Humor is flowing into film too. Eric Khoo's 12 Storeys, the first Singaporean film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival, is a tragicomic take on life in a standard HDB apartment block. Three households live through their own stories of suburban ennui: a strait-laced bureaucrat driven to distraction by his sister's sexual precocity, a lonely overweight woman who misses the daily scoldings of her dead mother, a buck-toothed hawker-stall owner who cannot understand why his young wife from Beijing no longer wants to sleep with him now that she has gained residence in Singapore. This is Singapore far from the retail palaces of Orchard Road, a place where the daily grind is unalleviated by glitzy sales promotions and where neighbors see the suicide of a 31-year-old man from the 12th floor as an opportunity to buy ticket number 1231 in the lottery.
The growth in drama has even hit the international arena, with Ong Keng Sen, director of TheatreWorks, taking a pan-Asian fusion of Shakespeare's King Lear to stages around the world--and being met by standing ovations. Adapted from the original by Japanese playwright Rio Kishida, Lear contains elements of Japanese Noh, Peking opera and Sumatran martial arts. Recently television has started to get in on the acting with some home-produced soap operas, less remarkable for their scripts than for their use of Singlish, the Singaporean pidgin which, for better or worse, is one of the nation's defining characteristics (-lah). "Only in the past few years have we found the confidence to speak and write in our own patois," says Yeo. "Discovering your own identity is not easy."
Losing it, however, is no problem at all for the hordes of spaghetti-strapped girls and designer-jeaned boys who flock to the trendy new bars along Mohamed Sultan Road, or go dancing at Zouk, with its big-name DJs flown in from Europe for a single night. The real hard core cross the causeway to Malaysia and go raving in Johor--and return to find the police waiting for them with urine tests. Drugs are still rare in Singapore: the death sentence is mandatory for anyone caught carrying more than 30 grams of cocaine or 500 grams of cannabis. But drunkenness seems to thrive to a remarkable extent, a cheap escape, perhaps, from the island's buttoned-down earnestness. Predictably the evidence is tidily cleaned up--or hosed down--by 3 a.m. when bars have to close.
Not all change in Singapore is so messy. The city-state is as wired as the film The Matrix, so cognoscenti no longer have to wait for a taxi in the long lines on Orchard Road; instead their mobile phones link them by satellite to individual cabs, which can be dispatched within seconds through a screen mounted on the driver's console. Meanwhile elementary-school students design zoos over the Internet with partner schools in Hawaii, negotiating their choices of animals as they get in on the ground floor of the high-tech revolution that Singapore wants to help lead.
To promote more creativity in schools, teachers have been instructed to reduce rote learning and give students more open-ended problems to contemplate, according to Education Minister Teo Chee Hean. The problem: teaching the teachers, who had become used to stuffing facts into their wards' heads with little extra thought required. Meanwhile, a team of Singaporeans has climbed Mount Everest and is now preparing to cross Antarctica in a government-blessed attempt to show how frontiers can be broadened. Censors recently swallowed their objections to a formerly offensive verb and allowed the new film Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me to be shown without a title change. Coffee shops have sprung up all over the island--caffeine chic with nicotine optional at the outside tables, even as local newspapers carry graphic anti-smoking ads with color photographs of cancerous lung tissue.
Changing, not changed. The old control instincts are still there, as opposition politician Chee Soon Juan discovered in December. He attempted to speak in public without a license--and was jailed. And an Internet service provider, a unit of the government-controlled telecom company, recently broke into thousands of customers' hard drives, allegedly to look for hackers.
But the more enlightened mandarins realize a soft touch can be just as effective. One look at the brewing chaos in Indonesia and the recent political friction in Malaysia keeps the majority in line, while the minority of creative types are turning out to be more wholesome and less scary than their old dossiers had suggested. In the shadow of Singapore's economic success, a space has opened up, and it is starting to fill with some interesting creations--a black market in ideas and inspirations no longer under government control. An aids patient stripping on stage may not have been precisely what the government thought of when it set out to promote a newly creative Singapore, but Paddy Chew's performance did not precipitate social breakdown. Singapore is becoming a more interesting place, and it is doing so by learning not to be afraid of its own shadow.
WE'RE NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE
How things have loosened up in the past decade
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| 1 9 8 9 |
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1 9 9 9 |
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WHERE THEY HANG OUT
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| Tiffin Room at the Raffles |
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Hooters |
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WHAT THEY'RE READING
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| Only state-approved stuff at MPH's bookshops |
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Almost anything: it's all there at Border's |
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WHAT THEY'RE WATCHING
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| The Little Mermaid |
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Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged (not Shioked!) Me |
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WHAT THEY'RE WEARING
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| Clean-cut Giordano |
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Mambo's attitude gear |
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WHAT'S NAUGHTY?
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| Raunchy Bugis Street (under renovation, to be replaced by shopping mall) |
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Transvestites for hire at private parties for $90 an hour |
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WHAT THEY THINK ABOUT COMMUNISM
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| Mao's Little Red Book was banned |
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Mao-chic eateries are fashionable |
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THIS WEEK'S TABLE OF CONTENTS
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