Originally written for YONQ: ISSUE 3.
“This is not a public protest. This is something else.”
There are a crowd of university students on the roof of the Hong Leong building, clad in their Uniqlo cotton shirts and high-waisted linen pants. Their Superga shoes leave marks in the dirt. There is a little pile of beige tote bags in the corner. The surface of the roof flakes off in little black chunks. It is thirty-five degrees Celsius; it has not rained in months.
One group of students is passing around two-dollar notes from a pile of spent angbaos. Another group of students stacks them. A third group is folding every note in a series of parallel creases along the dour face of Yusof bin Ishak. One crease goes through each eye. One goes in the opposite direction between them, passing through his lips. The notes are fresh from the bank. In the midday sun, their plastic faces shine.
The folded notes are clipped to a string. The string is wound in a loose coil. A student with a pair of binoculars looks across the street to the SGX Centre. Looking down, there are little shapes on the roof, too, who mill around like ants.
Michelle, who has brought us here, is standing around in Gentle Monster sunglasses, a hand-stitched cotton mask, and a little felt hat. She has fixed one end of the string to a drone. As it hovers, she twirls the string experimentally. The notes flip, and so does Yusof’s face. Up, then down. The creases warp his face into a joyous ahegao. She flips again, and Yusof sulks. She flips it back again.
“That building over there houses the central switchboard for Singapore’s stock exchange,” she explains, pointing. “There is a three-storey atrium linking the two towers where the financiers of the region gather to place bids on financial instruments. It’s the first weekday after the Lunar New Year. There will be a lot of financial instruments traded today.”
Michelle waves at the office ants. The office ants do not wave back. I am getting impatient from the heat. I ask her what her game plan is.
“We’ll fly the string of Yusofs across Lau Pa Sat. That's where they are having their lunch break.”
I peer down at the historic market between the two buildings. The roof of the market is encrusted with LEDs and bird shit. Little people in pastel office shirts are moving in and out of the covering. They are carrying little red and blue plastic bags filled with quinoa salad and deconstructed wontons. Their crew-cut heads duck between the shadows of tiny trees. Their polyester legs dash across sections of busy street.
I imagine them looking up, one by one.
Michelle checks her Apple Watch. “We go live at one.”
///
Over by the Civilian War Memorial, the students are burning boxes of sushi.
The coordinator for this section is wearing a blue Muji jumpsuit and matching blue facemask. Her face is all flushed and her mask is dark with sweat.
“They built this in the 60s,” she says. “Same architect as the Hong Leong tower. It was a very interesting time for local buildings. Lots of local designers got work before the foreign companies. It was a kind of indigenous moment for middle-class Chinese men. Why, are you going on a tour or something?”
That isn’t quite true; I tell her I’m a student journalist with Public Affairs.
“You've spoken to Michelle?”
She’d directed me here.
“I’m Nichelle.”
They had chosen the site on purpose. At each corner of the monolith’s four pillars is a red metal pail filled with flames. Students stand by with party packs of expired supermarket maguro, incinerating chunks at a time using long chopsticks wrapped in aluminium foil. Greasy smoke rises to the top of the memorial. The heat shimmers the air around the reflecting pool, which adds a little to the ambience.
“It's Total Defence Day today. Seventy-eight years to the day, this city fell to the Japanese. It was the first day of the New Year then. It's the first Monday after New Year's today. That's a lot of magical synchronicity. The dead are very sensitive to things like this.”
At the centre of the memorial is an urn containing the cremated remains of civilian mass graves. The urn is cemented onto the concrete plinth, which forms the foundation of the memorial. If the ashes could spin, they would spin the whole memorial with them. They had probably never eaten Japanese food in their lives.
“I disagree,” says Nichelle. “I think they’d find this quite engaging. We chose the very best expired sashimi we could find. It’s from Don Don Donki.”
The smoke is thick and black and very high. It must be visible across the city by now. Would the firefighters come at any moment? Would the police? Surely not the safe distancing officers—the students have been very careful to keep one metre apart.
Nichelle shrugs. “I have a Malay friend,” she says. “He says they’re all on lunch break.”
Something pops in one of the buckets. It sounds like a compacted chunk of tuna fat exploding. There is a commotion all around. Someone is already blasting a fire extinguisher. Many people are swearing. Someone drags Nichelle by the wrist towards the memorial. I run after them.
