Ultra-modern Singapore celebrates the Chinese New Year the traditional way.
In a warren of narrow streets lined with painstakingly preserved shophouses, roughly bound between two temples — one a centuries-old Hindu place of worship and the other a Buddhist construct of much newer vintage — a nation attempts to resuscitate its historic, cultural bonds with the Middle Kingdom at the beginning of each year.
For Singapore’s Chinese majority, 74 per cent of the 3.26 million citizens, the Lunar New Year, based on the lunisolar Chinese calendar, isn’t merely a 15-day celebration that leverages tradition in order to bring communities and families closer. It has evolved into a meticulously organised, if somewhat commercial, showcase of Singapore’s Chinese roots; a projection of oriental ethnicity in a globalised island-nation. And Singapore’s Chinatown is the gilded stage on which this elaborate performance is played out.
Chinatown, like the other two ethnic enclaves, Little India and the Malay-dominated Geylang, owes its existence to a blueprint of the city drawn out in 1822, but has seemingly always been first among equals by virtue of the demographic advantage that its inhabitants enjoy.
Flanked on the east by Singapore’s central business district, Chinatown is an alluring combination of historic low-slung structures, shadowed by modern, monolithic housing estates and sprawling shopping malls, with shop-lined alleyways and an improbable number of gastronomic destinations.
It is an abnormal place by Singaporean standards, a peculiarity shared with the two other ethnic districts, for it has little of the sterility and characterless architecture that much of this city has in abundance.
But Chinatown also emanates inner-city charm: crowded residential quarters, pungent food courts with a hint of disarray, shoppers milling in and out of establishments and wizened old men sullenly watching the world go by. It is probably this indeterminable character of Chinatown that makes it the perfect backdrop against which to read a nation and its people caught in the throes of an annual celebration.
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It’s quarter to seven on a rainy Saturday evening, the first of a four-day holiday that is the centre-piece of the Chinese New Year for most Singaporeans and the reason why some fly out for a quick vacation. But at Kreta Ayer Square — a charming open space enclosed by the iconic, hulking Chinatown Complex, known for its delectable food and the contemporary Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum, lined with red lamps — a clutch of old men gather around playing Chinese and Malay variants of chess. Unmindful of the shoppers thronging the makeshift stalls on Sago Street that borders the square, or the hundred or so spectators, mostly senior citizens, gathered before a temporary stage that hosts nightly performances, the players remain intensely involved with their game.
A little distance away, on the other side of the Buddhist temple, at the sizeable temporary market erected near Banda Street, vendors await the weekend crowds. The wares are varied: potted plants, caps, clocks and pottery to traditional Chinese decorations that hang outside homes and line streets. Banda Street’s market, however, is an incredibly small sample of the merchandise on offer.
Between the Buddhist temple and Sri Mariamman Temple, Singapore’s oldest Hindu temple, is another cluster of alleys with stalls, many erected for only 21 days, selling everything from lanterns and sweets to melons and acupressure devices. And although there is an overpowering commercial feel to the setting, Chinese New Year in Chinatown also means the abundance of another Singaporean speciality: good food.
Throughout the year, Chinatown retains its place as one of the top destinations for good makan, Malay for food, but during the New Year celebrations it attains a whole new dimension. Almost half the entire length of Smith Street, known as Food Street, is covered, converting a favourite al fresco dining stretch into an all-weather food paradise.
Beyond the crowds and the packed lanes around Kreta Ayer, there is also a more regimented side to the festivities. The People’s Association, a statutory board that looks at social cohesion and racial accord, helps organise the River Hongbao, a riverside carnival at the Marina Bay waterfront, and the Chingay Parade, an event conceived in 1973 after Singapore banned firecrackers, which has evolved into a multi-cultural festival.
And in Chinatown, Kreta Ayer-Kim Seng Citizens Consultative Committee, a grassroots organisation that liaises between the government and the local community, spends up to S$2 million for the Chinese New Year celebrations.
“In 2003, we decided to do the Chinese New Year celebrations in a bigger way. The events go on for about five weeks and we expect around 2 million Singaporeans and foreigners to visit Chinatown during this time,” says Philemon Loh, a spokesperson for the organising committee, walking down a blocked-off thoroughfare in Chinatown on New Years’ eve that houses a huge stage, reminiscent of television game-show sets. Later in the night, the stage will host a countdown party, to be telecast island-wide, and watched here by a few hundred.
Behind Loh, a massive 108-metre-long Dragon emerges from the road divider between Eu Tong Sen Street and New Bridge Road, part of the festive street light-up designed by Singaporean university students. The year 2012, after all, is the Year of the Dragon, one of luckiest in the Chinese zodiac and a favoured time for love, matrimony and childbirth.
That’s why Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called on Singaporeans to make more babies this year. “Hospitals are already expanding their maternity facilities to deliver more ‘Dragon’ babies. I fervently hope that this year will be a big Dragon year for babies,” Lee told a country which has experienced birth rates fall, life expectancy grow and is likely to see more than 14 per cent of its total population aged 65 years of above — a ‘silver tsunami’ that was evident at Kreta Ayer Square.
Despite the big money, grand plans and government involvement that create Singapore’s Chinese New Year celebration, to some it remains incomplete. “No, lah, the olden days were better,” taxi driver Ronald Toh declares nonchalantly in a typical Singaporean accent as he pulls out the change. “You just do not get the real feeling of Chinese New Year without fireworks”.
