S’pore: What is ‘domestic tourism’

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S’pore: What is ‘domestic tourism’

If you’ve ever seen a mural around Chinatown and Kampong Glam—think the famous letter writer mural—chances are they were painted by Yew Yip Chong. His cheery murals, found mostly around so-called “heritage” areas and in some HDB estates, typically depict deeply nostalgic, long-gone scenes.

Well, nostalgic for someone my parents’ age or older. After all, can you miss something you never got to experience? 

While I snapped away at the painted faces of the mural, I realised with that twinge of guilt I always feel whenever confronted with my cultural alienation, that I had never seen a traditional Chinese opera show, let alone a makeshift one by a street more colourful than it is now.

To those who had experienced Chinatown before it was “sanitised”, I can imagine a tour of the current Chinatown may also entail a sense of loss, as I felt upon viewing the artist’s depiction—essentially all that remains of it. 

Not all historical sights are preserved either. Missing from Yew’s murals is Sago Street where Yew grew up, only two streets away from the opera mural.

Infamously known as the Street of the Dead, it was a stretch of funeral parlours and home to loud wakes and the washing of nude corpses in open daylight. In a CNA interview, he stated that he has avoided the topic “due to the taboo behind death”, but I wondered, even if Yew had wanted to depict such a macabre subject—a huge departure from his usual cheery works—if it would be approved in a country where street art remains highly regulated.

All conservation is an active process of selecting the narratives that make up “place-identities”, the collection of ideas around a place and its identity, and prone to “tweaks”  by those doing that active selection according to objectives and ideologies. The seedier aspects of Kreta Ayer, such as the brothels immortalised in Charmaine Leung’s autobiographical 17A Keong Saik Road, or taboo subjects like the lesbian relationships many Samsui women and ma jies long-associated with the area entered into, may have limited space in the curated image of Chinatown.

The way “heritage” is packaged in Singapore—in forms easy-to-digest, state-sanctioned, and infinitely instagrammable—may be optimised to draw tourists, but may put off locals.  The transplantation of palm trees to the neighbourhood and influx of Middle Eastern restaurants in Kampong Glam have been criticised by the original residents for “Arabising” the landscape at the expense of the area’s original Malay-Muslim culture.

And additions like the shamelessly-touristy Chinatown Food Street do little to convince locals that the original charm of the area is being preserved. When we passed by it was nearly deserted, while the basement of People’s Park Centre where we had lunch was packed.

Source: MSN

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