Mall talk

The first time I was allowed to visit my neighbourhood shopping center unaccompanied was before a PSLE supplementary class. The details are fuzzy: I can’t remember whom I went with, or if I got my parents’ permission on the spare Nokia phone I carried around for emergencies (and playing Snake on). The one thing I know is that all my friends and I ended up in McDonald’s that day.

As a rule of thumb, all solid heartland shopping centers come with a Macs. More recently, they’ve also become likely to house a Starbucks. Other offerings in the mix: chain supermarket/s; food court; at least two bubble tea shops; $12-a-haircut barbershop; and that camera store that used to develop everybody’s holiday film rolls, but now sells passport photos and Fujifilm instax. Bonus points if your residential shopping center includes a Uniqlo or Breadtalk.

Because of how pervasive shopping centers are, I’d be hard-pressed to think of a day in the last year I failed to set foot in one. There are two reasons for this, the first being that I have to walk through a mall to get home. City planners probably hadn’t expected to feed the beast of consumerism this much when they decreed that more shopping malls be built in the heartlands for convenience’s sake. Either way, there’s now a mall next to nearly every MRT station on the East West Line.

The second reason is that I’m a mallrat. Local variants of the mallrat vary: my grandmother who was friends with the cashiers in the supermarket in our neighbourhood mall because she used to visit at least once a day to lament over how the bean sprouts weren’t fresh. Kids who spend Saturdays shunted between their creative-writing-enrichment-math-and-music classes. OLs who somehow always find the time for a quick lunchtime power-shop.

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In one of his essays, the architect Rem Koolhaas writes that shopping has devoured built environments by turning them into “junkspace”- mall-ifying everything, so that seemingly free zones meld into one seamless, warped, and inescapable space devoted to consumerism. “Continuity is the essence of junkspace,” he writes. “It exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain…”

Koolhaas’ thinking applies to space on a macro-level; think of the way urban megacities envelope border zones. But it also applies to individual architectural constructions like the shopping centre- a well-manicured microcosm of junkspace out in the world, where every single bit of space is charged with the frenetic energy of consumption.

Air-conditioned, multi-use transportation linkages double as on-the-go shopping stretches - not really destinations in themselves, they’re nevertheless spaces where you can buy a cookie as you traipse from Wisma Atria to Ngee Ann City, or sample perfume in the connector between the MRT station and Tangs. Koolhaas writes, “There is a special way of moving in junkspace, at the same time aimless and purposeful.” He probably didn’t mean to sound quite as wistful, but that’s an accurate description of the way I zigzag from shop to shop to shop when I’ve got time to kill.

At university, I used to spend awkwardly-timed breaks wandering around near-vacant shopping centers in town. I’ve interviewed for an internship at an empty coffeehouse in Marina Square, frowned over Excel problem sheets in Plaza Singapura, and whiled away time floating from one wing to another in Suntec City instead of writing papers.

The mall has everything that you could possibly want. Is it your birthday? Celebrate it with an eight-scoop ice-cream sundae at the diner-style restaurant on level two. An intellectual? There’s probably an in-house library for you somewhere, nestled in a corner. Baby spas, rock-climbing, ice-skating… the mall has you covered.

The director Li Lin Wee explored the idea of the mall as an all-encompassing paradise in her film “Gone Shopping,” which features three characters living+laughing+loving in shopping centers. The shopping center is “like our national treasure,” she told Reuters in 2007.

And more interestingly: “The mall is the most idyllic place.”

[a]

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At first blush, Ion Orchard at Christmastime is the farthest thing possible from the pastoral tranquility depicted in Theocritus’ Idylls, where shepherds, love and the countryside feature prominently. But apart from the herdsmen, I’d venture that the mall and the great outdoors have plenty in common.

The crux of it might be the currency that both offer, in the form of a vague sense of anonymity and insignificance. Because shopping centers primarily exist to facilitate functional, economic exchanges, it can feel as if you’re alone even when you’re surrounded by hundreds of other people. As Koolhaas writes, the mall is a piece of calculation rather than innocently designed: “the more erratic the path, eccentric the loops, hidden the blueprint, efficient the exposure, the more inevitable the transaction.” Brief conversational exchanges with salespeople notwithstanding, everyone is firmly ensconced in the task of buying whatever they’ve come for.

