Singapore

Day to night in the city

From the window in my parents’ new flat in the centre of Singapore, you can see out across the city. From one window, the skyline of the riverside financial district juts skyward its angry thumbs—the Marina Bay Sands and the Ferris Wheel Flyer. From the other, the lakelike flatness of the Bukit Timah nature reserve, its trees and jungle slowly being taken over by the creeping conurbation. It’s very much a place of differences, old versus new, coffee versus tea; even the country itself has been quadrisected.

Singapore’s one dollar coin has its name embossed on it four times: Singapore, Singapura, சிங்கப்பூர், and 新加坡. The country is split between its four nations: the Malays, the Chinese, the Indians, and what is typically referred to as ‘the expat community’.

You have the Chinese side, congregated in Chinatown, the Malay, clinging close to the border with Malaysia at Woodlands and in old Arab Street, and the Tamil, in the brightly lit hub of Little India. Each sector of Singapore is distinct, with its own histories, foods, costumes, and architecture, but all of it is undeniably mixed. It was part of an effort by the Singapore government to promote the mixing, with every HDB (government-subsidized state housing, typically high-rise apartment blocks in some shade of pastel) having a quota for diversity, ensuring that you’d be just as likely to see a Malay pengantin (or wedding) procession in the grounds of the HDB as you are a flaming bin filled with paper notes being thrown in by an elderly Chinese couple looking to send them to ancestors trapped in Hell. Then, you just have to look up and follow the trail of smoke to see the bank buildings, rooftop pools, and skyscrapers of the expatriate side, with hedge fund managers and secretaries running from floor to floor at all hours of the trade shift.

I, half British half Malay, spent my entire childhood here before moving to London at 18. (It does funny things to your head when you grow up split like that; I spent my first year of university in the UK sleeping in two pairs of socks, not used to the cold, let alone the food.) This is the first time I’ve been back in Singapore for a long while. My parents have moved from our childhood low-ceilinged bungalow to an apartment in the centre of the city, behind a newly sold nightclub and an organic supermarket. I look out over the tree-studded skyline, foggy and fenced by jet lag; a hornbill roosts in an Albizia tree.

Chinatown

I wander through the paper-lanterned streets, the sound of the Beijing Opera rehearsals clashing with the cobblers and the outdoor hotpot groups. Girls in flip-flops flick soup over themselves as they dunk thin slices of meat to boil in the pots, the gurgling of soup and the clinking of metal tongs clattering like practiced witchcraft into the street. There are stalls selling spiced duck necks, chilli crabs, and fresh fruit meshing together; the mangosteen glowing like dark and fat pearls in their ice bath, the duck necks looking significantly less appetizing but no less arresting, propagating the area with the filmy smell of mala oil.

On the corner, tucked into a small shophouse, is the Nanyang Coffee Museum. There’s a sign that describes how to order Singapore’s very specific brand of coffee—robusta roasted in sugar, strained through a sock in a high, ribboning arc of dark kopi, before being mixed into a heavy stoneware mug ladled with sugar and condensed milk. The air is acrid with the dark roast, steam juddering out from the watering can jugs used to boil the water for coffee and for eggs—once upon a time, they used to roast the beans with opium, as if the combination of condensed milk and cut-glass caster sugar weren’t enough. You’ll often see gangs of old uncles in their tank tops rolled up over their bellies dunking kaya toast into soft-boiled eggs and downing their kopi, all the while smoking cigarettes and checking the lottery numbers and competing with the early morning birdsong.

I get a kopi to go, iced, and suck at what tastes like sweetened jet fuel as the sun ambers its way toward afternoon. The centre of Chinatown has been taken over by Hungry Ghost revellers, celebrating the eighth month of the lunar calendar when the veil thins and ancestors walk the earth again. A family near me picks out offerings to burn at one of the stalls—they settle on comically large fake banknotes, and the little boy picks out an effigy of a PS5. I watch them leave, the boy not so much walking as kicking out his feet and hoping they’ll land, the plastic bag with the papers looped three times around his father’s wrist. They’ll head past me toward the oil drums that can still be found on some of the streets near here, painted a chipped red and simmering with heat continually throughout the day, throwing their offerings into its open flame-licking mouth. The smoke always smells like clove to me, cloying and sentimental. I’d thought for the longest time it was just the way I remembered it, the fuggy sweet smell of childhood; I learnt while writing this article that all the offerings were printed on incense paper, and it smells like that to everyone.

