Interpreting National Language Class Daniel Goh Nowadays, being forty-one years of age marks the middle of one’s life. It can

be a time for reflection on what we have achieved and what we want to do in the

remaining future. It can also be a time for denial, when the past is consumed as

mere nostalgia and the present momentum of life is adhered to with the gritting of

teeth. This was the dilemma of the nation in August 2006. The National Day

celebrations were getting perfunctory; the Parade was given significance only by the

fact that it would be the last one held in the old National Stadium before it is torn

down for redevelopment into a cosmopolitan sports hub that would complement the

‘bustling global business and financial hub’ in adjacent Marina Bay (Singapore

Sports Council, Sports Hub marketing brochure, c. 2005). Even more so in the age

of globalization, relentless national progress does not have the time for the

grounding of memories and identity.

Amidst the weary celebrations, cultural producers struggled to organize

reflections on our national identity. Theater company Wild Rice staged the Singapore

Theater Festival for a good part of August. Among the plays was Paul Rae’s National

Language Class, a provocative piece inspired by Chua Mia Tee’s 1959 painting of

the same title. Journalist Ong Soh Chin wrote a thought-provoking review of the play

National Language Class (Straits Times, 19 August 2006, p. S10). For Ong, the

interplay of Malay and Chinese languages and racial personas in the play produces

poignant questions of national identity in a multicultural society confronting

cosmopolitanism and globalization. The questions scribbled on the chalkboard in the

play-painting, 'siapa nama kamu?' (what is your name?) and 'di-mana awak tinggal?'

(where do you live?), are questions that need to be asked of Singaporeans today.

Figure 1. Chua Mia Tee, National Language Class, 1959, 112 x 153 cm, oil on

canvas. Source: Kwok 1996, p. 71.

I have not seen the play. Nor have I reflected at length on the painting, which I

have seen at the Singapore Art Museum. But today, the painting and the questions

bothered me. Siapa nama kamu? Di-mana awak tinggal? The chalk scrawls in the

margins of Chua's painting called out to my social existence and very location in the

cultural and political muck of postcolonial Singapore and demanded a response.

Being homo historicus, I peered into the painting to see the depth of time and the

mark of the author. Perhaps then, I would have an epiphany on the location of my

name.

Chua was born in China in 1931 and migrated to Singapore in 1937, growing

up along the banks of the Singapore River. He might have arrived in time to watch

the lavish celebrations of the coronation of King George VI in May, where all the

ethnic communities of Singapore held parades and other festivities to show their

loyalty to the Empire, a nascent exercise of Frankensteinian multiracialism (based on

the notion of distinct separate parts joined into one) in service of a communal

spectacle not unlike our National Day Parade. But 1937 was also the year that

organized anti-colonial political action against the British began. In late 1937, in two

separate incidents, 10,000 Chinese rubber and coal workers went on a communist-

organized strike and 13,000 Indian municipal and construction workers went on a

nationalist-inspired strike. The strikes, which would be followed in later years by

more industrial action, made mockery of King George's loyal multiracialism, exposing

the ethnic fixing of colonial exploitation and heralding the anti-colonial movements

that would span rural and urban Malaya and Malayans of all racial hues after the

War.

It is in this context that we should place Chua's painting. There is some

confusion over which year it was painted, 1950 or 1959. Kwok Kian Chow's

Channels and Confluences: A History of Singapore Art (1996, p. 71) put the date

down as 1950. Ong dated it as 1959, thus giving the work the interpretation of 'a

patriotic post-colonial assertion of national identity'. 1959 has to be the correct date,

since Malay was not promoted as Singapore’s national language until the late-1950s.

The exact date is not as important as the implications of the decade signified by

1950-59: from the height of the Emergency sparked by the communist revolt in the

peninsula after the failure of the Malayan Union proposal to grant equal recognition

to all races, to the year of Singapore's attainment of self-governing autonomy,

through the turbulent years of anti-colonial action organized by socialists in

Singapore.

After the failure of the communist revolt, the socialists outside the ambit of the

Malayan Communist Party in Malaysia and Singapore sought to form loose alliances.

This was a multiracial compact, involving leaders like Said Zahari, MK Rajakumar

and Lim Chin Siong, one of the founders of the People's Action Party (PAP), formed

to reassert the Malayan Union multiracialism. Their 'Malaysian Malaysia' cry was

later championed by Lee Kuan Yew and the ‘democratic socialist’ PAP purged of

radical socialists, including Lim. Lim was influential in advocating for Malay to be

adopted as the national language and learnt by everyone wishing to call him/herself

Malaysian (see Tan and Jomo 2001).

