by Yap Hao Yang /
A five-hour long production, HOTEL opens with a captivating sequence of actors crisscrossing the stage with urgency, unpacking suitcases and getting dressed. The opening spectacle foretells the play’s key theme of transience, but the music is also reminiscent of the bar-bell, giving the audience a palpable sense that theatre was unfolding right before our eyes.
One of my most memorable lessons from a literature teacher is that theatre is a communal experience — and that is what HOTEL truly achieved. The play dives into over a century of Singapore’s history, fleshing out such pivotal moments as the Japanese occupation and Separation and spotlighting communities that formed our nation. Through its odyssey into our collective memory, HOTEL made tangible the imagined community that is the nation — the spotlights illuminated the faces of my fellow theatregoers as much as they did the actors on stage.
NOSTALGIA HAS NO VALUE, YOUNG MAN
It has been said of the German capital, Berlin, that it is a city ‘condemned forever to become and never to be’, that it is a site in perpetual restless flux, ever transfiguring itself into something new. The same can be said of Singapore.
In the first half of the play, the characters, being immigrants, are hotel guests on the island of Singapore. Their stay is transient. In the second half, Singapore develops its own national identity and more residents call the island home. However, it seems that Singaporeans continued to retain their nomadic, hotel guest-like attitude like the waves of immigrants that came after them. Unburdened by shared history and regional ties, the characters’ primary concerns remained material comfort and possessions.
The depiction of Chinese characters post-independence is telling; emerging as the nouveau riche, they forget their dialects and eventually lose Mandarin itself to the tides of globalisation and westernisation. I, too, have observed the cultural shame and material pride that have come to define Singaporean-ness. Each time National Day rolls along, is there truly a love of place and nation, or the mere gratitude for being born in the post-colonial emporium and not in the periphery?
Are Singaporeans content with forgetting? With not knowing our histories? Sure, we know our political history all too well — Colonial Era, Japanese Invasion, Merger, Independence — some of us may even be familiar with the various names of the island and anthems sung at different eras in the play. There is recognition, but is there resonance? For many of us, the Singapura of the past is exactly that — a thing of the past. History serves only to lead us teleologically to the present: a prosperous state diametrically opposed to what it once was.
In this vein, it is not hard to see why political history is the only history most Singaporeans are familiar with — it is the only useful one. Political history can reinforce the legitimacy of the present-day state. However, political history can only be skeletal. The true flesh of our existence is in our shared, sociocultural history. To only know the political history of one’s country is similar to knowing one’s great-grandfather existed but nothing else about him. What was his childhood like? What hopes and aspirations did he have? What were his beliefs? Just like how it is impossible to feel any meaningful connection to said great-grandfather, it is also unlikely that one can feel a meaningful bond to the nation without knowing any of its stories on an emotional level.
I doubt there can be meaningful pride and belonging without an appeal to a collective history that resonates with the individual. I had never felt moved to tears before by the national anthem; yet, that evening, I did. I felt the struggles and aspirations of my forebears; and I saw them in myself. For all the change that Singapore embodies, some things really stay the same.
In the final scene, an aged and jaded Singaporean character claims ‘nostalgia has no value, young man’. But it is nostalgia that makes us realise our attachment to times and spaces — that we have long called a place home without once articulating it. What else does that for us?
FOR ALL THOSE WHO ARE NOT [ ]
Similar to a hotel, Singapore is a point of confluence for people from all corners of the globe. In Scene 7, an intricate exploration of Singapore’s attitude towards diversity unfolds during a conversation between a drag queen and Lee Kuan Yew. Bridget, the drag queen, asks ‘What kind of race is “Others”?’ and the old man replies ‘It’s for all those who are not Chinese, Malay, or Indian.’ While recognising the alienating effect of the “Others” category within the CMIO framework, the play also hints at (at least for me) an alternative possibility born out of practicality — that “Others” can be an all-encompassing and somewhat inclusive category. Despite the anti-Enlightenment critique questioning the necessity of categorising individuals in the first place, the classification system at least acknowledges the existence of those who do not neatly fit into conventional categories.
As tensions surrounding ethnicity give way to those concerning queer identities, it is my hope that Singaporeans can find acceptance in their hearts and create space for those who do not conform to the moulds of a heteronormative society organised around a gender binary. As Bridget reminds us, Singapore was the first country in Asia to perform sex change operations in 1971 and, two years later, to allow Singaporeans to change their sex on official documents. Bugis Street, now a shopping thoroughfare, used to be a gathering place for the transgender community. After all, we turn to history to explore other possibilities of being — and history does show there is nothing radically progressive (as though it were a Western import) in being accepting of different identities and lifestyles, and that pluralism has always been part of human cultures.
Recognising that ethnic diversity is inherent to Singapore — and that it extends beyond the major racial groups to include other immigrant communities — becomes increasingly significant post-Separation, particularly for the Singaporean Chinese.
