Oh you now yaya papaya
In the basement of our Singaporean house, there is a row of small shops and businesses. This is a common feature of HDB (Housing and Development Board) flats, which are public housing estates built by the government. The basement is designed to accommodate various small businesses and community spaces. The logic behind this was also followed in the Hungarian public housing construction boom of the 1960s. Recognizing the small size of the apartments, the original concept was to provide various functions in communal spaces. Laundry could be done in a shared laundry room, bicycles could be kept in a common bicycle storage, and kindergartens and nurseries were located between the buildings. After a while, even the basement hair salon could function as a cooperative (quasi-private enterprise) in the socialist Hungary.
This concept is also present in Singapore, but based on capitalism, so the foundation of the services found in residential areas is small businesses. These small businesses are of enormous value here. Besides the fact that many people make a living from them, they give life to local communities. Therefore, the government continuously supports small businesses, balancing the expansion of multinational corporations. The support comes in the form of, for example, recently providing every household with a $300 voucher that can be spent at local small businesses. Singapore has approximately 1.2 million households. The voucher is divided into $10 denominations, can be downloaded onto a phone, and the shopkeeper scans it with their own phone, after which the government transfers the money to them. It is up to the individual to decide whether to spend the money on a haircut or on food at a local eatery.
Our neighborhood is the oldest public housing estate in Singapore, built in the mid-1960s at the beginning of Singapore's independence, around the same time that public housing construction began in Hungary. The concept behind it is very remarkable. When the country became independent, they took out a large government loan to start off. The loan was split in half, with one portion going towards economic development and the other towards a large-scale social program. The program involved gradually replacing the outdated rural environment (called kampong in Malay) that remained from colonial times with modern public housing apartments built and maintained by the government.
It's worth dwelling on this fact for a moment. Singapore is still considered to be the bastion and leader of capitalism, the epitome of neoliberal economic policy (not just by me), but its social policy in many respects rivals the Scandinavian model. Not in its ideology, as it is more paternalistic and caring rather than satisfying individual needs through universal social rights, but in its volume. 70-80% of the population lives in government-subsidized public housing, which is leased to a family for 99 years. A sophisticated system has been developed for this housing policy, but I would like to draw attention to the fact that the massive investment in government housing construction and government rental housing policy did not begin when the country became wealthy enough to afford it, but rather with a massive social investment at the beginning of Singapore's modern history. The conscious raising of the standard of living and opportunities for those living here (the other investment was in education) was not the achievement of wealth, but rather a prerequisite.
Yesterday, while waiting with my daughter for my wife to arrive so we could finally go to Sentosa Island, I took the photo below of the row of shops in the basement of our house.
On the far left, there is a newsagent and paper store where you can also make photocopies. It is run by an elderly Chinese woman. Next to it is a beauty salon run by a young Indian woman.
Next to the Indian store is a general practitioner's clinic. The doctors here also operate in private practice, with at least 4-5 medical clinics in the area. The doctor is inside the clinic, but the assistant is in a glass cage facing the street, and the waiting room is also open to the street (so there is no wall, just a shutter that is raised in the morning, and the waiting room is visible to everyone on the street). This is important in the context of today's post because patients wait in an open space visible from the street, often standing outside the house, talking. The assistant is also part of the street scene. Every time I pass by the clinic (and I have to pass by it to get home), the woman loudly greets me and waves from behind the glass.
Next to the medical clinic, a Chinese sibling pair run a unisex hair salon. So they serve both men and women at the same time. I also go here for a haircut, which costs $15, which is considered cheap here. You can also go to the business district (3-4 subway stops away), where you can easily leave $1000 at a fancy hair salon.
The Chinese sibling pair in our building belongs to the hardcore of the local neighborhood. They are two middle-aged women. Like any traditional hairdresser, their shop serves as an information center, private detective agency, opinion leader center, and talk show all at once, with all the attendant features. The entrance side is a glass wall with a glass door, so the hairdressers constantly monitor every movement on the street with CCTV cameras that rival their efficiency. They know when everyone comes and goes and gather information from their customers while cutting their hair, and analyze it between two haircuts at the front-of-house analysis center with the neighboring shopkeepers.