In shopping centers, there’s an odd sense of safety in the knowledge that there isn’t much going on beyond mercantilism. Unlike friends who sip coffee in tiny shophouse cafes, I feel more drawn to F&B mall-outlets - like Starbucks, or that extra large Liho that comes with seating space. The intimacy of an independent cafe can be unsettling: peering myopically into their Macbooks, the ten customers at a small cafe all seem emotionally complicit in upholding some kind of shared cause - going local, advocating for organic produce, leading a specific kind of slick millennial lifestyle, something. In choosing the cafe, they’ve signalled themselves a collective. In Singapore, at least, the mall is no such symbol of status or difference. It’s just there; an empty signifier blending into the fabric of the city. It’s strangely comforting to enter the mall, and become one small element in thrall to a much larger, all-consuming force.

Not unlike how Romantic poets perceived nature and the sublime, then. Is nature immense and terrifying? So is the mall.

Another similarity between the countryside and the mall: one needs a certain level of capital, social and monetary, to access both comfortably. When reading a text glorifying nature as an idyllic escape from the material world, you learn more about the person saying these things than about nature itself - Wordsworth’s belief that for rural folk, the “essential passions of the heart … [were] less under restraint” so that they “[spoke] a plainer and more emphatic language” sounds a lot like something a yuppie might say after a weekend of glamping in the countryside. I’ve said similar things too, after sitting round campfires for no more than two or three nights at a time. But naturally, there’s never been a question of me giving up indoor plumbing for an outhouse just because some bluebell clusters looked charming.

Likewise, my affinity for malls comes from my inhabiting the right socio-economic stratum - that is, the one that malls are designed to attract. Koolhaas writes that “sometimes, an entire junkspace comes unstuck through the non-conformity of one of its members; a single citizen of another culture - a refugee, a mother - can destabilize an entire junkspace”. That’s a fair assessment of the malls I know, with their myriad of unspoken rules that I’ve learnt to instinctively perform. Whether it’s standing on the left side of the escalator and walking on the right - or how I temper my voice with the right amount of nonchalance to show that I can definitely afford what I’m asking to try - I’m only welcome at the malls in Singapore because I check the right boxes.

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[b]

Consumerism might have given us junkspace to contend with for the foreseeable future, but all that junk has its moments. The other day, I chanced upon a Tumblr documenting dead malls in the U.S.: relics from the 1980s with neon lighting strips, tiled floors and dubious potted shrubbery. Scrolling through those images of now-defunct malls made me think about the sense of timelessness at play in them.

I could write a whole compendium on the ghosts of malls past once intertwined with my existence. Whenever I’m in Elias Mall (i.e. not even that much), I think about the one time in kindergarten I attended a birthday party at the second-floor McDonald’s. Other times, I’ll reminisce about the shopping center gaming arcades I played “Bishi Bashi” in some 15 years ago, back when it was in fashion. My fondness for the mall extends beyond national borders - I have a soft spot for tacky Malaysian malls housing indoor theme parks. Maybe it’s a bit tragic: growing up, I hung out at shopping malls and therefore I was.

Our obsession with shopping centers goads unseen forces into extending the consumerist borders of junkspace. But then, a person living in these times who claims to be outside of capitalism is surely being disingenuous, like some kind of modern Wordsworth. If you live in a place like Singapore, so much of your life happens in shopping malls that all that junkspace becomes impregnated with something richer. For all the calculation that goes into constructing malls, the unintended ways we use them and the incidental goings-on that transpire within them turn them into sites of meaning and memory, making them compelling.

Junkspace giveth, and junkspace taketh away.

Art by Kenneth Chen, Words by Cheang Ming

Image credits:

[a] Photo: Li Lin Wee, Gone Shopping

[b] Via http://dead-malls.tumblr.com