1	Singapore, identity, State for National Development and Education, Asia, News

At yesterday’s opening ceremony of Sengkang’s new food complex, a sprawling combination of a wet market and a kopitiam, something interesting happened. The presiding minister of the ceremony, Senior Minister of State for National Development and Education Grace Fu, said this little gem of crystallised absurdity:

“The food centre and market plays an important role in creating an identity within the community and building residents' attachment to where they live.”

I paused when I saw this quote, before beginning to comprehend how absurd it is. To demonstrate how illogical such a statement is, let us take it apart and consider its implications.

Taking the premise that the complex creates “an identity within the community”, the first question that follows naturally is this - what kind of identity have we fostered after building a new kopitiam and wet market?

The hawker centre is a time honoured Singapore tradition, yet the modern kopitiam is not; it adopts nothing but the relatively cheap pricing and imitations of national dishes. It is sterile, air conditioned, completed with snazzy lighting and an obsession with efficiency – eat and vacate, eat and vacate, eat and vacate - lest the people queuing for your treasured seat exhale their germ-infested breath too hard down your neck. How a kopitiam is an exercise in culture and formulates identity is beyond my grasp of the human realm. Perhaps that is why I don’t have a million-dollar job, unlike Grace Fu who clearly possesses understanding beyond the mortal ken.

And the wet market?  It looks set to retain the traditional character of a wet market, though apparently the floors aren’t as wet. Yet, I cannot really see how it is an integral aspect of Singaporean identity, or even to the identity of Sengkangnians – After all, people don’t define themselves on the basis of whether they buy from a supermarket or buy from a wet market; for that matter, people don’t define themselves on the basis of whether they eat from a kopitiam or from a hawker centre.

National identity is rather a definition of the self on the basis of shared strong beliefs. In Singapore, we don’t have very strong beliefs. Unlike America’s beliefs in the sacrosanct ideal of a democracy, or China’s belief in being at the cusp of becoming a world’s power, we have merely “highfalutin ideals” that have become corrupted – Singapore’s multiculturalism has been undermined by the embedded Confucianism bias in our system, while our system of meritocracy has been used to entrench the presence of a more talented and merited elite…

In the absence of strong beliefs, it is no wonder that we have to clutch onto Kopitiams and wet markets, holding them high, and declaring:

Look and behold, we have a national identity after all!