Dateline : 26 Tuesday 7-pm – 9.30pm

The Ngee Ann Kongsi auditorium of the sprawled out spanking new campus of University Town, NUS  fills up. The event: “Moving House” jointly organised by NUS Museum and All Things Bukit Brown.  The highlight:   a timely resurrection of  an award winning documentary by film maker Tan Pin Pin. “Moving House” made in 2001  which followed  the  Chew family ,  one of 55,000 Singapore families forced to relocate the remains of their relatives to a columbarium as  grave sites made way for urban redevelopment. The screening   was followed  by a presentation by Dr Hui Yew Foong on the  first exhumation documented at Bukit Brown on 3 June 2012 by his team which also included a video clip of present day descendants at the grave of their ancestors. It was a reprisal of a poignant scene from Pin Pin’s Moving House 11 years ago to the present which struck a chord with Judith Huang who was in the audience,  and moved her to write in her  blog  about matters of national importance  the morning after. We reproduce it here with her kind permission

Matters of National Importance

For most the glittering success of Singapore is like a mirage, can see but cannot touch. – a friend

I consider myself a patriotic Singaporean, and have been since I was a small child. Perhaps it is a quirk of my character, a function of being unusually enthusiastic about group identities, or perhaps I am just one of those people more susceptible to propaganda. I can’t be sure. But every morning, from the age of 7 through 18, when I recited the Singapore pledge, I meant every word of it (and still do). I still remember this feeling of national pride in progress – particularly economic and technological, that was thick in the air in the 80s and 90s. In particular, when I was in primary school, the object of national pride was the MRT  (built in 1986) and Changi airport, both of which featured prominently in any national day poster we would draw for primary school art competitions. There was a sense that this infrastructure, as symbols of modernity and top-of-the-line technology, was part of a national effort to prove that Singapore had a future – or, rather, that Singapore was the future, and that we were all in this together.

The past 5 years saw massive changes in my country’s skyline, population makeup and politics, all of which I am grappling with as a returnee Singaporean. For me something changed when the casinos were opened. I’ve been down by Marina Bay quite a few times now, and I especially enjoyed the iLight festival, where this city really did seem like something out of a scifi movie set, only real. But there is something disconcerting about the fact that our most iconic building is not an opera house, not a national stadium, not a government building, but a casino which bars locals from entering, built for the cynical purpose of milking superrich foreigners to increase the GDP. Can someone who believes gambling is a vice really feel national pride in something like this? I know I feel distinctly uncomfortable when I look at those three slender columns and the ship-like sky garden linking them. Many of my friends from overseas have enjoyed the spectacular view from the top in the infinity pool, but something still restrains me from paying the $20 to enter the sky garden. Somehow, I don’t want my money to go to a company that makes money off other people’s misery and addiction, even if I’m not directly spending it in the casino.

In a week or so another spectacular national development will be unveiled – the supertrees, also in the Marina Bay area. I’m a little more enthusiastic about these, since they also appeal to my geeky side. The supertrees cost $1 billion, and are touted as an amazing man-made imitation of nature, a leap forward in ecological architecture. While I will definitely be checking them out, I can’t help but contrast the construction of the supertrees with the destruction of Bukit Brown, a natural secondary forest, rich in biodiversity, where human heritage and ecology mingle seamlessly.

While watching the screening of Tan Pin Pin’s documentary Moving House at NUS yesterday, I was hit viscerally by the high human cost of national development. The sight of aunties and uncles praying to their ancestors for forgiveness before plunging their hoes into their parents’ graves, the half-curious, half-fearful peering into the grave to see the blackened, shrunken bones of the loved ones they buried some twenty years ago, and the uneasy feeling that their ghosts may be unhappy at these developments were both difficult and fascinating to watch. I think we Singaporeans are no strangers to “sacrificing the small me to complete the big we” (牺牲小我，完成大我）. The sort of boh-pian stoicism, the black humour in the “can’t be helped, government needs your land, sorry sorry” explanations offered to the ghosts, are all deeply familiar and endearing, resignation tinged with the tiny sting of resentment.

But the thing is, we are able to swallow this resentment as long as we see the point of the sacrifice. The danger comes when national development is seen to be benefiting not citizens as a whole, but a small, privileged group, which, furthermore, may not even be primarily Singaporean. Yes, the supertrees will be open to the public  – the $1 billion is not going to finance a private garden. However, they are located in the Marina Bay CBD area, enhancing the million-dollar views of the skyscraping buildings and condos in that region, and I’m willing to bet that the average heartlander will probably not make the trip down to see them all that often. Bukit Brown, on the other hand, is a far more humble site, though occupying some pretty prime land (next to the exclusive Singapore Island Country Club). It is a sacred site for veneration of ancestors, a rich source of historical information as well as biodiversity. Furthermore, its destruction (and so, the loss of historical memory) is irreversible – it’s not as though we can simply transplant the gravestones somewhere, or preserve the material culture without destroying it.

The truth is that much of the frustration I sense from the people who have relocated, exhumed graves, or had their land repossessed for the sake of “national development” is that simply not enough information is given to explain why their sacrifices matter, and, crucially, what they (and people like them) are going to get out of it. In other words, the cost-benefit analysis, while a process transparent to policymakers, is largely opaque to those affected. Perhaps the average Singaporean would be more willing to relocate because an MRT station needs to be built, rather than a highway, since he may see the MRT as a more egalitarian infrastructure project compared with a highway that he associates with cars (which, due to the high cost of COEs, are out of the reach of most Singaporeans).

Funnily enough, I find that now I have returned, my sense of national pride has shifted from the nation-building projects to the amazing growth of civil society I’ve witnessed from afar in the last few years. I am amazed at the volunteer spirit of the “brownies”, the way they have set out to teach other Singaporeans about their heritage and history and ecology. While the building projects are monumental and aspirational, the movement to preserve Bukit Brown’s heritage is nostalgic and humble, but also noble in its insistence that every pioneer buried there matters, and offers a glimpse of life on this island as it once was, a piece of history that, once destroyed, represents a loss to all of us, because our own understanding of ourselves would be that much poorer. The narration of the past is just as important as the building of the future. We are not rootless creatures. Although our nation may be young, each of our family histories reaches as far back into time as anyone else’s, no matter what our nationality, and it is truly up to us to preserve or discard these pasts.

Whatever the outcome at Bukit Brown, what is remarkable about the movement that has sprung up around it is that dialogue has opened up in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. Although activists may say that the government has been unresponsive, and civil servants may be wringing their hands at the unexpected “trouble” activists have given them, the truth is that the level of dialogue and collaboration has far exceeded any other civil society case in recent memory, and this can only be a good thing, as the government learns how to communicate its plans and decision-making processes better, and civil society gains more experience and tools in making the wishes and aspirations of Singaporeans known.

After all, a sense of national identity needs to come from the citizens themselves, rooted in our culture and our history, because in our democratic society sovereignty rests with the citizens, and legitimacy rests with their elected representatives. It is our shared past and our shared future that makes us Singaporean, and if we don’t stand up to define it, no one else will.

Judith’s other pieces on Bukit Brown can be found here and this one was written after her first visit to Bukit Brown

“Moving House” (photo courtesy of Tan Pin Pin)