Their neighbors are a Chinese food store that sells dried food. The real business is inside the store, but for some reason, the Chinese female owner has improvised a large table in front of her shop, surrounded by chairs from various places, and it operates as a community center. During the day, the owner sits outside all day, surrounded by older gentlemen (perhaps her fans) leaning on their sticks, chatting, reading newspapers, and playing.
Next to the store is a Chinese cookie shop (more like biscuit-type cookies) and a bakery. After that, there are two elevators and staircases in the building, followed by another wing of the building that is just as long. This wing doesn't show a similar communal life. There is a Chinese medical practice next to it, but I have never seen anyone come out of there. Next to it is a daycare center, a playground, and a development center for young children, where in the early afternoon, mothers and/or domestic helpers (i.e., maids) wait for their children. To the right of them is a jewelry store and a store that sells plumbing or other household supplies, but I have never seen them open. So life is more to the left of the elevators.
Now, what this whole post wants to talk about is how these small shops are not just businesses. They sell goods and services for money, but the workers, regular customers, and residents of the 12-story building together form a continuously interacting community.
Yesterday, while waiting downstairs with my daughter, I noticed that there was no one at the hair salon. The owner came out to the makeshift table in front of the neighboring shop and portioned out some dried goods on a small scale, helping the elderly shopkeeper. The Chinese New Year is approaching, which is the biggest holiday here, much bigger than Christmas, and during this time, specific foods are eaten and given as gifts to relatives. They portioned these out together, the shop owner, the hairdresser, and the present "fans" of old men.
I also often see that the newspaper vendor has an agreement that the council of elders sitting at the table can browse the daily news and fresh magazines for free. The basic idea is that they watch each other's stores while the other eats or goes to the restroom. The customer base also comes from the neighborhood. For example, I go to the hairdresser and the doctor's office. Everyone knows everyone. In a previous post, I wrote that in Singapore, the dead are laid out in open spaces at the bottom of public housing buildings. This means that someone's death in the neighborhood is ceremoniously visible to the entire community. People passing by can express their condolences by bringing flowers, and the relatives there invite them for a drink and a quiet conversation over small pastries. People don't disappear and are never seen again, but death is a part of everyday life, and everyone is kept accountable.
These same spaces or very similar ones can also be used as study corners. In Singapore, the school system is very tough, so almost every child goes to tuition classes, extra classes. One of the established and supported places for these classes are completely free study corners, with small paired concrete tables and fixed chairs. The walls are painted in different colors, there are places where there are refrigerators, or vending machines. The children come down, the tutor is probably also living in the neighborhood. Wall-mounted fans are installed in these spaces and anyone can use them freely.
The picture also shows green bicycles. They are everywhere in the city, with a mobile application, for $1, you can take them for an hour (if longer, it costs more) and there are numerous QR codes placed in the sidewalks, which serve as bike parking lots, you lock the bike there and continue on foot. There are also bike racks at every bus stop and around every block. I also use them when I go to the store further away. I leave it in front of the building and take the elevator home.
Similarly to the study corners, the sports facilities located between the buildings also work. There are outdoor gyms everywhere. Mostly the elderly use them, and they are also designed for them, so they do not work like those muscle-flexing gyms in California. There are such gyms, but those places are on the beach or in trendy air-conditioned glass-walled gyms in shopping malls. The traditional community spaces do not lack scruples, as can be seen in the photo (I hope), that it really is a run-down housing estate culture. However, I still prefer to live in this environment because the local communities have a breathing soul.
Everyone here already knows me too, obviously I was a big deal at the beginning as a white person, but there are plenty of white people living here. Two houses down there's a Malay family-run eatery that specializes in Western food, where you can get everything from spaghetti to fried chicken for 7-10 dollars, which is considered very cheap here. Basic Chinese dishes can be bought at one of the neighboring eateries for 3-5 dollars, which is enough for a lunch. At this eatery that sells Western food, I often see many Western families living in the area. I am not the only white person in the neighborhood, although it is true that the majority of Western business people who work here live on the East Coast. We are in the center.
