Around the World in 80 Dinners - Bill Jamison [45]
Many visitors come to Singapore on business, a better reason than pleasure travel in most respects. The authorities want to encourage conventional tourism, and have tried to do it with enormous investments in a great airport, large international hotels, and colossal contemporary shopping centers. Apparently, they hope your main interest in a destination is duty-free buying and seeing the beauty of efficient air transportation.
The other tourist attractions—described of course in glowing terms in guidebooks and travel magazine articles—just don’t add up to much. The historic colonial area sounds impressive on paper, but basically it’s full of intentionally intimidating, blocky nineteenth-century buildings. Visitors often end up spending much of their time on the “miracle mile” of Orchard Road, an orgy of a shopping strip featuring absolutely nothing distinctive. Our trip to the area lasts less than thirty minutes before we flee the massive malls in dismay.
The extensive Chinatown is the only area we enjoy for sightseeing. Despite considerable urban renewal, it retains a fair measure of traditional character. The Chinatown Heritage Centre illustrates both the changes and the constants. Political turmoil, natural disasters, and famine drove many thousands of Chinese settlers here in the late nineteenth century, all risking their lives on a monthlong boat journey in horribly overcrowded conditions to reach what they called Nanyang, a place of escape. Most planned to return home at some point, but few ever did, sometimes succumbing to the ready availability of opium, alcohol, and gambling. They lived generally in two-and three-story shop-houses, with businesses on the ground floor and a dozen or more tiny residential cubicles upstairs, barely bigger than the beds they held, as the Centre documents in replicas; forty inhabitants might share one toilet, bath, and kitchen, as well as some space on the street outside as their common living room.
Japanese occupation of Singapore during World War II brought the local economy to a standstill, forcing many people to create makeshift jobs for themselves. Large numbers set up street-food stalls, cooking and selling one or a few specialties from their region of China, India, or Malaysia. These small “hawker” stands continued to flourish after the war, when Chinatown entered something of a golden age in vibrancy and liveliness. Important elements of that spirit remain today, though the government in recent decades has moved the street-food entrepreneurs into market buildings and hawker centers, the very places that have enticed us to Singapore.
Apple’s story in the Times grabbed our attention not for its comments on Sin Huat, one of many places mentioned, but because the journalist talks at length about K. F. Seetoh and his guidebook to hawker street food. Neither of us could track down the version of the book Apple cites, but Bill soon found and ordered a revised edition, named die, die, must try!, at an online Singapore bookstore. Don’t be put off by the strange title if you’re planning a visit. You should die, die to buy it. The tome sucks in many respects, particularly the design and the maps, but it’s one of the most extraordinary eating guides ever written.
The city enjoys a worldwide reputation, at least in culinary circles, for its wealth of tasty street food. The possibilities appealed to us strongly, but how would we find our way among the roughly twelve thousand food stalls scattered around Chinatown and all the other neighborhoods of the city? The book provides the answer. Seetoh’s publishing and broadcasting company, Makansutra (from the Malay word for “eat” and the Sanskrit word for “lesson”), sends out about thirty-five undercover “Makanmatas” (“food police”) to locate and rate the best cooking in the one-hundred-plus hawker centers and markets. Their research, tidily packaged in die, die, must try!, convinced us that we could pig out grandly in Singapore even on a short stop, now knowing the right food centers to visit, the