Common Ground, Multiple Claims: Representing and Constructing Singapore’s “Heartland”

Abstract

This article examines the various meanings of “heartland” and “heartlander” in Singapore that emerged as the city-state embarked on its transformation into a global city in the 1990s. It discusses the political and ideological nature of these terms, including the way the state has tended to deploy them and the ways they are used in public discourse. The terms’ usage serves as a measure of the state’s not unproblematic attempts to define its citizenry in order to reinscribe its legitimacy. The deployment of the terms by non-state actors and individuals, however, indicates greater civic involvement in national self-identification, which complicates the official state version. The article focuses on two significant Singapore texts that contribute to the cultural imaginary of the heartland and the heartlander – the novel Heartland by Daren Shiau and the film Eating Air by Kelvin Tong and Jasmine Ng. In implicit opposition to the state view, these creative works seek to convey a sense of the local and of national authenticity through their creative representation of the Singapore heartland and what it means to be a heartlander, disclosing in the process various social tensions, silences and cultural blind spots.

Keywords:

• Heartland
• heartlander
• Singapore culture
• Singapore politics
• Eating Air

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to my colleagues from NIE, especially Peter Teo, Pat Wong and Angus Whitehead, for helpful discussions about the heartland, and to the two reviewers who gave me many good suggestions.

Notes

1. The HDB replaced the Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) set up by the British colonial authorities to look into safer, cleaner and better housing for the population.

2. “Owners” of HDB flats in Singapore are technically holders of a transferable 99-year lease. The Central Provident Fund is a social security savings scheme where working Singaporeans must save a certain percentage of their monthly salary for their retirement needs. Before retirement, they can draw on their CPF savings only for certain expenses such as buying a HDB flat or paying for medical insurance. For its Home Ownership Program, the HDB received the United Nations Public Service Award, or UNPSA, in 2008.

3. As Chua Beng-Huat (1997, p. 125) has observed, “[f]or the PAP government, continuing support for public housing is, like economic development, one plank of its legitimacy to rule”. In the 1997 general elections, the PAP explicitly made the upgrading and improvement of housing estates an issue when it made clear that constituencies that did not vote for the PAP would have lower priority when it came to upgrading. The high price of public housing was a major hot-button issue in the 2011 general elections.

4. See, for example, Sumiko Tan, ‘A Singaporean in HDB heartland’, The Straits Times, 10 August 1991. In this article, I rely heavily on The Straits Times as a source for determining the usage of the words “heartland” and “heartlander” since it is the main English-language broadsheet in Singapore, although its primacy has been threatened by news from other online media sources. The articles cited tend to be either direct pieces of reportage covering government speeches and official comments to the press or editorial and opinion pieces in which journalists discuss political, social and cultural issues of the day.

5. In the Singapore context, “Chinese-educated” usually refers to older, Chinese-speaking Singaporeans, probably but not necessarily educated in Chinese-medium schools of the past, and sometimes with very little formal education at all. The article, however, qualified Yeo’s point by saying that “heartlanders” could be Chinese or English-educated.

6. According to A Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English, a heartlander is defined as “A person, typically regarded as less sophisticated, conservative and down-to-earth, who lives in a public housing estate built by the Housing and Development Board considered as part of the heartland of Singapore; an ordinary Singaporean”. Available at www.singlishdictionary.com, accessed 9 November 2011.

7. Orchard Road is Singapore’s high street. It is the country’s main shopping area with malls and shops selling goods from many international brands.

8. Singlish refers to the variety of English used by Singaporeans. It is colloquial and often contains Malay and Hokkien words. Goh is using Singlish as the distinctive marker of the local here.

9. The state had sought to manage this anxiety over class divisions and potential social conflict two years earlier with the introduction of National Education in all schools in Singapore to “develop national cohesion, the instinct for survival and confidence in the future”. See http://www.ne.edu.sg/, accessed 9 February 2010.

10. The issue received considerable mention in The Straits Times, as evident in these other articles, ‘“Go global but keep Asian values”’ (The Straits Times, 10 January 2000) and ‘When Mr Cosmopolitan clashes with Mr Heartlander’ (Long, 9 January 2000).

11. The Gini coefficients among employed households increased from 0.442 to 0.472 between 2000 and 2006 (Singapore Department of Statistics, 2007).

12. The PAP’s characterisation of “heartlander” as articulated by Goh is one that opposition parties have had to engage with. In the general elections of 2011, the Singapore Democratic Party attributed its loss to its perceived “Westernised” image and to a “lack of heartland support” (Wong, 9 May 2011).

13. In the same poll by the Feedback Unit taken after Goh’s speech, 37 per cent described themselves as heartlanders, 7 per cent as cosmopolitans, and 49 per cent as a mix of the two (Chua, 2000, p. 70).

14. R21 or Restricted 21 is a film classification label for films deemed suitable for viewing only by adults aged 21 and above.

15. Following Heartland, Shiau has published a book of poems, Peninsular: Archipelagos and other islands (2000), and Velouria (2008), a book of micro-fiction. Kelvin Tong has also since made a name for himself as a commercially successful filmmaker of horror movies such as The Maid (2005) and comedies such as It’s A Great Great World (2011).

16. Besides Heartland, other literary texts that foreground or feature the heartland include Dave Chua’s Gone Case (1997), Alfian Sa’at’s poetry and his collection of short stories Corridor and Other Stories (1999), Colin Cheong’s ‘Void-deck and other poems’, and the poetry collection edited by Alvin Pang and Aaron Lee called No Other City: The Ethos Anthology of Urban Poetry (2000). Films that focus on heartland living include Eric Khoo’s Twelve Storeys (1997), Royston Tan’s 15 (2003), and Woo Yen Yen and Colin Goh’s Singapore Dreaming (2006).

17. Dave Chua’s novel Gone Case, about a boy growing up in an HDB flat, was published in 1997 and predates Shiau’s novel as a novel set in the heartlands.

18. In Chinese families, uncles and aunts are distinguished by order of birth so “Fifth Uncle” refers to the younger brother of Wing’s father and the fifth son born to the family.

19. Twelve Storeys was the first Singapore film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and one of the first independent films to mine the heartland space for stories. Apart from independent films, commercial films meant for local consumption also prominently feature the heartland. These include films such as Money No Enough (1998) and I Not Stupid (2002) by Jack Neo, a well-known, cross-dressing Chinese comedian and television actor who has made a string of commercially successful Chinese films (Millet, 2006, p. 88). Neo’s films are unabashedly didactic, melodramatic and sentimental. Their overt populism tends to compromise whatever critique Neo might also make of the heartland space and Singapore politics in general. See, for example, Tan’s analysis of Neo’s films in Cinema and Television in Singapore, pp. 145–84.

20. The title of the film is the literal English translation of a Hokkien term meaning “to go for a spin”.