With independence came the promotion of an idealistic, race-blind ideology of meritocracy. The Chinese started anew, achieving cultural dominance due to their demographic advantage. It is natural for a people settling into a new home to impose their own vision upon it, to make the place their own. However, this inevitably leads to the rise of xenophobia. More concerning, though, is the arrogance exhibited towards the non-Chinese population in Singapore, who are just as essential to the social fabric as the Chinese. Such arrogance rears its ugly head in the inter-racial wedding scene, set in 1995. During an argument between the Chinese and Indian families regarding whether the Chinese bride should don a sari to honour her Indian in-laws, the Chinese mother appears more assured in her racist denunciation of Indian culture, despite both sides hurling racist remarks at each other. While racial prejudices undoubtedly existed pre-independence, Chinese cultural chauvinism was not necessarily tied to nationalism, simply because there was no Singaporean nation yet. Haven’t we all heard the joke that Singapore is merely ‘little China’? Reflecting on our history, HOTEL unequivocally demonstrates that we are far from being a miniature of China, but rather, an ethnically diverse and multicultural country.
The multilayered diversity in Singapore is beautiful, but do we truly appreciate it?
We often neglect even our linguistic diversity, content with speaking English fluently and our mother tongue barely passably (at least for many Chinese individuals I know). Meanwhile, my grandmother speaks Malay, Mandarin, and various Chinese dialects solely to communicate with her neighbours. In Scene 6, on the eve of Singapore’s independence, three characters speak to each other in Cantonese, Hokkien, and Malay without the need for translation. That is lost now. HOTEL left me questioning my inclination to learn European languages rather than the languages spoken by my neighbours — languages that exist in our midst.
I THINK IT’S TIME
A few months ago, I remember coming across a video of a few uncles of different races singing and dancing in a hawker centre to a non-English song. I asked my dad if he had heard it before, and he said yes, it was an Indonesian song, ‘Macu Dan Racun’, that was popular back in the 80s. A decade later, Singaporean televisions would broadcast Asia Bagus!, a star-search program, together with Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, among other countries in the region.
Where has that sense of regional kinship gone?
Our exceptional economic development has led us to lose touch with our neighbouring countries. Instead of embracing regional connections, we often find ourselves identifying against them. This brings me to what is the most poignant part of the play for me: the fraught relationship between Malaysia and Singapore.
In an early scene, Ah Ying, a kind and cheerful servant, dons a gown belonging to her abusive mistress and immediately adopts her cruel demeanour, as if possessed. She declares her intention to become a mistress in her next life. However, when her cousin reminds her of their hometown, Seun Tat Village, she softens and breaks down, and they embrace. It becomes clear that sacrificing our humanity for anything else is simply not worth it. It was at that moment that I realised why I still consider Malaysia my home: the simplicity of life, the sincerity, and the hospitality.
Is that why I teared up upon hearing the first four plaintive notes of Negaraku — the Malaysian national anthem? That sweet and simple tune had left me for so long, and now it came back to me as though it had never left. It was the first time I had heard the anthem without having to sing along; it felt as though the country was singing to me, rather than the other way around. It evoked memories of my early childhood and a longing for those days of simplicity, surrounded by the love of family. It is unfortunate that Singaporeans and Malaysians can no longer relate to each other as they once did. Singapore has become a workplace while Malaysia has transformed into a haven for shopping and dining, separated by a congested causeway.
In the Separation scene, written with poetical interlocking dialogue and parallel relationships on personal and national levels, tears, tears, tears. One of the characters laments, ‘I think it’s time,’ before adding that time itself is the problem. Even if the right people meet, if it happens at the wrong time, if they are living on different timelines (such as a financially independent, urban Singaporean woman and a traditional mechanic from a Malaysian village), the only choice is to separate. The television broadcasting Lee Kuan Yew’s famous speech breaks down, and the hotel manager (the aforementioned urban Singaporean woman) declares it cannot be fixed; she then cries as the melody of the new national anthem rises. This mirrors our present reality looking back at the past between Singapore and Malaysia, replaying Lee Kuan Yew’s tears — nothing can be done about it. The countries’ timelines are severed for good. This is Paul Klee’s Angel of History. Now I wonder if Malaysia will ever catch up, and if it even should.
In the words of one of the characters, ‘having nothing to remember means having nothing to forget’. In a rapidly changing country, holding onto memories can be painful, as the need to let go is always lurking round the corner.
I still recall my ferry ride back home from Pulau Tekong after nearly three weeks of confinement. It felt as though home was an illusion because my absence seemed to have gone unfelt, and the island remained unchanged without me. Children continued playing on the shores of Pasir Ris, and cranes carried on stacking concrete upon concrete.
A home is meant to be a place where you feel needed and valued. However, a country that changes relentlessly, with or without your presence, is quite different in that aspect. It’s no wonder that Henry, in his later years, perceives home as an illusion, tethered solely to his life support machine, eventually passing away in the century-old hotel now owned by a Middle Eastern family.
At its core, HOTEL tells of the Singaporean, if not human, struggle of transforming a space into a place, a mere house into a true home.
Yap Hao Yang (b. 2003) is a writer and arts organiser from Singapore.
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