There are a thousand small signs of good neighborliness. I can best appreciate this based on what we experienced in Estonia. I really love Estonia and have written a lot about it, but I also talk about how, from a Hungarian perspective at least, the place is a disaster when it comes to human relationships and social attitudes. Neighbors literally avoid each other. They deliberately (and admittedly) hide behind shelves in the store so they don't have to say hello or, God forbid, have a conversation. They get sick in the elevator if someone else gets on because the personal distance is too small, and Estonians find this difficult to handle. The Dutch give three kisses. When we landed at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam with Estonian colleagues and were greeted by Dutch people hugging and giving three kisses at the exit, they looked like they had just woken up from a Freddy Krueger nightmare.
My Estonian language teacher (who speaks Hungarian fluently and knows Hungarian culture very well) said about this phenomenon that in her opinion, the 800 years of occupation and living under other powers have created an Estonian basic position where, as she put it, we sneak under the eaves to blend in with the wall. And it's really like the residents of the concentration camps in Schindler's List, who did everything they could to blend in with the crowd for survival, so that they wouldn't stand out in any way, so as not to be beaten with a whip or being shot. I also knew about this phenomenon from my military service. An experienced soldier never volunteers for anything and goes through the barracks yard as if he doesn't exist. He can't attract any attention, for example, he can't walk too slowly, he has to act like someone who has a life-threatening order to convey to some general, lest someone think he's loitering in the yard and give him a task. If they moved to a new barrack, the experienced soldier never chooses the bed next to the door, especially not the one next to the light switch (the person who sleeps next to the switch is called Aladdin in military slang - we can imagine the rest). The experienced (now I'll use the technical term: old) soldier positions himself in multiple cover behind the door. The officers are already tired of giving orders. They don't bother to distribute the tasks evenly. They burst into the barrack and point to the two nearest beds:
Two people, very quickly!
Always the same two newbies (freshly enlisted, inexperienced soldiers) go. Compared to this basic atmosphere, we arrived in Singapore where a completely different attitude awaited us. Both in our first year of renting an apartment and now in our own apartment, the hallways are designed like the circular corridors of Budapest's tenement houses (only the circular corridor is always on the outer rim of the building), so people have to pass many apartments to get home. Doors are often left open by default, especially on higher floors, because if the door and opposite window are open at the same time, it creates a pleasant cross-breeze (rather than just ventilation) and there's no need to use air conditioning in the tropical heat.
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| Our corridor is adorned with essential plants in front of the apartments. |
This creates a kind of open house concept where neighbors greet each other at the door and exchange a few words. The care of the flowers and plants on the corridor is a continuous topic of conversation. We exchange flowers, give advice, and people even water each other's plants if they go away. There is also a disciplinary aspect to this, because due to the abundance of greenery (despite being a housing estate, Singapore is a very green city), there are a lot of animals, reptiles, and insects everywhere that need to be kept in check. The lizard is a friend because it eats mosquitoes, which are considered public enemy number one due to the risk of dengue fever. The National Environment Agency marks the so-called dengue clusters on real-time maps, and these areas are surrounded by posters with instructions on what to do.
One of these tasks is that there cannot be stagnant water under or around the plants because mosquitoes lay their eggs there. Neighbors warn each other about this and they easily reach out to my flowers and turn over any plastic mats filled with rainwater. If they don't do it, the authorities who patrol the dengue zones will, but they already leave penalty tickets.
If anything happens in the neighborhood, like in "Süsü" (a Hungarian children's story), a thousand heads appear at the door. Although it is written on the basement information board to keep all valuables away from the windows and entrance doors, I still can't imagine a sneaky thief who could slip away with anything under the crossfire of surveillance cameras present everywhere, even in the elevator, and the much more advanced system of retiree gazes. When I was hospitalized and the ambulance came to pick me up, I was home alone with my 10-year-old daughter. Immediately, the neighbors came out, and the helper from the Philippines (the personal assistant/nurse of the 85-year-old Cantonese neighbor) immediately reassured me that she would take care of my daughter, and she went straight to our apartment.
