e pur si muove

“Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.” - Wernher von Braun

this quote, seen on agagooga’s blog, is a pretty good distillation of what non-scientists think of basic research. (i use the appellation ’scientist’ also in contrast to ‘engineer’ ). von braun, the infamous nazi rocket ’scientist’, was not so much a scientist as an engineer. the basic science was already there; putting it all together to make things that launch wmds and other beacons of death into the heavens is, as true-blue scientists love to put it, ‘merely an engineering problem.’

it follows by definition that ‘pure’ science is completely useless as far as applications go. which is perhaps why singapore agencies professing to support ‘research and development’ are in reality doing nothing but development, throwing the much harder problem of abstract research to the local universities. (agagooga’s premier institue of social engineering, as of today, is the only university that is in principle capable of scientific research, as opposed to engineering development.) i like to think of the classification as perfect, but i am sure that there are examples that i am unaware of that spoil the perfect dichotomy. the same singapore agencies, in contrast, would be at intense loggerheads with me to challenge my definitions of ’science’ and ‘engineering’, perhaps with the same intensity as they have opposed my vivisection of some of their policies.

what a pleasant surprise it was to me, then, to discover sympathetic feelings among some of the scholars attending citylights chicago, the annual singaporean gathering in the midwest organized by samsu@uchicago. it seems that they have diversified it into being more than an undergraduate students’ event: among the attendees were a professor of theology, a management consultant, a sprinking of other graduate students, and of course the vip royston tan. even my feeble attempts at mingling with the crowd managed to elucidate interesting responses from people who’d read my blog at at least one point in time. i was even told by more than one person that what i had written was ‘a quiet inspiration for [them] all”. i also learnt, unfortunately, that my post lambasting a certain scholarship agency managed to land the person that i mentioned in it in hot soup. it seems incredibly illogical, given that it was plainly obvious that my only link to her was that she was a fellow alum and that she had no involvement in it other than being featured in that one bulletin. chalk up one point to the demons of irrationality!

the feeling of pseudo-celebrity continued when i returned from citylights as, to my great amusement, i found out via kevin lim’s blog that i seem to be featured in a talk during the Singapore Youth & Media Conference 2005. kevin’s transcript shows a bullet point from a ms. masturah ismail’s talk being “Blog of Ex-government scholar now graduate student”. incidentally, my impression of ms. ismail is bolstered by her insight into the motivation of many bloggers. her description of blogs being a ” ‘liminal’ space between public & private” is spot on; to me, they are the exact digital analogue of published personal journals. i’d be immensely interested in what she’d really said back then. incidentally, she is the second person whom i know of (other than a professor of american history whose class i attended back in summer 2001) who has used the word ‘liminal’ in a non-medical context. bravo!

but back to citylights. the 2.5-hour trip to chicago was well worth the ride, despite the inevitable snafus that arise from trying to coordinate the movements of twenty-seven singaporeans. (coincidentally, the singapore film board of censors made twenty-seven cuts in fifteen before approving its release as nc-16 in singapore, a record ‘celebrated’ by royston’s later release, ‘cut’, which is downloadable from talkingcock.com.) for some inscrutable reason, the logistics planners failed to bring maps of chicagoland along for the trip, relying instead of text-only directions from mapquest. a closure of the garfield boulevard (55th street) off-ramp flustered the designated navigator, who eschewed thinking on the spot for a fellow passenger’s remark that “we have to trust that the directions are correct.” the consequence? travelling westward on garfield two-thirds of the way to midway airport (instead of eastward to campus), wandering around englewood, marquette manor and other unsavory neighborhoods of chicago, panicking when random pedestrians walked by, locking the doors in response to squeals of squeamish girls, and finally turning around when i pointed out firmly that we had to be near the airport when a plane flew indifferently over our heads. to quote spinglasser: “all planes fly to singapore”, i.e. the wrong way. the result: blind faith in authority, 2; contingency planning, 0.

when we finally arrived on campus, we had missed the first two short films of the evening. but the last three were all pretty interesting. ‘red strings’ was a ghost story flick with an interesting twist, where the ghosts were hallunications induced by the protagonist’s injuries after an abortive attempt at suicide. she tried to commit suicide with her son, binding their wrists together with ‘fate strings’ to ensure that they would remain together, even after death. but the boy dies and she survives. despite this, the boy remains with her in her mind as she experiences post-trauma breakdown. ‘lorong 27′ was cute, in the portrayal of a british exchange student’s adventures in singapore and the demolition of ‘his’ stereotypes, one of which being a loanshark that helped him retrieve his stolen bag and tar paus food for his mummy.

