You may have noticed took a hiatus from posts for the last couple months. At the beginning of May I picked up an 8 week old, fresh, puppy named Daisy. It’s been a lot of work which hopefully can explain the absence of material. However, I can say it’s been well worth it. She is a delightful companion with a wonderful personality and it is a joy to have her around.
More recently I returned to Toronto from a couple weeks travelling in S. E. Asia mostly in Singapore and Hong Kong. The trip elicited many thoughts and feelings for me so it seemed like it might be a good source of material for an essay and a chance to pick back up a writing habit.
Travel writing can be a lot of fun. The best of the genre offers both a window into another world and an exposé of the authors quirks. However, at the other end of the spectrum it can be the source of much navel-gazing and ignorant reification1.
In this latter form, travel writing is really a cover for a particularly type of low self-esteem. The author has some sense that their life, ‘back home’, cannot satisfy them whether in terms of excitement, intrigue, or even as it relates to their own relationships, career, or character. They think that travel will somehow give them a chance to plug these holes. Of course, the truth is that they will be confronted all too quickly with the truth that “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.”2.
This phenomenon has been thoughtfully described by Agnes Callard riffing on Ralph Waldo Emerson. Paraphrasing her account you could say that the former kind of insightful travel writing happens when people have a commitment to the place they are travelling to, ‘a reason to be there’. The latter kind of is the result of a simple, unreflective, wanderlust. She offers this heuristic for how to spot the difference: “One sign that you have a reason to be somewhere is that you have nothing to prove, and therefore no drive to collect souvenirs, photos, or stories to prove it… [the other form of travel] “tourism” is the kind of travel that aims at the interesting”.
I had no necessity whether business, artistic, or scholarly that I can point to for the trip. But nonetheless it did feel like something I was committed to.
I’d never been to Singapore and had only spent a couple days in Hong Kong, but both cities have long fascinated me as modern examples of what a city on a hill might be like, and it felt important for me to know what this meant in my bones3.
Ultimately, I’d like to believe that I was not aimed at the interesting but was more trying to satisfy a commitment to these cities as part of my image of what excellence can look like. The judge will be if I was able to see these places not as an imagined other that needed to be captured and collected to prop up my self-esteem but simply as the rich parts of the human tapestry that they are.
With this overly long, but hopefully useful, preamble here are a couple observations that I made:
Material Progress & Culture
The self-image that most people have of the relative material wealth in N. America compared to the rest of the world is wrong.
Depending on how you cut it the global middle class in terms of purchasing power (i.e. can own a home, a washing machine, a car etc.) now makes up roughly half of all people on the planet4. Moreover, there are concentrations of wealth in certain areas that far outstrip the US.
In the case of Singapore and Hong Kong, these top level statistics actually obscure another more subtle and enviable kind of relative material progress.
As you walk around both cities the quality of the public infrastructure (subways, parks, sidewalks) compared to N. America and Europe is a shock. Things are clean, functional, often beautiful, and always cared for.
In addition, both cities take a zero tolerance approach to the use of illegal drugs and have very active police efforts. The sense of safety that results adds another invisible layer of material wealth. It even changes the status of ‘private’ spaces. This meme comes from Shenzhen but the observation could easily have been made in either of these cities:
No matter how rich you are you simply can’t buy this kind of experience in North America. A black car waiting at your door with a personal security detail is not the same.
When I bring up these observations with people in Toronto the most common response I hear is that these cities - and in particular Singapore - can do this because they are relatively authoritarian. High justice, low mercy. This authoritarian bent may keep the streets clean, crime low, and the subway running but ultimately it stifles innovation and cultural productivity, while causing real harm to those on the margins5.
I don’t want to dismiss these criticisms outright. But, it certainly didn’t accord cleanly to my experience. I found both places to be very generative. The food was complex and delicious, the density of small businesses was far beyond anything I’ve seen in N. America, and the range of local consumer products was amazing. I was even shocked to find in Singapore things like bookstores with large sections for Singaporean Mandarin authors and one of the most well curated museums I’ve ever visited.
On reflection, I think it may be that a good chunk of this criticism comes from foreigners looking for cultural productivity in an English speaking context.
For example in the 70s and 80s, Singapore birthed a new style of music called 新谣6 - comparable to folk but with a more harmonic kind of poetry. This style was an important influence on modern Singaporean musicians like JJ Lin and Stefanie Sun who in turn have had a massive impact.
If you don’t speak Mandarin you may not have heard of Stefanie Sun but “On 27 May 2022, more than 240 million people watched Sun perform in a one hour virtual concert.”7. It’s hard to see how that isn’t an impressive kind of cultural productivity for a country of less than 6 million8.
Language
I’m studying Mandarin and had a few opportunities to practice while travelling. So, one of the aspects of the trip that stood out for me was the way that language comes to life in both cities.
Singapore is a city of many languages. I was able to use English everywhere as a kind of lingua franca. However, when observing locals I could see that there was a near constant code switching that happened as people moved between Mandarin, English, Malay, Cantonese, and Singlish depending on the context. Each conversation then taking on a rich web of meanings that could only exist within that particular linguistic frame.
Two characteristic examples:
1) I visited a hawker stall to buy what I had read on Google were some especially excellent “萝卜糕”9. When I found the stall I got the proprietor’s attention and ordered in Mandarin. We talked briefly and although my language abilities are meagre I found his accent totally clear and we were able to hold a pretty decent conversation.
