Interesting article in TODAY but a little bit of over-romanticisation of New York and its people?
Can S’pore handle New York’s buzz?
Goh Kok Huat
It was the kind of day that New Yorkers savour: Sunny, with glorious blue sky that occasionally occurs in the short, sultry summer months. I took a walk in Central Park and wandered into the meadows, dotted with sun-soaked bodies in varying degrees of decency. It struck me, then, that half of Manhattan is not populated by New Yorkers but by people from different shores.
This is perhaps the Singapore we want and that has become a national preoccupation since Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong sketched his vision of Singapore as a vibrant cosmopolitan city, full of foreign talents, where the citizens of the world can feel at ease.
When I first relocated to New York for work several months ago, a colleague gave me a book containing a concise and remarkable essay written by EB White in 1948.
He wrote: “There are roughly three New Yorks. There is first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.
“Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is the goal. It is the third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts and its incomparable achievements.”
New York, in 1948, was a city of migrants. Today, everywhere I turn since I arrived here tells me that it is still one. It is only a city of America by virtue of its geography and political construct; it is really a city of the world by virtue of the people that live in it.
The friends I showed around New York one afternoon asked the driver of every yellow cab where he was from. One was from Pakistan, another from Bangladesh, and so on.
I can hardly remember ever hopping into a cab where the driver had a native New Yorker’s accent. More often than not, they are from Nigeria, China or another far-flung place.
The eight people who form the immediate circle in my office is another interesting group of nationalities: An Argentinian, two Indians, one German, a Beijing-born Chinese, two Americans and now a Singaporean.
The result of this tremendous melting pot is an incredibly vibrant city that constantly surprises.
In Manhattan, the epicentre of New York, I am always amazed at what I can find 24/7. Recently, I took my Singaporean friends to a Japanese brasserie. They make tofu fresh, every hour on the hour, and it’s the finest I have tasted anywhere. Nobu, the fine-dining restaurant synonymous with great Japanese food worldwide, started out in New York City.
An email I received from an Indian deli boldly proclaimed that Tiffins-style deliveries (based on the famous Mumbai service) are available in Manhattan. Even Singapore and Malaysian cuisines are amply represented. The roti prata served in the Penang Cafe and Singapore Restaurant is as good as that in Seletar. Friends ask if I miss Singapore food; the answer is no.
Music is another case in point. Wander into Central Park on a summer weekend afternoon, and you will find impromptu performances, sometimes R&B, or reggae or Latin, and often all at once, with audiences gathering.
Diversity — of cuisine, music, arts, culture, people — is what I and the world have come to enjoy about New York. It is perhaps this diversity, among other qualities, that gives New York its edge and its continued status as the city of the world.
It is this diversity that fuels personal and economic growth, as one group learns from another about different cultures and ways of doing things. Such interaction has a curious effect of keeping minds open to ideas, which ultimately translates into a greater capacity to innovate and to create.
Singapore started out as a migrant nation, much like New York. Perhaps the period when Singapore was chiefly a migrant nation, in its early years, coincides with its period of rapid growth.
Today, while we are cosmopolitan, we are a city of homogeneity — one largely of Singaporeans, albeit with different historical origins, and a minority of “migrants”.
While diversity leads to growth, it also produces consequences that have to be managed. New York City is not spared that, either.
On a day-to-day level, it takes effort to understand and to be understood. At a societal level, government and private enterprise expend extra effort to accommodate cultural differences and keep interests in check.
More seriously, diversity can also give rise to social and political costs. Government has to contend more than ever with issues such as ethnic clustering within a locale, which is inevitable given that human beings prefer to stay within their comfort zone. Such clustering, left unchecked, can lead to division and unrest. New York’s history certainly shows this.
So here’s the challenge of diversity: A careful tolerance by all of all, and a basic acceptance that no matter how different someone can be, they are to be treated with the respect we desire for ourselves.
I wonder if we are prepared for all this, even though we are a multi-racial society. Are we as accepting of other cultures, or has the forging of the Singaporean identity made us less tolerant of things foreign?
Do we have enough sensibility to tread the delicate balance required for a society in which there is not one dominant culture with minority cultures, but many equally dominant cultures?
Does it challenge us too much, perhaps, that we might lose our prevailing identity? Do we find it threatening if the ang moh culture becomes a mainstream one on our shores? Or that the mainland Chinese culture or the Indian cultures become as dominant as the Singapore culture?
My gut feeling as a Singaporean is that while we have the foundations of tolerance, we still have some way to go. I have often heard friends comment, in Singapore, whenever they see ang mohs running shirtless along the road: “There you go, the ang mohs … no sense of decency!”
Or, for that matter, friends and family who look with apprehension at the congregation of Indian workers in Serangoon or the Thais in Beach Road or the Filipinos in Lucky Plaza on the weekends.
I think we need to dig deep and ask if we can be truly open-minded towards people who behave differently from us; and if we are ready to embrace this as acceptable behaviour within Singapore society, so long as they do not violate universal moral values.
Such openness requires all of us to stretch our comfort zones — but the fruits can be rewarding. Or, perhaps, whether we are prepared for diversity is the wrong question. Perhaps what is at stake is whether Singapore, a city that has no natural resource save its people, can afford NOT to be a city of diverse talents from all shores.
One day in the future, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Singapore when I wander in the Botanic Gardens, I hope I will stumble upon a field dotted with bodies in varying degrees of decency — and ponder on how marvellous it is that we have such diversity.
The writer, a Singaporean based in New York, is a managing director with a leading real estate developer/owner. These are his personal views.
July 2006- The Mr Brown Affair
