB under challenging circumstances. UB's program is housed within another institution (Singapore Institute of Management), so there's not a place that's just for UB, for them be "at" UB, for the UB community to have ground to take root. Students instead seem to coalesce around "intake" cohorts; students in the first sociology instake will form a little peer group of their own. It isn't that they don't try to make UB very real--they make their own organizations, including a student council and a psychology club, and have a student newsletter they call the UB Bullhorn. UB students even threw themselves a formal Red Carpet dinner at one of the snazzy hotels a couple of weeks ago.
Although they are troopers, I felt sorry for the UB students staffing the student council booth on Saturday afternoon during the recruiting open house. There were hundreds of people milling around, but there were also half a dozen college/university programs participating, not just UB. The students bravely staffed a booth, at which I was their only customer. They have to raise all of their own $$ for activities--they don't get any student activity funds at all. So pathetic were they that I donated S$20 to the cause--they insisted I take a teeshirt or lanyard (I opted for the latter, the teeshirts are teeny weeny, and I'm not). Anyway, they invited me to the UB Fall Bash. I think I'll go, at least make an appearance. The invitation seemed pretty sincere.

I have looming deadlines glooming deadines drop deadlines. I teach tomorrow, I have a ton of grading to do...and I feel that trans-Pacific psychic pressure from my colleagues to pick up the pace, get moving, so I'm trying...I'll feel more centered and anchored when Tony arrives, I'm certain.

Farewell Ghosts, Selamat Hari Raya

Friday night marked the (temporary) demise of hungry ghosts, fed for the last time this lunar year. The 55 gallon oil drums around Boundary Ville emitted desultry threads of acrid smoke, stuffed with ashes of burnt fake money. Joss sticks and food offerings lined the edges of virtually all sidewalks throughout the neighborhood, as ethnic Chinese Singaporeans cajoled the hungry ghosts back to the underworld. Walk carefully between the altars, neighbors reminded me, never over or through them--bad luck to do that. No big parties Friday night, the month of offerings just quietly wrapped up. Making too much of a fuss on the last night is bad form. It's okay earlier in the month, but at the end, too much attention might encourage greedy ghosts to dawdle. Better to be respectful but low key, as the ghosts depart until next year. By Saturday morning, no evidence of ghosts or offerings to them remained. They had disappeared like...

One great thing about Singapore's four large and distinctive ethnic groups is that chances are pretty good that at least one will be celebrating something at any given time. This weekend's big celebration is Hari Raya Puasa, the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. Holidays here are carefully apportioned among the four main religious groups: Buddhists, Christians, Muslims and Hindus. Each group gets two public holidays; everyone seems to celebrate all of them. Hari Raya Puasa is a public holiday (it falls on Sunday this year, celebrated Monday), that helps me not so much--I have a Tuesday through Friday teaching schedule. Still, I'll be happy to be festive on Monday, in solidarity with Singaporeans enjoying the day off!

Ramadan is when all healthy adult Muslims are expected to fast and deprive themselves during the day so that they can understand the plight of the less fortunate. As fasting month draws to a close, the Malay community gears up with preparations for the new year--busy cleaning house, buying new clothes and household items, and creating special foods for celebrations. For Muslim kids, this is a time when parents are especially generous, so it is pretty festive. The several days after Ramadan are particularly joyous, spent feasting and visiting with family and friends, asking and giving forgiveness and being thankful for blessings.


Acquiring the trappings associated with the end of Ramadan/the first day of Eid-ul Fitr creates demand for traditional holiday goods. One place to get them is a pasar malam, or night market. These are itinerant vendors who set up shop (often in tents) sometimes once a week for a night or two, sometimes once a month for several nights, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood. Pasar malams have everything from soup to nuts. Buy fresh food and groceries, or meals to take home. Buy shoes, a cell phone holder, or a broom. My students tell me they also specialize in stalls that sell ramly burgers, but I haven't encountered those yet (I don't think).


