Quite a short update this week. Talking to other people who’ve finished national service, one gets the sense that ennui sets in – no set time to wake up, have your meals, no work to do. Playing on your phone feels like a guilty indulgence than a way to wait for freedom. Luckily that hasn’t been the case: a routine of just working on some French grammar/vocabulary and reading has been enough. If anything, I look at how the days go by, and sometimes think: “Wow! Where did the time go?”
Eating
Back in JC I used to go to Taman Jurong lots. I remember being fascinated by how quiet the estate seemed, its unusual road names that vacillated between the blandly-industrial (‘Corporation Road’) to permutations of super-Chinese names (Ho Ching, Yuan Chung, Yung Ho etc.) Occasionally I’d sleep over in my friend’s house and we’d just spend time reading or walking around the neighbourhood, observing that distinctly 90s fluorescent lighting bathing stationery shops, fruit sellers, and tuition advertisements alight in their tubular white glow. Since 2016 I’ve been meaning to try the famous fish head curry, run by the grandma of an old classmate. I got tantalisingly close, but ended up at the wrong stall this time, where there was some pretty impressive fish curry, sesame chicken, and vegetables nonetheless. The place really does feel the same from half a decade ago, tucked away and bypassed by MRT lines present and future.
Something on my to-do list that I did manage to try this time was the fantastic Minangkabau food at Kampong Glam, at Rumah Makan Minang. My residual suspicion at ordering mutton outside probably stems from having to pay out the wazoo each time at my usual places to order them – Sari Ratu (just a few minutes away from Rumah Makan Minang) and Dju Dju across the road from my house (RIP, replaced by the incredible mediocrity of chain ayam penyet). This was food at its finest – a towering tahu telor, a wetter beef rendang that eschews the usual coconut flakes, and very sambally kangkong. Alongside things like thosai, nasi padang is one of those foods I deeply miss when overseas, but for some reason neither the government functionaries responsible for maintaining networks of expatriate Singaporeans nor the celebrity chefs opening up food court-style affairs in cities like New York or London grasp this. Instead one gets hokkien mee (okay, I concede this is excellent), satay or chicken rice there.
Reading
I wrote a review of my friend Milton Wong’s poetry collection, over at my other website – for now, new York (2022) is a satisfying, slim pink volume. Some of my appreciation comes from how in about 15 months I’ll be at Columbia myself (hopefully doing well in the housing lottery like him), but more importantly it’s a deeply human book, the kind that serves as a beautiful gift to the writer as much as it is about sharing these happy memories.
Finished Helen Gordon’s Notes from Deep Time, a truly impressive book. I’ve written a bit about it last week, but one thing I appreciate is how grounded this experience is in her own travels and curiosity as a writer. (“Touching the edges of one of the theropod’s lozenge-shaped toes, 150 million years almost dissolve in the hot desert air. There really were dinosaurs here. For a moment that fact becomes amazing once again.”) I suppose there are two ways of trying to narrativize the scientific – one way is to treat it as a people-centred enterprise, which has always been an affair of the literary anyway, even as historians do it. The other is a more travel or biographical approach, but weaving them together is an entirely different undertaking. I learnt a lot – seeing the debate over the concept of the Anthropocene unfold from the debate between stratigraphers and geologists is a different thing, even if I’d originally engaged with the concept for my undergraduate experience. Various other topics like palaeontology, urban geology, nuclear waste facilities, are all covered with a mix of great source work, interviews with experts, and the simple experience of paying attention while on a tour, walking through natural landscapes, or touching what the earth has to offer.
Started on Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy, a book that looks at the giant coal mine of Fushun (Liaoning, China) from its Qing-era origins to a vast expansion under the Japanese colonial corporation ‘Mantetsu’, where it produced more than a sixth of the Japanese empire’s coal, to its brief administration under the Chinese Nationalists and then the Communist Party. The titular ‘carbon technocracy’ is, riffing off Mitchell’s concept of ‘carbon democracy’, Seow’s way of understanding the “distinctive sociotechnical apparatus” that its proponents, despite vast differences, valorised as “modernity – universal, scientific, inevitable”, to “marshal[] science and technology towards the exploitation of fossil fuels for statist ends” (4). The coal of Carbon Technocracy, pitted against Mitchell’s exploration of oil producers, therefore reveals how central to this idea of development was how carbon energy came to embody “a means to modernity engendered for them tensions between a fear of fuel scarcity and a faith in securing, largely through technoscientific means, a near limitless fuel supply.”
The periodisation of the book is interesting: chapters are organised by administration, but political ideology seems to give way to significant continuity in how governments – top-down, extractive, and often indifferent to mines’ effects on human body and natural environment alike – handled the mines’ operations, fetishised coal output as an indicator of growth, national health, and modernity itself. Evidently “mechanical and managerial means” are so key to carbon technopolitics, and Seow discusses these in an incredibly engaging way (well, engaging compared to the works of environmental historians – I remember slugging through the works of Cronon and Uekötter for a university essay). The book’s various protagonists, from the mid-level bureaucrats to anecdotes of workers, often skew towards those with technical knowledge, functionaries who helped reify the big nation-affirming, progress-craving ideologies from capitals as much as they helped to fuel and co-create these beliefs.
Reading between the lines also suggests that resource-based technocracy also involves a story of resource-based colonialism, especially when the sites of extraction and energy production are precipitated by precursor processes of prospecting, processing and transport. Clearly, carbon technocracy is not uniquely borne out of the cases of Japanese empire-building or Communist state formation, but to me, many earth-shifting, plume-spitting megastructures are also situated across South Asia, Central Africa etc. where the concept of technocracy itself, looks markedly different, if at all.
Looking:
Everyone has their internet rabbit holes. Mine entails a kind of travel through Wikivoyage, with its predictable sections of what to see, what to eat, where to sleep, how and where to go next. Something about these distant places, reduced to pithy, often-outdated crowdsourced information fascinates me. (Of course, one’s view of the world is sorely lacking when it is filtered purely through tourism, much less an Anglophone, internet-user lens. Here I’m just using it as a brief springboard for flights of fancy). I think it was a mention of Niue on some online newspaper that made me think of the remarkably unusual situation of the island – independent yet seen as part of New Zealand, sovereign largely as a membership for some organisations like UNESCO. What is it like to be the Premier of a nation with 2,000 people, or to live on an island one can drive across in twenty minutes? Anyway, I recognise that these are real questions with correspondingly real answers – just talk to people who live there, duh – but at the same time, flights are something like twice a week from Auckland. So, my thoughts on these faraway places remain confined to these surveys.
Photo from Google Maps – duh!
It looks like a local hotel mapped out part of the island using this hilariously low-resolution (even by 2010 standards – it’s quite funny to me these images are less than a year old) camera. So at least some of my questions are answered.
Leave a Reply