As a nation Singapore is a little over 40 years old. Although today it is a stable and affluent oasis in a region known for corruption and instability, it is breathtaking to realize how recently it was something entirely other; a lawless, poverty stricken country, with no sense of itself.
No more than a dot on the map of Asia, only 247 square miles -London by comparison is 659 square miles – the nation state of Singapore at the time of its independence had no natural resources, no agriculture and not enough water. The shadow of communism was everywhere and the larger part of its multiracial population had neither a bowl of rice a day to eat or a roof to shelter under. These things must be understood if one is to understand the way today’s Singaporeans read.
Education was the only road to survival. Doctors, teachers, engineers, lawyers, technicians etc were needed to establish a nation. Men and women who might have otherwise become writers or artists when left to their own devices, focused their energy on becoming doctors and lawyers, engineers and technicians. There was no time to dream, no time to waste and, dutifully, Singapore grew quickly in powerful ways. But along the road to prosperity some thing important was forgotten.
This is the dilemma of today’s Singapore, to regain its inventive soul. Singapore’s bookshops are packed with people, but a recent survey found most customers were buying self-help manuals and career orientated books. Fiction, that dangerous elixir of emotions had only a miniscule showing. Everyone was reading to educate themselves just as they had been instructed to do for 40 years since independence. It would seem that few had time to read fiction, few as yet had time to dream, even though the miracle of transformation had been achieved and the streets were now paved with gold.
From its new state of the art library building, Singapore’s National Library Board initiated an outreach project. READ Singapore was modeled after the many One City One Book reading initiatives around the world. For three months of the year the city of Singapore would be encouraged to read novels and dream a little, to enter the minds of diverse writers and touch experiences beyond their everyday lives. Yet, Singapore being the multiracial city it is, always politically and correctly mindful of its neighbour’s ethnicity and culture, books must be chosen in the full stratum of languages; English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil. This was done and READ Singapore was launched in 2005 and is now in its 8th year.
Each year the number of people drawn into the initiative’s net has increased. READ Singapore has made efforts to reach diverse and unlikely communities, to whom the alternative worlds entered through reading fiction may be something not willingly experienced before. Yet what is important is that a growing number of people are reading and meeting to discuss this new-found enjoyment in community centres, local libraries, schools or cafes; Chinese taxi drivers, prison inmates in their prisons, Malay hairdressers in the heartlands, Tamil hospital nurses, hotel service staff and many more. Those who chose to read in the English language have now read and discussed Harper Lee’s, To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Hadden’s, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Dai Saaji’s, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Jumpa Lahri’s, The Namesake and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s, The Shadow of the Wind to name but a few of the English language choices over the years.
The fact that the number of readers is growing annually with this outreach, says something for the human need to enter the world of the imagination. Only in the imagination can one dream, and only through dreams can new vision be born. Slowly, hopefully, through this small reading initiative, Singaporeans are reclaiming a forgotten part of their soul.