The traditional Malay neighborhood of Singapore, Geylang Serai is the great local grandaddy of night markets, running for the whole period of Ramadan and beyond. Its pasar malam features acres of makeshift tents with tipsy turvy plywood floors, signalling the coming festive season. Neighborhood streets are bridged not only by the ubiquitous Singapore pedestrian overpasses (with their signature splashes of bougainvilla softening the concrete structures) but also by twinkling blue and gold lights spanning busy streets, thronged with cars and pedestrians. It is a luminous spectacle, and my pictures certainly don't do it justice.

Geylang Serai would be very busy Saturday night, but I wasn't quite prepared for the crowds. When I arrived around 7 pm (just before sunset, when most Muslims had yet to break fast), the numbers were probably in the hundreds, with the market easy to walk around--with tilting and uneven plywood kept in mind--and not uncomfortably hot, what with the sun almost down. By 8 pm, people were thousands upon thousands, adding to both the heat and the din. I dressed modestly (when don't I? but I wore a long sleeved shirt) in case I happened upon a mosque I'd be comfortable entering and having the iftar (the break fast evening meal, which strangers are traditionally welcomed to join). Sadly, I didn't pass one in my meander. Only rows and rows and rows of brightly lit temporary shops. Many of the shopkeepers broke fast in their stalls, first eating a date and taking some water. That was generally followed by prayer, right there, before finally tucking in for some more substantial and yummy concoctions from plastic takeaway boxes or paper wraps. Then attention turned back to the prosaic pulse of commerce and customers.

There was a bewildering array of "stuff" for sale. Colorful artificial flowers and lights and brightly colored kids toys were popular items, maybe because they were affordable. The Straits Times reported that Singaporeans were being cautious about spending during Hari Raya this year--much like newspapers back home reported the downturn in Christmas shopping last, consumer spending here is a barometer for people's confidence in the strength of the economy.

Lots of cookie-type sweets and glutinous rice in several different traditional forms of palm leaf packaging were on sale. All manners of traditional Malay/muslim garb (for men and women) and modern clothing were being sold. So too were sponges and teacups, carpets (from beautiful persians to astroturf) and rice cookers, textiles and tires...anything that can be imagined was offered in some stall. I was especially capitvated by the intricate and colorful women's clothing. Many of the outfits were traditional Malay tunics and underskirts. Others were long-sleeved, fitted blouses with embroidery and beads, atop ankle length straight skirts. I noticed row of mannequins hanging from the superstructure of one of the tents, gazing dispassionately (as only dummies can!) at the throngs passing below, attired in that beautifully made, heavily sequined clothing.
There was so much stuff in the Geylang Serai night market, I couldn't buy anything. I always get paralyzed by too much choice.

I recalled that I was looking for balls to throw at students. If I couldn't find them here, they don't exist in Singapore. I finally found BUNCHES of them--but there were way too many, and the vendor didn't want to break up a package. I couldn't buy them all, students might throw them back at me! In a way the balls were indicative of the whole experience--too many balls, too many people, too much stuff, too claustrophobic, too noisy, too much to take in at once.

I dithered. I was hot. I was hungry. Which way would I walk next? Well, for sure with the crowd, it was the only way to move. It made me think of pilgrimages to Mecca, the faithful walking together in the Haj. The crowd in the market had a direction and pace of its own, and that seemingly single-minded community was not an easy one to leave. Where did I want to go? What did I want to see? Was it just wherever the crowd took me? Only for a few minutes, it was hot and close, too close for my comfort.

I finally managed to extricate myself from the pedestrian conga line, and watched several women apply henna to hands with incredible speed--about 3 minutes per hand--for intricate beautiful designs. I considered getting it done, then decided against...I wasn't sure whether that was a cultural practice with ritual significance that might offend come students back in the classroom (probably not, but better safe than sorry, I thought, recalling the funeral). Plus, I didn't know how long it would take to get it off.

I've decided that I'll try to go back to the Geylang Serai pasar malam some evening this week, before the night merchants fold their tents and go home 'til next year. On the first excursion, there was just no way to take it all in...I simply didn't know where to look or go next. And I was somewhat distracted by my hunt for an iftar opportunity or Malay curry for dinner. Next time I can dispense with the long sleeves, with no likelihood of dining in a mosque (drat, missed opportunity) and I'll try to arrive earlier to get my bearings first, and to pay more attention to see both the mundane and unusual in that scene.

