Spot the tourist…
I only spent one night in Singapore but I can say that as far as cities go, it’s pretty cool. The buses are awesome (especially after a few weeks in Jakarta) and it’s so easy to get around. And so clean! Oh my goodness the cleanliness. It puts London to shame!
One thing I will comment on, though, is the lack of…community? I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but all the signs, for example, were in 4 different languages. I can get by in Malay and obviously speak English, which should really put me in good stead to get around Singapore, but it didn’t. Singapore seems to have the multiculturality of London but instead of being a capital city, the city is the nation state. In Singapore my belief in the nation state became even weaker. It felt as though the people living there, having no shared language and few shared customs, had little in common. I guess it’s like Indonesia in a way, but Singapore’s diverse and multilingual nature is condensed into a city state rather than spread over a sprawling archipelago.
In Singapore I had the strong sense of being in a former colony – much stronger than anywhere else I’ve ever been. The main shared language, for example, is English but many don’t speak English (quite a few bus drivers, for example…). The main language of a state in the middle of Southeast Asia is English, when neighbouring countries have more local languages as the lingua franca. Why does this little speck in the ocean, consisting of many languages and peoples, call itself a nation? But then why does an entire archipelago full of different ethnic groups like Indonesia call itself a nation?
I find it difficult to feel patriotic or to have a belief in nationalism when I have experienced and continue to experience nations that resemble (for want of a better analogy) flatshares in London. People share a space but continue to live privately, continuing about their everyday lives and rarely sharing experiences. Yet this is the mechanism through which poverty, displacement and war become ‘their problem’. Nations divide the world into units, drawing borders that really don’t exist, especially when you consider the fluidity and heterogeneity of existing states. Nations are supposed to have shared experience, customs and interests but it is as difficult to find that within a single nation state as it is to find across the entire world.
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