Cold War Reckonings: Authoritarianism and the Genres of Decolonization by Jini Kim Watson

Author:Jini Kim Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5. Ho Juan Thai looks toward Singapore from Malaysia in To Singapore, with Love. Image courtesy of Tan Pin Pin.

Presented collectively in the film, these dissident figures form their own alternative territorial figuring and political imagining of Singapore, offering national, regional, and global imaginaries far more complex and multilayered than the binary of Singapore/non-Singapore. Indeed, Tan’s curating of these disparate exilic lives constitutes something like an archipelago of other Singapores, a political and spatial alternative to the Singaporean state’s monological and insular narratives of success. Such a logic is reinforced at the formal level. In the film, similar scenes or cities are occasionally juxtaposed with a slight delay in identifying titles, leaving the viewer momentarily disoriented as to whether or not we have left one location for another. For example, the film cuts suddenly from a scene of Tan Wah Piow walking down a London street to Yap Wan Pin negotiating with a taxi driver on a road in Hat Yai, Thailand. These simultaneous filmic and geospatial disjunctures produce a concatenation of spaces, a series of discontinuous but interpenetrating islands of exilic space.

The film not only challenges the unitary spatial imaginary of Singapore but also emphatically questions its temporal underpinnings. The progressivist, teleological account of Singapore’s success has been well captured by longtime prime minister and founding father Lee Kuan Yew in his best-selling memoirs, The Singapore Story (1998) and From Third World to First (2000). His writings helped legitimize the national myth of the tiny colonial trading port that made the incredible leap to become Asia’s model “world-class” city and oasis of First World modernity. In contrast, in To Singapore, with Love, London, Hat Yai and Betong in Thailand, and Johor Bahru and Shah Alam in Malaysia function as multiple external vantage points through which to contest Singapore’s smooth temporal narrative of postcolonial development. The London office of the lawyer Tan Wah Piow holds a veritable library of Singapore’s (authoritarian) political history, just as Yap Wan Pin and Tan Hee Kim’s unassuming noodle shop in Yat Hai doubles as a reading room for contemporary Singaporean affairs. He Jin and Shu Shihua’s house in Bangkok holds a photographic archive of the MCP’s long and forgotten struggle in the Thai-Malaysian jungles. Such personal archives—comprising photos, memories, newspaper clippings, and musical recordings—function as anachronistic counter-archives to Singapore’s official histories. One way to read the film’s aesthetics of exile, then, is to see these anachronistic lives and memories as challenging the PAP’s hegemonic spatial-temporal logic, which has claimed its own path of development as the only possible form of decolonization for the vulnerable city-state.17 It is for these reasons, I would argue, that the film was banned in Singapore, earning a “Not Allowed for All Ratings” classification in 2014. As Tan noted, this has caused To Singapore, with Love to also “be in exile.”

In part, the difficulty of examining other histories—and their futurities—beyond the overriding “Singapore Story” is due to the prevalence of what I alluded to in the Introduction as “Three-Worlds ideology.

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