In the meantime, Selamat Hari Raya , have a peaceful and prosperous year.

No Rib Off in Boundary Ville

Food nostalgia, that might be my problem. Singapore, where food is a national preoccupation, and eating the national sport. Food nostalgia was inevitable, attention to food is unrelenting on this island. Not just at mealtime, all the time.

Some day I want to teach a Sociology of Food course so I learn about this more systematically. But for now, I'm sure that I've got food nostalgia (a yearning for familiar tastes, rituals, and social relationships associated with food preparation and consumption). That nostalgia is probably pretty acute because I missed a food event (with the Ruskin Road Athletic Club [RRAC], six or seven couples who get together semi-regularly for dinner) that I really look forward to each year.

The annual RRAC Rib Off is a "friendly" competition among neighborhood grillers with different roads to the perfect rib: charcoal, smoke, gas. Each has a top chef wannabee who cooks ribs on her/his fuel of choice for accolades from other RRAC members (who supply the other fixings). The extravaganza traces back to a winter party, where our collective memories of summer evening cookouts morphed into a drunken series of escalating insults and challenges associated with barbecuing spare ribs. Who really IS the best rib chef in the neighborhood? We'd find out at a late summer ritual of porkly and saladish and dessertable delight, with lots to drink but no need for a designated driver to get home. We always have three winners, and WAY TOO MUCH really good food, drink, fun, and company. And I missed it yesterday for the first time, along with the companionship of my neighbors from Ruskin Road. Wah.

I wonder, were there ribs left over?

Missing that fed my food nostalgia, though it would surely have happened eventually, no matter what. I've been avoiding pricey western restaurants and eating like many Singaporeans in my determination to "be (as) native" (as possible) while I'm here. No western food for me (yet). But I'm definitely craving hot cornbread, cool tangy coleslaw, and a rib. Maybe two. One just rubbed, one with sauce. Yum.

Don't get me wrong. While I like all variants of Asian food in principle (at least I like Chinese, Indian, Thai, and Indonesian, in their western forms), I don't necessarily like all of Asian foods' potential ingredients in their authentic practice! Or maybe I only think I don't like certain ingredients. For example, what if I didn't know what an ingredient was ahead of time? I couldn't worry about it so I might just eat. Or, what if I would put certain known (but feared) ingredients in my mouth (even if skeptical)? Maybe I'd realize that I [irrationally] assume I don't like food that tastes really good.

The scars of past failure may feed my irrational food fears. I once tried to cure my childhood aversion to liver, convinced it was all in my head. Tony offered a bite from his appetizing restaurant meal of liver smothered with onions. Looked good. Smelled good. I chewed but just could not swallow. I fled to the bathroom and vomited. That's now a lifelong aversion. But surely some of my psychic aversions to certain food items ARE just untested prejudices, unlikely to inspire such visceral reactions.

When I see a picture of a dish at a stall and read what it is, I wonder, does the English translation fully capture what ingredients really are? Is the dish as benign as it sounds, or is the name a horribly misleading mis-translation of something truly awful? Both are possible in Singapore. Sometimes the ingredients SOUND awful (like bull's testicles). Sometimes ingredients SMELL awful (the durian fruit is so stinky it is banned on public transportation) but it's a local delicacy! I will try durian, just not yet. Other foods LOOK scary. Do I really want the FEEL of something that looks like THAT in my mouth? All goes to show that food isn't only or even mostly about taste; all of our senses and sensibilities are invoked. I wonder, would a companion possibly egg me on to be braver and to sample more scary and alien and discriminated against foods? Hard to say. But I often dine alone, and there sure are many food adventures and mysteries left to tackle.