‘family portrait’ was perhaps the most controversial short film, where a nouveau pauvre family struggles with financing a daughter’s overseas education. amusingly enough, the daughter is filmed walking away from the departure gates as she leaves for her studies! a friend complained that the portrayal of financial stuggle was rendered tasteless with the specific addressing of sponsoring overseas education, and the portrayal of it as something incredibly prestigious. yet another friend remarked how he could identify with the dilemma of spending a big chunk of money on a valuable education despite being in dire financial straits. the polarization induced is perhaps in itself of great interest. (and before anyone asks, both of them are on fms.) but no doubt the closing film was close to many of us studying abroad.

the whole experience was marred by the snide comments made out loud by some singaporean intellectual-wannabe, spouting drivel which he doubtlessly considered to be highly intelligent. strike three for singaporean affectations!

spent the night at a friend’s place playing bridge and returned for saturday’s feature focus on royston tan (陈子谦 ). doing his films justice would take far too long, so i have to cut short the commentary and present a few quotes from the screenings of his earlier works and dialogue:

“for every ten films, i make a film like jesses. i call it a masturbatory film; it’s for my own pleasure.” - royston, on jesses

“子有父原谅，父有谁原谅？ (the father will forgive the son; who will forgive the father?)” - son

“boat quay was a place where boats head to to dock. there were fights every night. now most of the shops of the harbour have been replaced by discos, but there are fights still. history repeats itself.” - old man and the river.

royston reiterated that ‘mother’ was not an autobiographical film, but was made at the behest of a prisoner whom he visited, who asked him to make a film for his mother. royston remarked wryly at receiving hundreds of emails from concerned audience members to go home and patch things up with his mother? the film itself was short but spellbinding, a tearjerker of a film replete with nostalgic scenes of kiteflying and playing at home, while the running commentary contributed undertones of despair and regret.

royston’s newest film, “absentee”, was also screened, addressing what he termed “overloading of the media”. the film was mostly about faces with pupil-less eyes and headphones strapped over the ears. also interesting was faint grey blobs that seemed to float randomly around the screen, much in the same way the eye occasionally images specks of dirt floating on the eyeball. i don’t think it was very well received, though.

the highlight of the film festival, of course, was the screening of the complete feature-length film, 15 (only the eighth such screening in the world so far!). those who missed it need not worry, since it is supposed to officially debut in london and new york next month. it is not difficult to sympathize with the film censors, after watching the film in its entirely. compiled entirely out of first-hand accounts of life in the singapore underground, 15 is indeed a remarkably complex film, replete with disturbing scenes such as one of drug trafficking, where one ah beng was forcing himself to swallow large condoms supposedly full of drug pills, being finally reduced to tears as he swallows the last one. it was a really sick parody of oral sex. a much more amusing scene before that was one where two boys whipped out their penises and measured their lengths. a ten-second shot of one of their penises and a hand holding a ruler predictable managed to elicit gasps of feminine shock and titters from the audience.

royston commented that his works had been criticized for being all style and no content, but i think whoever said that completely did not get the point at all. one scene where a suicidal boy was sitting on a bus was run completely backward, as could be seen from the bus traveling ‘up’ orchard road and tears running back into the boy’s eyes. i thought it was a reference to the fabled flashbacks of suicidal persons, but royston explained that running the scene backward was his metaphor for “holding back one’s tears.” clever.

but for those in the audience who cared little for literary pretensions, there were fleeting scenes of unbelievable verisimilitude. a particular scene where a boy was cutting another’s hair while the other was slumped, arms around a huge goldfish bowl (also used as a fishtank) elicited responses of amazement from ah bengs who watched the show, who couldn’t believe how much research royston had put into the film. (he told us that he studied those five boys for two years before putting together the screenplay.) the point of the fishbowl? i thought it was allegory for their feelings about their role in contemporary society, considering that fishtanks had been shown in the film in earlier scenes and that there were other scenes featuring staring scenes in public places. the real reason was much more prosaic; the boy was high and needed to cool down from the heat generated by his own body. hugging a fishtank was the quickest way to keep his body cool.

