Singapore Swing Read Free Page A

fact, I dare you to find me a French film where there is no lunch or dinner sequence – you’ll have to resort to the 1895 experiments of the pioneering Lumière brothers for that. And even they, after filming workers leaving a factory in La Sortie des Usines Lumière , and a train entering a station in L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat , what did they film next? Repas de Bébé : I rest my case.
    As befits such a culture, it sometimes seems that all Singapore is about is food. Every hawker stall in the streets offers its own speciality dish: from translucent aromatic marine delicacies at a stall on Mosque Street to the day-glo green of a wheatgrass and aloe vera shake on a Trengganu kiosk. Men and women around me are gobbling up food: sat down, standing up, leaning against a wall, walking rapidly alone, strolling slowly arm in arm. Some are even eating for charity under a banner: ‘Meals for Tidal Waves Asia Victims’. I feel a warm glow when I realise that I can satisfy a pressing bodily function and help the destitute at the same time, but the menu puts a dampener on my appetite: Pig’s tail noodle? Grass jelly with tadpole? Tripe and tendons? I have seen many weird things eaten across the Channel but the Chinese beat the French in devouring disgusting life forms hands down. I decide that boiled pig gut and sliced jellyfish had better be left to the connoisseurs. As for fried carrot cake – it sounds worse that anything the Scots could have concocted.
    I move away from the hawkers and back to the sound and vision show that is every weekend night in central Chinatown. I walk under a sign for the Cantonese Opera The Patriotic Princess performed in aid of a ‘Moral Home for the Disabled’ – and that ‘moral’ has me pondering a lot. This is an old red-light district; the Chinese name for Banda Street means ‘End of the Foreign Brothels’ for here is where the Japanese girls, the Karayuki-sans, were based. I glance at a large hand-painted movie poster opposite that advertises Blue Velvet , warning us that the film has a ‘matured’ theme. (Is this how they fooled the censors? Did they think it was about cheese?) I stroll past closed shops with names out of a Jules Verne literary fantasy: Onn Fat Hong Tea Merchant; Hai Loo Store; Wong Loy Kee Aquarium – do you keep the fish as pets or as victuals?
    I finally stop by the Samsui women’s restaurant on Smith Street which boasts the best ginger chicken in town. The Samsui were Cantonese and Hakka women who lived together around Chin Chew street. Their distinctive red head coverings have become iconic: sloping and flat, they look like upside-down open books. The sole purpose in life of the Samsui was to work and send money to their families on the mainland. Some of them were married but most opted for spinsterhood having assumed the role of breadwinner: not only as housekeepers and wet-nurses, but also as stevedores and construction workers. Theirs was a one-way ticket to the poor quarters in Chinatown; starvation wages killed any hopes of return. As they turned older and infirm, the only luxury they permitted themselves was their traditionally cooked chicken during the Chinese New Year. This was a whole chicken, steamed with ginger for a fixed duration at a specific temperature so that it maintained its fragrance and flavour. It is still the dish of choice in the Smith Street restaurant: it is served already shredded, and you eat it by dipping a piece in ginger sauce and wrapping it in lettuce.
    I walk upstairs and an old, wrinkled, diminutive Chinese waitress moving more slowly and stiffly than a legless man on crutches leads me to a table. I sit on an exquisitely carved low wooden stool in the shape of a bongo drum under the whirl of a ceiling fan and open the menu that resembles a pharmaceutical catalogue. As in every other society – from a medieval witch’s brew to a