LIFE IN SINGAPORE

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 126, 1 May 1925, Page 9

LIFE IN SINGAPORE

; : . “ A REAL CHINESE DINNER." SHARK’S FIN, AND CRABS’ EGGS. Recently a tourist ship containing over 400 Americans arrived at Singapore (writes' a correspondent). It might have been expected that these travellers would have penetrated the darkest recesses of the town in their search for new things. Instead they accepted the dictum. of Solomon that “there is no new thing under the sun, ’ and sat all day in the hotel lounges and drank cocktails, and compared Singapore with little old New York, and danced the parrot-shuffling fox-trots and two-steps of Western culture and fashion. Little they knew of Singapore who only the Raffles knew. A few of them went into High Street and were fleeced by the suave Bengalis and Bombay men who sell silk in that historic highway. Down in the streets to the south of New Bridge Road, where the Chinese theatre is, is a vast warren of Asiatic culture which should really be of more interest to the tourist than cocktails and hotel lounges, because it is real. It is not like the Chinese quarter of Sydney or Melbourne, where the Chinese all wear bowler hats and eat beefsteaks, and speak English with more or less precision. It is China itself, the amusement section. Here are the Chinese clubs,, where the merchant Chinese gather together and eat and hear the music of their country, flutes, two-stringed viols, gongs, and the voices of the singing girls.

A FIVE-COURSE DINNER. Here, too, are the Chinese cafes and eating-houses. It was to one of these which I went, escorted by one, Koo Beng Wat, to have a real Chinese dinner in a real Chinese city, served by real Chinese waiters. I don’t know that I would care to forgo European food for Chinese, but the dinner was excellent, if strange in flavour, and as I couldn’t handle the soup with my chopsticks, I reverted to the Western spoon. There were five courses. The first was Hye Wong E. Chee (shark’s fin and crabs’ eggs), and as we ate it, a gruel-like mass, to which more solid pieces of gristle and jelly gave consistency. Beng Wat remarked on the strange blindness of Australians who refused to eat shark’s fins and sent this food of the gods up to China, where it is worth its weight in silver. Then there w6re fried pigeons: (Siu Yu Kap) and Ha Yok Yee Yuon (prawns fried in batter). The waiter brought towels, wrung out in boiling water, with which to mop our faces, and Beng Wat told of the life of a young Chinese of the merchant class. He would, he declared, like to go abroad, and see the world as do some of the students, but in China a son must not leave his father. “My father,” he said, “is old, and I cannot go. When he dies, too, I shall be the head of the house. In the West a father can leave all his money to the daughters if he wills it. In China liinetenths must go to the son.” Then came Kai Yong Yan Wi (fowl and birds’ nests), and as Beng Wat plied neat cliop-sticks ho told me that this was the very best birds’ nest, the white birds’ nest of some islands whose name I could not catch. ' The next course, and the last, was Sang Ching Pak Chong E. (fish done with chopped vegetables and what seemed like glue and gristle). This fish again was a special fish, known locally as “The White One,” as opposed to “The Black One,” which is of poorer quality. Apparently the whiter in colour food is the more it is esteemed by the Chinese.

CUSTOMS OF CHINESE. Then there were more towels and tea, drunk, of course, in the Chinese way, without milk or sugar. And then Beng Wat made clear a few things about the Chinese manner of life. Having observed that they seemed to spend their time eating or aimlessly wondering or gambling,’ he replied to me that the Chinese, except the small class of students, had no intellectual interests at all. Most of them cannot read, because to read Chinese literature of the better kind is a monumental job, which takes a lifetime. He himself had not read Confucius. There was, of course, music, but this was not written, the tunes being handed down by ear. There remained gambling, drinking smoking, eating and drinking. The sleeping is usually done between four o’clock in. the morning and eight o’clock, and there is an afternoon siesta, when business allows. Then, of course, there is work. The macaroni sellers were still beating their sticks to call custom at one o’clock in the morning, and there was hammering in the carpenters’ shops. Locking out on the street, full of idling rickshaw coolies and street sellers and dawdling throngs of young Chinese, ; there fell upon one a vast sense of the futility of human life. The atmosphere of the East is all against effort. What use to strive when the brain is wasted ,n money-making, and the rest is a mere killing of time? The life of the street flowed under the lights like a scene from a production by Oscar Asche, but- it was real life, prodigal, unthinking, driven by primal desires, wonderfully peaceful, each unit thinking just as each other unit. Back at the hotels of the Europeans the tourists were drinking cocktails and fox-trotting. Surely we should be glad of our nobler, steadier purpose in life.