Singapore: Day Five

Day Five: More Food.

For lunch I go to the hawker center next to the hotel and order takeaway chicken rice from one of the many stalls that offer it. A scoop of white rice is topped with a few slices of cucumber and some chopped, bone-in chicken and wrapped in brown paper. A plastic soup spoon and a small bag of chili sauce are placed in a bag along with the chicken rice package. It’s $2 SGD--about $1.30 American. Back at the hotel, I sit on the floor at the coffee table and eat my chicken rice and drink a diet Pepsi.

Funny that, sitting on the floor. It took me a long time to get used to sitting on the floor in Japan, even in my own apartment, where I didn’t have a choice as I didn’t own a chair or bed. I did eventually get used to it despite my dislike, but I always laughed at just how comfortable Japanese found the floor. In Japan I would be invited to a friend’s apartment, and maybe they’d have a chair or sofa, but we’d always sit on the floor. In private homes, I never ate sitting in a chair and in I definitely ate more restaurant meals on the floor than I did sitting in a chair. I never really got comfortable with the practice though, and it was easy enough to abandon once I came home, but the first time Akira and I brought takeaway back to the hotel, I set up cushions on the floor and he sat happily on the floor and exclaimed, “Oh, nice!”

Usually, if Akira wasn’t in the room, I ate on the bed, at the desk, on the couch, or sometimes, yes, sitting on the floor. If he was in the room, we always ate sitting on the floor. But mostly we ate out.

That night for dinner, we went by MRT to Newton Circus Hawker Center. Newton is something of a tourist-trap near downtown Singapore. It has the same food as most of the other hawker centers, but because it’s in all the guidebooks, the prices are higher and the lighting is brighter, and the hawkers are pushier.

“A bit touristy,” Akira said as we made our way to Newton. I agreed but told him, “It’s okay.” It’s in all the guidebooks so I can cross it off my list of sights to see.

We arrived at Newton in the early evening. It was slightly crowded, but not terrible for a weeknight. We wandered around the center eyeing the offerings at the brightly lit stalls. Because busloads of Japanese tourists arrive constantly, some stalls had menus in Japanese and the offerings leaned heavily toward seafood, which I wasn’t interested in. Instead I chose a stall whose glass cases were filled with bent-neck boiled and roasted birds and I ordered roast duck with noodles. From a different stall, Akira ordered noodle soup with fish and beef. We sat and waited for round one, ate, and tried to decide on round two. We wandered around the center a bit more and Akira ordered chili mussels and I had roti john (a kind of Indian sandwich made of a length of baguette grilled with onions, egg, and mutton). We drank Tiger beer and diet Pepsi.

After dinner I wanted to try ais kacang, a Singaporean dessert. Ais kacang (“ice ka-chang”) or simply kacang (“ka-chang”) are like sno-cones on steroids, bowls of miniature crushed-icebergs drizzled with four or five different flavored syrups and sweetened condensed milk and fruit or other toppings like corn or aloe jelly. I ordered mango kacang which means that my iceberg had mango puree on top. As I dug down into my bowl, I found that it also included sweet beans and some kind of jelly (maybe aloe jelly) and an unfamiliar but obviously canned fruit. I tried everything but the canned fruit. That I couldn’t put in my mouth but I fed some to Akira who made a face and said that it tasted like “bad seafood.” (I think it was palm or atap seed.)

Akira ordered grass jelly kacang, which was a pile of crushed iced topped with grass jelly and longan fruit (canned, of course) and a wedge of lime. I tried the grass jelly and didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t sweet and didn’t have any appealingly colored syrup on it, but looked a bit like someone blew brown, gelatinous chunks on ice. Akira ate about a third of it, then abandoned it disinterestedly.

We had moved from table to table as we’d ordered from each different stall and finally, as we lingered over our kacang, I had time to look at the crowd around us. We had taken a booth near the ais kacang stall which happened to be in one corner of the hawker center. As we sat, there had been a few Asian faces here and there, finishing up their dinner, but now I noticed that the people around us were largely Western tourists.

“Is it gaijin corner?” I asked Akira.

He looked around, surprised, and laughed.

This is our little Tokyo joke, gaijin corner, from the time when I explained to him that in Japan, the gaijin were always seated in restaurant corners. We were in a Denny’s at the time, and had just been seated in the most remote corner of the nearly empty restaurant. It seemed funny until another couple was seated at the booth next to us. They weren’t Western but Asian so they didn’t look like gaijin and Akira was skeptical of the gaijin corner rule until the other couple began to speak to each other. Of course they didn’t speak Japanese. They were Asian gaijin, not Japanese.