Chua's artistic style has been called Social Realism, a school of art

responding to the industrial revolution and urbanization, focusing specifically on

working class realities rather than the colored idealism and ‘bourgeois’ formalism of

Impressionism. Many social realist artists around the world were socialists but not

necessarily communists. In Singapore, the social realist artists were associated with

the Chinese Middle School Arts Association, the Equator Art Society and the

Woodcut Movement. The Singaporean social realists blended anti-colonial

sentiment, nationalist aspirations and socialist concerns in various proportions in

their work. In their 1965 catalogue, the Equator Art Society artists criticized

contemporary artists for copying Western art, “which has not the least of our national

flavour”, which is “not the art that serves to help uphold our national dignity and to

help in our nation building” (quoted in Kwok 1996, p. 72).

If we look closer at the painting, the trace of Lim Chin Siong's socialist

promotion of Malaysian multiracialism through linguistic adoption is evident. Pasar

Melayu (market Malay), after all, was already well used by the common people.

Malay would not only bring together all the races but was also the language of the

working classes, the socialist common denominator of class equality. Significantly,

Chua's painting shows young women and men, the future of the nation, of different

linguistic habits and different classes learning Malay from the cikgu: the

bespectacled middle-class man of pressed pants and shoes, the working-class man

in white cotton shirt tucked out of khaki slacks in loafers, the woman in white

Chinese school uniform dress, the smiling nonya woman in capped-sleeve baju

Shanghai and so on. Notice that they sit around a round table, a symbol of equality,

which also signifies a plebian/proletarian public sphere, being reminiscent of the

marble-top kopitiam tables one find in the coffee shops of old. As they sat facing

each other, they are called to consider the deceivingly simple questions: Siapa nama

kamu? Di-mana awak tinggal?

But that was 1959, when the belief that unity in the quest for national progress

would eradicate the divisions of race, class and gender was at its peak. The

subsequent trauma of racial conflict inflicted by membership in the Federation of

Malaysia and separation from that fraternity led to the PAP government’s adoption of

strong political discipline to accomplish rapid economic development. It was more

the rule of the rattan cane rather than the iron-rule of an authoritarian dictatorship,

but slowly, the democratic socialism of the PAP rulers morphed into communitarian

capitalism (see Chua 1995). The class struggle was submerged under the weight of

the heightened management of multiracialism, ideologically successful provision of

housing and labor welfare and knee-jerk responses to any form of dissent remotely

related to class politics. In the paternal and censorious atmosphere, the knuckles of

cultural producers who openly reflected on our national identity, asking ‘Siapa nama

kamu? Di-mana awak tinggal?’ in the crosscutting terms of race, class, gender and

sexuality, were rapped. The more recalcitrant voices, including playwright Kuo Pao

Kun, were grounded, detained without trial, for years.

Figure 2. Chua Mia Tee, Market Place at Clive Street, 1982, 91 x 61 cm, oil on

canvas. Source: Chua 1986, p. 26.

Chua’s social realism shifted its focus and became less politically charged.

But class remained an important topic for Chua. As the fabric of vernacular everyday

life disappeared with the spatial cleansing of the state’s urban renewal programs,

Chua ‘saw the urgency as an artist to document those scenes which I knew would

disappear soon from Singapore’s cityscape’, from Chinatown to the various

marketplaces that dotted the downtown area, to ‘the daily bustle of the barges, the

boatmen and the coolies, against a background of old shophouses and godowns’ of

the Singapore River. In Market Place at Clive Street (1982), we find the vernacular

texture of multiracial Singapore, where different economic classes of Singaporeans

in their culturally and colorfully diverse outfits mingle and interact for the provision of

everyday life.

Such scenes of vernacular multiracialism are now impossible to find in clean

and green Singapore. The conserved shophouses and godowns of the Singapore

River, splashed with the psychedelic and neon colors of lifestyle consumption, are

now celebrated as cosmopolitan watering holes of the young and the well-heeled,

where socially mobile locals flirt with global corporate elites. In this historical erasure,

it is easy to slip into remorseful or consumptive nostalgia with Chua’s images of

depoliticized realism. Critical reflection requires a different form in this day and age

when the consumption of images, memories and nostalgia is accelerating with the

cultural flows of globalizing mass media. The critical work of art in the age of

electronic reproduction is a form shorn of nostalgic images, pared down to the bare

minimum of abstract concepts represented by familiar objects.

