Abstract
This paper explores the ways in which social and economic hierarchies, drawn along ethnic lines, are materially inscribed onto a quotidian urban landscape. Using weddings as a lens onto everyday life, I will show how my professional practice (as a wedding photographer) and social research (as part of my PhD) have illuminated the way Chinese individuals in Singapore create their ethnic identities in the spaces they live and dwell in, 1 and how these identities texture the social and economic hierarchies they find themselves in. This paper will also draw upon an innovative mix of photography 2 and semi-auto/biographical 3 poetry to interrogate my chosen landscape, offering a variety of visual and textual aesthetic textures and spaces that invite the reader to participate in my informants’ ethnicity-making and everyday life.
I began photographing weddings in Singapore professionally eight years ago. My role as a wedding photographer was to document wedding rituals, take posed group photographs and ensure the bride and groom had a romantic record of their wedding day. I adopted a photojournalistic approach, concentrating on personal and hidden moments that happened during the wedding. Around the same time, I became interested in the sociological and anthropological aspect of weddings – what did the rituals mean? Why were they doing what they did? What did this say about them as Singaporeans, particularly Chinese Singaporeans? This curiosity culminated in my PhD research 4 on Chinese weddings in Singapore, where I used photography to understand the mechanisms through which Singaporean Chineseness was made. Drawing upon social stratification theory, I showed how an individual’s choice of ethnic identifications textured his or her social and economic life-paths. I argued that ethnicity was made in social distances, where individuals who preferred one identification over another became more intimate with that identification, or an associated person or lifestyle, and vice-versa. The result of this was a realization that social and economic hierarchies are drawn along lines of ethnicity, where the choices one makes (and are made for one) about one’s ethnic identifications can and do affect one’s position in the economy.
Using weddings to interrogate the urban landscape
My research uses weddings as a lens to understand the hierarchical material environments of Chinese Singaporeans. Weddings are a crossroads of cultural norms, socio-economic aspirations and diasporic journeys. They are concentrated bursts of activity that allow one to efficiently capture everyday life in a short span of time. My research is the first in-depth sociological study of Chinese weddings in Singapore since the 1950s, when Maurice Freedman undertook a study of Chinese wedding rituals in relation to kinship and the family. 5
Singaporean Chinese weddings follow a format that is both rigid and fluid. Two rituals are most commonly observed – a morning tea ceremony where bride and groom visit each other’s family homes to serve tea to family elders, and an evening wedding banquet where friends, family and business associates are invited. The sequence in which these rituals occur is highly scripted. The first involves travel from the bride’s home to the groom’s home then back, and the latter is strongly dictated by commercially produced wedding ‘menus’. However, within these events and rituals there lies a huge variation of minor rituals and consumption choices – what to wear, eat, do and at what time and to what extent. I will be focusing on the first of these rituals – the tea ceremony, primarily because it occurs within and around the homes of my informants. In doing so, the photographs I have chosen dwell on homes and neighbourhoods – places where ethnicity, diaspora, economy and everyday landscapes particularly collide.
My initial photographs (2003–5), which I drew on as data, were commissioned work and I was fortunate that my style meant that these photographs had sufficient ethnographic and aesthetic value to prove useful. As my research progressed (2005–10), I used my role as a professional wedding photographer to conduct participant observation, and the photos generated in this period became a product of practice and research – I also supplemented these images with field trips into neighbourhoods to capture the varying architectural styles I encountered during a wedding but had no time to photograph. I have chosen the latter period of photographs for use in this paper, as they best reflect a mix of social research, professional obligations and autobiographical involvement, given my own identity as a Chinese Singaporean.
Photography and autobiographical poetry
This autobiographical aspect is significant because my PhD research became a very personal journey. Prior to my research, I often took the urban landscape of Singapore for granted, and never realized just how marked economic distinctions were in the places and spaces individuals lived and dwelled in. My photography often involved wide-angles, purposefully situating my subjects in their environment so as to provide a deeper narrative (instead of, for example, zoomed-in portraits). As such, my photographs charted the intimate, liminal and macro spaces of my informants. I became a witness to their personal landscapes, and as a result I began to question my own position in these landscapes.
This questioning forced me to find a separate voice apart from my photographs. One that was more personal and more intimate than my photographs of other people. I found that voice in poetry, which I used to create an additional emotional texture to my photographs. I found that poetry, particularly poetry written from my own experiences, did two significant things. One, it created a deeper autobiographical layer over my photographs. As much as my photographs reflected my style and my observations, they were of other individuals. Poetry became a way for me to link photographs of different and disparate weddings together into a personal theme, drawing upon auto/biographical methods in social research. As Evans pointed out, it is in the individual that we find the social. 6 My own experiences worked as a foil to the social lives of my informants, creating opportunities for a reflexive reading of my data.
