tell me about it

In response to this article, wherein he concludes:

In summary, Singapore is a shopping destination and nothing much more. There is really no Singapore history beyond the 1800’s. There really isn’t a Singapore culture. No rain forests. No ancient temples. Heck, because of land reclamation, there really isn’t even a natural beach on the whole island.

While it was nice to go someplace where English is one of the official languages, I really don’t think I will make a return trip to Singapore.

Wow…I mean, wow, I really just couldn’t leave this alone. Gotta be a passionately patriotic SG citizen (yes, we exist!)! I’m not sure if you followed a guidebook in doing the things that you did (sure sounds like Tourist 101!) but what you got was pretty much the distilled tourist version of Singapore. Plus, you did it alone, without a local to give you background info (oh, screw that, most Singaporeans don’t really know much about their own history anyway).

But just for your information. Yes, majority of food in Singapore is, as you would put it, Chinese, or Malay, or Indian. However the type of Chinese food you get in Singapore just isn’t the same kind of food you would find in China, for example. I’ve gone to China and I have never been able to find any of the dishes we serve in local hawker centres. Chilli crab is uniquely Singaporean, for one thing – and as you were staying right in the midst of Geyland (FOOD HAVEN!) you’d have ready access to Chilli crab, Crab noodles with XO, frog leg porridge, dim sum, etc, all of which are Chinese dishes which have evolved to be quite different in Singapore.

Take Chinese food in the US for example. There is nowhere in Singapore (or China, for that matter) where you would ever find such strangely named dishes as moo goo gai pan, or chop suey. It’s Chinese food, evolved to suit American tastebuds. But it isn’t really Chinese food. Chinese-inspired perhaps, which is probably what Singaporean food could plausibly be really called.

You missed our nature preserves – Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Sungei Buloh, Chek Jawa and the rest of Pulau Ubin, Kusu Island shore walk, Chinese Garden, and many more. There’s plenty more to Singapore than the neatly packaged tourist bit you did. You say you visited Chinatown, Little India. You could have gotten a day tour – Singapore Walks (www.singaporewalks.com) does fantastic day tours with brilliant background information and spicy stories that show you Singapore’s character.

We also do have farms – veggie and hydroponics farms mostly, goat farms (Hay Dairies Goat Farm in Boon Lay), fish farms (Qian Hu Fish Farms among many). 277 farms in Singapore to be exact! (He says he has Internet access at Hotel 81, but fails to realize if he merely Googles “Singapore farm”, a wealth of info is at his fingertips.) Of course we don’t have cattle farms! We are far too small to rear most animals, especially cows, commercially – again, cows, I hope, are not the be all and end all of farming. Though if you’d popped down to quiet Sembawang I do recall that you could actually see cows wandering around the grassy areas a few years back. With our small land space it is much more efficient to import our meat. We simply don’t have the huge space needed for viable farming, as your country does.

We don’t have much visible history before the 1800s because there are few stone quarries in Singapore – anyway, our ancient people built with wood rather than stone due to availability (and heat). So few of these constructions have survived, due to the material used. But I hope that old buildings are not all that make a country – certainly they do not make ours.

We Asians are very much a collectivist culture rather than individualistic as most Europeans are and so I take no umbrage at your opinion that we should have our own, easily recognizable features. Rather I do like that as an immigrant country and a young one, at that, we are still very much a beautiful melting pot of cultures, races and religions that are slowly beginning to find our common ground. What we do have, as we’ve obviously shown, is a passionate love for our country (no matter how much we bitch about govt, taxes, etc, we are the only ones who are allowed to bitch about our country – let anyone else try and tomorrow.sg readers will crucify ‘em!).

I tried to post on your blog and even registered but for some reason my comment cannot be posted. Well, perhaps Singapore doesn’t appeal to you merely because it is not a place that is aligned with your particular interests. I hope though that I’ve corrected some of your false impressions, and maybe you’ll come back another time to give Singapore another shot – and this time, get someone who knows his/her stuff to take you around. I volunteer.