royston also commented on the board of censor’s cuts. in particular, he singled out one amy chua, who told him that his film was a threat to national security. citations for censorship included a scene with red draperies which were feared to have communist undertones (would she have banned chinese traditional decorations if she could?!), and the broadcast of gang chants and the use of real gang names (including those that royston himself had oestensibly made up for the purposes of the film!) cut, as mentioned earlier, was created specifically in a satirical bent. royston wryly remarked that the board of censors “nearly died when they saw [the] film, but they were under a lot of pressure to release it” since heavyweights such as cnn and the bbc were only too eager to pounce on the change to give the expected banning of ‘cut’ worldwide media coverage. he also mentioned that it was possibly the largest conspiracy in local film history, to bring together 1500 people to create the film within two days without the authorities catching wind of the project at all.

some quotes that i liked about from and about 15 and cut:

“optimism is only for the rich”

“lians are like spice girls, only more high class” - royston, closing a dialogue over why ah lians were conspicuously absent in the movie.

“one thing about jack neo that i have yet to learn is how to f the government and then kiss back… so if you want to suan the government, do it with good english.” - royston, on cut.

“after being scolded publicly by the minister on public tv, everywhere i go, i get discount[s] at supermarket and coffee shops. [even my soft-boiled eggs are cracked for me!]” - royston on his infamy after releasing ‘cut’

royston also commented on the origin of his research. his familiarity with the actors (acting out scenes from their own lives) stemmed from a community service project where he held filmmaking classes for juvenile delinquents. by making the lessons interactive and engaging them in games, he managed to gain their trust and treated him like a big brother. students are given cameras to take back home, and the kinds of scenes that they had captured were woven into a screenplay. the upshot of it, then, is 15 it is not so much a scripted play as a video montage. even royston commented on how the movie took a life of its own and was way beyond his control. in fact, 15 is more like a published video blog than a film for its organic, unscripted quality. which perhaps is the only way for them to communicate to us in the mainstream and elite levels, since most of them are only functionally literate and probably won’t be interested in writing blogs or novels or anything like that.

videoblogging is perhaps is an interesting solution to royston’s challenge to those who have watched 15: now what? do we help these people, knowing their unspoken rules of behavior and aware of their existence, or do we continue to lead our lifes, content to leave the social substrata alone? but if we choose to help them, how should we do it? pride will force them to decline help, but it is clear that they themselves are dissatisfied with their situation. the gangster father’s chastising of his son (was it simon?) shows very clearly that he wanted better of his son, and specifically that mean that simon should have concentrated on his studies rather than muck around in the gangster underworld. i think it’s a very asian (or even specifically chinese) problem: how to help those who need help but are too proud to ask for it outright. certainly it is the foremost concern of social workers, and should be an important mcds issue. but putting royston on the police blacklist for possible connections to the underworld, thus pulling the plug on his involvement with delinquents in schools and prison, is certainly one of the most myopic things i’ve ever encountered about the civil service. the ouroboros syndrome strikes again.

ok, my garlicked chicken stew is ready now. time to feed. but let me leave you with another thought that came to my mind watching “old man and the sea”: the struggles of the past were physical; those of today are mental. but how many people realizes the truth today? too many people live in slavish mimicry of their forebears in their daily struggle for making ends meet. they think that working ever harder will pay off in the end, but in a capitalist economy, it is leverage that truly rewards.

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while i’ve heard similar things being uttered from the various sheep that have passed off for some of my classmates (it’s pretty easy, having been to schools that have all-white uniforms), this particular quote from singabloodypore takes the cake:

Well Queenie, god bless her, looked up and uttered the following most philosophical thing I have ever heard a sheep say.

“I didn’t come here to think. I came here for you to think, then tell me what to think.”

She wanted to be a teacher…

it’s not the first time i’ve heard this, or even wrote about this. but it’s not too surprising, really.

such mindsets are sad relics of an educational system that is way past its prime. i suppose it worked well and well enough, back when what singapore needed was warm bodies to fill economic positions, not so much people who question their way through every hoop and obstacle thrown in their way. this is the kind of conditioning that is wrought into us by our teachers - at least, enough of the old guard that remain - memorize and regurgitate, no need to think.

it’s what is expected from us able-bodied males, as national servicemen. an army needs soldiers who are obedient, not men who question orders from up high. the utility of conscription as a social indoctrination tool is then crystal-clear: two (or more) years of military service produces citizens who are accustomed to the chain of command; sheep, who are used to following. having punished almost half the population for resisting the system in what is possibly the two most pliable years of youth, who is going to stand up against the system after such brainwashing?

the faustian bargain of old shows its ugly side - that the cost of rapid development along predetermined lines of crisp, stern policy has been at the cost of stamping out human ingenuity and creativity:

To paraphrase Orson Welles, neighbouring Indonesia had a bloody revolution, 1 million dead, a militant insurgency and three decades of Soeharto’s rule, and yet it produced the fiction of Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Singapore had 30 years of peace and stability, and what did it produce? The disk drive of personal computers.

and to update that, it hasn’t been doing too well in making hard disks either. most of the actual manufacturing facilities have packed up and left for cheaper locales, such as malaysia or china. and the so-called pillar of the economy that runs on silicon has been practically driven to the ground in recent years, with glc strongholds such as micron semiconductor running a large streak of ever-mounting financial losses under the august leadership of none less than mrs ho ching, supposedly a president’s scholar and the crème de la crème of the singaporean elite. but this whole issue of scholarships and meritocracy as practiced in singapore is, again, something i’ve already commented on.

in a nutshell, scholars have demonstrated a shocking lack of correlation between academic results and leadership prowess. and since in a meritocracy, scholars are by definition the best in the society, it then follows that either everyone else is even more screwed-up than the scholars; or that singapore is teaching its students for the wrong goals, ended up with defective products, and is blaming them for being defective. and as argued before, the education ministry is de facto the most important arm of a meritocratic government. the conclusion: we need reform; specifically, education reform!

i’ve long been an advocate of education reform, and it’s heartening that in the last few years a whole lot of change has been doled out from the imposing grey-and-green-glass headquarters. but far from the soul-wrenching excercise it should have been, the cowardly bureaucrats of educational policy have done nothing more than to throw more monkey wrenches into a fundamentally exhausted system, hoping for it to reorganize itself into something fundamentally different from what it is today. how can one talk about introducing creative thinking into a lesson plan that has to be drawn up a year in advance, and in flawless detail, down to the pages of the textbook used, homework assignments to be given, and a relentless timetable leading up to standardized examinations that will weed out the next batch of nitwits and lay the paths of those who pass through its be-all-and-end-all weeks of hell? yet it is officially sanctioned ministry policy for teachers to have to do that, and to me it explains the prevalence of oxymorons such as ‘teaching creativity’.

the stories from the frontlines seem to corroborate my view that recent policy changes seem to have little impact beyond stressing out teachers even more. teachers are still overworked, if not underpaid - an average teaching load in 2002 was four to six classes per teacher, two subjects per class, and 30-40 students per class. it is humanly impossibly for any teacher to pay undivided attention to the academic performance of two hundred pupils in the scant eight hours or so of classroom time. tales abound of teachers bringing home assignments to grade in huge paper metro shopping bags, marking at home until the wee hours before snatching a few precious hours of sleep. education policy as it stands today requires lesson plans to incorporate such ‘important’ elements such as ‘information technology’, ‘national education’ and ‘creative thinking’ into every unit that they teach.

but that is not all that a teacher has to do. teachers are expected to be in charge of a class of students and supervise their gestalt development as the school year progresses. for teachers in secondary schools, dealing with antsy teenagers in the throes of puberty (’long pants syndrome’, anyone?) is a delicate matter, to say the least. and on top of that, teachers are expected to be actively involved in at least one co-curricular activity, meaning that at the very least, saturdays have become non-negotiable work days too, and it is work that is on top of their nominal workload. need i comment more on the ‘knowledge-sharing’ wits teams that more than one exasperated teacher has dubbed ‘wasting important time schemes’? is it any surprise, then, that teachers have such a high turnover rate, and that many teachers are drived to the brink of psychological nonequilibrium by their profession?

the response from the teaching force from such hare-brained policies is simpleminded and worrying: science teachers who give worksheets with rebuses that spell ‘SINGAPORE’; mathematics teachers with test problems on working out percentage changes in declining birth rates; old and crusty computerphobic history teachers with powerpoint slides containing video clips of bloody monochrome carnage (ooh, multimedia!), clicking something somewhere that jams their presentation and having to be rescued by their l33t students; chinese teachers holding brainstorming sessions on civic issues such as subject x, and give out model answers at the end of class. (and in a bizarre twist of reverse racism, expatriate teachers seem to be exempt from these exasperating policies to varying degrees, depending on their contracts.)

such linear, reactionary thinking is both outmoded and damaging, considering the fruits of their labor such as the aforementioned Queenie. but who is really to blame for her mode of thought? herself, for not knowing better? the teachers, boxed in from all sides? or the policymakers, with their visions of clockwork efficiency?