THE CITIZEN
It’s 11.43pm. We’re sitting in a gondola heading to Brani Island. The relative calm of the Kallang River turns to the choppy water of the sea as we swing out into the Straits. We keep a good distance of sight from the shore while refraining from straying out too far into open water, where the patrol boats keep a lookout for illegal immigrants. The lights of the MCE flow out from the residential areas into the CBD -- night owls looking for drinks and women; the empty materialism of modern life. Materialism which I do not partake in. I wonder: is my austerity a result of my destiny, or is my destiny a result of my austerity?
“Why are we going to Brani island?”
“To dance,” replies Robert Sebastian Cheong, prompting an excited whoop from Tan Vee Bun.
The salty spray of the sea mixes in with my sweat as we edge our way past the Tanjong Pagar terminal, turning into a small alcove to park the boat. Tan Vee Bun and Robert Sebastian Cheong pick up the two trash bags of mantou and climb out from the boat. Robert Sebastian Cheong holds out his hand and pulls me from the gondola. In the distance, a construction of shipping containers, piled up in a rudimentary structure approximating a kind of temple. Strobe lighting emanates from the centre from which the faint sound of dance music broadcasts across the reef.
We arrive at a dance party. Bangladeshis, Indians, PRCs, Sikhs, Malays and Arabs bounce against shipping containers. Walls of gurgling synths reverberate against metal and flesh. And a 140 bpm soundtrack captures the helplessness, the desperation and the wild abandon of a world suddenly set free. Groups of denim clad construction workers thrust forward aggressively through the crowd. Sweat soaked machinery operators down beer from upturned safety hats. In the corner, a security guard makes out with a waitress, while her friends cheer her on. Next to me, Tan Vee Bun and Robert Sebastian Cheong dance along to the music, their heads bobbing aggressively as they open up the bags of mantou, reach in, and toss them into the air. From the sea of heads emanating waves of heat and sweat, skinny fists stretch up to the sky to catch the mantou. As for me, I pass my portion to whichever lost soul happens to be near me, their gurning faces smiling their thanks as they bite into the bread.
HO HO!
HO BU HO!
The pumping rhythm of the music gets into my head. Buoyed by the crowd, their every bite into the mantou bringing back the fog of a future full of hope and uncertainty, I feel an incomparable sense of freedom. The people of Singapore, their souls no longer tied to a rigid grid of machine code, manipulated by the all-encompassing spread of ubiquitous mantou, free to become whatever form of inefficiency to smash against the tide of the wider world of society, culture, politics, economics, foreign policy, what have you. I begin to dance. I shut my eyes and flail my arms around to the drilling thuds of the dance beats as the mass of people surge into and around me as a barely controlled entity breaking free of the chains of oppression.
I bump into a half-naked Indian man, yellow safety vest tied round the top of his head. He hugs me and screams in my ear, “Ah Gong Temple is for the people!”
HO HO!
HO BU HO!
Delirious, I laugh back at him and continue my flailing. In front of me, Robert Sebastian Cheong and Tan Vee Bun have finished distributing the mantou, bringing the end to the centralized monopoly on the bread and butter issues of our land. The balance of power shifting back to the people. My people.
Yellow, green and purple spotlights climb up the shipping containers. The names Maersck, Cosco, Yang Ming reflect back into my eyes. The signifiers of international trade, long scarred upon the landscape, installed as reminders of humanity’s drive towards efficiency, now as bemused spectators to our temporary melding together as a mob of flesh, ephemeral, defiant, powerful.
I notice a stout, shapely man in chinese robes and a Cai Shen hat. He sports a thin moustache and beard which flows down to his exposed chest. In his hands, two pink glowsticks draw patterns in the air as he shuffles around his space clear of the crowd. Curious, I walk up to him, and he smiles at me. A beatific, wise smile. He says to me, “Ah gong temple is for the chewren.”
HO HO!
HO BU HO!
My heart skips a beat, the wise man disappears into black, leaving the two glowsticks spinning in the air while the music starts to slow. A loping, languorous beat like an orang utan swinging from branch to branch. I step back and watch the scene in slow motion: each person in his or her own dance, arms bent, arms straight, fists rising into the air, fingers touching a spotlight beamed across the dance floor, bodies jumping and writhing in wild abandon, and on every single face, eyes closed or open, a pureness undiluted by what in that moment I perceived as the structures of thought imposed upon all society. As we step from one version of the past into another version of the future, all of us, momentarily free, sitting in between ideologies, outside of the politics of the pragmatic, the thought structures of macroeconomics, the tit-for-tat of international politics, the hard logic of mathematics, the omniscient eyes of religion and technology.
Think of a coast, and draw a line demarcating the line made between the sea and the beach. And then measure its length. Then zoom in, and detail that line, so that every grain of sand is accounted for in the line. And measure again. Now, go in even further, so that every cell, atom, organism, is accounted for in the line. And measure it. In that one moment as the sea retreats back from the shore, we see a vision of a line infinitely expanding, growing longer and longer and longer the more you care to look. Imagine that moment in history, as the wars end, before the governments slide in, as the revolutions succeed, before the leaders step up, as a life begins, before the baby’s first scream. The one moment, fragile and ecstatic, between civilisation and savagery, between the city and the jungle, between reality and hallucination, between truth and lie, between present and future, between farce and truth...a floating bliss free from events and expectations…
Robert Sebastian Cheong interrupts my thought. He’s half naked. His lithe, dolphin-like body coated in a shimmering layer of rainbow sweat. He lays a hand on my shoulder.
“Ah Gong Temple is for you.”
HO HO!
HO BU HO!
He ruffles my hair and jumps back into the crowd.
I breath in the air. The joy of the moment, the flash as one lens overlaps with another, and right is wrong and wrong is right and somehow an ephemeral flash of truth erupts, just impossible to catch, filtering somewhere into your bowels to be reproduced in some other white space to be misinterpreted and misused by yet another overenthusiastic stoned out academic overthinker -- uselessly trying to grasp what can never be grasped, only felt, and finding himself holding onto what else but a fist sized lump of lies.
HO HO!
HO BU HO!