Jewel // Joanne Leow

Joanne Leow tells the story of a cab ride in Singapore, juxtaposing a mall development with the flora and “greening of Singapore” as part of our guest edited month looking at Urban Ephemera.

It is my first time on a direct flight from North America to Singapore. I stumble off the plane after 17 hours to an equatorial dawn, tempered by the brightly lit shops, air conditioning, and manicured flora of Changi Airport. The lines for those with foreign passports are long. My entrance to the country is automated, through a two-stage plastic gantry that instructs me to place my bright red passport and then my thumb onto the appropriate glass sensors. The machine pauses, then its screen lights up. “WELCOME JOANNELEOWCHUANGCHING” my names pressed up against each other, my selves packed into a microchip and a fingerprint record. The signs for the new Changi Jewel, a $1.7 billion mall development at the airport, beckon as I exit the luggage claim area. I hesitate. Who does not want to see the fancy new glass-domed structure? Its centre open to the sky to accommodate the world’s largest indoor waterfall. Its flora and fauna imported from all over the world, particularly the 100-year-old trees uprooted from Spain and artfully placed amidst the fancy shops and Shake Shack outpost. The HSBC Rain Vortex, the Shiseido Forest Valley. The Manulife Sky Nets, Hedge Maze, Mirror Maze and Discovery Slides. Even before returning to Singapore, I have seen this space from endless angles, selfies, photographs of people taking selfies in front of the immense rush of water. I demur. Instead, I turn to the non-existent queue for taxis, ever efficiently planned for more and more visitors, and hand my bags over the genial cab driver who greets me. As we exit the car park, he begins extolling the virtues of the Jewel and I let him go at it for a few minutes before interrupting him, my voice and accent slipping so easily into the sing-song cadences of Singaporean English: "Eh! Macam Singapore tourism board advertisement. Not bad yah!” At my sly jibe, the man erupts into a high-pitched guffaw. He could not place me before but now he has. He relaxes a little and we start to carefully negotiate conversation topics: the weather, the government, the new law clamping down on “fake news” that many of us see as an attack on freedom of speech, the Prime Minister’s public tiff with his siblings, the endlessly changing cityscape: life, here. As he drives me from the eastern part of Singapore, where the airport is, we remark on the numerous trees and flower bushes that have been planted on either side of the expressway and in the middle dividers I make out new flowers that I have not seen before. "Those are new right? The light purple-pink ones?” "Yah, always planting new things.” The topic invariably turns to the founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew; the driver reminds me he is the one responsible for “greening” Singapore. I return to my joking repartee with him, "Yah lor, he planted every single tree right?” Another dashboard slamming burst of laughter greets this statement. And I tell him the anecdote of the late man who during a tree-planting ceremony suddenly bent down to touch the pavement around a new sapling declaring the ambient temperature a bit too warm to support its growth. We marvel at the story of his micromanagement skills, his attention to detail. I tell him about the logical offshoot of this: the National Parks trees website, where in classic Singaporean bureaucratic style, each tree is mapped out on an island map that is interactive. Click on a small green dot and you will get information on its taxonomic classification, its common name, its estimated age, and exactly how much carbon it is sequestering for our great island-state.As we continue to our journey, the driver turns my attention to the trees again:“Some of these trees too old already now, look at them, all botak. Dunno why. Must be the climate, or the pollution.”Samanea Saman (small leaves), or rain tree. These are 22 years old, the map tells me later. I would have been 17 when they were first planted. Their branches sinuously curve in unpredictable ways before reaching canopies of delicate small leaves, softening the hot curves of the asphalt. They line this part of the journey from the airport to the city, strategically planted to make a good impression on visitors to the island. Our Garden City, our Tropical City of Excellence, our City in a Garden, terraformed inside and out, already filled with trees from somewhere else. Etymologically, as the National Parks website handily informs us, “saman” is

derived from linguistic corruption of the trees’ vernacular Spanish name in northern Venezuela. Its common name, “rain tree,” alludes to the tree’s habit of folding up its leaves before rain, or to the shower of secretions from sap-sucking cicadas resting on it. It is hardy, tolerant of poor acidic soils and water-logged conditions.

The powers that be also know why it is dying: attacked by a fungal complex that is promoted by drought stress. A pragmatic, workhorse of a tree, now suffering from the heat like the rest of us—many of its branches bereft of leaves, its bark covered in excessive lichen. I wonder what will survive in these times, in this climate, in this atmosphere, on this island of constant change, constant progress? Will we retreat to our enclosed domes, our man-made water features, the sound of water hiding the constant drone of climate-controlled air?I watch as the trees give way to newer specimens undoubtedly chosen for the same reasons that these saplings were brought in from so far away, almost a quarter of a century ago. I watch the rows and rows of slab-like public housing mingled with tall, slim condominium apartment blocks, endless new flyovers and road re-alignments and widenings, the sharp clay red of soil that has been upturned for construction. When I arrive where my parents live, a set of three older, slightly mossy slab blocks sit on the edge of a water catchment forest reserve, and the driver and I conclude our conversation with the usual niceties. As I exit his vehicle, I ask for his name, shake his hand. He says, this is the best conversation he has had with a customer in a long time and wishes me well before slipping back into his sleek white car.

Joanne Leow (Ph.D. University of Toronto) is Assistant Professor at the University of Saskatchewan. She has published articles on Singapore literature and film, and diasporic North American literature in various academic journals. Her poems and literary non-fiction have appeared in Ricepaper, Catapult, The Kindling, The Goose,untethered, and Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore. She is currently completing Counter-Cartographies, a book manuscript on authoritarianism, urban space, and contemporary Singaporean cultural production. She is also creating the SSHRC-funded “Intertidal Polyphonies,” a transmedial resource of interviews, readings, short films, field recordings, and other research on the coastlines of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Vancouver.