Akira had laughed and made a joke about it’s being in the restaurant manual. (Which is funny given that racism is almost never documented--and that Denny’s got into a few years ago in the US for requiring prepayment by black teenagers and refusing to serve a group of African-American Secret Service agents.) Soon however, Akira began to notice that every time we went into a restaurant together, sure enough, we were seated in an out-of-the-way corner and often next to any other gaijin in the restaurant.

It was Muji’s (my English friend of Indian descent) joke to always ask for a different corner than the one offered us in restaurants. “I’ll choose my own corner, thank you very much,” he’d say laughingly in his smart, London-accented English.

I look around and see that it’s no different in Singapore, all the gaijin stuffed in one corner. Only this time, it’s by the gaijins’ choice. Anyone can sit wherever they want to in hawker centers but for some reason, all the Westerners have chosen to sit in this small corner. I look around us at the other Western tourists. Nearby is a couple, the man in his mid-30’s, the woman a bleached blonde in her early 40’s. The man is wearing a sports coat, his companion jeans and heels. They look hot and overdressed. They share a Tiger beer while they wait for their food. At the next table is a white family, middle-aged mother and father in shorts and t-shirts, chubby teenaged son. They also look overheated, red-faced, miserable. The son says he wants a glass of sugarcane juice. They don’t smile at each other and they speak loudly to another white middle-aged couple nearby. “How’s the lemsak?” someone asks the father. He grimaces and shrugs his reply.

I dig into the mango kacang and offer Akira a spoonful of red beans.

Then I notice that my upper lip has started to swell up. I ask Akira if he can see anything, an insect bite or anything, and he says no, but it looks swollen. I can feel with my tongue where there’s a sore spot, rubbed raw and quickly swelling and I panic, remembering the times in Japan when mosquito bites on my legs would cause my lips to swell. I pull out my bottle of antihistamines and swallow four of the pink tablets. The pills stick in my throat and I don’t have a drink.

There’s a drink stall, a few steps away from our table and as I approach the hawker asks me if I want beer. No, I say and order a lime juice. The man asks if my husband wants anything. He means Akira. No, I say, just the lime juice. I use the lime juice to swallow another four antihistamines. My throat begins to itch and the insides of my ears begin to swell.

“I think we need to leave,” I tell Akira. I know there is a clinic at the airport and that the hotel has a doctor on call. I know less about finding a hospital in Singapore other than these options, so I decide that maybe a taxi to the hotel is best

We walk back to the MRT station where there is a taxi queue and wait for a taxi. The driver barely speaks English and, when Akira gives him the name of the hotel, he doesn’t understand. It’s the only hotel in Changi Village and I am dismayed that he doesn’t even know this. He asks if we want to go to Changi Airport and Akira tries to correct him. He seems to understand but I’m not sure. I say that we should just go to the airport.

From the airport, we can catch a shuttle to the hotel. In both places I’ll be near a doctor in case my allergic reaction becomes severe. As we drive to the airport, I try to stay calm. I can feel a raw spot on the inside of my swollen lip. I wonder if I’ve been bitten by some bug attracted by the sweet syrup on the kacang or if it’s a reaction to some unfamiliar food. In the back of the taxi, My ears are still swollen and it’s hard to hear anything and my nose has started to swell. I begin to think about what I would feel if these were to be the last moments of my life.

Muji used to have a game that he played in which, invited to do something dangerous or stupid, he’d imagine the death notice being delivered to his parents. Your drunk son fell off the roof of a gay underground club in Moscow kept him from accepting the invitation to climb out onto the roof of the gay underground club in Moscow. Your son was beaten to death by stoned Nazi skinheads in Amsterdam kept him cowering under the blankets of a dorm room in a youth hostel in Amsterdam.

I imagine the death notice delivered to my parents: Your daughter died of anaphylactic shock from an insect bite in Singapore is not so bad--until you add in a taxi in the arms of her married lover to it.

I indulge this little melodramatic flirtation with the idea of dying so far from home just as I used to when I lived in Tokyo and mosquito bites would cause me to have an allergic reaction. I remember the first time it happened. I was alone in at Yanaka cemetery and was bitten four or five times on the leg. The bites immediately spread into a series of large, hard, swollen lumps and within minutes my lips went numb. I downed a couple of antihistamines and rode the train home in a daze to sleep off the doping effect of the drug. After a few more mosquito bites, I began to wear 100% DEET and to carry a bottle of antihistamines with me everywhere. I was sure I was going to die this way, from anaphylactic shock triggered by a mosquito bite. Once, I had to go to the doctor after being bitten on the hand by some kind of fly or mosquito. My hand swelled up and became numb. The doctor gave me a prescription for antibiotics that I never filled. Instead I took handfuls of antihistamines and stayed afraid of dying alone and so far from home.

The taxi dropped us at Changi Airport and finally, finally, as we waited for the hotel shuttle, the antihistamines began to work.

Back at the hotel, the doping effect of the drugs took over and I slept.