Singapore Part II: Culture

SINGAPORE -- Although Singapore is a tropical city very close to the equator, it’s also a perfectly modern city with high-rise buildings and shopping malls everywhere.

In Singapore, where the per-capita wealth is slightly higher than in the U.S., shopping is the national pastime. My hotel was interconnected with one of the largest malls on the island, and it was pretty well packed every day of the week, any time of day from about 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

I’m not big into shopping, but I did walk through a few stores to see if their were deals available, as the Singapore dollar is worth about 70 percent of the U.S. dollar. In equalized currency, products in Singapore were a little less, but only by about 10 to 20 percent. You certainly wouldn’t make back the cost of your airfare by coming here to shop.

The thing that actually caught my eye in these stores was a female mannequin. It stood out because it was so thin, even more so than mannequins in the U.S. I began to wonder if S’porean retailers are subject to American-style criticisms about unattainable body images, until I noticed something that was entirely unlike the U.S. experience: The women shopping were the same size as the mannequins. (Men are smaller than their U.S. counterparts, too; I felt really tall the whole time I was here.) I got the impression that if women here weighed 280 pounds, shopkeeps would simply trot out size-18 dummies and their customers would still see themselves in their clothes.

Speaking of things that are better than in the U.S. (uh, by which I mean retail shopping, not women), the trains here beat the heck out of the CTA. They’re clean, they’re quick, and the seats are lined up with backs to the wall to open up more standing space. And the cars are open-ended, giving the illusion that the train is just one long car. But what I really liked is that in addition to a name, each stop was given a sequential number, so even a first-time rider could tell that NS15 Yio Chu Kang is exactly 10 stops from NS25 City Hall on the North-South line.

Like everything else, the signs in the stations are written in four languages. The official language of Singapore is English, owing to its long history as a British colony, but everything is also written in Mandarin Chinese, Malay and some other language that I believe is spoken in parts of India. That would stand to reason, as Chinese, Malaysians and Indians seem to be the largest ethnic groups.

Everyone mixes pretty well, though you have to wonder if that’s by choice or because of a government that can be eerily restrictive. Banning guns is all fine and well, but banning gum -- as in chewing gum, which is illegal for Singapore residents to possess as an anti-litter measure -- is quite another matter.

One of my American co-workers, who’s on a six-month rotation here, lamented upon my arrival that she forgot to ask me to bring her some gum. I asked the locals if the post office would be likely to examine a package for contraband if I sent her one from the U.S., and they said sure enough. No gum for Rachel!

It’s also illegal to have a satellite dish because you could use it to pick up TV signals from outside of Singapore, where TV is carefully edited to remove most sexual references. Legal brothels and newspaper ads to improve your “sexy cleavage” don’t bother these people, but words like “mistress” broadcast over the air do. I guess it has something to do with the captive audience on TV.

The locals seem pretty happy and don’t mind the government regulations, but it’s a level of intrusion that I certainly hope is never tolerated in the United States.