Showing posts with label Asia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Asia. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 02, 2022

En Route to Bali 1973 - Singapore/Jakarta

 


In 1973 Singapore didn’t allow people with long hair to enter. So my brother Damien and I were ceremoniously sheared among friends in Perth before our departure on an A.U.S. flight. AUS stood for Australian Union of Students and everyone on board was a student enjoying cheap student fares so you can imagine the party like atmosphere .

I passed the haircut inspection after having to turn a full 360 degrees twice to allow the customs officer to closely inspect my hair, but lingered to see how one of the more senior passengers (he was probably all of 30) with very long hair would get through. He had tucked all his hair up under a hat. He was asked to remove his hat and at that point he immediately started demanding in a very loud voice that he would like to speak to someone from the Australian embassy. He just kept repeating this over and over and eventually he was allowed to enter Singapore with no haircut!

This was my first visit to Asia. I was 19. Singapore had not yet gone through its economic boom time and the streets between Changi airport and the city were lined with poverty. People dressed in rags living by the side of the road; rickety market stalls lined the route, noisy dirty traffic flew past without any apparent order. It’s that assault on the senses that many Asian nations offer first time visitors that nothing can prepare you for. I remember staring open mouthed at the chaos unfolding by the side of the road as we made our way to the hotel.

That aside, the party atmosphere continued on at the student hotel most of us were booked in to. We roamed between various rooms where the alcohol and marijuana was flowing. One of the rooms belonged to the senior hippy guy who had bluffed his way through customs and who was now sitting on his bed naked and cross-legged rolling joints like an Indian holy man. There was a sudden moment of panic when we get a call to one of the rooms that the authorities were coming up to investigate. People scattered back to their own rooms and all the marijuana was quickly flushed down toilets, and windows opened to allow the smoke out.  Smoking and possession of marijuana in Singapore in those days was even more serious than having long hair! It turned out to be a prank - one of the students had just decided to freak everyone out with the fake phone call. It worked. It killed the mood completely.

Damien and I were planning to head to Bali in Indonesia. This involved flying to Jakarta to catch the train through Java and then a ferry to Bali. The flight to Jakarta was not a student flight. I was seated next to a seasoned traveller who had been to Jakarta many times and wasn’t impressed that his work had brought him back there. He called it a hell hole and said that if I thought Singapore was bad I hadn’t seen anything yet. How right he was. There are moments in your travelling life that you never forget. My first steps outside Jakarta airport was one such moment. It was absolute mayhem. A mass of people and traffic and noise in a chaos impossible to comprehend. As we stood trying to work out how to get a bemo (taxi) I noticed a man lying in the gutter – barely clothed and quite still. He could easily have been dead. And the traffic flooded past just inches from his head. No one appeared to notice. Or care. The opening lyrics to a Neil Young song played in my head: “old man lying by the side of the road…. don’t let it bring you down…. it’s only castles burning….”

By the time we reached our accommodation for the night all the women in the bemo were crying at what we’d seen. They guys I guess were crying on the inside. I know I was. Jakarta was extreme culture shock. I think we spent a couple of days there. It’s all a bit of a blur. It taught me so much in such a short time. I have never felt the desire to return.

Our next adventure was the train across Java en route to the island paradise of Bali.

Saturday, October 23, 2021

OzAsia Festival - White Pearl


Sydney Theatre Company and Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta, Wed 20 Oct, 2021.

The set reveals a modern business office in Singapore. Lots of clean shiny straight lines and floor to ceiling windows. An advertisement for Clearday cosmetics loops continuously above the stage – just like the 24/7 screen assault one experiences wandering around modern Asian cities.

The five Clearday employees all hail from different parts of Asia and are over the moon at the success of their newest product. When a video that casts the company in a somewhat different light goes viral on social media the mood changes and they move into damage control. An electronic hit counter tracking the viral video ticks away ominously and relentlessly as cracks emerge in the social fabric of this young company.

Many of these cracks revolve around racism. Is it okay to trade in questionable cultural stereotypes for races that have a minimal presence in Asian countries? Can personal relationships overcome the negative intra-Asian cultural assumptions made about people from Japan, Taiwan or Korea? The dynamics of office politics and the power balance between genders are also put under the spotlight. A strong and even cast deliver an often sassy dialogue with a class and style that forces quieter personalities to conduct their conversations in other surprising locations outside the office.

Plenty of humour ensures the mood never stays too heavy for long – led by the local Singaporean employee (played by Cheryl Ho) who seems lost in an American rap style time warp. Kristy Best as Priya the Indian office boss is suitably commanding, while Nicole Milinkovic as a Thai American has a lot of fun (mostly) exploiting the Thai girl stereotype.

Provocative and confronting, White Pearl is an entertaining analysis of modern business ethics, cultural assumptions, and the role of social media in contemporary Asia and raises many important questions. But we may have to wait for a sequel to find the answers!

(This review also published in The Clothesline at https://theclothesline.com.au/white-pearl-ozasia-festival-2021-review/)

Paulina Lenoir: Puella Eterna

  Paulina Lenoir: Puella Eterna The Yurt at the Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum, Tue 12 Mar Paulina Lenoir was busy preenin...