THE CITIZEN

It is 9am in the morning. I wake up with a jolt, noticing that the sun is brighter than it should be and I’m late for work. Joanne is still half-asleep, groaning to no one in particular as I shower, dry, and throw on some clothes before rushing out the door and calling a taxi. 

The drudgery of capitalism. The world my wife is tentatively stepping into, against our youthful ideals. In the 60s, who would’ve thought that making money would be so boring? No one, perhaps. Maybe back then, no one really did any thinking either. Just parroted rhetoric from the people in charge. White skinned or white clothed, the hunger for submission amongst the Asian diaspora is overwhelming then as it is now. 

And here I toil, to keep my soul, my pitiful soul, attached to my physical body in defiance of the headwinds of dystopia, in the vain hope of salvation, but at the cost of knowledge, the awareness of my slavery, of the torture of my people, of the bottomless pit of labour in the service of capital. 

So let us amuse ourselves with the dramas of the day -- the housewife complaining of expired vouchers, counterfeit parking coupons, fruits left to rot in the corridor by anonymous hooligans, undeserved service charges, speeding taxis on the loose, the next generation of hawkers, self-made twenty-something millionaires, escaped chickens and lost iphones, the birthdays of important orang utans, celibate pandas, transsexual criminals, haunted bridges, jungle brothels, reservoir crocodiles, territorial cyclists on the ECP...and somewhere in there, a story about a samurai sword. 

My own complicity in oiling the machinery. The mirage to distract from the truth, just beyond the sports, the comics, and the classifieds. A proper job. 

I jump into a cab, directing the cabbie to my workplace. He responds, to my surprise, with a British accent. 

“Not a problem, mate,” he says.

I snort to myself - when did the “foreign talent” start becoming professional drivers? Are they not satisfied with taking just our high paying jobs? Do they want to take our unwanted jobs as well? Another example of how my country is no longer my country. I remain quiet in the back seat, watching the HDB flats float by. In the distance, an MRT train trundles into Simei station. 

“Is there something wrong, sir?” the cabbie asks. 

“Drive faster lah. I’m late,” I snap back at the ang moh. 

“Oh. Forgive me, but I must follow the rules of the road. And the speed limit here is 60 km/h.”

“For what? This isn’t Eng-gur-lund you know. You are in Asia now.”

“But I must follow the rules of…”

“Yah yah. Or else the gahmen deport you is it? Aiyah, you’re white lah. They’ll never deport you.”

“Oh, but sir,” he says, “I’m not white.”

I lean forward and look into the rear view mirror. True enough, the cabbie isn’t white. His burnt honey skin-tone is of a strongly tanned chinese man. His eyes, jet black. His head, botak. His eyebrows, thin and straight. What the?

And then he continues, “My good man. It is me, sir: Doctor Tan Vee Bun!”

True enough, it’s really Tan Vee Bun driving the cab. He’s even still wearing the same blue check shirt and black pants as yesterday. 

I ask him jokingly, “Same clothes as yesterday ah?”

He laughs, changing his accent back to Singaporean, “Of course wat! This one my uniform ok! Also this is Comfort cab colours,” referring to the blue-ish tones of the Comfort cab he’s driving. 

“Wait, if you’re a doctor, why are you driving a cab?”

“I am a doctor of philosophy! In political science and ancient history!”

“So...why are you driving a cab, and speaking in a British accent?”

“Because I am a true Singaporean son!” he yells back, “after finishing my thesis, a no-holds-barred takedown of the Singaporean experiment -- I worked as a typewriter salesman. And coincidentally enough, I soon found the entire industry was irrelevant. I intended to move back to academia, but found that all records of my enrolment in NUS had disappeared. My thesis, four years worth of painstaking research, made to disappear. No thanks to the Lee family, who have undoubtedly contributed to my decline. And now I am destitute, a shell of the man I was once was. My savings have since evaporated away, and my CPF, sham as it is, empty, a complete non-starter. Meanwhile the foreigners have taken away all the jobs and I can’t get income other than as a taxi driver. Even this rice bowl is being eroded away by the foreigners. I have nothing left except this taxi, rented from the government.”

He speaks music to me. My heart reaches out to him. Our souls, drifting in the grey, humid void that is Singapore, circling each other in a tentative dance. Outside, it has started to rain. 

Tan Vee Bun suddenly changes his tone. 

“Brother,” he says, “they are after you.”

“Who is after me?” I ask, after a pause.  

“The government. They have sent their agents -- the agents of nationalism -- to apprehend you. They have been circling you. Sometimes invisibly, sometimes right before your eyes.”

I think back to the gang at the playground. As clear as day, I recall that silhouette leaning against the swings, smoking that cigarette, burning green and hot and unnatural, hypnotizing me with its devilry. 

“But we, too, have been tracking you. There is something about you that they want for their plan.”

“What plan? Is this because I scratched my crotch at the mall?”, I ask. A flood of questions rush into my head as I wait for Tan Vee Bun’s answer. Is it my anti-government, pro-freedom attitudes that they want me for? Have they ascertained that I could possibly be the seed of something greater -- the beginning of a revolution that will slowly but surely, bury the PAP under their hubris and rhetoric of “pragmatism”. As I save the country from the mass production of labour, under the evil one-eyed glare of Capital as run by the powers-that-be. 

I begin to wonder, who has betrayed me? My wife? Or is it my mind? Have they already entered my mind? How have they been spying on me? And then it dawns on me: the pile of shit at the loading bay...they have been spying on me for 3 months, shitting at the loading bay to intimidate me whilst stealing my knowledge and my ideas for the betterment of society. Have they no shame? Stealing my soul in the middle of the night, to nullify it in the pursuit of a policy?

“Their plan,” Tan Vee Bun continues, “is to grow the clone of Lee Kuan Yew for his continued rule over Singapore.”

The taxi slows down as a young girl, head buried in her phone, jaywalks in front of us. I wish I could be her, outside of this taxi, outside of this conspiracy of clandestine surveillance by the government, of intimidation and poverty, of the burden of curiosity and the curse of knowledge that torments my soul -- bamboo satay sticks burrowing into my sense of innocence and beauty. I wish to be ignorant again. 

“You know this to be true,” continues Tan Vee Bun, his voice now deeper and more confident.

I ask myself, is the government working on stealing my soul, or my DNA? I hesitate before replying.

“I need some time to think about this.”

“They want to harvest your semen.”

“What?”

“You don’t have much time. We don’t have much time.”

I despair; he’s giving me more information than even I can handle. I bury my head in my hands and say, “can you drop me off here?”

Tan Vee Bun stops the taxi abruptly outside a McDonald’s restaurant. Someone horns at us, and then speeds past. 

“You have to come with us.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

Tan Vee Bun starts to answer, and then I change my mind. I place a $50 note on the armrest and jump out of the cab, running to the safety of the crowds of sheeple congregated at the McDonald’s for the Sanrio-Hello Kitty dolls. 

But then someone tackles me to the ground. I start yelling and Tan Vee Bun pushes a Nokia phone in my hand, before abruptly jumping up and sprinting back to his taxi, hightailing it down Toa Payoh Lorong 1. 

People have crowded around me for the 3rd time in 2 days. Taking photos and chattering amongst themselves. Yet again, no one helps. I hide the phone in my pocket and push my way through the crowd towards my office, hoping that I won’t become the day’s top story -- “Man gets Rugby-tackled outside McDonald’s at Toa Payoh” -- a headline just exciting enough to scare me.