Reflection written by Mavis Lok - Dec 2019

Since the premiere and success of Crazy Rich Asian (2018), Singapore has become a more familiar country amongst the masses. Whilst the movie brought great light to the rich, colourful, post-colonial city-state, I think the movie did not do justice in presenting Singapore beyond the glitz and glamour. So, what best represents Singapore? I think hawker centres. In this reflection, I attempt to uncover what hawker centres are as national spaces and its relations to national identity, with the aim of better understanding what these spaces mean to me as a Singaporean.

Hawker centres are open-air food markets filled with hundreds of unique food stalls. As a Singaporean foodie, my relationship between food and national identity is prominent yet complex. As David Bell and Gill Valentine point out in Consuming Geographies: We Are Where We Eat (1997), 'the history of any nation’s diet is the history of the nation itself'. (Bell and Valentine, 1997: 186) Similarly, hawker centres are symbols of Singapore's post-colonial social and economic evolution. Since the 1800s, street peddling was a common sight until the 1950s, when Singapore's first postwar governor and commander-in-chief, Franklin Charles Gimson set up a Hawkers Inquiry Commission to address problems in regards to social, economic and health. Eventually, in the 1960s, hawker centres were constructed by the government to regulate street hawkers' food hygiene. (Kong, 2007) The regulation of spaces of food production reflects the intersection of Focault's biopower, cultural-economic production and spaces. The legalisation of hawkers also meant that the streets no longer belonged to hawkers. Instead, they now reside in hawker centres that are state governed, for hawkers, residences and tourists to work, eat, learn, converse and complain.

While these regulations have made Singapore's hawker scene more sanitise and organised, hawker centres are also prime spaces that embody Singapore's multiculturalism, otherwise specified as multiracialism. Singapore’s policy of multiracialism was formed to create an egalitarian and inclusive society by integrating the different racial groups into a single Singaporean culture (Barr and Skrbiš, 2008:39), where the state categorises all Singaporeans using the CMIO Model: Chinese, Malay, Indian and Others. To the extent that every Singaporean's identity card includes one's race. This discourse suggests that Singaporeans are made to look at themselves in terms of race as part of their national identity. Similarly, multiracialism can also be observed by the variant cuisines and ethnically different hawkers present in hawker centres. Whilst Benedict Anderson argues that ‘the nation’ is imaginary and that 'nationality, nation-ness as well as nationalism are cultural artefacts of a particular kind’ (Anderson, 1983:13), I think hawker centres are artefacts built beyond the function of nationalism but rather for social-cultural-economical growth for people in Singapore, whereby people of different socio-economical background come together and eat foods of variant heritages. Therefore, I would now disagree with Anderson that the nation is imaginary because there are structural and material effects of governance that contribute to the formation of national identity and the nation in which have material consequences. In this case, the construction and development of the young nation-state Singapore and the individuals' embodiment of racial and national identities.

After thinking about hawker centres for a while now, I also realised how difficult it is to be critical about hawker centres. I think hawker centres do well in masking the struggles of racial minorities. Seeing that food comes to play as a tool of cultural and national assimilation within the context of interacting with hardworking hawkers, these factors conceal the complexities of inclusion and exclusion of who 'belongs' to the nation based on their racial identity. Or perhaps, this could also just be a reflection of Singapore's 'nature' of meritocracy. As Paul Gilroy explains, 'The new racism is primarily concerned with mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. It specifies who may legitimately belong to the national community and simultaneously advances reasons for the segregation or banishment of those whose 'origin, sentiment or citizenship' assigns them elsewhere.' (Gilroy, 1987:45) In other words, whilst a community may share similar values, there is still segregation amongst people due to signifiers of difference as part of identifying who should belong to the national community. However, I think hawker centres are great examples of nation artefacts that are public spaces that bring different individuals to work, eat and live under one roof to provide a living for themselves and feed the community. Nonetheless, 'the production of the nation involves processes of self-identification in which the nation comes to be realised as belonging to the individual (the construction of the ‘we’ as utterable by the individual)'. (Ahmed, 2000:98) Therefore, the complexity of national identity still leans on individuals' beliefs and understanding of their sense of belonging to a nation.

The Singaporean identity is highly complex and transformative. As an island city-state situated in South East Asia, it has been founded by migrations of people all over the world, bringing about deep histories, cultures and languages. I wanted to write about hawker centres because within the midst of loud noises, the mixture of food smells and movement of busy crowds there is harmony in the amalgamation of different cultures, flavours and people, that I believe to be my favourite representation of Singapore. I cannot help myself going back to the notion of 'we are what we eat' and my relationship between food and national identity is complex and may be too entangled. While I write fondly of multiracialism in Singapore, I also understand how 'Like a language, food articulates notions of inclusion and exclusion, of national pride and xenophobia' (Bell and Valentine, 1997: 168). The iconic national dish Curry Fish Head is a great example in illuminating Singapore's inclusive multicultural identity. In 1949, an Indian curry stall owner created this dish by combining fish heads with his curry when he saw how the Chinese loved fish heads. (National Library Board, 2002) This dish has since been enjoyed by many Singaporeans from all walks of life. At the same time, it is important to question who is assimilating and why. Whilst Singapore's policy of multiracialism and CMIO model formulated and constructed an inclusive nation, I suppose one may attempt to critically question the authenticity of this inclusive culture. The nation is imaginary and at the same time real. After reflecting upon hawker centres, nation and national identity, I will continue to struggle to introduce myself as a Chinese-Singaporean; let alone, what it means to be Singaporean without having to mention our love for food.

Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge

Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso.