Welcome to Wayang

     Last week, the spouse and I attended a performance of waying kulit, shadow puppetry, at the Malay Heritage Center.  A few days later, I saw a woodblock with wayang kulit as its subject at the Singapore National Gallery. 

Cong Way Ndut

Choo ken Kwang's Wayang Kulit

     Our resident anthropologist (Seriously, there are two at the moment.) informs me that Indonesians prefer to present wayang kulit with the audience on the side of the puppet master.  Even as the performance was in Bahasa Indonesia, we could follow the humorous asides from the puppet master and the musicians. It helped that the story was a familiar one, from the Ramayana.  That ancient Hindu epic remains a favourite in predominantly Moslem Indonesia.

Children of all ages enjoying wayang kulit

Peeling Away the Layers of History

My Mental Map of Singapore, 21 July

An hour's bus ride from our housing at N.U.S. is the Malay Heritage Center at Istana Kampong Gelam.

     You could be forgiven for thinking a small island would be easy to traverse. In Singapore, it's easier to get lost.  My solution is to form a map of places I visit, so that I have an association with place names.  I'll keep track of this for you on the paper above.

     I wanted to begin with Singapore's beginnings, so I took myself, on the Number 33 Bus, to the Malay Heritage Center. This was an hours journey from the National University of Singapore's tree-filled, high-rise filled campus into older parts of the city.  

     Place names are so revealing.  Kent Vale: so English.  Istana Kampong Gelam, where the museum is housed, tells an old story.  The Istana, or palace, was built for the Sultans of Jahor in the early 19th Century. Kampong is the term for Malay village.  Gelam refers to the former plantation of tree grown for the use of its bark for caulking ships.  The landscape which surrounded the Istana was that of a tropical plantation, enclosed by a wall.  The architecture of the istana could be called tropical Palladian, most likely designed by George Drumgold Coleman, an Irish civil architect who designed much of colonial Singapore. He incorporated the pyramidal roof of traditional Malay limas. 

     Thru Colonial machinations, the Kampong became the property of the British Crown, and state land at Singapore's independence.  In 2004, the Istana was refurbished to serve as the Malay Heritage Center.  As a North American, used to broad expanses of land, I struggle to imagine the watery world view of the Malay Archipelago.  Eric Tagliacozzo's lecture at the Asian Art Museum and his book help. The age and complexity of maritime trade in this part of the world is humbling to one who considers herself cosmopolitan. The term Malay itself is as about as precise as European.  Malay describes a wide range of peoples and languages of Sumatra, Borneo and the Malay Peninsula, a realm sometimes called Nusantara.
     The list of things I don't understand about Singapore's Malay heritage is endless.  Maritime trade and its role as a hub for Muslim pilgrims made Singapore an important center of the Malay world centuries before the legendary Sir Stamford Raffles arrived.  In the late 19th and early 20th Century Singapore was a center of Malay intellectual and cultural production.  Kampong Gelam was a center for printing and publishing.  The famous Hong Kong film company, Shaw Brothers, had a Malay subsidiary, and made more than 150 films from 1949 to 1967.  At the museum I watched clips from several different genre: romantic musical, horror, and social realism.  (I have a feeling that the Asian Film class I'm taking this fall will be nothing like what I learned at San Francisco City College!)
    The Heritage Center has a series of exhibitions called Se-Nusantara, which feature one of the sub-groups of Malays of Singapore.  At the moment it's The Heritage and Culture of the Javanese in Singapore. Tomorrow night we'll attend a performance of wayang kulit, the famous shadow puppet theatre, at the Heritage center.  As for Javanese food, you'll have to read about it my food blog!
     

     

     

Deep Background

     Wondering why you should read my posts about Singapore? If you are curious about these questions:

• How does this multi-lingual, multi-ethnic/racial, multi-cultural society function?  Is it doing better than the USA?
• How does this island nation, which imports almost all its food, feed itself so well?

Read on.

     For me, awareness of Singapore began with my dad telling the story of how he sailed on a troop ship from Halifax around Cape Horn in the early days of World War II. After the ship set down his American Field Service contingent in Bombay, the boat carried the remains of the British Commonwealth Army on to Singapore, where they were bombed, sunk and captured in the Japanese invasion. Noel Barber, an early contributor to Gourmet, wrote about this from the British perspective in his Sinister Twilight: The Fall of Singapore. 

     Contrast that to the account that the late leader Lee Kuan Yew gives in the first volume of his autobiography, The Singapore Story.  

     A better understanding of the Singapore perspective is my goal.

Off to the Many Singapores

     Perhaps I'm just jet lagged. My brain is whirling. I'm in this place where everything I've been studying for ten years is in the air.  The Hindu temples for Sri Layan Sithi Vinayagar and Sri Mariamman; the Masjid Jamae Mosque; the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple; the Thian Hock Keng Temple; all within central Singapore's Chinatown.
     Out the west side Expressway for the night, we are surrounded by skyscrapers and 100 shades of greenery.  Next to our hotel is an enormous multi-purpose futuristic-looking concert hall with shopping mall, and next to that the junction of the Circle and East West lines of the MRT.
     On Saturday we will settle into a flat near the University. The spouse will begin his teaching duties on Monday, and I'll begin exploring the many Singapores.

Balustrades, Raffles Balcony Courtyard
October 2015

Supertrees, Gardens-by-the-Bay
October 2015