I then sat down at a table with what I surmised was his mother, who I would guess was about 60 and her mother who I think might have been in her late 80s. When I chatted with his mother it was a bit tougher to understand and she was more likely to break into english though it wasn’t clear if this was for my benefit or hers. With his grandmother though we could only exchange a couple words before she would then speak to her daughter in a Chinese dialect that I couldn’t recognise.
2) Another time I was visiting an art museum. The attendant in one of the rooms greeted me in English with a British accent. We spoke for a bit about the paintings in the room. After I wandered off, a couple tourists from mainland China came in and asked him if he spoke Mandarin. He did and I listened while they chatted about the opening times for another part of the museum. Finally another attendant came into the room and started speaking with the first in what I could only surmise was some kind of super thick-accented Singlish. Of the three conversations this was the one I found the hardest to understand by far.
Hong Kong by contrast is a city interwoven with one language. As you walk around it is definitely Cantonese that predominates. However, similar to Singapore, I found I could get around with English no problem. There perhaps wasn’t quite the same level of fluency everywhere but everyone had enough phrases to transact. In addition essentially everyone appeared to also speak mandarin10. Over the course of my stay I must have asked two dozen people “你说普通话吗?”11 and in every case received an affirmation.
The differences between these two forms of the language left me with very different impressions of what it meant to be culturally ‘at home’ in both cities.
In Hong Kong I felt like if I really worked to become fluent in Cantonese I could eventually cross a tipping point where I would be seen as a (very strange looking) local. In Singapore my sense was that no matter how good my Mandarin got, even if I tried to copy the local accent and ways of speaking there would always be some tiny tell that would set me apart as a ‘resident’ and not a Singaporean. Being a resident I could have a wonderful career and be very successful but there would always be some distance between me and the rest of the society.
Another way of saying this is that both cities are incredibly international but with different stress. Singapore is international it is the meeting point for many distinct nations. Even within its own citizenry there is a delicate cultural balancing act taking place to see how many truly distinct groups can peacefully coalesce. Hong Kong on the other hand is international. In Hong Kong people from very different parts of the world and very different background have met in a distinct nation.
As an analogy - though I’m wary it may obscure more than it uncovers - it may be that Singapore is more like Canada with its mosaic while Hong Kong is more like the US with its melting pot.
What do these cities whisper?
One of the best pieces of writing ever on cities is probably this piece by Paul Graham. In it he outlines a heuristic that once you hear is hard to forget:
Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.
The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York [for example] tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.
In the rest of the essay Graham gives further examples of the messages that you hear from Boston (“be smarter”), Silicon Valley (“be powerful”), Paris (“do things with style”).
I was planning to end this piece by trying to say what Singapore and Hong Kong are whispering but as I reflected on it I don’t think that I was there long enough to be able to pronounce their message with confidence and I wouldn’t want to end this post by looking foolish.
However, what I was certain of was the first part of this formula. These cities are whispering something. There is a concentration of ambition - authentic striving - in both places that is an absolute pleasure to be around. Both, in their own ways, are examples of what a city on a hill could be like. For me personally they will continue to inspire aspirations for what a vision of the world should be.
We have a new mayor in Toronto, Olivia Chow. It is nearly impossible this early on to say how exactly this will change things but change is needed. We have historically been seen as a highly ‘livable’ city gracing the top of the Economist charts for healthcare, education, safety etc. This has led to incredible growth over the last couple decades as people have flocked here.
However, since the Covid pandemic we have started to see real issues with homelessness and crime let alone the cost of housing for the average person.
Visiting these two cities gave me real hope for what we can achieve. I pray for our new mayor that she will be gifted a chance to help change our city for the better so that we too can become such an example for the world.
I haven’t read the book so I don’t want too judge too quickly but this appears to be exactly the kind of thing you see in productions like Eat, Pray, Love. I haven’t read it in its entirety but Orientalism by Edward Saaid appears to be a good corrective for exposing the degree to which this can happen as well as the real dangers that can come as a result by charting how the “West” has created the idea of the “East” from Homer to Dick Cheney.
Source: Neil Gaiman
I said I wanted to avoid navel gazing but to be totally honest I should add that I’ve also been lucky enough to spend a good part of my life in East and S. East Asia. Cumulatively I’ve spent a bit over a year living in China and maybe another 2-3 months in Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. This time has completely changed the trajectory of my life including leading to me selecting major in university and shaping the philosophical underpinnings for how I see the world. Yet I hadn’t been to this part of the world for more than 6 years. It felt like something was missing.
See here. Of course if you look in blunt GDP terms the US is still very rich compared to almost everywhere else but this massively overcounts things like the US dollar being the world reserve currency.
This last point is the one that resonates most deeply with me. In Singapore homosexual acts were only decriminalised in 2022 in an act that also changed the constitution to enshrine marriage as between a man and a woman.
Xīnyáo “New Songs” though the first character is also the first character for Singapore 新加坡.
Though maybe not quite as impressive as the GTA birthing Drake, Justin Bieber, the Weeknd and Shawn Mendes 😉
luóbogāo is a special kind of fried turnip dish. Incredibly filling and delicious. In Singapore they call this “fried carrot cake” though it very much contains no carrots and no cake.
Observing this also brought home the stats that say more than half the people in the world are bilingual.
Nǐ shuō Pǔtōnghuà ma? “Do you speak Mandarin”?
I think you were able to describe Singapore with way more nuance and curiosity than any local here! Love it. Didn’t know you were in town, would have loved to catch coffee