Arab Street

The call to prayer is at seven o’clock in Singapore, deviating very slightly with the turn of the year. The azan blares out from the Sultan Mosque on Muscat Street, all lilting and sinuous in the damp evening air, as the stallholders start packing up. It ribbons out across the area, from the pashmina stalls on Arab Street and the bars on Bussorah, but if you’re sat on the cold concrete benches outside of the soukh market, you’ll hear it in full force—over the hawking of the incense sellers, the carpet merchants, and the man who has, for all my life, seemed to be trying to get rid of his late mother-in-law’s tagine set. A middle-aged woman sits down next to me on the bench and starts to pull out rustling plastic boxes of kuih cake, their squat sticky shapes glimmering like jelly gemstones in a display case. She breaks one, a two-tone rice cake, in half and feeds herself with two fingers, like a horse having its bit slid in.

I sit here a while and watch the sunset go over the onion dome of the masjid. This is what the Malays call lepak, which translates roughly to just ‘hanging about’. A gang of teenagers has already started, laughing in the hen-pecked pidgin Singlish as they smoke popping clove cigarettes and eat instant noodles from the 7-11. A girl points her chopsticks at her boyfriend and spills some of the pot noodle onto the table, exploding the salty smell over all of us. All the perfumes of Arabia are bested by red ramen.

In order to get away from the chatter and the lingering scent of instant soup packets, I wander toward the old Malay cemetery, a graveyard of crooked teeth kuboh headstones just off the main road. A couple holding hands crosses the street to avoid passing it directly, the boy dragging the girl, and the shredded leaves in the banana trees waft like something you ought to be superstitious about. It’s just me, and the crickets, and coughing geckos sucking up that noiseless sound-quiet that nights in graveyards always seem to have. I follow the couple back across the road, feeling childishly grown up about the fact that I wasn’t as afraid as they were. I would have been once; I’d sprinted out of the jungle the second the call to prayer started at seventeen. There isn’t anything, in my opinion, capable of haunting in London. I’d forgotten how to be scared.

Little India

If you keep following the lights, and the music, and the incense, you’ll find yourself in Little India. This is one of my favourite parts of the city, where rolling stalls of fresh flowers are strung up on strings for you to buy, varmala pomanders of hibiscus and chrysanthemum and petaloso tuberose like scented bunting, a street party in paradise. The old woman sitting on a blue plastic stool who’s busy threading flowerhead onto flowerhead offers me a string of jasmine flowers when she notices me watching, tossing her dark grey braid over her shoulder and pulling me close. Her fingers are perforated from years of this, a seamstress of lotus and oleander, and the jasmine’s cool blue smell clings to me all day.

Little India is a flurry of colour. There are shops filled to the brim with gold brighter and yellower than any storybook illustration; there are restaurants downstairs where crowds of people huddle over banana leaves and waiters carry multiple vegetable curries on belt holsters; and there are, as ever, crowds of children in playgrounds dancing Indian classical and Bollywood dance for an iPhone on a rickety tripod. I sit in an outdoor restaurant and snack on a roti prata by tearing off small layered shards of it and dunking them into my fish-head curry, the fish head in question watching me with shiny, mournful eyes. I watch as a little girl in the playground trips over her own foot, crashing to the astroturf in a flurry of pink silk sari and jingling. She lifts up her skirt and peers down at her foot, where she’s tied an anklet, a spotted belt of bells. They ring out as her father picks her up and swoops her away.

I get an ais kopi bungkus peket, or iced coffee takeaway in a plastic bag, which they loop around my wrist and stick a hot-pink straw into. It’s barely cold, and if you wiggle your straw, you can get the sensation of hot coffee mixing with cold ice in your mouth as you walk toward the river. It’s not something you can really get anywhere else, and I’ve tried in the comfort of my London flat, but it always turns to sludge. Besides, it’d be a waste buying those little plastic bags—wholesale only, apparently.