Now, before giving the impression that this is characteristic of the whole island, I would like to balance out this post with two things:
- These old buildings (40-60 years old) were consciously designed to foster these neighborhood interactions. The new buildings, especially the high-end condominiums, were created with a different culture in mind. There, everything is about the individual. It is considered a value if someone can get to their own apartment without meeting anyone else after stepping out of the elevator. There is a 24-hour concierge service, and in some places, visitors' data is still recorded even after COVID.
- There is a kind of watershed in Singaporean society, between those who enjoy local food stalls and those who are not willing to eat anywhere except air-conditioned (i.e. mall) places. There are those who live in individualized condominiums with their own swimming pool and gym, or use the district pool that is just five minutes away. Some people would not speak Chinese, and try to use English or American English, attempting to get rid of their accent. Others use the melodious Singlish, which is a very creative blend of Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and English, and is much more emotional (and I think more direct) than the stiff business English.
The woman works at one of the prestigious investment banks and answers the phone in a courteous "corporate" tone. This is the sound of the workplace. Her outfit is also typical office attire, with a clean, ironed blouse or a possible option of a skirt suit. On weekends, we can easily see the same woman in shorts and a t-shirt with flip-flops on the subway.
As soon as she answers the phone and recognizes the voice of her former colleague, she immediately switches to Singlish and starts teasing her friend in the distinctive sing-song style in a mixed language of Chinese, Malay, and English. To me, this joking, colorful, and slightly vulgar port world is much more sympathetic than the washed-out corporate office style. The heartlander Singaporean world is a bit like a Jenő Rejtő book. And for me, it is very interesting to see how these very different cultures have clung to each other to create something entirely new. If there is a Singaporean identity, it is much more this than the skyscrapers of the financial district. However, the truly exciting thing is that these two worlds do not contradict each other. The port's Popeye world continues to live between the skyscrapers, and people can navigate between the two.
What does the title mean?
The quote in the title comes from the video. "Oh you now yaya papaya." This is a typical Singlish sentence. "Yaya" is originally a Malay word, meaning "arrogant, snobbish, proud". They turbocharged this by adding the similarly sounding word "papaya" (the fruit). In this sense, "yaya papaya" is a slang term, like "Richie Rich" or "Cheap Charlie" in English.
There are two more things to notice to understand Singlish.
- The sentence is grammatically incorrect in English because it follows Chinese grammar and word order. So, she speaks English and Malay, but following Chinese grammar. This is very characteristic in other combinations too. The expression "don't play play" uses all English words, but follows Malay grammar, which expresses plural or emphasis by repeating the word. "Don't play play" means "don't fool around, don't cheat, no swindling." Another example is "can can" as a local response to questions like "Can you please open the door?" In English, one would say "Yes, I can" or "Of course, I can," but in Chinese, it is enough to say "can," and for emphasis, they repeat it. Again, it is English spoken according to Chinese rules.
- Singlish, the intonation and melody are what give real meaning to the message. This also comes from the Chinese language, where there are 4 tones and each word can be pronounced in 4 different ways, each with a different meaning. Therefore, intonation, melody, and stress are of particular importance. In southern Chinese dialects, this is how they live. And most of the Chinese in Singapore have come from southern provinces of China since the early 19th century. They call this intonation Lah-Loh-Leh. It has no meaning, does not add content to the sentence, but they add it after almost every sentence, Lah or Loh or Leh. Not just any way. Or imperatively (Ok, lah - leave it!), (I can do it, lah - of course I can, don't question me). Lah can be infinitely long or short and sharp. It can be shouted or chanted. If someone explains something quickly, it becomes "a". "You go out to the yard, a!", "You take the bag from the lady, a!", "You bring it to me, a!", "And you put it on the table here, a!" Here, the function of "a" is to say "Do we understand each other? Is it clear?" The listener nods and says "a" after every sentence. Therefore, "I understand." This again comes from Chinese.
Today there is talk of Singlish being considered a separate language. The English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil languages have interwoven in Singapore and have created an endlessly creative, interesting, and colorful world from these languages. Just as colorful as the communities and the entire country itself.
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