章節試閱
§ Gravity
Bras Basah Complex, named after the area in which it is located, sits across from the famous Raffles Hotel, which is said to have been home, however briefly, to several notable writers, including Conrad and Burgess, at points in its illustrious history. It is bounded by Bain Street, Cashin Street, Victoria Street, and North Bridge Road—the brothers Gilbert Angus and Robert Bain, the prominent Cashin family, Queen Victoria, and the north of Presentment Bridge (now Elgin Bridge). At the bottom, there is a four-story podium of shops and offices. On the fifth floor, one often finds people exercising, walking their dogs, or gossiping about not-present neighbours. And above that, residential flats split between two HDB apartment blocks, containing the most normal lives in the most normal of environments It is both a shopping centre and a residential estate, public housing right smack in the middle of the city, where real estate is at a premium. There is a shop selling watches here that looks like it must have had been here from the very beginning, and an art gallery that opened this past week. A complex of connected buildings, but also a complex of intersecting paths, of in-between qualities.
Bras Basah is a Malay name—beras basah, misspelled—meaning “wet rice”. It refers to a time where the area was a lagoon where boats carrying rice would come through. With land reclamation and urban development, there is hardly a trace of wet rice here today—and certainly no lagoon. Bras Basah Complex has a Chinese name: 百勝樓 (Baisheng Lou), which literally means Building of a Hundred Victories. It sounds much more dramatic and important in English, and was likely chosen perhaps because of the way it approximates the sound of “Bras Basah” (百勝, Baisheng) while carrying an auspicious implication.
Bras Basah Complex is also colloquially known as “書城” (Shucheng), which means “city of books”. This is a reference to a time when it housed an impressive number of bookstores, which were consolidated from the greater area of 大坡 (Dapo) and 小坡 (Xiaopo). While the complex is not actually all that old—it was built in 1980—it is connected to a much larger history of Singapore’s publishing industry and Chinese diasporic culture. More directly, whether symbolically or materially it embodies entire cultural histories—and personal ones too. It contains ghosts.
Names are curious things. They can become so removed from their point of origin, can be erroneous, can be overwritten, can resist proper rectification. They can imply histories, but also obscure them.
The story goes that when I was very young, my grandfather would bring both me and my sister to Bras Basah. At that age, I was basically a useless biological machine, with no developed sense of purpose. More importantly, I had hardly any reading faculties and certainly nothing in the way of reading preferences. They say that you can positively influence a child’s development during pregnancy with Mozart and reading, so I guess my grandfather believed in similar processes of diffusion. When I was tired from all the walking, I supposedly asked him to carry me. I had already grown considerably by that time, and so my grandfather refused. Reluctantly, I said that I would carry myself.
I have no real recollection of this. I have the haziest impressions of these outings, and even then I wonder if I’ve imagined them. I am sceptical of these memories. I don’t doubt their veracity—that they actually happened—but I wonder if I’ve remembered these incidents myself. Perhaps these images came from my own sense of what would be reasonable based on the stories I had been told. When this thought first occurred to me, I immediately remembered the scene in Blade Runner where Rick Deckard is talking to Rachael, referencing a spider from her supposed childhood, and he says: “Those aren’t your memories; they’re somebody else’s.”
As I grew older and my reading preferences became more defined, there seemed to be little reason for the family to visit Bras Basah. I was more into Times the Bookshop, and then later, Borders and Kinokuniya. Those were the places that carried the books that I liked. Growing up, I spoke primarily English, and any situation where I was forced to speak in Chinese would prove calamitous. I carried this yoke all the way into my teenage years. Bras Basah Complex had, by then, turned into a more commercial space. There were a few bookstores; it had become more notable for the shops that sold musical instruments or art supplies.
I already knew of the 書城 name then, even if I couldn’t see the books. I believed it. I could only have imagined it, filling in the gaps according to the stories that I had been told or simply what the name evoked, but I could see this mythical city of books in my mind’s eye, almost as if I could remember things that I had no right to.
It’s strange to think that given how small the island of Singapore is, and how Bras Basah Complex sits right smack in the middle of the city, that I never quite found my way back to it after those early childhood years. Our paths through spaces, distant and foreign, familiar and convenient, is often so exactly defined that they become more linear narratives than spatial interactions. We have no energy, no need, no motivation—no time. Between time and space, you get one or the other sometimes. Our reality is the result of multiple choices and coincidences, the wide sea of possibilities funnelled into the stream of our experience, thinner than a thread.
Sometimes, I found it easy enough to convince myself that the mythical shopping destination of my imagination still existed. But each time I passed by, the reality of things would prove much more disappointing. It was crusty and old, and I almost never stepped in. I rarely had any strong motivation to, though perhaps I didn’t want to confront the emptiness that awaited me within the space.
Several years after my childhood adventures with my grandfather, I started a job at Bras Basah Complex. The interview took place on a weekday afternoon. I was quite early, but my anxiousness meant that time slipped by me all too quickly. A bag of nerves, I stepped into the building. There was a pronounced uncanniness. There were some features that looked familiar, certain stores, certain structural features, facets of a place that I must have remembered, heard about, imagined, or gleaned subconsciously from media.