“Look! Look!”
“I think I saw the urn move!”
///
The port of Singapore is not dead, even in a pandemic. Security, however, is slightly lax. A horde of students are milling around the containers like an overcrowded first-person-shooter map. They are carrying drills and screws and L-shaped metal braces.
“How do you unsettle something as transient as the shipping industry? It’s simple: you settle it.”
The coordinator, who is named Richelle, leads the pack from block to block. She is dressed for the occasion in a set of thrifted vintage Nike sportswear, a reflective vest, and a yellow hard hat. She and her group blend perfectly into the rainbow of boxes. Upon reaching each stack of containers she raps on the side with her fist and listens intently for the reverb. On an unsatisfying thunk, she directs eight students to go around the sides.
“Most of the containers are empty because the shipping companies have a bottom line to meet. I only pick the ones that are full.”
Four students drill holes into the ground at four corners of the shipping container. Then they drill four holes into the shipping container. The other four position metal braces between the holes and screw them in with portable power screwdrivers. Then they join the rest of the group at the next block of shipping containers.
Richelle raps on another container. “Unmarked AliExpress packages. Sounds like a lot of silicone.”
These students are spare architecture majors. They have signed on to this project for course credit, and also because they have girlfriends who are arts majors. They are looking very satisfied with their work.
When Richelle marches on to the next block, one of them stays to talk to me.
“I don’t really believe in this ‘arts’ stuff, but I do believe in the power of buildings.”
He’s cute, so I agree.
“The only thing different is the direction. I think we are building something sideways through space, instead of from the ground up.”
///
On the concurrent Zoom panel:
“The culture wars started when they imported these foreign ideas. Actually, that is inaccurate. The war had never started; it had always been fought. Its soldiers are imported foreign produce and migratory loanwords. Its battlegrounds are our supermarkets, our department stores, our network of transoceanic trade routes, and our schools. Its list of casualties is invisible. So is its list of combatants.”
“In this creatively destructive process, a large amount of small disruptions is amassed. Incrementally, each is assigned to a corner of this war. Just because it’s dissipated doesn’t mean there aren’t spaces we can fight in. On the contrary: total war demands an intense concentration of spatial thought. Attention must be paid to territoriality; where things interact is also their how. If you’ll look at this map, the network of happenings across the Central Business District forms the shape of a lion’s mane. It’s also the combined shape of the Circle and North-South train lines, which bleed positive energy from the city’s core.”
“This is one thing our ancestors got right. The sum total of a large amount of environmental changes is nothing but utter catastrophe. It’ll be a wonder if the country is left standing after this assault.”
“Will we win? Hah! I don’t even know which side we’re on!”
///
At one p.m., the city erupts.
I had heard a team was planning something with the sewer lines, but nobody could point me where to go. So instead I could only watch from the banks of the river as the pipes burst one by one, flooding the streets with grey water and inflatable yellow rubber ducks.
Across the city, smoke billows from the memorial. Two-dollar-notes scatter in the air over the banks. A hundred thousand Yusof bin Ishaks laugh and frown simultaneously. Confetti streams from the roofs of shopping malls, bearing lines of text from social studies textbooks on the fall of Venice. Lo-fi hip-hop remixes of the national anthem rattle from every car radio, interspersed with bass-boosted readings of the national pledge.
The roof of the Marina Bay Sands building, detached from its moorings, slides sideways into the bay. The Merlion statue is left unscathed, which proves to be the greatest act of cruelty to us all.
Police officers stream out of armoured vans, looking for perpetrators. They only find piles of empty tote bags and hastily-annotated readings. The students are nowhere to be found. One gives herself up to the police and has her photo plastered on social media that afternoon. She later admits to being a false-flag actor planted by the evangelical Christian right. She is let off with a slap on the wrist and gains a cult following on Instagram, where she continues to promote the sale of counterfeit Chinese bags.
No permanent damage has been dealt. On Tuesday morning I email my article to Vice Media and find the equivalent of two hundred American dollars in my bank account. I celebrate with a breakfast of avocado toast and cold brew from the café across the street from my block. I savour the taste of smoky blandness and wonder if we’ll ever learn from anything ever again.