The river

The veil between all the cultures in Singapore thins, in particular, by the river. Towering office blocks that splash light onto the river stand rank and file with the outdoor bars that serve Tiger beer in plastic tabletop dispensers, where locals in singlets and bankers in suits sit together and sprawl across both shores shoulder to shoulder. I sit down at a bar I don’t recognize (they turn over quickly here) and drink a brown bottle of Tiger, the condensation so intense against the table that I’m convinced for a second I must have spilled some.

The nightclubs here are also locally themed, from the Cantopop siam diu bars where you can buy flower garlands for performers in order to entice them to come and talk to you, to the heaving Tamil dance parties that bleed out onto the street, or the endearingly country-western themed bar at the top of Circular Road, Heroes, which insistently forces its live band to play only covers of Bon Jovi’s greatest hits. In between sets, all of the patrons flood out onto the street, going for looping walks by the river to cool down and smoke menthol cigarettes, waving hello to the rest of the bar scene they recognize. You can hear the popping noise of each minty ball in their filters as everyone lights up, a choir of carcinogens, and waits for the bands to change.

I drift with them out of the club, following their flip-flopped feet toward the stairs that bank the river, as everyone sits in front of the water to cool down. I used to sit in the restaurants nearby with my parents when I was little, and watch the drunks on the steps where I am now, singing and chatting and being grown-ups. I can see my face addled in the reflection of the water, scrambled and streaked by the bum boats still chugging at this time, and the hulking dinner junks for tourists all hurly-burly with plates and bodies and full banquet dinner services on the water. We’re all bottled beer and lit cigarettes and far too hot. A little girl, just a shadow against the humming light of her dinner boat, waves at us. Our little crowd of drunks whoop and wave back. Gan bei! they call, and cheers!

1. Asylum

Tucked into a brilliantly blue old shophouse on Jalan Besar, Asylum is a cafe with a fishhook-shaped bar totally at odds with its exterior. The walls, chairs, and floors are all a bright white, sparkling like the building’s perfect teeth when you walk by. It specializes in buah keluak roasted coffee, a kind of nut and/or fruit found in Straits settlement perfumey curries. You can buy the beans here, whole, in jerry cans decorated with ferny Victorian prints, and tap them out into your palm to smell that musky, cyanide scent. Grab a cold brew and hover outside to take in the colonnades of the building with its Etruscan-type columns painted in greens, golds, and reds; a Prima Porta of the Peranakan style.

2. Chye Seng Huat

Every generation and country has its idea of what the ideal coffeeshop ought to look like; Chye Seng Huat is Millennial Singapore’s. Woodblock tables with sawn-off corners, blackboard menus toting mentaiko pasta and deep-fried Spam shaped into french fry blocks, the ubiquitous industrial young person hunched over their laptop, sipping gingerly at a flat white. The filter coffee is served in dark orange Duralex mugs, the same colour and thinness of a well-sucked lozenge. I am afraid to break mine. I am also afraid of the fried Spam.

3. Apartment

Named the sixth-best coffeeshop in the world and the best in Asia, Apartment is essential for anyone wanting to get specialty coffee in Singapore. It is like stepping into the void, all white and matte surfaces, with no one really talking. A line of goosenecked white kettles and shiny enamel V60s stand like silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row, watched over by the birdlike and girlish barista, the only person in the entire place dressed in black. I’ve had too much coffee at this point in the day, and so they pour me some of their fermented dark hot chocolate, which is delightfully fizzy in all ways I never thought hot chocolate could be. The barista wipes down the neck of one of the kettles as though taming an unruly horse and smiles proudly.

4. Common Man Coffee Roasters

An institution in Singapore, Common Man was one of the first coffee shops I went to when I was still studying and wanting to be cool. It may actually be the first place I ever had a proper cold brew, in the spotty teenage panic of my exam years. I get the Citrus Cloud Cold Brew instead, all grown up, which feels corrosively sour against the fronts of my teeth in a way I can only describe as thrilling. A gaggle of schoolchildren walks by the front door, presumably headed for Starbucks.