The second thing that poetry did was to supplement realist-style (descriptive) captions with expressivist-style (emotive) counterpoints. 7 Juxtaposing poetry next to photographs was a way for me to create waypoints and signposts as part of the mapping exercise. The poems helped to contextualize the photographs without making the obvious too obvious. Poetry meant that the reader was invited to make multiple interpretations of both poem and adjoining photograph, thereby further democratizing readings and encouraging an asynchronous, collaborative effort between informant, researcher and reader. In the next section, I will introduce Singapore as the site of my photo essay, explaining how I photographed the material environments of my informants in the context of their weddings.
Introducing Chinese Singapore and the photo essay
Singapore in South-East Asia is one of the few instances where a diasporic community of Chinese immigrants now form their own ethnic majority nation-state. 8 Like many postcolonial nation-states, Singapore’s independence in 1965 meant concerted efforts by its government to create a geographically bounded identity, a difficult task given the complexity and size of immigrants residing in Singapore. Chinese immigrants into Singapore were (and still are) ethnically heterogeneous, with many regional variations in terms of cultural practices and dialects spoken.
The state took upon itself the task of ethnically homogenizing its majority ethnic population by instituting Mandarin as the common alternative to Chinese dialects through various acts of policy. 9 But Chinese heterogeneity remained, manifesting itself in formations of economic and social hierarchies based largely on English language ability, aesthetic comportment and consumption patterns. 10 Such hierarchies are made tangible in the material environments that Chinese Singaporeans live their quotidian existences in. Housing is particularly used as a proxy for one’s economic situation – state-subsidized flats are the norm and economic aspirations are significantly centred on privately-owned flats or houses.
In weddings, the relationship between ethnicity, socio-economic stratification and material environment is magnified. Conspicuous consumption patterns in weddings reflect the ethnic identifications that different Chinese Singaporeans adhere to or distance themselves from, accentuating their social and economic life-paths. These patterns are most readily observed in the way homes are decorated, both for the wedding and the lingering decorations used in everyday life. Altars, banners, urns, religious artefacts, popular media (posters, cultural icons, etc.) are all on display in one’s home. The items and decorations are sometimes known as aesthetic markers – material artefacts that express one’s ethnic identifications. 11
As a wedding photographer, I was allowed unprecedented access into the personal worlds of my informants. By photographing and experiencing these worlds, I was able to create narrative maps of their everyday social, economic and ethnic landscapes. The following essay is a summary of the mappings I have generated over the last six years. I will begin each section (there are three) of the essay with a short introduction detailing the kinds of spaces I am presenting.
Home
Home looks at the highly intimate spaces of individuals, from their bedrooms to living rooms to dining rooms. Interspersed within photographs of these rooms are more detailed portraits of aesthetic markers that are scattered around, painting a social dimension of an individual’s habitat 12 and her ethnic identifications. The home and things in a home are an integral part of a Chinese Singaporean’s ethnicity, ‘its fabric and the artefacts and objects it contains act as . . . material supports for a particular way of life’. 13 Everyday clothes that hang behind the door, posters and paintings, relics and souvenirs all dot this domestic home-scape. Such home-scapes are the building blocks upon which more aggregated lifestyles can be perceived.
Lineage, Private Home
Bedroom in Chinatown
They were called the Gods of
Health, Wealth and Prosperity. 14
Everyone had them in the house somewhere. House Gods.
Porcelain and painted, neither elevated
nor enchanted. I regarded them
like I regarded my toys, my shield
with Chinese dragons on them.
Then we changed our tone, and went to church.
And someone’s friend from somewhere else
came along and said we could not have House Gods.
Or our pots with dragons painted on them.
Or my dragon shield.
Because the Bible said the dragon was Satan.
They said that the robot whose head became
another robot was evil. And we believed them.
And we believed them. And smashed
the pots and House Gods, and threw away
Satan on my Shield and my evil Headmaster robot.
One day i will get my robot back.
Above:Altar in Christmas Time, HDB Flat
Right: Living Room / Kitchen 3 Bedroom HDB 15 Flat
Ah Ma used to have a balcony before she moved.
It was large and concrete, with rolled up
bamboo curtains tied with pink plastic raffia string
taut against the rough surfaces
making wrinkles and winks.
They hung along the handlebars
I used to cling onto.
We would play every Chinese New Year.
My annual cousins. It was always
Hide-and-Seek, and it would always be the thin
cloth curtain blocking the cardboard boxes
we looked behind first.
On that balcony we would sit and have
reunion dinner. I always found the communal
soup bowl to be strange. Wasn’t it unhygienic?
And why did Ah Ma only have a squat toilet?
I wasn’t used to it.