Cheo Chai-Hiang’s Singapore River (2006) interrogates the transformation of

the River, which Chua memorializes as ‘the lifeblood of Singapore’s economy’

(quoted in Lim 1990, p. 32), from this object-conceptual perspective. The piece

began life as a rejected submission to the 1972 annual exhibition of the Modern Art

Society consisting of instructions to the exhibitors to draw a five-feet square partially

on a wall and partially on the floor (see Sabapathy and Briggs 2000). In the 2006

piece for the Singapore Biennale, which began in September after the National Day

celebrations and coincided with the heavily guarded conferences of the International

Monetary Fund and World Bank summit, the square was made up by neon lighting

tubes and accompanied by a hotel luggage trolley. Reference to the framed River

paintings of nostalgic consumption and remorse is made in the ornately framed text,

where Cheo writes, ‘There are at least 40 Singapore River paintings in the Singapore

Art Museum Collection alone. Hundreds of other such paintings have been produced

and consumed … some simply forgotten’. The object-art provokes desires that give

pause for a critical reflection and calls for a response. Should one take the trolley for

a joyride on the circuits of globalization to the heart’s content? Should one smash the

fragile glass in protest against the new imperialism that shackles us with delightful

consumerism? What and who have been forgotten in the transformation of

Singapore into a cosmopolitan global city?

Figure 3. Cheo Chai-Hiang, Singapore River, 2006, installation. Source: Gerhard

Haupt and Pat Binder (eds.), “Singapore Biennale 2006”, Universes in Universe – Worlds of Art, http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/singapore/eng/2006/index.htm, downloaded 11 Feb. 2007.

I read the resurgent significance of Chua’s National Language Class as

aligned with Cheo’s critical gesture towards Singapore’s participation in globalization.

I interpret National Language Class with the same abstract conceptualism that marks

Cheo’s Singapore River. I see not a painting evoking an idealism of a bygone era, to

be appreciated in light of today’s realism, but objects with race and class vectors –

cikgu, young men and women, round kopitiam table – strategically lined up by Chua

like Cheo’s neon-lit square and mobile trolley, accompanied by the blackboard-

framed text that calls for a critical response. Siapa nama kamu? Di-mana awak

tinggal?

Here is where I locate my critique of Ong's review of the play and the painting,

for the dimension of class is missing in her attempt to draw out the race-language-

nation connection. Race-class-language lies at the heart of today's divide in

globalizing Singapore: pre- and post-65ers, heartlanders and cosmopolitans. The

physical and social mobility of the educated elites is being matched by the physical

and social stasis of increasing number of citizens of the middle and working classes.

The influx of lighter-skinned foreign talent to be considered as our immigrant

brethren is being matched by the flux of darker-skinned foreign laborers whose

desire to be citizens are irrelevant just as our forefathers' desire once were under

British rule. The significance of National Language Class is not linguistic, not the

psychological dissonance we get when we sing the National Anthem in Malay just

before reciting the pledge in English. The significance is in the issues of race and

class, inflected through language, tearing at our official multiracial identity in the age

of globalization. We are in dire need of a multiculturalism that is bottom-up

democratic, that instead of happily glossing over the old-new inequalities with

consumption and nostalgia would push them to the forefront of public consideration.

Who are you? Where are you?

References

Chua Beng Huat, 1995, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore,

London: Routledge.

Chua Mia Tee, 1986, Chua Mia Tee, Singapore: Chua Mia Tee.

Kwok Kian Chow, 1996, Channels and Confluences: A History of Singapore Art,

Singapore: Singapore Art Museum.

Lim, Richard (ed.), 1990, Singapore Artists Speak, Singapore: C. H. Yeo.

Sabapathy, T. K., and Cecily Briggs, 2000, Cheo Chai-Hiang: Thoughts and

Processes (Rethinking The Singapore River), Singapore: Nanyang Academy

of Fine Arts and Singapore Art Museum.

Tan Jing Quee and Jomo K. S. (eds.), 2001, Comet in Our Sky: Lim Chin Siong in

History, Kuala Lumpur: INSAN.