Not long after the interview, I learnt that I had secured the position, and would be able to start work very quickly. Feeling as if I hadn’t done very well in the interview, the news came as a surprise, and yet, it also felt like a strange sort of homecoming, like there was underneath it all a slender thread of destiny reeling me towards this place that I had effectively forgotten.
I took some time acclimatising to my new job. Different hours, different commute, new habits. Part of this process was getting to know the space. For such a small building, it concealed many surprises within nooks and crannies—shops hidden from plain view, disused spaces, unusually useful facilities, toilets to avoid. There was none of the mythical City of Books that I had learnt of or perhaps imagined, only details, rigid and practical.
During my university years, I found a book that was a gift from a professor to one of her students in one of the used bookstores. The professor taught at the university I attended. In fact, I had taken one of her classes before, so there was an unusual sense of providence. I turned the page and saw a second note. The recipient of the gift had passed it on to another friend for her birthday. Somewhere further down the line it ended up on those shelves. It always fascinated me that there was a clearly traceable path that the book had taken to arrive in that place at the time, for me to discover it, as though it had been guided by some destiny. I sometimes wonder what happened to that book in the second-hand bookstore. Sometimes I also think that I am much like that book, swept along by rewritings and erasures, barely making so much as a ripple, perceiving destiny in my stories when there’s no such thing as destiny.
There are few bookstores left in this old building. I remember Select Books, run by the indefatigable Lena Lim, and her stories about shoplifters. I remember how the Youth Book Company was trapped in limbo for a considerable length of time after its owner had passed away and none of his children took up the mantle. I would pass by the store from time to time and wonder when its green signboard would light up again. Basheer Graphic Books remains, a favourite haunt in my youth. In a corner of the building, Xinhua Cultural Enterprises houses an immense book collection belonging to Mr Yeo Oi Sang that still intimidates me with its size, breadth, and depth. His collection and his life story mirror the histories hidden beneath the façade of Bras Basah Complex, of the Chinese publishing industry in the region. Now and then you can see him reading the papers outside the store or tending to his plants.
It feels as though I’ve known these stories all my life, but the truth is that I learnt of many of them only when I started working in the building, and somehow was drawn to retelling them. They would come to me in various ways—collaged from fragments of remembrances and anecdotal accounts, information I came across in the course of my work, stories I read in the papers or remember from years and years ago—a patchwork of story parts, truths and half-truths curated from a malady of tedium, leaving only the most exciting portions, extruded into some new reality.
I don’t remember what our plans were that day. I only remember that they had failed in some way—a meal that was disappointing, or a show that we were late for. No, we went to the art museum. I feel sure that we went to the art museum, even if no impressions of our time there remain. You wanted to go to Bras Basah Complex, you said.
I can see us walking down the rain-swept streets. You lead the way because it’s not an area that I frequent. I see myself shuffling along gingerly because my shoes prove too slippery. I’m looking for art supplies, you say. Do you want to come along? We cross the road at the traffic junction, turn around, walk past the library, and then let the rickety escalators take us up to the fourth floor. Barely a word passes between us.
We walk up the stairs and you start to look at the stationery. I merely tag along, silent witness, moral support. I am out of my depth. I have no knowledge of arts and crafts, only the trauma of flailing away during the classes in my schooling years. The sound of footsteps, the squeak of shoes, outside, the glare of the sun. Do you see it? you say. It’s not here, you say. I nod, make some sort of noise in agreement. It’s just paper, but I barely have any idea what I’m looking at.
Somewhat disappointed in your eventual haul, you pay for the few items you manage to find. Then you say that you have to rush home to help your brother with something. I nod. You say goodbye like it’s any other day, but every goodbye here feels final.
To be frank, I’ve never seen my grandfather reading. I didn’t know if he was much of a reader at all. In spite of the childhood memories and his clear belief in the importance of a cultural education, I can’t say that he was ever into books—and certainly not literature. The only book I can be certain that he read was one that I had lent to him when he was in the hospital, thinking it would keep him entertained. It was 《城門開》 or City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao, and after he had completed it, he mentioned repeatedly that some of the terms used were from the Beijing dialect.
Encouraged by the success of this recommendation, I lent him a book by Gao Xingjian. He was in the hospitals a lot by that time, and I wondered if it would kickstart a book-reading renaissance for him. The book was 《靈山》Soul Mountain, perhaps Gao’s most famous work and also a tome of considerable heft. I thought that a long book would keep him occupied for a decent amount of time. Among the greatest enemies in any prolonged hospital experience is boredom.
Some months later, after he had been in and out of different hospitals a few times, I asked if he enjoyed the book, but he couldn’t seem to recall that I had lent anything to him. It was lost for several months, vanished without a trace. A theory surfaced that my aunt had been overzealous when tidying up their place for them. At that point, I grew resigned, convinced that the book was lost forever.
