Playing House

Spending the last few days viewing apartments has been a most illuminating experience. Jude and I aren't dead set on buying something but just thought to keep our options open and so have been looking at several places around his parents' place. Just back from another house-hunting session, and bearing an uncanny sense of contemplation, a feeling I can't quite pin down, somewhere between anticipation, anxiety, and resignation I suppose. I love the idea of finally having a place of our own which we can fix up in a way which is uniquely us and a home we can be proud stewards of; on the other hand, buying a house is a huge committment, and one I'm not sure whether as grad students we can truly undertake. Also, walking around the many housing estates has offered an interesting insight into the whole Singaporean housing experience, one I never quite fully appreciated till now. There's a whole language associated with buying a house in Singapore- phrases like "valuation", "4-S", "4-A", "co-broke", etc. are thrown about and everyone in the loop toss them around as if they were born with that vocabulary; then there are all the players involved in the transaction- the buyers, sellers, agents on both sides, the government gets into the picture, as well as banks, tenants if we want to rent our apartment out, and of course our parents who are probably going to have to help us watch over it while we're away.

Interestingly, this relates really well to something we recently watched on DVD. While we were Christmas shopping last week, we chanced upon the inagural collection of Singapore short films, Singapore Shorts. Jude continues to keep abreast of the Singapore arts scene and we decided to buy the compilation, especially for Tan Pin Pin's Moving House, a short film about compulsory exhumation of grave-sites in Singapore. It elegantly and evocatively brings together social & political commentary about Singapore's housing and development policies, and a moving ethnography about one family's attempt to deal with exhuming their parents' graves in order for the government to take over the land in the name of urban redevelopment.

I grew up in an era where public housing is ubiquitous and the almost instinctual housing of choice. I'd never stopped to think about what it meant to try to contain 4 million people into an island which takes only 45 minutes to drive the length of, and the sacrifices and compromises which have to be made in the name of advancement and modernity. The film brought home to me the realities which belie our internationally reknown housing policy and interrogated the taken-for-grantedness which has always characterized my ideas of what it means to gain a home in Singapore, and what is lost in that process.

Jude and I still haven't decided if we're going to buy anything, but whatever the case may be, as it is proverbially acknowledged, a house doesn't make a home. We have each other, and as far as we're concerned, that's good enough for now.