Preserving the Past

The one thing about a holiday in France is that it takes a long time to get over it. It has been more than 3 week since we got back and we are well into the second week of school. My car had stalled twice in the past week and it turned out to be a defect in the fuel pressure gauge which I paid over SGD500 to fix today. Yet I am still thinking about the holiday in France. It doesn't help that a number of people have been posting photos of their wonderful summer holidays in Europe on Facebook. My sister is holidaying in Switzerland with her family right this moment.

With France it was so easy to get a sense of the place. Magnificent castles and palaces in the Loire Valley and Paris telling the stories that make up the history of the nation. The beautiful towns of Amboise, Colmar and Strasbourg which retained the charm of their half timber houses - you would think that you were in the set of the Beauty & The Beast. We didn't go to the Lourve because my kids were fed up with too much history, it was coming out of their ears. There is grandeur everywhere you looked in Paris - Place the la Concorde, Arch de Triomphe, Pont Alexandre III, Notre Dame, Montmatre. As an Instagrammer, I had panic attacks trying to decide what shots would fully capture the sense of the place. 

Coming home to Singapore felt like I had just gotten off an adrenaline-high from an amusement park ride, not that I do many of those. It feels like everything around me seems slower, less exciting. My Instragram posts switched back to photos of what I am having for lunch. Contempt with familiarity. Yes we have historical buildings too - Victoria Theatre & Concert Hall,  National Gallery Singapore, The Fullerton Hotel, Clifford Pier, Raffles Hotel, the pre-war buildings in Chinatown. But we could have and should have done better to preserve the old buildings that used to stand in Raffles Place.  We almost tore down the primary school which my wife attended, what is now CHIJMES. 

So you can tell how I feel about the debate on the fate of 38 Oxley Road. Yes it is a private home of a man who wanted his family life to remain very private. Yes, he saw the danger in the state immortalising the old guards and was constantly reminding the nation to strain forward towards the future.  But he knew that there was a deep longing for Singaporeans to have a means to remember him by. Whilst he had a personal preferences on what should happen to his family home, he also knew that his life was not his own. His life, as he had made it, was for the people he served and for that reason, rightfully or wrongfully, people feel that they he belonged to them. I remember the long lines that we all joined to pay our last respects when he passed away. And the truth is that as a nation we are still a little lost when we think about how we keep his memory alive - it is far less psychotic to visit a LKY memorial than to chant "I will contribute to the progress of Singapore because of what our great leader LKY has done for us." Singapore is a young nation and we must be very careful to retain our cultural heritage. France is a few hundred years in the lead in preserving its heritage, so we have to do better on catching up on the past. 

(I really appreciate the transparency and context provided in Parliament today)