5. Bhai Sarbat

Now this is traditional. Proper old-school Malay coffee. Brewed in a watering can and filtered through a clean sock, it has goops of condensed milk and teaspoons of sparkling sugar. It is cooled down in tarik fashion: the owner dances with two tin mugs of coffee (or more normally tea), streaming the liquid through the air over and over, playing double-dutch with the drinks until they’re cool enough. Drink the Malay kopi the way it’s meant to be enjoyed: poured into a tiny plastic bag and hung from your motorbike’s right handle, sucked through a blazing hot straw as you avoid the claggy city traffic.

6. Nanyang Old Coffee

Part coffee shop, part museum, Nanyang is Singapore’s Chinese coffee scene entrenched in amber. It has all the hallmarks of a coffee shop that would have existed at the height of Singapore’s Chinese immigration: heavy stoneware cups that fit a thimbleful of acrid robusta, roasted in sugar; a menu that teaches you the exact way to order your coffee (condensed milk, evaporated, sweet, with butter, mixed with tea, etc.); and the parboiled eggs with coconut jam toast cut into fluffy soldiers. Sit here and pretend it’s 1925 as Shanghai Swing blares through the decrepit, dusty radio, the condensed milk and kaya jam running voluptuous and sticky through your veins.

7. Mustafa

In a country famous for shopping malls bricked with Hermés, Dior, and Chanel, I am only going to recommend one. Mustafa is a 24/7 Indian department store in the heart of Little India, with four sprawling legs that branch out into the city. Do you want to buy gold? Perfume? Cameras? Your weekly shop? Christmas trees? A Rolex? A hulking tray of longshelf- life Indian sweets? Bizarre, bonkers, and utterly charming. I spot a roving family with bleary-eyed children stumbling through the costume section; someone has clearly forgotten tomorrow was dress-up day. My father bought fairy lights here on Christmas Eve after ours gave up the ghost. Mustafa, where quite literally anything is possible—or for purchase.

8. Prawning

Go back to Singapore’s sleepy start as a fishing village by going prawning; it’s fishing, but for prawns. ORTO, just opposite Haw Par Villa (see below), is a round-the-clock catch-your-own operation. In the day, the place is filled with children coming to terms with mortality by realizing the fact that they’re cooking what they catch, and at night it transforms into a slow den of old men fishing, catching up, and drinking in sweat-stained singlets and sarongs. A boy squeals with delight as he wrenches a prawn from the water, fishing rod a warped windlass from the strain, and trots it over to the free-use charcoal barbecue.

9. Haw Par Villa

Singapore’s notorious death-themed theme park. Run by the magnate behind Tiger Balm, the park takes you through over a thousand dioramas, statues, and scare houses that portray Chinese Buddhist hell. From bare-breasted mermaids frolicking in dry pools to intensely rendered scenes of robbers being flayed alive by demons, it has somehow cemented itself as fun for the whole family since 1950.

10. People’s Park

A Brutalist sensation in green and yellow, People’s Park is one of the icons of Singapore’s skyline. Designed after the Corbusian architectural ideal, it has an open-air food court downstairs, a wet market, and floor after floor of cobblers, tailors, playrooms, shops, and kiosks. The flames enfold huge woks in handshakes, setting alight the oyster omelette I ordered as the hunched hawker uncle takes my cash and counts it with pixie-like speed. His wife lounges in her leopard-print leggings and smokes as she tries to call more people to the store—‘oyster omelette, carrot cake, char kway teow.’ It worked on me.

11. Zam Zam

Zam Zam is famous for its Indian Muslim food. Order crispy, flaky roti prata or mouse-deer stuffed murtabak while you are shuffled back and forth on the rickety floorboards as family after family files in. The tables are long, and you sit shoulder to shoulder with groups of squabbling old women or exhausted semi-drunk teenagers, right hands moving like pecking birds from roti to curry to mouth. Absolutely do not mention the longstanding rumour about hitmen. I cannot say more for fear of libel.

12. Pulau Ubin

If Singapore gets all a bit too Singapore, take the ferry from Changi to Pulau Ubin. The last bastion of kampung life, it’s a tiny island just off the coast, populated by some 50 or so people who refuse to modernize. The island plays host to many different ghosts: a granite quarry, an abandoned coffee plantation, and a shrine to a young German girl who died in the First World War. Drink an ais kopi on the jetty, smoke a traditional gudang clove cigarette, and watch as the tide drifts in from mainland Singapore.