Like, what exactly is a fishball? A local cooking show demonstrated a dish prepared with bull testicles and I've seen bull's balls with noodles or rice advertised in Chinatown. So sometimes ingredients are the sort of balls that seem what the vernacular suggests. Fish have none, so obviously fish is an ingredient made into balls. But what parts--flesh? Eyeballs? Skin? Are there bones? (fish bones scare me). I don't know why it would matter if it tastes good (they must be wholesome, people aren't dying from eating fishballs), but my food imagination goes into overdrive. I've seen them in dozens of stalls and while one stall's fishballs may differ in important ways (taste? texture) from their neighbors, fishballs everywhere look like squidgey ping pong balls to me. Perhaps I should discipline myself and try a bowl for lunch tomorrow. If I don't like it, I can always abandon it, right? Maybe I'll walk to a shop (with a queue, a good sign of good food) a little further away from home than usual to try...what I lack in peer support I can compensate with the courage of anonymity.

Exotic food worries aside, I've enjoyed several inexpensive and delicious meals recently. Last weekend I had lunch at the Chinatown hawker center (soy sauce chicken with noodles, and a mango milkshake). Yummy and only S$6.20. Interesting surroundings, a VERY busy place for lunch on Sunday.

Last night dinner was from Geylan Serai, the night market that runs throughout Ramadan in the traditional Malay neighborhood. Even busier than Chinatown. I ate from a stall run by two Malay women. Dish one was glutinous rice in a skinny package (about the size and shape of a hot dog) wrapped attractively in a palm frond, tied in ribbon. Maybe it's an acquired taste, or an acquired texture. It had the faintest whiff of banana, a tiny taste of coconut, but the overwhelming impression was bland and gummy. I picked out a couple of its dark spots before I sampled (thinking they might be bugs, see below), but (with glasses back on) the spots were just red beans. Whew. Even the beany parts lacked taste, and didn't seem to vary the texture. Maybe glutinous rice isn't meant to be eaten naked, needing something else for flavor. I'll have to find out.

The second dish was vegetables (yellow curried cabbage, onions and beans) and rendang chicken (sweet and spicy, coconutty), served takeway. A "refreshing drink" of strawberry jam on crushed ice with tapioca pearls tasted better than it sounds, drunk on the spot, what with a 16 stop bus ride home. I could smell my dinner, hot in my lap in its brown paper--and other bus riders' meals, too--all looking forward to breaking Ramadan fast with yummy Malay food. I was ravenous by the time I got home and dug in. Dinner (but for the glutinous rice, the shiny banana-looking thing in the foreground of the photo) was scrumptious. It cost S$4.80.

Breakfast today was the local instant beverage that's not so much coffee as a caffeinated drink that tastes warm and brown. The whole works comes in a little sachet. Just dump in a cup, add boiling water, and voila, morning caffeine. A (usually) much better choice is a cup of kopi, which I'll talk about some other time. That's because I don't think I can do kopi justice now, due to recent kopi trauma. Last time (Thursday) I visited my local kopitiam, my final mouthful ALMOST included a dead cockroach. I spotted it in the nick of time, just before it slid into my mouth. So I'm still recovering from my aversion to the idea of a dead cockroach being at the bottom of a cup of something I just chugged back. Come to think of it, that kopi with unexpected secret ingredient (up till then it was a particularly savory cup) might be another contributing factor to this little bout of food nostalgia.

Students in Singapore

I really like my research methods students, who are starting to venture answers and opinions. I went over by 10 minutes today (by accident, we were on a roll) and not a single student made any move to pack up their stuff or leave the room. It might have been good manners, but they seem really captivated, or gave a good impression of that...

Haven't figured out yet how to enliven SOC 101. I haven't had any problem getting a laugh from them, or commanding their attention. But I'm having no luck getting them to participate much unless I break them into groups--no one wants to be the lone answerer. With standing room for 120ish students, there's the sheer volume of audience intimidation factor for putting a hand up in a place like Singapore where students have traditionally been seen and not heard, I guess. And then there's the anonymity. I know almost all of the 40 methods students, but only a sprinkling of SOC 101. I know students have things to say, a few--sometimes a dozen--stay after every class to ask me about something I've said during the lecture, or to answer the question I asked, or to tell me something intersting and perhaps relevant to the lecture...but they don't want to say much in front of the class. Must make 101 seating map today, and see if knowing more names helps. Or resign myself to being a talking head for the semester in that course. yuck.