Category: History

Review: Finding A Home In This City

cover-of-city-of-small-blessingsThe cosmopolitan youth and the old man ask what is home in Simon Tay’s City of Small Blessings

In this poetic but tranquil collision, the City of Small Blessings brings together a father and a son, two disparate elements of Singapore society – the greying population and its cosmopolitan youths – to question the common loss of home in the young city-state of Singapore.

Bryan is a retired school principal who recently returned home after a failed migration to Canada, where his only son, Peter, immigrated to a few years ago. Together with his wife, Bryan rents a house in an old airbase in the north of Singapore when it is announced that the area is to be redeveloped and the house repossessed. In a way, this mirrors Singapore’s plans for its former Seletar airbase where author Simon Tay and his family are currently renting a colonial house. While this was part inspiration for the book, unlike Bryan, Tay’s house is not facing demolition.

The book follows Bryan’s vain attempts to save his home and the neighbourhood from the wrecking ball. He rallies his neighbours, going about the official channels of protest: writing letters to the newspapers, government agencies, MPs and organising events to attract the public’s attention, but in typical Singapore fashion, to no avail. Desperate, Bryan even personally appeals to his former students who have rose to the highest echelons of the public service for help – Tay’s subtle hint to the lengths one must take for the ordinary man to be heard in Singapore.

And the beauty of this book lies in such questions and issues about the values of Singapore that Tay hints at throughout the book as he collides people, places and time: Bryan and Peter, Canada and Singapore, a father’s history and a son’s future. While the theme of preservation versus progress dominates the book, it is really life in the city and the little things that Tay details, like a neighbour explaining why the government did not allow her to keep cat as pets and how Bryan felt when he stopped receiving invites from the Prime Minister’s Office to attend National Day Parades after retirement, that we get a sense of why people struggle to find a home in this city.

This collision comes out best in the prose as Tay breaks away from linear story-telling and the book not only shuffles between perspectives of father and son, but also time, as we are brought through the back story of a father’s friendship with a Japanese soldier during World War II and the uncertain future that this city holds for Bryan and Peter.

While the book would have easily became a retiree’s rants against the merciless tide of progression here, “This is a story of a city I do not know”, Tay shows restraint and even introduces a new victim in Peter, the cosmopolitan youth who feels estranged from his birth place, “This used to be a home, our home. Now it is just real estate.” It is here where one can feel Tay speak. The 47-year-old has after all spent considerable time overseas with the Singapore International Foundation and as the current chairman of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs. And it is through a father-son conversation about alienation that we are brought through the jittery psyche of the young and elderly Singaporean as they try to make sense of where is home.

Thus, one wonders if the book was inspired by Tay’s background. His late father, Tay Seow Huah, was formerly a permanent secretary in the public service while Tay, a law lecturer today, represents a generation of young Singaporeans that can comfortably jet set from city to city.

But this book suffers from Tay’s restraint too. Bryan is never angry but always measured, riding away from his problems on his bicycle, taking the reader on a ride but never going fast enough. And as it marches to its ending, the sophistication and subtlety in Tay’s earlier prose gives way to a burst of didactics as if fearful that the reader might have taken this as a mere leisure ride.

But it is not. While Tay maintains that this book is “not autobiography nor a political tirade”, it does continue the themes of alienation from home that have ran through his two earlier books — Stand Alone (1991) was his first novel of 12 short stories and three poems about Singapore that he wrote during his 1½ year travels in Europe and South America, while Alien Asian (1997) was an account of his time in America as a foreigner. Instead, Tay hopes the book, first written some 12 years ago, remains art that will allows us to survive the truth as Nietzsche once said, an optimism that makes his Singapore, truly, a city of small blessings.

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A review I wrote for my assignment in COM419A:Arts and Cultural Reporting

FOUND: Visual Thinking and Thoughts

visual-thinking

This was how Peter Ong explained visual thinking in a 1994 AMIC paper where he also championed the importance of packaging and design so that newspapers stayed relevant to readers. The way to do so is to be, what I call, a total journalist.

According to Peter, such a journalist should:

  1. Integrate themselves fully into the design process
  2. Learn to think graphically
  3. Look for graphic potential in every story
  4. Collaborate with sub-editors and artists in the final packaging of their stories

The New Paper is one local English paper that I think has such journalists as one can see from how prominently they use infographics. I believe they are the only paper with the post of Infographic Journalist. You can see an archive of their works online here. Below are three of my favourites:

I love how this infographic not only served to categorise the price increases across different sectors but more also how it acted as a distinct visual element to convey the idea of price hikes so simply! Great layout too.

Here, the process of setting up the Singapore Flyer is well explained and readers get a sense of the scale of this world’s tallest observation wheel as it is compared with other megastructures around the world.

The details that go into this one show that infographics need not be simple, but can be jam-packed with information if it is well-designed. I like how the outline of a person is place on the chair to show how comfortable it might be to sleep in one of these seats. The big picture is not forgotten as the detail on the bottom left corner lets the reader know where this chair is in the plane.

FOUND: A Short History of Newspaper Design

In this 1987 Asian Media Information and Communication paper that I found via Googling, Peter Ong, a former regional editor of the Society of Newspaper Design, provides a short history of newspaper design. A former editor in The Straits Times and The New Paper, he sees the birth of newspaper design as a necessary response to consumer’s changing expectations and needs, and looks to the American newspapers as the leaders in this area. The follow areas are covered in this 14-page PDF

  • The American Experience — why and how American newspapers focused on newspaper design
  • Design Trends — modular layout systems, how wide a column should be and what kind of font size to use
  • Why redesign a newspaper and how to go about doing it
  • Thoughts on the electronic newspaper and how it might change things

Though dated, this is still a very good read to be introduced to the fundamentals of newspaper design. The section on why to redesign and how to go about doing it is very useful for understanding the process of putting together a newspaper. Finally, it is quite interesting to see how his predictions of changes to the newsroom over 20 years ago panned out:

Just imagine this: A reporter leaves the office for an assignment with a photographer. All she has in her hands is a tiny tape recorder. No notebook. No pen or pencil.

The photographer, too, is seen with a strange-looking camera. Instead of the usual film, the camera has a computer-like disk.

At the end of the assignment, they return to the office. The reporter plugs her tape recorder into a computer system and the story appears on the screen in front of her. There is no typing to be done. Any corrections she wants is made through a voice-activated computer. When she is satisfied with her story, she transmits it to her editor at the click of a button.

In the photo department, the photographer slips the disk into a computer. He scans through the pictures he has shot, selects the best and then transmits it to the editor.

The editor calls up the story and photograph on a video display terminal, crops and sizes the picture the way he wants it and merges it with the story which he has edited.

Story and picture are sent to the sub-editors and designers who then lay out the various pages on a video display terminal. Once the page is completely filled, he sends the page off to the production room where a plate is made directly from the computer. The page is ready for printing any minute now.

Except for the part on “no typing”, much of what he imagined has actually come true!