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45 pages

English

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From the playfully satirical pen of Catherine Lim comes the wild, weird and wacky world of O Singapore! This is modern-day Singapore where the campaigns and directives of the unremittingly competent leadership come face to face with the undeniably human fads, foibles and follies of the local people. Using uniquely Singaporean traits as focal points, Lim takes us through the dizzying whirl of these merry collisions with consummate wit and comic inventiveness. The Series:This title is being reissued under the new Marshall Cavendish Classics: Literary Fiction series, which seeks to introduce some of the best works of Singapore literature to a new generation of readers. Some have been evergreen titles over the years, others have been unjustly neglected. Authors in the series include:Catherine Lim, Claire Tham,Colin Cheong, Michael Chiang,Minfong Ho, Ovidia Yu andPhilip Jeyaretnam.

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Singapore

Singapour

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Publié par	Marshall Cavendish International
Date de parution	09 juillet 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789814974646
Langue	English

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MARSHALL CAVENDISH CLASSICS
O SINGAPORE!
O Singapore! Stories in Celebration
CATHERINE LIM
2021 Catherine Lim and Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
First published in 1989 by Times Editions
This edition published in 2021 by Marshall Cavendish Editions
An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Requests for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196.
Tel: (65) 6213 9300. E-mail: genref@sg.marshallcavendish.com
Website: www.marshallcavendish.com
The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no event be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 800 Westchester Ave, Suite N-641, Rye Brook, NY 10573, USA Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd, 253 Asoke, 16th Floor, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
Marshall Cavendish is a registered trademark of Times Publishing Limited
National Library Board, Singapore Cataloguing in Publication Data
Name(s): Lim, Catherine.
Title: O Singapore! : stories in celebration / Catherine Lim.
Other title(s): Marshall Cavendish classics.
Description: Singapore : Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2021. | First published in 1989 by Times Editions.
Identifier(s): OCN 1253340547 | e-ISBN: 978 981 4974 64 6
Subject(s): Singaporean wit and humor. | Singapore--Social life and customs--Fiction. Classification: DDC S823--dc23
Printed in Singapore
Contents
The Malady and the Cure
Sorry ... Temporary Aberrations
Kiasuism: A Socio-Historico-Cultural Perspective
In Search Of (A Play)
Goonalaan s Beard
A Singapore Fairy Tale
The Concatenation
Write, Right, Rite ; Or How Catherine
Lim Tries to Offer Only the Best on the Altar of Good Singapore Writing
The Malady and the Cure
This is the strange story of one Mr Sai Koh Phan, one of the faceless thousands in Singapore, rescued from the facelessness by a malady. Mr Sai Koh Phan, civil servant, is now a celebrity of sorts in the country and region, and since his case will be presented by his doctor at the next Geneva International Conference of Remarkable Disorders, there is a chance that he will be known to the world as well, at least the medical world.
The malady has, moreover, created considerable ripples in the political world. But for adroit top-level manoeuvring, it could have resulted in serious political repercussions for Singapore.
I m only a humble civil servant. I suffered much, but I m glad that in the end it was for the good of so many Singaporeans, says Mr Sai Koh Phan, when he is interviewed by a reporter from Newsweek who asks him how it feels to be the centre of so much attention. And he repeats, I m only a humble civil servant, and I m glad to be of service to my country, when another reporter, from TIME , asks him how it feels to have helped avert a national crisis. He adds, with a sudden access of gratitude. I must express my deepest thanks to my government and to my doctor, Dr Sindoo, without either of whom this miracle would not have been possible.
Now gratitude has been the abiding principle of all Mr Sai Koh Phan s actions, a gratitude constantly evoked by the daily reminders of his secure, well-paying job as the principal of a school, his well-furnished two-storey semi-detached house where he lives with his wife, four sons and mother-in-law, his other equally well-furnished apartment which he is renting to a Japanese bank executive, his sizeable bank account. To comprehend the full extent of his rise from the deprivations of his childhood, Mr Sai Koh Phan matches each deprivation against the solidity of present comforts, so that daily routines in the home become so many cautionary tales to his children.
Chicken? I never ate chicken except once a year, on the first day of Chinese New Year, so eat up all that chicken on your plate, and be grateful, he would admonish his children.
Air-conditioning? I shared a room with three brothers and two sisters on the top-floor of a shophouse in Chinatown. We had two mattresses to share among us. Most of the time, I slept on rice-sacks. Now my son says he can t study except in an air-conditioned room!
Mr Sai Koh Phan s gratitude to the country that has given him and his family this good life, is of the deep-welling, not the merely perfunctory kind, and extends retrospectively on behalf of those ancestors who had come from China with nothing but the proverbial shirt on their backs, and on their behalf, Mr Sai Koh Phan s eyes fill with grateful tears.
Mr Sai Koh Phan s position as principal of a large primary school offers him plenty of opportunities for the expression of this emotion, for the school is in the constituency of a very active Member of Parliament who likes to make visits to show up Mr Sai Koh Phan s school as the model of a well-run, well-disciplined school. Mr Sai Koh Phan is all effusiveness when the Member of Parliament comes calling, he is even more fervid when the Minister of State for Education drops in one day, and when the Senior Minister for Education himself indicates that he would like to come for a visit, Mr Sai Koh Phan knows that he has reached the apotheosis of his career and there is nothing more that he could wish for in this life. The depth of the gratitude expressed in his welcoming speech that day has been without parallel.
Now so powerful an emotion must have a channel for its proper ordering, and Mr Sai Koh Phan has found the perfect channel in the national campaigns. The comprehensiveness of the campaigns, covering nearly every aspect of the Singaporean s life, from the way he grows his hair, to the size of his family, together with the regularity with which they occur in the course of the individual s life, has provided the ideal framework within which the awesome power of Mr Sai Koh Phan s emotions can be organised and structured. Hence the campaigns have provided the guiding principle of Mr Sai Koh Phan s existence, and he has never felt more contented and happy. The campaigns have provided an overriding philosophy that can be expressed concretely in 101 ways in his daily life at work and at home. Mr Sai Koh Phan needs not the posters and advertisements and handbills to remind him of what he must do and must not do. For the injunctions and admonitions are etched deep in his consciousness so that any infringements, no matter how small, are instantly felt and appropriately responded to. Long hair is frowned upon, so a single hair springing up in defiant growth out of the neatly cropped head of a pupil, is immediately noticed and seized upon by Mr Sai Koh Phan in his vigilant rounds of the school. Mr Sai Koh Phan likes to be a good example to his pupils, so he wears a crew-cut and no hair of his will be seen to even remotely violate the official stipulation of the above-the-back-collar hair length, and he continues to keep the crew-cut long after the campaign against long hair is over. Mr Sai Koh Phan prides himself on being different from those who are quite content to fulfil only minimum requirements or who grudgingly comply because they fear the fines that come with non-compliance. Mr Sai Koh Phan believes in going the extra mile; indeed, his sense of gratitude will not let him do less. And that is why he not only cuts his hair very short, but keeps it that short, beyond campaign time. And that is also why he has four children when the campaign urges Singaporeans to have three. The age gap between his two elder sons and the two younger ones matches exactly the time gap between the campaign to Stop at Two and the campaign to Have Three - or more, if you can afford.
This full, total and whole-hearted response to the campaigns has not been without personal sacrifices, but it would take more than personal sacrifices to daunt Mr Sai Koh Phan. There is the Incident of the Bee, and there is the Incident of Xiu, both of which vividly testify to Mr Sai Koh Phan s readiness to put up with any discomfort in his commitment to the campaigns.
The Incident of the Bee: Mr Sai Koh Phan stands at attention during the singing of the National Anthem at the morning school assembly in the school field, his chest pushed out, his shoulders pushed up, his fists clenched, his facial muscles taut with the effort of a full display of patriotic fervour. Now this position of ramrod straightness is not without cost to a body long trained to respond to a built-in dictum that crawling is a more effective mode of locomotion than walking, and the constant demands made of that poor body in terms of abrupt changes from the bowing, bobbing and scraping motions to perfect erectness, must be great indeed. But that is of little concern to Mr Sai Koh Phan. He stands, muscle-taut, singing the National Anthem, when suddenly a bee works itself up his left trouser leg and stings him right up there. It is a large and most vicious bee, and the pain it inflicts is excruciating, but Mr Sai Koh Phan s disciplined patriotism will not allow even the smallest tremor in that superbly erect frame, so he goes through the whole morning s ceremony, perhaps only a little paler than usual, and it is only when the last strains of the song have faded away in the air, and he