The words UNESCO heritage site and intangible cultural heritage mean nothing to me, and perhaps that's my fault. Ignorance, admitted. (I've been to three UNESCO heritage sites, I think, outside of Singapore, and it's not as if I wanted to visit them on that basis.)
"... the identification, protection and preservation of cultural and natural heritage around the world considered to be of outstanding value to humanity."
"... ensuring visibility and awareness of the significance of the intangible cultural heritage and to encouraging dialogue, thus reflecting cultural diversity worldwide and testifying to human creativity."
UNESCO. It's a chop of approval, which frankly, these things never did much for me. No, I think Makan Sutra is something of an authority on food in Singapore, I'll accept that. But things like ISO, Michelin, Man Booker, Wine of the Year, you know, I take that stuff with a pinch of snuff. If the thing has inherent value, if it means something, which I've appreciated for my own reasons, then I figure that's better than borrowing from someone else's judgment. And they morph into popularity contests anyway, the judging is arbitrary, opaque, gossip-fodder.
And these are all just labels, in competition, which to me is counter-intuitive because no one place should be compared to another, and judged adequate or wanting. In whose eyes more culturally significant, by whose toil more worthy of admiration? By whose humanity? I don't get it, and I hope I don't get it either. Why should we court the attentions of those who can be drawn by a label? By what merit do we feel ennobled to be treated as having attained iconic status? What does the child of this country think of being compatriot to a land with two UNESCO labels? But I'll speak for myself and say I think it's all very silly.
Take the Botanical Gardens. It's not a place, I don't think, which Singaporeans would recommend as uniquely us, something that had to be walked to understand this country, what it's about. And it's a legacy in a way of our colonial past, when Great Britain had the whole natural history craze going (Darwin sailed on the Beagle eight years after Raffles started the Gardens, and he published On the Origin of Species thirty years after. I'd be remiss for not mentioning his younger colleague Alfred Russell Wallace, who, you say?). Would an Asiatic, a Straits Chinese get all huffy about plants the same way? Don't get me wrong, I love it. I'll talk about it sometime else. I just don't think it's an icon we cherish in quite that national way, not like the old Kallang Stadium with the fireworks and winning the Tiger Cup, or City Hall overlooking the Padang, or Changi Airport when it had two terminals. I mean, am I wrong?
And it's worse, I think, for two reasons, when it comes to hawker centres, hawker culture. The first is that our hawkers are our own, and what I mean by that is that the UN and whomever they have in the culture department have nothing to do with our hawkers. I say "our own", of course, without in any way appropriating the lives that hawkers live. No, on the contrary, hawkers are the salt of Singaporean earth, and I am not. I simply can't be, me a child of the sanguine eighties. They're individuals, families, old and small, little else besides handed down recipes, ancient words passed down besides stoves and stone pestles, and toughness, always toughness. The war and old families meant no school for most. Waking up at four am, noses to the grind, peeling prawns, cutting chili, boiling broth, god, they live by the sweat of their brows. Us, when we get a three dollar bowl of noodles, take a one dollar bowl of soy beancurd, how much do we think of the labour that goes into making all that? And yes, we talk of profit, of five hundred bowls a day, but do we talk of rent, do we talk of toil, do we talk of the heat of the wok and the heft of the garbage pail? No, we're next-generation. Someone else does it. Someone else slaps the iron spatula and tends the roaring flame. They're a dying breed, and we all know that. When I was a child and someone told me that hawkers would die out, I knew I'd never do what my grandma did, and so it was inevitable. Not at that price, nor at that sacrifice. My grandma, my uncle, they have hands, you know what I mean?
I mean, it's ridiculous, what does the UN have to do with that?
Which is related to my second point, which is that the [rude-word] Singaporean government has little to do with that either! I mean, I'll say it like it is, right here. Yes, they've built the centres, they've sort of managed the rents (don't quote me on that, you'll get an earful for sure), they've kept the grounds tidy, they've put in part work part welfare and things like that. But what on earth is the Singaporean government being all proud of the individual hawkers for when the hawkers have stood up for themselves from day one to present-day-eighty-thousand and going on? I mean, stuff that, you overstuffed shirts, take a hike. Put up your banners and your congratulations from the MPs somewhere else. This publicity, this flirting with UNESCO, it's a joke.
Think about it this other way. Every bit of heritage, every rough word, subtle cooking savvy, keen skill and artful acumen handed down, is so unique, so precious and fiercely protected. These are trade secrets in the purest sense. How's it make any sense to aggregate all that, build a "brand", for crying out loud, and pop a shiny ribbon on it? I mean sure, you can defend the idea of "hawker culture" as the heritage, and you can pretend that the idea that each hawker is unique is still protected, somehow. But you take a visitor to Singapore and ask them, well what do you think of this bit of heritage which has now taken home the UNESCO thing, and they eye the bak chor mee stall next to the mee rebus stall and that's kind of it?
UNESCO? Why? ¿Por qué? For what?
