Looking Back

It would be remiss of me not to say anything about the morning I spent at the Peranakan Museum last Friday. The carefully curated exhibition rooms offer a deeply nostalgic glance over the shoulder at a vanishing world. Hearteningly that world represents the positive aspects of inter-cultural exchange in the region, something in the way of an ideal. And pitching this for students at the level of Stella Kon's appealing play Emily of Emerald Hill makes for an experience that the average visitor will find easily 'relatable', as people like to say these days. (Never thought I'd use the expression in writing, but I'm keenly aware of the need to move with the times.)

One fascinating aspect of the social world on display was the degree to which it expressed itself in what one might reasonably characterise as creatively artistic ways. Female fashions especially seemed to have an unusual weight, as did music and interior decoration in general. Appearances were kept up and meant something.

Funnily enough I experienced something akin to an attack of nostalgia myself in the course of the morning - actually two quite separate onsets thereof. The first came as I approached Armenian Street, on which the museum is situated, from the Bras Basah MRT station. I'd walked through the SMU campus and was crossing the road leading to the tunnel for traffic that avoids the campus when I realised I could no longer picture the old National Library building which had been situated there and in which I'd spent a number of happy hours in my earliest years in this Far Place. The 'new' tourist area around the museum building had been superimposed on an old workaday world pretty much erased from memory. 

And the second came as I remembered the first musical I'd been involved in directing, back in 1989 for the school I worked in then. The powers-that-be had already decided to put on Flower Drum Song, wrenching it from its American setting, beautifully delineated by Rogers & Hammerstein, and transplanting it to the Peranakan community inhabiting the East Coast of the island. We ended up borrowing a lot of furniture for the show and getting help from various luminaries associated with that fading world. I'd enjoyed it then, but hadn't really invested myself too deeply in the cultural aspects of our version of the show. Something of an opportunity missed.

All our worlds fade eventually, of course. So best to enjoy them whilst they're around.