I contemplated purchasing a second copy. By that time, I had already started working in Bras Basah Complex, and every so often, I would look up the book in the few surviving bookstores within. It wasn’t difficult to find. In fact, I would always come across the same edition—an anniversary edition published in Taiwan that included photographs—and came close to purchasing it on several occasions. I’m not sure why I looked for the book exclusively in Bras Basah Complex. Perhaps I was encouraged by the memories—experienced or inherited—of my childhood, or perhaps it just seemed to fit the narrative that one goes to Bras Basah to find Chinese books. It was also helped by the fact that there weren’t all that many Chinese bookstores in Singapore, with most of them having to prune their inventories to make space for better-selling products.
Or perhaps it was because I intuited that the place held particular significance for my grandfather. One time, he asked me to buy a Chinese dictionary from Bras Basah Complex because he knew that it was where I worked. He explained that, having not done much writing over the years, he could feel the language slipping away from him. The City of Books narrative clearly still held great meaning for him, or maybe he was remembering the times we had spent together when I was much smaller and he was still sprightly. Maybe I was trying to continue his story in a place that I had wilfully believed it should continue.
This indecision over whether I ought to purchase a new copy continued for months until one day, I saw my book at my grandparents’ place, stored neatly in a plastic crate. By that time, both my grandfather and aunt had died. My grandmother didn’t even know that it was mine. She returned it to me and smiled briefly, glad that she was able to help, and then the smile disappeared again—hardly unusual, as she had always seemed quite distracted in the past few months. She had lost too much too quickly.
presences as thin as whispers. Two people, two shadows, standing in the open plaza. Us, a version of us, but no longer one which we can lay a claim to, now lost or just forbidden. The rectangular frame of the architecture above us, unfolds into vastness, into void, the night sky taking on the mantle of a god. That night, we passed by this same building, passed through it, assimilated it into some tale.
I described it to you as one describes a tourist attraction, contrary to my intentions. I wanted you to feel at home, wanted to remove the barriers to experience, but perhaps set up more instead. In the end, it should not have been surprising. I was an outsider to this bastion, I did not belong in my memories. The door was shut, leaving a space most unresponsive, most inert, a sullen façade staring at us, unreadable gaze.
the city surrounds. District, distance. Disjunct, disconnect. Together we stepped through the plaza, looked at the pathways, listened for the sounds that weren’t there, ghost-voices, wave patterns. Together, seekers of endings.
quiet, dull above you who are missing, comforting, unnerving. It was awful, yet paradoxically calming, and we, survivors of a deathly stillness, poets of an unnamed eschatology. It wasn’t the last evening we spent together—and yet it may as well have been.
I walk through the place with equal measures of pity and disgust. Officially painted murals sit next to scratches and scrawls on the walls. Cockroaches nest in the rubbish chutes. Benches decorated with last night’s beer bottles. There is a staircase that perpetually smells of urination. There is another where I once saw teens getting their hands all over one another. The rain washes grime onto concrete, pattern, draught, a chart of the indecipherable relief of time.
The place is lived in, unlike so many of the buildings around it, sterilised, maintained, continuously renewed or replaced. In contrast, Bras Basah Complex is bodily, alive, ageing, bearing scuffs and scars, sputum, secretions, various disjecta.
Yet it is also a place that I want to return to, and yet am unable to—nostalgia, the pain of not being able to return. The repulsive body and the pristine memory, the same disconnect that Barthes describes between the voice and the grain of the voice, the same separation between identity and being. Biology and story, machine, memory.
Today, I went into the complex to see that renovation works were underway. Lift upgrading works, a fresh coat of paint. Stores closing, opening, moving, renewing themselves. Losses, replacements. Piecemeal changes, shedding skin. But like in the quandary of the Ship of Theseus, how does a place remain a place? Why do we imagine such stability for our places?
Places are not vessels for memories, but they can give such an impression when so many lines converge. I keep wandering the area, I keep walking down the same paths, the shops that are different and yet the same. I watch as scenes transform or vanish, as things are effaced and disappeared. My memories of those outings with my grandfather have also been obscured, transformed into memorable anecdotes. Is the unfortunate effect of writing to turn even the most mundane of stories into unnecessarily attractive narratives?
The City of Books no longer exists, and perhaps it never did—at least not physically. What is there is a body, ageing, decaying, excreting, but also a body of changes, the traces of which are often erased or invisible, but in the tangle of old and new, in the tensions between that which departs and that which remains, a picture emerges of absences, glorious histories, delicate stories. The thread hints at an imperceptible web. The memories bubble to the surface, lost friendships, stolen glances, regrets, moments too mundane to be turned into stories. Then I see my grandfather, in tinted glasses and clothes unfamiliar to me, an impression pieced together using the identikit of photographs
and myself, young again, small again, only just starting to recognise words, only just beginning to discover the mechanisms of gravity.
§ Gravity
Bras Basah Complex, named after the area in which it is located, sits across from the famous Raffles Hotel, which is said to have been home, however briefly, to several notable writers, including Conrad and Burgess, at points in its illustrious history. It is bounded by Bain Street, Cashin Street, Victoria Street, and North Bridge Road—the brothers Gilbert Angus and Robert Bain, the prominent Cashin family, Queen Victoria, and the north of Presentment Bridge (now Elgin Bridge). At t...
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