Oogh

Last night I made the girlfriend cry. It was not for a good reason, and it wasn’t even for a bad reason, it’s just one of those things that seems to evolve naturally from a seemingly innocent point of conversation and suddenly starts opening up doors in the heart that should stay closed until a more approriate time.

Of late I have been waxing rebellious over at the William Gibson blog forum, because some local there, calling himself Big.Brother, started up a thread claiming to be an inhabitant of what Gibson, in an essay for Wired magazine called, Disneyland With A Death Penalty. Basically Wired gave him a free trip here about ten years ago, just to get his written impressions of the place. Since this Big.Brother seemed to have no compunction about blasting the place, I gleefully joined in. In a–in retrospect anyway, at the time I was totally caught off guard–not so surprising twist of fate, it turns out that the guy I attended film studies with at the U of A, who got me here and who I consequently stopped speaking to a couple of years later, was also tooling around on the forum (He’s a big Gibson fan himself and, like me, is very influenced by his writing, though I was influenced by it at 14, he was influenced by it at 28 or something), and started to take issue with all the slamming, though he responded to Big.Brother’s posts, not mine. I didn’t want to get into a flame war, and so never directly responded to his posts either, but the gist of it is, since he came here with useless history degree, white skin and the usual attitude that locals come to expect from caucasians, he found paradise. He called himself a writer, and thus instantly became one here, found a nice Chinese girl that gave him none of the attitude of the girls back home, and found a job and a people more willing to accept his genius than he ever could back home. So he was mighty offended with people who actually picked holes at what he referred to as his “private utopia”.

This, to say the least, invoked the wrath of Big.Brother who called his posts deluded and myopic, but then he doesn’t know the guy is white. Since then, a flame-war has been simmering between the two as Big.Brother and “Ebo” (The name of the main character from his first abandoned novel, actually it’s Eboman) started trading posts and snippets from other websites either praising or damning Singapore, proving that other countries have the same problems that Singapore does, so leave this island paradise alone.

What does all this have to do with the girlfriend?

What started it all was when Ebo made an effort to play peacemaker and said something to the effect of, “The only problem that Singapore has is rude cellular phone users.”

In retaliation, Big.Brother posted a hot spanking new story (Still, unsurprisingly, not covered by the press) about 6 protesters being arrested by the police for attempting an anti-war demonstration. In addition, they were interrogated and it was found that the source of their motivation was an SMS message urging people to demonstrate. Doubtless whoever made that initial SMS is already detained. Here’s the story.

I mentioned this to the girlfriend and she was quite incensed. So incensed in fact, that she needed to rant about it on her own blog. Then she read Gibson’s article, and she got very upset indeed.

I have always hated this place from the perspective of someone who is used to a certain vibrancy, texture and freedom, who is pissed that I am denied that here. I’d never really come face to face with someone who’s emotions equalled my own, but came from being intelligent enough to realize that she’d never even had a taste of what I had enjoyed and was incensed about no longer having.

I really got a sense of just how much she hates this place tonight. She said a lot of striking things, the most memorable images for me all centering around her feelings of betrayal about this place. She grew up here, constantly being fed by the propaganda machine of how important, worldly and sophisticated Singapore is. And she was really disheartened when reality set in. She likened it a couple of ways. Like when you’re one of the rich kids at schools, and all the other kids say stuff like, “My dad comes from a family of 6 generations of weatlh.” “My dad made his money as high powered lawyer, putting criminals away in celebrated cases.” “My dad is the CEO of a company that produces polymers found in every electrical appliance.” And when it’s your turn, you say, “My dad won the lottery.”

But what really drove the point home for her was when she had a chance to travel and found herself away from the machine for a while. All that talk of Singapore’s significance in the region and in the world evaporated in the face of real places that were more concerned with things other than having a World Class Airport. No one cared whether an airport was world class or not, and if it was, they didn’t see why it should be important. All the reassurances of the importance of Singapore were suddenly, acutely absent and insignificant in the grand scheme of things. She said it was like having a braggart father, that was always coming home talking about how important his job was, what a contribution he made to the company that day, how it was so tough being the head of his division, and when she finally got out of the house and visited the office, he was just a pencil-pushing, mid-level bureaucrat with a cubicle by the watercooler, occasionally mentioned whenever more toner was needed for the photocpy machine.

It bothers her that Singapore needs to praise itself so ardently because it really just emphasizes to her how insecure it is. And it really bugs her that she’s from this country and that stigma will always follow her to some degree, that she’s from a country that is in love with its own airport.

So she was talking about all this, pausing, starting, and having to stop again when the tears came. I think I watched decades of frustration just come pouring out tonight, and for her, this attempt to snuff out freedom of expression is just one more nail in the coffin, since it runs counter to Singapore’s sudden need to have radical, innovative thinkers… provided they don’t shake things up and just make lots of money. The fact that Ebo actually defends this point of view and deems it necessary for order (He ascribes to the As Long As The Electricity Works and The Streets Are Clean, I’ll Tolerate Anything ethos) is just another signal to her that people are essentially materialist animals that will do anything as long you keep their bellies full and give them a compliant, adoring, warm body to fuck. Well, that and she’s even less impressed with white people than she was before. A guy that couldn’t hack it in the Real World and retreated here to let his skin do all the talking rates very low in her estimation. The fact that her own country eagerly embraces such individuals and rewards them for their “cheat,” just downright depresses her.

But it was still an enlightening and even kind of touching experience to see just how deeply she feels about all this. If I respected her before, it’s just gone up a couple of orders of magnitude after last night’s conversation.