She always told the same stories to my mother.
How my father got his name.
How my father was nearly sent to China
to be someone else’s son, because they had none.
Ah Ma would sometimes try to
talk to me.
But she always forgot I that didn’t speak Teochew.
Void Decks, Corridors & Carparks
. . . examines the semi-public, liminal spaces of individuals as they leave their rooms to lead their everyday lives. These are the corridors, lift landings and public spaces underneath flats (void decks). These are also the roads that lead out of houses and the carparks that dot both public and private estates. These spaces act as metaphors of diasporic journeys (past and present), and this is especially so for those Chinese Singaporeans who make an everyday journey from heartland suburbia to business and shopping districts, almost as if mimicking the economically-driven diasporic journeys that their grandparents took. Singaporean Chinese weddings involve a great deal of movement, and the bride’s journey is symptomatic of the everyday movements of other individuals. Her special processional mirrors the mundane steps she takes on any other day.
Corridor: Mature HDB Flat, 30+ years old
Carpark, Mature HDB Flats
Driveway, Private House
Bride departs, HDB Corridor
Bride arrives, Private Home
Tender blades of infant grass mingle at her toes.
Her lips like dew stained morning flowers
her laughter carried by the wind
herald fleeting fancy.
She passed me like every other,
and my wandering eyes stopped down
and followed in a gaze.
Feet follow eyes.
Where eyes look away the feet shuffle in
and step onto a nameless trail.
She is but beauty, and I know nothing else.
She remains silent in my mind.
Where fancy turns the heart is absent.
Only fancy lives for her.
For some other crouches in the corner
of my eye, and lies in my heart’s chamber.
Terence Heng, Postcards from Chinatown, in A. Lee and A. Peng (eds) No Other City (Singapore: Ethos, 2000), p.18
Marks from Burnt Offerings, Shops, HDB Shopping Complex, Chinatown
Shops, HDB Flats
Racks of clothes along racks of clocks, as
if ticking away the fashion of the eras.
Fortune telling machine, I never
stepped on one before. Durian sign sale,
bicycle underneath a no-bicycle sign.
Rusty trishaw parked outside renovated
lifts. And an old dental surgery somewhere
next to an older barber in the HDB.
Urn, three joss sticks burnt out sometime ago.
That was the background where I walked,
background of the closed down emporium,
background of the foreign worker outside
an unopened shophouse. Background wet market,
background unanswered responses to the cajoling
from the hawkers in the background hawker centre.
Background, backstage.
Our performance dictates a different set of scripts.
Souvenir shops selling Chinese hats and fake
pigtails stapled to the end.
Umbrellas for holding water.
Postcards of nothing we really do.
I’ll sell this as distinctly local. Our whole stage of
rojak culture and the embracement of strolling
down the street back into the tourist bus. Shiny shiny
trishaws and fluorescent T-shirts peddle you around
the incorporated country. This is Singapore,
ladies and gentlemen, although you don’t see
the locals anywhere.
Void Deck, HDB Flat
Porch, Private Home
Cityscapes
. . . considers the wider material environment that individuals find themselves in. Aesthetic markers are apparent on both personal levels as well as institutionally imposed by political and commercial entities in the form of architecture and advertising. Singapore’s landscape is a rapidly and continually changing entity – buildings are constantly being demolished and rebuilt, and conservation is sometimes a highly political process. 16 As such, the cityscape of Singapore hides and exposes diasporic stories from Singapore’s colonial past up to its nation-state present. It is an historical framework in which Chinese Singaporeans stage their everyday lives and shape their ethnic identities.
HDB Flat 2000s
HDB Flat 1980s
It feels different, doesn’t it? The air conditioning smells different,
the trolleys move when you hold down the handle instead of
letting go. The taxi driver who gabbles in that foreign tongue
you thought you left forgotten in your AO level certificate.
It works like this – you say ‘ahhhhh, I want one fillet-o-fish value meal.’
you do not say, ‘one fillet-o-fish value meal, please’, because
you will sound atas. No, you don’t want that, you don’t want
to be a potato eater. You miss your chicken rice, your laksa, stingray melting
on your tongue. You miss the swearing in that foreign gibberish at football matches and IPPT.
It stays with you, squats at the back of your mind scratching itself.
Reminds you that they are the red haired ghosts, 17 the foreign devils
(you called them that over there as well).
It is classless, indeterminate, symbiotic.
And you miss it all. You really do.
Terence Heng, From Where I’m Standing (Singapore: Landmark, 2004), p. 10
Tangjong Pagar. Central Singapore Business District. Foreground: Pre-War Shophouse. Background Centre: Old HDB Flats (1960s–70s). Background Right: New HDB Flats (2000s)
Left: Novena, Private & Commercial Estate
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.